Russian Thinkers

With these ideas it is not surprising to find that Tolstoy was personally happier among the Slavophil reactionaries. He rejected their ideas; but at least they seemed to him to have some contact with

reality-the land, the peasants, traditional ways of life. At least they

believed in the primacy of spiritual values and the futility of trying

to change men by changing the more superficial sides of their life

by political or constitutional reform. But the Slavophils also believed

in the Orthodox Church, in the unique historical destiny of the Russian

people, the sanctity of history as a divinely ordained process, and therefore the justification of many absurdities because they were native and ancient, and therefore instruments in the divine tactic; they lived

by a Christian faith in the great mystical body-at once community

and church-of the generation of the faithful, past, present, and yet

unborn. Intellectually Tolstoy repudiated this, temperamentally he

responded to it all too strongly. He understood well only the nobility

and the peasants; and the former better than the latter; he shared

many of the instinctive beliefs of his country neighbours; like them

he had a natural aversion to all forms of middle-class liberalism: the

bourgeoisie scarcely appears in his novels. His attitude to parliamentary

democracy, the rights of women, universal suffrage, was not very

different from that of Cobbett or Carlyle or Proudhon or D. H.

Lawrence. He shared deeply the Slavophil suspicions of all scientific

and theoretical generalisations as such, and this created a bridge which

made personal relations with the Moscow Slavophils congenial to

him. But his intellect was not at one with his instinctive convictions.

As a thinker he had profound affinities with the eighteenth-century

philosopher. Like them he looked upon the patriarchal Russian state

and Church, which the Slavophils defended, as organised and hypocritical conspiracies. Like the great thinkers of the Enlightenment he looked for values not in history, nor in the sacred missions of nations

or cultures or churches, but in the individual's own personal experience.

;l

R U S S IAN TH INKERS

Like them, too, ht! bdieved in eternal (and not in historically evolving)

truths and values, and rejected with both hands the romantic notion of

race or nation or culture as creative agents, still more the Hegelian

conception of history as the self-realisation of self-perfecting reason

incarnated in men or in movements or in institutions (ideas which

had deeply influenced his generation) -all his life he looked on this as

cloudy metaphysical nonsense.

This clear, cold, uncompromising realism is quite explicit in the

notes and diaries and letters of his early life. The reminiscences of

those who knew him as a boy or as a student in the University of

Kazan reinforce this impression. His character was deeply conservative, with a streak of caprice and irrationality; but his mind remained calm, logical, and unswerving; he followed the argument easily and

fearlessly to whatever extreme it led him -a typically, and sometimes

fatally, Russian combination of qualities. What did not satisfy his

critical sense, he rejected. He left the University of Kazan because

he decided that the professors were incompetent and dealt with trivial

issues. Like Helvetius and his friends in the mid-eighteenth century,

Tolstoy denounced theology, history, the teaching of dead languagesthe entire classical curriculum-as an accumulation of data and rules that no reasonable man could wish to know. History particularly

irritated him as a systematic attempt to answer non-existent questions

with all the real issues carefully left out: 'history is like a deaf man

replying to questions which nobody puts to him', he announced to

a startled fellow-student, while they were both locked in the university detention room for some minor act of insubordination. The first extended statement of his full 'ideological' position belongs to the

I 86os: the occasion for it was his decision to compose a treatise on

education. All his intellectual strength and all his prejudice went into

this attempt.

In 1 86o, Tolstoy, then thirty-two years old, found himself in one

of his periodic moral crises. He had acquired some fame as a writer:

Sebastopol, Childhood, Adolescence and Youth, two or three shorter tales,

had been praised by the critics. He was on terms of friendship with

some of the most gifted of an exceptionally talented generation of

writers in his country-Turgenev, Nekrasov, Goncharov, Panaev,

Pisemsky, Fet. His writing struck everyone by its freshness, sharpness,

marvellous descriptive power, and the precision and originality of its

images. His style was at times criticised as awkward and even barbarous; but he was unquestionably the most promising of the younger 2.42

TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTEN M ENT

prose writers; he had a future; yet his literary friends felt reservations

about him. He paid visits to the literary salons, both right- and leftwing (political divisions had always existed and were becoming sharper in Petersburg and Moscow), but he seemed at ease in none of them.

He was bold, imaginative, independent. But he was not a man of

letters, not fundamentally concerned with problems of literature and

writing, still less of writers; he had wandered in from another, less

intellectual, more aristocratic and more primitive world. He was a

well-born dilettante; but that was nothing new: the poetry of Push kin

and his contemporaries, unequalled in the history of Russian literature,

had been created by amateurs of genius. It was not his origin but his

unconcealed indifference to the literary life as such -to the habits or

problems of professional writers, editors, publicists-that made his

friends among the men of letters feel uneasy in his presence. This

worldly, clever young officer could be exceedingly agreeable; his love

for writing was genuine and very deep; but at literary gatherings he

was contemptuous, formidable and reserved; he did not dream of

opening his heart in a milieu dedicated to intimate, unending selfrevelation. He was inscrutable, disdainful, disconcerting, arrogant, a little frightening. He no longer, it was true, lived the life of an

aristocratic officer. The wild nights on which the young radicals looked

with hatred and contempt as characteristic of the dissipated habits of

the reactionary jeunesse diJree no longer amused him. He had married

and settled down, he was in love with his wife, and became for a time

a model (if occasionally exasperating) husband. But he did not trouble

to conceal the fact that he had far more respect for all forms of real

life-whether of the free Cossacks in the Caucasus, or that of the rich

young Guards officers in Moscow with their race-horses and balls

and gypsies- than for the world of books, reviews, critics, professors,

political discussions, and talk about ideals, opinions, and literary values.

Moreover, he was opinionated, quarrelsome and at times unexpectedly

savage; with the result that his literary friends treated him with

nervous respect, and, in the end, drew away from him; or perhaps he

abandoned them. Apart from the poet Fet, who was an eccentric and

deeply conservative country squire himself, Tolstoy had no intimates

among the writers of his own generation. His breach with Turgenev

is well known. He was even remoter from the other litterateurs; he

liked Nekrasov better than his poetry; but then Nekrasov was an

editor of genius and admired and encouraged Tolstoy from his earliest

beginnings.

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The sense o f the contrast between life and literature haunted

Tolstoy. It made him doubt his own vocation as a writer. Like other

young Russians of birth and fortune, he was conscience-stricken by

the appalling condition of the peasants. Mere reflection or denunciation seemed to him a way of evading action. He must act, he must start with his own estate. Like the eighteenth-century radicals he

was convinced that men were born equal and were made unequal by

the way in which they were brought up. He established a school for

the boys of his village; and, dissatisfied with the educational theories

then in vogue in Russia, decided to go abroad to study western methods

in theory and in practice. He derived a great deal from his visits to

England, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany-including the

title of his greatest novel. But his conversations with the most advanced

western authorities on education, and observation of their methods,

had convinced him that these methods were at best worthless, at worst

harmful, to the children upon whom they were practised. He did not

stay long in England and paid little attention to its 'antiquated' schools.

In France he found that learning was almost entirely mechanical-by

rote. Prepared questions, lists of dates, for example, were answered

competently, because they had been learnt by heart. But the same

children, when asked for the same facts from some unexpected angle,

often produced absurd replies, which showed that their knowledge

meant nothing to them. The schoolboy who replied that the murderer

of Henri IV of France was Julius Caesar seemed to him typical : the

boy neither understood nor took an interest in the facts he had stored

up: at most all that was gained was a mechanical memory.

But the true home of theory was Germany. The pages which

Tolstoy devotes to describing teaching and teachers in Germany rival

and anticipate the celebrated pages in War and Ptact in which he

makes savage fun of admired experts in another field-the German

strategists employed by the Russian army-whom he represents as

grotesque and pompous dolts.

In Yasnaya Po/ypna, a journal which he had had privately printed

in 1 861-2, Tolstoy speaks of his educational visits to the west and, by

way of example, gives a hair-raising (and exceedingly entertaining)

account of the latest methods of teaching the alphabet, used by a

specialist trained in one of the most advanced of the German teachers'

seminaries. He describes the pedantic, immensely self-satisfied schoolmaster, as he enters the room, and notes with approval that the children are seated at their desks, crushed and obedient, in total silence,

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as prescribed by German rules of behaviour. 'He casts a look round the

class, and knows already what it is that they ought to understand; he

knows this, and he knows what the children's souls are made of, and

much else that the seminary has taught him.' He is armed with the

latest and most progressive pedagogic volume, called Das Fischbuch. It

contains pictures of a fish.

'What is this, dear children?' 'A fish,' replies the brightest. 'No.'

And he will not rest until some child says that what they see is not a

fish, but a book. That is better. ' And what do books contain?' 'Letters,'

says the boldest boy. 'No, no,' says the schoolmaster sadly, 'you really

must think of what you are saying.' By this time the children are

beginning to be hopelessly demoralised : they have no notion of what

they are meant to say. They have a confused and perfectly correct

feeling that the schoolmaster wants them to say something unintelligible-that the fish is not a fish-that whatever it is he wants them to say, is something they will never think of. Their thoughts begin to

stray. They wonder (this is very Tolstoyan) why the teacher is wearing

spectacles, why he is looking through them instead of taking them off,

and so_ on. The teacher urges them to concentrate, he harries and

tortures them until he manages to make them say that what they see

is not a fish, but a picture, and then, after more torture, that the

picture represents a fish. If that is what he wants them to say, would

it not be easier, Tolstoy asks, to make them learn this piece of profound

wisdom by heart, instead of tormenting them with the Fischhuch

method, which so far from causing them to think 'creatively', merely

stupefies them?

The genuinely intelligent children know that their answers are

always wrong; they cannot tell why; they only know that this.is so;

while the stupid, who occasionally provide the right answers, do not

know why they are praised. All that the German pedagogue is doing

is to feed dead human material -or rather living human beings- into

a grotesque mechanical contraption invented by fanatical fools who

think that this is a way of applying scientific method to the education

of men. Tolstoy assures us that his account (of which I have only

quoted a short fragment) is not a parody, but a faithful reproduction

of what he saw and heard in the advanced schools of Germany and in

'those schools in England that have been fortunate enough to acquire

these wonderful . . . methods'.

Disillusioned and indignant, Tolstoy returned to his Russian estate

and began to teach the village children himself. He huilt schools,

..

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continued to study, reject and denounce current doctrines of education,

published periodicals and pamphlets, invented new methods of learning

geography, zoology, physics; composed an entire manual of arithmetic

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

which consisted of forcing children against their will to memorise

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

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

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

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

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

powers. His overriding didactic purpose is easily forgotten in the

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

thoughts and feelings of individual village children, and the marvellous

concreteness and imagination with which their talk and behaviour,

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

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

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

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

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

owing to the unbounded vitality and constructive genius of the

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

history of literature.

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

claim special authority over other men. Universities and professors

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

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

There is something eighteenth-century, reminiscent both of Voltaire

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

incompetent professors and the desperately bored and obsequious

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

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

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

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

a distance.

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

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

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

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

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

truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

robbed or enslaved by oppressors and exploiters; whereas civilised men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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vividly. The Cossacks Lukashka and Uncle Yeroshka are morally

superior, as well as happier and aesthetically more harmonious beings

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

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

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

Nekhlyudov in The Morning of a Landowner. This conviction fills

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

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

Ilich are not intelligible without it.

Tolstoy's critical thought constantly revolves round this central

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tolstoy applies his criterion literally, almost mechanically. Thus

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

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

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

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

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

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

and then to stop. Turgenev, on the other hand, is judged to be both

an excellent writer and to stand in a real, morally adequate, relationship to his subjects; but he fails on the second count : the subjects are too circumscribed and trivial -and for this no degree of integrity or

skill can compensate. Content determines form, never form content;

and if the content is too small or trivial, nothing will save the work of

the artist. To hold the opposite of this-to believe in the primacy of

form-is to sacrifice truth; to end by producing works that are con-

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trived. There is no harsher word in Tolstoy's entire critical vocabulary

than 'made-up', indicating that the writer did not truly experience or

imagine, but merely 'coinposed'-'made up'-that which he is purporting to describe.

So, too, Tolstoy maintained that Maupassant, whose gifts he

admired greatly, betrayed his genius precisely owing to false and

vulgar theories of this kind; yet he remained, none the less, a good

writer to the degree to which, like Balaam, although he might have

meant to curse virtue, he could not help discerning what was good;

and this perception attracted his love to it, and forced him against his

own will towards the truth. Talent is vision, vision reveals the truth,

truth is eternal and objective. To see the truth about nature or about

conduct, to see it directly and vividly as only a man of genius (or a

simple human being or a child) can see it, and then to deny or tamper

with the vision in cold blood, no matter for the sake of what, is

monstrous, unnatural; a symptom of a deeply diseased character.

·

Truth is discoverable: to follow it is to be good, inwardly sound,

harmonious. Yet it is clear that our society is not harmonious or

composed of internally harmonious individuals. The interests of the

educated minority-what Tolstoy calls the professors, the barons, and

the bankers-are opposed to those of the majority-the peasants, the

poor; each side is indifferent to, or mocks, the values of the other.

Even those who, like Olenin, Pierre, Nekhlyudov, Levin, realise the

spuriousness of the values of the professors, barons, ·and bankers, and

the moral decay in which their false education has involved them, even

those who are truly contrite cannot, despite Slavophil pretensions, go

native and 'merge' with the mass of the common people. Are they too

corrupt ever to recover their innocence? Is their case hopeless? Or

can it be that civilised men have acquired (or discovered) certain true

values of their own, values which barbarians and children may know

nothing of, but which they, the civilised, cannot lose or forget, even if,

by some impossible means, they could transform themselves into

peasants or the free and happy Cossacks of the Don and the Terek?

This is one of the central and most tormenting problems in Tolstoy's

life, to which he goes back again and again, and to which he returns

conflicting answers.

Tolstoy knows that he himself clearly belongs to the minority of

barons, bankers, professors. He knows the symptoms of his condition

only too well. He cannot, for example, deny his passionate love for the

music of Mozart or Chopin or the poetry of Tyutchev or Pushkin,

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the ripest fruits of civilisation. He needs, he cannot do without, the

printed word and all the elaborate· paraphernalia of the culture in

which such lives are lived and such works of art are created. But what

is the use of Pushkin to village boys, when his words are not intelligible

to them? What real benefits has the invention of printing brought the

peasants? We are told, Tolstoy observes, that books educate societies

('that is, make them more corrupt'), that it was the written word that

has promoted the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. Tolstoy denies

this: the government would have done the same without books or

pamphlets. Pushkin's Boris Godunov pleases only him, Tolstoy: but

to the peasants it means nothing. The triumphs of civilisation? The

telegraph tells him about his sister's health, or about the prospects of

King Otto I of Greece; but what benefits do the masses gain from it?

Yet it is they who pay and have always paid for it all; they know this

well. When peasants kill doctors in the 'cholera riots' because they

regard them as poisoners, what they do is no doubt wrong, but these

murders are no accident: the instinct which tells the peasants who

their oppressors are is sound, and the doctors belong to that class.

When Wanda Landowska played to the villagers of Yasnaya Polyana,

the great majority of them remained unresponsive. Yet can it be

doubted that it is the simple people who lead the least broken lives,

immeasurably superior to the warped and tormented lives of the rich

and educated?

The common people, Tolstoy asserts in his early educational tracts,

are self-subsistent not only materially but spiritually-folksong, the

Iliad, the Bible, spring from the people itself, and are therefore

intelligible to all men everywhere, as the marvellous poem Silmtium

by Tyutchev, or Don Giovanni, or the Ninth Symphony is not. If

there is an ideal of man, it lies not in the future, but in the past.

Once upon a time there was the Garden of Eden and in it dwelt the

uncorrupted human soul as the Bible and Rousseau conceived it, and

then came the Fall, corruption, suffering, falsification. It is mere

blindness (Tolstoy says over and over again) to believe, as liberals or

socialists-the progressives-believe, that the golden age is still before

us, that history is the story of improvement, that material advance in

natural science or material skills coincides with real moral advance.

The truth is the reverse of this.

The child is closer to the ideal harmony than the grown man, and

the simple peasant than the tom, 'alienated', morally and spiritually

unanchored and self�estructive parasites who form the civilised elite.

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From this doctrine springs Tolstoy's notable anti-individualism: and

in particular his diagnosis of the individual's will as the source of

misdirection and perversion of 'natural' human tendencies, and hence

the conviction (derived largely from Schopenhauer's doctrine of the

will as the source of frustration) that to plan, organise, rely on science,

try to create rational patterns of life in accordance with rational

theories, is to swim against the stream of nature, to dose one's eyes

to the saving truth within us, to torture facts to fit artificial schemata,

and torture human beings to fit social and economic systems against

which their natures cry out. From the same source, too, comes the

obverse of this: Tolstoy's faith in an intuitively grasped direction of

things as not merely inevitable, but objectively-providentially-good;

and therefore belief in the need to submit to it: his quietism.

