equality by means of persuasion or indeed any civilised means open to
men of liberal convictions. Herzen himself never wholly recovered
from this collapse of his hopes and ideas. Bakunin was disoriented by
it; the older generation of liberal intellectuals in Moscow and St
Petersburg scattered, some to drift into the conservative camp, others
to seek comfort in non-political fields. But the principal effect which
the failure of 1 848 had had on the stronger natures among the
younger Russian radicals was to convince them firmly that no real
accommodation with the Tsar's government was possible-with the
result that during the Crimean war a good many of the leading
intellectuals were close to being defeatist: nor was this by any means
confined to the radicals and revolutionaries. Koshelev in his memoirs,
published in Berlin in the 8os, 1 declares that he and some of his friends
- nationalists and Slavophils-thought that a defeat would serve
RusSia's best interests, and dwells on public indifference to the outcome of the war-an admission far more shocking at the time of its publication, during the full tide of pan-Slav agitation, than the facts
themselves can have been during the Crimean war. The Tsar's
uncompromising line precipitated a moral crisis which finally divided
the tough core of the opposition from the opportunists: it caused the
former to turn in more narrowly upon themselves. This applied to
both camps. Whether they were Slavophils and rejected the west like
the Aksakovs and Samarin, or materialists, atheists and champions of
western scientific ideas like Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Pisarev,
they became increasingly absorbed in the specific national and social
problems of Russia and, in particular, in the problem of the peasanthis ignorance, his misery, the forms of his social life, their historical origins, their economic future. The liberals of the 40s may have been
stirred to genuine compassion or indignation by the plight of the
peasantry: the institution of serfdom had long been an acute public
problem and indeed a great and recognised evil. Yet, excited as they
were by the latest social and philosophical ideas which reached them
from the west, they felt no inclination to spend their time upon
detailed and tedious researches into the actual condition of the
peasantry, upon the multitude of unexplored social and economic data
which had been so superficially described by Custine, or later in
1 A. I. Koshelev, Zopisli (Berlin, 1 884), pp. 81-4.
19
R U S S I AN T H IN K E R S
greater detail by Haxthausen. Turgenev had done something to
awaken interest in the day-to-day hyt1 of the peasants by the realism
of his Sportsman's Sketches. Grigorovich had moved both Belinsky
and Dostoevsky by his tragic but, to a later taste, lifeless and overwrought descriptions of peasants in The Yillage, and in Anton Goremyka, published in I 84 7. But these were ripples on the surf.lce. During the
period of enforced insulation �fter I 849, with Europe in the arms of
reaction, and only Herren's plaintive voice faintly audible from afar,
those socially conscious Russian intellectuals who had survived the
turmoil directed their sharp and fearless analytical apparatus upon the
actual conditions in which the vast majority of their countrymen were
living. Russia, which a decade or two earlier was in considerable
danger of becoming a permanent intellectual dependency of Berlin
or of Paris, was forced by this insulation to develop a native social and
political outlook of her own. A sharp change in tone is now noticeable;
the harsh, materialistic and 'nihilistic' criticism of the 6os and 70s
is due not merely to the change in economic and social conditions,
and the consequent emergence of a new class and a new tone in
Russia as in Europe, but in at least equal measure to the prison walls
within which Nicholas I had enclosed the lives of his thinking subjects.
This led to a sharp break with the polite civilisation and the nonpolitical interests of the past, to a general toughening of fibre and exacerbation of political and social differences. The gulf between the
right and the left-between the disciples of Dostoevsky and Katkov
and the followers of Chernyshevsky or Bakunin-all typical radical
intellectuals in I 848 -had grown very wide and deep. In due course
there emerged a vast and growing army of practical revolutionaries,
conscious-all too conscious-of the specifically Russian character of
their problems, seeking specifically Russian solutions. They were
forced away froo the general current of European development (with
which, in any case, their history seemed to have so little in common)
by the bankruptcy in Europe of the libertarian movement of I 848 :
they drew strength from the very harshness of the discipline which
the failure in the west had indirectly imposed upon them. Henceforth
the Russian radicals accepted the view that ideas and agitation wholly
unsupported by material force were necessarily doomed to impotence;
and they adopted this truth and abandoned sentimental liberalism
without being forced to pay for their liberation with that bitter,
1 Approximately, 'way of life'.
2.0
R U S S I A AND 1 84 8
personal disillusionment and acute frustration which proved too much
for a good many idealistic radials in the west. The Russian radials
learnt this lesson by means of precept and example, indirectly as it
were, without the destruction of their inner resources. The experience
obtained by both sides in the struggle during these dark years was a
decisive factor in shaping the uncompromising character of the later
revolutionary movement in Russia.
21
The Hedgehog and the Fox
A queer combination of the brain of an Englilh chelllist
with the eoul of an Indian Buddhist.
E. M. de Vogili
T H a R I! is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus
which says: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows
one big thing. '1 Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation
of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for
all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken
figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they
mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers,
and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great
chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single
central vision, one system less or more coherent or -articulate, in
terms of which they ·understand, think and feel-a single, universal,
organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say
has significance-and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends,
often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in
some dt facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause,
related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform
acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal,