Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

If someone had proved that Balzac was a spy in the service of the

French Government, or that Stendhal conducted immoral operations

on the Stock Exchange, it might have upset some of their friends,

but it would not, on the whole, have been regarded as derogating

from their status and genius as artists. But there is scarcely any Russian

writer in the nineteenth century who, if something of the sort had

been discovered about himself, would have doubted for an instant

whether the charge was relevant to his activity as a writer. I can

think of no Russian writer who would have tried to slip out with the

alibi that he was one kind of person as a writer, to be judged, let us

say, solely i n terms of his novels, and quite another as a private

individual. That is the gulf between the characteristically 'Russian'

and 'French' conceptions of life and art, as I have christened them.

I do not mean that every western writer would accept the ideal which

I have attributed to the French, nor that every Russian would subscribe to what I have called the 'Russian' conception. But, broadly speaking, I think it is a correct division, and holds good even when

you come to the aesthetic writers- for instance, the Russian symbolist

poets at the turn of the last century, who despised every form of

utilitarian or didactic or 'impure' art, took not the slightest interest

in social analysis or psychological novels, and accepted and exaggerated

the aestheticism of the west to an outre degree. Even these Russian

symbolists did not think that they had no moral obligation. They

saw themselves, indeed, as Pythian priestesses upon some mystical

tripod, as seers of a reality of which this world was merely a dark

symbol and occult expression, and, remote though they were from social

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idealism, believed with moral and spiritual fervour in their own sacred

vows. They were witnesses to a mystery; that was the ideal which

they were morally not permitted, by the rules of their art, to betray.

This attitude is utterly different from anything that Flaubert laid

down about the fidelity of the artist to his art, which to hin\ is identical

with the proper function of the artist, or the best method of becoming

as good an artist as one could be. The attitude which I attribute to

the Russians is a specifically moral attitude; their attitude to life and

to art is identical, and it is ultimately a moral attitude. This is something not to be confused with the notion of art with a utilitarian purpose, in which, of course, some of them believed. Certainly, the

men of whom I propose to speak-the men of the 30s and early 40Sdid not believe that the business of novels and the business of poetry was to teach men to be better. The ascendancy of utilitarianism came

much later, and it was propagated by men of far duller and cruder

minds than those with whom I am here concerned.

The most characteristic Russian writers believed that writers are,

in the first place, men; and that they are directly and continually

responsible for all their utterances, whether made in novels or in

private letters, in public speeches or in conversation. This view, in

turn, affected western conceptions of art and life to a marked degree,

and is one of the arresting contributions to thought of the Russian

intelligentsia. Whether for good or ill, it made a very violent impact

upon the European conscience.

V I I I

A t the time o f which I speak, Hegel and Hegelianism dominated

the thought of young Russia. With all the moral ardour of which

they were capable, the emancipated young men believed in the

necessity of total immersion in his philosophy. Hegel ·Nas the great

new liberator; therefore it was a duty-a categorical duty-to express

in every act of your life, whether as a private individual or as a writer,

truths which you had absorbed from him. This allegiance-later

transferred to Darwin, to Spencer, to Marx-is difficult to understand

for those who have not read the fervid literature, above all, the

literary correspondence of the period. To illustrate it, let me quote

some ironical passages from Herzen, the great Russian publicist, who

lived the latter part of his life abroad, written when, looking back, he

described the atmosphere of his youth. It is, as so often with this

incomparable satirist, a somewhat exaggerated picture-in places a

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caricature-but nevertheless it successfully conveys the mood of the

time.

After saying that an exclusively contemplative attitude is

wholly opposed to the Russian character, he goes on to talk about

the fate of the Hegelian philosophy when it was brought over to

Russia:

. . . there is no paragraph in all the three parts of the Logic,

two parts of the Aesthetic, of the Encyclopedia . . . which was not

captured after the most desperate debates lasting several nights.

People who adored each other became estranged for entire weeks

because they could not agree on a definition of 'transcendental

spirit', were personally offended by opinions about 'absolute personality' and 'being in itself'. The most worthless tracts of German philosophy that came out of Berlin and other [German] provincial

towns and villages, in which there was any mention of Hegel, were

written for and read to shreds- till they came out in yellow stains, till

pages dropped out after a few days. Thus, just as Professor Francoeur

was moved to tears in Paris when he heard that he was regarded as a

great mathematician in Russia, that hisalgebraical symbolism was used

for differential equations by our younger generation, so might they

all have wept for joy-all these forgotten Werders, Marheineckes,

Michelets, Ottos, Vatkes, Schallers, Rosenkranzes, and Arnold Ruge

himself . . . -if they had known what duels, what battles they had

started in Moscow between the Maros�ika and Mokhovaya (the

names of two streets in Moscow], how they were read, how they

were bought . . .

I have a right to say_ this because, carried away by the torrents

of those days, I myself wrote just like this, and was, in fact, startled

when our famous astronomer, Perevoshchikov, referred to it all as

'bird talk'. Nobody at this time would have disowned a sentence like

this: 'The concrescence of abstract ideas in the sphere of the plastic

represents that phase of the self-questing spirit in which it, defining

itself for itself, is potentialised from natural immanence into the

harmonious sphere of formal consciousness in beauty.'

He continues:

A man who went ior a walk in Sokolniki [a suburb of Moscow],

went there not just for a walk, but in order to surrender himself

to the pantheistic feeling of his identification with the cosmos. If,

on the way, he met a tipsy soldier or a peasant woman who said

something to him, the philosopher did not simply talk with them,

but determined the substantiality of the popular element, both in

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its immediate and its accidental presentation. The very tear which

might rise to his eye was strictly classified and referred to its proper