This is one aspect of his teaching-the most famous, the most

central idea of the Tolstoyan movement-and it runs through all his

works, imaginative, critical, didactic, from The Cossadts and Family

Happiness to his last religious tracts. This is the doctrine which the

liberals and Marxists condemned. It is in this mood that Tolstoy

maintains that to imagine that heroic personalities determine events

is a piece of colossal megalomania and self-deception; his narrative is

designed to show the insignificance of Napoleon or Tsar Alexander,

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

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

and intellectual impotence of historians and philosophers who try to

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

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

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

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

human life.

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

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

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

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

the study of the gospels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Pierre and Nikolay Rostov know obscurely that in some sense

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

the educated reader that the peasant

needs what your life of ten generations uncrushed by hard labour

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

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

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

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

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

itself creates direct obligations. Those who are members of the

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

benefit of those whose labour made it �ible.

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

society in accordance with those objective standards which all men,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

questions which the reader can neither escape nor answer without

rigorous and painful self-examination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

arrived at a programme of Christian anarchism which had much in

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

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

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

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

quietism; this programme underlay the educational reform that he

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

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

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

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

..

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R U SSIAN T H INKERS

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

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

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

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

Rousseau did not doubt, would achieve harmony within men and

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

cramp and kill them.

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

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

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

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

to complete harmony in which everything fits and is at peace; with

the corollary that knowledge of man's nature gained from observation

or introspection or moral intuition, or from the study of the lives and

writings of the best and wisest men of all ages, can show us this path.

This is not the place for considering how far the doctrine is compatible

with ancient religious teachings or modern psychology. The point I

wish to stress is that it is, above all, a programme of action, a declaration of war against current social values, against the tyranny of states, societies, churches, against brutality, injustice, stupidity, hypocrisy,

weakness, above all against vanity and moral blindness. A man who

has fought a good fight in this war will thereby expiate the sin of

having been a hedonist and an exploiter, and the son and beneficiary

of robbers and oppressors.

This is what Tolstoy believed, preached, and practised. His 'conversion' altered his view of what was good and what was evil. It did not weaken his faith in the need for action. His belief in the principles

themselves never wavered. The enemy entered by another door:

Tolstoy's sense of reality was too inexorable to keep out tormenting

doubts about how these principles-no matter how true themselvesshould be applied. Even though I believe some things to be beautiful or good, and others to be ugly and evil, what right have I to bring up

others in the light of my convictions, when I know that I cannot help

liking Chopin and Maupassant, while these far better men-peasants

or children-do not? Have I, who stand at the end of a long period of

elaboration-of generations of civilised, unnatural living-have I the

right to touch thnr souls?

To seek to influence someone is to engage in a morally suspect

enterprise. This is obvious in the case of the crude manipulation of

one man by another. But in principle it holds equally of education. All

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TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTENMENT

educators seek to shape the minds and lives of the educated towards a

given goal, or to resemble a given model. But if we-the sophisticated

members of a deeply corrupt society-are ourselves unhappy, inharmonious, gone astray, what can we be doing but trying to change children born healthy into our own sick semblance, to make cripples

of them like ourselves? We are what we have become, we cannot help

our love of Pushkin's verse, of Chopin's music; we discover that

children and peasants find them unintelligible or tedious. What do we

do? We persist, we 'educate' them until they too appear to enjoy these

works or, at least, see why we enjoy them. What have we done? We

find the works of Mozart and Chopin beautiful only because Mozart

and Chopin were themselves children of our decadent culture, and

therefore their words speak to our diseased minds; but what right have

we to infect others, to make them as corrupt as ourselves? We can

see the blemishes of other systems. We see all too clearly how the

human personality is destroyed by Protestant insistence on obedience,

by Catholic stress on emulation, by the appeal to self-interest and the

importance of social position or .rank on which Russian education,

according to Tolstoy, is based. Is it not, then, either monstrous

arrogance or a perverse inconsistency to behave as if our own favoured

systems of education-something recommended by Pestalozzi, or the

Lancaster method, systems which merely reRect their inventors'

civilised, and consequently perverted, personalities-are necessarily

superior, or less destructive, than what we condemn so readily

and justly in the superficial French or the stupid and pompous

Germans?

How is this to be avoided? Tolstoy repeats the lessons of Rousseau's

Emile. Nature: only natur� will save us. We must seek to understand

what is 'natural', spontaneous, uncorrupt, sound, in harmony with

itself and other objects in the world, and clear paths for development

on these lines; not seek to alter, to force into a mould. We must

listen to the dictates of our stiRed original nature, not look on it as

mere raw stuff upon which to impose our unique personalities and

powerful wills. To defy, to be Promethean, to create goals and build

worlds in rivalry with what our moral sense knows to be eternal

truths, given once and for all to all men, truths in virtue of which

they are men and not beasts-that is the monstrous sin of pride, committed by all reformers, all revolutionaries, all men judged great and effective. And no less by government officials, or by country squires

who, from liberal convictions or simply caprice or boredom, interfere

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with the lives of the peasants.1 Do not teach; learn: that is the sense

of Tolstoy's essay, written nearly a hundred years ago, 'Who should

learn to write from whom: should peasants' children learn from us,

or should we learn from peasants' children?', and of all the accounts

published in the 1 86os and 7os, written with his customary freshness,

attention to detail, and unapproachable power of direct perception, in

which he gives examples of stories written by the children in his

village, and speaks of the awe which he felt while in the presence of

the act of pure creation, in which, he _assures us, he played no part

himself. These stories would only be spoilt by his 'corrections'; they

see� to him far more profound than any of the works of Goethe; he

explains how deeply ashamed they make him of his own superficiality,

vanity, stupidity, narrowness, lack of moral and aesthetic sense. If one

can help children and peasants, it is only by making it easier for them

to advance freely along their own instinctive path. To direct is to

spoil. Men are good and need only freedom to realise their goodness.

'Education', writes Tolstoy in 1 862., 'is the action of one man on

another with a view to causing this other person to acquire certain

moral habits (we say: they have brought him up to be a hypocrite, a

robber or a good man. The SP.rtans brought up brave men, the

French bring up one-sided and self-satisfied persons).' But this is

speaking of-and using-human beings as so much raw material that

we model; this is what 'bringing up' to be like this or like that means.

We are evidently ready to alter the direction spontaneously followed

by the souls and wills of others, to deny their independence-in favour

of what? Of our own corrupt, false, or at best, uncertain values? But

this involves always some degree of moral tyranny. In a wild moment

of panic Tolstoy wonders whether the ultimate motive of the educator

is not envy, for the root of the educator's passion for his task is 'envy

of the purity of the child and the desire to make the child like himself,

that is, more corrupt'. What has the entire history of education been?

All philosophers of education, from Plato to Kant, sought one goal :

'to free education from the oppression of the chains of the historic

past'. They want 'to guess at what men need and then build their new

1 Mikhailovsky maintains that in Polilusllla, one of Tolstoy's best stories,

composed during the period of the educational tracts, he represents the

tragic death of the hero as ultimately due to the wilful interference with the

lives of her peasants on the part of'the well-meaning, but vain and foolish,

landoWDer. His argument is highly convincing.

zs6

TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTEN MENT

schools on what, less or more correctly, they take this to be'. They

struck off one yoke only to put another in its place. Certain scholastic

philosophers insisted on Greek because that was the language of

Aristotle, who knew the truth. But, Tolstoy continues, Luther denied

the authority of the Church Fathers and insisted on inculcating the

original Hebrew, because he lmn» that that was the language in which

God had revealed eternal truths to men. Bacon looked to empirical

knowledge of nature, and his theories contradicted those of Aristotle.

Rousseau proclaimed his faith in life, life as he conceived it, and not in

theories.

But about one thing they were all agreed: that one must liberate

the young from the blind despotism of the old; and each immediately

substituted his own fanatical, enslaving dogma in its place. If I am sure

that I know the truth and that all else is error, does that alone entitle

me to superintend the education of another? Is such certainty enough?

Whether or not it disagrees with the certainties of others? By what right

do I put a wall round the pupil, exclude all external influences, and try

to mould him as I please, into my own or somebody else's image?

The answer to this question, Tolstoy passionately says to the

progressives, must be 'Yes' or 'No': 'If it is "Yes", then the Jews'

synagogue, the church school, has as much legitimate right to exist

as all our universities.' He declares that he sees no moral difference, at

least in principle, between the compulsory Latin of the traditional

establishments and the compulsory materialism with which the radical

professors indoctrinate their captive audiences. There might indeed be

something to be said for the things that the liberals delight in denouncing: education at home, for example. For it is surely natural that parents should wish their children to resemble them. Again there is a

case for a religious upbringing, for it is natural that believers should

want to save all other human beings from what they, at any rate, are

certain must be eternal damnation. Similarly the government is

entitled to train men, for society cannot survive without some sort of

government, and governments cannot exist without some qualified

specialists to serve them.

But what is the basis of' liberal education' in schools and universities,

staffed by men who do not even claim to be sure that what they teach

is true? Empiricism? The lessons of history? The only lesson that history

teaches us is that all previous educational systems have proved to be

despotisms founded on falsehoods, and later roundly condemned. Why

should the twenty-first century not look back on us in the nineteenth

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R U S S I AN T H I N K ERS

with the same scorn and amusement as that with which we now loolt:

on medieval schools and universities? If the history of education is

the history merely of tyranny and error, what right have we to carry

on this abominable farce? And if we are told that it has always been

so, that it is nothing new, that we cannot help it, and must do our bestis this not like saying that murders have always taken place, so that we might as well go on murdering, even though we have now discovered

what it is that makes men murder?

In these circumstances, we should be villains if we did not say at

least so much as this: that since, unlike the Pope or Luther or modem

positivists, we do not ourselves claim to base our education (or other

forms of interference with human beings)on the knowledge of absolute

truth, we must at least stop torturing others in the name of what we

do not know. All we can know for certain is what men actually want.

Let us at least have the courage of our admitted ignorance, of our

doubts and uncertainties. At least we can try to discover what others,

children or adults, require, by taking off the spectacles of tradition,

prejudice, dogma, and making it possible for ourselves to know men

as they truly are, by listening to them carefully and sympathetically,

and understanding them and their lives and their needs, one by one

individually. Let us at least try to provide them with what they ask

for, and leave them as free as possible. Give them Bildung (for which

he produces a Russian equivalent, and points out with pride that there

is none in French or English)-that is to say, seek to influence them

by precept and by the example of our own lives; but do not apply

'education' to them, which is essentially a method of coercion, and

destroys what is most natural and sacred in man-the capacity for

knowing and acting for himself in accordance with what he thinks

to be true and good -the power and the right of self-direction.

But he cannot let the matter rest there, as many a liberal has tried

to do. For the question immediately arises: how are we to contrive

to leave the schoolboy and the student free? By being morally neutral?

By imparting only factual knowledge, not ethical, or aesthetic, or

social or religious doctrine? By placing the 'facts' before the pupil,

and letting him form his own conclusions, without seeking to influence

him in any direction, for fear that we might infect him with our own

diseased outlooks? But is it really possible for such neutral communications to occur between men? Is not every human communication a conscious or unconscious impression of one temperament, attitude to life, scale of values, upon another? Are men ever so

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TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTEN M ENT

thoroughly insulated from each other, that the careful avoidance of

more than the minimum degree of social intercourse will leave them

unsullied, absolutely free to see truth and falsehood, good and evil,

beauty and ugliness, with their own, and only their own eyes? Is this

not an absurd conception of individuals as creatures who can be kept

pure from all social influence-absurd in the world even of Tolstoy's

middle years-even, that is, without the new knowledge of human

beings that we have acquired today, as the result of the labours of

psychologists, sociologists, philosophers? We live in a degenerate

society: only the pure can rescue us. But who will educate the educators? Who is so pure as to know how, let alone be able, to heal our world or anyone in it?

Between these poles-on one side facts, nature, what there is; on

the other duty, justice, what there should be; on one side innocence,

on the other education; between the claims of spontaneity and those

of obligation, between the injustice of coercing others, and the injustice

of leaving them to go their own way, Tolstoy wavered and struggled

all his life. And not only he, but all those populists and socialists and

idealistic students who in Russia 'went to the people', and could not

decide whether they went to teach or to learn, whether the 'good of

the people' for which they were ready to sacrifice their lives was what

'the people' in fact desired, or something that only the reformers

knew to be good for them, what the 'people' should desire-would

desire if only they were as educated and wise as their championsbut, in fact, in their benighted state, often spurned and violently resisted.

These contradictions, and his unswerving recognition of his failure

to reconcile or modify them, are, in a sense, what gives their special

meaning both to Tolstoy's life and to the morally agonised, didactic

pages of his art. He furiously rejected the compromises and alibis of

his liberal contemporaries as mere feebleness and evasion. Yet he

believed that a final solution to the problems of how to apply the

principles of Christ must exist, even though neither he nor anyone

else had wholly discovered it. He rejected the very possibility that

some of the tendencies and goals of which he speaks might be literally

both real and incompatible. Historicism versus moral responsibility;

quietism versus the duty to resist evil; teleology or a causal order

against the play of chance and irrational force; spiritual harmony,

simplicity, the mass of the people on the one hand, and the irresistible

attraction of the culture of minorities and its art on the other; the

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

corruption of the civilised portion of society on one side, and its dir•.:ct

duty to raise the masses of the people to its own level on the other;

the dynamism and falsifying influence of passionate, simple, one-sided

faith, as against the clear-sighted sense of the complex facts and

inevitable weakness in action which flows from enlightened scepticism

-all these strains are given full play in the thought of Tolstoy. His

adhesion to them appears as a series of inconsistencies in his system

because it may be that the conflicts exist in fact and lead to collisions

in real life.1 Tolstoy is incapable of suppressing, or falsifying, or

explaining away by reference to dialectical or other ·�eeper' levels of

thought, any truth when it presents itself to him, no matter what

this entails, where it leads, how much it destroys of what he most

passionately longs to believe. Everyone knows that Tolstoy placed

truth highest of all the virtues. Others have said this too, and have

celebrated her no less memorably. But Tolstoy is among the few who

have truly earned that rare right: for he sacrificed all he had upon her

altar-happiness, friendship, love, peace, moral and intellectual certainty, and, in the end, his life. And all she gave him in return was doubt, insecurity, self-contempt and insoluble contradictions.

In this sense, although he would have repudiated this violently, he

is a martyr and a hero-perhaps the most richly gifted of all-in the

tradition of European enlightenment. This seems a paradox; but then

his entire life bears witness to the proposition to the denial of which

his last years were dedicated: that the truth is seldom wholly simple

or clear, or as obvious as it may sometimes seem to the eye of the

common observer.

1 Some Marxist critics, notably Lukacs, represent these contradictions u

the expression in art of the crisis in Russian feudalism and in particular in

the condition of the peasants whO&e predicament Tolstoy is held to reflect.

This seems to me an over-optimistic view: the destruction of Tolstoy's world

should have made his dilemmu obsolete. The reader can judge for himself

whether this is so.

Fathers and Children

T U R G E N E V A N D T H E LI B E R A L

P R E D I C A M E N T

You do not, I see, quite undentand the Ruaaian public. Ita

character is determined by the condition of Russian society,

which contain11, imprisoned within it, fresh forces seething

and bunting to break out; but crushed by heavy repression

and unable to escape, they produce gloom, bitter depression, apathy. Only in literature, in spite of our Tartar censonhip, there is still o.ome life and forward movement.

This is why the writer's calling enjoys such respect among

u11, why literary success is so r:uy here even when there ia

little talent . • . This is why, especially amongst us, univenal attention ia paid • • . to every manifestation of any so-called liberal trend, no matter how poor the writer's

gifts • . . The public • . • sees in Russian writen its only

leaden, defenden and savioun from dark autocracy,

Orthodozy and the national way of life • • • 1

Vissarion Belinsky (0�" Lmtr '' G'gel, 1 5 July 1 84-7)

O N 9 October 1 883 Ivan Turgenev was buried, as he had wished.

in St Petersburg. near the grave of hi.s admired friend. the critic

• Belinsky's words-s•motltrz!Jtlflit, prtlfi()J/tlflit ; flllrDJ,,sl' -echo the

official patriotic formula invented by a Minister of Education early in the

reign of Nicholas I. The last of these words-flllrotlfloJI'-was evidendy intended

as the Russian equivalent of Yollstum; it was used in thil context to contrat

the traditional 'folkways' of the common people with the imported, 'arti6cial'

constructions of'wiaeacres' inJluenced by western enlightenment. In practice

it connoted official patriotism as well as such institutions as serfdom, the

hierarchy of estates, and the duty of implicit obedience to the Emperor and

his Government. Belinsky'• letter is a bitter indictment of Gogol for uaing his

genius 'sincerely or insincerely' to serve the cause of obecurantiam and reaction. It was on the charge of reading the letter at a secret meeting of a aubvenive group that Dostoevsky wu arrC:sted and condemned to death.

