reading

Editorial Preface

Henry Hardy

[…] a cumbrous editorial apparatus apparently, if hopelessly, designed to embalm the most effervescent of all contemporary historians […]

Nicholas Richardsonfn1

This is one of four volumes in which, between the mid-1970s and 1980, I brought together, and prepared for reissue, the majority of the more substantial published essays by Isaiah Berlin that had not hitherto been made available in a collected form.fn2 His many writings had previously been scattered, often in obscure places, most were out of print, and only half a dozen essays had previously been collected and reissued.fn3 By making much more of his work readily accessible than before, these volumes revealed a quantity, a range and a depth of writing that surprised many readers, and their author’s reputation was, as he himself generously recognised, markedly enhanced.

Since then I have edited twelve further volumes by Berlin, including a number that draw on previously unpublished material; some of these, mentioned below, have points of contact with the present volume. More of Berlin’s Nachlass is posted in The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library (the website of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust),fn4 and here too items on Russian themes will be found.

Russian Thinkers comprises ten essays on nineteenth-century Russian literature and thought. Their previous publication details are as follows:

‘Russia and 1848’: Slavonic Review 26 (1948)

‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’: in a shorter form, as ‘Lev Tolstoy’s Historical Scepticism’, Oxford Slavonic Papers 2 (1951); reprinted with additions under its present title (London, 1953: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York, 1953: Simon and Schuster)

‘Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty’: in Ernest J. Simmons (ed.), Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1955: Harvard University Press)

‘A Remarkable Decade’, the Northcliffe Lectures for 1954, delivered at University College London, and broadcast later that year on the Third Programme of the BBC: as ‘A Marvellous Decade’ in Encounter 4 No 6 (June 1955), 5 No 11 (November 1955), 5 No 12 (December 1955) and 6 No 5 (May 1956)

‘Russian Populism’: as the introduction to Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (London, 1960: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York, 1960: Knopf); in Encounter 15 No 1 (July 1960)

‘Tolstoy and Enlightenment’, the PEN Hermon Ould Memorial Lecture for 1960:in Encounter 16 No 2 (February 1961); in Mightier than the Sword (London, 1964: Macmillan)

‘Fathers and Children: Turgenev and the Liberal Predicament’, the Romanes Lecture for 1970: Oxford, 1972: Clarendon Press; reprinted with corrections 1973; New York Review of Books (18 October, 1 and 15 November, 1973); as the introduction to Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, translated by Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth, 1975: Penguin)

I am grateful to the publishers concerned for allowing me to reprint these essays. A few passages – chiefly translations – were revised by Berlin for this volume: his versions, which characteristically refine their originals without misrepresenting their substance, were occasionally too free even by this unpedantic criterion. In addition, some overlaps between passages quoted in more than one essay were reduced by excision or substitution. Otherwise, apart from necessary corrections, and the addition of missing references in the footnoted essays, the texts were reprinted in the first edition of this book essentially in their original form. In particular, overlapping treatments of the same topics in what were originally independent essays, and remarks in the present tense about events current at the time of writing, were not altered. Moreover, ‘A Remarkable Decade’, ‘Russian Populism’ and ‘Tolstoy and Enlightenment’ were left without references, as they had originally appeared, partly because we were unable to find the sources of all the quotations they contain.

The same policy has been followed in this edition,fn5 with one important exception. Since 1978, the sources of many more (though not quite all) of the unreferenced quotations have been tracked down, by myself and others. The resetting of the book for Penguin Classics has created the welcome opportunity for me to add this information, so that all the essays are now treated consistently. I shall be grateful to be told of any remaining sources that I have not yet unearthed,fn6 though my guess is that some at any rate of the remaining unsourced ‘quotations’ are in fact closer to paraphrase, and in some cases, following Berlin’s own practice for the first edition, I have removed quotation marks where the relationship of his renderings to his source is somewhat approximate.

