others), which were sacred to him, ends for the sake of which he was
prepared to live and to die. It is for this reason that Herzen so seriously
and passionately believed in the independence and freedom of individuals; and understood what he believed in, and reacted so painfully against the adulteration or obfuscation of the issues by metaphysical
or theological patter and democratic rhetoric. In his view all that is
ultimately valuable are the particular purposes of particular persons;
and to trample on these is always a crime because there is, and can
be, no principle or value higher than the ends of the individual, and
therefore no principle in the name of which one could be permitted
to do violence to or degrade or destroy individuals-the sole authors
of all principles and all values. Unless a minimum area is guaranteed
to all men within which they can act as they wish, the only principles
and values left will be those guaranteed by theological or metaphysical
or scientific systems claiming to know the final truth about man's
place in the universe, and his functions and goals therein. And these
claims Herzen regarded as fraudulent, one and all. It is this particular
species of non-metaphysical, empirical, 'eudaemonistic' individualism
that makes Herzen the sworn enemy of all systems, and of all claims
to suppress liberties i n their name, whether in the name of utilitarian
considerations or authoritarian principles, of mystically revealed ends,
or of reverence before irresistible power, or 'the logic of the facts',
or any other similar reason.
What can Bakunin offer that is remotely comparable? Bakunin,
1 1 2.
H E RZEN AND B A K U N I N ON L I B E RTY
with his gusto and his logic and his eloquence, his desire and capacity
to undermine and burn and shiver to pieces, now disarmingly childlike, at other times pathological and inhuman; with his odd combination of analytical acuteness and unbridled exhibitionism; carrying with him, with superb unconcern, the multicoloured heritage of the
eighteenth century, without troubling to consider whether some
among his ideas contradicted others - the 'dialectic' would look after
that-or how many of them had become obsolete, discredited, or had
been absurd from the beginning- Bakunin, the official friend of
absolute liberty, has not bequeathed a single idea worth considering
for its own sake; there is not a fresh thought, not even an authentic
emotion, only amusing diatribes, high spirits, malicious vignettes, and
a memorable epigram or two. A historical figure remains-the 'Russian
Bear', as he liked to describe himself- morally careless, intellectually
irresponsible, a man who, in his love for humanity in the abstract,
was prepared, like Robespierre, to wade through seas of blood ; and
thereby constitutes a link in the tradition of cynical terrorism and
unconcern for individual human beings, the practice of which is the
main contribution of our own century, thus far, to political thought.
And this aspect of Bakunin, the Stavrogin concealed inside Rudin,
the fascist streak, the methods of Attila, 'Petrograndism', sinister
qualities so remote from the lovable 'Russian Bear' -die grosse Liselwas detected not merely by Dostoevsky, who exaggerated and caricatured it, but by Herzen himself, who drew up a formidable indictment against it in the Letters to an Old Comrade, perhaps the most instructive, prophetic, sober and moving essays on the prospects of
human freedom written in the nineteenth century.
1 As Herzen used to call him after his three-year-old daughter, Bakunin's
friend.
A Remarkable Decade
I
T H E B I R T H O F T H E R U S S I A N
I N T E L L I G E N T S I A
I
M v title- 'A Remarkable Decade'-and my subject are both taken
from a long essay in which the nineteenth-century Russian critic and
literary historian, Pavel Annenkov, described his friends more than
thirty years after the period with which he deals. Annenkov was an
agreeable, intelligent, and exceedingly civilised man, and a most understanding and dependable friend. He was not, perhaps, a very profound critic, nor was the range of his learning wide-he was a scholarly
dilettante, a traveller about Europe who liked to meet eminent men,
an eager and observant intellectual tourist.
It is clear that in addition to his other qualities he possessed considerable personal charm, so much, indeed, that he even succeeded in captivating Karl Marx, who wrote him at least one letter considered
important by Marxists on the subject of Proudhon. Indeed, Annenkov
has left us an exceedingly vivid description of the physical appearance
and ferocious intellectual manner of the young Marx-an admirably
detached and ironical vignette, perhaps the best portrait of him that
has survived.
It is true that, after he went back to Russia, Annenkov lost interest
in Marx, who was so deeply snubbed and hurt by this desertion by
a man on whom he thought he had made an indelible impression, that
in after years he expressed himself with extreme bitterness about the
Russian intellectual fldneurs who Buttered around him in Paris in the
40s, but turned out not to have any serious intentions after ali. But
although not very loyal to the figure of Marx, Annenkov did retain
the friendship of his compatriots Belinsky, Turgenev and Herzen to
the end of his days. And it is about them that he is most interesting.
1 1 4
B I RTH O F THE R U S S IAN I N T E L L I G ENTSIA
'A Remarkable Decade' is a description by him of the life of some
among the early members-the original founders-of the Russian
intelligentsia, between 1 8 38 and 1 848, when they were all young
men, some still at the university, some j ust emerged from it. The
subject is of more than literary or psychological interest because these
early Russian intellectuals created something which was destined
ultimately to have world-wide social and political consequences. The
largest single effect of the movement, I think it would be fair to say,
was the Russian Revolution itself. These rlvoltes early Russian
intellectuals set the moral tone for the kind of talk and action which
continued throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
until the final climax in 1 9 1 7.
It is true that the Russian Revolution (and no event had been more
discussed and speculated about during the century which preceded itnot even the great French Revolution) did not follow the lines that most of these writers and talkers had anticipated. Yet despite the
tendency to minimise the importance of such activity by such thinkers
as, for example, Tolstoy or Karl Marx, general ideas do have great
influence. The Nazis seemed to grasp this fact when they took care
at once to eliminate intellectual leaders in conquered countries, as
likely to be among the most dangerous figures in their path ; to this
degree they had analysed history correctly. But whatever may be
thought about the part played by thought in affecting human lives,
it would be idle to deny that the influence of ideas-and in particular
of philosophical ideas-at the beginning of the nineteenth century did
make a considerable difference to what happened later. Without the
kind of outlook of which, for example, the Hegelian philosophy, then
so prevalent, was both the cause and the symptom, a great deal of what
happened might, perhaps, either not have happened, or else have
happened differently. Consequently the chief importance of these
writers and thinkers, historically speaking, lies in the fact that they
set in train ideas destined to have cataclysmic effects not merely in
Russia itself, but far beyond her borders.
And these men have more specific claims to fame. It is difficult
to imagine that the Russian literature of the mid-century, and, in
particular, the great Russian novels, could have come into being save
for the specific atmosphere which these men created and promoted.
The works of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, and of
minor novelists too, are penetrated with a sense of their own time,
of this or that particular social and historical milieu and its ideological
,,
I I S
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
content, t o a n even higher degree than the 'social' novels o f the west.
To this topic I propose to revert later.
Lastly, they invented social criticism. This may seem a very bold
and even absurd claim to make; but by social criticism I do not mean
the appeal to standards of judgment which involve a view of literature
and art as having, or as obliged to have, a primarily didactic purpose;
nor yet the kind of criticism developed by romantic essayists, especially
in Germany, in which heroes or villains are regarded as quintessential
types of humanity and examined as such ; nor yet the critical process
(in which the French in particular showed superlative skill) which
attempts to reconstruct the process of artistic creation mainly by
analysing the social, spiritual and psychological environment and the
origins and economic position of the artist, rather than his purely
artistic methods or character or specific quality; although, to some
degree, the Russian intellectuals did all this too.
·
Social criticism in this sense had, of course, been practised before
them, and far more professionally, scrupulously and ·profoundly, by
critics in the west. The kind of social criticism that I mean is the
method virtually invented by the great Russian essayist Belinsky-the
kind of criticism in which the line between life and art is of set purpose not too clearly drawn; in which praise and blame, love and hatred, admiration and contempt are freely expressed both for artistic forms
and for the human characters drawn, both for the personal qualities
of authors and for the content of their novels, and the criteria involved
in such attitudes, whether consciously or implicitly, a.re identical with
those in terms of which living human beings are in everyday life
judged or described.
This is, of course, a type of criticism which has itself been much
criticised. It is accused of confusing art with life, and thereby derogating from the purity of art. Whether these Russian critics did perpetrate this confusion or not, they introduced a new attitude
towards the novel, derived from their particular outlook on life. This
outlook later came to be defin� as that peculiar to members of the
intelligentsia - and the young radicals of 1 8 38-48, Belinsky, T urgenev,
Bakunin, Herzen; whom Annenkov so devotedly describes in his
book, are its true original founders. 'Intelligentsia' is a Russian word
invented in the nineteenth century, that has since acquired worldwide significance. The phenomenon itself, with its historical and literally revolutionary consequences, is, I suppose, the largest single
Russian contribution to social change in the world.
J I 6
B I RT H OF T H E R U S S I AN INTE L L I G ENTSIA
The concept of intelligentsia must not be confused with the notion
of intellectuals. Its members thought of themselves as united by
something more than mere interest in ideas; they conceived themselves
as being a dedicated order, almost a secular priesthood, devoted to the
spreading of a specific attitude to life, something like a gospel. Historically their emergence requires some explanation.
I I
Most Russian historians are agreed that the great social schism
between the educated and the 'dark folk' in Russian history sprang
from the wound inAicted on Russian society by Peter the Great. In
his reforming zeal Peter sent selected young men into the western
world, and when they had acquired the languages of the west and
the various new arts and skills which sprang from the scientific
revolution of the seventeenth century, brought them back to become
the leaders of that new social order which, with ruthless and violent
haste, he imposed upon his feudal land. In this way he created a small
class of new men, half Russian, half foreign-educated abroad, even
if they were Russian by birth; these, in due course, became a small
managerial and bureaucratic oligarchy, set above the people, no
longer sharing in their still medieval culture; cut off from them
irrevocably. The government of this large and unruly nation became
constantly more difficult, as social and economic conditions in Russia
increasingly diverged from the progressing west. With the widening
of the gulf, greater and greater repression had to be exercised by the
ruling elite. The small group of governors thus grew more and more
estranged from the people they were set to govern.
The rhythm of government in Russia in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries is one of alternate repression and liberalisation.
Thus, when Catherine the Great felt that the yoke was growing too
heavy, or the appearance of things became too barbarous, she relaxed
the brutal rigidity of the despotism and was duly acclaimed by Voltaire
and Grimm. When this seemed to lead to too much sudden stirring
from within, too much protest, and too many educated persons began
to compare conditions in Russia unfavourably with conditions in the
west, she scented the beginnings of something subversive; the French
Revolution finally terrified her; she clamped down again. Once more
the regime grew stern and repressive.
The situation scarcely altered in the reign of Alexander I. The
,,
RU SSIAN THINKERS
vast majority of the inhabitants of Russia still lived in a feudal darkness,
with a weak and, on the whole, ignorant priesthood exercising relativdy little moral authority, while a large army of fairly faithful and at times not inefficient bureaucrats pressed down on the more and
more recalcitrant peasantry. Between the oppressors and the oppressed
there existed a small cultivated class, largely French-speaking, aware
of the enormous gap between the way in which life could be livedor was lived-in the west and the way in which it was lived by the Russian masses. They were, for the most part, men acutely conscious
of the difference between justice and injustice, civilisation and barbarism, but aware also that conditions were too difficult to alter, that they had too great a stalce in the regime themselves, and that reform
might bring the whole structure toppling down. Many among them
were reduced either to an easy-going quasi-Voltairean cynicism, at
once subscribing to liberal principles and whipping their serfs; or to
noble, eloquent and futile despair.
This situation altered with the invasion ofNapoleon,which brought
Russia into the middle of Europe. Almost overnight, Russia found
herself a great power in the heart of Europe, conscious of her crushing
strength, dominating the entire scene, and accepted by Europeans
with some terror and great reluctance, as not merely equal but
superior to them in sheer brute force.
The triumph over Napoleon and the march to Paris were events
in the history of Russian ideas as vitally important as the reforms of
Peter. They made Russia aware of her national unity, and generated
in her a sense of herself as a great European nation, recognised as
such; as being no longer a despised collection of barbarians teeming
behind a Chinese wall, sunk in medieval darkness, half-heartedly and
clumsily imitating foreign models. Moreover, since the long Napoleonic
war had brought about great and lasting patriotic fervour, and, as a
result of a general participation in a common ideal, an increase in the
feeling of equality between the orders, a number of relatively idealistic
young men began to feel new bonds between themselves and their
nation which their education could not by itself have inspired. The
growth of patriotic nationalism brought with it, as its inevitable concomitant, a growth of the feeling of responsibility for the chaos, the squalor, the poverty, the inefficiency, the brutality, the appalling
disorder in Russia. This general moral uneasiness affected the least
sentimental and perceptive, the hardest-hearted of the semi-civilised
members of the ruling class.
1 1 8
B I RT H OF T H E R U S S IAN INTE L L I G E NTSIA
Ill
There were other factors which contributed to this collective sense of
guilt. One, certainly, was the coincidence (for coincidence it was) of
the rise of the romantic movement with the entrance of Russia into
Europe. One of the cardinal romantic doctrines (connected with the
cognate doctrines that history proceeds according to discoverable laws
or patterns, and that nations are unitary 'organisms', not mere collections, and 'evolve' in an 'organic', not a mechanical or haphazard fashion) is that everything in the world is as and where and when it
is because it participates in a single universal purpose. Romanticism
encourages the idea that not only individuals but groups, and not only
groups but institutions-states, churches, professional bodies, associations that have ostensibly been created for definite, often purely utilitarian purposes - come to be possessed by a 'spirit' of which they
themselves might well be unaware-awareness of which is, indeed,
the very process of enlightenment.
The doctrine that every human being, country, race, institution
has its own unique, individual, inner purpose which is itself an
'organic' element in the wider purpose of all that exists, and that in
becoming conscious of that purpose it is, by this very fact, participating
in the march towards light and freedom- this secular version of an
ancient religious belief powerfully impressed the minds of the young
Russians. They imbibed it all the more readily as a result of two causes,
one material, one spiritual.
The material cause was the unwillingness of the government to
let its subjects travel to France, which was thought of, particularly
after 1 830, as a chronically revolutionary country, liable to perpetual
upheavals, blood-letting, violence and chaos. By contrast, Gennany
lay peaceful under the heel of a very respectable despotism. Consequently young Russians were encouraged to go to German universities, where they would obtain a sound training in civic principles that
would, so it was supposed, make them still more faithful servants of
the Russian autocracy.
The result was the exact opposite. Crypto-francophile sentiment
in Gennany itself was at this time so violent, and enlightened Cennans
themselves believed in ideas-in this case those of the French enlightenment-so much more intensely and fanatically than the French themselves, that the young Russian Anacharsises who dutifully went to Gennany were infected by dangerous ideas far more violently there
,,
1 19
R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S
than they could ever have been had they gone to Paris in the easygoing early years of Louis Philippe. The government of Nicholas I could hardly have foreseen the chasm into which it was destined to fall.
If this was the first cause of romantic ferment, the second was its
direct consequence. The young Russians who had travelled to
Germany, or read German books, became possessed with the simple
idea that if, as ultramontane Catholics in France and nationalists in
Germany were sedulously maintaining, the French Revolution and
the decadence that followed were scourges sent upon the people for
abandoning their ancient faith and ways, the Russians were surely
free from these vices, since, whatever else might be true of them, no
revolution had been visited upon them. The German romantic
historians were particularly zealous in preaching the view that, if the
west was declining because of its scepticism, its rationalism, its
materialism, and its abandonment of its own spiritual tradition, then
the Germans, who had not suffered this melancholy fate, should be
viewed as a fresh and youthful nation, with habits uncontaminated
by the corruption of Rome in decay, barbarous indeed, but full of
violent energy, about to come into the inheritance falling from the
feebie hands of the French.
The Russians merely took this process of reasoning one step
further. They rightly judged that if youth, barbarism, and lack of
education were criteria of a glorious future, they had an even more
powerful hope of it than the Germans. Consequently the vast outpouring of German romantic rhetoric about the unexhausted forces of the Germans and the unexpended German language with its
pristine purity and the young, unwearied German nation, directed
as it was against the 'impure', Latinised, decadent western nations,
was received in Russia with understandable enthusiasm. Moreover, it
stimulated a wave of social idealism which began to possess all classes,
from the early 20s of the century until well into the early 40s. The
proper task of a man was to dedicate himself to the ideal for which
his 'essence' was intended. This could not consist in scientific rationalism (as the French eighteenth-century materialists had taught), for it was a delusion to think that life was governed by mechanical laws. It
was an even worse delusion to suppose that it was possible to apply a
scientific discipline, derived from the study of inanimate matter, to
the rational government of human beings and the organisation of
their lives on a world-wide scale. The duty of man was something
very different-to understand· the texture, the 'go', the principle of
1 20
B I RT H OF T H E R U SS I A N IN T E L L I G ENTSIA
life of all there is, to penetrate to the soul of the world (a theological
and mystical notion wrapped by the followers of Schelling and Hegel
in rationalist terminology), to grasp the hidden, 'inner' plan of the
universe, to understand his own place in it, and to act accordingly.
