The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  Herzen’s ideas have long since entered into the general texture of Russian political thought – liberals and radicals, populists and anarchists, socialists and communists have all claimed him as an ancestor. But what survives today of all that unceasing and feverish activity, even in his native country, is not a system or a doctrine but a handful of essays, some remarkable letters, and the extraordinary amalgam of memory, observation, moral passion, psychological analysis and political description, wedded to a major literary talent, which has immortalised his name. What remains is, above all, a passionate and inextinguishable temperament and a sense of the movement of nature and of its unpredictable possibilities, which he felt with an intensity which not even his uniquely rich and flexible prose could fully express.

  He believed that the ultimate goal of life was life itself; that the day and the hour were ends in themselves, not a means to another day or another experience. He believed that remote ends were a dream, that faith in them was a fatal illusion; that to sacrifice the present or the immediate and foreseeable future to these distant ends must always lead to cruel and futile forms of human sacrifice. He believed that values were not found in an impersonal, objective realm, but were created by human beings, changed with the generations of men, but were none the less binding upon those who lived in their light; that suffering was inescapable, and infallible knowledge neither attainable nor needed. He believed in reason, scientific methods, individual action, empirically discovered truths; but he tended to suspect that faith in general formulae, laws, prescription in human affairs was an attempt, sometimes catastrophic, always irrational, to escape from the uncertainty and unpredictable variety of life to the false security of our own symmetrical fantasies. He was fully conscious of what he believed. He had obtained this knowledge at the cost of painful, and, at times, unintended, self-analysis, and he described what he saw in language of exceptional vitality, precision and poetry. His purely personal credo remained unaltered from his earliest days: ‘Art, and the summer lightning of individual happiness: these are the only real goods we have,’ he declared in a self-revealing passage of the kind that so deeply shocked the stern young Russian revolutionaries in the 1860s. Yet even they and their descendants did not and do not reject his artistic and intellectual achievement.

  Herzen was not, and had no desire to be, an impartial observer. No less than the poets and the novelists of his nation, he created a style, an outlook, and, in the words of Gorky’s tribute to him, ‘an entire province, a country astonishingly rich in ideas’,26 where everything is immediately recognisable as being his and his alone, a country into which he transplants all that he touches, in which things, sensations, feelings, persons, ideas, private and public events, institutions, entire cultures are given shape and life by his powerful and coherent historical imagination, and have stood up against the forces of decay in the solid world which his memory, his intelligence and his artistic genius recovered and reconstructed. My Past and Thoughts is the Noah’s ark in which he saved himself, and not himself alone, from the destructive flood in which many idealistic radicals of the 1840s were drowned. Genuine art survives and transcends its immediate purpose. The structure that Herzen built, in the first place, perhaps, for his own personal salvation, built out of material provided by his own predicament – out of exile, solitude, despair – survives intact. Written abroad, concerned largely with European issues and figures, his reminiscences are a great permanent monument to the civilised, sensitive, morally preoccupied and gifted Russian society to which Herzen belonged; their vitality and fascination have not declined in the hundred years and more that have passed since the first chapters saw the light.

  1 Reported by P. A. Sergeenko in his book on Tolstoy, Tolstoy i ego sovremenniki (Moscow, 1911), p. 13.

  2 Sergeenko (ibid., pp. 13–14) says that Tolstoy told him in 1908 that he had a very clear recollection of his visit to Herzen in his London house in March 1861. ‘Lev Nikolaevich remembered him as a not very large, plump little man, who generated electric energy. “Lively, responsive, intelligent, interesting,” Lev Nikolaevich explained (as usual illustrating every shade of meaning by appropriate movements of his hands), “Herzen at once began talking to me as if we had known each other for a long time. I found his personality enchanting … I have never met a more attractive man. He stands head and shoulders above all the politicians of his own and of our time.”’

  3 There is evidence, although it is not conclusive, that she was married to him according to the Lutheran rite, not recognised by the Orthodox Church.

  4 A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow, 1954–66), vol. 8, p. 86. Subsequent reference in this essay to Herzen’s works are to this edition, hereafter called Sobranie sochinenii.

  5 Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8, p. 64: ‘Parce qu’il a été traître à la patrie.’

  6 The historical and sociological explanation of the origins of Russian socialism and of Herzen’s part in it cannot be attempted here. It has been treated in a number of (untranslated) Russian monographs, both pre- and post-revolutionary. The most detailed and original study of this topic to date [1968] is Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855 ([Cambridge, Massachusetts], 1961) by Martin Malia.

  7 op. cit (p. 220 above, note 3), vol. 6, p. 383.

  8 The clearest formulation of this well-worn and almost universal thesis is to be found in E. H. Carr’s lively and well-documented treatment of Herzen in his The Romantic Exiles (London, 1933). Malia’s book (op. cit., p. 505 above, note 1) avoids this error.