Some critics have argued against adding footnotes to essays originally published without. I have quoted the opinion of Nicholas Richardson at the head of this preface; in another context Stefan Collini referred to ‘a slightly bastardised state of [Berlin’s] essays’, observing that the provision of references ‘threaten[s] to domesticate what had been personal and stylish into appearing merely conventional and industrious’.fn7 I have responded to these criticisms in Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism.fn8 The main contrary consideration is that Berlin himself was thoroughly in favour of footnotes, deploying them himself in four of the essays included here; he would most probably have included them throughout if he had kept a more careful record of his sources for the essays that started life as lectures not destined for publication. Having spent more time than I care to remember looking for these sources, I also wish to spare others the need to repeat the process. So I make no apology for adding references throughout this edition, and only regret that this was not done thirty years ago. The references will enable scholars to follow Berlin’s intellectual path in more detail, and they have also enabled me to eliminate numerous errors, both in the text and in the notes – Berlin’s mention in his preface of ‘vague references and excessively free translations’ being something of an understatement.

I have also sought to make this edition a little more user-friendly in other ways. I have added in the notes, for the benefit of readers without the relevant languages, details of English translations of the works quoted from, and translations of a number of French passages that had previously been left untranslated. Jason Ferrell has generously compiled a glossary of names, modelled on the one by Helen Rappaport in The Soviet Mindfn9 (and incorporating some of her material), which provides basic background information on (principally Russian) figures mentioned by Berlin who may not be familiar to all his readers. And in one or two cases my explorations, or those of others, yielded additional information that it seemed helpful to pass on to readers: this is printed within square brackets in the notes to make its editorial authorship clear.

Those who know the author’s work in this field will notice that three important items are missing. Two of these are his introductions to translations of Herzen’s works mentioned in the list of abbreviations and conventions (xx–xxii below). These were excluded because they both overlap to some extent with the two essays on Herzen in this volume. The introduction to From the Other Shore and The Russian People and Socialism has now been included in a collection of Berlin’s shorter essays, The Power of Ideas (London and Princeton, 2000); the introduction to My Past and Thoughts is in Against the Current. The third piece is ‘Artistic Commitment: A Russian Legacy’, which was not available in 1978, but has now appeared in Berlin’s The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History (London, 1996; New York, 1997), a collection mainly comprising previously unpublished essays.

Berlin’s special affinity with Turgenev, vividly displayed in ‘Fathers and Children’, is also reflected in three translations he made of Turgenev’s work – a novella, a play and an autobiographical story. The translations of the novella, First Love, and the play, A Month in the Country, are also available in Penguin Classics. The story, ‘A Fire at Sea’, was published with an introduction by Berlin as ‘An Episode in the Life of Ivan Turgenev’ in the London Magazine in July 1957, and reissued with the novella as First Love and A Fire at Sea (London, 1982: Hogarth Press; New York, 1983: Viking).

Readers may also like to know of other pieces in, or related to, this area which do not appear here. There are three radio talks, ‘The Man Who Became a Myth’ (Belinsky), ‘The Father of Russian Marxism’ (Plekhanov) and ‘The Role of the Intelligentsia’, all included in The Power of Ideas. There are several essays on Soviet Russia, collected as The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism (Washington, 2004: Brookings Institution Press), which also includes a bibliography of Berlin’s other writings on Russia. ‘Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956’, mainly about Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, is to be found in Personal Impressions; a shortened version of this essay, entitled ‘Conversations with Akhmatova and Pasternak’, is one of the essays in The Soviet Mind, and also appears in The Proper Study of Mankind (London, 1997; New York, 1998), an anthology of essays drawn from the preceding collections.

Another recent episode in the history of Berlin’s writings on Russia should also be mentioned here. Tom Stoppard’s trilogy of plays on the Russian intelligentsia, The Coast of Utopia, premiered at the National Theatre in London in 2002, at the Lincoln Center in New York in 2006–7, and at the Russian Academic Youth Theatre in Moscow in 2007, ‘was inspired’, in Stoppard’s words, ‘by reading Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers, and becoming fascinated by some of the people he wrote about’; indeed, he is ‘the presiding spirit of the trilogy’.fn10 Certainly Berlin’s ‘complex vision’, to borrow the title of Aileen Kelly’s illuminating introduction,fn11 palpably informs the world portrayed in these remarkable plays.

