Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

of his own, inveighed against all methods of coercion, especially those

which consisted of forcing children against their will to memorise

facts and dates and figures. In short, he behaved like an original,

enlightened, energetic, opinionated, somewhat eccentric eighteenthcentury landowner who had become a convert to the doctrines of Rousseau or the abbe Mably. His accounts of his theories and experiments fill two stout volumes in the pre-revolutionary editions of his collected works. They are still fascinating, .if only because they contain

some of the best descriptions of village life and especially of children,

both comical and lyrical, that even he had ever composed. He wrote

them in the 1 86os and 70s when he was at the height of his creative

powers. His overriding didactic purpose is easily forgotten in the

unrivalled insight into the twisting, criss-crossing pattern of the

thoughts and feelings of individual village children, and the marvellous

concreteness and imagination with which their talk and behaviour,

and physical nature round them, are described. And side by side with

this direct vision of human experience, there run the clear, firm

dogmas of a fanatically doctrinaire eighteenth-century rationalistdoctrines not fused with the life that he describes, but superimposed upon it, like windows with rigorously symmetrical patterns drawn

upon them, unrelated to the world on which they open, and yet

achieving a kind of illusory artistic and intellectual unity with it,

owing to the unbounded vitality and constructive genius of the

writing itself. It is one of the most extraordinary performances in the

history of literature.

The enemy is always the same: experts, professionals, men who

claim special authority over other men. Universities and professors

are a frequent target for attack. There are intimations of this already

in the section entitled 'Youth' of his earlier autobiographical novel.

There is something eighteenth-century, reminiscent both of Voltaire

and of Bentham, about Tolstoy's devastating accounts of the dull and

incompetent professors and the desperately bored and obsequious

students in Russia in his time. The tone is unusual in the nineteenth

century: dry, ironical, didactic, mordant, at once withering and entertaining; the whole based on the contrast between the harmonious simplicity of nature and the self-destructive complications created by

the malice or stupidity of men-men from whom the author feels

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himself detached, whom he affects not to understand, and mocks from

a distance.

We are at the earliest beginnings of a theme which grew obsessive

in Tolstoy's later life; that the solution to all our perplexities stares

us in the face-that the answer is about us everywhere, like the light

of day, if only we would not close our eyes or look everywhere but

at what is there, staring us in the face, the clear, simple, irresistible

truth.

Like Rousseau and Kant and the believers in natural law, Tolstoy

was convinced that men have certain basic material and spiritual needs,

in all places, at all times. If these needs are fulfilled, they lead harmonious lives, which is the goal of their nature. Moral, aesthetic, and other spiritual values are objective and eternal, and man's inner

harmony depends upon his correct relationship to these. Moreover, all

his life he defended the proposition-which his own novels and sketches

do not embody-that human beings are more harmonious in childhood

than under the corrupting influences of education in later life; and

also that simple people (peasants, Cossacks, and so on) have a more

'natural' and correct attitude towards these basic values than civilised

men; and that they are free and independent in a sense in which

civilised men are not. For (he insists on this over and over again)

peasant communities are in a position to supply their own material and

spiritual needs out of their own resources, provided that they are not

robbed or enslaved by oppressors and exploiters; whereas civilised men

need for their survival the forced labour of others-serfs, slaves, the

exploited masses, called ironically 'dependants', because their masters

depend on them. The masters are parasitic upon others: they are

degraded not merely by the fact that to enslave and exploit others is a

denial of such objective values as justice, equality, human dignity, love

- values which men crave to realise because they cannot help this,

because they are men-but for the further, and to him even more

important reason that to live on robbed or borrowed goods, and so fail

to be self-subsistent, falsifies 'natural' feelings and perceptions, corrodes

men morally, and makes them both wicked and miserable. The human

ideal is a society of free and equal men, who live and think by the

light of what is true and right, and so are not in conflict with each

other or themselves. This is a form-a very simple one-of the classical

doctrine of natural law, whether in its theological or secular, liberalanarchist form. To it Tolstoy adhered all his life; as much in his

'secular' period as after his 'conversion'. His early stories express this

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R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

vividly. The Cossacks Lukashka and Uncle Yeroshka are morally

superior, as well as happier and aesthetically more harmonious beings

than Olenin in The Cossacks; Olenin knows this; indeed that is the

heart of the situation. Pierre in War and Peace and Levin in Anna

Karenina have a sense of this in simple peasants and soldiers; so does

Nekhlyudov in The Morning of a Landowner. This conviction fills

Tolstoy's mind to a greater and greater degree, until it overshadows

all other issues in his later works: Resurrection and The Death of Ivan

Ilich are not intelligible without it.

Tolstoy's critical thought constantly revolves round this central

notion-the contrast between nature and artifice, truth and invention.

When, for instance, in the I 89os he laid down conditions of excellence

in art (in the course of an introduction to a Russian translation of

Maupassant's stories), he demanded of all writers, in the first place

the possession of sufficient talent; in the second that the subject itself

must be morally important; and finally that they must truly love (what

was worthy of love) and hate (what was worthy of hate) in what they

describe- 'commit' themselves-retain the- direct moral vision of childhood, and not maim their natures by practising self-imposed, selflacerating and always illusory impartiality and detachment-or, still worse, deliberate perversion of 'natural' values. Talent is not given

equally to all men; but everyone can, if he tries, discover eternal,

unchanging attributes-what is good and what is bad, what is important

and what is trivial. Only false-'made-up'-theories delude men and

writers about this, and so distort their lives and creative activity.

Tolstoy applies his criterion literally, almost mechanically. Thus

Nekrasov, according to him, treated subjects of profound importance,

and possessed superb skill as a writer; but his attitude towards his

suffering peasants and crushed idealists, .-emained chilly and unreal.

Dostoevsky's subjects lack nothing in seriousness, and his concern is

profound and genuine; but the first condition is unfulfilled : he is

diffuse and repetitive; he does not know how to tell the truth clearly