From Russian Thinkers (1978) by Isaiah Berlin

A Remarkable Decade

Lecture 1

THE BIRTH OF THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA

I

My title- ‘A Remarkable Decade’ - and my subject are both taken from a long essay in which the nineteenth-century Russian critic and literary historian. Pavel Annenkov, described his friends more than thirty years after the period with which he deals. Annenkov was an agreeable. Intelligent, and exceedingly civilised man, and a most understanding and dependable friend. He was not, perhaps, a very profound critic, nor was the range of his learning wide- he was a scholarly dilettante, a traveller about Europe who liked to meet eminent men, an eager and observant intellectual tourist.

It is clear that in addition to his other qualities he possessed considerable personal charm. so much, indeed, that he even succeeded in captivating Karl Marx, who wrote him at least one letter considered important by Marxists on the subject of Proudhon. Indeed, has left us an. exceedingly vivid description of the physical appearance and ferocious intellectual manner of the young Marx- an admirably detached and ironical vignette, perhaps the best portrait of him that has survived.

It is true that, after he went back to Russia, Annenkov lost interest in Marx, who was so deeply snubbed and hurt by this desertion by a man on whom he thought he had made an indelible impression, that in after years he expressed himself with extreme bitterness about the Russian intellectual flaneurs who fluttered around him in Paris in the 40s, but turned out not to have any serious intentions after all. But although not very loyal to the figure of Marx, Annekov did retain the friendship of his compatriots Belinsky, Turgenev, and Herzen to the end of his days. And it is about them that he is most interesting.

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'A Remarkable Decade' is a description by him of the life of some among the early members- the original founders- of the Russian intelligentsia, between 1838 and 1848, when they were all young men, some still at the university, some just emerged from it. The subject is of more than literary or psychological interest because these early Russian intellectuals created something which was destined ultimately to have world-wide social and political consequences. The largest single effect of the movement, I think it would be fair to say, was the Russian Revolution itself. These revoltes early Russian intellectuals set the moral tone for the kind of talk and action which continued throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries until the final climax in 1917.

It is true that the Russian Revolution{and no event had been more discussed and speculated about during the century which preceded it, not even the great French Revolution) did not follow the lines that most of these writers and talkers had anticipated. Yet despite the tendency to minimise the importance of such activity by such thinkers as, for exarnple Tolstoy or Karl marx, general ideas do have great influence. The Nazis seemed to grasp this fact when they took care at once to eliminate intellectual leaders in conquered countries, as likely to be among the most dangerous figures in their path; to this degree they had analysed history correctly. But whatever may be thought about the part played by thought in affecting human lives, it would be idle to deny that the influence of ideas- and in particular of philosophical ideas- at the beginning of the nineteenth century did make a considerable difference to what happened later. Without the kind of outlook of which, for example, the Hegelian philosophy, then so prevalent, was both the cause and the symptom. a great deal of what happened might, perhaps, either not have happened, or else have happened differently. Consequently, the chief importance of these writers and thinkers, historically speaking, lies in the fact that they set in train ideas destined to have cataclysmic effects not merely in Russia itself, but far beyond her borders.

And these men have more specific claims to fame. It is difficult to imagine that that Russian literature of the mid-century, and. in particular, the great Russian novels, could have come into being save for the specific atmosphere which these men created and promoted. The works of Turgenev. Tolstoy. Goncharov. Dostoevsky, and of minor novelists too, are penetrated with a. sense of their own time, of this or that particular social and historical milieu and its ideological

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Content, to an even higher degree than the 'social' novels of the west. To this topic I propose to revert later.

Lastly, they invented social criticism. This may seem a very bold and even absurd claim to make; but by social criticism I do not mean the appeal to standards of judgment which involve a view of literature and art as having, or as obliged to have, a primarily didactic purpose; nor yet the kind of criticism developed by romantic essayists, especially in Germany, in which heroes or villains are regarded as quintessential types of humanity and examined as such; nor yet the critical process (in which the French in particular showed superlative skill) which attempts to reconstruct the process of artistic creation mainly by analysing the social, spiritual and psychological environment and the origins and economic position of the artist, rather than his purely artistic methods or character or specific quality; although, to some degree, the Russian intellectuals did all this too.

Social criticism in this sense had, of course, been practised before them, and far more professionally, scrupulously and profoundly, by critics in the west. The kind of social criticism that I mean is the method virtually invented by the great Russian essayist Belinsky- the kind of criticism in which the line between life and art is of set purpose not too clearly drawn; in which praise and blame, love and hatred, admiration and contempt are freely expressed both for artistic forms and for the human characters drawn, both for the personal qualities of authors and for the content of their novels, and the criteria involved in such attitudes, whether consciously or implicitly, are identical with those in terms of which living human beings are in everyday life judged or described.

This is, of course, a type of criticism which has itself been much criticised. It is accused of confusing art with life, and thereby derogating from the purity of art. Whether these Russian critics did perpetrate this confusion or not, they introduced a new attitude towards the novel, derived from their particular outlook on life. This outlook later came to be defined as that peculiar to members of the intelligentsia- and the young radicals of 1838-48, Belinsky, Turgenev, Bakunin, Herzen, whom Annenkov so devotedly describes in his book, are its true original founders. “Intelligentsia” is a Russian word invented in the nineteenth century, that has since acquired worldwide significance. The phenomenon itself, with its historical and literally revolutionary consequences, is, I suppose, the largest single Russian contribution to social change in the world.