I have many debts of gratitude, and can mention only the weightiest here. I begin with the first edition. First and foremost, the great bulk of the detailed editorial work was undertaken by Dr Aileen Kelly, without whose specialist knowledge of the Russian language and of nineteenth-century Russian culture my task would have been impossible. During an unusually busy time she devoted many hours to the search for answers to my queries, and my obligation and gratitude to her remain very great. Isaiah Berlin himself was unfailingly courteous, good-humoured and informative in response both to my persistent general advocacy of the revival of his work, which he regarded with considerable, and mounting, scepticism, and to my often over-meticulous probings into points of detail. Lesley Chamberlain gave valuable help with ‘Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty’. Pat Utechin, Isaiah Berlin’s last and longest-serving secretary, was an indispensable source of aid and encouragement at all stages.

Turning to the revised edition, I should like first to extend my exceedingly grateful thanks to Derek Offord for spending an enormous amount of time, over a long period, tracing quotations and checking their accuracy, with saintly patience and generosity. It is no exaggeration to say that without him I could not have prepared this edition in its present form. I am also greatly indebted to the expert knowledge (and ready willingness to help) of Tatiana Pozdnyakova, who miraculously tracked down almost all the passages despaired of by others (helped on occasion by Konstantin Glebovich Isupov), as well as arranging for the illustrations in ‘Fathers and Children’ to be scanned by the Russian National Library in St Petersburg. The dedication of these two scholars, far beyond any conceivable call of duty, is reflected in the dedication of the book, whose editorial element depends so substantially on their help.

Marshall Shatz has most kindly and uncomplainingly assisted me with many problems, especially those involving Bakunin; Andrew Drozd, Jaap Engelsman, Richard Freeborn, Steffen Gross, Robin Hessman, Aileen Kelly, Marina Khmelnitskaya, Marina Kozyreva, Nikolai Sergeyevich Matveyev, Helen Rappaport, Judy Skelton, Roman Davidovich Timenchik, Patrick Waddington and Andrei Zorin have also come to my aid, some of them more than once. I was rescued, too, on several occasions by Nick Hearn, Richard Ramage, Lisa-Maria Spierin and their colleagues in the Slavonic section of the Taylorian Institution Library in Oxford. Indeed, my rusty and in any event somewhat rudimentary knowledge of Russian has made me specially dependent on others in revising this volume, which is in this sense a collective enterprise, unjustly credited on the title page to only four of those who have contributed to it. Nevertheless, the responsibility for any remaining editorial deficiencies is of course mine alone.

H.H.

Wolfson College, Oxford

October 2007

Introduction

A Complex Vision

Aileen Kelly

Do not look for solutions in this book – there are none; in general modern man has no solutions.

Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shorefn1

In an attempt to explain Russian Bolshevism to Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell once remarked that, appalling though it was, it seemed the right sort of government for Russia: ‘If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky’s characters should be governed, you will understand.’fn2

In the eyes of many Western liberals, the Soviet tyranny was the inescapable outcome of the ideas and actions of Dostoevsky’s ‘possessed’: the Russian radical intelligentsia. In the degree of their alienation from their society and of their impact on it, the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century were a phenomenon almost sui generis. Their ideological leaders were a small group with the cohesiveness and sense of mission of a religious sect. In their fervent moral opposition to the existing order, their single-minded preoccupation with ideas, and their faith in reason and science, they paved the way for the Russian Revolution and thereby achieved major historical significance. But they are too often treated by English and American historians with a mixture of condescension and moral revulsion – because the theories to which they were so fervently attached were not their own but borrowed from the West and often misunderstood and misapplied, and because in their fanatical passion for extreme ideologies they are held to have rushed, like Dostoevsky’s devils, to blind self-destruction, dragging their country, and then much of the rest of the world, after them. The Russian Revolution and its aftermath have strengthened the belief, deeply entrenched in the Anglo-Saxon outlook, that a passionate interest in ideas is a symptom of mental and moral disorder.

