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they are forced to emigrate, find life abroad more agonising than other
exiles. Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Lavrov were by birth gentlemen,
and lived abroad, if not happily, at any rate without becoming embittered specifically by contact with it. Herz.en did not greatly love Switzerland and he disliked Twickenham and London a great deal,
but he preferred either to St Petersburg under Nicholas I, and he was
happy in the society of his French and Italian friends. Turgenev
seemed more than contented on Madame Viardot's estate at Bougival.
But Belinsky can no more be thought of as a voluntary emigre than
Dr Johnson or Cobbett. He stormed and ranted and denounced the
most sacrosanct Russian institutions, but he did not leave his country.
And although he must have known that imprisonment and slow and
painful death were inevitable if he persisted, he did not, and obviously
could not for a moment, contemplate emigrating beyond the frontiers
of the Russian Empire: the Slavophils and the reactionaries were the
enemy, but the battle could be fought only on native soil. He could
not be silent and he would not go abroad. His head was with the west,
but his heart and his ill-kept body were with the mass of inarticulate
peasants and small traders-the 'poor folk' of Dostoevsky, the inhabitants of the teeming world of Gogol's terrible comic imagination.
Speaking of the Westerners' attitude to the Slavophils, Herz.en said :
Yes, we were their opponents, but very peculiar ones. We had only
ont love, but it did not takt tht samt form.
From our earliest years, we were possessed by one powerful,
unaccountable, physiological, passionate feeling, which they took
for memory of the past, we for a vision of the future-a feeling of
love, limitless, embracing all our being, love for the Russian people,
the Russian way of life, the Russian type of mind. We, like Janus
or the double-headed eagle, looked in opposite directions, while ont
htart beat in us all.
Belinsky was not torn between incompatible ideals. He was an
integrated personality in the sense that he believed in his own feelings,
and was therefore free from the self-pity and the sentimentality which
spring from indulgence in feelings which one does not respect in
oneself. But there was a division within him which arose from a
simultaneous admiration for western values and ideals, and a profound
lack of sympathy with, indeed dislike and lack of respect for, the
characters and form of life of the western bourgeoisie and typical
western intellectuals. This ambivalence of feeling, created by history-
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by the social and psychological conditions, which formed the Russian
intellectuals in the nineteenth century- was inherited by and became
prominent in the next generation of radical intellectuals- in Chernyshevsky and Nekrasov, in the populist movement, in the assassins of Alexander II, and indeed in Lenin too, Lenin who could not be
accused of ignoring or despising the contributions of western culture,
but felt far more alien in London or Paris than the more 'normal'
type of international exile. To some degree this peculiar amalgam of
love and hate is still intrinsic to Russian feelings about Europe: on
the one hand, intellectual respect, envy, admiration, desire to emulate
and excel; on the other, emotional hostility, suspicion, and contempt, a
sense of being clumsy, dt trop, of being outsiders; leading, as a result,
to an alternation between excessive self-prostration before, and
aggressive flouting of, western values. No visitor to the Soviet Union
can have failed to remark something of this phenomenon: a combination of intellectual inadequacy and emotional superiority, a sense of the west as enviably self-restrained, clever, efficient, and successful :
but also as being cramped, cold, mean, calculating, and fenced in,
without capacity for large views or generous emotion, for feeling which
must, at times, rise too high and overflow its banks, for heedless selfabandonment in response to some unique historical challenge, and consequently condemned never to know a rich flowering of life.
This spontaneity of feeling and passionate idealism are in themselves sufficient to distinguish Belinsky from his more methodical disciples. Unlike later radicals, he was not himself a utilitarian, least
of all where art was concerned. Towards the end of his life he pleaded
for a wider application of science, and more direct expression in art.
But he never believed that it was the duty of the artist to prophesy
or to preach- to serve society directly by telling it what to do, by
providing slogans, by putting its art in the service of a specific programme. This was the view of Chernyshevsky and N ekrasov in the sixties; of Lunacharsky and Mayakovsky and Soviet critics today.
Belinsky, like Gorky, believed in the duty of the artist to tell the
truth as he alone, being uniquely qualified to see and to utter, sees it
and can say it; that this is the whole duty of a writer whether he be a
thinker or an artist. Moreover he believed that since man lives in
society, and is largely made by society, this truth must necessarily be
largely social, and that, for this reason, all forms of insulation and
escape from environment must, to that degree, be falsifications of
the truth, and treason to it. For him the man and the artist and the
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citizen are one; and whether you write a novel, o r a poem, or a work
of history or philosophy, or an article in a newspaper, or compose a
symphony or a picture, you are, or should be, expressing the whole
of your nature, not merely a professionally trained part of it, and you
are morally responsible as a man for what you do as an artist. You
must always bear witness to the truth, which is one and indivisible,
in every act and in every word. There are no purely aesthetic truths
or aesthetic canons. Truth, beauty, morality, are attributes of life and
cannot be abstracted from it, and what is intellectually false or morally
ugly cannot be artistically beautiful, or vice versa. He believed that
human existence was-or should be -a perpetual and desperate war
between truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, in which no man
had the right to be neutral or have relations with the enemy, least of
all the artist. He declared war on the official nationalists because they
suppressed and distorted or coloured the facts: and this was thought
unpatriotic. He denounced copybook sentiments, and with a certain
brutality of expression tried to formulate the crude truth behind them,
and that was thought cynical. He admired first the German romantics,
then only their radical wing, and then the French socialists, and was
thought subversive. He told the Slavophils that inner self-improvement
and spiritual regeneration cannot occur on an empty stomach, nor in
a society which lacks social justice and suppresses elementary rights,