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Visarion Belinsky. His body was brought from Paris after a brief

ceremony near the Gare du Nord, at which Ernest Renan and Edmond

About delivered appropriate addres5e5. The burial service took place

in the presence of representative$ of the Imperial Government, the

intelligentsia, and workers' organisations, perhaps the first and last

occasion on which these groups peacefully met in Russia. The times

were troubled. The wave of terrorist acts had culminated in the

assassination of Alexander II two years earlier; the ringleaders of the

conspiracy had been hanged or sent to Siberia, but there was still

great unrest, especially among students. The Government feared that

the funeral procession might turn into a political demonstration. The

press received a secret circular from the Ministry of the Interior

instructing it to print only ofticial information about the funeral

without disclosing that any such instructions had been received.

Neither the St Petersburg municipality nor the workers' organisations

were pennitted to identify themselves in the inscriptions on their

wreaths. A literary gathering at which Tolstoy was to have spoken

about his old friend and rival was cancelled by government order. A

revolutionary leaflet was distributed during the funeral procession, but

no official notice of this was taken, and the occasion seems to have

passed off without incident. Yet these precautions, and the uneasy

abnosphere in which the funeral was conducted, may surprise those

who see Turgenev as Henry James or George Moore or Maurice

Baring saw him, and as most of his readers perhaps see him still: as a

writer of beautiful lyrical prose, the author of nostalgic idylls of

country life, the degiac poet of the last enchanbnents of decaying

country houses and of their ineffective but irresistibly attractive

inhabitants, the incomparable story-teller with a marvellous gift for

describing nuances of mood and feeling, the poetry of nature and of

love, gifts which have given him a place among the foremost writers

of his time. In the French memoirs of the time he appears as It douz

gltmt, as his friend Edmond de Goncoun had called him, the good

giant, gende, charming, infinitely agreeable, an entrancing talker,

known as 'The Siren' to some of his Russian companions, the admired

friend of Flauben and Daudet, George Sand and Zola and Mau�t,

the most welcome and delightful of all the hobituls of the s11/rm of

his intimate life-long companion, the singer Pauline Viardot. Yet the

Russian Government had some grounds for its fears. They had not

welcomed Turgenev's visit to Russia, more particularly his meetings

with students, two years before, and had found a way of.conveying

:16:1

FAT H E R S AND C H I LDREN

this to him in unambiguous terms. Audacity was not among his

attributes; he cut his visit short and returned to Paris.

The Government's nervousness is not surprising, for Turgenev was

something more than a psychological observer and an exquisite stylist.

Like virtually every major Russian writer of his time, he was, all his

life, profoundly and painfully concerned with his·country's condition

and destiny. His novels constitute the best account of the social and

political development of the small, but influential, elite of the liberal

and radical Russian youth of his day -of it and of its critics. His books,

from the point of view of the authorities in St Petersburg, were by

no means safe. Yet, unlike his great contemporaries, Tolstoy and

Dostoevsky, he was not a preacher and did not wish to thunder at

his generation. He was concerned, above all, to enter into, to understand, views, ideals, temperaments, both those which he found sympathetic and those by which he was puzzled or repelled. Turgenev possessed in a highly developed form what Herder called Einfiihlen

(empathy), an ability to enter into beliefs, feelings and attitudes alien

and at times acutely antipathetic to his own, a gift which Renan had

emphasised in his eulogy;1 indeed, some of the young Russian revolutionaries freely conceded the accuracy and justice of his portraits of them. During much of his life he was painfully preoccupied with the

controversies, moral and political, social and personal, which divided

the educated Russians of his day; in particular, the profound and

bitter conflicts between Slavophil nationalists and admirers of the west,

conservatives and liberals, liberals and radicals, moderates and fanatics,

realists and visionaries, above all between old and young. He tried to

stand aside and see the scene objectively. He did not always succeed.

But because he was an acute and responsive observer, self-critical and

self-effacing both as a man and as a writer, and, above all, because he

was not anxious to bind his vision upon the reader, to preach, to

convert, he proved a better prophet than the two self-centred, angry

literary giants with whom he is usually compared, and discerned the

birth of social issues which have grown world-wide since his day.

Many years after Turgenev's death the radical novelist Vladimir

Korolenko, who declared himself a 'fanatical' admirer, remarked that

Turgenev 'irritated . . . by touching painfully the most exposed nerves

of the live issues of the day'; that he excited passionate love and

1 For the text of the Discours delivered on 1 October 1 883 see I. Tourgut!neff, Otuflm JmriJrts, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1 88 5), pp. 297-302.

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respect and violent criticism, and 'was a storm centre . . . yet he knew

the pleasures of triumph too; he understood others, and others understood him'.1 It is with this relatively neglected aspect of Turgenev's writing, which speaks most directly to our own time, that I intend to

deal.

I

By temperament Turgenev was not politically minded. Nature, personal relationships, quality of feeling- these are what he understood best, these, and their expression in art. He loved every manifestation

of art and of beauty as deeply as anyone has ever done. The conscious

use of art for ends extraneous to itself, ideological, didactic or utilitarian, and especially as a deliberate weapon in the class war, as demanded by the radicals of the I 86os, was detestable to him. He was

often described as a pure aesthete and a believer in art for art's sake,

and was accused of escapism and lack of civic sense, then, as now,

regarded in the view of a section of Russian opinion as being a despicable form of irresponsible self-indulgence. Yet these descriptions do not fit him. His writing was not as deeply and passionately committed

as that of Dostoevsky after his Siberian exile, or of the later Tolstoy,

but it was sufficiently concerned with social analysis to enable both

the revolutionaries and their critics, especially the liberals among them,

to draw ammunition from his novels. The Emperor Alexander II,

who had once admired Turgenev's early work, ended by looking upon

him as his hlte noire.

In this respect Turgenev was typical of his time and his class. More

sensitive and scrupulous, less obsessed and intolerant than the great

tormented moralists of his age, he reacted just as bitterly against the

horrors of the Russian autocracy. In a huge and backward country,

where the number of educated persons was very small and was divided

by a gulf from the vast majority of their fellow-men-they could

scarcely be described as citizens-living in conditions of unspeakable

poverty, oppression and ignorance, a major crisis of public conscience

was bound sooner or later to arise. The facts are familiar enough: the

Napoleonic wars precipitated Russia into Europe, and thereby, inevitably, into a more direct contact with western enlightenment than had previously been permitted. Army officers drawn from the land-1 Quoted from V. G. Korolenko's anicle '1. A. Goncharov i "molodoe

pokolenie" ', Polnoe so6ronie sochinenii (Petrograd, 191+), vol. 9• p. 3Z+;

see Targtntfl r1 nmloi lritilt (Moscow, 1 953), p. s:z7.

2.64

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

owning elite were brought into a degree of companionship with their

men, lifted as they all were by a common wave of vast patriotic

emotion. This for the moment broke through the rigid stratification

of Russian society. The salient features of this society included a semiliterate, state-dominated, largely corrupt Church; a small, incompletely westernised, ill-trained bureaucracy struggling to keep under and hold

back an enormous, primitive, half-medieval, socially and economically

undeveloped, but vigorous and potentially undisciplined, population

straining against its shackles; a widespread sense of inferiority, both

social and intellectual, before western civilisation; a society distorted

by arbitrary bullying from above and nauseating conformity and

obsequiousness from below, in which men with any degree of independence or originality or character found scarcely any outlet for normal development.

This is enough, perhaps, to account for the genesis, in the first half

of the century, of what came to be known as the 'superfluous person',

the hero of the new literature of protest, a member of the tiny minority

of educated and morally sensitive men, who is unable to find a place

in his native land and, driven in upon himself, is liable to escape either

into fantasies and illusions, or into cynicism or despair, ending, more

often than not, in self-destruction or surrender. Acute shame or furious

indignation caused by the misery and degradation of a system in which

human beings-serfs-were viewed as 'baptised property', together with

a sense of impotence before the rule of injustice, stupidity and corruption, tended to drive pent-up imagination and moral feeling into the only channels that the censorship had not completely shut off-literature

and the. arts. Hence the notorious fact that in Russia social and political

thinkers turned into poets and novelists, while creative writers often

became publicists. Any protest against institutions, no matter what its

origin or purpose, under an absolute despotism is to ipso a political act.

Consequently literature became the battleground on which the central

social and political issues of life were fought out. Literary or aesthetic

questions which in their birthplace-in Germany or France-were confined to academic or artistic coteries, became personal and social problems that obsessed an entire generation of educated young Russians

not primarily interested in literature or the arts as such. So, for

example, the controversy between the supporters of the theory of pure

art and those who believed that it had a social function-a dispute that

preoccupied a relatively small section of French critical opinion during

the July Monarchy-in Russia grew into a major moral and political

,,

2.65

R U S S IAN T H INKERS

issue, of progress against reaction, enlightenment versus obscurantism,

moral decency, social responsibility, and human feeling against aut�

cracy, piety, tradition, conformity, and obedience to established

authority.

The most passionate and influential voice ofhis generation was that

of the radical critic Vissarion Belinsky. Poor, consumptive, ill-born,

ill-educated, a man of incorruptible sincerity and great strength of

character, he became the Savonarola of his generation-a burning

moralist who preached the unity of theory and practice, of literature

and life. His genius as a critic and his instinctive insight into the heart

of the social and moral problems that troubled the new radical youth

made him its natural leader. His literary essays were to him and to his

readers an unbroken, agonising, unswerving attempt to find the truth

about the ends of life, what to believe and what to do. A man of

passionate and undivided personality, Belinsky went through violent

changes of position, but never without having lived painfully through

each of his convictions and having acted upon them with the whole

force of his ardent and uncalculating nature until they failed him, one

by one, and forced him, again and again, to make a new beginning, a

task ended only by his early death. Literature was for him not a

mltitr, nor a profession, but the artistic expression of an all-embracing

outlook, an ethical and metaphysical doctrine, a view of history and

of man's place in the cosmos, a vision that embraced all facts and all

values. Belinsky was, first and foremost, a seeker after justice and

truth, and it was as much by the example of his profoundly moving

life and character as by his precepts that he bound his spell upon the

young radicals. Turgenev, whose early efforts as a poet he encouraged,

became his devoted and life-long admirer. The image of Belinsky,

particularly after his death, became the very embodiment of the committed man of letters; after him no Russian writer was wholly free from the belief that to write was, first and foremost, to bear witness

to the truth : that the writer, of all men, had no right to avert his

gaze from the central issues of his day and his society. For an artistand particularly a writer-to try to detach himself from the deepest concerns of his nation in order to devote himself to the creation of

beautiful objects or the pursuit of personal ends was condemned as

self-destructive egoism and frivolity; he would only be maimed and

impoverished by such betrayal of his chosen calling.

The tormented honesty and integrity of Belinsky's judgements-the

tone, even more than the content-penetrated the moral consciousness

1.66

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

of his Russian contemporaries, sometimes to be rejected, but never to

be forgotten. Turgenev was by nature cautious, judicious, frightened

of all extremes, liable at critical moments to take evasive action; his

friend, the poet Yakov Polonsky, many years later described him to a

reactionary minister as being 'kind and soft as wax . . . feminine . . .

without character'.1 Even if this goes too far, it is true that he was

highly impressionable and liable to yield to stronger personalities all

his life. Belinsky died in I 848, but his invisible presence seemed to

haunt Turgenev for the rest of his life. Whenever from weakness, or

love of ease, or craving for a quiet life, or sheer amiability of character,

Turgenev felt tempted to abandon the struggle for individual liberty

or common decency and to come to terms with the enemy, it may well

have been the stern and moving image of Belinsky that, like an icon,

at all times stood in his way and called him back to the sacred task.

The Sportsman's Sketches was his first and most lasting tribute to his

dying friend and mentor. To its readers this masterpiece seemed, and

seems still, a marvellous description of the old and changing rural

Russia, of the life of nature and of the lives of peasants, transformed

into a pure vision of art. But Turgenev looked on it as his first great

assault on the hated institution of serfdom, a cry of indignation

designed to burn itself into the consciousness of the ruling class. When,

in I 879, he was made an Honorary Doctor of Laws by the University

of Oxford in this very place,• James Bryce, who presented him,

described him as a champion of freedom. This delighted him.

Belinsky was neither the first nor the last to exercise a dominating

inftuence on Turgenev's life; the first, and perhaps the most destructive, was his widowed mother, a strong-willed, hysterical, brutal, bitterly frustrated woman who loved her son, and broke his spirit.

She was a savage monster even by the none too exacting standards of

humanity of the Russian landowners of those days. As a child Turgenev

had witnessed abominable cruelties and humiliations which she inflicted

upon her serfs and dependants; an episode in his story The Brigadier

is apparently founded on his maternal grandmother's murder of one

of her boy serfs: she struck him in a fit of rage; he fell wounded on

the ground; irritated by the spectacle she smothered him with a

1 See S!Jornilt PusA!tit�sltogo doffla 110 I923 god (Petrograd, 19z:z), pp.

288-9 (letter to K. P. Pobedonostsev, r 88r).

• The Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, in which a shortened version of this

lecture was delivered on 1 2 November 1970.

R U S S IAN T H INKERS

pillow •1 Memories of this kind fill his stories, and it took him his

entire life to work them out of his system.

It was early experience of scenes of this kind on the pan of men

brought up at school and university to respect the values of western

civilisation that was largely responsible for the lasting preoccupation

with the freedom and dignity of the individual, and for the hatred of

the relics of Russian feudalism, that characterised the political position

of the entire Ruv.ian intelligentsia from its beginnings. The moral

confusion was very great. 'Our time longs for convictions, it is tormented by hunger for the truth,' wrote Bdinsky in 1 8.p, when Turgenev was twenty-four and had become intimate with him, 'our

age is all questioning, questing, searching, nostalgic longing for the

truth . . . '1 Thirteen years later Turgenev echoed this: 'There are

epochs when literature cannot mertly be artistic, there are interests

higher than poetry.'1 Three years later Tolstoy, then dedicated to the

ideal of pure an, suggested to him the publication of a purely literary

and artistic periodical divorced from the squalid political polemics of

the day. Turgenev replied that it was not 'lyrical twittering' that the

times were calling for, nor 'birds singing on boughs';t 'you loathe this

political morass; true, it is a dirty, dusty, vulgar business. But there is

dirt and dust in the streets, and yet we cannot, after all, do without

towns.'5

The conventional picture of Turgenev as a pure artist drawn into

political strife against his will but remaining fundamentally alien to

it, drawn by critics both on the right and on the left (particularly by

those whom his political novels irritated), is misleading. His major

1 Ludwig Pietsch describes this incident aa related to him by Turgenev.

See JnostrtltJtJtlJtl lritilta o TurgtntrJt (St Petenburg, 1 884), p. 147. Pietsch is

quoted by E. A. Soloviev (l.S. TurgttrtrJ. Ego zlliu' i littrfllllr"11tlJtl dtytlttl'nost'

(Kazan, 19zz), pp. 39-40), who in tum is quoted by J. Mourier. This latter,

apparently misreading Soloviev, has it that the woman in question was

Turgenev's mother. J. Mourier, lr�an Strgulilr�itcll Tourgulntff a Spaulol

(St Petersburg, 1 899), p. z8.

• 'Rech' o kritike', Polnoe so6ranit socllintnii, vol. 6 (Moscow, 195 5),

pp. z67, z69.

1 Letter to V asily Botkin, z9 June 1 8 5 5. I. S. Turgenev, Polnot so6rt�nit

l«hitJtJiii i pistm (Moscow/Leningrad, 1960-68), Pis'mt�, vol. z, p. z8z. All

references to Turgenev's letten are to this edition, unless otherwise indicated.

t Letter to L. N. Tolstoy, z9 January 1 8 58.

a To Tolstoy, 8 April 18s8.

268

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

novels, from the middle iSsos onwards, are deeply concerned with the

central social and political questions that troubled the liberals of his

generation. His outlook was profoundly and pennanently influenced

by Belinsky's indignant humanism and in particular by his furious

philippics against all that was dark, corrupt, oppressive, false.1 Two

or three years earlier, at the University of Berlin, he had listened to

the Hegelian sermons of the future anarchist agitator Bakunin, who

was his fellow student, sat at the feet of the same Gennan philosophical

master and, as Belinsky had once done, admired Bakunin's dialectical

brilliance. Five years later he met in Moscow and soon became intimate

with the radical young publicist Herzen and his friends. He shared

their hatred of every form of enslavement, injustice and brutality, but

unlike some among them he could not rest comfortably in any doctrine

or ideological system. All that was general, abstract, absolute, repelled

him: his vision remained delicate, sharp, concrete, and incurably

realistic. Hegelianism, right-wing and left-wing, which he had imbibed

as a student in Berlin, materialism, socialism, positivism, about which

his friends ceaselessly argued, populism, collectivism, the Russian

village commune idealised by those Russian socialists whom the

ignominious collapse of the left in Europe in 1 848 had bitterly

disappointed and disillusioned-these came to seem mere abstractions

to him, substitutes for reality, in which many believed, and a few

even tried to live, doctrines which life, with its uneven surface and

irregular shapes of real human character and activity, would surely

resist and shatter if ever a serious effort were made to translate them

into practice. Bakunin was a dear friend and a delightful boon companion, but his fantasies, whether Slavophil or anarchist, left no trace on Turgenev's thought. Herzen was a different matter: he was a

sharp, ironical, imaginative thinker, and in their early years they had

much in common. Yet Herzen's populist socialism seemed to Turgenev

a pathetic fantasy, the dream of a man whose earlier illusions were

killed by the failure of the revolution in the west, but who could

1 'Doubb tormented (Belinsky], robbed him of sleep, food, relendessly

gnawed at him, burnt him, he would not let himself sink into forgetfulness,

did not know fatigue . . • his sincerity affected me too,' he wrote in his

reminiscences with characteristic self-deprecating irony and affection, 'his

fire communicated itself to me, the importance of the topic absorbed me; but

after talking for two to three hours I used to weaken, the frivolity of youth

would take its toll, I wanted to rest, I began to think of a walk, of dinner • • . '

Lilmzlurnyt i zhiuisl.it oospomiflt�fliya (Leningrad, 1934), p. 79·

•'

:169

R U S S I AN T H INKERS

not live long without faith; with his old ideals, social justice, equalitr,

liberal democracy, impotent before the forces of reaction in the west,

he must find himself a new idol to worship: against 'the golden calf'

(to use Turgenev's words) of acquisitive capitalism, he set up 'the

sheepskin coat' of the Russian peasant.