One powerful liberal voice never failed to dissent from this view of the Russian intelligentsia. Isaiah Berlin is one of the most widely admired political thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, the proponent of what John Gray describes as a ‘stoical and tragic liberalism’ of unavoidable conflict between competing values, which injected new life into the liberal intellectual tradition.fn3 His writings are penetrated with the conviction that liberal values are best defended by those who best understand the power of ideas, in particular the intellectual and moral attractions of what he has called the great despotic visions of the right and left. One of his distinctive contributions to English intellectual life was as a counterforce to its parochial indifference to intellectual movements in Europe. In a succession of dazzling studies he carried the personalities and ideas of some of the most original thinkers of the post-Renaissance world to a wide audience, and in the essays brought together in this book he achieved the same for the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia.

Berlin’s approach to Russian thought was directed by his interest in how ideas are ‘lived through’ as solutions to moral problems. Avoiding the common tendency to pronounce on Russian solutions with the wisdom of historical hindsight, he focused instead on the dilemmas they were conceived to resolve. Though his essays on Russian subjects stand by themselves, with no need of philosophical annotation or cross-reference, they are also a substantial contribution to the central theme of all his writings on intellectual history, and their originality can best be appreciated if they are approached within this wider framework.

Berlin’s writings are centrally concerned with what he sees as one of the most fundamental of the open issues on which moral conduct depends: Are all absolute values ultimately compatible with one another, or is there no single final solution to the problem of how to live, no one objective and universal human ideal? In the essays on liberty that encapsulate his thinking on this issue, he explores the historical and psychological roots and consequences of monist and pluralist visions of the world. He argues that the great totalitarian structures built on Hegelian and Marxist foundations are not a terrible aberration but rather a logical development of the central assumption shared by the main currents of Western political thought: that a fundamental unity, deriving from a single universal purpose, underlies all phenomena. This can be discovered, according to some, through scientific enquiry or, according to others, through religious revelation or metaphysical speculation. When discovered, it will provide a definitive answer to the question of how one should live.

Although the most extreme forms of this faith, with their dehumanising visions of individuals as instruments of abstract historical forces, have led to criminal perversions of political practice, Berlin emphasises that the faith itself cannot be dismissed as the product of sick minds. It is the basis of all traditional morality and is rooted in a ‘deep and incurable metaphysical need’fn4 that arises from humanity’s sense of an inner split and its yearning for a mythical lost wholeness. This craving for absolutes is often the expression of an urge to shed the burden of responsibility for one’s fate by transferring it to a ‘vast amoral, impersonal, monolithic whole – nature, or history, or class, or race, or the “harsh realities of our time”, or the irresistible evolution of the social structure – that will absorb and integrate us into its limitless, indifferent, neutral texture, which it is senseless to evaluate or criticise, and against which we fight to our certain doom’.fn5

Berlin believes that precisely because monistic visions of reality answer fundamental human needs, truly consistent pluralism is rarely found in history. In the sense in which he uses the word, pluralism is not to be confused with that which is commonly defined as a liberal outlook – according to which all extreme positions are distortions of true values and the key to social harmony and a moral life lies in moderation and the golden mean. True pluralism, as Berlin understands it, is much more tough-minded and intellectually bold: it rejects the view that all conflicts of values can be finally resolved by synthesis and that all desirable goals may be reconciled. It recognises that human nature generates values which, though equally sacred, equally ultimate, exclude one another, without there being any possibility of establishing an objective hierarchical relation among them. Moral conduct may therefore involve making agonising choices, without the help of universal criteria, between incompatible but equally desirable values.

This permanent possibility of moral uncertainty is, in Berlin’s view, the price that must be paid for recognition of the true nature of one’s freedom: the individual’s right to self-direction, as opposed to direction by State or Church or Party, is plainly of supreme importance if one holds that the diversity of human goals and aspirations cannot be evaluated by any universal criterion or subordinated to some transcendent purpose. But he maintains that although this belief is implicit in some humanist and liberal attitudes, the consequences of consistent pluralism are so painful and disturbing, and so radically undermine some of the central and uncritically accepted assumptions of the Western intellectual tradition, that they are seldom fully articulated. In seminal essays on Giambattista Vico, Niccoló Machiavelli and Johann Gottfried von Herder, and in ‘Historical Inevitability’, Berlin has shown that those few thinkers who spelled out the consequences of pluralism have been consistently misunderstood and their originality undervalued.

