Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

What Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and their numerous expositors and

interpreters provided was little short of a new religion. A corollary

of this new frame of mind is the Russian attitude to literature.

VII

There may be said to exist at least two attitudes towards literature and

the arts in general, and it may not be uninteresting to contrast them.

For short, I propose to call one French, the other Russian. But these

will be mere labels used for brevity and convenience. I hope I shall

not be thought to maintain that every French writer held what I

propose to call the ' French' attitude, or every Russian the 'Russian'.

The distinction taken in any literal sense would, of course, be gravely

misleading.

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

The French writers of the nineteenth century o n the whole believed

that they were purveyors. They thought that an intellectual or an

artist had a duty to himself and to the public-to produce as good an

object as possible. If you were a painter, you produced as beautiful a

picture as you could. If you were a writer you produced the best

piece of writing of which you were capable. That was your duty to

yourself, and it was what the public rightly expected. If your works

were good, they were recognised, and you were successful. If you

possessed little taste, or skill, or luck, then you were unsuccessful; and

that was that.

In this ' French' view, the artist's private life was of no more

concern to the public than the private life of a carpenter. If you order

a table, you are not interested in whether the carpenter has a good

motive for making it or not; or whether he lives on good terms with

his wife and children. And to say of the carpenter that his table must

in some way be degraded or decadent, because his morality is degraded

or decadent, would be regarded as bigoted, and indeed as silly : certainly

as a grotesque criticism of his merit as a carpenter.

This attitude of mind (which I have deliberately exaggerated)_ was

rejected with the utmost vehemence by almost every major Russian

writer of the nineteenth century; and this was so whether they were

writers with an explicit moral or social bias, or aesthetic writers

believing in art for art's sake. The 'Russian' attitude (at least in the

last century) is that man is one and cannot be divided; that it is not

true that a man is a citizen on the one hand and, quite independently

of this, a money-maker on the other, and that these functions can be

kept in separate compartments; that a man is one kind of personality

as a voter, another as a painter, and a third as a husband. Man is

indivisible. To say 'Speaking as an artist, I feel this; and speaking as

a voter, I feel t!lat' is always false; and immoral and dishonest too.

Man is one, and what he does, he does with his whole personality.

It is the duty of men to do what is good, speak the truth, and produce

beautiful objects. They must speak the truth in whatever media they

happen to work. If they are novelists they must speak the truth as

novelists. If they are ballet dancers they must express the truth in their

dancing.

This idea of integrity, of total commitment, is the heart of the

romantic attitude. Certainly Mozart and Haydn would have been

exceedingly surprised if they were told that as artists they were

peculiarly sacred, lifted far above other men, priests uniquely dedicated

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B I RT H OF T H E R U S S IAN I NT E L L I G ENTSIA

to the worship of some transcendent reality, to betray which is mortal

sin. They conceived of themselves as true craftsmen, sometimes as

inspired servants of God or of Nature, seeking to celebrate their

divine Maker in whatever they did; but in the first place they were

composers who wrote works to order and strove to make them as

melodious as possible. By the nineteenth century, the notion of the

artist as a sacred vessel, set apart, with a unique soul and unique status,

was exceedingly widespread. It was born, I suppose, mainly among

the Germans, and is connected with the belief that it is the duty of

every man to give himself to a cause; that upon the artist and poet

this duty is binding in a special degree, for he is a wholly dedicated

being; and that his fate is peculiarly sublime and tragic, for his form

of

himself totally to his ideal. What this

ideal is, is comparatively unimportant. The essential thing is to offer

oneself without calculation, to give all one has for the sake of the light

within (whatever it may illuminate) from pure motives. For only

motives count.

Every Russian writer was made conscious that he was on a public

stage, testifying; so that the smallest lapse on his part, a lie, a deception,

an act of self-indulgence, lack of zeal for the truth, was a heinous

crime. If you were principally engaged in making money, then,

perhaps, you were not quite so strictly accountable to society. But if

you spoke in public at all, be it as poet or novelist or historian or

in whatever public capacity, then you accepted full responsibility for

guiding and leading the people. If this was your calling then you were

bound by a Hippocratic oath to tell the truth and never to betray it,

and to dedicate yourself selflessly to your goal.

. There are certain clear cases-Tolstoy is one of them-where this

principle was accepted literally and followed to its extreme consequences. But this tendency in Russia was far wider than Tolstoy's peculiar case would indicate. Turgenev, for example, who is commonly thought of as the most western among Russian writers, a man who believed in the pure and independent nature of art more

than, say, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, who consciously and deliberately

avoided moralising in his novels, and was, indeed, sternly called to

order by other Russian authors for an excessive-and, it was indicated.

regrettably western-preoccupation with aesthetic principles, for

devoting too much time and attention to the mere form and style of

his works, for insufficient probing into the deep moral and spiritual

essence of his characters-even the 'aesthetic' Turgenev is wholly

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

committed to the belief that social and moral problems are the central

issues of life and of art, and that they are intelligible only in their own

specific historical and ideological context.

I was once astonished to see it stated, in a review by an eminent

literary critic in a Sunday newspaper, that, of all authors, Turgenev

was not particularly conscious of the historical forces of his time.

This is the very opposite of the truth. Every novel of Turgenev deals

explicitly with social and moral problems within a specific historical

setting; it describes human beings in particular social conditions at

an identifiable date. The mere fact that Turgeaev was an artist to

his marrow-bones, and understood the universal aspects of human

character or predicament, need not blind us to the fact that he fully

accepted his duty as a writer to speak the objective truth-social no

less than psychological-in public, and not to betray it.