Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

designed to show the insignificance of Napoleon or Tsar Alexander,

or of the aristocratic and bureaucratic society in Anna Kartnina, or of

the judges and official persons in Resurrection; or again, the emptiness

and intellectual impotence of historians and philosophers who try to

explain events by employing concepts like 'power' which is attributed

to great men, or 'influence' ascribed to writers, orators, preacherswords, abstractions which, in his view, explain nothing, being themselves far more obscure than the facts for which they purport to account. He maintains that we do not begin to understand, and therefore cannot explain or analyse, what it is to wield authority or strength, to influence, to dominate. Explanations that do not explain are, for

Tolstoy, a symptom of the disruptive and self-inflated intellect, the

faculty that destroys innocence and leads to false ideas and the ruin of

human life.

That is the strain, inspired by Rousseau and present in early

romanticism, which inspired primitivism in art and in life, not in

Russia alone. Tolstoy imagines that he and others can find the path

to the truth about how one should live by observing simple people, by

the study of the gospels.

His other strain is the direct opposite of this. Mikhailovsky says,

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with justice, that Olenin cannot, charmed as he is by the Caucasus

and the Cossack idyll, transform himself into a Lukashka, return to

the childlike harmony, which in his case has long been broken. Levin

knows that if he tried to become a peasant this could only be a grotesque

farce, which the peasants would be the first to perceive and deride; he

and Pierre and Nikolay Rostov know obscurely that in some sense

they have something to give that the peasants have not. Tolstoy tells

the educated reader that the peasant

needs what your life of ten generations uncrushed by hard labour

has given you. You had the leisure to search, to think, to sufferthen give him that for whose sake you suffered; he is in need of it • . .

do not bury in the earth the talent given you by history . . .

Leisure, then, need not be merely destructive. Progress can occur: we

can learn from what happened in the past, as those who lived in that

past could not. It is true that we live in an unjust order. But this

itself creates direct obligations. Those who are members of the

civilised elite, cut off as they tragically are from the mass of the people,

have the duty to attempt to re-create broken humanity, to stop

exploiting them, to give them what they most need-education, knowledge, material help, a capacity for living better lives. Levin in A""a Karmi,a, as Mikhailovsky remarks, takes up where Nikolay Rostov

in War anti Ptact left off. They are not quietists, and yet what they

do is right. The emancipation of the peasants, in Tolstoy's view,

although it did not go far enough, was nevertheless an act of willgood-will-on the part of the government, and now it is necessary to teach peasants to read and write and grasp the rules of arithmetic,

something which they cannot do for themselves; to equip them for

the use of freedom. I cannot merge myself with the mass of peasants;

but I can at least use the fruit of the unjustly obtained leisure of

myself and my ancestors-my education, knowledge, skills- for the

benefit of those whose labour made it �ible.

This is the talent I may not bury. I must work to promote a just

society in accordance with those objective standards which all men,

except the hopelessly corrupt, see and accept, whether they live by

them or not. The simple see them more clearly, the sophisticated

more dimly, but all men can see them if they try; indeed to be able

to see them is part of what it is to be a man. When injustice is perpetrated, I have an obligation to speak out and act against it; nor may artists any more than others sit with folded hands. What makes good

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writers good is ability to see truth-social and individual, material and

spiritual-and so present it that it cannot be escaped. Tolstoy holds

that Maupassant, for example, is doing precisely this, despite himself

and his aesthetic fallacies. He may, because he is a corrupt human

being, take the side of the bad against the good, write about a worthless

Paris seducer with greater sympathy than he feels for his victims. But

provided that he tells the truth at a level that is sufficiendy profoundand men of talent cannot avoid doing this-he will face the reader with fundamental moral questions, whether he means to do this or not,

questions which the reader can neither escape nor answer without

rigorous and painful self-examination.

This, for Tolstoy, opens the path to regeneration, and is the proper

function of art. Vocation-talent-is obedience to an inner need: to

fulfil it is the artist's purpose and his duty. Nothing is more false than

the view of Pie artist as a purveyQr, or a craftsman whose sole function

it is to create a beautiful thing, as Flaubert, or Renan, or Maupassantl

maintain. There is only one human goal, and it is equally binding on

all men, landowners, doctors, barons, professors, bankers, peasants: to

tell the truth, and be guided by it in action, that is, to do good, and

persuade others to do so. That God exists, or that the Iliad is beautiful,

or that men have a right to be free and also equal, are all eternal

and absolute truths. Therefore we must persuade men to read the Iliad

and not pornographic French novels, and to work for an equal society,

not a theocratic or political hierarchy. Coercion is evil; men have

always known this to be true; therefore they must work for a society

in which there will be no wars, no prisons, no executions, in any

circumstances, for any reason; for a society in which individual

freedom exists to the maximum degree. By his own route Tolstoy

arrived at a programme of Christian anarchism which had much in

common with that of the Russian populists, with whom, but for their

doctrinaire socialism, and their beliefin science and faith in the methods

of terrorism, Tolstoy's attitude had much in common. For what he

now appeared to be advocating was a programme of action, not of

quietism; this programme underlay the educational reform that he

1 Tolstoy is moved to indignation by Maupa.ssant's celebrated dictum

(which he quotes) that the business of the artist is not to entertain, delight,

move, utonish, cause his reader to dream, reflect, smile, weep, or shudder,

but (ft�irt J rjulf•t t:Aost tie 6tt�• tlt�fll '" jof'fllt 9•i rJfJMI t:Oflrlitfltlr" It fllin3t t1' .pns rJOirt ltfllplrt�flltfll.

..

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attempted to carry out. He strove to discover, collect, expound eternal

truths, awaken the spontaneous interest, the imagination, love,

curiosity of children or simple folk; above all to liberate their 'natural'

moral, emotional and intellectual forces, which he did not doubt, as

Rousseau did not doubt, would achieve harmony within men and

between them, provided that we eliminate everything that might maim,

cramp and kill them.

This programme-that of making possible the free self-development

of all human faculties-rests on one vast assumption: that there exists

at least one path of development on which these faculties will neither

conflict with each other, nor develop disproportionately-a sure path