In Four Essays on Libertyfn6 he suggests that pluralist visions of the world are often the product of historical claustrophobia, during periods of intellectual and social stagnation, when a sense of the intolerable cramping of human faculties by the demand for conformity generates a demand for ‘more light’,fn7 an extension of the areas of individual responsibility and spontaneous action. But as the dominance of monistic doctrines throughout history shows, people are much more prone to agoraphobia: at moments of historical crisis, when the need for choice generates fears and neuroses, they eagerly trade the doubts and agonies of moral responsibility for determinist visions, conservative or radical, that give them ‘the peace of imprisonment, a contented security, a sense of having at last found one’s proper place in the cosmos’.fn8 Berlin points out that the craving for certainties has never been stronger than in the twentieth century; and his essays on liberty are a powerful warning of the need to discern, through a deepening of moral perceptions – a ‘complex vision’fn9 of the world – the cardinal fallacies on which such certainties rest.

Like many other liberals, Berlin believes that such a deepening of perceptions can be gained through a study of the intellectual background to the Russian Revolution. But his conclusions are very different from theirs. With the subtle moral sense that led him to radically new insights into European thinkers, he refutes the common view that the Russian intelligentsia were, to a man, fanatical monists: their historical predicament strongly predisposed them to both types of vision of the world, the monist and the pluralist – the fascination of the intelligentsia derives from the fact that the most sensitive among them suffered simultaneously, and equally acutely, from historical claustrophobia and agoraphobia, so that they were at once strongly attracted to messianic ideologies and morally repelled by them. The result, as he reveals, was a remarkably concentrated self-searching that in many cases produced prophetic insights into the great problems of our time.

The causes of that extreme Russian agoraphobia which generated a succession of millenarian political doctrines are well known: in the political reaction following the failure of the Decembrist rising of 1825 the Westernised intellectual èlite became deeply alienated from their backward society. With no practical outlet for their energies, they channelled their social idealism into a religiously dedicated search for truth. In the historiosophical systems of German idealist philosophy, then at the height of its influence in Europe, they sought a unitary vision that would make sense of the moral and social chaos around them and anchor them in reality.

This yearning for absolutes was one source of that notorious consistency which, as Berlin observes, was the most striking characteristic of Russian thinkers – their habit of taking ideas and concepts to their most extreme, even absurd, conclusions: to stop before the ultimate consequences of one’s reasoning was seen as moral cowardice, insufficient commitment to the truth. But there was a second, conflicting motivation behind this consistency. Among the Westernised minority, imbued through their education and reading with both Enlightenment and romantic ideals of liberty and human dignity, the primitive and crushing despotism of Nicholas I produced a claustrophobia that had no parallel in the more advanced countries of Europe, and was expressed in a radical questioning of traditionally accepted authorities and dogmas – religious, political and social. As Berlin shows in his essay ‘Russia and 1848’, the failure of the European revolutions in 1848 accelerated this process by increasing the intelligentsia’s distrust of Western liberal and radical ideologues and their social nostrums. The tensions and the insights generated by an iconoclasm that was driven by the thirst for faith are the central theme of Berlin’s essays on Russian thinkers.

In a series of vivid portraits of individual thinkers, he presents the most outstanding members of the intelligentsia as continually torn between their suspicion of absolutes and their longing to discover some monolithic truth that would once and for all resolve the problems of moral conduct. Some succumbed to the latter urge: Mikhail Bakunin began his political career with a famous denunciation of the tyranny of dogmas over individuals and ended it by demanding total adherence to his dogma of the wisdom of the simple peasant; and many of the young ‘nihilist’ iconoclasts of the 1860s accepted without question the tenets of a crude materialism. In other thinkers the battle was more serious and sustained. The literary critic Vissarion Belinsky is often cited as the arch example of the intelligentsia’s fanatical attachment to the principle of logical consistency: from Hegelian principles he deduced that the despotism of Nicholas I was to be accepted as a necessary stage in the march of History. But as Berlin shows in a moving study of Belinsky, after a tormenting inner struggle he surrendered to the promptings of his conscience, fervently denouncing Hegel’s doctrine of progress as a Moloch to whom living human beings were sacrificed. In their search for an ideal that would withstand their destructive critique, many other Russian intellectuals were led to question the great metaphysical systems that ruled over nineteenth-century European thought as well as some of the most cherished assumptions of progressive ideologies. In an essay on the populist tradition that dominated Russian radical thought in the nineteenth century, Berlin observes that this movement was far ahead of its time in pointing to the dehumanising implications of contemporary liberal and radical theories of progress, which placed such faith in quantification, centralisation, and the rationalisation of productive processes.