Turgenev understood and sympathised with his friend's cultural

despair. Like Carlyle and Flaubert, like Stendhal and Nietzsche, Ibsen

and Wagner, Herzen felt increasingly asphyxiated in a world in which

all values had become debased. All that was free and dignified and

independent and creative seemed to Herzen to have gone under beneath

the wave of bourgeois philistinism, the commercialisation of life by

corrupt and vulgar dealers in human commodities and their mean and

insolent lackeys who served the huge joint-stock companies called

France, England, Germany; even Italy (he wrote), 'the most poetical

country in Europe', when the 'fat, bespectacled little bourgeois of

genius', Cavour, offered to keep her, could ·not restrain herself and,

deserting both her fanatical lover Mazzini and her Herculean husband

Garibaldi, gave herself to him.1 Was it to this decaying corpse that

Russia was to look as the ideal model? The time was surely ripe for

some cataclysmic transformation- a barbarian invasion from the east

which would clear the air like a healing storm. Against this, Herzen

declared, there was only one lightning conductor-the Russian peasant

commune, free from the taint of capitalism, from the greed and fear

and inhumanity of destructive individualism. Upon this foundation a

new society of free, self-governing human beings might yet be built.

Turgenev regarded all this as a violent exaggeration, the dramatisation of private despair. Of course the Germans were pompous and ridiculous; Louis Napoleon and the profiteers of Paris were odious,

but the civilisation of the west was not crumbling. It was the greatest

achievement of mankind. It was not for Russians, who had nothing

comparable to offer, to mock at it or keep it from their gates. He accused

Herz.en of being a tired and disillusioned man, who after 1 849 was

looking for a new divinity and had found it in the simple Russi.m

peasant. 2 'You erect an altar to this new and unknown God because

almost nothing is known about him, and one can . . . pray and believe

1 A. I. Herzen, 'Kontsy i nachala', First Letter, I 862. Solmmit sochifltflii

'l1 tridtsati tolflallh (Moscow, 19 54-65), vol. 1 6, p. 1 3 8. Later references to

Herzen's works ai:e to this edition.

1 Letter to Herzen, 8 November 1 86z.

FATH ERS AND C H I LDREN

and wait. This God does not begin to do what you expect of him;

this, you say, is temporary, accidental, injected by outside forces; your

God loves and adores that which you hate, hates that which you love;

(he J accepts precisely what you reject on his behalf: you avert your

eyes, you stop your ears . . .'1 'Either you must serve the revolution,

and European ideals as before. Or, if you now think that there is

nothing in all this, you must have the courage to look the devil in

both eyes, plead guilty to the whole of Europe-to its face-and not make

an open or implied exception for some coming Russian Messiah' - least

of all for the Russian peasant who is, in embryo, the worst conservative

of all, and cares nothing for liberal ideas.1 Turgenev's sober realism

never deserted him. He resporided to the faintest tremors of Russian

life; in particular, to the changes of expression on what he called 'the

swiftly altering physiognomy of those who belong to the cultured

section of Russian society'.8 He claimed to do no more than to record

what Shakespeare called the 'form and pressure' of the time. He faithfully described them all-the talkers, the idealists, the fighters, the cowards, the reactionaries, and the radicals-sometimes, as in Smoke,

with biting polemical irony, but, as a rule, so scrupulously, with so

much understanding for all the overlapping sides of every question,

so much unruffled patience, touched only occasionally with undisguised

irony or satire (without sparing his own character and views), that he

angered almost everyone at some time.

Those who still think of him as an uncommitted artist, raised high

above the ideological battle, may be surprised to learn that no one in

the entire history of Russian literature, perhaps of literature in general,

has been so ferociously and continuously attacked, both from the

right and from the left, as Turgenev. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy held

far more violent views, but they were formidable figures, angry

prophets treated with nervous respect even by their bitterest opponents.

Turgenev was not in the least formidable; he was amiable, sceptical,

'kind and soft as wax',� too courteous and too self-distrustful to frighten

anyone. He embodied no clear principles, advocated no doctrine, no

1 ibid. On this topic see Pis'ma K. D. KilfJe/i1111 i I. S. TMrge11�11 l A. /.

Gn-tst11M, ed. M. Dragomanov (Geneva. 1 89: ),)etten byTurgenev for r 86z-J.

• Letter to Herzen, 8 November r 86:.

1 Introduction to the collected novels, r88o, Pol11ot so6ra11ie socAitu11ii i

pise111 (Moscow/Leningrad, 196o-68), 8ocAi11e11iya, vol. r :, p. 303. later

references to Turgenev'a works are to this edition, unless otherwise indicated.

' See above, p. :67, note 1.

R U SSIAN T H IN K E R S

panacea for the 'accursed questions', as they arne to be called, personal

and social. 'He felt and understood the opposite sides of life,' said

Henry James of him, 'our Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, moralistic conventional standards were far away from him . . . half the charm of conversation with him was that one breathed an air in which cant

phrases . . • simply sounded ridiculous.'1 In a country in which readers,

and especially the young, to this day look to writers for moral direction,

he refused to preach. He was aware of the price he would have to pay

for such reticence. He knew that the Russian reader wanted to . be

told what to believe and how to live, expected to be provided with

clearly contrasted values, clearly distinguishable heroes and villains.

When the author did not provide this, Turgenev wrote, the reader

was dissatisfied and blamed the writer, since he found it difficult and

irritating to have to make up his own mind, find his own way. And,

indeed, it is true that Tolstoy never leaves you in doubt about whom

he favours and whom he condemns; Dostoevsky does not conceal

what he regards as the path of salvation. Among these great, tormented

LaocoOns Turgenev remained cautious and sceptical; the reader is left

in suspense, in a state of doubt: central problems are raised, and for the

most part left-it seemed to some a trifle complacently-unanswered.

No society demanded more of its authors than Russia, then or now.

T urgenev was accused of vacillation, temporising, infirmity of purpose,

of speaking with too many voices. Indeed, this very topic obsessed

him. Rudin, Asya, On the Eve, the major works of the 1 Ssos, are

preoccupied with weakness-the failure of men of generous heart,

sincerely held ideals, who remain impotent and give in without a

struggle to the forces of stagnation. Rudin, drawn partly from the

young Bakunin, partly from himself,1 is a man of high ideals, talks

well, fascinates his listeners, expresses views which Turgenev could

accept and defend. But he is made of paper. When he is faced with a

genuine crisis which calls for courage and resolution, he crumples and

collapses. His friend, Lezhnev, defends Rudin's memory: his ideals

were noble but he had 'no blood, no character'. In the epilogue (which

the author added as an afterthought to a later edition), after aimless

l Partial Portraill (London, ! 888), pp. z96-7. For James's view of

Turgenev see also Tltt .1rt of Fiction (Oxford, 1948).

1 His critical friend Herz:en said that Turgenev created Rudin 'in biblical

fashion-after his own image and likeness'. 'Rudin', he added, 'is Turgenev

the Second, plus (t�oslr11luwslziisya) a lot of . . . Bakunin's philosophical

jargon.' So6ra11it roclzifll!flii, vol. I I, p. 3 59·

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

wanderings, Rudin dies bravely but uselessly on the barricades of

Paris in 1 848, something of which his prototype Bakunin was, in

Turgenev's view, scarcely capable. But even this was not open to him

in his native land; even if Rudin had blood and character, what could

he have done in the Russian society of his time? This 'superfluous'

man, the ancestor of all the sympathetic, futile, ineffective talkers in

Russian literature, should he, couid he, in the circumstances of his

time have declared war upon the odious aristocratic lady and her world

to which he capitulates? The reader is left without guidance. The

heroine of On the Eve, Elena, who looks for a heroic personality to

help her escape from the false existence of her parents and their milieu,

finds that even the best and most gifted Russians in her circle lack willpower, cannot act. She follows the fearless Bulgarian conspirator Insarov, who is thinner, drier, less civilised, more wooden than the

sculptor Shubin or the historian Bersenev, but, unlike them, is possessed by a single thought-to liberate his country from the Turk, a simple dominant purpose that unites him with the last peasant and the

last beggar in his land. Elena goes with him because he alone, in her

world, is whole and unbroken, because his ideals are backed by

indomitable moral strength.

Turgenev published On the Eve in the CDntnnpDrary (Sovremmnik),

a radical journal then moving steadily and rapidly to the left. The

group of men who dominated it were as uncongenial to him as they

were to Tolstoy; he thought them dull, narrow doctrinaires, devoid of

all understanding of art, enemies of beauty, uninterested in personal

relationships (which were everything to him), but they were bold

and strong, fanatics who judged everything in the light of a single

goal-the liberation of the Russian people. They rejected compromise:

they were bent on a radical solution. The emancipation of the serfs,

which moved Turgenev and all his liberal friends profoundly, was to

these men not the beginning of a new era, but a miserable fraud : the

peasants were still chained to their landlords by the new economic

arrangements. Only the 'peasant's axe', a mass rising of the people

in arms, would give it freedom. Dobrolyubov, the literary editor of

the magazine, in his review of On the Eve, acclaimed the Bulgarian

as a positive hero: for he was ready to give his life to drive out the

Turk from his country. And we? We Russians, too (he declared),

have our Turks-only they are internal: the court, the gentry, the

generals, the ofli.cials, the rising bourgeoisie, oppressors and exploiters

whose weapons are the ignorance of the masses and brute force. Where

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:173

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

are our lnsarovs? Turgenev speaks of an eve; when will the real day

dawn? If it has not dawned yet, this is because the good, the enlightened

young men, the Shubins and Bersenevs in Turgenev's novel, are

impotent. They are paralysed, and will, for all their fine words, end

by adapting themselves to the conventions of the philistine life of their

society, because they are too closely connected with the prevailing

order by a network of family and institutional and economic relationships which they cannot bring themselves to break entirely. 'If you sit in an empty box', said Dobrolyubov, in the final version of his

article, 'and try to upset it with yourself inside it, what a fearful effort

you have to make ! But if you come at it from outside, one push will

topple this box.'1 Insarov stood outside his box-the box is the Turkish

invader. Those who are truly serious must get out of the Russian box,

break off every relationship with the entire monstrous structure, and

then knock it over from outside. Herzen and Ogarev sit in London

and waste their time in exposing isolated cases of injustice, corruption

or mismanagement in the Russian Empire; but this, so far from

weakening that empire, may even help it to eliminate such shortcomings and last longer. The real task is to destroy the whole inhuman system. Dobrolyubov's advice is clear: those who are serious must

endeavour to abandon the box-remove themselves from all contact

with the Russian state as it is at present, for there is no other means

to acquire an Archimedean point, leverage for causing it to collapse.

lnsarov rightly lets private revenge-the execution of those who

tortured and killed his parents-wait until the larger task is accomplished. There must be no waste of energy on piecemeal denunciations, on the rescue of individuals from cruelty or injustice. This is mere liberal fiddling, escape from the radical task. There is nothing

common between 'us' and 'them'. 'They', and Turgenev with them,

seek reform, accommodation.'We' want destruction, revolution, new

foundations of life; nothing else will destroy the reign of darkness.

This, for the radicals, is the clear implication of Turgenev's novel;

but he and his friends are evidently too craven to draw it.

Turgenev was upset and, indeed, frightened by this interpretation

of his book. He tried to get the review withdrawn. He said that if it

1 This sentence does not occur in the original review of r 86o, but wu

included in the posthumous edition of Dobrolyubov's essays two years later.

See 'Kogda zhe pridet nastoyashchii den'l' 8o6rtJ•it sotll;.,,;;, vol. 6

(Moscow, 1963), p. r :z6.

274

FATHERS AND C H ILDREN

appeared he would not know what to do or where to run. Nevertheless

he was fascinated by these new men. He loathed the gloomy puritanism

of these 'Daniels of the Neva', as they were called by Herzen,l who

thought them cynical and brutal and could not bear their crude antiaesthetic utilitarianism, their fanatical rejection of all that he held dear-liberal culture, art, civilised human relationships. But they were

young, brave, ready to die in the fight against the common enemy,

the reactionaries, the police, the state. Turgenev wished, in spite of

everything, to be liked and respected by them. He tried to flirt with

Dobrolyubov, and constantly engaged him in conversation. One day,

when they met in the offices of the Contemporary, Dobrolyubov

suddenly said to him, 'Ivan Sergeevich, do not let us go on talking to

each other: it bores me,'1 and walked away to a distant corner of the

room. Turgenev did not give up immediately. He was a celebrated

charmer; he did his best to find a way to woo the grim young man.

It was of no use; when he saw Turgenev approach he stared at the

wall or pointedly left the room. 'You can talk to Turgenev if you

like,' Dobrolyubov said to his fellow editor Chernyshevsky, who at

this time still looked with favour and admiration on Turgenev, and

he added, characteristically, that in his view bad allies were no allies.•

This is worthy of Lenin; Dobrolyubov had, perhaps, the most

Bolshevik temperament of all the early radicals. Turgenev in the

t Ssos and early 6os was the most famous writer in Russia, the only

Russian writer with a great and growing European reputation. Nobody

had ever treated him like this. He was deeply wounded. Nevertheless,

he persisted for a while, but in the end, faced with Dobrolyubov's

implacable hostility, gave up. There was an open breach. He crossed

over to the conservative review edited by Mikhail Katkov, a man

regarded by the left wing as their deadliest enemy.

In the meanwhile the political atmosphere grew more stormy. The

terrorist Land and Liberty League was created in 1 86 1 , the very year

of the great emancipation. Violently worded manifestos calling on the

peasants to revolt began to circulate. The radical leaders were charged

1 A. I. Herzen, So6r11nit socAinenii, vol. 14, p. 322.

I N. G. Chemyshevaky's reminiscences quoted in /. 8. TurgtfltrJ Cl e�ospominllniylllA JOCirtmtnflilw (Moscow, 196o), vol. I, p. 356. This story was recorded by Chemyshevaky in J884, many years after the event, at the

request of his cousin Pypin, who was collecting material about the radical

movement of the 6os; there is no reason for doubting its accuracy.

I ibid., p. ] 5 8.

275

R U SSIAN THINKERS

with conspiracy, were imprisoned or exiled. Fires broke out in the

capital and university students were accused of starting them; Turgenev did not come to their defence. The booing and whistling of the radicals, their brutal mockery, seemed to him mere vandalism; their

revolutionary aims, dangerous Utopianism. Yet he felt that something

new was rising-a vast social mutation of some kind. He declared that

he felt it everywhere. He was repelled and at the same time fascinated

by it. A new and formidable type of adversary of the regime-and of

much that he and his generation of liberals believed in-was coming

into e�istence. Turgenev's curiosity was always stronger than his fears:

he wanted, above everything, to understand the new Jacobins. These

men were crude, fanatical, hostile, insulting, but they were undemoralised, self-confident, and, in some narrow but genuine sense, rational and disinterested. He could not bear to tum his back upon

them. They seemed to him a new, clear-eyed generation, undeluded

by the old romantic myths; above all they were the young, the future

of his country lay in their hands; he did not wish to be cut off from

anything that seemed to him alive, passionate, and disturbing. After

all, the evils that they wished to fight were evils; their enemies were,

to some degree, his enemies too; these young men were wrongheaded, barbarous, contemptuous ofliberals like himself, but they were fighters and martyrs in the battle against despotism. He was intrigued,

horrified and dazzled by them. During the whole of the rest of his

life he was obsessed by a desire to explain them to himself, and perhaps

himself to them.

1 1

Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: 'You had content

but no force.' Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: 'And

you have force but no content.'