The task of the philosopher was to discern the march of history, or
of what was, somewhat mysteriously, called 'the Idea', and discover
whither it was carrying mankind. History was an enormous river,
the direction of which could, however, only be observed by people
with a capacity for a special kind of deep, inner contemplation. No
amount of observation of the outer world would ever teach you where
this inward Drong, this subterranean current, led. To uncover it
was to be at one with it; the development both of your individual
self as a rational being, and of society, depended upon a correct assessment of the spiritual direction of the larger 'organism' to which you belonged. To the question of how this organism was to be identified what it was-the various metaphysicians who founded the principal romantic schools of philosophy replied differently. Herder declared
this unit to be a spiritual culture or way of life; the Roman Catholic
penseurs identified it with the life of the Christian Church; Fichte
somewhat obscurely, and after him Hegel unequivocally, declared it
to be the national state.
The whole notion of organic method militated in favour of supposing that the favourite instrument of the eighteenth centurychemical analysis into constituent bits, into ultimate, irreducible atoms, whether of inanimate matter or of social institutions-was an inadequate
way of apprehending anything. 'Growth' was the great new term new, that is, in its application far beyond the bounds of scientific biology; and in order to apprehend what growth was, you had to have
a special inner sense capable of apprehending the invisible kingdom,
an intuitive grasp of the impalpable principle in virtue of which a
thing grows as it does; grows not simply by successive increments of
'dead' parts, but by some kind of occult vital process that needs a
quasi-mystical power of vision, a special sense of the Row of life, of
the forces of history, of the principles at work in nature, in art, in
personal relationships, of the creative spirit unknown to empirical
science, to seize upon its essence.
I V
This is the heart of political romanticism, from Burke to our own
day, and the source of many passionate arguments directed against
,I
1 21
R U SSIAN TH INKERS
liberal reform and every attempt to remedy social evils by rational
means, on the grounds that these were based on a 'mechanical' outlook
-a misunderstanding of what society was and of how it developed.
The programmes of the French Encyclopedists or of the adherents of
Lessing in Germany were condemned as so many ludicrous and
Procrustean attempts to treat society as if it were an amalgam of
bits of inanimate stuff, a mere machine, whereas it was a palpitating,
living whole.
The Russians were highly susceptible to this propaganda, which
drew them in both a reactionary and a progressive direction. You
cauld believe that life or history was a river, which it was useless and
perilous to resist or deflect, and with which you could only merge
your identity-according to Hegel by discursive, logical, rational
activity of the Spirit; according to Schelling intuitively and imaginatively, by a species of inspiration the depth of which is the measure of human genius, from which spring myths and religions, art and
science. This led in the conservative direction of eschewing everything analytical, rational, empirical, everything founded upon experiment and natural science. On the other hand, you might declare that you felt within the earth the pangs of a new world struggling to be
born. You felt-you knew-that the crust of the old institutions was
about to crack under the violent inner heavings of the Spirit. If you
genuinely believed this, then you would, if you were a reasonable
being, be ready to risk identifying yourself with the revolutionary
cause, for otherwise it would destroy you. Everything in the cosmos
was progressive, everything moved. And if the future lay in the
fragmentation and the explosion of your present universe into a new
form of existence, it would be foolish not to collaborate with this
violent and inevitable process.
German romanticism, in particular the Hegelian school, was
divided on this issue; there were movements in both directions in
Germany, and consequently also in Russia, which was virtually an
intellectual dependency of German academic thought. But whereas
in the west ideas of this kind had for many years been prevalenttheories and opinions, philosophical, social, theological, political, had since the Renaissance at feast, clashed and collided with each other
in a vast variety · of patterns, and formed a general process of rich
intellectual activity in which no one idea or opinion could for long
hold undisputed supremacy-in Russia this was not the case.
One of the great differences between the areas dominated by the
1 22
B I RT H O F THE R U SSIAN INTEL L I G ENTSIA
eas.:em and the western Churches was that the former had had no
Renaissance and no Reformation. The Balkan peoples could blame
th'e Turkish conquest for their backwardness. But the case was little
better in Russia, which did not have a gradually expanding, literate,
educated class, connecting-by a series of social and intellectual stepsthe most and the least enlightened. The gap between the illiterate peasants and those who could read and write was wider in Russia
than in other European states, in so far as Russia could be called
European at this time.
Thus the number and variety of social or political ideas to be heard
if you moved in the salons of St Petersburg and Moscow were nothing
like so great as you would find in the intellectual ferment of Paris or
Berlin. Paris was, of course, the great cultural Mecca of the time. But
even Berlin was scarcely less agitated with intellectual, theological,
artistic controversies, despite the repressive Prussian censorship.
You must therefore imagine in Russia a situation dominated by
three main factors: a dead, oppressive, unimaginative government
chiefly engaged in holding its subjects down, preventing change
largely because this might lead to yet further change, even though its
more intelligent members obscurely realised that reform-and that of
a very radical kind- for instance with regard to the serf system or
the systems of justice and education-was both desirable and inevitable.
The second factor was the condition of the vast mass of the Russian
population-an ill-treated, economically wretched peasantry, sullen
and inarticulately groaning, but plainly too weak and unorganised to
act effectively in its own defence. Finally, between the two, a small,
educated class, deeply and sometimes resentfully influenced by western
ideas, with minds tantalised by visits to Europe and by the great new
social and intellectual movement at work in the centres of its culture.
May I remind you again that there was in the air, as much in
Russia as in Germany, a romantic conviction that every man had a
unique mission to fulfil if only he could know what it was; and that
this created a general enthusiasm for social and metaphysical ideas,
perhaps as a kind of ethical substitute for a dying religion, that was
not dissimilar to the fervour with which philosophical systems and
political Utopias had, for more than a century, been acclaimed in
France and Germany, by men in search of a new theodicy uncompromised by association with some discredited political or religious establishment. But in Russia there was, in addition, among the
educated classes, a moral and intellectual vacuum due to the absence
1 23
R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S
of a Renaissance tradition of secular education, and maintained by
the rigid censorship exercised by the government, by widespread
illiteracy, by the suspicion and disfavour with which all ideas as such
were regarded, by the acts of a nervous and often massively stupid
bureaucracy. In this situation, ideas which in the west competed
with a large number of other doctrines and attitudes, so that to become
dominant they had to emerge victorious from a fierce struggle for
survival, in Russia came to lodge in the minds of gifted individuals
and, indeed, obsess them, often enough simply for lack of other ideas
to satisfy their intellectual needs. Moreover, there existed in the capital
cities of the Russian Empire a violent thirst for knowledge, indeed
for mental nourishment of any kind, together with an unparalleled
sincerity (and sometimes a disarming naivety) of feeling, intellectual
freshness, passionate resolve to panicipate in world affairs, a troubled
consciousness of the social and political problems of a vast country,
and very little to respond to this new state of mind. What there was,
was mostly imponed from abroad-scarcely one single political and
social idea to be found in Russia in the nineteenth century was born
on native soil. Perhaps Tolstoy's idea of non-resistance was something
genuinely Russian-a restatement of a Christian position so original
that it had the force of a new idea when he preached it. But, in general,
I do not think that Russia has contributed a single new social or
political idea: nothing that was not traceable, not merely to some
ultimate western root, but to some doctrine discoverable in the west
eight or ten or twelve years earlier than its first appearance in Russia.
v
You must conceive, therefore, of an astonishingly impressionable
society with an unheard of capacity for absorbing ideas- ideas which
might waft across, in the most casual fashion, because someone
brought back a book or collection of pamphlets from Paris (or because
some audacious bookseller had smuggled them in) ; because someone
attended the lectures of a neo-Hegelian in Berlin, or had made friends
with Schelling, or had met an English missionary with strange ideas.
Genuine excitement was generated by the arrival of a new 'message'
emanating from some disciple of Saint-Simon or FouJier, of a book
by Proudhon, by Cabet, by Leroux, the latest social Messiahs in
France; or again, by an idea attributed to Davia Strauss or Ludwig
Feuerbach or Lamennais or some other forbidden author. Because of
their relative scarcity in Russia, these ideas and fragments of ideas
1 24
B I RTH OF T H E R U S S I AN I N T E L L I G ENTSIA
would be seized upon with the utmost avidity. The social and economic
prophets in Europe seemed full of confidence in the new revolutionary
future, and their ideas had an intoxicating effect upon the young
Russians.
When such doctrines were pro1pulgated in the west, they sometimes excited their audience, and occasionally led to the formation of parties or sects, but they were not regarded by the majority of those
whom they reached as the final truth; and even those who thought
them crucially important did not immediately begin to put them into
practice with every means at their disposal. The Russians were liable
to do just this; to argue to themselves that if the premises were true
and the reasoning correct, true conclusions followed : and further, that
if these conclusions dictated certain actions as being necessary and
beneficial, then if one was honest and serious one had a plain duty to
try to realise them as swiftly and as fully as possible. Instead of the
generally held view of the Russians as a gloomy, mystical, self-lacerating,
somewhat religious nation, I should like to suggest, at least as far as
the articulate intelligentsia are concerned, that they were somewhat
exaggerated Westerners of the nineteenth century; and that so far
from being liable to irrationalism. or neurotic self-absorption, what
they possessed in a high, perhaps excessive, degree was extremely
devdoped powers of reasoning, extreme logic and lucidity.
It is true that when people tried to put these Utopian schemes
into operation and were almost immediately frustrated by the police,
disillusionment followed, and with it a liability to fall into a state of
apathetic melancholy or violent exasperation. But this came later. The
original phase was neither mystical nor introspective, but on the
contrary rationalist, bold, extroverted and optimistic. I think it was the
celebrated terrorist Kravchinsky who once said about the Russians
that, whatever other qualities they might have, they never recoiled
froin the consequences of their own reasoning. If you study the
Russian 'ideologies' of the nineteenth and indeed the twentieth
century, I think you will find, on the whole, that the more difficult,
the more paradoxical, the more unpalatable a conclusion is, the greater
is the degree of passion and enthusiasm with which some Russians, at
any rate, tend to embrace it; for to do so seems to them no more than
a proof of a man's moral sincerity, of the genuineness of his devotion
to the truth and of his seriousness as a human being; and although
th� consequences of one's reasoning may appear prima fane unplausible or even downright absurd, one must not for that reason 1 25
R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
recoil from them, for what would that be but cowardice, weakness,
or-worst of all- the setting up of comfort before the truth? Herzen
once said :
We are great doctrinaires and raisonneurs. To this German
capacity we add our own national . . . element, ruthless, fanatically
dry : we are only too willing to cut off heads . . . With fearless step we
march to the very limit, and go beyond it; never out of step with the
dialectic, only with the truth . . .
And this characteristically acid comment is, as a verdict on some of
his contemporaries, not altogether unjust.
VI
Imagine, then, a group of young men, living under the petrified
regime of Nicholas I -men with a degree of passion for ideas perhaps
never equalled in a European society, seizing upon ideas as they
come from the west with unconscionable enthusiasm, and making
plans to translate them swiftly into practice-and you will have some
notion of what the early members of the intelligentsia were like . .They
were a small group of litterateurs, both professional and amateur,
conscious of being alone in a bleak world, with a hostile an� arbitrary
government on the one hand, and a completely uncomprehending
mass of oppressed and inarticulate peasants on the other, conceiving
of themselves as a kind of self-conscious army, carrying a banner for
all to see- of reason and science, of liberty, of a better life.
Like persons in a dark wood, they tended to feel a certain solidarity
simply because they were so few and far between ; because they were
weak, because they were truthful, because they were sincere, because
they were unlike the others. Moreover, they had accepted the romantic
doctrine that every man is called upon to perform a mission beyond
mere selfish purposes of material existence; that because they had had
an education superior to that of their oppressed brothers they had a
direct duty to help them toward the light; that this duty was uniquely
binding upon them, and that, if they fulfilled it, as history surely
intended them to do, the future of Russia might yet be as glorious
as her past had been empty and dark; and that for this they must
preserve their inner solidarity as a dedicated group. They were a
persecuted minority who drew strength from their very persecution;
they were the self-conscious bearers of a western message, freed from
the chains of ignorance and prejudice, stupidity or cowardice, by
1 26
B I RTH OF THE R U S S I AN INTELLIG ENT S I A
some great western liberator-a German romantic, a French socialistwho had transformed their vision.
The act ofliberation is something not uncommon in the intellectual
history of Europe. A liberator is one who does not so much answer your
problems, whether of theory or conduct, as transform them-he ends
your anxieties and frustrations by placing you within a new framework where old problems CtZe to have meaning, and new ones appear which have their solutions, as it were, already to some degree prefigured in the new universe in which you find yourself. I mean that those who were liberated by the humanists of the Renaissance or the
philosophes of the eighteenth century did not merely think their old
questions answered more correctly by Plato or Newton than by
Albertus Magnus or the Jesuits- rather they had a sense of a new
universe. Questions which had troubled their predecessors suddenly
appeared to them senseless and unnecessary. The moment at which
ancient chains fall off, and you feel yourself recreated in a new image,
can make a life. One cannot tell by whom a man might not, in this
sense, be set free-Voltaire probably emancipated a greater number of
human beings in his own lifetime than anyone before or after him;
Schiller, Kant, Mill, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Samuel Butler, Freud have
liberated human beings. For all I know Anatole France, or even
Aldous Huxley, may have had this effect.
The Russians of whom I speak were 'liberated' by the great
German metaphysical writers, who freed them on the one hand from
the dogmas of the Orthodox Church, on the other from the dry
formulas of the eighteenth-century rationalists, which had been not
so much refuted as discredited by the failure of the French Revolution.
What Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and their numerous expositors and
interpreters provided was little short of a new religion. A corollary
of this new frame of mind is the Russian attitude to literature.
VII
There may be said to exist at least two attitudes towards literature and
the arts in general, and it may not be uninteresting to contrast them.
For short, I propose to call one French, the other Russian. But these
will be mere labels used for brevity and convenience. I hope I shall
not be thought to maintain that every French writer held what I
propose to call the ' French' attitude, or every Russian the 'Russian'.
The distinction taken in any literal sense would, of course, be gravely
misleading.
R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
The French writers of the nineteenth century o n the whole believed
that they were purveyors. They thought that an intellectual or an
artist had a duty to himself and to the public-to produce as good an
object as possible. If you were a painter, you produced as beautiful a
picture as you could. If you were a writer you produced the best
piece of writing of which you were capable. That was your duty to
yourself, and it was what the public rightly expected. If your works
were good, they were recognised, and you were successful. If you
possessed little taste, or skill, or luck, then you were unsuccessful; and
that was that.
In this ' French' view, the artist's private life was of no more
concern to the public than the private life of a carpenter. If you order
a table, you are not interested in whether the carpenter has a good
motive for making it or not; or whether he lives on good terms with
his wife and children. And to say of the carpenter that his table must
in some way be degraded or decadent, because his morality is degraded
or decadent, would be regarded as bigoted, and indeed as silly : certainly
as a grotesque criticism of his merit as a carpenter.
This attitude of mind (which I have deliberately exaggerated)_ was
rejected with the utmost vehemence by almost every major Russian
writer of the nineteenth century; and this was so whether they were
writers with an explicit moral or social bias, or aesthetic writers
believing in art for art's sake. The 'Russian' attitude (at least in the
last century) is that man is one and cannot be divided; that it is not
true that a man is a citizen on the one hand and, quite independently
of this, a money-maker on the other, and that these functions can be
kept in separate compartments; that a man is one kind of personality
as a voter, another as a painter, and a third as a husband. Man is
indivisible. To say 'Speaking as an artist, I feel this; and speaking as
a voter, I feel t!lat' is always false; and immoral and dishonest too.
Man is one, and what he does, he does with his whole personality.
It is the duty of men to do what is good, speak the truth, and produce
beautiful objects. They must speak the truth in whatever media they
happen to work. If they are novelists they must speak the truth as
novelists. If they are ballet dancers they must express the truth in their
dancing.
This idea of integrity, of total commitment, is the heart of the
romantic attitude. Certainly Mozart and Haydn would have been
exceedingly surprised if they were told that as artists they were
peculiarly sacred, lifted far above other men, priests uniquely dedicated
1 28
B I RT H OF T H E R U S S IAN I NT E L L I G ENTSIA
to the worship of some transcendent reality, to betray which is mortal
sin. They conceived of themselves as true craftsmen, sometimes as
inspired servants of God or of Nature, seeking to celebrate their
divine Maker in whatever they did; but in the first place they were
composers who wrote works to order and strove to make them as
melodious as possible. By the nineteenth century, the notion of the
artist as a sacred vessel, set apart, with a unique soul and unique status,
was exceedingly widespread. It was born, I suppose, mainly among
the Germans, and is connected with the belief that it is the duty of
every man to give himself to a cause; that upon the artist and poet
this duty is binding in a special degree, for he is a wholly dedicated
being; and that his fate is peculiarly sublime and tragic, for his form
of
himself totally to his ideal. What this
ideal is, is comparatively unimportant. The essential thing is to offer
oneself without calculation, to give all one has for the sake of the light
within (whatever it may illuminate) from pure motives. For only
motives count.