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The concept of intelligentsia must not be confused with the notion of intellectuals. Its members thought of themselves as united by something more than mere interest in ideas; they conceived themselves as being a dedicated order, almost a secular priesthood, devoted to the spreading of a specific attitude to life, something like a gospel. Historically their emergence requires some explanation.

II

Most Russian historians are agreed that the great social schism between the educated and the 'dark folk' in Russian history sprang from the wound inflicted on Russian society by Peter the Great, In his reforming zeal Peter sent selected young men into the western world, and when they had acquired the languages of the west and the various new arts and skills which sprang from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, brought them back to become the leaders of that new social order which, with ruthless and violent haste, he imposed upon his feudal land. In this way he created a small class of new men, half Russian, half foreign-educated abroad, even if they were Russian by birth; these, in due course, became a small managerial and bureaucratic oligarchy, set above the people, no longer sharing in their still medieval culture; cut off from them irrevocably. The government of this large and unruly nation became constantly more difficult, as social and economic conditions in Russia increasingly diverged from the progressing west. With the widening of the gulf, greater and greater repression had to be exercised by the ruling elite. The small group of governors thus grew more and more estranged from the people they were set to govern.

The rhythm of government in Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is one of alternate repression and liberalisation. Thus, when Catherine the Great felt that the yoke was growing too heavy, or the appearance of things became too barbarous, she relaxed the brutal rigidity of the despotism and was duly acclaimed by Voltaire and Grimm. When this seemed to lead to too much sudden stirring from within, too much protest, and too many educated persons began to compare conditions in Russia unfavourably with conditions in the west, she scented the beginnings of something subversive; the French Revolution finally terrified her; she clamped down again. Once more the regime grew stem and repressive.

The situation scarcely altered in the reign of Alexander I.

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The vast majority of the inhabitants of Russia still lived in a feudal darkness with a weak and, on the whole, ignorant priesthood exercising relatively little moral authority, while a large army of fairly faithful and at times not inefficient bureaucrats pressed down on the more and more recalcitrant peasantry. Between the oppressors and the oppressed there existed a small cultivated class,largely French-speaking, aware of the enormous gap between the way in which life could be lived or was lived in the west and the way in which it was lived by the Russian masses. They were, for the most part, men acutely conscious of the difference between justice and injustice, civilisation and barbarism, but aware also that conditions were too difficult to alter, that they had too great a stake in the regime themselves, and that reform might bring the whole structure toppling down. Many among them were reduced either to an easy-going quasi-Voltairean cynicism, at once subscribing to liberal principles and whipping their serfs; or to noble, eloquent and futile despair.

This situation altered with the invasion of Napoleon, which brought Russia into the middle of Europe. Almost overnight. Russia found herself a great power in the heart of Europe, conscious of her crushing strength. dominating the entire scene, and accepted by Europeans with some terror and great reluctance, as not merely equal but superior to them in sheer brute force.

The triumph over Napoleon and the march to Paris were events in the history of Russian ideas as vitally important as the reforms of Peter. They made Russia aware of her national unity, and generated in her a sense of herself as a great European nation, recognised as such, as being no longer a despised collection of barbarians teeming behind a Chinese wall, sunk in medieval darkness, half-heartedly and clumsily imitating foreign models. Moreover, since the long Napoleonic war had brought about great and lasting patriotic fervour, and, as a result of a general participation in a common ideal, an increase in the feeling of equality between the orders, a number of relatively idealistic young men began to feel new bonds between themselves and their nation which their education could not by itself have inspired. The growth of patriotic nationalism brought with it, as its inevitable concomitant. A growth of the feeling of responsibility for the chaos, the squalor, the poverty, the inefficiency, the brutality, the appalling disorder in Russia. This general moral uneasiness affected the least sentimental and perceptive, the hardest-hearted of the semi-civilised members of the ruling class.

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III

There were other factors which contributed to this collective sense of guilt. One, certainly, was the coincidence (for coincidence it was) of the rise of the romantic movement with the entrance of Russia into Europe. One of the cardinal romantic doctrines (connected with the

cognate doctrines that history proceeds according to discoverable laws or patterns, and that the nations are unitary organisms not mere not mere collections, and 'evolve' in an 'organic', not a mechanical or haphazard fashion) is that everything in the world is as and where and when it

is because it participates in a single universal purpose. Romanticism encourages the idea that not only individuals but groups, and not only groups but institutions- states, churches, professional bodies, associations that have ostensibly been created for definite, often purely

utilitarian purposes- come to be possessed by a ‘spirit’ of which they themselves might well be unaware- awareness of which is, indeed, the very process of enlightenment.

The doctrine that every human being, country, race, institution has its own unique, individual, inner purpose which is itself an 'organic' element in the wider purpose of all that exists, and that in becoming conscious of that purpose it is, by this very fact, participating in the march towards light and freedom this secular version of an ancient religious belief powerfully impressed the minds of the young Russians. They imbibed it all the more readily as a result of two causes, one material, one spiritual.