Most Russian thinkers regarded their destructive criticism as a mere preliminary, the clearing of the ground for some great ideological construction; Berlin sees it as highly relevant to our time, when only a consistent pluralism can protect human freedom from the depredations of the systematisers. Such a pluralism, he has pointed out, was fully articulated in the ideas of a thinker whose originality had hitherto been largely overlooked: Alexander Herzen.

The founder of Russian populism, Herzen was known in the West mainly as a Russian radical with a Utopian faith in an archaic form of socialism. In two essays on Herzen, and in introductions to his greatest works, From the Other Shore and My Past and Thoughts,fn10 Berlin established him firmly as one of Russia’s ‘three moral preachers of genius’,fn11 the author of profound reflections on liberty.

Herzen had begun his intellectual career with a search for an ideal; he found it in an advanced form of socialism that he believed existed in embryo in the Russian peasant commune. But he argued that neither his nor any other ideal could be a universal solution to the problems of social existence: the search for such a solution was incompatible with respect for human liberty. He accused the revolutionaries of his time of being conservatives in their reluctance to confront the common source of all forms of political oppression: the tyranny of abstractions over individuals. Herzen’s attacks on all deterministic philosophies of progress, Berlin argues, showed a prescient understanding that ‘one of the greatest of sins that any human being can perpetrate is to seek to transfer moral responsibility from his own shoulders to those of an unpredictable future order’,fn12 to sanctify monstrous crimes by faith in some remote Utopia.

Berlin depicts Herzen’s predicament as a very modern one. Herzen was torn between the conflicting values of equality and excellence; he recognised the injustice of èlites but valued the intellectual and moral freedom and the aesthetic distinction of true aristocracy. But while refusing, unlike other leading ideologists of the Russian left, to sacrifice excellence to equality, he understood, with John Stuart Mill, something that has become much clearer in our day: that the common mean between these values, represented by ‘mass societies’, is not the best of both worlds but more frequently, in Mill’s words, an aesthetically and ethically repellent ‘collective mediocrity’,fn13 the submergence of the individual in the mass. In a language as vivid as Herzen’s own, Berlin has conveyed to the English-speaking reader the originality of Herzen’s belief that there are no general solutions to individual and specific problems, only temporary expedients that must be based on an acute sense of the uniqueness of each historical situation and on a responsiveness to the needs and demands of diverse individuals and peoples.

Berlin’s exploration of the self-searching of Russian thinkers includes studies of two writers – Tolstoy and Turgenev – that remove the widespread misconception that in pre-Revolutionary Russia literature and radical thought formed two distinct and mutually hostile traditions. Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s well-known aversion to the intelligentsia has been frequently quoted to emphasise the gulf between Russia’s great writers, who were concerned with exploring human spiritual depths, and its radical thinkers, perceived as obsessed with the external forms of social existence. Berlin maintains that the art of Tolstoy and Turgenev can be understood only as a product of the same moral conflict as that experienced by the radical intelligentsia. In his study of Tolstoy’s view of history, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, and in his essay on Tolstoy and the Enlightenment, he interprets the relation between Tolstoy’s artistic vision and his moral preaching as a titanic struggle between monist and pluralist visions of reality. Tolstoy’s lethal nihilism demolished the pretensions of all theories, dogmas and systems to explain, order or predict the complex and contradictory phenomena of history and social existence, but the driving force of this attack was a passionate longing to discover a single unitary truth, encompassing all existence and impregnable to attack. He was thus constantly in contradiction with himself, perceiving reality in its multiplicity but believing only in ‘one vast, unitary whole’.fn14 In his art he expressed an unsurpassed feeling for the irreducible variety of phenomena, but in his moral preaching he advocated simplification, reduction to one single level, that of the Russian peasant or the simple Christian ethic. In some of the most psychologically delicate and revealing passages ever written on Tolstoy, Berlin suggests that his tragedy was that his sense of reality was too strong to be compatible with any of the narrow ideals he set up; the conclusions articulated in Herzen’s writings were demonstrated in Tolstoy’s inability, despite the most desperate attempts, to harmonise opposing but equally valid goals and attitudes. Yet his failure to resolve his inner contradictions gives Tolstoy a moral stature apparent even to those most mystified or repelled by the content of his preaching.