Every Russian writer was made conscious that he was on a public
stage, testifying; so that the smallest lapse on his part, a lie, a deception,
an act of self-indulgence, lack of zeal for the truth, was a heinous
crime. If you were principally engaged in making money, then,
perhaps, you were not quite so strictly accountable to society. But if
you spoke in public at all, be it as poet or novelist or historian or
in whatever public capacity, then you accepted full responsibility for
guiding and leading the people. If this was your calling then you were
bound by a Hippocratic oath to tell the truth and never to betray it,
and to dedicate yourself selflessly to your goal.
. There are certain clear cases-Tolstoy is one of them-where this
principle was accepted literally and followed to its extreme consequences. But this tendency in Russia was far wider than Tolstoy's peculiar case would indicate. Turgenev, for example, who is commonly thought of as the most western among Russian writers, a man who believed in the pure and independent nature of art more
than, say, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, who consciously and deliberately
avoided moralising in his novels, and was, indeed, sternly called to
order by other Russian authors for an excessive-and, it was indicated.
regrettably western-preoccupation with aesthetic principles, for
devoting too much time and attention to the mere form and style of
his works, for insufficient probing into the deep moral and spiritual
essence of his characters-even the 'aesthetic' Turgenev is wholly
129
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
committed to the belief that social and moral problems are the central
issues of life and of art, and that they are intelligible only in their own
specific historical and ideological context.
I was once astonished to see it stated, in a review by an eminent
literary critic in a Sunday newspaper, that, of all authors, Turgenev
was not particularly conscious of the historical forces of his time.
This is the very opposite of the truth. Every novel of Turgenev deals
explicitly with social and moral problems within a specific historical
setting; it describes human beings in particular social conditions at
an identifiable date. The mere fact that Turgeaev was an artist to
his marrow-bones, and understood the universal aspects of human
character or predicament, need not blind us to the fact that he fully
accepted his duty as a writer to speak the objective truth-social no
less than psychological-in public, and not to betray it.
If someone had proved that Balzac was a spy in the service of the
French Government, or that Stendhal conducted immoral operations
on the Stock Exchange, it might have upset some of their friends,
but it would not, on the whole, have been regarded as derogating
from their status and genius as artists. But there is scarcely any Russian
writer in the nineteenth century who, if something of the sort had
been discovered about himself, would have doubted for an instant
whether the charge was relevant to his activity as a writer. I can
think of no Russian writer who would have tried to slip out with the
alibi that he was one kind of person as a writer, to be judged, let us
say, solely i n terms of his novels, and quite another as a private
individual. That is the gulf between the characteristically 'Russian'
and 'French' conceptions of life and art, as I have christened them.
I do not mean that every western writer would accept the ideal which
I have attributed to the French, nor that every Russian would subscribe to what I have called the 'Russian' conception. But, broadly speaking, I think it is a correct division, and holds good even when
you come to the aesthetic writers- for instance, the Russian symbolist
poets at the turn of the last century, who despised every form of
utilitarian or didactic or 'impure' art, took not the slightest interest
in social analysis or psychological novels, and accepted and exaggerated
the aestheticism of the west to an outre degree. Even these Russian
symbolists did not think that they had no moral obligation. They
saw themselves, indeed, as Pythian priestesses upon some mystical
tripod, as seers of a reality of which this world was merely a dark
symbol and occult expression, and, remote though they were from social
1 30
B I RT H OF T H E R U S S I AN I N T E L L I G ENTSIA
idealism, believed with moral and spiritual fervour in their own sacred
vows. They were witnesses to a mystery; that was the ideal which
they were morally not permitted, by the rules of their art, to betray.
This attitude is utterly different from anything that Flaubert laid
down about the fidelity of the artist to his art, which to hin\ is identical
with the proper function of the artist, or the best method of becoming
as good an artist as one could be. The attitude which I attribute to
the Russians is a specifically moral attitude; their attitude to life and
to art is identical, and it is ultimately a moral attitude. This is something not to be confused with the notion of art with a utilitarian purpose, in which, of course, some of them believed. Certainly, the
men of whom I propose to speak-the men of the 30s and early 40Sdid not believe that the business of novels and the business of poetry was to teach men to be better. The ascendancy of utilitarianism came
much later, and it was propagated by men of far duller and cruder
minds than those with whom I am here concerned.
The most characteristic Russian writers believed that writers are,
in the first place, men; and that they are directly and continually
responsible for all their utterances, whether made in novels or in
private letters, in public speeches or in conversation. This view, in
turn, affected western conceptions of art and life to a marked degree,
and is one of the arresting contributions to thought of the Russian
intelligentsia. Whether for good or ill, it made a very violent impact
upon the European conscience.
V I I I
A t the time o f which I speak, Hegel and Hegelianism dominated
the thought of young Russia. With all the moral ardour of which
they were capable, the emancipated young men believed in the
necessity of total immersion in his philosophy. Hegel ·Nas the great
new liberator; therefore it was a duty-a categorical duty-to express
in every act of your life, whether as a private individual or as a writer,
truths which you had absorbed from him. This allegiance-later
transferred to Darwin, to Spencer, to Marx-is difficult to understand
for those who have not read the fervid literature, above all, the
literary correspondence of the period. To illustrate it, let me quote
some ironical passages from Herzen, the great Russian publicist, who
lived the latter part of his life abroad, written when, looking back, he
described the atmosphere of his youth. It is, as so often with this
incomparable satirist, a somewhat exaggerated picture-in places a
..
IJI
R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
caricature-but nevertheless it successfully conveys the mood of the
time.
After saying that an exclusively contemplative attitude is
wholly opposed to the Russian character, he goes on to talk about
the fate of the Hegelian philosophy when it was brought over to
Russia:
. . . there is no paragraph in all the three parts of the Logic,
two parts of the Aesthetic, of the Encyclopedia . . . which was not
captured after the most desperate debates lasting several nights.
People who adored each other became estranged for entire weeks
because they could not agree on a definition of 'transcendental
spirit', were personally offended by opinions about 'absolute personality' and 'being in itself'. The most worthless tracts of German philosophy that came out of Berlin and other [German] provincial
towns and villages, in which there was any mention of Hegel, were
written for and read to shreds- till they came out in yellow stains, till
pages dropped out after a few days. Thus, just as Professor Francoeur
was moved to tears in Paris when he heard that he was regarded as a
great mathematician in Russia, that hisalgebraical symbolism was used
for differential equations by our younger generation, so might they
all have wept for joy-all these forgotten Werders, Marheineckes,
Michelets, Ottos, Vatkes, Schallers, Rosenkranzes, and Arnold Ruge
himself . . . -if they had known what duels, what battles they had
started in Moscow between the Maros�ika and Mokhovaya (the
names of two streets in Moscow], how they were read, how they
were bought . . .
I have a right to say_ this because, carried away by the torrents
of those days, I myself wrote just like this, and was, in fact, startled
when our famous astronomer, Perevoshchikov, referred to it all as
'bird talk'. Nobody at this time would have disowned a sentence like
this: 'The concrescence of abstract ideas in the sphere of the plastic
represents that phase of the self-questing spirit in which it, defining
itself for itself, is potentialised from natural immanence into the
harmonious sphere of formal consciousness in beauty.'
He continues:
A man who went ior a walk in Sokolniki [a suburb of Moscow],
went there not just for a walk, but in order to surrender himself
to the pantheistic feeling of his identification with the cosmos. If,
on the way, he met a tipsy soldier or a peasant woman who said
something to him, the philosopher did not simply talk with them,
but determined the substantiality of the popular element, both in
1 32
B I RT H OF T H E R U S S I AN I N TE L L I G E NTSIA
its immediate and its accidental presentation. The very tear which
might rise to his eye was strictly classified and referred to its proper
category-Gemuth, or 'the tragic element in the heart'.
Herzen's ironical sentences need not be taken too literally. But
they show vividly the kind of exaltl intellectual mood in which his
friends had lived.
Let me now offer you a passage from Annenkov- from the excellent
essay called 'A Remarkable Decade', to which I referred at the outset.
It gives a different picture of these same people at the same period, and
it is worth quoting if only to correct Herzen's amusing sketch, which
may, quite unjustly, suggest that all this intellectual activity was so
much worthless gibberish on the part of a ridiculous collection of overexcited young intellectuals. Annenkov describes life in a country house, in the village of Sokolovo in 1 84 5, that had been taken for the summer
by three friends-Granovsky, who was a professor of history in the
University of Moscow, Ketcher, who was an eminent translator, and
Herzen himself, who was a rich young man of no very fixed profession,
then still vaguely in government service. They took the house for the
purpose of entertaining their friends and enjoying intellectual conversation in the evenings .
. . . only one thing was not allowed, and that was to be a philistine.
Not that what was expected were flights of eloquence or flashes of
brilliant wit-on the contrary, students absorbed in their own special
fields were respected deeply. But what was demanded was a certain
intellectual level and certain qualities of character . . . They protected themselves against contacts with anything that seemed corrupt
. . . and were worried by its intrusion, however casual and unimportant. They did not cut themselves off from the world, but stood aloof from it, and attracted attention for that very reason; and
because of this they developed a special sensitiveness to everything
artificial and spurious. Any sign of a morally doubtful sentiment,
evasive talk, dishonest ambiguity, empty rhetoric, insincerity, was
detected at once, and . . . provoked immediate storms of ironical
mockery and merciless attack . . . The circle . . . resembled an order
of knighthood, a brotherhood of warriors; it had no written constitution. Yet it knew all its members scattered over our vast country; it was not organised, but a tacit understanding prevailed.
It stretched, as it were, across the stream of the life of its time, and
protected it from aimlessly flooding its banks. Some adored it; others
detested it.
1 33
R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
I X
The sort of society which Annenkov described, although it may have
about it a slight suggestion of priggishness, is the sort of society which
tends to crystallise whenever there is an intellectual minority (say in
Bloomsbury or anywhere else) which sees itself as divided by its ideals
from the world in which it lives, and tries to promote certain intellectual
and moral standards, at any rate within itself. That is what these
Russians from 1 838 to 1 848 tried to do. They were unique in Russia
in that they did not automatically come from any one social class,
even though few among them were of humble origin. They had to
be moderately well-born, otherwise their chance of obtaining an
adequate, that is to say western, education was too small.
Their attitude to each other was genuinely free from bourgeois
self-consciousness. They were not impressed by wealth, nor were
they self-conscious about poverty. They did not admire success.
Indeed they almost tried to avoid it. Few among them became successful persons in the worldly sense of that word. A number went into exile, others were professors perpetually under the eye of tsarist
police; some were poorly paid hacks and translators; some simply
disappeared. One or two of them left the movement and were regarded
as renegades. There was Mikhail Katkov, for example, a gifted
journalist and writer who had been an original member of the movement and had then crossed over to the tsarist government, and there was Vassily Botkin, the intimate friend of Belinsky and
Turgenev, who started as a philosophical tea-merchant and became
a confirmed reactionary in later years. But these were exceptional
cases.
Turgenev was always regarded as a case somewhat betwixt and
between : a man whose heart was in the right place, who was not
devoid of ideals and knew well what enlightenment was, and yet not
quite reliable. Certainly he was vehement against the serf system, and
his book, A Sportsman's Sketchts, had admittedly had a more powerful
social effect upon the public than any other book hitherto published
in Russia-something like Uncle Tom's Cahin in the United States at
a later date, from which it differed principally in being a work of art,
indeed of genius. Turgenev was regarded by the young radicals, on the
whole, as a supporter of the right principles, on the whole a friend and
an ally, but unfortunately weak, flighty, liable to indulge his love of
pleasure at the expense of his convictions; apt to vanish unaccountably
I J4
B I RT H OF T H E R U SS IAN INTE L L I G ENTSIA
-and a little guiltily-and be lost to his political friends; yet still
'one of us'; still a member of the party; still with us rather than
against us, in spite of the fact that he often did things which had to
be severely criticised, and which seemed mainly due to his unfortunate
infatuation with the French diva, Pauline Viardot, which led him
to sell his stories-surreptitiously-to reactionary newspapers in order
to obtain enough money to be able to buy a box at the opera, since
the virtuous left-wing periodicals could not afford to pay as much. A
vacillating and unreliable friend; still, and despite everything, fundamentally on our side; a man and a brother.
There was a very self-conscious sense ofliterary and moral solidarity
amongst these people, which created between them a feeling of
genuine fraternity and of purpose which certainly no other society
in Russia has ever had. Herzen, who later met a great many celebrated
people, and was a critical and intolerant, often an exceedingly sardonic
and at times cynical judge of men, and Annenkov, who had travelled
a good deal in western Europe and had a variegated acquaintance
among the notables of his day-both these connoisseurs of human
beings, in later years, confessed that never in their lives had they
again found anywhere a society so civilised and gay and free, so
enlightened, spontaneous, and agreeable, so sincere, so intelligent, so
gifted and attractive in every way.
1 35
II
G E R M A N R O M A N T I C I S M
I N P E T E R S B U R G A N D M O S C O W
A L L-or nearly all-historians of Russian thought or literature, whatever their other differences, seem agreed upon one thing: that the dominant inRuence upon Russian writers in the second quarter of the
nineteenth century is that of German romanticism. This judgement,
like most such generalisations of its type, is not quite true. Even if
Pushkin is held to belong to an earlier generation, neither Lermontov
nor Gogo] nor Nekrasov, to take only the most notable writers of
this time, can be regarded as disciples of these thinkers. Nevertheless,
it is true that German metaphysics did radically alter the direction of
ideas in Russia, both on the right and on the left, among nationalists,
Orthodox theologians, and political radicals equally, and profoundly
affected the outlook of the more wide-awake students at the universities,
and intellectually inclined young men generally. These philosophical
schools, and in particular the doctrines of Hegel and Schelling, are
still, in their modern transformations, not without inRuence today.
Their principal legacy to the modern world is a notorious and powerful
political mythology, which in both its right- and left-wing forms has
been used to justify the most obscurantist and oppressive movements
of our own times. At the same time the great historical achievements
of the romantic school have become so deeply absorbed into the very
texture of civilised thought in the west that it is not easy to convey
how novel, and to some minds intoxicating, they once proved to be.
The works of the early German romantic thinkers- Herder, Fichte,
Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, and their followers, are not easy to read.
The treatises of Schelling, for instance-vastly admired in their dayare like a dark wood into which I do not, here at least, propose to venture-vtStigia terrent, too many eager inquirers have entered it
never to return. Yet the art and thought of this period, at any rate
in Germany, and also in eastern Europe and Russia, which were, in
effect, intellectual dependencies of Germany, are not intelligible
1 36
G E R M A N R O M ANT I C I S M
without some grasp of the fact that these metaphysicians-in particular
Schelling-caused a major shift in human thought: from the mechanistic categories of the eighteenth century to explanation in terms of aesthetic or biological notions. The romantic thinkers and poets
successfully undermined the central dogma of eighteenth-century
enlightenment, that the only reliable method of discovery or interpretation was that of the triumphant mechanical sciences. The French philosopher may have exaggerated the virtue, and the German romantics
the absurdity, of the application of the criteria of the natural sciences
to human affairs. But, whatever else it may have done, the romantic
reaction against the claims of scienti fic materialism did set up permanent doubts about the competence of the sciences of manpsychology, sociology, anthropology, physiology-to take over, and put an end to the scandalous chaos of, such human activities as history,
or the arts, or religious, philosophical, social, and political thought. As
Bayle and Voltaire had mocked the theological reactionaries of their
time, so the romantics derided the dogmatic materialists of the school
of Condillac and Holbach; and their favourite field of battle was that
of aesthetic experience.
If you wanted to know what it was that made a work of art; if
you wanted to know, for example, why particular colours and forms
produced a particular piece of painting or sculpture; why particular
styles of writing or collocations of words produced particularly strong
or memorable effects upon particular human beings in specific states
of awareness; or why certain musical sounds, when they were juxtaposed, were sometimes called shallow and at other times profound, or lyrical, or vulgar, or morally noble or degraded or characteristic of
this or that national or individual trait; then no general hypothesis of
the kind adopted in physics, no general description or classification
or subsumption under scientific laws of the behaviour of sound, or
of patches of paint, or of black marks on paper, or the utterances of
human beings, would begin to suffice to answer these questions.