The material cause was the unwillingness of the government to let its subjects travel to France, which was thought of, particularly after 1830, as a chronically revolutionary country, liable to perpetual upheavals, blood-letting, violence and chaos. By contrast, Germany lay peaceful under the heel of a very respectable despotism. Consequently, young Russians were encouraged to go to German universities, where they would obtain a sound training in civic principles that would, so it was supposed, make them still more faithful servants of the Russian autocracy.

The result was the exact opposite. Crypto-francophile sentiment in Germany itself was at this time so violent, and enlightened Germans themselves believed in ideas- in this case those of the French enlightenment- so much more intensely and fanatically than the French themselves, that the young Russian Anacharsises who dutifully went to Germany were infected by dangerous ideas far more violently there

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than they could ever have been had they gone to Paris in the easy- going early years of Louis Philippe. The government of Nicholas I could hardly have foreseen the chasm into which it was destined to fall.

If this was the first cause of romantic ferment, the second was its direct consequence. The young Russians who had travelled to Germany, or read German books, became possessed with the simple idea that if, as ultramontane Catholics in France and nationalists in Germany were. sedulously maintaining, the French Revolution and the decadence that followed were scourges sent upon the people for abandoning their ancient faith and ways, the Russians were surely free from these vices, since whatever else might be true of them, no revolution had been visited upon them. The German romantic historians were particularly zealous in preaching the view that if the west was declining because of its scepticsm, its rationalism. its materialism, and its abandonment of its own spiritual tradition, then the Germans, who had not suffered this melancholy fate should be viewed as a fresh and youthful nation, with habits uncontaminated by the corruption of Rome in decay, barbarous indeed, but full of violent energy, about to come into the inheritance falling from the feeble hands of the French.

The Russians merely took this process of reasoning one step further. They rightly judged that if youth, barbarism, and lack of education were criteria of a glorious future, they had an even more powerful hope of it than the Germans. Consequently, the vast outpouring of German romantic rhetoric about the unexhausted forces of the Germans and the unexpended German language with its pristine purity and the young unwearied German nation, directed as it was against the ‘impure’, latinised decadent western nations was received in Russia with understandable enthusiasm. Moreover. it stimulated a wave of social idealism which began to possess all classes, from the early 20s of the century until well into the early 40s. The proper task of a man was to dedicate himself to the ideal for which his ‘essence’ was intended. This could not consist in scientific rationalism (as the French eighteenth century materialists had taught), for it was a delusion to think that life was governed by mechanical laws. It was an even worse delusion to suppose that it was possible to apply a scientific discipline, derived from the study of inanimate matter, to the rational government of human beings and the organisation of their lives on a worldwide scale. The duty of man was something very different- to understand the texture, the 'go', the principle of

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life of all there is, to penetrate to the soul of the world (a theological and mystical notion wrapped by the followers of Schelling and Hegel in rationalist terminology), to grasp the hidden, ‘inner’ plan of the universe, to understand his own place in it, and to act accordingly.

The task of the philosopher was to discern the march of history, or of what was, somewhat mysteriously, called 'the Idea', and discover whither it was carrying mankind. History was an enormous river, the direction of which could, however, only be observed by people with a capacity for a special kind of deep, inner contemplation. No amount of observation of the outer world would teacb you where this inward Drang, this subterranean current, led. To uncover it was to be at one with it; the development both of your individual self as a rational being, and of society, depended upon a correct assessment of the spiritual direction of the larger ‘organism’ to which you belonged. To the question of how this organism was to be identified, what it was- the various metaphysicians who founded the principal romantic schools of philosophy replied differently. Herder declared this unit to be a spiritual culture or way of life, the Roman Catholic penseurs identified it with the life of the Christian Church; Fichte somewhat obscurely, and after him Hegel unequivocally, declared it to be the national state.

The whole notion of organic method militated in favour of supposing that the favourite instrument of the eighteenth century- chemical analysis into constituent bits, into ultimate, irreducible atoms, whether of inanimate matter or of social institutions- was an inadequate way of apprehending anything. ‘Growth” was the great new term, new, that is, in its application far beyond the bounds of scientific biology; and in order to apprehend what growth was, you had to have a special inner sense capable of apprehending the invisible kingdom, an intuitive grasp of the impalpable principle in virtue of which a thing grows as it does; grows not simply by successive increments of 'dead' parts, but by some kind of occult vital process that needs a quasi-mystical power of vision, a special sense of the flow of life, of the forces of history, of the principles at work in nature, in art, in personal relationships, of the creative spirit unknown to empirical science, to seize upon its essence.

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IV

This is the heart of political romanticism, from Burke to our own day, and the source of many passionate arguments directed against liberal reform and every attempt to remedy social evils by rational means, on the grounds that these were based on a ‘mechanical’ outlook- a misunderstanding of what society was and of how it developed. The programmes of the French Encyclopedists or of the adherents of Lessing in Germany were condemned as so many ludicrous and Procrustean attempts to treat society as if it were an amalgam of bits of inanimate stuff, a mere machine, whereas it was a palpitating, living whole.

