Narcissists
Ronald Hingley
Russian Thinkers Isaiah Berlin (The Hogarth Press £6.95)
Russian Thinkers is the first of four volumes to be devoted to the Selected Writings of Sir Isaiah Berlin issued under the general editorship of Henry Hardy. That the best of these important but scattered works, many of them somewhat inaccessible, should now be brought together is obviously appropriate. Dr Hardy's editing and that of the co-editor of the present volume (Dr Aileen Kelly) is tasteful and scrupulous.
Re-reading this material, issued over a quarter of a century from 1948 onwards and devoted to Russian intellectual life, I have found nothing to diminish my respect for the author's profound erudition, philosophical zest and rhetorical panache. Nor would I dissent from his two cardinal theses: the elusiveness of ultimate truth; and the importance, to' Russia and the world, of that country's digestion and regurgitation of ideas in the mid-nineteenth century.
On authors and thinkers familiar to western readers, particularly Tolstoy and Turgenev, their elucidator provides insights which make a fresh impact even on rereading. He is, for example, eloquent on the folly of attempting to view Tolstoy's novels in abstraction from his philosophical strivings. He persuasively presents Turgenev's Fathers and Children as a still valid paradigm of the dilemmas facing the modern liberal; and, never, surely, was donnish vacillation more brilliantly defended — even being presented as a peculiar form of heroism — than in the last essay in this book.
Where I part company with Sir Isaiah is in this. I simply do not share the boundless, almost ecstatic sympathy which a contemplation of Russian intellectual eccentricities seems to arouse in him. His is not, be it said, an addiction to Russian ideas as original contributions to thought. 'Scarcely one single political and social idea to be found in Russia in the nineteenth century was [he asserts] born on native soil.' Nor is he enamoured of the skill with which those ideas are, in general, presented. Far from it, for he repeatedly shows consciousness of what Miss Kelly, in her introduction, frankly calls the 'glaring intellectual defects' of the material: its repetitiousness, its incoherence, the proliferation of halfdigested ideas. No. It is neither the ideas nor the form in which they are expressed that so inspires their champion, but rather the passion, the commitment, the dedication with which they were conceived and preached. Again and again is this special Russian fever superbly evoked in these pages until even
my own long-standing and ingrained scepticism began to wilt under the white heat of so much eloquence, only to revive again.
The notoriously elusive concept of the 'Russian intelligentsia' is here invoked as representing something more cohesive than the widely varying use of the term warrants. As for the allied concept of populism, its adherents really cannot both represent a 'dedicated order' (p. 231) and 'a loose congeries' (p. 210). Moreover, however we choose to conceive the intelligentsia — radical, populist, revolutionary or whatever — and whichever of a myriad competing definitions we might choose to accept, it is hard to feel that this mysterious amalgam merits . all the adulation here accorded to it. Not, of course, that the author is ignorant of the criticisms that have so often been levelled against the Russian intelligentsia, whatever it may be: its fierce intolerance; its lack of respect for solid achievement; its contempt for serious endeavour;its obsession with egalitarianism at the expense of creativity; its penchant for brainless peasant-fancying; its bias towards political criminality and gangsterism (what I call `psychopatholitics'); its mindless worship of youth; its innate destructiveness, of its country and of itself; a narcissism so intense that one of its principal activities has been described as 'the absorbed study of itself'.
For these reasons I feel that the uninstructed student would gain a more balanced view of Russian intellectual life from the work of other scholars; Tibor Szamtiely and Richard Pipes are among the more recent authorities who come to mind. Whether they would prove comparably stimulating is another matter, but they too write with no little passion and they are certainly more informative. They no doubt belong to that 'majority' among foreign students of Russia to whom Miss Kelly ma4s several oracular references in her introduction, and whose misconceptions have been allegedly corrected on these pages. Personally I have had the opposite impression to hers: to wit, that the great majority of western authorities (and many, surely, under Sir Isaiah's own powerful influence) are far, far too kind to the wretched Russian intelligentsia.
All in all, much of what the author views with fascinated enthusiasm I personally view with fascinated horror. Not that I would go as far as Dostoievsky who once dismissed the subjects of this book, or most of them, as 'the dung-beetle Belinsky and shits of that ilk.' But there are times when I tend to feel that the profoundest and most sensitive comment on 'Russian thought' is that of the twentieth-century poet Mandelstam. So keenly was he attuned, even in infancy, to the vibrations of modernity, that he allegedly fainted right away (at the ripe age of six) on merely hearing the unfamiliar word progress.
That ideas incubated in Russia have exercised a profound influence on human affairs I concede. So too have the tubercle bacillus, the plague rat and the Gatling gun.
Previous page
