Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

progress . . . Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism, or aestheticism, or piety, but in the achievements of education, civilisation, and humane culture. She has no need of sermons (she has heard too

many), nor of prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of

the awakening in the people of a feeling of human dignity, lost for

so many ages in mud and filth. It needs laws and rights in accordance

not with the teachings of the church, but with those of common

sense and justice . . . Instead of which she offers the terrible

spectacle of a land where men buy and sell other men without even

the cant of the Americans, who say that negroes are not men . . . a

country where there are no guarantees of personal libeny or honour

or property; not even a police state, only huge corporations of

official thieves and robbers . . . The government . . . knows well

what the landlords do to their peasants, and how many landlords

are massacred by their serfs every year . . . Preacher of the whip,

apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and black reaction,

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V I S SA R I ON B E L I N SK Y

defender of a Tartar way of life-what are you doing? Look at the

ground beneath your feet. You are standing on the edge of an abyss.

You found your teachings upon the Orthodox Church, and that I

understand, for the Church has always favoured whips and prisons,

it has always grovelled to despotism. But what has this to do with

Christ? . . . Of course a Voltaire whose ridicule put out the flames

of fanaticism and illiteracy in Europe is far more a son of Christ,

flesh of His flesh, and bone of His bone, than all your parsons,

bishops, patriarchs, metropolitans . . . [Our country priests] are the

heroes of rude, popular tales . . . the priest is always the glutton, the

miser, the sycophant, the man lost to all sense of shame . . . Most

of our clergy are . . . either pedantic schoolmen, or else appallingly

ignorant and blind. Only our literature, in spite of a barbarous

censorship, shows signs of life and forward movement. That is why

the calling of the writer is so honoured among us, why even a

small literary gift makes for success; that is why the profession of

letters has thrown into the shade the glitter of epaulettes and gaudy

uniforms; that is why a liberal writer, even one whose capacity is

poor, excites general attention, while great poets who . . . sell their

gifts to serve the Orthodox Church, autocracy and nationalism,

quickly lose their popularity . . . The Russian people is right. It

sees in writers of Russia its only leaders, defenders, and saviours

from the darkness of Russian autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationalism.

It can forgive a bad book but not a harmful one.

He read this letter to his friends in Paris. 'This is a work of genius,'

Herun said in a low voice to Annenkov, who records the scene, 'and

I think his last will and testament. • This celebrated document became

the bible of Russian revolutionaries. Indeed it is for reading it to an

illicit discussion circle that Dostoevsky was condemned to death, then

sent to Siberia.

Belinsky in his final phase was a humanist, an enemy of theology

and metaphysics, and a radical democrat, and by the extreme force

and vehemence of his convictions turned purely literary disputes into

the beginnings of social and political movements. Turgenev said of

him that there are tWo types of writer: a writer may be brilliantly

imaginative and creative, but remain on the periphery of the collective

experience of the society to which he belongs. Or he may live at the

centre of his society, being connected 'organically' with the emotions

and state of mind of his community. Belinsky knew, as only true

social critics do, where the centre of moral gravity of a book, an

opinion, an author, a movement, an entire society, could be found.

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The central issue o f Russian society was not political but social and

moral. The intelligent and awakened Russian wanted above all to be

told what to do, how to live as an individual, as a private person.

Turgenev testifies that never were people more interested in the

problems of life, and never less in those of pure aesthetic theory, than

in the 1 84os and 50s. The mounting repression made literature the

only medium within which any degree of free discussion of social

questions could take place. I ndeed the great controversy between

Slavophils and 'Westerners', between the view of Russia as a still

uncorrupted spiritual and social organism, bound by impalpable links

of common love, natural piety, and reverence for authority, to which

the application of artificial, 'soulless' western forms and institutions

had done, and would do, fearful damage; and, on the other hand, the

view of it held by the 'Westerners' as a retarded semi-Asiatic despotism

lacking even the rudiments of social justice and individual liberty-this

crucial debate, which split educated Russians in the nineteenth century,

was c.arried on principally in the semi-disguise of literary and philosophical argument. The authorities viewed neither side with favour, and, with some j ustice, regarded public discussion of any serious issue

as in itself a menace to the regime. Nevertheless the effective techniques of suppression, as we know them now, had not as yet been i nvented; and the half-clandestine controversy continued, sharpened

and rendered more personal by the acute consciousness of their own

social origins which infected the opinions and quality of feeling of the

principal adversaries themselves.

Russia in Belinsky's day, in the I 8JOS and the 1 840s, was still, in

the main, a feudal society. It was pre-industrial and, in certain parts

of it, semi-colonial. The state was based on sharply drawn divisions

which separated the peasantry from the merchants and from the lower

clergy, and there was a still wider gap which divided the gentry from

the nobility. It was not altogether impossible, although it was very

difficult and very uncommon, to rise from a lower to a higher stratum.

But in order to do this a man had to have not merely exceptional

energy, exceptional ambition and talent, but also a certain willingness

and capacity to jettison his past and to identify himself morally,

socially, and mentally with the higher milieu, which on certain terms,

if he tried hard enough, might be prepared to receive and assimilate

him. The most remarkable Russian in the eighteenth century, the

father of polite letters and of the natural sciences in his country,

Mikhail Lomonosov -'the Russian Leonardo'- was1a man of obscure

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and humble origin, but he rose and was transformed. There is a good

deal that is robust and vigorous, but nothing primitive, no trace of a

rustic accent in his writing. He had all the zeal of a convert and a

self-taught one at that, and did more than anyone to establish the

formal conventions of Russian literary prose and verse in the later

eighteenth century, rigorously modelled on the most elaborate European-that is to say French -practice of the time. Until the second quarter of the nineteenth century the social elite alone possessed