The Russians were highly susceptible to this propaganda, which drew them in both a reactionary and a progressive direction. You could believe that life or history was a river, which it was useless and perilous to resist or deflect, and with which you could only merge your identity- according to Hegel by discursive, logical, rational activity of the Spirit; according to Schelling intuitively and imaginatively, by a species of inspiration the depth of which is the measure of the human genius, from which spring myths and religions, art and science. On the other hand, you might declare that you felt within the earth the pangs of a new world struggling to be born. You felt- you knew- that the crust of the old institutions was about to crack under the violent inner heavings of the Spirit. If you genuinely believed this. then you would, if you were a reasonable being, be ready to risk identifying yourself with the revolutionary cause, for otherwise it would destroy you. Everything in the cosmos was progressive, everything moved. And if the future lay in the fragmentation and the explosion of your present universe into a new form of existence, it would be foolish not to collaborate with this violent and inevitable process.

German romanticism, in particular the Hegelian school was divided on this issue; there were movements in both directions in Germany, and consequently also in Russia, which was virtually an intellectual dependency of German academic thought. But whereas in the west ideas of this kind had for many years been prevalent theories and opinions, philosophical, social, theological. political, had since the Renaissance at least, clashed and collided with each other in a vast variety of patterns, and formed a general process of rich intellectual activity in which no one idea or opinion could for long hold undisputed supremacy- in Russia this was not the case.

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One of the great differences between the areas dominated by the eastern and the western Churches was that the former had had no Renaissance and no Reformation. The Balkan peoples could blame the Turkish conquest for their backwardness. But the case was little better in Russia, which did not have a gradually expanding, literate, educated class, connecting- by a series of social and intellectual steps, the most and the least enlightened. The gap between the illiterate peasants and those who could read and write was wider in Russia than in other European states, in so far as Russia could be called European at this time. Thus the number and variety of social or political ideas to be heard if you moved in the salons of St. Petersburg and Moscow were nothing like so great as you would find in the intellectual ferment of Paris or Berlin. Paris was, of course, the great cultural Mecca of the time. But even Berlin was scarcely less agitated with intellectual, theological, artistic controversies, despite the repressive Prussian censorship . You must therefore imagine in Russia, a situation dominated by three main factors: a dead, oppressive unimaginative government chiefly engaged in holding its subjects down, preventing change largely because this might lead to yet further change, even though its more intelligent members obscurely realised that reform- and that of a very radical kind - for instance with regard to the serf system or the systems of justice and education-was both desirable and inevitable. The second factor was the condition of the vast mass of the Russian population, an ill-treated, economically wretched peasantry, sullen and inarticulately groaning, but plainly too weak and unorganised to act effectively in its own defence. Finally, between the two, a small educated class, deeply and sometimes resentfully influenced by western ideas, with minds tantalised by visits to Europe and by the great new social and intellectual movement at work in the centres of its culture. May I remind you again that there was in the air, as much in Russia as in Germany, a romantic conviction that every man had a unique mission to fulfill if only he could know what it was; and that this created a general enthusiasm for social and metaphysical ideas, perhaps as a kind of ethical substitute for a dying religion, that was not dissimilar to the fervour with which philosophical systems and political Utopias had, for more than a century, been acclaimed in France and Germany, by men in search of a new theodicy uncompromised by association with some discredited political or religious establishment. But in Russia there was, in addition, among the educated classes, a moral and intellectual vacuum due to the absence

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of a Renaissance tradition of secular education, and maintained by the rigid censorship exercised by the government, by widespread illiteracy, by the suspicion and disfavour with which all ideas as such were regarded , by the acts of a nervous and often massively stupid bureaucracy. In this situation, ideas, which in the west competed with a large number of other doctrines and attitudes, so that to become dominant they had to emerge victorious from a fierce struggle for survival, in Russia came to lodge in the minds of gifted individuals and, indeed, obsess them, often enough simply for lack of other ideas to satisfy their intellectual needs. Moreover, there existed in the capital cities of the Russian Empire a violent thirst for knowledge, for mental nourishment of any kind, together with an unparalleled sincerity (and sometimes a disarming naivety) of feeling, intellectual freshness, passionate resolve to participate in world affairs, a troubled consciousness of the social and political problems of a vast country, and very little to respond to this new state of mind. What there was, was mostly imported from abroad- scarcely one single political and social idea to be found in Russia in the nineteenth century was on native soil. Perhaps Tolstoy’s idea of non-resistance was something genuinely Russian- a restatement of a Christian position so original that it had the force of a new idea when he preached it. But, in general, I do not think that Russia has contributed a single new social or political idea: nothing that was not traceable, not merely to some ultimate. western root, but to some doctrine discoverable in the west eight or ten or twelve years earlier than its first appearance in Russia.