From a contemporary conversationl

This is the topic pf Turgenev's most famous, and politically most

interesting, novel Fathtrs and Childrm. It was an attempt to give

Aesh and substance to his image of the new men, whose mysterious,

implacable presence, he declared, he felt about him everywhere, and

who inspired in him feelings that he found difficult to analyse. 'There

1 The original epigraph to F athrs 1111d Childrtll, which Turgenev later

discarded. See A. Mazon, Mallf�J(rits pllrisit11s d'/rJafl TrmrguiMrJ (Paris,

1930), PP· 6+-S·

FATHERS AND CHILDREN

was', he wrote many years later to a friend, '-please don't laugh-some

sort of fatum, something stronger than the author himself, something

independent of him. I know one thing: I started with no preconceived

idea, no "tendency"; I wrote naively, as if myself astonished at what

was emerging.'1 He said that the central figure of the novel, Bazarov,

was mainly modelled on a Russian doctor whom he met in a train in

Russia. But Bazarov has some of the characteristics of Belinsky too.

Like him, he is the son of a poor army doctor, and he possesses some

of Belinsky's brusqueness, his directness, his intolerance, his liability

to explode at any sign of hypocrisy, of solemnity, of pompous conservative, or evasive liberal, cant. And there is, despite Turgenev's denials, something of the ferocious, militant, anti-aestheticism of

Dobrolyubov too. The central topic of the novel is the confrontation

of the old and young, of liberals and radicals, traditional civilisation

and the new, hanh positivism which has no use for anything except

what is needed by a rational man. Bazarov, a young medical researcher,

is invited by his fellow student and disciple, Arkady Kinanov, to stay

at his father's house in the country. Nikolay Kinanov, the father, is a

gentle, kindly, modest country gentleman, who adores poetry and

nature, and greets his son's brilliant friend with touching courtesy.

Also in the house is Nikolay Kinanov's brother, Pavel, a retired army

officer, a carefully dressed, vain, pompous, old-fashioned dandy, who

had once been a minor lion in the solons of the capital, and is now

living out his life in elegant and irritated boredom. Bazarov scents

an enemy, and takes deliberate pleasure in describing himself and his

allies as 'nihilists', by which he means no more than that he, and those

who think like him, reject everything that cannot be established by

the rational methods of natural science. Truth alone matten: what

cannot be established by observation and experiment is useless or

harmful ballast-'romantic rubbish'-which an intelligent man will

ruthlessly eliminate. In this heapofirrational nonsense Bazarov includes

all that is impalpable, that cannot be reduced to quantitative measurement-literature and philosophy, the beauty of art and the beauty of nature, tradition and authority, religion and intuition, the uncriticised

assumptions of conservatives and liberals, of populists and socialists, of

landownen and serfs. He believes in strength, will-power, energy,

utility, work, in ruthless criticism of all that exists. He wishes to tear

off masks, blow up all revered principles and norms. Only irrefutable

t From a letter to M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, I S January I 876.

R U S S IAN THINKERS

facts, only useful knowledge, matter. He clashes almost immediatdy

with the touchy, conventional Pavel Kirsanov: 'At present', he tells

him, 'the most useful thing is to deny. So we deny.' 'Everything�'

asks Pavel Kirsanov. 'Everything.' 'What� Not only art, poetry . . . but

even . . . too horrible to utter . . .' 'Everything.' 'So you destroy every-

thing . . . but surely one must build, too?' 'That's not our business • . .

First one must clear the ground.'

The fiery revolutionary agitator Bakunin, who had just then

esaped from Siberia to London, was saying something of this kind :

the entire rotten structure, the corrupt old world, must be razed to the

ground, before something new can be built upon it; what this is to be

is not for us to say; we are revolutionaries, our business is to demolish.

The new men, purified from the infection of the world of idlers and

exploiters, and its bogus values-these men will know what to do. The

French anarchist Georges Sorel once quoted Marx as saying 'Anyone

who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.'1

This went beyond the position of Turgenev's radical critics of the

Contemporary: they did have a programme of sorts: they were democratic populists. But faith in the people seems just as irrational to Bazarov as the rest of the 'romantic rubbish'. 'Our peasants', he declares, 'are prepared to rob themselves in order to drink themselves blind at the inn.' A man's first duty is to develop his own powers, to be

strong and rational, to create a society in which other rational men

can breathe and live and learn. His mild disciple Arkady suggests to

him that it would be ideal if all peasants lived in a pleasant whitewashed hut, like the head man of their village. 'I have conceived a loathing for this . . . peasant,' Bazarov says, 'I have to work the skin

off my hands for him, and he won't so much as thank me for it;

anyway, what do I need his thanks for? He'll go on living in his

whitewashed hut, while weeds grow out of me . . . ' Arkady is shocked

by such talk; but it is the voice of the new, hard-boiled, unashamed

materialistic egoism. Nevertheless Bazarov is at his ease with peasants;

they are not self-conscious with him even if they think him an odd

sort of member of the gentry. Bazarov spends his afternoon in dissecting

frogs. 'A decent chemist', he tells his shaken host, 'is twenty times

1 Sorel declares that this passage occurs in a letter which, according

to the economist Lujo Brentano, Marx wrote to one of his English friends,

Professor Beesly (RijltxifJns sur Ia rJiolttut, 7th ed. [Paris, 1 930 ], p. 199,

note z). I have not found it in any published collection of Marx's letters.

278

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

more use than any poet.' Arkady, after consulting Bazarov, gently

draws a volume of Pushkin out of his father's hands, and slips into

them BUchner's Kraft und Stoff',! the latest popular exposition of

materialism. Turgenev describes the older Kirsanov walking in his

garden: 'Nikolay Petrovich dropped his head, and passed his hand over

his face. "But to reject poetry," he thought again, "not to have a

feeling for art, for nature . . • " and he cast about him, as if trying to

understand how it was possible not to have a feeling for nature.' All

principles, Bazarov declares, are reducible to mere sensations. Arkady

asks whether, in that case, honesty is only a sensation. 'You find this

hard to swallowl' says Bazarov. 'No, friend, if you have decided to

knock everything down, you must knock yourself down, too! • . . '

This is the voice of Bakunin and Dobrolyubov : 'one must clear the

ground'. The new culture must be founded on real, that is materialist,

scientific values: socialism is just as unreal and abstract as any other

of the 'isms' imported from abroad. As.for the old aesthetic, literary

culture, it will crumble before the realists, the new, tough-minded

men who can look the brutal truth in the face. 'Aristocracy, liberalism,

progress, principles . . . what a lot of foreign . . . and useless words. A

Russian would not want them as a gift.' Paul Kirsanov rejects this

contemptuously; but his nephew Arkady cannot, in the end, accept it

either. 'You aren't made for our harsh, bitter, solitary kind of life,'

Bazarov tells him, 'you aren't insolent, you aren't nasty, all you have

is the audacity, the impulsiveness of youth, and that is of no use in

our business. Your type, the gentry, cannot get beyond noble humility,

noble indignation, and that is nonsense. You won't, for instance, fight,

and yet you think yourselves terrific. We want to fight . . . Our dust

will eat out your eyes, our dirt will spoil your clothes, you haven't

risen to our level yet, you still can't help admiring yourselves, you

like castigating yourselves, and that bores us. Hand us others-it is

them we want to break. You are a good fellow, but, all the same, you

are nothing but a soft, beautifully bred, liberal boy . . . '

Bazarov, someone once said, is the first Bolshevik; even though he

is not a socialist, there is some truth in this. He wants radical change

and does not shrink from brute force. The old dandy, Pavel Kirsanov,

protests against this: 'Force? There is force in savage Kalmucks and

Mongols, too . . . What do we want it for? . . . Civilisation, its fruits,

are dear to us. And don't tell me they are worthless. The most

1 Turgenev calls it Stoff t111J Krtlft.

,,

279

R U S S IAN T H I N K ERS

miserable dauber . • . the pianist who taps on the keys in a restaurant

. . . they are more useful than you are, because they represent civilisation and not brute Mongol force. You imagine that you are progressive; you should be sitting in a Kalmuck wagon !' In the end, Bazarov,

against all his principles, falls in love with a cold, clever, well-born

society beauty, is rejected by her, suffers deeply, and not long after

dies as a result of an infection caught while dissecting a corpse in a

village autopsy. He dies stoically, wondering whether his country had

any real need of him and men like him; and his death is bitterly

lamented by his old, humble, loving parents. Bazarov falls because he

is broken by fate, not through failure of will or intellect. 'I conceived

him', Turgenev later wrote to a young student, 'as a sombre figure,

wild, huge, half-grown out of the soil, powerful, nasty, honest, but

doomed to destruction because he still stands only in the gateway to

the future • . .'1 This brutal, fanatical, dedicated figure, with his

unused powers, is represented as an avenger for insulted human

reason; yet, in the end, he is incurably wounded by a love, by a human

passion that he suppresses and denies within himself, a crisis by which

he is humiliated and humanised. In the end, he is crushed by heartless

nature, by what the author calls the cold-eyed goddess Isis, who does

not care for good or evil, or art or beauty, still less for man, the

creature of an hour; he is not saved either· by his egoism or his altruism,

by faith or works, by rational hedonism or puritanical pursuit of duty;

he struggles to assert himself; but nature is indifferent; she obeys her

own inexorable laws.

Fathers and Children was published in the spring of I 862 and caused

the greatest storm among its Russian readers of any novel before or,

indeed, since. What was Bazarov? How was he to be taken? Was he

a positive or a negative figure? A hero or a devil? He is young, bold,

intelligent, strong, he has thrown off the burden of the past, the

melancholy impotence of the 'superfluous men' beating vainly against

the bars of the prison house of Russian society. The critic Strakhov in

his review spoke of him as a character conceived on a heroic scale. 1

Many years later Lunacharsky described him as the first 'positive' hero

in Russian literature. Does he then symbolise progress? .Freedom? Yet

1 Letter to K. K. Sluchevsky, 26 April I 862.

• 'Ottsy i deti', Yrtmyt�, 1 862 No 4, pp. sB-84. See also his essays on

Turgenev in Kriticlmlit st11t'i o6 I. S. Turgtnltlt i L. N. Toll/om (I86z-Bs)

(St Petersburg, J88S)·

FAT H E RS AND C H I LD R E N

his hatred of art and culture, of the entire world of liberal values, his

cynical asides-does the author mean to hold these up for admiration?

Even before the novel was published his editor, Mikhail Katkov,

protested to Turgenev. This glorification of nihilism, he complained,

was nothing but grovelling at the feet of the young radicals. 'T urgenev',

he said to the novelist's friend Annenkov, 'should be ashamed of

lowering the Rag before a radical', or saluting him as an honourable

soldier.1 Katkov declared that he was not deceived by the author's

apparent objectivity: 'There is concealed approval lurking here . . .

this fellow, Bazarov, definitely dominates the others and does not

encounter proper resistance', and he concluded that what Turgenev

had done was politically dangerous.• Strakhov was more sympathetic.

He wrote that Turgenev, with his devotion to timeless truth and

beauty, only wanted to describe reality, not to judge it. He too, however, spoke of Bazarov as towering over the other characters, and declared that Turgenev might claim to be drawn to him by an

irresistible attraction, but it would be truer to say that he feared him.

Katkov echoes this: 'One gets the impression of a kind of embarrassment in the author's attitude to the hero of his story . . . It is as if the author didn't like him, felt lost before him, and, more than this, was

terrified of him !'1

The attack from the left was a good deal more virulent. Dobrolyubov's successor, Antonovich, accused T urgenev in the Contemporary'

of perpetrating a hitleous and disgusting caricature of the young.

Bazarov was a brutish, cynical sensualist, hankering after wine and

women, unconcerned with the fate of the people; his creator, whatever

his views in the past, had evidently crossed over to the blackest reactionaries and oppressors. And, indeed, there were conservatives who congratulated Turgenev for exposing the horrors of the new, destructive nihilism, and thereby rendering _a public service for which all men of decent feeling must be grateful. But it was the attack from the_

1 /. 8. TurgtntfJ c> c>ospomint�niyt�lll JDflrtmtllllilw, vol. 1, p. 343·

I ibid, PP· 343-4·

a Letter to Turgenev, quoted by him in LittrtiJumyt i z!Jittislit tJospomint�niyt�, P· I sB.

• See M. A. Antonovich, 'Aamodey nashegovremeni', Swrtmtnnil, March

1 862, pp. 6S-I I4, and V. G. Bazanov, 'Turgenev i antinigilisticheskii roman',

K trrtliytl (Petrozavodsk, 1940 ), vol. 4. p. 160. Also V. A. Zelinsky, K ritichslit

rt1z/Jory romt111t1 'Ottsy i tkti' I. S. Turgtllnltl (Moscow, 1 894), and V.

Tukhomitsky, 'Prototipy Bazarova', K prt�t:>tk (Moacow, 1904), pp. 227-85.

•'

:18 1

R U SS IAN THINKERS

left that hurt Turgenev most. Seven years later he wrote to a friend

that 'mud and filth' had been flung at him by the young. He had been

called fool, donkey, reptile, Judas, police agent.1 And again, 'While

some accused me of • • . backwardness, black obscurantism, and

informed me that "my photographs were being burnt amid contemptuous laughter", yet others indignantly reproached me with kowtowing to the . . . young. "You are crawling at Bazarov's feet !" cried one

of my correspondents. "You are only pretending to condemn him.

Actually you scrape and bow to him, you wait obsequiously for the

favour of a casual smile !" • . . A shadow has fallen upon my name.'1

At least one of his liberal friends who had read the manuscript of

Fathers tmd Childrm told him to burn it, since it would compromise

him for ever with the progressives. Hostile caricatures appeared in the

left-wing press, in which Turgenev was represented as pandering to

the fathers, with Bazarov as a leering Mephistopheles, mocking his

disciple Arkady's love for his father. At best, the author was drawn

as a bewildered �gure simultaneously attacked by frantic democrats

from the left and threatened by armed fathers from the right, as he

stood helplessly between them.8 But the left was not unanimous. The

radical critic Pisarev came to Turgenev's aid. He boldly identified

himself with Bazarov and his position. Turgenev, Pisarev wrote,

might be too soft or tired to accompany us, the men of the future;

but he knows that true progress is to be found not in men tied to

tradition, but in active, self-emancipated, independent men, like

Bazarov, free from fantasies, from romantic or religious nonsense.

The author does not bully us, he does not tell us to accept the values

of the 'fathers'. Bazarov is in revolt; he is the prisoner of no theory;

that is his attractive strength; that is what makes for progress and

freedom. Turgenev may wish to tell us that we are on a false path,

but in fact he is a kind of Balaam: he has become deeply attached to

the hero of his novel through the very process of creation, and pins

all his hopes to him. 'Nature is a workshop, not a temple', and we are

workers in it; not melancholy daydreams, but will, strength, intelligence, realism-these, Pisarev declares, speaking through Bazarov, 1 To L. Pietsch, 3 June I 869.

1 'Po povodu OtiiiJrl i tktti' (I 869), LittrtJit11'71Jt i zllittislit oospomi11tJiliyt�,

PP· I S7-9·

a e.g. in the journal Ost1 (I863 No7). See M. M. K.levensky,'lvan Sergeevich

Turgenev v karikaturakh i parodiyakh', Go/os mi11tlf!shgo, I 9 I 8 Nos I-3,

pp. I 8 5-2 I 8, and D11my i pts11i D. D. Mi11t1tflt1 (St Petersburg, I 863).

2.82.

FATHERS AND C H ILDREN

these will find the road. Bazarov, he adds, is what parents today see

emerging in their sons and daughters, sisters in their brothers. They

may be frightened by it, they may be puzzled, but that is where the

road to the future lies.1

Turgenev's familiar friend, Annenkov, to whom he submitted all

his novds for criticism before he published them, saw Bazarov as a

Mongol, a Genghis Khan, a wild beast symptomatic of the savage

condition of Russia, only 'thinly concealed by books from the Leipzig

Fair'.1 Was Turgenev aiming to become the leader of a political

movement? 'The author himself . . . does not know how to take him ..

he wrote, 'as a fruitful force for the future, or as a disgusting boil on

the body of a hollow civilisation, to be removed as rapidly as possible. •a

1 D. I. Pisarev, 'Bazarov' (Russloe slflfiD, 1 862, No 3), PDifiH so!Jranit

sod1i11t11ii (St Petersburg, I4JOI), vol. 2, pp. 379-4-28; and 'Realisty' (1 864-),

ibid., vol. 4. pp. 1-14-6. It is perhaps worth noting for the benefit of those

interested in the history of Russian radical ideas that it was the controversy

about the character of Bazarov that probably inJluenced Chemyshevsky in

creating the character of Rakhmetov in his famous didactic novel 11'/uzl is

lo lit Jont?, published in the following year; but the view that Rakhmetov

is not merely 'the answer' to Bazarov, but a 'positive' version of Turgenev's

hero (e.g. in a recent introduction to one of the English translations of the

novel) is without foundation. Pisarev's self-identification with Bazarov

marks the line of divergence between the rational egoism and potential

elitism of the 'nihilists' of Russ lot slflfiiJ with their neo-Jacobin allies of the

1 86os-culminating in Tkachev and Nechaev-and the altruistic and genuinely

egalitarian socialism of Sflflrtmmtflil and the populists of the 7os, with their

acuter sense of civic duty, whom Turgenev later attempted to describe, not

always successfully, in Yirgin Soil (see on this Joseph Frank, 'N. G. Chernyshevsky: A Russian Utopia', Tnt Soulntm RtJJitw, Baton Rouge, Winter 1 967, pp. 68-84-). This emerges most clearly in the famous controversy between

Tkachev and Lavrov in the 70s. Bazarov's historical importance is considerable, not because he is the original but because he is one of the antitheses of Rakhmetov; and this despite the story, which, according to at least one

source, Turgenev did not deny, that the same individual may have served

IS the 'model' for both. To this extent the indignant attacks by Antonovich

and later by Shelgunov, however intemperate or valueless IS criticism, were

not without foundation.

