Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

not widely known in English-speaking countries, and that for no good

reason, for it has been translated into English, the first part magnificently by J. D. Duff, and the whole adequately by Constance Garnett; unlike some works of political and literary genius, it is, even

in translation, marvellously readable.

In some respects, it resembles Goethe"s Dichtung und Wahrheit

more than any other book. For it is not a collection of wholly personal

memoirs and political reRections. It is an amalgam of personal detail,

descriptions of political and social life in various countries, of opinions,

personalities, outlooks, accounts of the author's youth and early manhood in Russia, historical essays, notes of journeys in Europe, France, Switzerland, Italy, of Paris and Rome during the revolutions of I 848

and I 849 (these last are incomparable, and the best personal documents

about these events that we possess), discussions of political leaders, and

of the aims and purposes of various parties. All this is interspersed

with a variety of comment, pungent observation, sharp and spontaneous,

occasionally malicious, vignettes of individuals, of the character of

peoples, analyses of economic and social facts, discussions and epigrams

about the future and past of Europe and about the author's own

hopes and fears for Russia; and interwoven with this is a detailed and

poignant account of Herzen's personal tragedy, perhaps the most

extraordinary self-revelation on the part of a sensitive and fastidious

man ever written down for the benefit of the general public.

Alexander I vanovich Herzen was born in Moscow in I 8 I 2, not

long before the capture of the city by Napoleon, the illegitimate son

of I van Yakovlev, a rich and well-born Russian gentleman, descended

from a cadet branch of the Romanovs, a morose, difficult, possessive,

distinguished and civilised man, who bullied his son, loved him deeply,

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A L E X AN D E R H E RZEN

embittered his life, and had an enormous influence upon him both by

attraction and repulsion. His mother, Luiz� Haag, was a mild

German lady from Stuttgart in Wurttemberg, the daughter of a minor

official. I van Y akovlev had met her while travelling abroad, but

never married her. He took her to Moscow, established her as mistress

of his household, and called his son Herzen in token, as it were, of

the fact that he was the child of his heart, but not legitimately born

and therefore not entitled to bear his name.

The fact that Herzen was not born in wedlock probably had a

considerable effect on his character, and may have made him more

rebellious than he might otherwise have been. He received the regular

education of a rich young nobleman, went to the University of

Moscow, and there early asserted his vivid, original, impulsive

character. He was born (in later years he constantly came back to this)

into the generation of what in Russia came to be called /ishnie lyudi,

'superfluous men', with whom Turgenev's early novels are so largely

concerned.

These young men have a place of their own in the history of

European culture in the nineteenth century. They belonged to the

class of those who are by birth aristocratic, but who themselves go

over to some freer and more radical mode of thought and of action.

There is something singularly attractive about men who retained,

throughout life, the manners, the texture of being, the habits and

style of a civilised and refined milieu. Such men exercise a peculiar

kind of personal freedom which combines spontaneity with distinction.

Their minds see large and generous horizons, and, above all, reveal a

unique intellectual gaiety of a kind that aristocratic ed:.�cation tends

to produce. At the same time, they are intellectually on the side of

everything that is new, progressive, rebellious, young, untried, of that

which is about to come into being, of the open sea whether or not

there is land that lies beyond. To this type belong those intermediate

figures, like Mirabeau, Charles James Fox, Franklin Roosevelt,

who live near the frontier that divides old from new, between the

douceur de Ia vie which is about to pass and the tantalising future,

the dangerous new age that they themselves do much to bring into

being.

Herzen belonged to this milieu. In his autobiography he has described

what it was like to be this kind of man in a suffocating society, where

there was no opportunity of putting to use one's natural gifts, what it

meant to be excited by novel ideas which came drifting in from all

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RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S

kinds o f sources, from classical texts an d the old Utopias o f the west,

from French social preachers and German philosophers, from books,

journals, casual conversations, only to remember that the milieu in

which one lived made it absurd even to begin to dream of creating in

one's own country those harmless and moderate institutions which

had long become forms of life in the civilised west.

This normally led to one of two results: either the young enthusiast

simply subsided, and came to terms with reality, and became a wistful,

gently frustrated landowner, who lived on his estate, turned the pages

of serious periodicals imported from Petersburg or abroad, and

occasionally introduced new pieces of agricultural machinery or some

other ingenious device which had caught his fancy in England or in

France. Such enthusiasts would endlessly discuss the need for this or

that change, but always with the melancholy implication that little or

nothing could or would be done; or, alternatively, they would give in

entirely and fall into a species of gloom or stupor or violent despair,

becoming self-devouring neurotics, destructive personalities slowly

poisoning both themselves and the life round them.

Herzen was resolved to escape from both these familiar predicaments. He was determined that of him, at any rate, nobody would say that he had done nothing in the world, that he had offered no

resistance and collapsed. When he finally emigrated from Russia in

1 847 it was to devote himself to a life of activity. His education was

that of a dilettante. Like most young men brought up in an aristocratic

milieu, he had been taught to be too many things to too many men,

to reflect too many aspects of life, and situations, to be able to concentrate sufficiently upon any one particular activity, any one fixed design.

Herzen was well aware of this. He talks wistfully about the good

fortune of those who enter peacefully upon some steady, fixed profession, untroubled by the many countless alternatives open to gifted and often idealistic- young men who have been taught too much, are

too rich, and are offered altogether too wide an opportunity of doing

too many things, and who, consequently, begin, and are bored, and

go back and start down a new path, and in the end lose their way

and drift aimlessly and achieve nothing. This was a very characteristic

piece of self-analysis: filled with the idealism of his generation in

Russia that both sprang from and fed the growing sense of guilt

towards 'the people', Herzen was passionately anxious to do something

memorable for himself and his country. This anxiety remained with

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