Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

is-how vile the world is, especially in our neighbourhood.

And in the same year:

And oh the mad nonsense which I have poured out . . . against the

French, that energetic and noble nation, shedding its blood for the

most sacred rights of mankind . . . I have awoken and recollect my

dreams with horror . . .

And apropos the inexorable march of the Spirit (Herzen records) :

So it is not for myself that I create, but for the Spirit . . . Really what

kind of an idiot does it take me for? I'd rather not think at allwhat do I care about Its consciousness?

R U SS IAN T H INKERS

And in his letters there are passages in which such sacred metaphysical

entities as Universality- Cosmic Consciousness-the Spirit-the rational

State etc. are denounced as a Moloch of abstraction devouring living

human beings.

A year later he finally settled accounts with the master himself:

All Hegel's talk about morality is utter nonsense, since in the

objective realm of thought there is no morality . . . Even if I

attained to the actual top of the ladder of human development, I

should at that point still have to ask [Hegel] to account for all the

victims of life and of history, all the victims of accident and superstition, of the Inquisition and Philip II, and so on and so forth; otherwise I will throw myself off head-downwards . . . I am told

that disharmony is a condition of harmony. This may be found

agreeable . . . by musical persons, but is not quite so satisfactory

from the point of view of those whose fate it is to express in their

lives the element of disharmony.

And in the same year he tries to explain the aberration:

. . . because we understood that for us there is no life in real life, and

because our nature was such that without life we could not live, we

ran away into the world of books, and began to live and to love

according to books, and made life and love a kind of occupation, a

kind of work, an anxious labour . . . In the end we bored and

irritated and maddened each other . . .

Be social or die ! That is my slogan. What is it to me that something universal lives, so long as the individual suffers, that solitary genius should live in heaven, while the common herd rolls in the

mud? What is it to me if I do apprehend . . . the essence of art or

religion or history, if I cannot share this with all those who should

be my human brothers, my brethren in Christ, but are in fact

strangers and enemies because of their ignorance? . . . I cannot bear

the sight of barefoot boys playing . . . in the gutter, poor men in

tatters, the drunken cab-driver, the soldier coming off duty, the

official padding along with a portfolio under his arm, the selfsatisfied army officer, the haughty nobleman. When I give a penny to a soldier or a beggar I almost cry, I run from him as if I had done

something terrible, as if I did not wish to hear the sound of my own

steps . . . Has a man the right to forget himself in art or science,

while this goes on?

He read the materialist Feuerbach and became a revolutionary

democrat, denouncing tyranny, ignorance, and the bestial lives of his

fellow countrymen with ever-increasing ferocity. After his escape

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V I SSARION B E L I N S K Y

from the spell of a half-understood German metaphysics he felt a

sense of extreme liberation. As always the reaction took an external

form and poured itself out i n passionate paeans to individualism. In a

letter to his friend Botkin he denounced his intellectual milieu for its

lack of seriousness and personal dignity:

. . . we are the unhappy Anarcharsises of the new Scythia. Why do

we all gape, yawn, bustle, and hurry and take an interest in everything and stick to nothing, and consume everything and remain hungry? We love one another, we love warmly and deeply, and how

have we shown our friendship? We used to be tremendously excited

about one another, enthusiastic, ecstatic, we hated one another, we

wondered about each other, we despised one another . . . When

separated from each other for long we pined and wept salt tears at

the mere thought of meeting, we were sick with love and affection :

when we met, our meetings were cold and oppressive, and we would

separate without regret. That is how it was, and it is time that we

stopped deceiving ourselves . . . Our learned professors are pedants,

a mass of social corruption . . . We are orphans, men without a

country . . . The ancient world is enchanting . . . its life contains

the seed of everything that is great, noble, valiant, because the

foundation of its life is personal pride; the dignity and sanctity of

the individual.

There follows an ecstatic comparison of Schiller to Tiberi us Gracchus

and of himself to Marat.

The human personality has become the point on which I fear I will

go off my head. I am beginning to love mankind a Ia Marat: to

make the smallest ponion of it happy I am ready, I do believe, to

destroy the rest by lire and sword.

He loves only the Jacobins-only they are effective: 'The two-edged

sword of word and deed-the Robespierres and the St Justs . . . not . . .

the sugary and ecstatic turns of phrase, the pretty idealism of the

Gironde', and this leads to socialism-of that pre-Marxist, 'Utopian'

kind, which Belinsky embraced before he understood it, because of

its promise of equality:

• . . socialism . . . idea of ideas, essence of essences . . • the alpha and

omega of faith and science. The day will come when nobody will

be burnt alive, nobody will have his head chopped off . . . There

will be no rich, no poor, no kings and subjects . . . [men] will be

brothers • . .

..

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R U S·SIAN T H I N K E R S

I t i s this mystical vision that Dostoevsky had i n mind when a

good many years after Belinsky's death he said: 'He believed . . . that

socialism not only does not destroy the freedom of the individual

personality but, on the contrary, restores it to unheard-of splendour,

on new and this time adamantine foundations.' Belinsky was the first

man to tell Dostoevsky, then still young and obscure, that in his Poor

Folk he had done in one stroke what the critics vainly tried to do in

lengthy essays-he had revealed the life of the grey, humiliated,

Russian minor official as nobody had even done before; but he disliked

Dostoevsky personally and detested his Christian convictions, and

deliberately scandalised him by violent atheistic and blasphemous

tirades. His attitude to religion was that of Holbach or Diderot, and

for the same reasons: 'in the words God and rtligion I see only black

darkness, chains and the knout'.

In 1 847 Gogo!, whose genius Belinsky had acclaimed, published a

violently anti-liberal and anti-western tract, calling for a return to

ancient patriarchal ways, a spiritually regenerated land of serfs, landlords, the tsar. The cup brimmed over. In a letter written from abroad Belinsky, in the last stages of his wasting disease, accused Gogo!

of betraying the light:

. . . one cannot be silent when, under cover of religion, backed by

the whip, falsehood and immorality are preached as truth and virtue.

Yes, I loved you, with all the passion with which a man tied by ties

of blood to his country loves its hope, its glory, its pride, one of its

great leaders along the path of consciousness, development and