Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

an effective force. And the Soviet revolution returned, albeit in a

crude and distorted utilitarian form, to the canons of Belinsky and the

social criteria of art.

Many things have been said against Belinsky, particularly by the

opponents of naturalism, and some of them it is difficult to deny. He

was wildly erratic, and all his enthusiasm and seriousness and integrity

do not make up for lapses of insight or intellectual power. He declared

that Dante was not a poet; that Fenimore Cooper was the equal of

Shakespeare; that Othello was the product of a barbarous age; that

Pushkin's poem Ruslan and Lyudmila was 'infantile', that his Tales

of Belkin and Fairy Tales were worthless, and Tatyana in Evgeny

One gin 'a moral embryo'. There are equally wild remarks about

Racine and Corneille and Balzac and Hugo. Some of these are due

to irritation caused by the pseudo-medievalism of the Slavophils,

some to an over-sharp reaction against his old master Nadezhdin and

his school, which laid down that it was inartistic to deal with what

is dark or ugly or monstrous, when life and nature contain so much

that is beautiful and harmonious; but it is mostly due to sheer critical

blindness. He did damn the magnificent poet Baratynsky _out of hand,

and erased a gifted minor contemporary of Pushkin-the lyrical poet

Benediktov-out of men's minds for half a century, for no better

reason than that he disliked mere delicacy without moral fervour. And

he began to think that he was mistaken in proclaiming the genius

of Dostoevsky, who was perhaps no more than an exasperating

religious neurotic with persecution mania. His criticism is very uneven.

His essays in artistic theory, despite good pages, seem arid and artificial

and conceived under the inAuence of Procrustean German systems,

alien to his concrete, impulsive, and direct sense of life and art. He

wrote and talked a very great deal, and said far too much about too

many unrelated things, and too often spoke incoherently and naively,

with the uncritical exaggeration and half-baked dogmatism of an

autodidact-'always in a dither of excitement, always frantic, always

hurrying', falling and rising and stumbling on, sometimes pathetically

ill-equipped, hurrying desperately wherever the battle between truth

and falsehood, life and death, seemed most critical. He was the more

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R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S

erratic because h e took pride i n what seemed to him freedom from

petty qualities, from neatness and tidiness and scholarly accuracy, from

careful judgement and knowing how far to go. He could not bear

the cautious, the morally timid, the intellectually genteel, the avoiders

of crises, the bien pensant seekers of compromise, and attacked them

in long and clumsy periods full of fury and contempt. Perhaps he was

too intolerant, and morally lop-sided, and overplayed his own feelings.

He need not, perhaps, have hated Goethe quite so much for his, to

him, maddening serenity, or the whole of Polish literature for being

Polish and in love with itself. And these are not accidental blemishes,

they are the defects inherent in everything that he is and stands for.

To dislike them overmuch is ultimately to condemn his positive

attitude too. The value and influence of his position reside precisely

in his lack of, and conscious opposition to, artistic detachment: for he

saw in literature the expression of everything that men have felt and

thought and have had to say about life and society, their central

attitude to man's situation and to the world, the justification of their

whole life and activity, and consequently looked on it with the deepest

possible concern. He abandoned no view, however eccentric, until he

had tried it out on himself as it were, until he had 'lived himself'

through it, and paid the price in nervous waste and a sense of inadequacy, and sometimes total failure. He put truth, however fitfully glimpsed, however dull or bleak it might turn out to be, so far above

other aims that he communicated a sense of its sanctity to others and

thereby transformed the standards of criticism in Russia.

Because his consuming passion was confined to literature and books,

he attached immense importance to the appearance of new ideas, new

literary methods, above all new concepts of the relation of literature

and life. Because he was naturally responsive to everything that was

living and genuine, he transformed the concept of the critic's calling

in his native country. The lasting effect of his work was in altering,

and altering crucially and irretrievably, the moral and social outlook

of the leading younger writers and thinkers of his time. He altered

the quality and the tone both of the experience and of the expression

of so much Russian thought and feeling that his role as a dominant

social influence overshadows his attainments as a literary critic. Every

age has its official preachers and prophets who castigate its vices and

call to a better life. Yet it is not by them that ia; deepest malaise is

revealed, but in the artists and thinkers dedicated to the more painful

and difficult task of creation, description and analysis-it is they, the

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poets, the novelists, the critics, who live through the moral agony

of their society in their own personal experience; and it is they, their

victories and their defeats, that affect the fate of their generation and

leave the most authentic testimony of the battle itself for the benefit

of interested posterity. Nekrasov w.as a very gifted poet, but before

everything he was a preacher and a propagandist of genius; consequently it was not he but Belinsky who first saw the central issue and saw it more clearly and directly and simply than anyone would ever

see it again. Nor did the thought ever seem to arise in his mind that

it might be possible not to face it with all its implications, to practise

caution, to be more circumspect in one's choice of a moral and

political position, or perhaps even to retire to a neutral and disinterested

attitude above the din of the battle. 'He knew no fear, because he was

strong and sincere; his conscience was clear.' It is because he committed himself so violently and irrevocably to a very specific vision of the truth, and to a very specific set of moral principles to govern both

thought and action, at a price which grew greater continually to

himself and those who chose to follow him, that his life and his outlook

alternately appalled and inspired the generation which came after him.

No final verdict had been declared upon him in his own lifetime. Not

even official canonisation in his native country has finally laid the

ghost of his doubts and torments or stilled his indignant voice. The

issues on which he spent his life are today more alive-and, in consequence of revolutionary forces which he himself did so much to set in motion, more pressing and more threatening-than ever before .

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IV

A L E X A N D E R H E R Z E N

A L E XA N D E R H E R Z E N is the most arresting Russian political writer

in the nineteenth century. No good biographies of him exist, perhaps

because his own autobiography is a great literary masterpiece. It is