What were the non-scientific modes of explanation which could
explain life, thought, art, religion, as the sciences could not? The
romantic metaphysicians returned to ways of knowing which they
attributed to the Platonic tradition; spiritual insight, 'intuitive' knowledge of connections incapable of scientific analysis. Schelling (whose views on the working of the artistic imagination, and in particular
about the nature of genius, are, for all their obscurity, arrestingly
original and imaginative) spoke in terms of a universal mystical
1 37
R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
vision. He saw the universe as a single spirit, a great, animate organism,
a soul or self, evolving from one spiritual stage into another. Individual
human beings were, as it were, 'finite centres', 'aspects', 'moments',
of this enormous cosmic entity-the 'living whole', the world soul,
the transcendental Spirit or Idea, descriptions of which almost recall
the fantasies of early gnosticism. Indeed the sceptical Swiss historian,
Jakob Burckhardt, said that when he listened to Schelling he began
to see creatures with many arms and feet advancing upon him. The
conclusions drawn from this apocalyptic vision are less eccentric. The
finite centres-the individual human beings-understand each other,
their surroundings and themselves, the past and to some degree the
present and the future too, but not in the same sort of way in which
they communicate with one another. When, for example, I maintain
that I understand another human being- that I am sympathetic to
him, follow, 'enter into' the workings of his mind, and that I am
for this reason particularly well qualified to form a j udgement of his
character-of his 'inner' self- 1 am claiming to be doing something
which cannot be reduced to, on the one hand, a set of systematically
classified operations and, on the other, a method of deriving further
information from them which, once discovered, could be reduced to
a technique, and taught to, and applied more or less mechanically by,
a receptive pupil. Understanding men or ideas or movements, or the
outlooks of individuals or groups, is not reducible to a sociological
classification into types of behaviour with predictions based on scientific experiment and carefully tabulated statistics of observations.
There is no substitute for sympathy, understanding, insight, 'wisdom'.
Similarly, Schelling taught that if you wanted to know what it
was, for example, that made a work of art beautiful, or what it was
that gave its own unique character to a historical period, it was
necessary to employ methods different from those of experiment,
classification, induction, deduction, or the other techniques of the
natural sciences. According to this doctrine, if you wished to understand what, for example, had brought about the vast spiritual upheaval of the French Revolution, or why Goethe's Faust was a profounder
work than the tragedies of Voltaire, then to apply the methods of
the kind of psychology and sociology adumbrated by, say, Condillac
or Condorcet would not prove rewarding. Unless you had a capacity
for imaginative insight-for understanding the 'inner', the mental and
emotional-the 'spiritual' -life of individuals, societies, historical
periods, the 'inner purposes' or 'essences' of institutions, nations,
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G E R MAN RO M AN TI C I S M
churches, you would for ever remain unable to explain why certain
combinations form 'unities', whereas others do not: why particular
sounds or words or acts are relevant to, fit with, certain other elements
in the 'whole', while others fail to do so. And this no matter whether
you are 'explaining' the character of a man, the rise of a movement
or a party, the process of artistic creation, the characteristics of an
age, or of a school of thought, or of a mystical view of reality. Nor is
this, according to the view I am discussing, an accident. For reality
is not merely organic but unitary: which is a way of saying that its
ingredients are not merely connected by causal relationships-they do
not merely form a pattern or harmony so that each element is seen
to be 'necessitated' by the disposition of all other elements-but each
'reRects' or 'expresses' the others; for there is a single 'Spirit' or 'Idea'
or 'Absolute' of which all that exists is a unique aspect, or an articulation-and the more of an aspect, the more vividly articulated, the
'deeper', the 'more real' it is. A philosophy is 'true' in the proportion
in which it expresses the phase which the Absolute or the Idea has
reached at each stage of development. A poet possesses genius, a
statesman greatness, to the degree to which they are inspired by, and
express, the 'spirit' of their milieu-state, culture, nation-which is
itself an 'incarnation' of the self-realisation of the spirit of the universe
conceived pantheistically as a kind of ubiquitous divinity. And a work
of art is dead or artificial or trivial if it is a mere accident in this development. Art, philosophy, religion are so many efforts on the part of finite creatures to catch and articulate an 'echo' of the cosmic harmony.
Man is finite, and his vision will always be fragmentary; the 'deeper'
the individual, the larger and richer the fragment. Hence the lofty
contempt which such thinkers express for the 'merely' empirical or
'mechanical', for the world of everyday experience whose denizens
remain deaf to the inner harmony in terms of which alone anythingand everything-is 'truly' to be understood.
The romantic critics in some cases supposed themselves not merely
to be revealing the nature of types of knowledge or thought or feeling
hitherto unrecognised or inadequately analysed, but to be building
new cosmological systems, new faiths, new forms of life, and indeed
to be direct instruments of the process of the spiritual redemption,
or 'self-realisation', of the universe. Their metaphysical fantasies arefortunately, I may add-all but dead today; but the incidental light which they shed on art, history, and religion transformed the outlook
of the west. By paying a great deal of attention to, the unconscious
1 39
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
activity o f the imagination, to the role of irrational factors, to the part
played in the mind by symbols and myths, to awareness of unanalysable
affinities and contrasts, to fundamental but impalpable connections
and differences which cut across the conventional lines of rational
classification, they often succeeded in giving an altogether novel
account of such phenomena as poetical inspiration, religious experience,
political genius, of the relationship of art to social development, or of
the individual to the masses, or of moral ideals to aesthetic or biological
facts. This account was more convincing than any that had been
given before; at any rate than the doctrines of the eighteenth century,
which had not treated such topics systematically, and largely left them
to the isolated utterances of mystically inclined poets and essayists.
So too Hegel, despite all the philosophical obfuscation for which
he was responsible, set in motion ideas which have become so universal
and familiar that we think in terms of them without being aware of
their relative novelty. This is true, for example, of the idea of the
history of thought as a continuous process, capable of independent
study. There existed, of course, accounts- usually mere catalogues
raisonnls-of particular philosophical systems in the ancient world or
in the Middle Ages, or monographs devoted to particular thinkers.
But it was Hegel who developed the notion of a specific cluster of
ideas as permeating an age or a society, of the effect of those ideas
upon other ideas, of the many invisible links whereby the feelings,
the sentiments, the thoughts, the religions, the laws and the general
outlook-what is nowadays called ideology-of one generation are
connected with the ideology of other times or places. Unlike his
predecessors Vico and Herder, Hegel tried to present this as a coherent,
continuous, rationally analysable development-the first in the fatal
line of cosmic historians which stretches through Comte and Marx
to Spengler and Toynbee and all those who find spiritual comfort in
the discovery of vast imaginary symmetries in the irregular stream of
human history.
Although much of this programme is a tantasy, or at any rate a
form of highly subjective poetry in prose, yet the notion that the
many activities of the human spirit are interrelated, that the artistic
or scientific thought of an age is best understood i'n its interplay with
the social, economic, theological, legal activities pursued in the society
in which artists and scientists live and work-the very notion of
cultural history as a source oflight-is itself a cardinal step in the history
of thought. And again Schelling (following Herder) is largely respons-
I+O
G E R M AN R O M AN T I C I S M
ible for the characteristically romantic notion that poets or painters
may understand the spirit of their age more profoundly and express
it in a more vivid and lasting manner than academic historians; this
is so because artists tend to have a greater degree of sensibility to the
contours of their own age (or of other ages and cultures) than either
trained antiquaries or professional journalists, inasmuch as they are
irritable organisms; more responsive to, and conscious of, inchoate,
half-understood factors which operate beneath the surface in a given
milieu, factors which may only come to full maturity at a later period.
This was the sense in which, for �xample, Karl Marx used to maintain that Balzac in his novels had depicted the life and character not so much of his own time, as of the men of the 6os and 70s of the nineteenth century, whose lineaments, while they were still in embryo, impinged upon the sensibilities of artists long before they emerged
into the full light of day. The romantic philosophers vastly exaggerated
the power and reliability of this kind of intuitive or poetical insight;
but their fervid vision, which remained mystical and irrationalist no
matter how heavily disguised in quasi-scientific or quasi-lyrical
terminology, captivated the imagination of the young Russian intellectuals of the 30s and 405, and seemed to open a door to a nobler and calmer world from the sordid reality of the Empire ruled by Tsar
Nicholas I.
The man who, more persuasively than anyone else in Russia,
taught the educated young men of the t 8Jos to soar above empirical
facts into a realm of pure light where all was harmonious and eternally
true, was a student of Moscow University called Nicholas Stankevich,
who, while still in his early twenties, gathered round him a circle of
devoted admirers. Stankevich was an aristocratic young man of great
distinction of mind and appearance, a gentle and idealistic personality,
and exceptional sweetness of character, with a passion for metaphysics
and a gift for lucid exposition. He was born in t 8 I J, and in the course
of his short life (he died at twenty-seven) exercised a remarkable moral
and intellectual ascendancy over his friends. They idolised him in his
lifetime, and after his death worshipped his memory. Even Turgenev,
who was not addicted to uncritical admiration, painted a portrait of
him in his novel Rudin under the name of Pokorsky in which there
is not a trace of irony. Stankevich had read widely in German romantic
literature, and preached a secular, metaphysical religion which for him
had taken the place of the doctrines of the Orthodox Church in which
neither he nor his friends any longer believed.
14 1
R U SSIAN T H IN K E R S
H e taught that a proper understanding of Kant and Schelling (and
later Hegel) led one to realise that beneath the apparent disorder and
the cruelty, the injustice and the ugliness of daily life, it was possible
to discern eternal beauty, peace and hannony. Artists and scientists
were travelling their different roads to the selfsame goal (a very
Schellingian idea) of communion with this inner hannony. Art (and
this included philosophical and scientific truth) alone was immortal,
stood up unscathed against the chaos of the empirical world, against
the unintelligible and shapeless ftow of political, social, economic
events which would soon vanish and be forgotteil. The masterpieces
of art and thought were pennanent memorials to the creative power
of men, because they alone embodied moments of insight into some
portion of the everlasting pattern which lies beyond the ftux of the
appearances. Stankevich believed (as many have believed, particularly
after some great fiasco in the life of their society, in this case perhaps
the failure of the Decembrist revolution of 1 825) that in the place of
social reforms, which merely affected the outer texture of life, men
should seek rather to reform themselves within, and everything else
would be added unto them: the kingdom of heaven-the Hegelian
self-transcending Spirit-lies within. Salvation comes from individual
self-regeneration, and to achieve truth, reality, happiness, men must
learn from those who truly know : the philosophers, the poets, the
sages. Kant, Hegel, H�mer, Shakespeare, Goethe were harmonious
spirits, saints and sages who saw what the multitude would never see.
Study, endless study alone could afford a glimpse into their Elysian
world, the sole reality in which the broken fragments came together
again into their original unity. Only those who could attain to this
beatific vision were wise and good and free. To pursue material values
-social refonns or political goals of any kind�was to pursue phantoms,
to court broken hopes, frustration and misery.
For anyone who was young and idealistic in Russia between 1 830
and 1 848, or simply human enough to be depressed by the social
conditions of the country, it was comforting to be told that the
appalling evils of Russian life-the ignorance and poverty of the serfs,
the illiteracy and hypocrisy of the clergy, the corruption, inefficiency,
brutality, arbitrariness of the governing class, the pettiness, sycophancy,
and inhumanity of the merchants-that the entire barbarous system,
according to the sages of the west, was a mere bubble upon the surface
of life. It was all ultimately unimportant, the inevitable attribute of
the world of appearances which, seen from a superior vantage point,
147.
G E R M AN ROMANT I C I S M
did not disturb the deeper harmony. Musical images are frequent in
the metaphysics of this time. You were told that if you simply listened
to the isolated notes of a given musical instrument you might find
them ugly and meaningless and without purpose; but if you understood the entire work, if you listened to the orchestra as a whole, you would see that these apparently arbitrary sounds conspired with other
sounds to form a harmonious whole which satisfied your craving for
truth and beauty. This is a kind of translation into aesthetic terms of
the scientific method of explanation of an earlier time. Spinoza-and
some among the rationalists of the eighteenth century-had taught
that if you could understand the pattern of the universe (some said
by metaphysical intuition, others by perceiving a mathematical or
mechanical order) then you would cease to kick against the pricks,
for you would realise that whatever was real was necessarily what
and when and where it was, part of the rational order of the harmony
of the cosmos. And if you saw this you became reconciled and achieved
inner peace: for you could no longer, as a rational human being, rebel
in an arbitrary and capricious fashion against a logically necessary
order.
The transposition of this into aesthetic terms is the dominant
factor of the Gennan romantic movement. Instead of talking about
necessary connections of a scientific kind, or oflogical or mathematical
reasoning to be employed in the unravelling of these mysteries, you
are invited to use a new kind of logic which unfolds to you the
beauty of a picture, the depth of a piece of music, the truth of a
literary masterpiece. If you conceive of life as the artistic creation of
some cosmic divinity, and of the world as the progressive revelation
of a work of art-if, in short, you are converted from a seientific to
a mystical or 'transcendental' view of life and history, you may well
experience a sense of liberation. Previously you were the victim of
unexplained chaos, which rendered you indignant and unhappy, a
prisoner in a system which you vainly tried to reform and correct,
with the result that you only suffered failure and defeat. But now you
..cquired a sense of yourself willingly and eagerly participating in the
cosmic enterprise : whatever befeil necessarily fulfilled the universal,
.md thereby your own personal, design. You were wise, haFPY• anci
:ree : for you were at one with tile purposes of the universe.
Under the conditions ofiiterary censorship then prevalent in Russia.
where it was difficult to give open expression to political ami sociai
ideas, where literature was the ';ln)y vehicle in which �uch ideas
'43
R U S S IAN THINKERS
could, however cryptically, be conveyed, a programme which invited
you to ignore the repulsive (and, after the fate of the Decembrists,
perilous) political scene, and concentrate upon personal-moral,
literary, artistic-self-improvement, offered great comfort to people
who did not wish to suffer too much. Stankevich believed in Hegel
deeply and sincerely, and preached his quietist sermons with an
eloquence which sprang from a pure and sensitive heart and an unswerving faith which never left him. Such doubts as he had, he stilled within himself; and remained until his early end an unworldly saint
in whose presence his friends felt a sense of spiritual peace which
flowed from the beauty of his singularly unbroken personality, and
the feminine delicacy and charm with which he used to bind his
gentle spell upon them. This influence cea8ed with his death : he left
a few graceful, faded poems, a handful of fragmentary essays, and a
bundle of letters to his friends and to various German philosophers;
among them moving avowals to the most admired of his friends, a
young playwright and professor in Berlin in whom he discerned
something akin to genius, a disciple of Hegel whose very name is
now justly forgotten. From this scanty material it is scarcely possible
to reconstruct the personality of this leader of Russian Idealism.
His most gifted and impressionable disciple was a man of very
different cast, Mikhail Bakunin, at this time an amateur philosopher,
and already notorious for his turbulent and despotic character.
Bakunin had, by the late I 8Jos, resigned his commission in the army
and was living in Moscow largely by his wits. Endowed with an
exceptional capacity for absorbing other people's doctrines, he expounded them with fervour and enthusiasm as though they were his own, and in the course of this changed them somewhat, making them,
as a rule, simpler, clearer, cruder, and at times more convincing.
Bakunin had a considerable element of cynicism in his character, and
cared little what the exact effect of his sermons might be on his
friends-provided only that it was powerful enough; he did not ask
whether they excited or demoralised them, or ruined their lives, or
bored them, or turned them into fanatical zealots for some wildly
Utopian scheme. Bakt• nin was a born agitator with sufficient scepticism
in his system not to be taken in himself by his own torrential eloquence.
To dominate individuals and sway assemblies was his mltin-: he
belonged to that odd, fortunately not very numerous, class of persons
who contrive to hypnotise others into throwing themselves into causes
-if need be killing and dying for them-while themselves remaining
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G E R M AN R O M ANT I C I S M
coldly, dearly, and ironically aware o f the effect o f the spells which
they cast. When his bluff was called, as occasionally it was, for example,
by Herzen, Bakunin would laugh with the greatest good nature, admit
everything freely, and continue to cause havoc, if anything with greater
unconcern than before. His path was strewn with victims, casualties,
and faithful, idealistic converts; he himself remained a gay, easygoing, mendacious, irresistibly agreeable, calmly and coldly destructive, fascinating, generous, undisciplined, eccentric Russian landowner to the end.
He played with ideas with adroitness and boyish delight. They came
from many sources: from Saint-Simon, from Holbach, from Hegel,
from Proudhon, from Feuerbach, from the Young Hegelians, from
Weitling. He would imbibe these doctrines during periods of short
but intensive application, and then he would expound them with a
degree of fervour and personal magnetism which was, perhaps,
unique even in that century of great popular tribunes. During the
decade which Annenkov describes, he was a fanatically orthodox
Hegelian, and preached the paradoxical principles of the new metaphysics to his friends night after night with lucidity and stubborn passion. He proclaimed the existence of iron and inexorable laws of
history, and indeed of everything else. Hegel-and Stankevich-were
right. It was idle to rebel against them, or to protest against the
cruelties and injustices which they seemed to entail; to do so was
simply a sign of immaturity, of not understanding the necessity and
beauty of the rationally organised cosmos-to fail to grasp the divine
goal in which the sufferings and disharmonies of individual lives
must, if you understood them properly, inevitably culminate and be
resolved.