I Letter to Turgenev, 26 September 1 861. Quoted in V. A. Arkhipov, 'K

tvorcheskoi iatorii romana I. S. Turgeneva 0111y i tltti', Russlaya liltratura,

Moscow, 19S8 No I , p. 148.

I ibid., P· 147·

R U S SIAN THINKERS

Yet he cannot be both, 'he is a Janus with two faces, each party will

see only what it wants to see or can understand.'1

Katkov, in an unsigned review in his own journal (in which the

novel had appeared), went a good deal further. After mocking the

confusion on the left as a result of being unexpectedly faced with its

own image in nihilism, which pleased some and horrified others, he

reproaches the author for being altogether too anxious not to be unjust

to Bazarov, and consequently for representing him always in the best

possible light. There is such a thing, he says, as being too fair: this

leads to its own brand of distortion of the truth. As for the hero,

Bazarov is represented as being brutally candid: that is good, very good;

he believes in telling the whole truth, however upsetting to the poor,

gentle 'Kirsanovs, father and son, with no respect for persons or

circumstances: most admirable; he attacks art, riches, luxurious living;

yes, but in the name of what? Of science and knowledge? But, Katkov

declares, this is simply not true. Bazarov's purpose is not the discovery

of scientific truth, else he would not peddle cheap popular tracts­

Biichner and the rest-which are not science at all, but journalism,

materialist propaganda. Bazarov (he goes on to say) is not a scientist;

this species scarcely existli in Russia in our time. Bazarov and his

fellow nihilists are merely preachers: they denounce phrases, rhetoric,

inflated language- Bazarov tells Arkady not to talk so 'beautifully'but only in order to substitute for this their own political propaganda; they offer not hard scientific facts, in which they are not interested,

with which, indeed, they are not acquainted, but slogans, diatribes,

radical cant. Bazarov's dissection of frogs is not genuine pursuit of

the truth, it is only an occasion for rejecting civilised and traditional

values which Pavel Kirsanov, who in a better-ordered society-say

England-would have done useful work, rightly defends. Bazarov and

his friends will discover nothing; they are not researchers; they are

mere ranters, men who declaim in the name of a science which they

do not trouble to master; in the end they are no better than the

ignorant, benighted Russian priesthood from whose ranks they mostly

spring, and far more dangerous.•

Herzen, as always, was both penetrating and amusing. 'Turgenev

1 ibid.

1 'Roman Turgeneva i ego kritiki', R•sslii fltllflil, May 1 86z, pp. 393"

.f.Z6, and '0 nashem nigilizme. Po povodu romana Turgeneva', ibid., July

1 86z, pp. 4oz-z6.

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

was more of an artist in his novel than people think, and for this

reason lost his way, and, in my opinion, did very well. He wanted

to go to one room, but ended up in another and a better one.'1 The

author clearly started by wanting to do something for the fathers, but

they turned out to be such nonentities that he 'became carried away

by Bazarov's very extremism; with the result that instead of Bogging

the son, he whipped the fathers'.21 Herzen may well be right: it may

be that, although Turgenev does not admit this, Bazarov, whom the

author began as a hostile portrait, came to fascinate his creator to such

a degree that, like Shylock, he turns into a figure more human and a

great deal more complex than the design of the work had originally

allowed for, and so at once transforms and perhaps distorts it. Nature

sometimes imitates art: Bazarov affected the young as Werther, in the

previous century, influenced them, like Schiller's The Rohhers, like

Byron's Laras and Giaours and Childe Harolds in their day. Yet these

new men, Herzen added in a later essay, are so dogmatic, doctrinaire,

jargon-ridden, as to exhibit the least attractive aspect of the Russian

character, the policeman's-the martinet's-side of it, the brutal

bureaucratic jackboot; they want to break the yoke of the old despotism,

but only in order to replace it with one of their own. The 'generation

of the 4os', his own and Turgenev's, may have been fatuous and weak,

but does it follow that their successors-the brutally rude, loveless,

cynical, philistine young men of the 6os, who sneer and mock and

push and jostle and don't apologise-are necessarily superior beings?

What new principles, what new constructive answers have they

provided? Destruction is destruction. It is not creation. 8

In the violent babel of voices aroused by the novel, at least five

attitudes can be distinguished.& There was the angry right wing which

thought that Bazarov represented the apotheosis of the new nihilists,

and sprang from Turgenev's unworthy desire to Ratter and be accepted

by the young. There were those who congratulated him on successfully exposing barbarism and subversion. There were those who denounced him for his wicked travesty of the radicals, for providing

reactionaries with ammunition and playing into the hands of the

1 A. I. Herzen, 'Eshche raz Bazarov', So6ra11it SIJchilltllii, vol. zo, p. 339·

I ibid.

a 81J6r1111it so&hi11t11ii, vol. 1 1, p. 3 5 1.

& For a full analysis of the immediate reaction to the novel see 'Z' (E. F.

Zarin), 'Ne v brov', a v glaz', Bi6/iottlta dlya chlt11iya, 1 86z No 4.. pp. z 1-5 5·

..

R U SS IAN T H INKERS

police; by them he was c;alled renegade and traitor. Still others, like

Dmitry Pisarev, proudly nailed Bazarov's colours to their mast and

expressed gratitude to Turgenev for his honesty and sympathy with

all that was most living and fearless in the growing party of the future.

Finally there were some who detected that the author himself was

not wholly sure of what he wanted to do, that his attitude was genuinely

ambivalent, that he was an artist and not a pamphleteer, that he told

the truth as he saw it, without a clear partisan purpose.

This controversy continued in full strength after Turgenev's death.

It says something for the vitality of his creation that the debate did

not die even in the following century, neither before nor after the

Russian Revolution. Indeed, as lately as ten years ago the battle was

still raging amongst Soviet critics. Was Turgenev for us or against us?

Was he a Hamlet blinded by the pessimism of his declining class, or

did he, like Balzac or Tolstoy, see beyond it? Is Bazarov a forerunner

of the politically committed, militant Soviet intellectual, or a malicious

caricature of the fathers of Russian communism? The debate is not

over yet.1

1 The literature, mostly polemical, is very extensive. Among the most

representative essays may be listed: V. V. Vorovsky's celebrated 'Dva nigilizma:

Bazarov i Sanin' (1909), Sochin�niya (Moscow, 193 I), vol. z, pp. 74-Ioo;

V. P. Kin in Lit�ratura i mark1izm, vol. 6 (Moscow, I 9z9), pp. 7 I-I I6;

L. V. Pumpyansky, '0111y i J�ti. lstoriko-literatumyi ocherk', in I� S.

Turgenev, Sochin�niya (Moscow/Leningrad, I939), vol. 6, pp. 167-86; I. K.

lppolit, unin D Turg�ntfl� (Moscow, I93.f.); I. I. Veksler, /. s. Turg�ntfl ;

politichukay• 6or'6a JAtJtituJyatyk!t goJIJfJ (Moscow/Leningrad, 1 93 5); V. A.

Arkhipov, in Ruukaya lituatura, 1958 No I, pp. I 3z-6:z; G. A. Byaly, in

NIJfJyi mir, Moscow, I958 No 8, pp. :z5 5-9; A. I. Batyuto, in /. 8. Turg�nto

(I8I8-I883-I958): Jtat'i i mat�rialy (Orel, I96o), pp. 77-95; P. G.

Pustovoit, Roman /. 8. Turg�ntoa Otllly i deti i iJtinaya 6or' 6a 6okh godot:J

XIX r;da (Moscow, 1 96o); N. Chernov in Yopro1y lit�ratury, Moscow,

1961 No 8, pp. I 88-93; William Egerton in Ruukaya lit�ratura, I967 No I,

PP· I49-54·

This represents a mere sample of the continuing controversy, in which

Lenin's scathing reference to the similarity of Turgenev's views to those

of German right-wing social democrats is constantly quoted both for and

against the conception of Bazarov as a prototype of Bolshevik activists. There

is an even more extensive mass of writing on the question of whether, and

how far, Katkov managed to persuade Turgenev to amend his tert in a

'moderate' direction by darkening Bazarov's image. That Turgenev did

alter his text as a result of Katkov's pleading is certain; he may, however,

286

FATH ERS AND C H I LDREN

T urgenev was upset and bewildered by the reception of his book.

Before sending it to the printer, he had taken his usual precaution of

seeking endless advice. He read the manuscript to friends in Paris, he

altered, he modi lied, he tried to please everyone. The figure of Bazarov

suffered several transformations in successive drafts, up and down the

moral scale as this or that friend or consultant reported his impressions.

The attack from the left inflicted wounds which festered for the rest

of his life. Years later he wrote 'I am told that I am on the side of

the "fathers"- I, who in the person of Pavel Kirsanov, actually sinned

against artistic truth, went too far, exaggerated his defects to the point

of travesty, and made him ridiculous !'1 As for Bazarov, he was

'honest, truthful, a democrat to his fingertips'.1 Many years later,

Turgenev told the anarchist Kropotkin that he loved Bazarov 'very,

very much . . . I will show you my diaries-you will see how I wept

when I ended the book with Bazarov's death.'8 'Tell me honestly,'

he wrote to one of his most caustic critics, the satirist Saltykov (who

complained that the word 'nihilist' was used by reactionaries to damn

anyone they did not like), 'how could anybody be offended by being

compared to Bazarov? Do you not yourself realise that he is the most

sympathetic of all my characters�'' As for 'nihilism', that, perhaps,

was a mistake. 'I am ready to admit . . . that I had no right to give

our reactionary scum the opportunity to seize on a name, a catchword;

the writer in me should have brought the sacrifice to the citizen- I

admit the justice of my rejection by the young and of all the gibes

hurled at me . . . The issue was more important than artistic truth,

have restored some, at any rate, of the original language when the novel was

published as a book. His relations with Katkov deteriorated rapidly; Turgenev

came to look on him as a vicious reactionary and refused his proffered hand

at a banquet in honour of Pushkin in I 88o; one of his favourite habits was

to refer to the arthritis which tormented him as Katkovitis (AatlOfl.fa). On

this see N. M. Gutyar, lrJtlfl Strguviclz TurgtflttJ (Yurev, 1907), and V. G.

Bazanov, /z littraturtloi poltmiAi 6oAh godOfl (Petrozavodsk, 1 94I), pp. 46-8.

The list of 'corrections' in the text for which Katkov is held responsible is

ritually reproduced in virtually every Soviet study of Turgenev's works. But

see also A. Batyuto, 'Parizhskaya rukopis' romana I. S. Turgeneva Ottsy i

tkti', RussAaya littratura, 1 961 No 4o pp. 57-78.

1 Littralurtlyt i z.hiltisAit tJospomiflafliya, p. I S S.

t Letter to K. K. Sluchevsky, :z6 April I 86:z.

a /. S. TurgtflttJ fJ tJospomiflafliyaAII SOtJrtflltflfliAOtJ, vol. I, p. 441 .

• Letter to M . E . Saltykov-Shchedrin, I S January I 876.

•'

2.87

R U S S I AN T H IN K E R S

and I ought to have foreseen this. '1 He claimed that he shared almost

all Bazarov's views, all save those on art. 1 A lady of his acquaintance

had told him that he was neither for the fathers, nor for the children,

but was a nihilist himself; he thought she might be right. 8 Herun

had said that there had been something of Bazarov in them all, in

himself, in Belinsky, in Bakunin, in all those who in the I 84os

denounced the Russian kingdom of darkness in the name of the west

and science and civilisation.' Turgenev did not deny this either. He

did, no doubt, adopt a different tone in writing to different correspondents. When radical Russian students in Heidelberg demanded clarification of his own position, he told them that 'if the reader does not love Bazarov, as he is-coarse, heartless, ruthlessly dry and brusque • . . the

fault is mine; I have not succeeded in my task. But to "dip him in

syrup" (to use his own expression)-that I was not prepared to do . . . I

did not wish to buy popularity by this sort of concession. Better lose a

battle (and I think I have lost this one), than win it by a trick.'11 Yet

to his friend the poet Fet, a conservative landowner, he wrote that he

did not himself know if he loved Bazarov or hated him. Did he mean

to praise or denigrate him? He did not know.8 And this is echoed

eight years later: 'My pei'S(Jnal feelings [towards Bazarov] were

confused (God only knows whether I loved him or hated him) !'7 To

the liberal Madame Filosofova he wrote, 'Bazarov is my beloved child;

on his account I quarrelled with Katkov . . . Bazarov, that intelligent,

heroic man-a caricature? !' And he added that this was 'a senseless

charge'.8

He found the scorn of the young unjust beyond endurance. He

wrote that in the summer of I 862 'despicable generals praised me, the

young insulted me'. 8 The socialist leader Lavrov reports that he bitterly

complained to him of the injustice of the radicals' change of attitude

towards him. He returns to this in one of his late Ponns in Prost:

'Honest souls turned away from him. Honest faces grew red with

1 ibid.

1 Liltrotumyt i zhittis �it rJospDmittoniyo, p. 1 55.

8 ibid., P· I 57.

' 'Eshche raz Bazarov', 8o6ronit sochintnii, vo]. zo, pp. 3 3 5-50.

6 Letter to K. K. Sluchevsky, z6 April I 86z.

8 Letter of 1 8 April I 86z.

7 Letter to I. P. Borisov, 4 January I 87o.

8 Letter of 30 August I 874.

11 Letter to Marko Vovchok (Mme Markovich}, z7 August I 8liz.

288

FATHERS AND C H ILDREN

indignation at the mere mention of his name. '1 This was not mere

wounded amour propre: He suffered from a genuine sense of having

got himself into a politically false position. All his life he wished to

march with the progressives, with the party ofliberty and protest. But,

in the end, he could not bring himself to accept their brutal contempt

for art, civilised behaviour, for everything that he held dear in Eur�

pean culture. He hated their dogmatism, their arrogance, their

destructiveness, their appalling ignorance of life. He went abroad,

lived in Germany and France, and returned to Russia only on flying

visits. In the west he was universally praised and admired. But in the

end it was to Russians that he wished to speak. Although his popularity

with the Russian public in the I 86os, and at all times, was very great,

it was the radicals he most of all wanted to please. They were hostile

or unresponsive.

His next novel, Smoke, which he began immediately after the

publication of Fathers and Children, was a characteristic attempt to

staunch his wounds, to settle his account with all his opponents. It

was published five years later, in I 867, and contained a biting satire

directed at both camps: at the pompous, stupid, reactionary generals

and bureaucrats, and at the foolish, shallow, irresponsible left-wing

talkers, equally remote from reality, equally incapable of remedying

the ills of Russia. This provoked further onslaughts on him. This time

he was not surprised. 'They are all attacking me, Reds and Whites,

from above and below, and from the sides, especially from the sides.'1

The Polish rebellion of I 863 and, three years later, Karakozov's

attempt to assassinate the Emperor produced great waves of patriotic

feeling even within the ranks of the liberal Russian intelligentsia.

Turgenev was written off by the Russian critics, of both the right

and the left, as a disappointed man, an expatriate who no longer knew

his country from the distance of Baden-Baden and Paris. Dostoevsky

denounced him as a renegade Russian and advised him to procure a

telescope which might enable him to see Russia a little better.8

In the 70s he began nervously, in constant fear of being insulted

1 From the prose poem 'Uslyshish' sud gluptsa'. Quoted by P. Lavrov in

'I. S. Turgenev i razvitie russkogo obshchestva', Ye111rilt frtlrrJJ,oi rJo/i, vol. :z

(Geneva, I 884), p. I I9.

I Letter to Herzen, 4 June I 867.

3 See Dostoevsky's letter to the poet A. N. Maikov of :z8 August I 867

(quoted in N. M. Gutyar, op. cit. [P· :z86, note I above], pp. 337-40}.

••

2.89

RU SSIAN TH INKERS

and humiliated, to rebuild his relations with the left wing. To his

astonishment and relief, he was well received in Russian revolutionary

circles in Paris and London; his intelligence, his goodwill, his undiminished hatred for tsardom, his transparent honesty and fairmindedness, his warm sympathy with individual revolutionaries, his great charm, had its effect on their leaders. Moreover, he showed

courage, the courage of a naturally timorous man determined to overcome his terrors: he supported subversive publications with secret gifts of money, he took risks in openly meeting proscribed terrorists

shadowed by the police in Paris or London; this melted their resistance.

