Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

and the violent acts of the extreme left, and continued to support the

uneasy alliance.

This painful conflict, which became the permanent predicament

of the Russian liberals for half a century, has now grown world-wide.

We must be clear: it is not the Baza.rovs who are the champions of

the rebellion today. In a sense, the Bazarovs have won. The victorious

advance of quantitative methods, belief in the organisation of human

lives by technological management, reliance on nothing but calculation

of utilitarian consequences in evaluating policies that affect vast

numbers of human beings, this is Bazarov, not the Kirsanovs. The

triumphs of the calm moral arithmetic of cost-effectiveness which

liberates decent men from qualms, because they no longer think of

th.! entities to which they apply their scientific computations as actual

human .beings who live the lives and suffer the deaths of concrete

individuals-this, today, is rather more typical of the establishment

than of the opposition. The suspicion of all that is qualitative, imprecise,

unanalysable, yet precious to men, and its relegation to Bazarov's

obsolete, intuitive, pre-scientific rubbish heap, has, by a strange

paradox, stirred both the anti-rationalist right and the irrationalist left

to an equally vehement opposition to the technocratic establishment

in the middle. From their opposed standpoints the extreme left and

the extreme right see such efforts to rationalise social life as a terrible

threat to what both sides regard as the deepest human values. If

Turgenev were living at this hour, the young radicals whom he

would wish to describe, and perhaps to please, are those who wish to

rescue men from the reign of those very. 'sophisters, economists, and

calculators' whose coming Burke lamented-those who ignore or

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despise what men are and what they live by. The new insurgents of

our time favour-so far as they a.n bring themselves to be at all

coherent-something like a vague species of the old, natural law. They

want to build a society in which men treat one another as human

beings with unique claims to self-expression, however undisciplined

and wild, not as producing or consuming units in a centralised, worldwide, self-propelling social mechanism. Bazarov's progeny has won, and it is the descendants of the defeated, despised 'superfluous men',

of the Rudins and Kirsanovs and N ezhdanovs, of Chekhov's muddled,

pathetic students and cynical, broken doctors, who are today preparing

to man the revolutionary barricades. Yet the similarity with Turgenev's

predicament does hold: the modern rebels believe, as Bazarov and

Pisarev and Bakunin believed, that the first requirement is the clean

sweep, the total destruction of the present system; the rest is not their

business. The future must look after itself. Better anarchy than

prison; there is nothing in between. This violent cry meets with a

similar response in the breasts of our contemporary Shubins and

Kirsanovs and Potugins, the small, hesitant, self�ritical, not always

very brave, band of men who occupy a position somewhere to the

left of centre, and are morally repelled both by the hard faces to their

right and the hysteria and mindless violence and demagoguery on

their left. Like the men of the 40s, for whom Turgenev spoke, they

are at once horrified and fascinated. They are shocked by the violent

irrationalism of the dervishes on the left, yet they are not prepared to

reject wholesale the position of those who claim to represent the young

and the disinherited, the indignant champions of the poor and the

socially deprived or repressed. This is the notoriously unsatisfactory,

at times agonising, position of the modern heirs of the liberal tradition.

'I understand the reasons for the anger which my book provoked

in a certain party,' wrote Turgenev just over a hundred years ago.

'A shadow has fallen upon my name . . . But is this really of the slightest

importance? Who, in twenty or thirty years' time, will remember all

these storms in a teacup, or indeed my name, with or without a

shadow�'1 Turgenev's name still lies under a shadow in his native

land. His artistic reputation is not in question; it is as a social thinker

that he is still today the subject of a continuing dispute. The situation

that he diagnosed in novel after novel, the painful predicament of the

believers in liberal western values, a predicament once thought

1 op. cit. (p. :z8z, note :z above), p. I S9·

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peculiarly Russian, is today familiar everywhere. So, too, is his own

oscillating, uncertain position, his horror of reactionaries, his fear of

the barbarous radicals, mingled with a pasllionate anxiety to be understood and approved of by the ardent young. Still more familiar is his inability, despite his greater sympathy for the patty of protest, to cross

over unreservedly to either side ·in the conflict of ideas, classes, and,

above all, generations. The figure of the well-meaning, troubled, selfquestioning liberal, witness to the complex truth, which, as a literary type, Turgenev virtually created in his own image, has today become

universal. These are the men who, when the battle grows too hot,

tend either to stop their ears to the terrible din, or attempt to promote

armistices, save lives, aven chaos.

As for the storm in a teacup, of which Turgenev spoke, so far from

being forgotten, it blows over the entire world today. If the inner life,

the ideas, the moral predicament of men matter at all in explaining

the course of human history, then Turgeriev's novels, especially

Fathtrs and Childrm, quite apan from their literary qualities, are as

basic a document for the understanding of the Russian past and of our

present as the plays of Aristophanes for the understanding of classical

Athens, or Cicero's letters, or novels by Dickens or George Eliot, for

the understanding of Rome and Victorian England.

Turgenev may have loved Bazarov; he certainly trembled before

him. He understood, and to a degree sympathized with, the case

presented by the new J acobins, but he could not bear to think of what

their feet would trample. 'We have the same credulity', he wrote in the

mid-1 86os, 'and the same cruelty; the same hunger for blood, gold,

filth . . . the same meaningless suffering in the name of . . . the same

nonsense as that which Aristophanes mocked at two thousand years

ago • . .'1 And an? And beauty? 'Yes, these are powerful words . . .

The P mus of Milo is less open to question than Roman Law or the

principles of 1 789'1-yet she, too, and the works of Goethe and

Beethoven would perish. Cold-eyed Isis-as he calls nature-'has no

cause for haste. Soon or late, she will have the upper hand . . . she

knows nothing of an or liberty, as she does not know the good • . .'3

1 Quoted from DIJtJol',o, an address read by him in r 86+o which was later

caricatured by Dostoevsky in Tile Posstsml. See So!Jra,it rod1i,t11ii, vol. 9•

PP· I I B-19.

I ibid., P· 1 19.

I ibid., P· I ZO.

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But why must men hurry so zealously to help her with her work of

turning all to dustl Education, only education, can retard this painful