Hegel taught that the spirit evolved not continuously, but by a
'dialectical' struggle of 'opposites' which (somewhat, it seems, like a
diesel engine) moved by a series of sharp explosions. This notion
suited Bakunin's temperament well, since, as he himself was fond· of
saying, he detested nothing more than peace, order, bourgeois contentment. Mere bohemianism, disorganised rebellion have been discredited too often. Hegelianism presented its tragic and violent view of life beneath the guise of an eternal rational system, an objective
'science', with all the logical paraphernalia of reasoned judgement. First
to justify the need to submit to a brutal government and a stupid
bureaucracy in the name of eternal Reason, then to justify rebellion
with the selfsame arguments, was a paradoxical task that delighted
..
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
Bakunin. In Moscow h e enjoyed his power o f turning peaceful
students into dervishes, ecstatic seekers after some aesthetic or metaphysical goal. In later life he applied these talents on a wider scale, and stirred some exceedingly unpromising human material-Swiss
watchmakers and German peasants-into unbelievable frenzies of
enthusiasm, which no one ever induced in them before or after.
During the period of which I am speaking, he concentrated these
sinister talents upon the relatively humble task of expounding Hegel's
Encydopedia, paragraph by paragraph, to his admiring friends. Among
these friends was another intimate of Stankevich, Nicholay Granovsky,
a gentle and high-minded historian who had studied in Germany and
there became a moderate Hegelian, and came back to lecture on
western medieval history in Moscow. Granovsky succeeded in making
his apparently remote subject into a means of inducing in his audiences
respect for the western tradition. He dwelt in particular on the
civilising effect of the Roman Church, of Roman law, and of the
institutions of feudalism, developing his theses in the fac-e of the
growing chauvinism-with its emphasis on the· Byzantine roots of
Russian culture-which was at this time encouraged by the Russian
Government as an antidote to the dangerous ideas of the west.
Granovsky combined erudition with a very balanced intellect, and
was not carried away by extravagant theories. Nevertheless he was
Hegelian enough to believe that the universe must have a pattern and
a goal; that this goal was slowly being approached, that humanity
was marching towards freedom, although the path was by no means
smooth or straight: obstacles occurred-relapses were frequent and
difficult to avert. Unless a sufficient number of human beings with
personal courage, strength, and a sense of dedication emerged, humanity
tended to subside into long nights of reaction, swamps from which it
extricated itself at terrible cost. Nevertheless, slowly and painfully,
but inexorably, humanity was moving towards an ideal state of
happiness, justice, truth, and beauty. Granovsky's lectures in Moscow
University in the early I 84os on the apparently recondite subject of
the late Merovingian and early Carolingian kings attracted a very
large and distinguished audience. These lectures were treated both by
the 'Westerners' and their nationalist Slavophil opponents as a quasipolitical demonstration of pro-western, liberal and rationalist sentiment: above all of faith in the transforming power of enlightened ideas, against mystical nationalism and ecclesiasticism.
I quote the example of Granovsky's famous lectures-passionately
146
G E RMAN ROMANTICISM
acclaimed by his friends, and attacked by the conservatives-as an
illustration of the peculiar disguises which in Russia (as to a lesser
extent in Germany) social and political liberalism had to adopt if it
was to find voice at all. The censorship was at once a heavy fetter
and a goad-it brought into being a peculiar brand of cryptorevolutionary writing, made more tortuous and more intense by repression, which in the end turned the whole of Russian literature
into what Henen described as 'one vast bill of indictment' against
Russian life.
The censor was the ofticial enemy, but unlike his modern successor,
he was almost wholly negative. The tsarist censorship imposed
silence but it did not directly tell professors what to teach; it did not
dictate to authors what to say and how to say it; and it did not command
composers to induce this or that mood in their audiences. It was
merely designed to prevent the expression of a certain number of
selected 'dangerous ideas'. It was an obstacle, at rimes a maddening
one. But because it was, like so much in old Russia, inefficient,
corrupt, indolent, often stupid, or deliberately lenient-and because
so many loopholes could always be found by the ingenious and the
desperate, not much that was subversive was stopped effectively. The
Russian writers who belonged to the radical intelligentsia did, after
all, publish their works, and published them, by and large, in an
almost undistorted form. The main effect of repression was to drive
social and political ideas into the relatively safe realm of literature.
This had already occurred in Germany, and it did so on a much
larger scale in Russia.
Yet it would be a mistake to exaggerate the role of the government
repression in compelling literature to become political in character.
The romantic movement was itself an equally potent factor in creating
'impure' literature, in filling it with ideological content. Turgenev
himself, the 'purest' of all the men of letters of his rime, and often
taken to task for this sin by censorious preachers like Dostoevsky or
the 'materialist' critics of the 6os, did, after all, at one time, contemplate an academic career-as a professor of philosophy. He was dissuaded from this; but his early Hegelian infatuation proved a lasting inftuence on his whole view of life. Hegel's teaching drove some to
revolution, others to reaction; in either case it emancipated its adherents
from the over-simplified classifications of men by the eighteenthcentury pamphleteers into the virtuous and the vicious, the benighted or the enlightened, of events into good and bad, and from the view
,,
147
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
of both men and things as intelligible and predictable i n terms o f clear,
mechanically conceived, causal chains. For Turgenev, on the contrary,
everything is compounded of characteristics in a perpetual process of
transformation, infinitely complex, morally and politically ambivalent,
blending into constantly changing combinations, explicable only in
terms of flexible and often impressionistic psychological and historical
concepts, which allow for the elaborate interplay of factors that are
too many and too fleeting to be reduced to scientific schemata or
laws. Turgenev's liberalism and moderation, for which he was so
much criticised, took the form of holding everything in solution-of
remaining outside the situation in a state of watchful and ironical
detachment, uncommitted, evenly balanced-an agnostic oscillating
contentedly between atheism and faith, belief in progress and scepticism, an observer in a state of cool, emotionally controlled doubt before a spectacle of life where nothing is quite what it seems, where
every quality is infected by its opposite, where paths are never straight,
never cross in geometrically regular patterns. For him (this is his
version of the Hegelian dialectic) reality for ever escapes all artificial
ideological nets, all rigid, dogmatic assumptions, defies all attempts
at codification, upsets all symmetrical moral or sociological systems,
and yields itself only to cautious, emotionally neutral, scrupulously
empirical attempts to describe it bit by bit, as it presents itself to the
curious eye of the morally disinterested observer. Herz.en, too, rejects
cut and dried systems and programmes: neither he nor Turgenev
accepted the positive Hegelian doctrines, the vast cosmological fantasy
-the historical theodicy which unhinged so many of their contemporaries. Both were profoundly affected by its negative aspect-the undermining of the uncritical faith in the new social sciences which
animated the optimistic thinkers of the previous century.
These were some of the more prominent and celebrated among
the avant-gardt young Russians of the late 30s and 40s-and there
were many members of this group whom there is not room to mention
Katkov, who began as a philosopher and a radical and later became a
famous and influential reactionary journalist; the philosopher Redkin,
the essayist Korsh, and the translator Ketcher; the actor Shchepkin;
wealthy young dilettanti like Botkin, Panaev, Sazonov, Ogarev,
Galakhov, the great poet Nekrasov, and many lesser figures whose
lives are of interest only to literary or social historians. But over all
these towers the figure of the critic Vissarion Belinsky. His defects
both of education and taste were notorious; his appearance was
. 148
GERMAN ROMANT I C I S M
unimpressive, his prose style left much to be desired. But he became
the moral and literary dictator of his generation. Those who came
under his influence remained affected by it long after his death ; and
whether for good or ill it transformed Russian writing-in particular
criticism-radically, and, it would seem, for ever.
149
III
V I S S A R I O N B E LI N S KY
I N I 8 s6 I van Aksakov' one of two famous Slavophil brothers, who
had no sympathy for political radicalism, wrote an account of one of
his tours of the provincial centres of European Russia. The tour was
conceived by him as a kind of nationalist pilgrimage, intended at once
to draw comfort and inspiration from direct contact with the untouched
mass of the Russian people, and to warn those who needed warning
against the horrors of the west and the snares of western liberalism.
Aksakov was bitterly disappointed.
The name of Belinsky is known to every thinking young man [he
wrote], to everyone who is hungry for a breath of fresh air in the
reeking bog of provincial life. There is not a country schoolmaster
who does not know-and know by heart- Belinsky's letter to Gogo!.
If you want to find honest people, people who care about the poor
and the oppressed, an honest doctor, an honest lawyer not afraid of
a fight, you will find them among Belinsky's followers . . . Slavophil
inRuence is negligible . . . Belinsky's proselytes increase.
Plainly we are dealing with a major phenomenon of some kind someone to whom, eight years after his death, idealistic young men, during one of the worst moments of repression in the nineteenth
century, looked as their leader. The literary reminiscences of the
young radicals of the 30s and 4os- Panaev and his wife, Turgenev,
Herzen, Annenkov, Ogareva, Dostoevsky-agree in stressing this
aspect of Belinsky as the 'conscience' of the Russian intelligentsia, the
inspired and fearless publicist, the ideal of the young rlvoltls, the
writer who almost alone in Russia had the character and the eloquence
to proclaim clearly and harshly what many felt, but either could not
or would not openly declare.
We can easily imagine the kind of young man Aksakov was speaking
of. In Turgenev's novel Rudin there is a mildly ironical, but sympathetic and touching, portrait of a typical radical of that time, employed 1 50
V I SSARION B E L INSKY
as tutor in a country house. He is a plain-looking, awkward, clumsy
university student, neither intelligent nor interesting; indeed he is
dim, provincial, rather a fool, but pure-hearted, embarrassingly
sincere and self-revealing, and comically naive. The student is a
radical not in the sense that he holds clear intellectual or moral
political views, but because he is filled with a vague but bitter hostility
towards the government of his country, the grey, brutish soldiers, the
dull, dishonest, and frightened officials, the illiterate, superstitious, and
sycophantic priests; with a deep distaste for the peculiar mixture
compounded of fear, greed, and a dislike of everything new or connected with the forces of life, which formed the prevailing Russian atmosphere. He is in full reaction against the queer variety of cynical
resignation which accepted the starved and semi-barbarous condition
of the serfs and the deathly stagnation of provincial Russian society as
something not merely natural, but possessing a deep, traditional value,
almost a kind of spiritual beauty, the object of a peculiar, nationalist,
quasi-religious mystique of its own. Rudin is the life and soul of the
house-party, and the young tu�or is completely taken in by his specious
liberal rhetoric, worships the ground Rudin treads on, and fills his
easy generalisations with all his own moral enthusiasm and faith in
truth and material progress. When Rudin, still gay and charming and
irresistible, still overflowing with empty liberal platitudes, refuses to
face a moral crisis, makes feeble excuses, behaves like a craven and a
fool, and gets himself out of an awkward predicament by a squalid
piece of minor treachery, his follower, the simple seeker after truth,
is left dazed, helpless, and outraged, not knowing what to believe or
which way to turn, in a typical Turgenev situation in which everyone
ends by behaving with weakness and irresponsibility that is human,
disarming, and disastrous. The tutor Basistov is a very minor figure,
but he is a direct if humble descendant of the foil-and sometimes the
dupe-ofthe or.iginal 'superfluous man' of Russian society, of Pushkin's
Lensky (as opposed to Onegin); he is of the same stock as Pierre
Bezukhov (as against Prince Andrey) in War and Peact, as Levin in
Anna Kartnina and all the Karamazovs, as Krutsifersky in Herzen's
novel Who is to hlame?, as the student in The Cherry Orc.�ard, as
Colonel Vershinin and the Baron in The Three Sisters. He is, in the
context of the 1 84os, the figure that came to be thought of as one of
the characteristic figures in the Russian social novel, the perplexed
idealist, the touchingly naive, over-enthusiastic, pure-hearted man,
the victim of misfortunes which could be averted but in fact never
R U SSIAN TH I NK E R S
are. Sometimes comial, sometimes tragical, often confused, blundering,
and inefficient, he is incapable of any falseness, or, at least, of irremediable falseness, of anything in any degree sordid or treacherous; sometimes weak and self-pitying, like Chekhov's heroes-sometimes strong and furious like Bazarov in Fathers and Children-he never loses an
inner dignity and an indestructible moral personality in contrast with
which the ordinary philistines who form the vast majority of normal
society appear at once pathetic and repulsive.
The original prototype of these sincere, sometimes childish, at other
times angry, champions of persecuted humanity, the saints and martyrs
in the cause of the humiliated and the defeated-the actual, historical
embodiment of this most Russian type of moral and intellectual
heroism- is Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky. His name became the
greatest Russian myth in the nineteenth century,, detestable to the
supporters of autocracy, the Orthodox Church, and fervid nationalism,
disturbing to elegant and fastidious lovers of western classicism, and
for the same reasons the idealised ancestor of both the reformers and
the revolutionaries of the second half of the century. In a very real
sense he was one of the founders of the movement which culminated
in I 9 I 7 in the overthrow of the social order which towards the end
of his life he increasingly denounced. There is scarcely a radical
Russian writer-and few liberals-who did not at some stage claim to
be descended from him. Even such timid and half-hearted members
of the opposition as Annenkov and Turgenev worshipped his memory,
even the conservative government censor, Goncharov, spoke of him
as the best man he had ever known. As for the true left-wing authors
of the 1 86os-the revolutionary propagandists Dobrolyubov and
Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, Lavrov and Mikhailovsky, and the
socialists who followed them, Plekhanov, Martov, Lenin and his
followers-they �ormally recognised him as one of the earliest, and,
with Herzen, the greatest of the heroes of the heroic 40s, when the
organised struggle for full social as well as political freedom, economic
as well as civil equality, was held to have begun in the Russian Empire.
Clearly, then, he was, to say the least, an arresting figure in the
history of Russian social thought. Those who have read the memoirs
of his friends, Herzen, Turgenev, and of course Annenkov, will
discover for themselves the reason for this. But in the west Belinsky
is even now relatively unknown. Yet, as anyone knows who has read
at all widely in his works, he is the father of the social criticism of
literature, not only in Russia but perhaps even in Europe, the most
I 52.
V I S SARION BELINSKY
gifted and formidable enemy of the aesthetic and religious and mystical
attitudes to life. Throughout the nineteenth century his views were
the great battlefield between Russian critics, that is, between two
incompatible views of art and indeed of life. He was always very poor,
and he wrote to keep alive, and, therefore, too much. Much of his
writing was composed in fearful haste, and a great deal is uninspired
hackwork. But in spite of all the hostile criticism to which he has
been exposed from his earliest beginnings as a critic (and let me add
that Belinsky is to this day the subject of heated controversy-no other
figure dead for over a century has excited so much devotion and so
much odium among Russians), his best work is in Russia regarded as
classical and immortal. In the Soviet Union his place is all too secure,
for (despite his lifelong war against dogma and conformism) he has
there long been canonised as a founding father of the new form of
life. But the moral and political issue with which he was concerned is,
in the west, open still. This alone makes him a figure of interest at
the present time.
His life was outwardly uneventful. He was born in poverty in I 8 I o
or I 8 1 1 , at Sveaborg in Finland, and brought up in the remote city
of Chembar in the province of Penza. His father was a retired naval
doctor who settled down to a small practice and to drink. He grew up
a thin, consumptive, over-serious, pinched little boy, prematurely old,
unsmiling and always in deadly earnest, who soon attrac!ed the
attention of his schoolmasters by his single-minded devotion to
literature, and his grim, unseasonable, and apparently devouring
passion for the truth. He went to Moscow as a poor scholar with a
government stipend, and after the normal troubles and misfortunes
of impoverished students of humble birth in what was still the home
of the gentry and nobility-the University of Moscow- was expelled
for reasons which are still obscure, but probably connected with lack
of solid knowledge, and the writing of a play denouncing serfdom.
The play, which survives, is very badly written, rhetorical, mildly
subversive, and worthless as a work of literature, but the moral was
plain enough for the intimidated university censors, and the author
was poor and lacked protectors. Nadezhdin, then a liberal young
professor of European literature at the university, who edited an ovantgarde periodical, was impressed by Belinsky's obvious seriousness and passion for literature, thought that he detected a spark of inspiration,
and engaged him to write reviews. From I 835 until his death thirteen
years later, Belinsky poured out a steady stream of articles, critical
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R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S
notices, and reviews i n various journals. They split educated Russian
opinion into rival camps, and became the gospel of the progressive
young men in every corner of the Empire, particularly of the university
students who became his most devoted and fanatical followers.
