Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

in October I 9 I 7. In due course the Bolsheviks repudiated this

programme, and transformed the cells of dedicated revolutionariesperhaps the most original contribution of populism to revolutionary practice-into the hierarchy of centralised political power, which the

populists had steadily and fiercely denounced until they were themselves finally, in the form of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, proscribed and annihilated. Communist practice owed much, as Lenin was always ready to admit, to the populist movement; for it borrowed

the technique of its rival and adapted it with conspicuous success to

serve the precise purpose which it had been invented to resist.

,,

237

Tolstoy and Enlightenment

'Two T H I N GS are always said about Count Tolstoy,' wrote the

celebrated Russian critic Mikhailovsky in a forgotten essay published

in the mid-1 87os, 'that he is an outstandingly good writer of fiction

and a bad thinker. This . . . has become a sort of axiom needing no

demonstration.' This almost universal verdict has reigned, virtually

unchallenged, for something like a hundred years; and Mikhailovsky's

attempt to question it remained relatively isolated. Tolstoy dismissed

his left-wing ally as a routine liberal hack, and expressed surprise that

anyone should take an interest in him. This was characteristic, but

unjust. The essay which its author called The Right Hand and the

Left Hand of Leo Tolstoy is a brilliant and convincing defence of

Tolstoy on both intellectual and moral grounds, directed mainly

against the liberals and socialists who saw in the novelist's ethical

doctrines, and in particular in his glorification of the peasants and

natural instinct, and his constant disparagement of scientific culture,

a perverse and sophisticated obscurantism which discredited the liberal

cause, and played into the hands of priests and reactionaries. Mikhailovsky rejected this view, and in the course of his long and careful attempt to sift the enlightened grain from the reactionary chaff in Tolstoy's

opinions, reached the conclusion that there was an unresolved, and

unavowed, conflict in the great novelist's conceptions both of human

nature and of the problems facing Russian and western civilisation.

Mikhailovsky maintained that, so far from being a 'bad thinker',

Tolstoy was no less acute, clear-eyed and convincing in his analysis of

ideas than of instincts or characters or actions. In his zeal for his

paradoxical thesis-paradoxical certainly at the time at which he wrote

it- Mikhailovsky sometimes goes too far; but in substance it seems to

me to be right; or at any rate, more right than wrong, and my own

remarks are no more than an extended gloss on it.

Tolstoy's opinions are always subjective and can be (as, for example,

in his writings on Shakespeare or Dante or Wagner) wildly perverse.

But the questions which in his most didactic essays he tries to answer

are nearly always cardinal questions of principle, always first-hand,

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TOLSTOY AND EN L I G HTEN M ENT

and cut far deeper, in the deliberately simplified and naked form in

which he usually presents them, than those of more balanced and

'objective' thinkers. Direct vision always tends to be disturbing.

Tolstoy used this gift to the full to destroy both his own peace and

that of his readers. It was this habit of asking exaggeratedly simple

but fundamental questions, to which he did not himself-at any rate in

the 1 86os and- 7os-possess the answers; that gave him the reputation

of being a 'nihilist'. Yet he certainly had no desire to destroy for the

sake of destruction. He only desired, more than anything else in the

world, to know the truth. How annihilating this passion can be is

shown by others who have chosen to cut below the limits set by the

wisdom of their generation: Machiavelli, Pascal, Rousseau; the author

of the Book of Job. Like them, Tolstoy cannot be fitted into any of

the public movements of his own, or indeed any other age. The only

company to which Tolstoy belongs is the subversive one of questioners

to whom no answer has been, or seems likely to be, given-at least no

answer which they or those who understand them will begin to accept.

As for Tolstoy's positive ideas-and they varied less during his long

life than has sometimes been represented-they are not at all unique:

they have something in common with the French Enlightenment of

the eighteenth century; something with those of the twentieth century;

little with those of his own times. In Russia he belonged to neither

of the great ideological streams which divided educated opinion in that

country during his youth. He was not a radical intellectual, with his

eyes turned to the west; nor a Slavophil, that is to say, a believer in a

Christian and nationalist monarchy. His views cut across these

categories. Like the radicals he had always condemned political

repression, arbitrary violence, economic exploitation, and all that

creates and perpetuates inequality among men. But the rest of the

'W esternising' outlook- the heart of the ideology of the intelligentsiathe overwhelming sense of civic responsibility, the belief in natural science as the door to all truth, in social and political reform, in

democracy, material progress, secularism-this celebrated amalgam

Tolstoy rejected, early in life, out of hand. He believed in individual

liberty and, indeed, in progress too, but in a queer sense of his own.1

1 Education for him is 'an activit)l based on the human need for equality

and the immutable law of the advance of education', which he interprets as

the constant equalisation of knowledge, knowledge which is always growing

because I know what the child does not know; moreover, each generation

..

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R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S

He looked with contempt on liberals and socialists, and with even

greater hatred on the right-wing parties of his time. His closest affinity,

as has often been remarked, is with Rousseau ; he liked and admired

Rousseau's views more than those of any other modern writer. Like

Rousseau, he rejected the doctrine of original sin, and believed that

man was born innocent, and had been ruined by his own bad institutions; especially by what passed for education among civilised men.

Like Rousseau again, he put the blame for this process of decadence

largely on the intellectuals-the self-appointed elites of experts, sophisticated coteries remote from common humanity, self-estranged from natural life. These men are damned because they have all but lost the

most precious of all human possessions, the capacity with which all

men are born-to see the truth, the immutable, eternal truth which

only charlatans and sophists represent as varying in different circumstances and times and places- the truth which is visible fully only to the innocent eye of those whose hearts have not been corrupted children, peasants, those not blinded by vanity and pride. the simple, the good. Education, as the west understands it, ruins innocence. That

is why children resist it bitterly and instinctively: that is why it has to

be rammed down their throats, and, like all coercion and violence,

maims the victim and at times destroys him beyond redress. Men crave

for truth by nature; therefore true education must be of such a kind

that children and unsophisticated, ignorant people will absorb it readily

and eagerly. But to understand this, and to discover how to apply this

knowledge, the educated must put away their intellectual arrogance,