Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

extent in Germany) social and political liberalism had to adopt if it

was to find voice at all. The censorship was at once a heavy fetter

and a goad-it brought into being a peculiar brand of cryptorevolutionary writing, made more tortuous and more intense by repression, which in the end turned the whole of Russian literature

into what Henen described as 'one vast bill of indictment' against

Russian life.

The censor was the ofticial enemy, but unlike his modern successor,

he was almost wholly negative. The tsarist censorship imposed

silence but it did not directly tell professors what to teach; it did not

dictate to authors what to say and how to say it; and it did not command

composers to induce this or that mood in their audiences. It was

merely designed to prevent the expression of a certain number of

selected 'dangerous ideas'. It was an obstacle, at rimes a maddening

one. But because it was, like so much in old Russia, inefficient,

corrupt, indolent, often stupid, or deliberately lenient-and because

so many loopholes could always be found by the ingenious and the

desperate, not much that was subversive was stopped effectively. The

Russian writers who belonged to the radical intelligentsia did, after

all, publish their works, and published them, by and large, in an

almost undistorted form. The main effect of repression was to drive

social and political ideas into the relatively safe realm of literature.

This had already occurred in Germany, and it did so on a much

larger scale in Russia.

Yet it would be a mistake to exaggerate the role of the government

repression in compelling literature to become political in character.

The romantic movement was itself an equally potent factor in creating

'impure' literature, in filling it with ideological content. Turgenev

himself, the 'purest' of all the men of letters of his rime, and often

taken to task for this sin by censorious preachers like Dostoevsky or

the 'materialist' critics of the 6os, did, after all, at one time, contemplate an academic career-as a professor of philosophy. He was dissuaded from this; but his early Hegelian infatuation proved a lasting inftuence on his whole view of life. Hegel's teaching drove some to

revolution, others to reaction; in either case it emancipated its adherents

from the over-simplified classifications of men by the eighteenthcentury pamphleteers into the virtuous and the vicious, the benighted or the enlightened, of events into good and bad, and from the view

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of both men and things as intelligible and predictable i n terms o f clear,

mechanically conceived, causal chains. For Turgenev, on the contrary,

everything is compounded of characteristics in a perpetual process of

transformation, infinitely complex, morally and politically ambivalent,

blending into constantly changing combinations, explicable only in

terms of flexible and often impressionistic psychological and historical

concepts, which allow for the elaborate interplay of factors that are

too many and too fleeting to be reduced to scientific schemata or

laws. Turgenev's liberalism and moderation, for which he was so

much criticised, took the form of holding everything in solution-of

remaining outside the situation in a state of watchful and ironical

detachment, uncommitted, evenly balanced-an agnostic oscillating

contentedly between atheism and faith, belief in progress and scepticism, an observer in a state of cool, emotionally controlled doubt before a spectacle of life where nothing is quite what it seems, where

every quality is infected by its opposite, where paths are never straight,

never cross in geometrically regular patterns. For him (this is his

version of the Hegelian dialectic) reality for ever escapes all artificial

ideological nets, all rigid, dogmatic assumptions, defies all attempts

at codification, upsets all symmetrical moral or sociological systems,

and yields itself only to cautious, emotionally neutral, scrupulously

empirical attempts to describe it bit by bit, as it presents itself to the

curious eye of the morally disinterested observer. Herz.en, too, rejects

cut and dried systems and programmes: neither he nor Turgenev

accepted the positive Hegelian doctrines, the vast cosmological fantasy

-the historical theodicy which unhinged so many of their contemporaries. Both were profoundly affected by its negative aspect-the undermining of the uncritical faith in the new social sciences which

animated the optimistic thinkers of the previous century.

These were some of the more prominent and celebrated among

the avant-gardt young Russians of the late 30s and 40s-and there

were many members of this group whom there is not room to mention­

Katkov, who began as a philosopher and a radical and later became a

famous and influential reactionary journalist; the philosopher Redkin,

the essayist Korsh, and the translator Ketcher; the actor Shchepkin;

wealthy young dilettanti like Botkin, Panaev, Sazonov, Ogarev,

Galakhov, the great poet Nekrasov, and many lesser figures whose

lives are of interest only to literary or social historians. But over all

these towers the figure of the critic Vissarion Belinsky. His defects

both of education and taste were notorious; his appearance was

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unimpressive, his prose style left much to be desired. But he became

the moral and literary dictator of his generation. Those who came

under his influence remained affected by it long after his death ; and

whether for good or ill it transformed Russian writing-in particular

criticism-radically, and, it would seem, for ever.

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III

V I S S A R I O N B E LI N S KY

I N I 8 s6 I van Aksakov' one of two famous Slavophil brothers, who

had no sympathy for political radicalism, wrote an account of one of

his tours of the provincial centres of European Russia. The tour was

conceived by him as a kind of nationalist pilgrimage, intended at once

to draw comfort and inspiration from direct contact with the untouched

mass of the Russian people, and to warn those who needed warning

against the horrors of the west and the snares of western liberalism.

Aksakov was bitterly disappointed.

The name of Belinsky is known to every thinking young man [he

wrote], to everyone who is hungry for a breath of fresh air in the

reeking bog of provincial life. There is not a country schoolmaster

who does not know-and know by heart- Belinsky's letter to Gogo!.

If you want to find honest people, people who care about the poor

and the oppressed, an honest doctor, an honest lawyer not afraid of

a fight, you will find them among Belinsky's followers . . . Slavophil

inRuence is negligible . . . Belinsky's proselytes increase.

Plainly we are dealing with a major phenomenon of some kind someone to whom, eight years after his death, idealistic young men, during one of the worst moments of repression in the nineteenth

century, looked as their leader. The literary reminiscences of the

young radicals of the 30s and 4os- Panaev and his wife, Turgenev,

Herzen, Annenkov, Ogareva, Dostoevsky-agree in stressing this

aspect of Belinsky as the 'conscience' of the Russian intelligentsia, the

inspired and fearless publicist, the ideal of the young rlvoltls, the