Few writers would seem to have less in common than Tolstoy, the fanatical seeker after truth, and Turgenev, a master of lyrical prose, the author of ‘nostalgic idylls of country life’.fn15 But in his essay on Turgenev, Berlin shows that although by temperament SollenSein

The same question recurs repeatedly in different versions: How can we prevent the alternatives of Sollen–Sein from becoming polarisations of Utopianism–opportunism, romanticism–conservatism, purposeless madness versus collaboration with crime masquerading as sobriety? How can we avoid the fatal choice between the Scylla of duty, crying its arbitrary slogans, and the Charybdis of compliance with the existing world, which transforms itself into voluntary approval of its most dreadful products? How to avoid this choice, given the postulate – which we consider essential – that we are never able to measure truly and accurately the limits of what we call ‘historical necessity’? And that we are, consequently, never able to decide with certainty which concrete fact of social life is a component of historical destiny and what potentials are concealed in existing reality.fn16

Kolakowski’s formulation of this dilemma that faced the twentieth century is surely valid. Yet Turgenev, a thinker of a very different type, faced it more than a century ago. Before proponents of one-sided visions, conservative or Utopian, possessed the technological equipment for experiments on limitless human material, it was less difficult to defend the view that one or other extreme vision, or even a middle course, was the whole answer. Isaiah Berlin has demonstrated that, at a time when both liberals and the ideologists of the left were still confident of the sufficiency of their systems, Turgenev had attained a more complex vision and had embodied it in his art.

Among the three central figures in these essays, there is no doubt where Berlin’s greatest sympathies lie. As he shows us, for all Tolstoy’s moral grandeur, his blindness at those moments when he relinquishes the humane vision of his art for a domineering dogmatism is repellent. And Turgenev, for all the clarity of his vision, his intelligence and his sense of reality, lacked the courage and moral commitment he so admired in the radical intelligentsia: his vacillation between alternatives was too often a state of agreeable melancholy, ultimately dispassionate and detached.

It is Herzen who emerges as the hero of Russian Thinkers. Although Berlin concedes that there was substance in Turgenev’s assertion that Herzen never succeeded in ridding himself of one illusion – his faith in the peasant ‘sheepskin coat’fn17 – for him this does not detract from a view of liberty that was both profound and prophetic in its perception that ‘one of the deepest of modern disasters is to be caught up in abstractions instead of realities’.fn18 Berlin concluded his inaugural lecture as Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford with a quotation from an author whom he did not identify: ‘To realise the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.’fn19 Herzen, who had the subtle vision of a Turgenev along with a self-sacrificing commitment to the truth that was the equal of Tolstoy’s, was in this sense both brave and civilised. He possessed to a great degree that consistent pluralism of outlook which for Berlin is the essence of political wisdom.