V

You must conceive, therefore, of an astonishingly impressionable society with an unheard of capacity for absorbing ideas- ideas which might waft across, in the most casual fashion, because someone brought back a book or collection of pamphlets from Paris (or because some audacious bookseller had smuggled them in); because someone attended the lectures of a neo-Hegelian in Berlin, or had made friends with Schelling, or had met an English missionary with strange ideas. Genuine excitement was generated by the arrival of a new 'message' emanating from some disciple of Saint-Simon or Fourier, of a book by Proudhon, by Cabet, by Leroux, the latest social Messiahs in France; or again, by an idea attributed to David Strauss or Ludwig Feuerbach or Lamennais or some other forbidden author. Because of their relative scarcity in Russia, these ideas and fragments of ideas

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would be seized upon with the utmost avidity. The social and economic prophets in Europe seemed full of confidence in the new revolutionary future, and their ideas had an intoxicating effect upon the young Russians. When such doctrines were promulgated in the west, they sometimes excited their audience, and occasionally led to the formation of parties or sects, but they were not regarded by the majority of those whom they reached as the final truth; and even those who thought them crucially important did not immediately begin to put them into practice with every means at their disposal. The Russians were liable to do just this; to argue to themselves that if the premises were true and the reasoning correct, true conclusions followed: and further, that if these conclusions dictated certain actions as being necessary and beneficial, then if one was honest and serious, one had a plain duty to try to realise them as swiftly and as fully as possible. Instead of the generally held view of the Russians as a gloomy, mystical, self-lacerating, somewhat religious nation, I should like to suggest, at least as far, as the articulate intelligentsia are concerned, that they were somewhat exaggerated Westerners of the nineteenth century; and that so far from being liable to irrationalism or neurotic self-absorption, what they possessed in a high, perhaps excessive, degree was extremely developed powers of reasoning, extreme logic and lucidity.

It is true that when people tried to put these Utopian schemes into operation and were almost immediately frustrated by the police, disillusionment followed, and with it a liability to fall into a state of apathetic melancholy or violent exasperation. But this came later. The original phase was neither mystical nor introspective, but on the contrary rationalist, bold extroverted and optimistic. I think it was the celebrated terrorist Kravchinsky who once said about the Russians that, whatever other qualities they might have, they never recoiled from the consequences of their own reasoning. If you study the Russian 'ideologies' of the nineteenth and indeed the twentieth century, I think you will find, on the whole, that the more difficult, the more paradoxical, the more unpalatable a conclusion is, the greater is the degree of passion and enthusiasm with which some Russians, at any rate, tend to embrace it; for to do so seems to them no more than a proof of a man's moral sincerity, of the genuineness of his devotion to the truth and of his seriousness as a human being; and although the consequences of one's reasoning may appear prima facie implausible or even downright absurd, one must not for that reason

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recoil from them, for what would that be but cowardice, weakness. Or- worst of al- the setting up of comfort before the truth? Herzen once said:

We are great doctrinaires and raisonneurs. To this German capacity we add our own national… element, ruthless, fanatically dry: we are only too willing to cut off heads… With fearless step we march to the very limit, and go beyond it; never out of step with the dialectic, only with the truth ...

And this characteristically acid comment is, as a verdict on some of his contemporaries, not altogether unjust.

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Imagine, then, a group of young men, living under the petrified regime of Nicholas I- men with a degree of passion for Ideas perhaps never equalled in a European society, seizing upon ideas as they come from the west with unconscionable enthusiasm, and making plans to translate them swiftly into practice- and you will have some notion of what the early members of the intelligentsia were like. They were a small group of litterateurs, both professional and amateur, conscious of being alone in a bleak world, with a hostile and arbitrary government on the one hand, and a completely uncomprehending mass of oppressed and inarticulate peasants on the other, conceiving of themselves as a kind of se1f-conscious army, carrying a banner for all to see- of reason and science, of liberty, of a better life.

Like persons in a dark wood, they tended to feel a certain solidarity simply because they were so few and far between; because they were weak, because they were truthful, because they were sincere, because they were unlike the others. Moreover, they had accepted the romantic doctrine that every man is called upon to perform a mission beyond mere selfish purposes of material existence; that because they had had an education superior to that of their oppressed brothers they had a direct duty to help them toward the light; that this duty was uniquely binding upon them, and that, if they fulfilled it, as history surely intended them to do, the future of Russia might yet be as glorious as her past had been empty and dark; and that for this they must preserve their inner solidarity as a dedicated group. They were a persecuted minority who drew strength from their very persecution; they were the self-conscious bearers of a western message, freed from the chains of ignorance and prejudice, stupidity or cowardice, by

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some great western liberator- a German romantic, a French socialist- who had transformed their vision.

The act of liberation is something not uncommon in the intellectual history of Europe. A liberator is one who does not so much answer your problems, whether of theory or conduct, as transform them- he ends your anxieties and frustrations by placing you within a new framework where old problems cease to have meaning, and new ones appear which have their solutions, as it were, already to some degree prefigured in the new universe in which you find yourself. I mean that those who were liberated by the humanists of the Renaissance or the philosophes of the eighteenth century did not merely think their old questions answered more correctly by Plato or Newton than by Albertus Magnus or the Jesuits- rather they had a sense of a new universe. Questions which had troubled their predecessors suddenly appeared to them senseless and unnecessary. The moment at which ancient chains fall off, and you feel yourself recreated in a new image, can make a life. One cannot tell by whom a man might not, in this sense, be set free- Voltaire probably emancipated a greater number of human beings in his own lifetime than anyone before or after him; Schiller, Kant, Mill, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Samuel Butler, Freud have liberated human beings. For all I know Anatole France, or even Aldous Huxley, may have had this effect.

The Russians of whom I speak were 'liberated' b the great German metaphysical writers. who freed them on the one hand from the dogmas of the Orthodox church, on the other from the dry formulas of the eighteenth-century rationalists which had been not so much refute as discredited by the failure of the French Revolution. What Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and. their numerous expositors and interpreters provided was little short of a new religion. A corollary of this new frame of mind is the Russian attitude to literature.

