Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

from the west, they felt no inclination to spend their time upon

detailed and tedious researches into the actual condition of the

peasantry, upon the multitude of unexplored social and economic data

which had been so superficially described by Custine, or later in

1 A. I. Koshelev, Zopisli (Berlin, 1 884), pp. 81-4.

19

R U S S I AN T H IN K E R S

greater detail by Haxthausen. Turgenev had done something to

awaken interest in the day-to-day hyt1 of the peasants by the realism

of his Sportsman's Sketches. Grigorovich had moved both Belinsky

and Dostoevsky by his tragic but, to a later taste, lifeless and overwrought descriptions of peasants in The Yillage, and in Anton Goremyka, published in I 84 7. But these were ripples on the surf.lce. During the

period of enforced insulation �fter I 849, with Europe in the arms of

reaction, and only Herren's plaintive voice faintly audible from afar,

those socially conscious Russian intellectuals who had survived the

turmoil directed their sharp and fearless analytical apparatus upon the

actual conditions in which the vast majority of their countrymen were

living. Russia, which a decade or two earlier was in considerable

danger of becoming a permanent intellectual dependency of Berlin

or of Paris, was forced by this insulation to develop a native social and

political outlook of her own. A sharp change in tone is now noticeable;

the harsh, materialistic and 'nihilistic' criticism of the 6os and 70s

is due not merely to the change in economic and social conditions,

and the consequent emergence of a new class and a new tone in

Russia as in Europe, but in at least equal measure to the prison walls

within which Nicholas I had enclosed the lives of his thinking subjects.

This led to a sharp break with the polite civilisation and the nonpolitical interests of the past, to a general toughening of fibre and exacerbation of political and social differences. The gulf between the

right and the left-between the disciples of Dostoevsky and Katkov

and the followers of Chernyshevsky or Bakunin-all typical radical

intellectuals in I 848 -had grown very wide and deep. In due course

there emerged a vast and growing army of practical revolutionaries,

conscious-all too conscious-of the specifically Russian character of

their problems, seeking specifically Russian solutions. They were

forced away froo the general current of European development (with

which, in any case, their history seemed to have so little in common)

by the bankruptcy in Europe of the libertarian movement of I 848 :

they drew strength from the very harshness of the discipline which

the failure in the west had indirectly imposed upon them. Henceforth

the Russian radicals accepted the view that ideas and agitation wholly

unsupported by material force were necessarily doomed to impotence;

and they adopted this truth and abandoned sentimental liberalism

without being forced to pay for their liberation with that bitter,

1 Approximately, 'way of life'.

2.0

R U S S I A AND 1 84 8

personal disillusionment and acute frustration which proved too much

for a good many idealistic radials in the west. The Russian radials

learnt this lesson by means of precept and example, indirectly as it

were, without the destruction of their inner resources. The experience

obtained by both sides in the struggle during these dark years was a

decisive factor in shaping the uncompromising character of the later

revolutionary movement in Russia.

21

The Hedgehog and the Fox

A queer combination of the brain of an Englilh chelllist

with the eoul of an Indian Buddhist.

E. M. de Vogili

T H a R I! is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus

which says: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows

one big thing. '1 Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation

of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for

all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken

figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they

mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers,

and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great

chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single

central vision, one system less or more coherent or -articulate, in

terms of which they ·understand, think and feel-a single, universal,

organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say

has significance-and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends,

often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in

some dt facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause,

related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform

acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal,

their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing

upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what

they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking

to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, allembracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and

artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes;

and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too

much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the

first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal,

Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees,

t 'IT0M• orB' O>tc!nnje, aM' EXWOS b1 ,.,.E-ya. Archilochus frag. :zor in

M. L. West (ed.), l11m6i tt Eltgi Gr��tci, vol. 1 {Oxford, 197 1).

22

THE H E D G E HO G AND THE FOX

hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere,

Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the

dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic, and ultimately

absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it

be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions

which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from

which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation.

Thus we have no doubt about the violence of the contrast between

Pushkin and Dostoevsky; and Dostoevsky's celebrated speech about

Pushkin has, for all its eloquence and depth of feeling, seldom been

considered by any perceptive reader to cast light on the genius of

Pushkin, but rather on that of Dostoevsky himself, precisely because it

perversely represents Pushkin-an arch-fox, the, greatest in the nineteenth century- as a being similar to Dostoevsky who is nothing if not a hedgehog; and thereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into

a dedicated prophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was

indeed the centre of Dostoevsky's own universe, but exceedingly

remote from the many varied provinces of Pushkin's protean genius.

Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature is spanned