so many loopholes could always be found by the ingenious and the
desperate, not much that was subversive was stopped effectively. The
Russian writers who belonged to the radical intelligentsia did, after
all, publish their works, and published them, by and large, in an
almost undistorted form. The main effect of repression was to drive
social and political ideas into the relatively safe realm of literature.
This had already occurred in Germany, and it did so on a much
larger scale in Russia.
Yet it would be a mistake to exaggerate the role of the government
repression in compelling literature to become political in character.
The romantic movement was itself an equally potent factor in creating
'impure' literature, in filling it with ideological content. Turgenev
himself, the 'purest' of all the men of letters of his rime, and often
taken to task for this sin by censorious preachers like Dostoevsky or
the 'materialist' critics of the 6os, did, after all, at one time, contemplate an academic career-as a professor of philosophy. He was dissuaded from this; but his early Hegelian infatuation proved a lasting inftuence on his whole view of life. Hegel's teaching drove some to
revolution, others to reaction; in either case it emancipated its adherents
from the over-simplified classifications of men by the eighteenthcentury pamphleteers into the virtuous and the vicious, the benighted or the enlightened, of events into good and bad, and from the view
,,
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R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
of both men and things as intelligible and predictable i n terms o f clear,
mechanically conceived, causal chains. For Turgenev, on the contrary,
everything is compounded of characteristics in a perpetual process of
transformation, infinitely complex, morally and politically ambivalent,
blending into constantly changing combinations, explicable only in
terms of flexible and often impressionistic psychological and historical
concepts, which allow for the elaborate interplay of factors that are
too many and too fleeting to be reduced to scientific schemata or
laws. Turgenev's liberalism and moderation, for which he was so
much criticised, took the form of holding everything in solution-of
remaining outside the situation in a state of watchful and ironical
detachment, uncommitted, evenly balanced-an agnostic oscillating
contentedly between atheism and faith, belief in progress and scepticism, an observer in a state of cool, emotionally controlled doubt before a spectacle of life where nothing is quite what it seems, where
every quality is infected by its opposite, where paths are never straight,
never cross in geometrically regular patterns. For him (this is his
version of the Hegelian dialectic) reality for ever escapes all artificial
ideological nets, all rigid, dogmatic assumptions, defies all attempts
at codification, upsets all symmetrical moral or sociological systems,
and yields itself only to cautious, emotionally neutral, scrupulously
empirical attempts to describe it bit by bit, as it presents itself to the
curious eye of the morally disinterested observer. Herz.en, too, rejects
cut and dried systems and programmes: neither he nor Turgenev
accepted the positive Hegelian doctrines, the vast cosmological fantasy
-the historical theodicy which unhinged so many of their contemporaries. Both were profoundly affected by its negative aspect-the undermining of the uncritical faith in the new social sciences which
animated the optimistic thinkers of the previous century.
These were some of the more prominent and celebrated among
the avant-gardt young Russians of the late 30s and 40s-and there
were many members of this group whom there is not room to mention
Katkov, who began as a philosopher and a radical and later became a
famous and influential reactionary journalist; the philosopher Redkin,
the essayist Korsh, and the translator Ketcher; the actor Shchepkin;
wealthy young dilettanti like Botkin, Panaev, Sazonov, Ogarev,
Galakhov, the great poet Nekrasov, and many lesser figures whose
lives are of interest only to literary or social historians. But over all
these towers the figure of the critic Vissarion Belinsky. His defects
both of education and taste were notorious; his appearance was
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GERMAN ROMANT I C I S M
unimpressive, his prose style left much to be desired. But he became
the moral and literary dictator of his generation. Those who came
under his influence remained affected by it long after his death ; and
whether for good or ill it transformed Russian writing-in particular
criticism-radically, and, it would seem, for ever.
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III
V I S S A R I O N B E LI N S KY
I N I 8 s6 I van Aksakov' one of two famous Slavophil brothers, who
had no sympathy for political radicalism, wrote an account of one of
his tours of the provincial centres of European Russia. The tour was
conceived by him as a kind of nationalist pilgrimage, intended at once
to draw comfort and inspiration from direct contact with the untouched
mass of the Russian people, and to warn those who needed warning
against the horrors of the west and the snares of western liberalism.
Aksakov was bitterly disappointed.
The name of Belinsky is known to every thinking young man [he
wrote], to everyone who is hungry for a breath of fresh air in the
reeking bog of provincial life. There is not a country schoolmaster
who does not know-and know by heart- Belinsky's letter to Gogo!.
If you want to find honest people, people who care about the poor
and the oppressed, an honest doctor, an honest lawyer not afraid of
a fight, you will find them among Belinsky's followers . . . Slavophil
inRuence is negligible . . . Belinsky's proselytes increase.
Plainly we are dealing with a major phenomenon of some kind someone to whom, eight years after his death, idealistic young men, during one of the worst moments of repression in the nineteenth
century, looked as their leader. The literary reminiscences of the
young radicals of the 30s and 4os- Panaev and his wife, Turgenev,
Herzen, Annenkov, Ogareva, Dostoevsky-agree in stressing this
aspect of Belinsky as the 'conscience' of the Russian intelligentsia, the
inspired and fearless publicist, the ideal of the young rlvoltls, the
writer who almost alone in Russia had the character and the eloquence
to proclaim clearly and harshly what many felt, but either could not
or would not openly declare.
We can easily imagine the kind of young man Aksakov was speaking
of. In Turgenev's novel Rudin there is a mildly ironical, but sympathetic and touching, portrait of a typical radical of that time, employed 1 50
V I SSARION B E L INSKY
as tutor in a country house. He is a plain-looking, awkward, clumsy
university student, neither intelligent nor interesting; indeed he is
dim, provincial, rather a fool, but pure-hearted, embarrassingly
sincere and self-revealing, and comically naive. The student is a
radical not in the sense that he holds clear intellectual or moral