Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

eighteenth century, without troubling to consider whether some

among his ideas contradicted others - the 'dialectic' would look after

that-or how many of them had become obsolete, discredited, or had

been absurd from the beginning- Bakunin, the official friend of

absolute liberty, has not bequeathed a single idea worth considering

for its own sake; there is not a fresh thought, not even an authentic

emotion, only amusing diatribes, high spirits, malicious vignettes, and

a memorable epigram or two. A historical figure remains-the 'Russian

Bear', as he liked to describe himself- morally careless, intellectually

irresponsible, a man who, in his love for humanity in the abstract,

was prepared, like Robespierre, to wade through seas of blood ; and

thereby constitutes a link in the tradition of cynical terrorism and

unconcern for individual human beings, the practice of which is the

main contribution of our own century, thus far, to political thought.

And this aspect of Bakunin, the Stavrogin concealed inside Rudin,

the fascist streak, the methods of Attila, 'Petrograndism', sinister

qualities so remote from the lovable 'Russian Bear' -die grosse Liselwas detected not merely by Dostoevsky, who exaggerated and caricatured it, but by Herzen himself, who drew up a formidable indictment against it in the Letters to an Old Comrade, perhaps the most instructive, prophetic, sober and moving essays on the prospects of

human freedom written in the nineteenth century.

1 As Herzen used to call him after his three-year-old daughter, Bakunin's

friend.

A Remarkable Decade

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T H E B I R T H O F T H E R U S S I A N

I N T E L L I G E N T S I A

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M v title- 'A Remarkable Decade'-and my subject are both taken

from a long essay in which the nineteenth-century Russian critic and

literary historian, Pavel Annenkov, described his friends more than

thirty years after the period with which he deals. Annenkov was an

agreeable, intelligent, and exceedingly civilised man, and a most understanding and dependable friend. He was not, perhaps, a very profound critic, nor was the range of his learning wide-he was a scholarly

dilettante, a traveller about Europe who liked to meet eminent men,

an eager and observant intellectual tourist.

It is clear that in addition to his other qualities he possessed considerable personal charm, so much, indeed, that he even succeeded in captivating Karl Marx, who wrote him at least one letter considered

important by Marxists on the subject of Proudhon. Indeed, Annenkov

has left us an exceedingly vivid description of the physical appearance

and ferocious intellectual manner of the young Marx-an admirably

detached and ironical vignette, perhaps the best portrait of him that

has survived.

It is true that, after he went back to Russia, Annenkov lost interest

in Marx, who was so deeply snubbed and hurt by this desertion by

a man on whom he thought he had made an indelible impression, that

in after years he expressed himself with extreme bitterness about the

Russian intellectual fldneurs who Buttered around him in Paris in the

40s, but turned out not to have any serious intentions after ali. But

although not very loyal to the figure of Marx, Annenkov did retain

the friendship of his compatriots Belinsky, Turgenev and Herzen to

the end of his days. And it is about them that he is most interesting.

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B I RTH O F THE R U S S IAN I N T E L L I G ENTSIA

'A Remarkable Decade' is a description by him of the life of some

among the early members-the original founders-of the Russian

intelligentsia, between 1 8 38 and 1 848, when they were all young

men, some still at the university, some j ust emerged from it. The

subject is of more than literary or psychological interest because these

early Russian intellectuals created something which was destined

ultimately to have world-wide social and political consequences. The

largest single effect of the movement, I think it would be fair to say,

was the Russian Revolution itself. These rlvoltes early Russian

intellectuals set the moral tone for the kind of talk and action which

continued throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

until the final climax in 1 9 1 7.

It is true that the Russian Revolution (and no event had been more

discussed and speculated about during the century which preceded itnot even the great French Revolution) did not follow the lines that most of these writers and talkers had anticipated. Yet despite the

tendency to minimise the importance of such activity by such thinkers

as, for example, Tolstoy or Karl Marx, general ideas do have great

influence. The Nazis seemed to grasp this fact when they took care

at once to eliminate intellectual leaders in conquered countries, as

likely to be among the most dangerous figures in their path ; to this

degree they had analysed history correctly. But whatever may be

thought about the part played by thought in affecting human lives,

it would be idle to deny that the influence of ideas-and in particular

of philosophical ideas-at the beginning of the nineteenth century did

make a considerable difference to what happened later. Without the

kind of outlook of which, for example, the Hegelian philosophy, then

so prevalent, was both the cause and the symptom, a great deal of what

happened might, perhaps, either not have happened, or else have

happened differently. Consequently the chief importance of these

writers and thinkers, historically speaking, lies in the fact that they

set in train ideas destined to have cataclysmic effects not merely in

Russia itself, but far beyond her borders.

And these men have more specific claims to fame. It is difficult

to imagine that the Russian literature of the mid-century, and, in

particular, the great Russian novels, could have come into being save

for the specific atmosphere which these men created and promoted.

The works of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, and of

minor novelists too, are penetrated with a sense of their own time,

of this or that particular social and historical milieu and its ideological

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content, t o a n even higher degree than the 'social' novels o f the west.

To this topic I propose to revert later.

Lastly, they invented social criticism. This may seem a very bold

and even absurd claim to make; but by social criticism I do not mean

the appeal to standards of judgment which involve a view of literature

and art as having, or as obliged to have, a primarily didactic purpose;

nor yet the kind of criticism developed by romantic essayists, especially

in Germany, in which heroes or villains are regarded as quintessential

types of humanity and examined as such ; nor yet the critical process

(in which the French in particular showed superlative skill) which

attempts to reconstruct the process of artistic creation mainly by

analysing the social, spiritual and psychological environment and the

origins and economic position of the artist, rather than his purely

artistic methods or character or specific quality; although, to some

degree, the Russian intellectuals did all this too.

·

Social criticism in this sense had, of course, been practised before

them, and far more professionally, scrupulously and ·profoundly, by

critics in the west. The kind of social criticism that I mean is the

method virtually invented by the great Russian essayist Belinsky-the