In appearance Belinsky was of middle height, thin, bony, and slightly
stooped; his face was pale, slightly mottled, and flushed easily when he
was excited. He was asthmatic, tired easily, and usually looked worn
out, haggard, and rather grim. His movements were awkward, like a
peasant's, nervous and abrupt, and before strangers he tended to be
shy, brusque and sullen. With his intimates, the young radicals,
Turgenev, Botkin, Bakunin, Granovsky, 'he was full of life and
irrepressible gusto. In the heat of a literary or philosophical discussion
his eyes would shine, his pupils dilate, he would walk from corner
to corner talking loudly, rapidly, and with violent intensity, coughing
and waving his arms. In society he was clumsy and uncomfortable
and tended to be silent, but if he heard what he regarded as wicked
or unctuous sentiments he intervened on principle, and Herzen
testifies that on such occasions no opponent could stand before the
force of his terrible moral fury. He was at his best when excited by
argument. Let me quote Herzen's words:
Without controversy, unless he was irritated, he did not talk well;
but when he felt wounded, when his dearest convictions were
touched, and the muscles of his cheeks began to quiver and his voice
broke-one should have seen him then: he would fling himself at
his victim like a panther, he would tear him to pieces, make him
ridiculous, make him pitiful, and in the course of it would develop
his own thought with astonishing power and poetry. The argument would often end in blood which poured from the sick man's throat; pale, choking, with eyes fixed on whoever he was addressing,
he would, with a trembling hand, lift the handkerchief to his
mouth, and stop-terribly upset, undone by his lack of physical
strength. How I loved and how I pitied him at those moments !
At dinner with some decayed and respectable official who had
survived from the reign of the Empress Catherine, Belinsky went out
of his way to praise the execution of Louis XVI. Someone ventured
to say in front of him that Chaadaev (a Russian sympathiser with
Roman Catholicism, who had denounced the barbarism of his country)
had, in a civilised country, been very properly declared insane by the
tsar for insulting the dearest convictions of his people. Belinsky, after
vainly tugging at Herzen's sleeve and whispering to him to intervene,
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VI SSARION B E L I N SKY
finally broke in himself, and said in a dead, dull voice that in still
more civilised countries the guillotine was invented for people who
advanced that kind of opinion. The victim was crushed, the host was
alarmed, and the party quickly broke up. Turgenev, who disliked
extremes, and detested scenes, loved and respected Belinsky for
precisely this social fearlessness that he himself conspicuously lacked.
With his friends Belinsky played cards, cracked commonplace
jokes, talked through the night, and charmed and exhausted them all.
He could not bear solitude. He was married unsuitably, from sheer
misery and loneliness. He died of consumption in the early summer
of 1 848. The head of the gendarmerie later expressed fierce regret
that Belinsky had died, adding: 'We would have rotted him in a
fortress.' He was thirty-seven or thirty-eight at the time of his death,
and at the height of his powers.
For all the external monotony of his days, Belinsky lived a life of
abnormal intensity, punctuated by acute crises, intellectual and moral,
which helped to destroy him physically. The subject which he had
chosen, the subject from which he cannot be separated even in thought,
was literature, and although he was, despite his detractors' charges of
lack of authentic capacity, acutely sensitive to pure literary quality, to
the sounds and rhythms and nuances of words, to images and poetical
symbolism and the purely sensuous emotions directed towards them,
yet that was not the central factor of his life. This centre was the
influence of ideas; not merely in the intellectual or rational sense in
which ideas are judgements or theories, but in that sense which is
perhaps even more familiar, but more difficult to express, in which
ideas embody emotions as well as thoughts, inarticulate as well as
explicit attitudes to the inner and to the outer worlds. This is the
sense in which ideas are something wider and more intrinsic to the
human beings who hold them than opinions or even principles, the
sense in which ideas constitute, and indeed are, the central complex
of relations of a man towards himself and to the external world, and
may be shallow or deep, false or true, closed or open, blind or endowed
with the power of insight. This is something which is discovered in
behaviour, conscious and unconscious, in style, in gestures and actions
and minute mannerisms at least as much as in any explicit doctrine or
professions of faith. It is ideas and beliefs in this sense, as they are
manifested in the lives and works of human beings-what is sometimes
vaguely called ideology-that perpetually excited Belinsky to enthusiasm
or anxiety or loathing, and kept him in a state sometimes amounting
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R U S S IAN T H INKERS
to a kind of moral frenzy. He believed what he believed very passionately, and sacrificed his entire nature to it. When he doubted he doubted no less passionately, and was prepared to pay any price for
the answers to the questions which tormented him. These questions
were, as might be supposed, about the proper relation of the individual
to himself and to other individuals, to society, about the springs of
human action and feeling, about the ends of life, but in panicular
about the imaginative work of the anist, and his moral purpose.
All serious questions to Belinsky were always, in the end, moral
questions: about what it is that is wholly valuable and worth pursuing
for its own sake. To him this meant the question of what is alone
wonh knowing, saying, doing, and, of course, fighting for-if need be,
dying for. The ideas which he found in books or in conversation were
not for him, in the first place, intrinsically interesting or delightful
or even intellectually imponant, to be examined, analysed, reflected
about in some detached and impartial fashion. Ideas were, above all,
true or false. If false, then like evil spirits to be exorcised. All books
embody ideas, even when least appearing to do so; and it is for these
that, before anything else, the critic must probe. To illustrate this I
shall give you a curious, indeed a grotesque, but nevertheless, it seems
to me, illuminating example of his method. His critics and biographers
do not mention it, since it is a trivial piece of writing. In the course
of his day-to-day journalism Belinsky pul>lished a shon review of a
Russian version of some nineteenth-century French translation of
The Yicar of Walujield. The review starts conventionally enough, but
gradually assumes an irritated and hostile tone: Belinsky does not like
Goldsmith's masterpiece because he thinks it falsifies the moral facts.
He complains that in the character of the Vicar, Goldsmith represents
apathy, placid stupidity, and incompetence as being ultimately superior
to the qualities of the fighter, the reformer, the aggressive champion of
ideas. The Vicar is represented as a simple soul, full of Christian
resignation, unpractical, and constantly deceived; and this natural
goodness and innocence, it is implied, is somehow both incompatible
with, and superior to, cleverness, intellect, action. This to Belinsky
is a deep and damnable heresy. All books embody points of view, rest
on underlying assumptions, social, psychological, and aesthetic, and
the basis on which the Yicar rests is, according to Belinsky, philistine
and false. It is a glorification of persons who are not engaged in the
struggle of life, who stand on the edge uncommitted, dlgagls, and
enter only to be bamboozled and compromised by the active and the
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V I SSARION B E L I N S K Y
crooked; which leads them to material defeat but moral victory. But
this, he exclaims, is to pander to irrationalism-to the faith in 'muddling
through' clung to by the average bourgeois everywhere�and to that
extent it is a dishonest representation of cowardice as a deeper wisdom,
of failure, temporising, appeasement, as a profound understanding of
life. One may reply that this is an absurd exaggeration; and places a
ludicrously heavy burden on the shoulders of the poor Vicar. But it
illustrates the beginning of a new kind of social criticism, which
searches in literature neither for ideal 'types' of men or situations (as
the earlier German romantics had taught), nor for an ethical instrument for the direct improvement of life; but for the attitude to life of an individual author, of his milieu, or age or class. This attitude
then requires to be judged as it would be in life in the first place for
its degree of genuineness, its adequacy to its subject-matter, its depth,
its truthfulness, its ultimate motives.
'I am a litterateur,' he wrote. 'I say this with a painful and yet
proud and happy feeling. Russian literature is my life and my blood.'
And this is intended as a declaration of moral status. When the radical
writer, Vladimir Korolenko, at the beginning of this century said 'My
country is not Russia, my country is Russian literature', it is this
position that was being so demonstratively defended. Korolenko was
speaking in the name of a movement which, quite correctly, claimed
Belinsky as its founder, of a creed for which literature alone was
free from the betrayals of everyday Russian life, and alone offered a
hope of justice, freedom, truth.
Books and ideas to Belinsky were crucial events, matters of life and
death, salvation and damnation, and he therefore reacted to them with
the most devastating violence. He was by temperament not religious,
nor a naturalist, nor an aesthete, nor a scholar. He was a moralist,
secular and anti-clerical through and through. Religion was to him a
detestable insult to reason, theologians were charlatans, the Church a
conspiracy. He believed that objective truth was discoverable in
nature, in society, and in the hearts of men. He was not an impressionist, he was not prepared to confine himself to ethically neutral analysis, or meticulous description without bias or comment, of the
tex�ure of life or of art. This he would have thought, like Tolstoy, or
Henen, shallow, self-indulgent or frivolous, or else (if you knew the
moral truth but preferred the outer texture) deliberate and odious
cynicism. The texture was an outer integument, and if you wanted to
understand what life was really like (and therefore what it could
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R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
become), you had to distinguish what is eternal and desperately
important from the the ephemeral, however attractive. It was not
enough to look at or even re-create what Virginia Woolf called the
'semi-transparent envelope' which encloses our existence from life to
death; you had to sink beneath the mere flow of life, and examine
the structure of the ocean bed, and how the winds blow and how the
tides flow, not as an end in itself (for no man may be indifferent to
his own fate), but in order to master the elements and to steer your
craft, it may be with unending suffering and heroism, it may be against
infinitely great odds, towards the goal of truth and social justice which
you in fact know to be (because this cannot be doubted) the only goal
worth seeking for its own sake. To linger on the surface, to spend
yourself in increasingly elaborate descriptions of its properties and of
your own sensations, was either moral idiocy or calculated immoral ism,
either blindness or a craven lie which would in the end destroy the
man who told it. The truth alone was beautiful and it was always
beautiful, it could never be hideous or destructive or bleak or trivial,
and it did not live in the outer appearance. It lay 'beneath' (as Schelling,
Plato, Hegel taught) and was revealed only to those who cared for
the truth alone, and was therefore not for the neutral, the detached,
the cautious, but for the morally committed, for those who were
prepared to sacrifice all they had in order to discover and vindicate the
truth, and liberate themselves and others from the illusions, conventions, and self-deceptions which blinded men about the world and their duty in it. This creed was the creed, then enunciated for the first
time, of the Russian intelligentsia, of the moral and political opposition
to autocracy, to the Orthodox Church, and to nationalism, the triple
slogan of the supporters of the regime.
Naturally, with a temperament of a Lucretius or a Beethoven,
Belinsky as a critic was, unlike his western contemporaries, neither a
classically pure connoisseur of Platonic forms like Landor, nor a
sharp, pessimistic, disillusioned observer of genius like Sainte-Beuve;
he was a moralist, painfully and hopefully sifting the chaff from the
grain. If anything seemed to him new or valuable or important or
even true, he would fly into ecstasies of enthusiasm and proclaim his
discovery to the world in hurrying, ill-written, impassioned sentences,
as if to wait might be fatal because the attention of the vacillating
public might be distracted. Moreover one must herald the truth
tumultuously, for to speak in an even voice would perhaps not indicate
its crucial importance. And in this way Belinsky, in his exuberance,
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V I S SA R I O N B E L I N SK Y
did discover and over-praise a handful of comparatively unknown and
worthless writers and critics whose names are today justly forgotten.
But he also revealed, and for the first time, the full glory of the great
sun of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, and he discovered and
assessed at their true worth Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev and
Dostoevsky, not to· mention such writers of the second rank as
Goncharov, or Grigorovich, or Koltsov. Of course Pushkin had been
recognised as a writer of genius before Belinsky had begun writing,
but it was Belinsky's eleven famous essays that established his importance, not merely as a poet of magnificent genius, but as being, in the literal sense, the creator of Russian literature, of its language, its
direction, and its place in the national life. Belinsky created the image
of Pushkin, which henceforth dominated Russian writing, as a man
who stood to literature as Peter the Great to the Russian state, the
radical reformer, the breaker of the old, the creator of the new; the
implacable enemy and the faithful child of the national tradition, as
at once the invader of hitherto remote foreign territory, and the
integrator of the deepest and most national elements of the Russian
past. With consistency and passionate conviction, Belinsky paints the
portrait of a poet who justly saw himself as a herald and a prophet,
because by his art he had made Russian society aware of itself as a
spiritual and political entity, with its appalling inner conflicts, its
anachronisms, its anomalous position among other nations, its huge
untried strength and dark and tantalising future. With a multitude
of examples he demonstrates that this was Pushkin's achievement,
and not that of his predecessors-the official trumpeters of Russia's
spirit and Russia's might- even of the most civilised and talented,
such as the epic poet Derzhavin, the admired historian Karamzin, or
his own mentor, the generous, romantic, mellifluous, always delightful
Zhukovsky.
This unique domination of literature over life, and of one man
over the entire consciousness and imagination of a vast nation, is a
fact to which there is no precise parallel, not even in the place occupied
in the consciousness of their nations by Dante or Shakespeare, Homer
or Vergil or Goethe. And this extraordinary phenomenon, whatever
may be thought of it, is, to a degree still unrecognised, the work of
Belinsky and his disciples; who first saw in Pushkin the central planet,
the source of light in whose radiance Russian thought and feeling
grew so wonderfully. Pushkin himself, who was a gay, elegant, and,
in his social life, an arrogant, disdainful and whimsical man, thought
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R U S S IAN TH INKERS
this embarrassing and spoke o f the angular and unfashionable Belinsky
as 'a queer character who for some extraordinary reason seems to
adore me'. He was a little frightened of him, half suspected that he
had something to say, thought of asking him to contribute to the
journal which he edited, recollected that his friends thought him
unpresentable, and successfully avoided a personal meeting.
Pushkin's snobbery, his intermittent attempts to pretend that he
was an aristocratic dilettante and not a professional man of letters at
all, touched the socially sensitive Belinsky on the raw, just as the
mask of worldly cynicism which Lermontov adopted had offended
him at their first meeting. Nevertheless, in the presence of genius
Belinsky forgot everything. He forgot Pushkin's coldness, he realised
that behind Lermontov's Byronic mask, his insulting cynicism and
desire to wound and be wounded, there was a great lyrical poet, a
serious and penetrating critic, and a tormented human being_gf great
tenderness and depth. The genius of these men had bound its spell
upon him, and it is really in terms o_0beiE;and in particular Push kin's,
art and personality that Belinsky, -whether he was aware of it or not,
tried to define his own ideas of what a creative artist is and should be.
As a critic he remained, all his life, a disciple of the great German
romantics. He sharply rejected the didactic and utilitarian doctrines of
the function of art, then enjoying a vogue among the French socialists:
'Poetry has no purpose beyond itself. It is its own end, as truth is of
knowledge, and the good of action.' Earlier in the same article he says:
The whole world, its . . . colours and sounds, all the forms of nature
and of life, can be poetical phenomena; but its essence is that which
is concealed in these appearances . • . that in them which enchants
and fascinates by the play oflife . . . [The poet] is an impressionable,
irritable organism, always active, which at the lightest touch gives
off electric sparks, suffers more painfully, savours pleasures more
fiercely than others, loves more violently, hates with more passion . . .
And again :
[Literature is] the fruit of free inspiration, of the united though not
the organised efforts of men . . . who fully express . . . the spirit of
the people . . . whose inward life they manifest . • . in its most
hidden depths and pulsations.
He rejected with passion the notion of art as a social weapon then
preached by George Sand and Pierre Leroux:
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V I S S A R I O N B E LIN SKY
Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet,
your works will contain them without your knowledge-they will
be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.
This is an echo of August Wilhelm Schlegel and his allies. And
from this early view Belinsky never retreated. Annenkov says that
he looked in art for an 'integral' answer to all human needs-to repair
the gaps left by other, less adequate forms of experience; that he felt
that perpetual return to the great classical works would regenerate
and ennoble the reader, that they alone would resolve-by transforming
his vision until the true relations of things were revealed -all moral
and political problems; provided always that they remained spontaneous
and self-subsistent works of art: worlds in themselves, and not the sham
structures of moral or social propaganda. Belinsky altered his opinions
often and painfully; but to the end of his days he believed that artand in particular literature-gave the truth to those who sought it; that the purer the artistic impulse-the more purely artistic the workthe clearer and profounder the truth revealed; and he remained faithful to the romantic doctrine that the best and least alloyed art was necessarily the expression not merely of the individual artist but
always of a milieu, a culture, a nation, whose voice, conscious and
unconscious, the artist was, a function without which he became
trivial and worthless, and in _the context of which alone his own personality possessed any significance. None of this would have been denied by his Slavophil opponents: their disagreements lay elsewhere.