In 1 876 he published f'irgin Soil (which he intended as a continuation

of Fathtrs and Children) in a final attempt to explain himself to the

indignant young. 'The younger generation', he wrote in the following

year, 'have, so far, been represented in our literature either as a gang

of cheats and crooks . . . or . . . elevated into an ideal, which again is

wrong, and, what is more, harmful. I decided to find the middle way,

to come closer to the truth -to take young people, for the most pan

good and honest, and show that, in spite of their honesty, their cause

is so devoid of truth and life that it can only end in a total fiasco.

How far I have succeeded is not for me to say . . . But they must feel

my sympathy . . . if not for their goals, at least for their personalities. •1

The hero of f'irgin Soil, Nezhdanov, a failed revolutionary, ends by

committing suicide. He does so largely because his origins and character

make him incapable of adapting himself to the harsh discipline of a

revolutionary organisation, or to the slow and solid work of the true

hero of the novel, the practical reformer Solomin, whose quietly

ruthless labours within his own democratically organised factory will

create a more just social order. N ezhdanov is too civilised, too sensitive,

too weak, above all too complex, to fit into an austere, monastic, new

order: he thrashes about painfully, but, in the end, fails because he

'cannot simplify himself'; nor-and this (as Irving Howe has pointed

out)2 is the central point-could Turgenev. To his friend Yakov

Polonsky he wrote: 'If I was beaten with sticks for Fathers and

Children, for f'irgin Soil they will beat me with staves, from both sides,

as usual. '3 Three years later Katk.ov's newspaper again denounced him

1 Letter to M. M. Stasyulevich, 3 January 1 877.

1 See the excellent essay on Turgenev in Politiu a,id the NOflel (London,

1961).

• Letter o£ 23 November 1 876.

FATHERS AND C H I LD R E N

for 'performing clownish somersaults to please the young' .1 As always.

he replied at once: he had not. he said. altered his views by an iota

during the last fony years. 'I am. and have always been. a "gradualist".

an old-fashioned liberal in the English dynastic sense. a man expecting

reform rmly from above. I oppose revolution in principle . . • I should

regard it as unworthy of [our youth] and myself. to represent myself in

any other light. '1

By the late 70s his shoncomings had been forgiven by the left. His

moments of weakness, his constant attempts to justify himself before

the Russian authorities, his disavowals of relations with the exiles in

London or Paris-all these sins seem to have been all but forgotten. a

His charm, his sympathy for the persons and convictions of individual

revolutionaries, his truthfulness as a writer, won much goodwill

among the exiles. even though they harboured no illusions about the

extreme moderation of his views and his inveterate habit of taking

cover when the battle became too hot. He went on telling the radicals

that they were mistaken. When the old has lost authority and the new

works badly, what is needed is something that he spoke of in the

Nest of Gentlefolk: 'active patience, not without some cunning and

1 See B. Markevich (under the pseudonym 'lnogorodnyi obyvatel'), 'S

beregov Nevy', Moslwslie t1etlomosti, 9 December 1 879.

I Letter to Yestnik ErJropy (Tiu European Heraltl), 2 January 1 88o,

Solmznit sodzint11ii, vol. I S• p. 1 8 5.

a In I 863 he was summoned back from Paris to be interrogated by a

Senatorial Commission in St Petersburg abOut his relations with Herzen

and Bakunin. How could he have plotted with theae men, he protested, he

who was a life-long monarchist, a butt of bitter onslaughts by the 'Reds'?

After F atlzers and C/zildrtn, he assured the Senaton, his relations with

Herzen, which had never been very close, had been 'severed'. There was an

element of truth in this. But it was not perhaps surprising that Herzen (who

had not forgotten Turgenev's refusal to sign his and Ogarev's manifesto

criticising the shortcomings of the Act of Emancipation of the ser&) should,

characteristically, have referred to 'a white-haired Magdalen of the male sex'

who could not sleep at night for thinking that the Emperor might not have

heasd of her repentance. Turgenev and Herzen saw each other again in

later years, but never again on the same intimate terms. In 1 879 Turgenev

similarly hastened to deny all connection with Lavrov and his fellow revolutionaries. Lavrov, too, forgave him. (For Turgenev's relations with Lavrov and other revolutionary 4!migrt!s see P. L. Lavrov, 'I. S. Turgenev i razvitie

russkogo obshchestva', op. cit. [p. 2 89, note I above], pp. � 149, and Michel

Delines [M. 0. Ashkinazy], TOflrgol•tjfi11t01111fl [Paris, 1888], pp. S3-7 S·)

·'

291

R U S S IAN T H IN K E R S

ingenuity'. When the crisis i s upon us, 'when', i n his telling phrase,

'the incompetent come up against the unscrupulous', what is wanted is

practical good sense, not the absurd, nostalgic idyll of Herzen and the

populists, with their blind, idolatrous adoration of the peasant who is

the worst reactionary of the lot. He said over and over again that he

loathed revolution, violence, barbarism. He believed in slow progress,

made only by minorities 'if only they do not destroy each other'. As

for socialism, it was a fantasy. It is characteristic of Russians, says his

hero and mouthpiece, Potugin, in Smolte, 'to pick up an old, wornout shoe which long, long ago fell from the foot of a Saint-Simon or a Fourier, and, placing it reverently on one's head, to treat it as

a sacred object'. As for equality, to the revolutionary Lopatin he

said, 'We are not, all of us, really going to walk about in identical

yellow tunics a Ia Saint-Simon, all buttoned at the back?'1 Still, they

were the young, the party of freedom and generosity, the party of the

have-nots, of those in pain or at least in distress; he would not refuse

them his sympathy, his help, his love, even while all the time looking

over his shoulder guiltily at his right-wing friends to whom he tried

again and again to minimise his unceasing flirtation with the left. On

his visits to Moscow or St Petersburg he tried to arrange meetings

with groups of radical students. Sometimes the conve�tions went well,

at other times, particularly when he tried to charm them with his

reminiscences of the 40s, they tended to become bored, contemptuous,

and resentful. Even when they liked or admired him, he felt that a

gulf divided them, divided those who wanted to destroy the old world,

root and branch, from those who, like him, wished to save it, because

in a new world, created by fanaticism and violence, there might be

too little worth living for.

It was his irony, his tolerant scepticism, his lack of passion, his

'velvet touch', above all his determination to avoid too definite a social

or political commitment that, in the end, alienated both sides. Tolstoy

and Dostoevsky, despite their open opposition to 'the progressives',

embodied unshakeable principles and remained proud and selfconfident, and so never became targets for those who threw stones at Turgenev. His very gifts, his power of minute and careful observation,

his fascination with the varieties of character and situation as such, his

detachment, his inveterate habit of doing justice to the full complexity

1 See German Lopatin's reminiscences in 1. 8. Turge� fl fiDspomilltJtri­

Jillh rtrJDiy•tsi!JIIffllfJ-StmitksytJJIIii!Jfl (Moscow/Leningrad, 1930), p. u4.

:l-9:1

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

and diversity of goals, attitudes, beliefs-these seemed to them morally

self-indulgent and politically irresponsible. Like Montesquieu, he was

accused by the radicals of too much description, too little criticism.

Beyond all Russian writers, Turgenev possessed what Strakhov

described as his poetic and truthful genius-a capacity for rendering

the very multiplicity of interpenetrating human perspectives that

shade imperceptiblyintoeach other,nuancesofcharacterand behaviour,

motives and attitudes, undistorted by moral passion. The defence of

civilisation by the spoilt but intelligent Pavel Kirsanov is not a caricature, and carries a kind of conviction, while the defence of what are apparently the very same values by the worthless Panshin in the NtSt

ofGmtlifollt does not, and is not meant to do so; Lavretsky's Slavophil

feeling is moving and sympathetic; the populism of both the radicals

and the conservatives in Smoltt is-and is intended to be- repulsive.

This clear, finely discriminating, slightly ironical vision, wholly dissimilar from the obsessed genius of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, irritated all those who craved for primary colours, for certainty, who looked

to writers for moral guidance and found none in Turgenev's scrupulous,

honest, but-as it seemed to them-somewhat complacent ambivalence.

He seemed to enjoy his very doubts: he would not cut too deep. Both

his great rivals found this increasingly intolerable. Dostoevsky, who

began as an enthusiastic admirer, came to look on him as a smiling,

shallow, cosmopolitan pouur, a cold-hearted traitor to Russia. Tolstoy

thought him a gifted and truthful writer but a moral weakling, and

hopelessly blind to the deepest and most agonising spiritual problems

of mankind. To Herzen he was an amiable old friend, a gifted artist,

and a feeble ally, a reed that bent too easily before every storm, an

inveterate compromiser.

Turgenev could never bear his wounds in silence. He complained,

he apologised, he protested. He knew that he was accused of lack of

depth or seriousness or courage. The reception of Fathers and Children

continued to prey upon him. 'Seventeen years have passed since the

appearance of Fathers and Chi/drm,' he wrote in 1 88o, 'yet the attitude of the critics . . . has not become stabilised. Only last year, I happened to read in a journal apropos Bazarov, that I am nothing

but a bashi-bazouk1 who beats to death men wounded by others. '1

1 Barbarous Turkish mercenary.

• Preface to the 1 88o edition of his novels. Solmmit ID(IIifltflii, vo}. u,

PP· 3°7·8.

293

R U SSIAN T H INKERS

His sympathies, he insisted again and again, were with the victims,

never the oppressors-with peasants, students, artists, women, civilised

minorities, not the big battalions. How could his critics be so blindl As

for Bazarov, there was, of course, a great deal wrong with him, but

he was a better man than his detractors; it was easy enough to depict

radicals as men with rough exteriors and hearts of gold; 'the trick is

to make Bazarov a wild wolf, and still manage to justify him • . .'1

The one step Turgenev refused to take was to seek an alibi in the

doctrine of art for art's sake. He did not say, as he might easily have

done, 'I am an artist, not a pamphleteer; I write fiction, which must

not be judged by social or political criteria; my opinions are my private

affair; you don't drag Scott or Dickens or Stendhal or even Flaubert

before your ideological tribunals-why don't you leave me alone?' He

never seeks to deny the social responsibility of the writer; the doctrine

of social commitment was instilled into him once and for all by his

adored friend Belinsky, and from it he never wholly departed. This

social concern colours even his most lyrical writing, and it was this

that broke through the reserve of the revolutionaries he met abroad.

These men knew perfectly well that Turgenev was genuinely at his

ease only with old friends of his own class, men who held views that

could not conceivably be described as radical-with civilised liberals or

country squires with whom he went duck-shooting whenever he

could. Nevertheless, the revolutionaries liked him because he liked

them, because he sympathised with their indignation : 'I know I am

only a stick they use to beat the Government with, but' (at this point,

according to the exiled revolutionary Lopatin, who reports this conversation, he made an appropriate gesture) 'let them do it, I am only too glad.'1 Above all, they felt drawn to him because he was responsive

to them as individuals and did not treat them simply as representatives

of parties or oudooks. This was, in a sense, paradoxical, for it was

precisely individual social or moral characteristics that, in theory, these

men tried ·to ignore; they believed in objective analysis, in judging men

sociologically, in terms of the role that, whatever their conscious

motives, they played (whether as individuals or as members of a social

class) in promoting or obstructing desirable human ends-scientific

knowledge, or the emancipation of women, or economic progress, or

the revolution.

1 Letter to Herzen, 28 April J 862.

t G. Lopatin, op. cit. (p. 292, note 1 above), p. 1 26.

:l-94

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

This was the very attitude that Turgenev recoiled from; it was

what he feared in Bazarov and the revolutionaries of Pirgin SDil.

Turgenev, and liberals generally, saw tendencies, political attitudes,

as functions of human beings, not human beings as functions of social

tendencies.1 Acts, ideas, art, literature were expressions of individuals,

not of objective forces of which the actors or thinkers were merely

the embodiments. The reduction of men to the function of being

primarily carriers or agents of impersonal forces was as deeply repellent

to Turgenev as it had been to Henen or, in his later phases, to his

revered friend Belinsky. To be treated with so much sympathy and

understanding, and indeed affection, as human beings and not primarily

as spokesmen for ideologies, was a nre enough experience, a kind of

luxury, for Russian revolutionary exiles abroad. This alone goes some

way to account for the fact that men like Stepnyak, Lopatin, Lavrov

and Kropotkin responded warmly to so understanding, and, moreover,

so delightful and so richly gifted a man as Turgenev. He gave them

secret subsidies but made no intellectual concessions. He believed-this

was his 'old-fashioned' liberalism in the 'English dynastic (he meant

constitutional] sense'1-that only education, only gradual methods,

'industry, patience, self-sacrifice, without glitter, without noise,

homoeopathic injections of science and culture' could improve the

lives of men. He shook and shivered under the ceaseless criticisms to

which he had exposed himself, but, in his own apologetic way, refused

to 'simplify' himself. He went on believing-perhaps this was a relic

of his Hegelian youth- that no issue was dosed for ever, that every

thesis must be weighed against its antithesis, that systems and absolutes

of every kind-social and political no less than religious-were a form

of dangerous idolatry;3 above all, one must never go to war unless

and until all that one believes in is at stake and there is literally no

other way out. Some of the fanatical young men responded with

1 For this excellent formulation of the distinction between liberals and

radicals see Tilt Positiflt Htro i11 Ruui1111 Littrllturt, by R. W. Mathewson

(New York, 1 958).

I Letter to Yt1111ilt. Ef!ropy (see above, p. 29 1, note z). See also the )etten

to Stasyulevich (p. 290, note 1 above), and to Herzen of 2 5 November I 86z,

and F. V olkhovsky's article, 'I van Sergeevich Turgenev', Frtt Russi11, vol.

9 No 4 ( 1 898), pp. z�.

a See the letters to Countess Lambert in 1 864, and to the writer M. A.

Milyutina in 1 875, quoted with much other rdevant material in V. N.

Gorbacheva, Mo/oJyt goJy Turgt11tf!ll (Kazan, 1926).

..

295

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

genuine regard and, at 'times, profound admiration. A young radical

wrote in 1 883 'Turgenev is dead. If Shchedrin1 should die too, then

one might as well go down to the grave alive . . . For us these men

replaced parliament, meetings, life, liberty !'1 A hunted member of a

terrorist organisation, in a tribute illegally published on the day of

Turgenev's funeral, wrote 'A gentleman by birth, an aristocrat by upbringing and character, a gradualist by conviction, Turgenev, perhaps without knowing it himself . . • sympathised with, and even served,

the Russian revolution. '3 The special police precautions at Turgenev's

funeral were clearly not wholly superfluous.

I I I

I t is time that Satums ceased dining off their children;

time, too, that children stopped devouring their parents

like the natives of Kamchatka.

Alexander Herzen'

Critical turning-points in history tend to occur, we are told, when a

form of life and its institutions are increasingly felt to cramp and

obstruct the most vigorous productive forces alive in a societyeconomic or social, artistic or intellectual-and it has not enough strength to resist them. Against such a social order, men and groups

of very different tempers and classes and conditions unite. There is an

upheaval-a revolution-which, at times, achieves a limited success. It

reaches a point at which some of the demands or interests of its

original promoters are satisfied to an extent which makes further

fighting on their part unprofitable. They stop, or struggle uncertainly.

The alliance disintegrates. The most passionate and single-minded,

especially among those whose purposes or ideals are furthest from

fulfilment, wish to press on. To stop half-way seems to them a betrayal.

The sated groups, or the less visionary, or those who fear that the old

yoke may be followed by an even more oppressive one, tend to hang

back. They find themselves assailed on two sides. The conservatives

look on them as, at best, knock-kneed supporters, at worst as deserters

1 The satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin;

1 Littrahlmoe 11as/ttislrlo, vol. 76, p. 33 2, and I. 8. TurgtnnJ eo eoospomillatJi·

yalll sourtmtnniloeo, vol. I, Introduction, p. 36.

• The author of the pamphlet was P. F. Yakubovich (quoted in Turgtneeo

eo nmloi hitilt, p. 401).

' 8o6ranit sod1intnii, vol. 10, p. 3 19.

296

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

and traitors. The radicals look on them as pusillanimous allies, more

often as diversionists and renegades.

Men of this sort need a good deal of courage to resist magnetisation

by either polar force and to urge moderation in a disturbed situation.

Among them are those who see, and cannot help seeing, many sides

of a case, as well as those who perceive that a humane cause promoted

by means that are too ruthless is in danger of turning into its opposite,

liberty into oppression in the name of liberty, equality into a new,

self-perpetuating oligarchy to defend equality, justice into crushing of

all forms of nonconformity, love of men into hatred of those who

oppose brutal methods of achieving it. The middle ground is a

notoriously exposed, dangerous, and ungrateful position. The complex

position of those who, in the thick of the fight, wish to continue to

speak to both sides is often interpreted as softness, trimming, opportunism, cowardice. Yet this description, which may apply to some men, was not true of Erasmus; it was not true of Montaigne; it was

not true of Spinoza, when he agreed to talk to the French invader of

Holland; it was not true of the best representatives of the Gironde,

or of some among the defeated liberals in 1 848, or of stout-hearted

members of the European left who did not side with the Paris Commune in 1 8 7 1 . It was not weakness or cowardice that prevented the Mensheviks from joining Lenin in 1 9 1 7, or the unhappy German

socialists from turning Communist in 1 932.

