Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

to a virtuous, idealistic� but dull and naive husband. It is not a good

novel, and its plot is not worth recounting, but the main point, and

what is most characteristic of Herzen, is that the situation possesses,

in principle, no solution. The lover is left broken-hearted, the wife

falls ill and probably dies, the husband contemplates suicide. It sounds

like a typically gloomy, morbidly self-centred caricature of the Russian

novel. But it is not. It rests on an exceedingly delicate, precise, and

at times profound description of an emotional and psychological situation to which the theories of a Stendhal, the method of a Flaubert, the depth and moral insight of George Eliot are inapplicable because

they are seen to be too literary, derived from obsessive ideas, ethical

doctrines not fitted to the chaos of life.

At the heart of Herzen's outlook (and of Turgenev's too) is the

notion of the complexity and insolubility of the central problems, and,

therefore, of the absurdity of trying to solve them by means of political

or sociological instruments. But the difference between Herzen and

Turgenev is this. Turgenev is, in his innermost being, not indeed

heartless but a cool, detached, at times slightly mocking observer who

looks upon the tragedies of life from a comparatively remote point of

view; oscillating between one vantage point and another, between

the claims of society and of the individual, the claims of love and of

daily life; between heroic virtue and realistic scepticism, the morality

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of Hamlet and the morality of Don Quixote, the necessity for efficient

political organisation and the necessity for individual self-expression;

remaining suspended in a state of agreeable indecision, sympathetic

melancholy, ironical, free from cynicism and sentimentality, perceptive, scrupulously truthful and uncommitted. Turgenev neither quite believed nor quite disbelieved in a deity, personal or impersonal;

religion is for him a normal ingredient of life, like love, or egoism,

or the sense of pleasure. He enjoyed remaining in an intermediate

position, he enjoyed almost too much his lack of will to believe, and

because he stood aside, because he contemplated in tranquillity, he

was able to produce great literary masterpieces of a finished kind,

rounded stories told in peaceful retrospect, with well-constructed

beginnings, middles and ends. He detached his art from himself; he

did not, as a human being, deeply care about solutions; he saw life

with a peculiar chilliness, which infuriated both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and he achieved the exquisite perspective of an artist who treats his material from a certain distance. There is a chasm between

him and his material, within which alone his particular kind of

poetical creation is possible.

Herzen, on the contrary, cared far too violently. He was looking

for solutions for himself, for his own personal life. His novels were

certainly failures. He obtrudes himself too vehemently into them,

himself and his agonised point of view. On the other hand, his autobiographical sketches, when he writes openly about himself and about his friends, when he speaks about his own life in Italy, in France, in

Switzerland, in England, have a kind of palpitating directness, a sense

of first-handness and reality, which no other writer in the nineteenth

century begins to convey. His reminiscences are a work of critical

and descriptive genius with the power of absolute self-revelation that

only an astonishingly imaginative, impressionable, perpetually reacting

personality, with an exceptional sense both of the noble and the

ludicrous, and a rare freedom from vanity and doctrine, could have

attained. As a writer of memoirs he is unequalled. His sketches of

England, or rather of himself in England, are better than Heine's or

Taine's. To demonstrate this one need only read his wonderful

account of English political trials, of how judges, for example, looked

to him when they sat in court trying foreign conspirators for having

fought a fatal duel in Windsor Park. He gives a vivid and entertaining

description of bombastic French demagogues and gloomy French

fanatics, and of the impassable gulf which divides this agitated and

..

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slightly grotesque emigre society from the dull, frigid, an d dignified

institutions of mid-Victorian England, typified by the figure of the

presiding judge at the Old Bailey, who looks like the wolf in Red

Riding Hood, i n his white wig, his long skirts, with his sharp little

wolf-like face, thin lips, sharp teeth, and harsh little words that come

with an air of specious benevolence from the face encased in disarming

feminine curls-giving the impression of a sweet, grandmotherly, old

lady, belied by the small gleaming eyes and the dry, acrid, malicious

judicial humour.

He paints classical portraits of German exiles, whom he detested,

of Italian and Polish revolutionaries, whom he admired, and gives

little sketches of the differences between the nations, such as the

English and the French, each of which regards itself as the greatest

nation on earth, and will not yield an inch, and does not begin to

understand the other's ideals-the French with their gregariousness,

their lucidity, their didacticism, their neat formal gardens, as against

the English with their solitudes and dark suppressed romanticism, and

the tangled undergrowth of their ancient, illogical, but profoundly

civilised and humane institutions. And there are the Germans, who

regard themselves, he declares, as an inferior fruit of the tree of which

the English are the superior products, and come to England, and

after three days 'say "yes" instead of "ja", and "well" where it is not required'. It is invariably for the Germans that both he and

Bakunin reserved their sharpest taunts, not so much from personal

dislike as because the Germans to them seemed to stand for all that

was middle-class, cramping, philistine and boorish, the sordid despotism

of grey and small-minded drill sergeants, aesthetically more disgusting

than the generous, magnificent tyrannies of great conquerors of

history.

Where they are stopped by their conscience, we are stopped by a

policeman. Our weakness is arithmetical, and so we yield; their

weakness is an algebraic weakness, it is part of the formula itself.

This was echoed by Bakunin a decade later:

When an Englishman or an American says 'I am an Englishman',

'I am an American', they are saying 'I am a free man'; when a

German says 'I am a German' he is saying ' . . . my Emperor is

stronger than all the other Emperors, and the German soldier who

is strangling me will strangle you all . . . '

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This kind of sweeping prejudice, these diatribes against entire nations

and classes, are characteristic of a good many Russian writers of this

period. They are often ill-founded, unjust and violently exaggerated,

but they are the authentic expression of an indignant reaction against

an oppressive milieu, and of a genuine and highly personal moral

vision which makes them lively reading even now.

.

His irreverence and the irony, the disbelief in final solutions, the

conviction that human beings are complex and fragile, and that there

is value in the very irregularity of their structure which is violated