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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R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
I X
The sort of society which Annenkov 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 any rate within itself. That is what these
Russians from 1 838 to 1 848 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 Sketchts, had admittedly had a more powerful
social effect upon the public than any other book hitherto published
in Russia-something like Uncle Tom's Cahin 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
I J4
B I RT H OF T H E R U SS IAN INTE L L I G ENTSIA
-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 criticised, 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 ofliterary 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 had. 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.
1 35
II
G E R M A N R O M A N T I C I S M
I N P E T E R S B U R G A N D M O S C O W
A L L-or nearly all-historians of Russian thought or literature, whatever their other differences, seem agreed upon one thing: that the dominant inRuence upon Russian writers in the second quarter of the
nineteenth century is that of German romanticism. This judgement,
like most such generalisations of its type, is not quite true. Even if
Pushkin is held to belong to an earlier generation, neither Lermontov
nor Gogo] nor Nekrasov, to take only the most notable writers of
this time, can be regarded as disciples of these thinkers. Nevertheless,
it is true that German metaphysics did radically alter the direction of
ideas in Russia, both on the right and on the left, among nationalists,
Orthodox theologians, and political radicals equally, and profoundly
affected the outlook of the more wide-awake students at the universities,
and intellectually inclined young men generally. These philosophical
schools, and in particular the doctrines of Hegel and Schelling, are
still, in their modern transformations, not without inRuence today.
Their principal legacy to the modern world is a notorious and powerful
political mythology, which in both its right- and left-wing forms has
been used to justify the most obscurantist and oppressive movements
of our own times. At the same time the great historical achievements
of the romantic school have become so deeply absorbed into the very
texture of civilised thought in the west that it is not easy to convey
how novel, and to some minds intoxicating, they once proved to be.
The works of the early German romantic thinkers- Herder, Fichte,
Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, and their followers, are not easy to read.
The treatises of Schelling, for instance-vastly admired in their dayare like a dark wood into which I do not, here at least, propose to venture-vtStigia terrent, too many eager inquirers have entered it
never to return. Yet the art and thought of this period, at any rate
in Germany, and also in eastern Europe and Russia, which were, in
effect, intellectual dependencies of Germany, are not intelligible
1 36
G E R M A N R O M ANT I C I S M
without some grasp of the fact that these metaphysicians-in particular
Schelling-caused a major shift in human thought: from the mechanistic categories of the eighteenth century to explanation in terms of aesthetic or biological notions. The romantic thinkers and poets
successfully undermined the central dogma of eighteenth-century