Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

motives, they played (whether as individuals or as members of a social

class) in promoting or obstructing desirable human ends-scientific

knowledge, or the emancipation of women, or economic progress, or

the revolution.

1 Letter to Herzen, 28 April J 862.

t G. Lopatin, op. cit. (p. 292, note 1 above), p. 1 26.

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FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

This was the very attitude that Turgenev recoiled from; it was

what he feared in Bazarov and the revolutionaries of Pirgin SDil.

Turgenev, and liberals generally, saw tendencies, political attitudes,

as functions of human beings, not human beings as functions of social

tendencies.1 Acts, ideas, art, literature were expressions of individuals,

not of objective forces of which the actors or thinkers were merely

the embodiments. The reduction of men to the function of being

primarily carriers or agents of impersonal forces was as deeply repellent

to Turgenev as it had been to Henen or, in his later phases, to his

revered friend Belinsky. To be treated with so much sympathy and

understanding, and indeed affection, as human beings and not primarily

as spokesmen for ideologies, was a nre enough experience, a kind of

luxury, for Russian revolutionary exiles abroad. This alone goes some

way to account for the fact that men like Stepnyak, Lopatin, Lavrov

and Kropotkin responded warmly to so understanding, and, moreover,

so delightful and so richly gifted a man as Turgenev. He gave them

secret subsidies but made no intellectual concessions. He believed-this

was his 'old-fashioned' liberalism in the 'English dynastic (he meant

constitutional] sense'1-that only education, only gradual methods,

'industry, patience, self-sacrifice, without glitter, without noise,

homoeopathic injections of science and culture' could improve the

lives of men. He shook and shivered under the ceaseless criticisms to

which he had exposed himself, but, in his own apologetic way, refused

to 'simplify' himself. He went on believing-perhaps this was a relic

of his Hegelian youth- that no issue was dosed for ever, that every

thesis must be weighed against its antithesis, that systems and absolutes

of every kind-social and political no less than religious-were a form

of dangerous idolatry;3 above all, one must never go to war unless

and until all that one believes in is at stake and there is literally no

other way out. Some of the fanatical young men responded with

1 For this excellent formulation of the distinction between liberals and

radicals see Tilt Positiflt Htro i11 Ruui1111 Littrllturt, by R. W. Mathewson

(New York, 1 958).

I Letter to Yt1111ilt. Ef!ropy (see above, p. 29 1, note z). See also the )etten

to Stasyulevich (p. 290, note 1 above), and to Herzen of 2 5 November I 86z,

and F. V olkhovsky's article, 'I van Sergeevich Turgenev', Frtt Russi11, vol.

9 No 4 ( 1 898), pp. z�.

a See the letters to Countess Lambert in 1 864, and to the writer M. A.

Milyutina in 1 875, quoted with much other rdevant material in V. N.

Gorbacheva, Mo/oJyt goJy Turgt11tf!ll (Kazan, 1926).

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R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

genuine regard and, at 'times, profound admiration. A young radical

wrote in 1 883 'Turgenev is dead. If Shchedrin1 should die too, then

one might as well go down to the grave alive . . . For us these men

replaced parliament, meetings, life, liberty !'1 A hunted member of a

terrorist organisation, in a tribute illegally published on the day of

Turgenev's funeral, wrote 'A gentleman by birth, an aristocrat by upbringing and character, a gradualist by conviction, Turgenev, perhaps without knowing it himself . . • sympathised with, and even served,

the Russian revolution. '3 The special police precautions at Turgenev's

funeral were clearly not wholly superfluous.

I I I

I t is time that Satums ceased dining off their children;

time, too, that children stopped devouring their parents

like the natives of Kamchatka.

Alexander Herzen'

Critical turning-points in history tend to occur, we are told, when a

form of life and its institutions are increasingly felt to cramp and

obstruct the most vigorous productive forces alive in a societyeconomic or social, artistic or intellectual-and it has not enough strength to resist them. Against such a social order, men and groups

of very different tempers and classes and conditions unite. There is an

upheaval-a revolution-which, at times, achieves a limited success. It

reaches a point at which some of the demands or interests of its

original promoters are satisfied to an extent which makes further

fighting on their part unprofitable. They stop, or struggle uncertainly.

The alliance disintegrates. The most passionate and single-minded,

especially among those whose purposes or ideals are furthest from

fulfilment, wish to press on. To stop half-way seems to them a betrayal.

The sated groups, or the less visionary, or those who fear that the old

yoke may be followed by an even more oppressive one, tend to hang

back. They find themselves assailed on two sides. The conservatives

look on them as, at best, knock-kneed supporters, at worst as deserters

1 The satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin;

1 Littrahlmoe 11as/ttislrlo, vol. 76, p. 33 2, and I. 8. TurgtnnJ eo eoospomillatJi·

yalll sourtmtnniloeo, vol. I, Introduction, p. 36.

• The author of the pamphlet was P. F. Yakubovich (quoted in Turgtneeo

eo nmloi hitilt, p. 401).

' 8o6ranit sod1intnii, vol. 10, p. 3 19.

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FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

and traitors. The radicals look on them as pusillanimous allies, more

often as diversionists and renegades.

Men of this sort need a good deal of courage to resist magnetisation

by either polar force and to urge moderation in a disturbed situation.

Among them are those who see, and cannot help seeing, many sides

of a case, as well as those who perceive that a humane cause promoted

by means that are too ruthless is in danger of turning into its opposite,

liberty into oppression in the name of liberty, equality into a new,

self-perpetuating oligarchy to defend equality, justice into crushing of

all forms of nonconformity, love of men into hatred of those who

oppose brutal methods of achieving it. The middle ground is a

notoriously exposed, dangerous, and ungrateful position. The complex

position of those who, in the thick of the fight, wish to continue to

speak to both sides is often interpreted as softness, trimming, opportunism, cowardice. Yet this description, which may apply to some men, was not true of Erasmus; it was not true of Montaigne; it was

not true of Spinoza, when he agreed to talk to the French invader of

Holland; it was not true of the best representatives of the Gironde,

or of some among the defeated liberals in 1 848, or of stout-hearted

members of the European left who did not side with the Paris Commune in 1 8 7 1 . It was not weakness or cowardice that prevented the Mensheviks from joining Lenin in 1 9 1 7, or the unhappy German

socialists from turning Communist in 1 932.

The ambivalence of such moderates, who are not prepared to break

their principles or betray the cause in which they believe, has become

a common feature of political life after the last war. This stems, in

part, from the historic position of nineteenth-century liberals for whom