Berlin was one of the most meticulous thinkers of the twentieth century. He was liberal, moderate, and thorough, all while seeking the truth. He combed other thinkers’ writings and interpreted them with his best intentions. His own writings were erudite without being overly academic. Berlin brings that style to this collection of essays on some of the foremost thinkers of nineteenth century Russia. Russia was profoundly affected by the liberal movements of the early nineteenth century and the counter-revolution that came from the uprisings in western Europe in 1848. Although Russia’s radicals did not rise up themselves, Tsar Nicholas I’s subsequent crackdown on intellectualism, liberalism, and free thought had profound consequences on the development of the country.
Berlin’s best known essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, is a rumination on Leo Tolstoy’s view of history. Berlin summarizes the Greek poet Archilochus, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin supposes that Tolstoy’s quest in life was to discover that one all-encompassing purpose for being, but that Tolstoy was better being the fox, dissecting all the ills of his Russian contemporaries. Tolstoy often wrote about those “proklyatye voprosy” (those accursed questions)- the central and moral issues of the day, which every honest Russian was forced to grapple with and whose answers could only be found, according to Tolstoy, in history, not in science and reason. As Tolstoy wrote, “to write the genuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one’s life.” Philosophy could only be understood through the prism of concrete, lived history. However, his meaning of history was not the kind we learn about in school. It was intensely personal. “History, as it is normally written, usually represents ‘political’- public- events as the most important, while spiritual- ‘inner’- events are largely forgotten; yet prima facie it is they- the ‘inner’ events- that are the most real, the most immediate experience of human beings; they, and only they, are what life, in the last analysis, is made of; hence the routine political historians are talking shallow nonsense.” Tolstoy objected to determinism, positivism, and scientism because he believed in the will of the spirit. “If we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e. as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed.” As such, he was vehemently opposed to the Whig theory of history, as well as the Great Man theory of history. “The higher soldiers or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect of the words and acts of such remote personages, despite all their theoretical authority, upon history.” Only looking back on public history, using hindsight, failing to see all the contingency, randomness, and luck involved, do these great men seem integral in shaping the course of events. Tolstoy, greatly influenced by Schopenhauer in his later life, believed, “that man suffers much because he seeks too much, [he] is foolishly ambitious and grotesquely overestimates his capacities.” Tolstoy also reacted “against liberal optimism concerning human goodness, human reason, and the value or inevitability of material progress…. Tolstoy rejected political reform because he believed ultimate regeneration could come only from within, and that the inner life was lived truly only in the untouched depths of the mass of the people…. Tolstoy, at least, does not go to the length of denying the efficacy of physics in its own sphere; but he thinks this sphere trivial in comparison with what is permanently out of reach of science- the social, moral, political, spiritual worlds, which cannot be sorted out and described and predicted by any science, because the proportion in them of ‘submerged’, uninspectable life is too high.”
While Tolstoy struggled with his role as part of the landed nobility in changing times, Alexander Herzen actually renounced his place in society- all in the name of liberalism. "Since the age of thirteen.... I have served one idea, marched under one banner- war against all imposed authority- against every kind of deprivation of freedom, in the name of the absolute independence of the individual. I would like to go on with my little guerrilla war- like a real Cossack- auf eigene Faust (on my own initiative)- as the Germans say.” The value of the individual was the single idea that he would propound again and again in his writings. Like Tolstoy, he was opposed to the positivism and scientism espoused by most liberals of his day. His own ethical and philosophical beliefs stated, “that nature obeys no plan, that history follows no libretto; that no single key, no formula, can, in principle, solve the problems of individuals or societies; that general solutions are not solutions, universal ends are never real ends, that every age has its own texture and its own questions, that short cuts and generalisations are no substitute for experience; that liberty- of actual individuals, in specific times and places- is an absolute value; that a minimum area of free action is a moral necessity for all men, not to be suppressed in the name of abstractions or general principles so freely bandied by the great thinkers of this or any age, such as eternal salvation, or history, or humanity, or progress, still less the State or the Church or the proletariat.” He was a socialist, but one who was uncomfortable with the collectivist schemes of either Bakunin (who was a friend) or Marx. Herzen was no friend of the people in the abstract. The masses “are indifferent to individual freedom, liberty of speech; the masses love authority. They are still blinded by the arrogant glitter of power; they are offended by those who stand alone. By equality they understand equality of oppression…. They want a social government to rule for their benefit, and not, like the present one against it. But to govern themselves doesn’t enter their heads.” Herzen also believed in the concrete wellbeing of individuals in the now, not in some far off distant utopia. “Do you truly want to condemn human beings alive today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some day to dance on…. or of wretched galley slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge…. with humble words ‘progress in the future’ upon its flag?” He also stated that man “wants to be neither a passive grave-digger of the past, nor the unconscious midwife of the future…. Why is belief in God [and] the Kingdom of Heaven silly, whereas belief in earthly Utopias is not silly?” Herzen, like Tolstoy, believed that true salvation for the individual was only possible by self-reflection. “If only people wanted…. instead of liberating humanity, to liberate themselves, they would do much for…. the liberation of man.”
