Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

among them moving avowals to the most admired of his friends, a

young playwright and professor in Berlin in whom he discerned

something akin to genius, a disciple of Hegel whose very name is

now justly forgotten. From this scanty material it is scarcely possible

to reconstruct the personality of this leader of Russian Idealism.

His most gifted and impressionable disciple was a man of very

different cast, Mikhail Bakunin, at this time an amateur philosopher,

and already notorious for his turbulent and despotic character.

Bakunin had, by the late I 8Jos, resigned his commission in the army

and was living in Moscow largely by his wits. Endowed with an

exceptional capacity for absorbing other people's doctrines, he expounded them with fervour and enthusiasm as though they were his own, and in the course of this changed them somewhat, making them,

as a rule, simpler, clearer, cruder, and at times more convincing.

Bakunin had a considerable element of cynicism in his character, and

cared little what the exact effect of his sermons might be on his

friends-provided only that it was powerful enough; he did not ask

whether they excited or demoralised them, or ruined their lives, or

bored them, or turned them into fanatical zealots for some wildly

Utopian scheme. Bakt• nin was a born agitator with sufficient scepticism

in his system not to be taken in himself by his own torrential eloquence.

To dominate individuals and sway assemblies was his mltin-: he

belonged to that odd, fortunately not very numerous, class of persons

who contrive to hypnotise others into throwing themselves into causes

-if need be killing and dying for them-while themselves remaining

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coldly, dearly, and ironically aware o f the effect o f the spells which

they cast. When his bluff was called, as occasionally it was, for example,

by Herzen, Bakunin would laugh with the greatest good nature, admit

everything freely, and continue to cause havoc, if anything with greater

unconcern than before. His path was strewn with victims, casualties,

and faithful, idealistic converts; he himself remained a gay, easygoing, mendacious, irresistibly agreeable, calmly and coldly destructive, fascinating, generous, undisciplined, eccentric Russian landowner to the end.

He played with ideas with adroitness and boyish delight. They came

from many sources: from Saint-Simon, from Holbach, from Hegel,

from Proudhon, from Feuerbach, from the Young Hegelians, from

Weitling. He would imbibe these doctrines during periods of short

but intensive application, and then he would expound them with a

degree of fervour and personal magnetism which was, perhaps,

unique even in that century of great popular tribunes. During the

decade which Annenkov describes, he was a fanatically orthodox

Hegelian, and preached the paradoxical principles of the new metaphysics to his friends night after night with lucidity and stubborn passion. He proclaimed the existence of iron and inexorable laws of

history, and indeed of everything else. Hegel-and Stankevich-were

right. It was idle to rebel against them, or to protest against the

cruelties and injustices which they seemed to entail; to do so was

simply a sign of immaturity, of not understanding the necessity and

beauty of the rationally organised cosmos-to fail to grasp the divine

goal in which the sufferings and disharmonies of individual lives

must, if you understood them properly, inevitably culminate and be

resolved.

Hegel taught that the spirit evolved not continuously, but by a

'dialectical' struggle of 'opposites' which (somewhat, it seems, like a

diesel engine) moved by a series of sharp explosions. This notion

suited Bakunin's temperament well, since, as he himself was fond· of

saying, he detested nothing more than peace, order, bourgeois contentment. Mere bohemianism, disorganised rebellion have been discredited too often. Hegelianism presented its tragic and violent view of life beneath the guise of an eternal rational system, an objective

'science', with all the logical paraphernalia of reasoned judgement. First

to justify the need to submit to a brutal government and a stupid

bureaucracy in the name of eternal Reason, then to justify rebellion

with the selfsame arguments, was a paradoxical task that delighted

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

Bakunin. In Moscow h e enjoyed his power o f turning peaceful

students into dervishes, ecstatic seekers after some aesthetic or metaphysical goal. In later life he applied these talents on a wider scale, and stirred some exceedingly unpromising human material-Swiss

watchmakers and German peasants-into unbelievable frenzies of

enthusiasm, which no one ever induced in them before or after.

During the period of which I am speaking, he concentrated these

sinister talents upon the relatively humble task of expounding Hegel's

Encydopedia, paragraph by paragraph, to his admiring friends. Among

these friends was another intimate of Stankevich, Nicholay Granovsky,

a gentle and high-minded historian who had studied in Germany and

there became a moderate Hegelian, and came back to lecture on

western medieval history in Moscow. Granovsky succeeded in making

his apparently remote subject into a means of inducing in his audiences

respect for the western tradition. He dwelt in particular on the

civilising effect of the Roman Church, of Roman law, and of the

institutions of feudalism, developing his theses in the fac-e of the

growing chauvinism-with its emphasis on the· Byzantine roots of

Russian culture-which was at this time encouraged by the Russian

Government as an antidote to the dangerous ideas of the west.

Granovsky combined erudition with a very balanced intellect, and

was not carried away by extravagant theories. Nevertheless he was

Hegelian enough to believe that the universe must have a pattern and

a goal; that this goal was slowly being approached, that humanity

was marching towards freedom, although the path was by no means

smooth or straight: obstacles occurred-relapses were frequent and

difficult to avert. Unless a sufficient number of human beings with

personal courage, strength, and a sense of dedication emerged, humanity

tended to subside into long nights of reaction, swamps from which it

extricated itself at terrible cost. Nevertheless, slowly and painfully,

but inexorably, humanity was moving towards an ideal state of

happiness, justice, truth, and beauty. Granovsky's lectures in Moscow

University in the early I 84os on the apparently recondite subject of

the late Merovingian and early Carolingian kings attracted a very

large and distinguished audience. These lectures were treated both by

the 'Westerners' and their nationalist Slavophil opponents as a quasipolitical demonstration of pro-western, liberal and rationalist sentiment: above all of faith in the transforming power of enlightened ideas, against mystical nationalism and ecclesiasticism.

I quote the example of Granovsky's famous lectures-passionately

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acclaimed by his friends, and attacked by the conservatives-as an

illustration of the peculiar disguises which in Russia (as to a lesser