And yet, despite his historicism-common to all romantics- Belinsky
does not belong to those whose main purpose and skill consist in a
careful critical or historical analysis of artistic phenomena, in relating
a work of art or an artist to a precise social background, analysing
specific influences upon his work, examining and describing the
methods which he uses, providing psychological or historical explanations of the success or failure of the particular .effects which he achieves. Belinsky did indeed now and then perform such tasks; and
was, in effect, the first and greatest of Russian literary historians. But
he detested detail and had no bent for scrupulous scholarship; he read
unsystematically and widely; he read and read in a feverish, frantic
way until he could bear it no longer, and then he wrote. This gives
his writing an unceasing vitality, but it is scarcely the stuff of which
balanced scholarship is made. Yet his criticism of the eighteenth century
is not as blind and sweeping as his detractors have maintained. His
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R U S SIAN T H I N K E R S
work i n assigning their due place to earlier Russian writers (for
example, Tredyakovsky, Khemnitser, Lomonosov, Fonvizin and
Dmitriev), and in particular his pages on the poet Derzhavin and the
fabulist Krylov, are a model of insight and lucid judgment. And he
did kill the reputations of a number of eighteenth-century mediocrities
and imitators once and for all.
But a capacity for lasting literary verdicts is not where his genius
lay. His unique quality as a literary critic, the quality which he
possessed to a degree scarcely equalled by anyone in the west, is the
astonishing freshness and fuUness with which he reacts to any and
every literary impression, whether of style or of content, and the
passionate devotion and scruple with which he reproduces and paints
in words the vivid original character, the colour and shape, above all
the moral quality of his direct impressions. His life, his whole being,
went into the attempt to seize the essence of the literary experience
which he was at any given moment trying to convey. He had an
exceptional capacity both for understanding and for articulating, but
what distinguished him from other, at least in this respect equally
gifted, critics, Sainte-Beuve for example, or Matthew Arnold, was
that his vision was wholly direct-there is, as it were, nothing between
him and the object. Several of his contemporaries, among them
Turgenev, noted an almost physical likeness to a hawk or a falcon:
and indeed he used to pounce upon a writer like a bird of prey, and
tear him limb from limb until he had said all he had to say. His
expositions were often too prolix, the style is uneven and sometimes
tedious and involved; his education was haphazard, and his words
have little elegance and little intrinsic magic. But when he has found
himself, when he is dealing with an author worthy of him, whether
he is praising or denouncing, speaking of ideas and attitudes to life,
or of prosody and idiom, the vision is so intense, he has so much to
say, and says it in so first-hand a fashion, the experience is so vivid
and conveyed with such uncompromising and uninterrupted force,
that the effect of his words is almost as powerful and unsettling
today as it was upon his own contemporaries. He himself said that
no one could understand a poet or a thinker who did not for a time
become wholly immersed in his world, letting himself be dominated
by his outlook, identified with his emotions; who did not, in short,
try to live through the writer's experiences, beliefs, and convictions.
In this way he did in fact 'live through' the influence of Shakespeare
and Pushkin, Gogo) and George Sand, Schiller and Hegel, and as he
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V I S S A R I O N B E L I N S KY
changed his spiritual domicile he altered his attitude and denounced
what he had previously praised, and praised what he had previously
denounced. Later critics have accused him of being a chameleon, a
sensitive surface which reflected too much and altered too quickly,
an unreliable guide, without a permanent core of inner principle, too
impressionable, too undisciplined, vivid and eloquent, but without a
specific, firm, critical personality, without a definite approach or an
identifiable point of view. But this is unjust, and none of his contemporaries who knew him best would have begun to understand such a judgement. If ever there lived a man of rigorous, indeed overrigorous, and narrow principle, dominated all his life by a remorseless, never-ceasing, fanatical passion for the truth, unable to compromise
or adapt himself, even for a short time and superficially, to anything
which he did not wholly and utterly believe, it was Belinsky. 'If a
man does not alter his views about life and art, it is because he is devoted
to his own vanity rather than to the truth,' he said. Belinsky radically
altered his opinions twice, each time after a painful crisis. On each
occasion he suffered with an intensity which Russians seem particularly
capable of conveying by the use of words, and he gave a full account
of it, principally in his letters, the most moving in the Russian language.
Those who have read them will know what I mean by the heroic
quality of his grimly undeviating, perpetually self-scrutinising honesty
of mind and feeling.
Belinsky held several intellectual positions in his life, and turned
from one to another and exhausted each to the uttermost until, with
great tormenting effort, he would liberate himself from it, to begin
the struggle over again. He arrived at no final or consistent outlook,
and the efforts by tidy-minded biographers to divide his thought into
three or more distinct 'periods', each neatly self-contained and coherent,
ignore too many facts: Belinsky is always 'relapsing' towards earlier,
'abandoned', positions; his consistency was moral, not intellectual. He
began to philosophise in the mid- I 8 30s, as a young man of twentythree, with that disgust and sense of being asphyxiated by the police state of Nicholas I which all young intellectuals with hearts and
consciences felt, and he adopted the philosophy then preacheJ by the
young Moscow philosophers, Stankevich and Bakunin, to whose
circle he belonged. Idealism was a reaction to the grim suppression
which followed the abortive Decembrist revolt in 1 825. The young
Russian intellectuals, encouraged as they were to go to Germany
rather than to Louis Philippe's dangerously fermenting France,
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returned full of German metaphysics. Life on earth, material existence,
above all politics, was repulsive but fortunately unimportant. The only
thing that mattered was the ideal life created by the spirit, the great
imaginative constructions by means of which man transcended the
frustrating material environment, freed himself from its squalor, and
identified himself with nature and with God. The history of western
Europe revealed many such sublime achievements, and it was idle
nationalistic cant to pretend that Russia had anything to put beside
this. Russian culture (so Belinsky in the I 8JOS was telling his readers)
was an artificial, imported growth, and till Pushkin arose, could not
be spoken of in the same breath as Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and
Schiller, or even such great realistic writers as Walter Scott and (of
all writers) Fenimore Cooper. Russian folk-song and hyliny and
popular epics were more contemptible than even the second- and
third-rate imitations of French models which formed the miserable
collection of reproductions dignified under the name of national
Russian literature. As for the Slavophils, their passion for old Russian
ways and manners, for traditional Slav dress and Russian song and
dances, for archaic musical instruments, for the rigidities of Byzantine
Orthodoxy, their contrast of the spiritual depth and wealth of the
Slavs with the decadent and 'rotting' west, corrupted by superstition
and sordid materialism-this was childish vanity and delusion. What
had Byzantium given? Its direct descendants, the southern Slavs,
were among the deadest and dullest of all European nations. If all the
Montenegrins died tomorrow, Belinsky cried in one of his revic:;ws,
the world would be none the poorer. Compared to one noble voice
from the eighteenth century, one Voltaire, one Robespierre, what had
Byzantium and Russia to offer? Only the great Peter, and he belonged
to the west. As for the glorification of the meek and pious peasantthe holy fool touched with grace- Belinsky, who, unlike the Slavophils, was by birth not a nobleman or a gentleman, but the son of a sodden
small-town doctor, looked on agriculture not as romantic and ennobling,
but merely as degrading and stupefying. The Slavophils infuriated him
by talking romantic and reactionary nonsense in their attempt to arrest
scientific progress by appeals to ancient and, as often as not, nonexistent traditions. Nothing was more contemptible than false, twopence-coloured nationalism, archaic clothes, a hatred of foreigners,
and a desire to undo the great heroic work which Peter the Great had
so boldly and magnificently begun. Like the Encyclopedists of the
eighteenth century in France, whose temper his much resembled,
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V I SSARION B E L IN SKY
Belinsky at the beginning of his career (and again towards
the end of his life) believed that only an enlightened despot-by
enforcing education, technical progress, material civilisation-could
rescue the benighted, barbarous Russian nation. In a letter to a friend
written in 1 837 he writes:
Above all you should abandoq politics and guard yourself against
the influence of politics on your ways of thought. Here in Russia,
politics has no meaning, and only empty heads can have anything
to do with it . . . If each of the individuals who compose Russia
could reach perfection by means of love, Russia would be the
happiest country in the world without any politics-education, that
is the road to happiness . . .
and again (in the same letter) :
Peter is clear evidence that Russia will not develop her liberty and
her civil structure out of her own resources, but will obtain it at the
hands of her tsars as so much else. True, we do not as yet possess
rights-we are, if you like, slaves; but that is because we still need
to be slaves. Russia is an infant and needs a nurse in whose breast
there beats a heart full of love for her fledgling, and in whose hand
there is a rod ready to punish it if it is naughty. To give the child
complete liberty is to ruin it. To give Russia in her present state a
constitution is to ruin her. To our people liberty . . . simply means
licence. The liberated Russian nation would not go to a parliament,
but run to the taverns to drink, break glass, and hang the gentry
because they shave their beards and wear European clothes . . . The
hope of Russia is education, not . . . constitutions and revolutions . . .
France has had two revolutions, and as a result of them a constitution. And in this constitutional France there is far less liberty of thought than in autocratic Prussia.
and again:
Our autocracy gives us complete freedom of thought and reflection,
but limits our freedom to raise our voices and interfere in her affairs.
It allows us to import books from abroad which it forbids us to
translate or publish. And this is right and just, because what you
may know the muzhik may not; an idea which might be good for
you, might be fatal to the muzhik, who would naturally misunderstand it . . . Wine is good for adults who know what to do with it, but fatal to children, and politics is wine which in Russia may even
turn into opium . . . And so to the devil with the French. Their
influence has brought us nothing but harm. We imitated their
.,.
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R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
literature, and killed our own . . . Germany-that i s the Jerusalem
of modern humanity.
Even the Russian nationalist school did not go so far. At a time
when even so western a thinker as Herzen, not to speak of mild
liberals such as Granovsky and Kavelin, was prepared to temporise,
and indeed to some degree shared the Slavophils' deep and sincere
feeling for the Russian tradition and older forms of life, Belinsky
would not bend. Western Europe, more particularly enlightened
despotism, was responsible for the major achiev."!ments of mankind.
There and only there were the forces of life and the critical canons
of scientific and philosophical truth, which alone made progress
possible. The Slavophils had turned their backs on this, and however
worthy their motives, they were blind and leaders of the blind, returning to the ancient slough of ignorant barbarism and weakness from which it had taken the great Peter such efforts to lift, or half-lift, his
primitive people; salvation lay in this alone. This doctrine is radical,
individualist, enlightened, and anti-democratic. Soviet authors in
search of texts to justify the progressive role of ruthless governing
elites find much to quote from Belinsky's early writings.
Meanwhile Bakunin had begun to preach Hegel to Belinsky, who
knew no German. Night after night he preached the new objectivism
to him, as he did later in Paris to Proudhon. Finally, after a fearful
inner struggle, Belinsky was converted to the new anti-individualist
faith. He had earlier toyed with the idealism of Fichte and Schelling,
as expounded by Stankevich, the effect of which had been to turn him
away from political issues altogether, as a sordid chaos of the trivial,
empirical world, a delusive curtain concealing the harmonious reality
beyond. This was now finished and done with. He moved to St
Petersburg, and under the influence of his new r�ligion wrote two
celebrated articles in I 839-40, one reviewing a poem and a work of
prose on an anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, the other a criticism
of an attack by a German Hegelian on Goethe. 'The real is the
rational,' the new doctrine had said. It was childish and shallow and
short-sighted to attack or seek to alter reality. What is, is, because it
must be. To understand it is to understand the beauty and the harmony
of everything as it falls into its own appointed time and place in
accordance with intelligible and necessary laws. Everything has its
place in the vast scheme of nature unrolling its pattern like a great
carpet of history. To criticise is only to show that you are not adjusted
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V I SSARION B E L IN SKY
to reality and that you do not sufficiently understand it. There were
no half-measures for Belinsky. Henen tells us that once Belinsky
finally adopted a view,
he did not quail before any consequences. He would not stop at
anything, neither considerations of moral propriety, nor the opinion
of others, which tends to frighten weaker and less elemental natures.
He knew no fear, because he was strong and sincere; his conscience
was clear.
His (or Bakunin's) interpretation oi Hegel's doctrine had convinced
him that contemplation and understanding was an attitude spiritually
superior to that of active fighting: consequently he threw himself
into 'acceptance of reality' with the same frenzy of passion as that
with which only two years later he was to attack the quietists and
demand active resistance to Nicholas l's abominations.
In 1 839-40 Belinsky proclaimed that might was right; that history
itself-the march of the inevitable forces-sanctified the actual; that
autocracy was, coming when it did, sacred ; that Russia was as it was
as part of a divine scheme marching towards an ideal goal; that the
government-the representative of power and coercion-was wiser than
its citizens; that protests against it were frivolous, wicked, and vain.
Resistance to cosmic forces is always suicidal.
Reality is a monster (he wrote to Bakunin ], armed with iron talons,
a huge mouth and huge jaws. Sooner or later she will devour everyone who resists her, who cannot live at peace with her. To be free-and instead of a terrible monster to see in her the source of
happiness-there is only one means-to know her.
And again:
I look upon reality, which I used to hold in such contempt, and
tremble with mystic joy, recognising its rationality, realising that
nothing of it may be rejected, nothing in it may be condemned or
spurned.
And in the same vein:
Schiller was . . . my personal enemy, and it was only with great
effort that I was able to prevent my hatred of him from going
beyond the bounds of such decency as I was capable of. Why this
hatred?
Because, he goes on to say, Schiller's works Die Rauber, Kabalt und
Liebe and Fiesco 'induced in me a wild hatred of the social order, in
1 67
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
the name of an abstract ideal of society, cut o ff from the geographical
and historical conditions of development, built in mid-air.' This echoes,
but in a politically far more sinister form, the relatively harmless
maxims of earlier, Fichtean Idealism, when he would declare that
society is always more right than the individual, or 'The individual is
real and not a phantom only to the degree to which he is an individual
expression of the universal.'
His friends were stupefied into silence. This was nothing less than
a major betrayal by the most single-minded and most fearless of all
the radical leaders . .The shock was so painful that in Moscow it could
scarcely be discussed at all. Belinsky knew precisely what effect his
secession would cause, and said so in his letters; nevertheless he saw
no way out. He had reached his conclusion by a rational process, and
if the choice was between betraying the truth and betraying his friends,
he must be man enough to betray his friends. Indeed the thought of
the appalling pain that this would cause him somehow merely underlined the inescapable necessity of this great sacrifice to principle. This acceptance of 'the iron laws' of social development and the march of
history as being not merely inevitable but just, rational, morally
liberating, was nevenheless marked, both then and later, by a profound
disgust with the conditions of Russian society in general and of his
own society in panicular.
Our life (he wrote to Konstantin Aksakov in I 840 ], what
sort of life is it to be? Where is it and what is it about? We are
so many individuals outside a society, because Russia is not a
society. We possess neither a political nor a religious nor a scientific
nor a literary life. Boredom, apathy, frustration, fruitless effortsthat is our life . . . China is a disgusting state, but more disgusting is a state which possessed rich materials for life but which is held in
an iron frame like a rickety child.
And the remedy? Conformity to the powers that be: adjustment
to 'reality'. Like many a communist of a later date Belinsky gloried
in the very weight of the chains with which he had chosen to bind
his limbs, in the very narrowness and darkness which he had willed
to suffer; the sl.ock and disgust of his friends was itself evidence of the
vastness, and therefore of the grandeur and the moral necessity, of the
sacrifice. There is no ecstasy to compare to that of self-immolation.
This condition lasted for a year, and then he could bear it no longer.
Herzen paid a visit to him in St Petersburg; it had begun in a frigid
J 68
V I SSARION B E L I N SKY
and awkward manner, and then in a great burst of emotion Belinsky
broke down, and admitted that the Hegelian year, with its wilful
'acceptance' and glorification of the black reaction of the regime, was
a heavy nightmare, an offering upon the altar not of truth but of an
insane logical consistency. What he cared about, what he had never
ceased to care about, was not the historical process or the condition
of the universe or the solemn march of the Hegelian God through
the world, but the lives and liberties and aspirations of individual men
and women whose sufferings no sublime universal harmony could
explain away or redeem. From that moment he never looked back.
The relief was immense:
I abominate [he wrote to Botkin] my contemptible desire to reconcile myself with a contemptible reality ! Long live the great Schiller, noble advocate of humanity, bright star of salvation, the emancipator of society from the blood-stained prejudices of tradition ! 'Long live reason, and may the darkness perish' as great Pushkin used to
exclaim ! The human personality is now above history, above society,
above humanity for me . . . good Lord, it frightens me to think of
what must have been happening to me-fever, madness- I feel like
a convalescent now . . . I will not make my peace or adjust myself
to vile realities. I look for happiness only in the world of fancy,
only fantasies make me happy. As for reality- reality is an executioner . . .
I am tormented by the thought of the pleasures I have let go
because of the contemptible idealism and feebleness of my character.
God knows what vile, revolting nonsense I have talked in print,
with all the sincerity and fanaticism of deep, wild conviction . . •
What horrible zigzags my path towards truth seems to involve;
what a terrible price I have had to pay, what fearful blunders I
have had to commit for the sake of truth, and what a bitter truth it
is-how vile the world is, especially in our neighbourhood.