It is often said of the Russians that their national peculiarity consists in expressing in an extreme fashion certain universal characteristics of the human condition; and for many the historical significance of the Russian intelligentsia consists in the fact that they embodied the human thirst for absolutes in a pathologically exaggerated form. Berlin’s essays present us with a very different and much more complex interpretation of the intelligentsia’s ‘universality’, showing that for a variety of historical reasons they embodied not one but at least two fundamental, and opposed, human urges. The urge to assert the autonomy of the self through revolt against necessity continually clashed with their demand for certainties, leading them to acute insights into moral, social and aesthetic problems that in this century have come to be regarded as of central importance. That this aspect of their thought has aroused so little attention in the West is due in some measure to the glaring intellectual defects of the thought of most leaders of the intelligentsia. The repetitiousness, the incoherence, the proliferation of half-digested ideas from foreign sources in the writings of men like Belinsky, together with the political disasters for which they are held responsible, have led many Western scholars to echo the Russian thinker Petr Chaadaev’s famous pronouncement that Russia exists only to teach the world some great lesson – apparently, that its example should be avoided at all costs. But with an acute instinct for quality, and with no trace of the condescension that is the frequent concomitant of historical hindsight, Berlin has discerned behind the formal shortcomings of the intelligentsia’s writings a moral passion worthy of attention and respect, a vindication of the belief he preached to his English audience over many years: enthusiasm for ideas is not a failing or a vice; on the contrary, the ability to think through political and social ideals in order to predict their ultimate consequences is the best safeguard we have against the tyranny of ideological systems.

As Berlin points out in Four Essays on Liberty, no philosopher has ever succeeded in proving or refuting the determinist proposition that subjective attitudes do not influence historical events. But his studies of how Russian thinkers ‘lived’ their beliefs, testing them in daily moral struggle, argue more powerfully than any logical demonstration in support of the message that penetrates all Isaiah Berlin’s writings: that human beings are morally free and are (more often, at least, than the determinists would concede) able to influence events for good or ill through their freely held convictions and ideals.

[ ]	Editorial addition
[…]	Editorial ellipsis
…	Ellipsis used by quoted author
B	V. G. Belinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1953–9)
C	N. G. Chernyshevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1947–53)
D	Polnoe sobranie sochinenii F. M. Dostoevskogo v XVIII tomakh (Moscow, 2003–6)
E	Tolstoy on Education: Tolstoy’s Educational Writings 1861–62, ed. Alan Pinch and Michael Armstrong, trans. Alan Pinch (London, 1982)
F	Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore, trans. Moura Budberg, and The Russian People and Socialism, trans. Richard Wollheim, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin (London, 1956)
FC	Fathers and Children (followed by the chapter number, and the page in vol. 8 of S: thus FC 7, 226 = Fathers and Children, chapter 7, S viii 226)
H	A. I. Gertsen [Herzen], Sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh (Moscow, 1954–66)
L	Alexander Herzen, Letters from France and Italy, 1847–1851, ed. and trans. Judith E. Zimmerman (Pittsburgh and London, 1995)
M	Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Constance Garnett, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin, 4 vols (London and New York, 1968)
O	Michel Bakounine, Œuvres (Paris, 1895–1913)
OC	Œuvres complètes de J. de Maistre (Lyon/Paris, 1884–7)
P	I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (Moscow/Leningrad, 1960–8), Pis’ma
S	I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (Moscow/Leningrad, 1960–8), Sochineniya
SPD	Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal etc., 1993)
T	L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1928–64)
W	Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (London, 1942: Macmillan); because the Maudes’ subdivisions of the text vary from edition to edition of their translation, and also differ from those in T, references to are given by page alone

Isaiah Berlin

RUSSIAN THINKERS

Edited by HENRY HARDY and AILEEN KELLY
With an Introduction by AILEEN KELLY

Revised by HENRY HARDY
Glossary by JASON FERRELL

THE BEGINNING

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Contents

PENGUIN CLASSICS

RUSSIAN THINKERS

Author’s Preface

Editorial Preface

Henry Hardy

Abbreviations and Conventions

Introduction

A Complex Vision

Aileen Kelly

Isaiah Berlin

RUSSIAN THINKERS

Edited by HENRY HARDY and AILEEN KELLYWith an Introduction by AILEEN KELLY

Revised by HENRY HARDYGlossary by JASON FERRELL

THE BEGINNING

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Contents

PENGUIN CLASSICS

RUSSIAN THINKERS

Author’s Preface

Editorial Preface

Henry Hardy

Abbreviations and Conventions

Introduction

A Complex Vision

Aileen Kelly

Edited by HENRY HARDY and AILEEN KELLY
With an Introduction by AILEEN KELLY

Revised by HENRY HARDY
Glossary by JASON FERRELL