VII

There may be said to exist at least two attitudes towards literature and the arts in general, and it may not be uninteresting to contrast them. For short, I propose to call one French, the other Russian. But these will be mere labels used for brevity and convenience. I hope I shall not be thought to maintain that every French writer held what I propose to call the ‘French’ attitude, or every Russian the ‘Russian’. The distinction taken in any literal sense would, of course, be gravely misleading.

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The French writers of the nineteenth century on the whole believed that they were purveyors. They thought that an intellectual or an artist had a duty, to himself and to the public- to produce as good an object as possible. If you were a painter, you produced as beautiful a picture as you could. If you were a writer, you produced the best piece of writing of which you were capable. That was your duty to yourself, and it was what the public rightly expected. If your works were good, they were recognised, and you were successful. If you possessed little taste, or skill, or luck, then you were unsuccessful; and that was that.

In this 'French' view, the artist's private life was of no more concern to the public than the private life of a carpenter. If you order a table, you are not interested in whether the carpenter has a good motive for making it or not; or whether he lives on good terms with his wife and children. And to say of the carpenter that his table must in some way be degraded or decadent, because his morality is degraded or decadent, would be regarded as bigoted, and indeed as silly: certainly as a grotesque criticism of his merit as a carpenter.

This attitude of mind (which I have deliberately exaggerated) was rejected with the utmost vehemence by almost every major Russian writer of the nineteenth century; and this was so whether they were writers with an explicit moral or social bias. or aesthetic writers believing in art for art's sake. The 'Russian' attitude (at least in the last century) is that man is one and cannot be divided; that it is not true that a man is a citizen on the one hand and, quite independently of this, a money-maker on the other, and that these functions can be kept in separate compartments; that a man is one kind of personality as a voter, another as a painter, and a third as a husband. Man is indivisible. To say ‘Speaking as an artist. I feel this; and speaking as a voter, I feel that’ is always false; and immoral and dishonest too. Man is one, and what he does, he does with his whole personality. It is the duty of men to do what is good, speak the truth, and produce beautiful objects. They must speak the truth in whatever media they happen to work. If they are novelists they must speak the truth as novelists. If they are ballet dancers they must express the truth in their dancing.

This idea of integrity, of total commitment, is the heart of the romantic attitude. Certainly Mozart and Haydn would have been exceedingly surprised if they were told that as artists they were peculiarly sacred, lifted far above other men, priests uniquely dedicated

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To the worship of some transcendent reality, to betray which is mortal sin. They conceived of themselves as true craftsmen, sometimes as inspired servants of God or of Nature, seeking to celebrate their divine Maker in whatever they did; but in the first place they were composers who wrote works to order, and strove to make them as melodious as possible. By the nineteenth century, the notion of the artist as a sacred vessel, set apart, with a unique soul and unique status, was exceedingly widespread. It was born, I suppose, mainly among the Germans, and is connected with the belief that it is the duty of every man to give himself to a cause; that upon the artist and poet thus duty is binding in a special degree, for he is a wholly dedicated being; and that his fate is peculiarly sublime and tragic, for his form of self-surrender is to sacrifice himself totally to his ideal. What this ideal is, is comparatively unimportant. The essential thing is to offer oneself without calculation, to give all one has for the sake of the light within (whatever it may illuminate) from pure motives. For only motives count.

Every Russian writer was made conscious that he was on a public stage, testifying; so that the smallest lapse on his part, a lie a deception an act of self-indulgence, lack of zeal for the truth, was a heinous crime. If you were principally engaged in making money, then, perhaps, you were not quite so strictly accountable to society. But if you spoke in public at all, be it as poet or novelist or historian or in whatever public capacity, then you accepted full responsibility for guiding and leading the people. If this was your calling then you were bound by a Hippocratic oath to tell the truth and never to betray it, and to dedicate yourself selflessly to your goal.

There are certain clear cases- Tolstoy is one of them- where this principle was accepted literally and followed to its extreme consequences. But this tendency in Russia was far wider than Tolstoy’s peculiar case, would indicate. Turgenev, for example, who is commonly thought of as the most western among Russian writers, a man who believed in the pure and independent nature of art more than, say, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, who consciously and deliberately avoided moralising in his novels, and was, indeed, sternly called to order by other Russian authors for an excessive- and, it was indicated, regrettably western- preoccupation with aesthetic principles, for devoting too much time and attention to the mere form and style of his works, for insufficient probing into the deep moral and spiritual essence of his characters- even the 'aesthetic' Turgenev is wholly

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committed to the belief that social and moral problems are the central issues of life and of art. and that they are intelligible only in their own specific historical and ideological context.

I was once astonished to see it stated, in a review by an eminent literary critic in a Sunday newspaper, that, of all authors, Turgenev was not particularly conscious of the historical forces of his time. This is the very opposite of the truth. Every novel of Turgenev deals explicitly with social and moral problems within a specific historical setting; it describes human beings in particular social conditions at an identifiable date. The mere fact that Turgenev was an artist to his marrow-bones, and understood the universal aspects of human character or predicament, need not blind us to the fact that he fully accepted his duty as a writer to speak the objective truth- social no less than psychological- in public, and not to betray it.

If someone had proved that Balzac was a spy in the service of the French Government, or that Stendhal conducted immoral operations on the Stock Exchange, it might have upset some of their friends, but it would not, on the whole, have been regarded as derogating from their status and genius as artists. But there is scarcely any Russian writer in the nineteenth century who, if something of the sort had been discovered about himself, would have doubted for an instant whether the charge was relevant to his activity as a writer. I can think of no Russian writer who would have tried to slip out with the alibi that he was one kind of person as a writer, to be judged, let us say, solely in terms of his novels, and quite another as a private individual. That is the gulf between the characteristically ‘Russian’ and ‘French’ conceptions of life and art, as I have christened them. I do not mean that every western writer would accept the ideal, which I have attributed to the French, nor that every Russian would subscribe to what I have called the ‘Russian’ conception. But, broadly speaking, I think it is a correct division, and holds good even when you come to, the aesthetic writers- for instance. the Russian symbolist poets at the turn of the last century, who despised every form of utilitarian or didactic or impure art, took not the slightest interest in social analysis or psychological novels, and accepted and exaggerated the aestheticism of the west to an outré degree. Even these Russian symbolists did not think they had no moral obligation. They saw themselves, indeed, as Pythian priestesses upon some mystical tripod, as seers of a reality of which this world was merely a dark symbol and occult expression. And, remote though they were from social

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idealism, believed with moral and spiritual fervour in their own sacred vows. They were witnesses to a mystery; that was the ideal which they were morally not permitted, by the rules of their art, to betray. This attitude is utterly different from anything that Flaubert laid down about the fidelity of the artist to his art, which to him is identical with the proper function of the artist, or the best method of becoming as good an artist as one could be. The attitude which I attribute to the Russians is a specifically moral attitude; their attitude to life and to art is identical, and it is ultimately a moral attitude. This is something not to be confused with the notion of art with a utilitarian purpose, in which, of course, some of them believed. Certainly, the men of whom I propose to speak, the men of the 30s and early 40s, did not believe that the business of novels and the business of poetry was to teach men to be better. The ascendancy of utilitarianism came much later, and it was propagated by men of far duller and cruder minds than those with whom I am here concerned.

The most characteristic Russian writers believed that writers are, in the first place, men; and that they are directly and continually responsible for all their utterances, whether made in novels or in private letters, in public speeches or in conversation. This view, in turn, affected western conceptions of art and life to a marked degree, and is one of the arresting contributions, to thought of the Russian intelligentsia. Whether for good or ill, it made a very violent impact upon the European conscience.

VIII

At the time of which I speak, Hegel and Hegelianism dominated the thought of young Russia. With all the moral ardour of which they were capable, the emancipated young men believed in the necessity of total immersion in his philosophy. Hegel was the great new liberator; therefore it was a duty- a categorical duty- to express in every act of your life, whether as a private individual or as a writer, truths which you had absorbed from him. This allegiance- later transferred to Darwin, to Spencer, to Marx- is difficult to understand for those who have not read the fervid literature, above all, the literary correspondence of the period. To illustrate it, let me quote· some ironical passages from Herzen, the great Russian publicist, who lived the latter part of his life abroad. written when, looking back, he described the atmosphere of his youth. It is, as so often with this incomparable satirist, a somewhat exaggerated picture- in places a

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caricature- but nevertheless it successfully conveys the mood of the time. After saying that an exclusively contemplative attitude is wholly opposed to the Russian character, he goes on to talk about the fate of the Hegelian philosophy when it was brought over to Russia:

… there is no paragraph in all the three parts of the Logic, two parts of the Aesthetic, of the Encyclopedia… which was not captured after the most desperate debates lasting several nights. People who adored each other became estranged for entire weeks because they could not agree on a definition of ‘transcendental spirit’, were personally offended by opinions about ‘absolute personality’ and ‘being in itself’. The most worthless tracts of German philosophy that came out of Berlin and other [German] provincial towns and villages, in which there was any mention of Hegel, were written for and read to shreds- till they came out in yellow stains, till pages dropped out after a few days. Thus, just as Professor Francoeur was moved to tears in Paris when he heard that he was regarded as a great mathematician in Russia, that his algebraical symbolism was used for differential equations by our younger generation, so might they all have wept for joy- all these forgotten Werders, Marheineckes, Michelets, Ottos, Vatkes, Schallers, Rosenkranzes, and Arnold Ruge himself… -if they had known what duels, what batlles they had started in Moscow between the Maroseika and Mokhovaya [the names of two streets in Moscow], how they were read, how they were bought •••

I have a right to say this because, carried away by the torrents of those days, I myself wrote just like this, and was, in fact, startled when our famous astronomer, Perevoshchikov, referred to it all as 'bird talk'. Nobody at this time would have disowned a sentence this: ‘The concrescence of abstract ideas in the sphere of the represents that phase of the self-questing spirit in which it, defining itself for itself, is potentialised from natural immanence into harmonious sphere of formal consciousness in beauty.'