The ambivalence of such moderates, who are not prepared to break

their principles or betray the cause in which they believe, has become

a common feature of political life after the last war. This stems, in

part, from the historic position of nineteenth-century liberals for whom

the enemy had hitherto always been on the right-monarchists,

clericals, aristocratic supporters of political or economic oligarchies,

men whose rule promoted, or was indifferent to, poverty, ignorance,

injustice and the exploitation and degradation of men. The natural

inclination of liberals has been, and still is, towards the left, the party

of generosity and humanity, towards anything that destroys barriers

between men. Even after the inevitable split they tend to be deeply

reluctant to believe that there can be real enemies on the left. They

may feel morally outraged by the resort to brutal violence by some of

their allies; they protest that such methods will distort or destroy the

common goal. The Girondins were driven into this position in 1 792;

liberals like Heine or Lamartine in 1 848; Mazzini, and a good many

socialists, of whom Louis Blanc was the most representative, were

..

297

R U S SIAN T HI N K E R S

repelled by the methods of the Paris Commune of 1 87 1 . These crises

passed. Breaches were healed. Ordinary politial warfare was

resumed. The hopes of the moderates began to revive. The desperate

dilemmas in which they found themselves could be viewed as being

due to moments of sudden aberration which could not last. But in

Russia, from the 1 86os until the revolution of 191 7, this uneasy

feeling, made more painful by periods of repression and horror, became

a chronic condition -a long, unceasing malaise of the entire enlightened

section of society. The dilemma of the liberals became insoluble, They

wished to destroy the regime which seemed to them wholly evil. They

believed in reason, secularism, the rights of the individual, freedom

of speech, of association, of opinion, the liberty of groups and races

and nations, greater social and economic equality, above all in the rule

of justice. They admired the selfless dedication, the purity of motive,

the martyrdom of those, no matter how extremist, who offered their

lives for the violent overthrow of the status quo. But they feared

that the losses entailed by terrorist or Jacobin methods might be

irreparable, and greater than any possible gains; they were horrified by the fanaticism and barbarism of the extreme left, by its contempt for the only culture that they knew, by its blind faith in what seemed to them Utopian fantasies, whether anarchist or populist or

.

Marxist.

These Russians believed in European civilisation as converts

believe in a newly acquired faith. They could not bring themselves

to contemplate, still less to sanction, the destruction of much that

seemed to them of infinite value for themselves and for all men in

the past, even the tsarist past. Caught between two armies, denounced

by both, they repeated their mild and rational words without much

genuine hope of being heard by either side. They remained obstinately

reformist and non-revolutionary. Many suffered from complex forms

of guilt: they sympathised more deeply with the goals upon their left;

but, spumed by the radials, they tended to question, like the selfcritial, open-minded human beings that they were, the validity of their own positions; they doubted, they wondered, they felt tempted,

from time to time, to jettison their enlightened principles and find

peace by conversion to a revolutionary faith, above all by submission

to the domination of the zealots. To stretch themselves upon a

comfortable bed of dogma would, after all, save them from being

plagued by their own uncertainties, from the terrible suspicion that

the simple solutions of the extreme left might, in the end, be as

7.98

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

irrational and as repressive as the nationalism, or elitism, or mysticism

of the right. Moreover, despite all its shortcomings the left still seemed

to them to stand for a more human faith than the frozen, bureaucratic,

heartless right, if only because it was always better to be with the

persecuted than with the persecutors. But there was one conviction

which they never abandoned : they knew that evil means destroyed

good ends. They knew that to extinguish existing liberties, civilised

habits, rational behaviour, to abolish them today, in the belief that,

like a phoenix, they would arise in a purer and more glorious form

tomorrow, was to fall into a terrible snare and delusion. Herzen told

his old friend, the anarchist Bakunin, in 1 869 that to order the intellect

to stop because its fruits might be misused by the enemy, to arrest

science, invention, the progress of reason, until men were made pure

by the fires of a total revolution-until 'we are free' -was nothing but

a self-destructive fallacy. 'One cannot stop intelligence', Herzen wrote

in his last and magnificent essay, 'because the majority lacks understanding, while the minority makes evil use of it . . . Wild cries to close books, abandon science, and go to some senseless battle of

destruction-that is the most violent and harmful kind of demagoguery.

It will be followed by the eruption of the most savage passions . • . No!

Great revolutions are not achieved by the unleashing of evil passions

.

I

. .

do not believe in the seriousness of men who prefer crude force

and destruction to development and arriving at settlements • • . '1 and

then, in an insufficiently remembered phrase, 'One must open men's

eyes, not tear them out. '1 Bakunin had declared that one must first

clear the ground: then we shall see. That savoured to Herzen of the

dark ages of barbarism. In this he spoke for his entire generation in

Russia. This is what Turgenev, too, felt and wrote during the last

twenty years of his life. He declared that he was a European; western

culture was the only culture that he knew; this was the banner under

which be had marched as a young man: it was his banner still.8_ His

spokesman is Potugin in Smoit, when he says 'I am devoted to

Europe, or to be more precise to • . . civilisation . . . this word is pure

and holy, while other words, "folk", for example, or . • • yes, or

"glory", smell of blood . . .' His condemnation of political mysticism

1 'K ataromu tovarishchu', Fourth Letter, 1 869, Bllllrfltlit 111'11;,,,;;, vol.

zo, PP· 59z-3.

I ibid., P· 593·

• Letter to Herzen of zs November 1 86z.

..

299

R U S S IAN T HINKERS

and irrationalism, populist and Slavophil, conservative or anarchist,

remained absolute.

But short of this, these 'men of the 40s' were less sure: to support

the left in its excesses went against the civilised grain; but to go against

it, or even to remain indifferent to its fate, to abandon it to the forces

of reaction, seemed even more unthinkable. The moderates hoped,

against all evidence, that the ferocious anti-intellectualism, which,

liberals in Russia told Turgenev, was spreading like an infectious

disease among the young, the contempt for painting, music, books,

the mounting political terrorism, . were passing excesses due to immaturity, lack of education; they were results of a long frustration; they would disappear once the pressures that had generated them

were removed. Consequently they explained away the violent language

and the violent acts of the extreme left, and continued to support the

uneasy alliance.

This painful conflict, which became the permanent predicament

of the Russian liberals for half a century, has now grown world-wide.

We must be clear: it is not the Baza.rovs who are the champions of

the rebellion today. In a sense, the Bazarovs have won. The victorious

advance of quantitative methods, belief in the organisation of human

lives by technological management, reliance on nothing but calculation

of utilitarian consequences in evaluating policies that affect vast

numbers of human beings, this is Bazarov, not the Kirsanovs. The

triumphs of the calm moral arithmetic of cost-effectiveness which

liberates decent men from qualms, because they no longer think of

th.! entities to which they apply their scientific computations as actual

human .beings who live the lives and suffer the deaths of concrete

individuals-this, today, is rather more typical of the establishment

than of the opposition. The suspicion of all that is qualitative, imprecise,

unanalysable, yet precious to men, and its relegation to Bazarov's

obsolete, intuitive, pre-scientific rubbish heap, has, by a strange

paradox, stirred both the anti-rationalist right and the irrationalist left

to an equally vehement opposition to the technocratic establishment

in the middle. From their opposed standpoints the extreme left and

the extreme right see such efforts to rationalise social life as a terrible

threat to what both sides regard as the deepest human values. If

Turgenev were living at this hour, the young radicals whom he

would wish to describe, and perhaps to please, are those who wish to

rescue men from the reign of those very. 'sophisters, economists, and

calculators' whose coming Burke lamented-those who ignore or

300

FATHERS AND C H I LD REN

despise what men are and what they live by. The new insurgents of

our time favour-so far as they a.n bring themselves to be at all

coherent-something like a vague species of the old, natural law. They

want to build a society in which men treat one another as human

beings with unique claims to self-expression, however undisciplined

and wild, not as producing or consuming units in a centralised, worldwide, self-propelling social mechanism. Bazarov's progeny has won, and it is the descendants of the defeated, despised 'superfluous men',

of the Rudins and Kirsanovs and N ezhdanovs, of Chekhov's muddled,

pathetic students and cynical, broken doctors, who are today preparing

to man the revolutionary barricades. Yet the similarity with Turgenev's

predicament does hold: the modern rebels believe, as Bazarov and

Pisarev and Bakunin believed, that the first requirement is the clean

sweep, the total destruction of the present system; the rest is not their

business. The future must look after itself. Better anarchy than

prison; there is nothing in between. This violent cry meets with a

similar response in the breasts of our contemporary Shubins and

Kirsanovs and Potugins, the small, hesitant, self�ritical, not always

very brave, band of men who occupy a position somewhere to the

left of centre, and are morally repelled both by the hard faces to their

right and the hysteria and mindless violence and demagoguery on

their left. Like the men of the 40s, for whom Turgenev spoke, they

are at once horrified and fascinated. They are shocked by the violent

irrationalism of the dervishes on the left, yet they are not prepared to

reject wholesale the position of those who claim to represent the young

and the disinherited, the indignant champions of the poor and the

socially deprived or repressed. This is the notoriously unsatisfactory,

at times agonising, position of the modern heirs of the liberal tradition.

'I understand the reasons for the anger which my book provoked

in a certain party,' wrote Turgenev just over a hundred years ago.

'A shadow has fallen upon my name . . . But is this really of the slightest

importance? Who, in twenty or thirty years' time, will remember all

these storms in a teacup, or indeed my name, with or without a

shadow�'1 Turgenev's name still lies under a shadow in his native

land. His artistic reputation is not in question; it is as a social thinker

that he is still today the subject of a continuing dispute. The situation

that he diagnosed in novel after novel, the painful predicament of the

believers in liberal western values, a predicament once thought

1 op. cit. (p. :z8z, note :z above), p. I S9·

JO I

R U SS IAN THINKERS

peculiarly Russian, is today familiar everywhere. So, too, is his own

oscillating, uncertain position, his horror of reactionaries, his fear of

the barbarous radicals, mingled with a pasllionate anxiety to be understood and approved of by the ardent young. Still more familiar is his inability, despite his greater sympathy for the patty of protest, to cross

over unreservedly to either side ·in the conflict of ideas, classes, and,

above all, generations. The figure of the well-meaning, troubled, selfquestioning liberal, witness to the complex truth, which, as a literary type, Turgenev virtually created in his own image, has today become

universal. These are the men who, when the battle grows too hot,

tend either to stop their ears to the terrible din, or attempt to promote

armistices, save lives, aven chaos.

As for the storm in a teacup, of which Turgenev spoke, so far from

being forgotten, it blows over the entire world today. If the inner life,

the ideas, the moral predicament of men matter at all in explaining

the course of human history, then Turgeriev's novels, especially

Fathtrs and Childrm, quite apan from their literary qualities, are as

basic a document for the understanding of the Russian past and of our

present as the plays of Aristophanes for the understanding of classical

Athens, or Cicero's letters, or novels by Dickens or George Eliot, for

the understanding of Rome and Victorian England.

Turgenev may have loved Bazarov; he certainly trembled before

him. He understood, and to a degree sympathized with, the case

presented by the new J acobins, but he could not bear to think of what

their feet would trample. 'We have the same credulity', he wrote in the

mid-1 86os, 'and the same cruelty; the same hunger for blood, gold,

filth . . . the same meaningless suffering in the name of . . . the same

nonsense as that which Aristophanes mocked at two thousand years

ago • . .'1 And an? And beauty? 'Yes, these are powerful words . . .

The P mus of Milo is less open to question than Roman Law or the

principles of 1 789'1-yet she, too, and the works of Goethe and

Beethoven would perish. Cold-eyed Isis-as he calls nature-'has no

cause for haste. Soon or late, she will have the upper hand . . . she

knows nothing of an or liberty, as she does not know the good • . .'3

1 Quoted from DIJtJol',o, an address read by him in r 86+o which was later

caricatured by Dostoevsky in Tile Posstsml. See So!Jra,it rod1i,t11ii, vol. 9•

PP· I I B-19.

I ibid., P· 1 19.

I ibid., P· I ZO.

JO:I

FATHERS AND C H I LDREN

But why must men hurry so zealously to help her with her work of

turning all to dustl Education, only education, can retard this painful

process, for our civilisation is far from exhausted yet.

Civilisation, humane culture, meant more to the Russians, latecomers to Hegel's feast of the spirit, than to the blase natives of the west. Turgenev clung to it more passionately, was more conscious of

its precariousness, than even his friends Flaubert and Renan.But unlike

them, he discerned behind the philistine bourgeoisie a far more furious

opponent-the young iconoclasts bent on the total annihilation of his

world in the certainty that a new and more just world would emerge.

He understood the best among these Robespierres, as Tolstoy, or even

Dostoevsky, did not. He rejected their methods, he thought their goals

naive and grotesque, but his hand would not rise against them if this

meant giving aid and comfort to the generals and the bureaucrats. He

offered no clear way out: only gradualism and education, only reason.

Chekhov once said that a writer's business was not to provide solutions,

only to describe a situation so truthfully, do such justice to all sides

of the question, that the reader could no longer evade it. The doubts

Turgenev raised have not been stilled. The dilemma of morally

sensitive, honest, and intellectually responsible men at a time of acute

polarisation of opinion has, since his time, grown acute and worldwide. The predicament of what, for him, was only the 'educated section' of a country then scarcely regarded as fully European, has

come to be that of men in every class of society in our day. He recognised it in its earlier beginnings, and described it with incomparable sharpness of vision, poetry, and truth.

Appendix

As an illustration of the political atmosphere in Russia in the 1 87os

and 8os, especially with regard to the mounting wave of political

terrorism, the account that follows of a conversation with Dostoevsky

by his editor, A. S. Suvorin, may be of interest. Both Suvorin and

'Dostoevsky were loyal supporters of the autocracy and were looked

upon by liberals, not without reason, as strong and irredeemable

reactionaries. Suvorin's periodical, Ntw Timts (NovrJt vrtmyo), was

the best edited and most powerful extreme right-wing journal published

in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the

..

R U S S IAN THINKERS

twentieth century. Suvorin's political position gives particular point

to this entry in his diary .1

On the day of the attempt by Mlodetsky1 on Loris Melikov I

was with F. M. Dostoevsky.

He lived in a shabby little apartment. I found him sitting by a

small round table in the drawing-room, he was rolling cigarettes;

his face was like that of someone who had just emerged from a

Russian bath, from a shelf on which he had been steaming himself

. . . I probably did not manage to conceal my surprise, because he

gave me a look and after greeting me, said 'I have just had an attack.

I am glad, very glad, to see you' and went on rolling his cigarettes.

Neither he nor I knew anything about the attempted assassination.

But our conversation presently turned to political crimes in general,

and a [recent] explosion in the Winter Palace in particular. In the

course of talking about this, Dostoevsky commented on the odd

attitude of the public to these crimes. Society seemed to sympathise

with them, or, it might be truer to say, was not too clear about how

to look upon them. 'Imagine', he said, 'that you and I are standing

by the window of Datsiaro's shop and looking at the pictures. A

man is standing near us, and pretending to look too. He seems to be

waiting for something, and keeps looking round. Suddenly another

man comes up to him hurriedly and says, "The Winter Palace will

be blown up very soon. I've set the machine." We hear this. You

must imagine that we hear it-that these people are so excited that

they pay no attention to their surroundings or how far their voices

amy. How would we act? Would we go to the Winter Palace to

warn them about the explosion, would we go to the police, or get

the corner constable to arrest these men? Would you do this?'

'No, I would not.'

'Nor would I. Why not? After all, it is dreadful; it is a crime.

We should have forestalled it.8 This is what I had been thinking

about before you came in, while I was rolling my cigarettes. I

went over all the reasons that might have made me do this. Weighty,

solid reasons. Then I considered the reasons that would have stopped

me from doing it. They are absolutely trivial. Simply fear of being

1 Dntr�niA A. S. Suflorina, ed. M. G. Krichevsky (Moscow/Petrograd,

1923). PP· I s-r 6. This entry for r 887 is the first in the diary of Dostoevsky's

(and Chekhov's) friend and publisher.

1 lppolit Mlodetsky made his attempt on the life of the head of the

Government on :zo February r 88o,some weeks after the failure ofKhalturin's

attempt to kill the Tsar. He was hanged two days la,ter.

• The Russian word can also mean 'give warning'.

JO.of.

FAT H E R S A N D C H I LD R E N

thought an informer. I imagined how I might come, the kind of

look I might get from them, how I might be interrogated, perhaps

confronted with someone, be offered a reward, or, maybe, suspected

of complicity. The newspapers might say that "Dostoevsky identified the criminals." Is this my affair? It is the job of the police. This is what they have to do, what they are paid for. The liberals would