R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
recoil from them, for what would that be but cowardice, weakness,
or-worst of all- the setting up of comfort before the truth? Herzen
once said :
We are great doctrinaires and raisonneurs. To this German
capacity we add our own national . . . element, ruthless, fanatically
dry : we are only too willing to cut off heads . . . With fearless step we
march to the very limit, and go beyond it; never out of step with the
dialectic, only with the truth . . .
And this characteristically acid comment is, as a verdict on some of
his contemporaries, not altogether unjust.
VI
Imagine, then, a group of young men, living under the petrified
regime of Nicholas I -men with a degree of passion for ideas perhaps
never equalled in a European society, seizing upon ideas as they
come from the west with unconscionable enthusiasm, and making
plans to translate them swiftly into practice-and you will have some
notion of what the early members of the intelligentsia were like . .They
were a small group of litterateurs, both professional and amateur,
conscious of being alone in a bleak world, with a hostile an� arbitrary
government on the one hand, and a completely uncomprehending
mass of oppressed and inarticulate peasants on the other, conceiving
of themselves as a kind of self-conscious army, carrying a banner for
all to see- of reason and science, of liberty, of a better life.
Like persons in a dark wood, they tended to feel a certain solidarity
simply because they were so few and far between ; because they were
weak, because they were truthful, because they were sincere, because
they were unlike the others. Moreover, they had accepted the romantic
doctrine that every man is called upon to perform a mission beyond
mere selfish purposes of material existence; that because they had had
an education superior to that of their oppressed brothers they had a
direct duty to help them toward the light; that this duty was uniquely
binding upon them, and that, if they fulfilled it, as history surely
intended them to do, the future of Russia might yet be as glorious
as her past had been empty and dark; and that for this they must
preserve their inner solidarity as a dedicated group. They were a
persecuted minority who drew strength from their very persecution;
they were the self-conscious bearers of a western message, freed from
the chains of ignorance and prejudice, stupidity or cowardice, by
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B I RTH OF THE R U S S I AN INTELLIG ENT S I A
some great western liberator-a German romantic, a French socialistwho had transformed their vision.
The act ofliberation is something not uncommon in the intellectual
history of Europe. A liberator is one who does not so much answer your
problems, whether of theory or conduct, as transform them-he ends
your anxieties and frustrations by placing you within a new framework where old problems CtZe to have meaning, and new ones appear which have their solutions, as it were, already to some degree prefigured in the new universe in which you find yourself. I mean that those who were liberated by the humanists of the Renaissance or the
philosophes of the eighteenth century did not merely think their old
questions answered more correctly by Plato or Newton than by
Albertus Magnus or the Jesuits- rather they had a sense of a new
universe. Questions which had troubled their predecessors suddenly
appeared to them senseless and unnecessary. The moment at which
ancient chains fall off, and you feel yourself recreated in a new image,
can make a life. One cannot tell by whom a man might not, in this
sense, be set free-Voltaire probably emancipated a greater number of
human beings in his own lifetime than anyone before or after him;
Schiller, Kant, Mill, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Samuel Butler, Freud have
liberated human beings. For all I know Anatole France, or even
Aldous Huxley, may have had this effect.
The Russians of whom I speak were 'liberated' by the great
German metaphysical writers, who freed them on the one hand from
the dogmas of the Orthodox Church, on the other from the dry
formulas of the eighteenth-century rationalists, which had been not
so much refuted as discredited by the failure of the French Revolution.
What Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and their numerous expositors and
interpreters provided was little short of a new religion. A corollary
of this new frame of mind is the Russian attitude to literature.
VII
There may be said to exist at least two attitudes towards literature and
the arts in general, and it may not be uninteresting to contrast them.
For short, I propose to call one French, the other Russian. But these
will be mere labels used for brevity and convenience. I hope I shall
not be thought to maintain that every French writer held what I
propose to call the ' French' attitude, or every Russian the 'Russian'.
The distinction taken in any literal sense would, of course, be gravely
misleading.
R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
The French writers of the nineteenth century o n the whole believed
that they were purveyors. They thought that an intellectual or an
artist had a duty to himself and to the public-to produce as good an
object as possible. If you were a painter, you produced as beautiful a
picture as you could. If you were a writer you produced the best
piece of writing of which you were capable. That was your duty to
yourself, and it was what the public rightly expected. If your works
were good, they were recognised, and you were successful. If you
possessed little taste, or skill, or luck, then you were unsuccessful; and
that was that.
In this ' French' view, the artist's private life was of no more
concern to the public than the private life of a carpenter. If you order
a table, you are not interested in whether the carpenter has a good
motive for making it or not; or whether he lives on good terms with
his wife and children. And to say of the carpenter that his table must
in some way be degraded or decadent, because his morality is degraded
or decadent, would be regarded as bigoted, and indeed as silly : certainly
as a grotesque criticism of his merit as a carpenter.
This attitude of mind (which I have deliberately exaggerated)_ was
rejected with the utmost vehemence by almost every major Russian
writer of the nineteenth century; and this was so whether they were
writers with an explicit moral or social bias, or aesthetic writers
believing in art for art's sake. The 'Russian' attitude (at least in the
last century) is that man is one and cannot be divided; that it is not
true that a man is a citizen on the one hand and, quite independently
of this, a money-maker on the other, and that these functions can be
kept in separate compartments; that a man is one kind of personality
as a voter, another as a painter, and a third as a husband. Man is
indivisible. To say 'Speaking as an artist, I feel this; and speaking as
a voter, I feel t!lat' is always false; and immoral and dishonest too.
Man is one, and what he does, he does with his whole personality.
It is the duty of men to do what is good, speak the truth, and produce
beautiful objects. They must speak the truth in whatever media they
happen to work. If they are novelists they must speak the truth as
novelists. If they are ballet dancers they must express the truth in their
dancing.
This idea of integrity, of total commitment, is the heart of the
romantic attitude. Certainly Mozart and Haydn would have been
exceedingly surprised if they were told that as artists they were
peculiarly sacred, lifted far above other men, priests uniquely dedicated
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