He continues:

A man who went for a walk in Sokolniki [a suburb of Moscow], went there not just for a walk, but in order to surrender himself to the pantheistic feeling of his identification with the cosmos. If, in the way, he met a tipsy soldier or a peasant woman who said something to him, the philosopher did not simply talk with them, but determined its immediate, and its accidental presentation. The very tear which might rise to his eye was strictly classified and referred to its proper category- Gemuth- or ‘the tragic element in the heart’.

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Herzen's ironical sentences need not be taken too literally. But they show vividly the kind of exalte intellectual mood in which his friends had lived.

Let me now offer you a passage from Annenkov - from the excellent essay called ‘A Remarkable Decade’, to which I referred at the outset. It gives a different picture of these same people at the same period, and it is worth quoting if only to correct Herzen's amusing sketch, which may, quite unjustly, suggest that all this intellectual activity was so much worthless gibberish on the part of a ridiculous collection of overexcited young intellectuals. Annenkov describes life in a country house, in the village of Sokolovo in 1845, that had been taken for the summer by three friends-Granovsky, who was a professor of history in the University of Moscow, Ketcher, who was an eminent translator, and Herzen himself, who was a rich young man of no very fixed profession, then, still vaguely in government service. They took the house for the purpose of entertaining their friends and enjoying intellectual conversation in the evenings.

… only one thing was not allowed, and that was to be a philistine. Not that what was expected were flights of eloquence or flashes of brilliant wit- on the contrary, students absorbed in their own special fields were respected deeply. But what was demanded was a certain intellectual level and certain qualities of character… They protected themselves against contacts with anything that seemed corrupt ... and were worried by its intrusion, however casual and unimportant. They did not cut themselves off from the world, but stood aloof from it, and attracted attention for that very reason; and because of this they developed a special sensitiveness to everything artificial and spurious. Any sign of a morally doubtful sentiment, evasive talk, dishonest ambiguity, empty rhetoric, insincerity, was detected at once, and… provoked immediate storms of ironical mockery and merciless attack …. The circle…resembled an order of knighthood, a brotherhood of warriors; it had no written constitution. Yet it knew all its members scattered over our vast country; it was not organised, but a tacit understanding prevailed. It stretched, as it were, across the stream of the life of its time, and protected it from aimlessly flooding its banks. Some adored it; others detested it.

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IX

The sort of society which Annenlcov described, although it may have about it a slight suggestion of priggishness, is the sort of society which tends to crystallise whenever there is an intellectual minority (say in Bloomsbury or anywhere else) which sees itself as divided by its ideals from the world in which it lives, and tries to promote certain intellectual and moral standards, at an rate within itself. That is what the Russians from 1838 to 1848 tried to do. They were unique in Russia in that they did not automatically come from any one social class, even though few among them were of humble origin. They had to be moderately well-born, otherwise their chance of obtaining an adequate, that is to say western, education was too small.

Their attitude to each other was genuinely free from bourgeois self-consciousness. They were not impressed by wealth, nor were they self-conscious about poverty. They did not admire success. Indeed they almost tried to avoid it. Few among them became successful persons in the worldly sense of that word. A number went into exile, others were professors perpetually under the eye of tsarist police; some were poorly paid hacks and translators; some simply disappeared. One or two of them left the movement and were regarded as renegades. There was Mikhail Katkov, for example, a gifted journalist and writer who had been an original member of the movement and had then crossed over to the tsarist government, and there was Vassily Botkin, the intimate friend of Belinsky and Turgenev, who started as a philosophical tea-merchant and became a confirmed reactionary in later years. But these were exceptional cases.

Turgenev was always regarded as a case somewhat betwixt and between: a man whose heart was in the right place, who was not devoid of ideals and knew well what enlightenment was, and yet not quite reliable. Certainly he was vehement against the serf system, and his book A Sportsman’s Sketches. had admittedly had a more powerful social effect upon the public than any other book hitherto published in Russia- something like Uncle Tom's Cabin in the United States at a later date, from which it differed principally in being a work of art, indeed of genius. Turgenev was regarded by the young radicals, on the whole, as a supporter of the right principles, on the whole a friend and an ally, but unfortunately weak, flighty, liable to indulge his love of pleasure at the expense of his convictions; apt to vanish unaccountably-

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and a little guiltily- and be lost to his political friends; yet still ‘one of us’; still a member of the party; still with us rather than against us, in spite of the fact that he often did things which had to be severely criticized, and which seemed mainly due to his unfortunate infatuation with the French diva Pauline Viardot, which led him to sell his stories- surreptitiously- to reactionary newspapers in order to obtain enough money to be able to buy a box at the opera, since the virtuous left-wing periodicals could not afford to pay as much. A vacillating and unreliable friend; still, and despite everything, fundamentally on our side; a man and a brother.

There was a very self-conscious sense of literary and moral solidarity amongst these people. which created between them a feeling of genuine fraternity and of purpose which certainly no other society in Russia has ever hid. Herzen, who later met a great many celebrated people, and was a critical and intolerant. often an exceedingly sardonic and at times cynical judge of men, and Annenkov, who had travelled a good deal in western Europe and had a variegated acquaintance among the notables of his day- both these connoisseurs of human beings, in later years, confessed that never in their lives had they again found anywhere a society so civilised and gay and free, so enlightened, spontaneous, and agreeable, so sincere, so intelligent, so gifted and attractive in every way.

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