Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

revolt is of a quality wholly different from that of the well-born and

well-bred radicals of the 1 84os who shook and in the end destroyed

the classical aristocratic fa�e of the 'Augustan age' of Russian

literature. The circle-or the two overlapping circles-in which he

moved, in his day still consisted principally of the sons of land-owning

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squires. But i n due course this aristocratic opposition gave way to

more violent figures drawn from the middle class and the proletariat.

Of these latter Belinsky is the greatest and most direct ancestor.

Those left-wing writers of a later day inevitably tended to imitate

the defects of his qualities, and in particular the brutal directness and

carelessness of his diction as a measure of their own contempt for the

careful and often exquisite taste of the polite belles lettres against which

they were in such hot rebellion. But whereas the literary crudities of

such radical critics of the 6os as Chernyshevsky or Pisarev were

deliberate-a conscious weapon in the war for ;naterialism and the

natural sciences, and against the ideals of pure art, refinement, and the

cultivation of aesthetic, non-utilitarian attitudes to personal and social

questions- Belinsky's case is more painful and more interesting. He

was not a crude materialist, and certainly not a utilitarian. He believed

in his critical calling as an end valuable in itself. He wrote as he spokein shapeless, over-long, awkward, hurrying, tangled sentences-only because he possessed no better means of expression; because that was

the natural medium in which he felt and thought.

Let me remind you once again that Russian writing for several

decades, before and after Push kin, practised, as it was, almost exclusively

by the 'awakened' members of the upper and upper middle class, drew

on foreign, principally French and later German, sources, and was

marked with an altogether exceptional sensibility to style and subtlety

of feeling. Belinsky's preoccupations, for all his insight into the process

of artistic creation, were predominantly social and moral. He was a

preacher, he preached with fervour, and could not always control the

tone and accent of his utterance. He wrote, as he spoke, with a grating,

occasionally shrill intonation, and Pushkin's friends-aesthetes and

mandarins- instinctively recoiled from this noisy, frantically excited,

half-educated vulgarian. Belinsky, whose admiration of their magnificent achievement was wholehearted and boundless, felt (as so often) wounded and socially humiliated. But he could not alter his

nature, nor could he alter or modify or pass over the truth as he saw_

it, painfully, but, from time to time, with overwhelming clearness.

His pride was great, and he was dedicated to a cause; the cause was

that of the unadorned truth, and in her service he would live and die.

The literary elite, the friends of Pushkin, the Arz.amas group as

they were called, despite radical ideas acquired abroad in the victorious

war against Napoleon, despite the Decembrist interlude, was on the

whole conservative, if not always politically, yet in social habits and

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temper; it was connected with the Court and the Army and deeply

patriotic. Belinsky, to whom this seemed a retrograde outlook, a sin

against the light of science and education, was convinced that Russia

had more to learn from the technologically progressive west than to

teach it, that the Slavophil movement was a romantic illusion, and,

in its extreme form, blind nationalistic megalomania, that western arts

and sciences and forms of civilised life offered the first and only hope

of lifting Russia from her backward state. Herzen, Bakunin, Granovsky believed this too, of course. But then they had had a semi-western education, and found it both easy and agreeable to travel and live

abroad and to enter into social and personal relations with civilised

Frenchmen or Germans. Even the Slavophils who spoke of the west

as worthless and decadent were delighted by their visits to Berlin or

Baden-Baden or Oxford or even Paris itself.

Belinsky, who intellectually was so ardent a Westerner, was

emotionally more deeply and unhappily Russian than any of his contemporaries, spoke no foreign languages, could not breathe freely in any environment save that of Russia, and felt miserable and persecutionridden abroad. He found western culture worthy of respect and emulation, but western habits of life were to him personally quite

insufferable. He began to sigh bitterly for home as soon as he had

left his native shore on a sea voyage to Germany; the Sistine Madonna

and the wonders of Paris did not comfort him; after a month abroad he

was almost insane with nostalgia. In a very real sense he embodied

the uncompromising elements of a Slav temperament and way of life

to a sharper degree than his friends and contemporaries-whether like

Turgenev they felt contented in Germany and Paris and unhappy in

Russia, or, like the Slavophils, wore traditional Russian dress and

secretly preferred a poem by Goethe or a tragedy by Schiller to any

number of ancit:nt Russian ballads or Slav chronicles. T:1is deep inner

conflict between intellectual beliefs and emotional, sometimes almost

physical, needs, is a characteristically Russian disease. As the nineteenth

century developed, and as the struggle between social classes became

sharper and more articulate, the contradiction, which tormented

Belinsky, emerged more clearly. The Marxists or agrarian socialists

or anarchists, when they are not noblemen or university professors,

that is to say, to some degree professionally members of an international society, make their bow with great conviction and sincerity to the west in the sense that they believe in its civilisation, above all

its sciences, its techniques, its political thought and practice, but when

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they are forced to emigrate, find life abroad more agonising than other

exiles. Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Lavrov were by birth gentlemen,

and lived abroad, if not happily, at any rate without becoming embittered specifically by contact with it. Herz.en did not greatly love Switzerland and he disliked Twickenham and London a great deal,

but he preferred either to St Petersburg under Nicholas I, and he was

happy in the society of his French and Italian friends. Turgenev

seemed more than contented on Madame Viardot's estate at Bougival.

But Belinsky can no more be thought of as a voluntary emigre than

Dr Johnson or Cobbett. He stormed and ranted and denounced the

most sacrosanct Russian institutions, but he did not leave his country.

And although he must have known that imprisonment and slow and

painful death were inevitable if he persisted, he did not, and obviously

could not for a moment, contemplate emigrating beyond the frontiers

of the Russian Empire: the Slavophils and the reactionaries were the

enemy, but the battle could be fought only on native soil. He could

not be silent and he would not go abroad. His head was with the west,

but his heart and his ill-kept body were with the mass of inarticulate

peasants and small traders-the 'poor folk' of Dostoevsky, the inhabitants of the teeming world of Gogol's terrible comic imagination.