Perhaps no intellectual was more greatly admired by his liberal peers than Vissarion Belinsky. He did not come from aristocratic stock- the son of a poor naval doctor. As a writer he was a critic, a pamphleteer, and essayist, who did not leave a grand treatise to posterity. He died young, at the age of thirty-seven, but his memory would inspire his contemporaries well beyond his death. His moral weight and sense of purpose was so strong as to inspire a generation of radicals with his ideas. “All serious questions to Belinsky were always, in the end, moral questions: about what it is that is wholly valuable and worth pursuing for its own sake.” He came from a group of Russian writers who believed that their works had to have moral worth. They had to be expressions of professed ideals, not merely aesthetic fancy. Their words were their very essence of being. “Books and ideas to Belinsky were crucial events, matters of life and death, salvation and damnation, and he therefore reacted to them with the most devastating violence…. To the end of his days he believed that art- and in particular literature- gave the truth to those who sought it; that the purer the artistic impulse- the more purely artistic the work- the clearer and profounder the truth revealed; and he remained faithful to the romantic doctrine that the best and least alloyed art was necessarily the expression not merely of the individual artist but always of a milieu, a culture, a nation, whose voice, conscious and unconscious, that artist was, a function without which he became trivial and worthless, and in the context of which alone his own personality possessed any significance.” As with Tolstoy and Herzen, Belinsky was no fan of scientism and materialism. “Life on earth, material existence, above all politics, was repulsive but fortunately unimportant.” Like Herzen, he was also a socialist individualist and also against the mass-man. “Be social or die! That is my slogan. What is it to me that something universal lives, so long as the individual suffers, that genius on earth should live in heaven, while the common herd rolls in the mud?” Like Bakunin, he was no fan of religion and particularly the Orthodox Church. “In the words God and religion I see only black darkness, chains and the knout.” Belinsky sought only one thing in his life- personal truth- and he struggled and died in his quest for it.
Ivan Turgenev is perhaps the most ambivalent of the Russian intellectuals. He thought of himself as a liberal and even firmly tried to ingratiate himself with the younger radicals and anarchists of his day. But they found his novels reactionary, while the reactionaries found them too liberal. He was a friend of Belinsky and lived his life trying to emulate the ideals and search for truth that his friend embodied. However, his opinions on art and literature were that they should not serve as beacons of morality in the way Belinsky professed. Berlin opines that Turgenev, “loved every manifestation of art and 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 1860s, was detestable to him.” Henry James would say of him, “he felt and understood the opposite sides of life.” Berlin summarizes the conflicted soul that grounded away at Turgenev, “all his life he wished to march with the progressives, with the party of liberty and protest. But, in the end, he could not bring himself to accept their brutal contempt for art, civilized behaviour, for everything that he held dear in European culture. He hated their dogmatism, their arrogance, their destructiveness, their appalling ignorance of life.” Turgenev himself states of his moral compass, “I am, and have always been, a “gradualist”, an old-fashioned liberal in the English dynastic sense, a man expecting reform only from above. I oppose revolution in principle.” At the same time he felt, “it was always better to be with the persecuted than with the persecutors.” His guiding principle was that “one must open men’s eyes, not tear them out.”
The Russian thinkers of the nineteenth century interacted with their western European cohorts even though their own ideas lagged somewhat behind. They could not rouse the masses and, for the most part, did not even try. Belinsky opined, “the people feel the need of potatoes, but none whatever of a constitution- that is desired only be educated townspeople who are quite powerless.” They believed in progress, but not in the name of some distant abstraction. These intellectuals believed of their fellows, “men are not simple enough, human lives and relationships too complex for standard formulae and neat solutions, and attempts to adapt individuals and fit them into a rational schema, conceived in terms of a theoretical ideal, be the motives for doing it ever so lofty, always lead in the end to a terrible maiming of human beings.” Given the revolutions which were to occur in twentieth century Russia, this was perhaps a modest and prescient admission.
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