And in the same year:
And oh the mad nonsense which I have poured out . . . against the
French, that energetic and noble nation, shedding its blood for the
most sacred rights of mankind . . . I have awoken and recollect my
dreams with horror . . .
And apropos the inexorable march of the Spirit (Herzen records) :
So it is not for myself that I create, but for the Spirit . . . Really what
kind of an idiot does it take me for? I'd rather not think at allwhat do I care about Its consciousness?
R U SS IAN T H INKERS
And in his letters there are passages in which such sacred metaphysical
entities as Universality- Cosmic Consciousness-the Spirit-the rational
State etc. are denounced as a Moloch of abstraction devouring living
human beings.
A year later he finally settled accounts with the master himself:
All Hegel's talk about morality is utter nonsense, since in the
objective realm of thought there is no morality . . . Even if I
attained to the actual top of the ladder of human development, I
should at that point still have to ask [Hegel] to account for all the
victims of life and of history, all the victims of accident and superstition, of the Inquisition and Philip II, and so on and so forth; otherwise I will throw myself off head-downwards . . . I am told
that disharmony is a condition of harmony. This may be found
agreeable . . . by musical persons, but is not quite so satisfactory
from the point of view of those whose fate it is to express in their
lives the element of disharmony.
And in the same year he tries to explain the aberration:
. . . because we understood that for us there is no life in real life, and
because our nature was such that without life we could not live, we
ran away into the world of books, and began to live and to love
according to books, and made life and love a kind of occupation, a
kind of work, an anxious labour . . . In the end we bored and
irritated and maddened each other . . .
Be social or die ! That is my slogan. What is it to me that something universal lives, so long as the individual suffers, that solitary genius should live in heaven, while the common herd rolls in the
mud? What is it to me if I do apprehend . . . the essence of art or
religion or history, if I cannot share this with all those who should
be my human brothers, my brethren in Christ, but are in fact
strangers and enemies because of their ignorance? . . . I cannot bear
the sight of barefoot boys playing . . . in the gutter, poor men in
tatters, the drunken cab-driver, the soldier coming off duty, the
official padding along with a portfolio under his arm, the selfsatisfied army officer, the haughty nobleman. When I give a penny to a soldier or a beggar I almost cry, I run from him as if I had done
something terrible, as if I did not wish to hear the sound of my own
steps . . . Has a man the right to forget himself in art or science,
while this goes on?
He read the materialist Feuerbach and became a revolutionary
democrat, denouncing tyranny, ignorance, and the bestial lives of his
fellow countrymen with ever-increasing ferocity. After his escape
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V I SSARION B E L I N S K Y
from the spell of a half-understood German metaphysics he felt a
sense of extreme liberation. As always the reaction took an external
form and poured itself out i n passionate paeans to individualism. In a
letter to his friend Botkin he denounced his intellectual milieu for its
lack of seriousness and personal dignity:
. . . we are the unhappy Anarcharsises of the new Scythia. Why do
we all gape, yawn, bustle, and hurry and take an interest in everything and stick to nothing, and consume everything and remain hungry? We love one another, we love warmly and deeply, and how
have we shown our friendship? We used to be tremendously excited
about one another, enthusiastic, ecstatic, we hated one another, we
wondered about each other, we despised one another . . . When
separated from each other for long we pined and wept salt tears at
the mere thought of meeting, we were sick with love and affection :
when we met, our meetings were cold and oppressive, and we would
separate without regret. That is how it was, and it is time that we
stopped deceiving ourselves . . . Our learned professors are pedants,
a mass of social corruption . . . We are orphans, men without a
country . . . The ancient world is enchanting . . . its life contains
the seed of everything that is great, noble, valiant, because the
foundation of its life is personal pride; the dignity and sanctity of
the individual.
There follows an ecstatic comparison of Schiller to Tiberi us Gracchus
and of himself to Marat.
The human personality has become the point on which I fear I will
go off my head. I am beginning to love mankind a Ia Marat: to
make the smallest ponion of it happy I am ready, I do believe, to
destroy the rest by lire and sword.
He loves only the Jacobins-only they are effective: 'The two-edged
sword of word and deed-the Robespierres and the St Justs . . . not . . .
the sugary and ecstatic turns of phrase, the pretty idealism of the
Gironde', and this leads to socialism-of that pre-Marxist, 'Utopian'
kind, which Belinsky embraced before he understood it, because of
its promise of equality:
• . . socialism . . . idea of ideas, essence of essences . . • the alpha and
omega of faith and science. The day will come when nobody will
be burnt alive, nobody will have his head chopped off . . . There
will be no rich, no poor, no kings and subjects . . . [men] will be
brothers • . .
..
1 7 1
R U S·SIAN T H I N K E R S
I t i s this mystical vision that Dostoevsky had i n mind when a
good many years after Belinsky's death he said: 'He believed . . . that
socialism not only does not destroy the freedom of the individual
personality but, on the contrary, restores it to unheard-of splendour,
on new and this time adamantine foundations.' Belinsky was the first
man to tell Dostoevsky, then still young and obscure, that in his Poor
Folk he had done in one stroke what the critics vainly tried to do in
lengthy essays-he had revealed the life of the grey, humiliated,
Russian minor official as nobody had even done before; but he disliked
Dostoevsky personally and detested his Christian convictions, and
deliberately scandalised him by violent atheistic and blasphemous
tirades. His attitude to religion was that of Holbach or Diderot, and
for the same reasons: 'in the words God and rtligion I see only black
darkness, chains and the knout'.
In 1 847 Gogo!, whose genius Belinsky had acclaimed, published a
violently anti-liberal and anti-western tract, calling for a return to
ancient patriarchal ways, a spiritually regenerated land of serfs, landlords, the tsar. The cup brimmed over. In a letter written from abroad Belinsky, in the last stages of his wasting disease, accused Gogo!
of betraying the light:
. . . one cannot be silent when, under cover of religion, backed by
the whip, falsehood and immorality are preached as truth and virtue.
Yes, I loved you, with all the passion with which a man tied by ties
of blood to his country loves its hope, its glory, its pride, one of its
great leaders along the path of consciousness, development and
progress . . . Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism, or aestheticism, or piety, but in the achievements of education, civilisation, and humane culture. She has no need of sermons (she has heard too
many), nor of prayers (she has mumbled them too often), but of
the awakening in the people of a feeling of human dignity, lost for
so many ages in mud and filth. It needs laws and rights in accordance
not with the teachings of the church, but with those of common
sense and justice . . . Instead of which she offers the terrible
spectacle of a land where men buy and sell other men without even
the cant of the Americans, who say that negroes are not men . . . a
country where there are no guarantees of personal libeny or honour
or property; not even a police state, only huge corporations of
official thieves and robbers . . . The government . . . knows well
what the landlords do to their peasants, and how many landlords
are massacred by their serfs every year . . . Preacher of the whip,
apostle of ignorance, champion of obscurantism and black reaction,
1 72.
V I S SA R I ON B E L I N SK Y
defender of a Tartar way of life-what are you doing? Look at the
ground beneath your feet. You are standing on the edge of an abyss.
You found your teachings upon the Orthodox Church, and that I
understand, for the Church has always favoured whips and prisons,
it has always grovelled to despotism. But what has this to do with
Christ? . . . Of course a Voltaire whose ridicule put out the flames
of fanaticism and illiteracy in Europe is far more a son of Christ,
flesh of His flesh, and bone of His bone, than all your parsons,
bishops, patriarchs, metropolitans . . . [Our country priests] are the
heroes of rude, popular tales . . . the priest is always the glutton, the
miser, the sycophant, the man lost to all sense of shame . . . Most
of our clergy are . . . either pedantic schoolmen, or else appallingly
ignorant and blind. Only our literature, in spite of a barbarous
censorship, shows signs of life and forward movement. That is why
the calling of the writer is so honoured among us, why even a
small literary gift makes for success; that is why the profession of
letters has thrown into the shade the glitter of epaulettes and gaudy
uniforms; that is why a liberal writer, even one whose capacity is
poor, excites general attention, while great poets who . . . sell their
gifts to serve the Orthodox Church, autocracy and nationalism,
quickly lose their popularity . . . The Russian people is right. It
sees in writers of Russia its only leaders, defenders, and saviours
from the darkness of Russian autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationalism.
It can forgive a bad book but not a harmful one.
He read this letter to his friends in Paris. 'This is a work of genius,'
Herun said in a low voice to Annenkov, who records the scene, 'and
I think his last will and testament. • This celebrated document became
the bible of Russian revolutionaries. Indeed it is for reading it to an
illicit discussion circle that Dostoevsky was condemned to death, then
sent to Siberia.
Belinsky in his final phase was a humanist, an enemy of theology
and metaphysics, and a radical democrat, and by the extreme force
and vehemence of his convictions turned purely literary disputes into
the beginnings of social and political movements. Turgenev said of
him that there are tWo types of writer: a writer may be brilliantly
imaginative and creative, but remain on the periphery of the collective
experience of the society to which he belongs. Or he may live at the
centre of his society, being connected 'organically' with the emotions
and state of mind of his community. Belinsky knew, as only true
social critics do, where the centre of moral gravity of a book, an
opinion, an author, a movement, an entire society, could be found.
,,
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R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
The central issue o f Russian society was not political but social and
moral. The intelligent and awakened Russian wanted above all to be
told what to do, how to live as an individual, as a private person.
Turgenev testifies that never were people more interested in the
problems of life, and never less in those of pure aesthetic theory, than
in the 1 84os and 50s. The mounting repression made literature the
only medium within which any degree of free discussion of social
questions could take place. I ndeed the great controversy between
Slavophils and 'Westerners', between the view of Russia as a still
uncorrupted spiritual and social organism, bound by impalpable links
of common love, natural piety, and reverence for authority, to which
the application of artificial, 'soulless' western forms and institutions
had done, and would do, fearful damage; and, on the other hand, the
view of it held by the 'Westerners' as a retarded semi-Asiatic despotism
lacking even the rudiments of social justice and individual liberty-this
crucial debate, which split educated Russians in the nineteenth century,
was c.arried on principally in the semi-disguise of literary and philosophical argument. The authorities viewed neither side with favour, and, with some j ustice, regarded public discussion of any serious issue
as in itself a menace to the regime. Nevertheless the effective techniques of suppression, as we know them now, had not as yet been i nvented; and the half-clandestine controversy continued, sharpened
and rendered more personal by the acute consciousness of their own
social origins which infected the opinions and quality of feeling of the
principal adversaries themselves.
Russia in Belinsky's day, in the I 8JOS and the 1 840s, was still, in
the main, a feudal society. It was pre-industrial and, in certain parts
of it, semi-colonial. The state was based on sharply drawn divisions
which separated the peasantry from the merchants and from the lower
clergy, and there was a still wider gap which divided the gentry from
the nobility. It was not altogether impossible, although it was very
difficult and very uncommon, to rise from a lower to a higher stratum.
But in order to do this a man had to have not merely exceptional
energy, exceptional ambition and talent, but also a certain willingness
and capacity to jettison his past and to identify himself morally,
socially, and mentally with the higher milieu, which on certain terms,
if he tried hard enough, might be prepared to receive and assimilate
him. The most remarkable Russian in the eighteenth century, the
father of polite letters and of the natural sciences in his country,
Mikhail Lomonosov -'the Russian Leonardo'- was1a man of obscure
V I S SARION B E L I N SKY
and humble origin, but he rose and was transformed. There is a good
deal that is robust and vigorous, but nothing primitive, no trace of a
rustic accent in his writing. He had all the zeal of a convert and a
self-taught one at that, and did more than anyone to establish the
formal conventions of Russian literary prose and verse in the later
eighteenth century, rigorously modelled on the most elaborate European-that is to say French -practice of the time. Until the second quarter of the nineteenth century the social elite alone possessed
enough education, leisure, and trained taste to pursue the fine arts,
and in particular literature: they looked to the mandarins of the west,
and borrowed little-at most here and there a touch of local colourfrom the traditional arts and crafts still practised with skill and imagination by peasants and artisans in forgotten corners of the great
empire. Literature was an elegant accomplishment and was practised
largely by aristocratic dilettanti and their proteges in St Petersburg,
and to a lesser extent in Moscow- the first the seat of the government,
the second the home of wealthy merchants and of the more solid and
old-fashioned nobility, who looked with distaste on the chilly and
sophisticated atmosphere of the Europeanised capital. The most
characteristic names in the first generation of the great literary
renaissance-Karamzin and Zhukovsky, Pushkin and Griboedov,
Baratynsky and Venevitinov, Vyazemsky and Shakhovskoy, Ryleev
and both Odoevskys- belong to this social stratum. A few individuals
from outside were, indeed, permitted to enter: the critic and journalist
Polevoy, the pioneer of literary naturalism in Russia, was the son of
a merchant in Siberia; the lyrical poet Koltsov was a peasant to the
end of his days. But such exceptions did not greatly affect the established literary hierarchy. The socially humble Polevoy, after beginning bravely enough as a frondeur against the elite, gradually assimilated
himself completely to the style and methods of the dominant group,
and ended his life (it is true, after persecution by the authorities) as a
tame and frightened supporter of the Orthodox Church and the autocratic government. Koltsov, who retained his country idiom to the end, achieved fame precisely as such -as a primitive of genius, the simple
peasant unspoilt by fame who charmed the sophisticated ulons by
the freshness and spontaneity of his gifts, and touched his well-born
admirers by the almost exaggerated humility of his manner, and by
his unhappy and self-effacing life.
Belinsky broke this tradition and broke it for ever. This he did
because he entered the company of his social superiors on his own
..
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
terms-without surrendering anything. H e was an uncouth provincial
when he arrived in Moscow, and he retained many of the tastes,
prejudices, and habits of his class to the end of his life. He was born
in poverty and bred in the atmosphere, at once bleak and coarse, of
an obscure country town in a backward province. Moscow did, to
some degree, soften and civilise him, but there remained to the end
a core of crudeness, and a self-conscious, rough, sometimes aggressive
tone in his writing. This tone enters Russian literature, never to
leave it. Throughout the nineteenth century it is the distinguishing
characteristic of the political radicals impatient of the urbanity of the
non-political or conservative intelligentsia. As the revolutionary movement grew in intensity, this note becomes by turns strident and violent, or muted and ominous. Its use gradually became a matter of principle:
a weapon deliberately employed by the intellectual sans-culottts against
the supporters of the established order, the rude and defiant tone of
the leaders of the underprivileged and oppressed, determined to do
away once and for all with the polite fictions which merely conceal
the deadness, futility, and above all the heartless wickedness of the
prevailing system. Belinsky spoke with this accent because this kind
of harshness was natural to him, because he was widely-read but halfeducated, violently emotional, and unrestrained by conventional breeding or a naturally moderate temper, liable to storms of moral
indignation, constantly boiling and protesting and crying out against
iniquity or falsehood without regard to time or place or company.
His followers adopted his manner because they were the party of the
tnragls, and this became the traditional accent of the new truth which
had to be spoken with anger, with a sense of freshly suffered insult.
In this sense the real heir of Belinsky is the 'nihilist' Bazarov in
Turgenev's Fathers and Children. When the cultivated but insufferable uncfe in that novel, who stands for elegant manners and Pushkin and an aesthetic view of life (with which Turgenev himself feels to
some degree identified, although not without a sense of guilt), enquires
why the dissection of frogs and the other sordid paraphernalia of
modern anatomy should be regarded as so supremely interesting or
important, Bazarov replies with deliberate harshness and arrogance
that this is so because they are 'true'. This kind of violent houtade,
asserting the primacy of the material facts of life and nature, became
the o�cial battle cry of the rebellious section of the intelligentsia,
and it became a duty not merely to tell the unpalatable truth but to
say it as loudly, as harshly, as disagreeably as possible, to trample with
1 76
V I SSARION B E L I N S K Y
excessive brutality upon the delicate aesthetic values of the older
generation, to employ shock tactics. The enemy was numerous,
powerful, and well-entrenched, and therefore the cause of truth could
not triumph without wholesale destruction of his defence works, however valuable or attractive they might be in themselves. Belinsky did not himself develop this attitude to its fullest and most destructive
extent, although Bakunin had begun to do so in his lifetime; he was
too sensitive to artistic experience as such, too deeply under the spell
of literary genius, whether it arne from a radial or a reactionary
source, and too honest to practise ruthlessness for its own sake. But the
unbending, puritanical attitude to the truth, and particularly the
passion for the seamy, the unmentionable side of everything, the
insistence on asserting it at whatever cost, at whatever sacrifice of
literary or social amenities, and consequently a certain exaggerated
emphasis on angular, blunt, unambiguous terms calculated to provoke
some kind of sharp reaction-that came from him and him alone, and
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