  9 In ‘An Georg Herwegh’ (1841).

  10 Herzen had no close English friends, although he had associates, allies and admirers. One of these, the radical journalist W. J. Linton, to whose English Republic Herzen had contributed articles, described him as ‘short of stature, stoutly built, in his last days inclined to corpulence, with a grand head, long chestnut hair and beard, small, luminous eyes, and rather ruddy complexion. Suave in his manner, courteous, but with an intense power of irony, witty … clear, concise, and impressive, he was a subtle and profound thinker, with all the passionate nature of the “barbarian”, yet generous and humane … Hospitable, and taking pleasure in society … a good conversationalist, with a frank and pleasant manner’: Memories (London, 1895), pp. 146–7. And in his European Republicans (London, 1893) he said that the Spanish radical Emilio Castelar declared that Herzen, with his fair hair and beard, looked like a Goth, but possessed the warmth, vivacity, verve, ‘inimitable grace’ and ‘marvellous variety’ of a southerner (pp. 275–6). Turgenev and Herzen were the first Russians to move freely in European society. The impression that they made did a good deal, though perhaps not enough, to dispel the myth of the dark ‘Slav soul’, which took a long time to die; perhaps it is not altogether dead yet.

  11 ‘[Copperfield] is Dickens’s Past and Thoughts,’ he said in one of his letters in the early 1860s; humility was not among his virtues. Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 27, p. 394 (letter of 16 December 1863).

  12 op. cit. (p. 502 above, note 1).

  13 Part of the inscription on the bell of the cathedral at Schaffhausen, used as the epigraph to Schiller’s ‘Das Lied von der Glocke’ (1799).

  14 ‘Pis’mo k Imperatoru Aleksandru vtoromu’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 12, pp. 272–4.

  15 ‘Cherez tri goda’, Kolokol, 15 February 1858: Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 13, pp. 195–7.

  16 See entry in the Journal for 8 February 1865 – ‘Dinner at Charles Edmund’s [Cojecki] … A Socratic mask with the warm and transparent flesh of a Rubens portrait, a red mark between the eyebrows as from a branding iron, greying beard and hair.

  ‘As he talks there is a constant ironical chuckle which rises and falls in his throat. His voice is soft, melancholy, musical, without any of the harsh sonority one might have expected from his huge neck: the ideas are fine, delicate, pungent, at times subtle, always definite, illuminated by words that take time to arrive, but which always possess the felicitou
s quality of French as it is spoken by a civilised and witty foreigner.

  ‘He speaks of Bakunin, of his eleven months in prison, chained to a wall, of his escape from Siberia by the Amur River, of his return by way of California, of his arrival in London, where, after a stormy, moist embrace, his first words [to Herzen] were “Can one get oysters here?”’

  Herzen delighted the Goncourts with stories about the Emperor Nicholas walking in the night in his empty palace, after the fall of Eupatoria during the Crimean War, with the heavy, unearthly steps of the stone statue of the Commander in Don Juan. This was followed by anecdotes about English habits and manners – ‘a country which he loves as the land of liberty’ – to illustrate its absurd, class-conscious, unyielding traditionalism, particularly noticeable in the relations of masters and servants. The Goncourts quote a characteristic epigram made by Herzen to illustrate the difference between the French and English characters. They faithfully report the story of how James Rothschild managed to save Herzen’s property in Russia.

  17 Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 10, p. 120

  18 This is the thesis in which orthodox Soviet scholars claim to discern a belated approach to those of Marx.

  19 loc. cit. (p. 266 above, note 2).

  20 Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, p. 94

  21 Letter to N. N. Gay senior of 13 February 1888. See also letter to V. G. Chertkov of 9 February 1888.

  22 Diary entry for 4 August 1860.

  23 Diary entry for 17 May 1896. But on 12 October 1905 he writes in his diary that he is reading Herzen’s From the Other Shore, and says ‘Our intelligentsia has sunk so low that … it cannot understand him.’

  24 Letter of 22–3(?) July 1862.

  25 Letter to his aunt, Countess A. A. Tolstaya, 7 August 1862.

  26 M. Gorky, Istoriya russkoi literatury (Moscow, 1939), p. 206.

  CONVERSATIONS WITH AKHMATOVA AND PASTERNAK

  I

  IN THE SUMMER of 1945 the British Embassy in Moscow reported that it was short-handed, especially in the matter of officials who knew Russian, and it was suggested that I might fill a gap for four or five months. I accepted this offer eagerly, mainly, I must admit, because of my great desire to learn about the condition of Russian literature and art, about which relatively little was known in the West at that time. I knew something, of course, of what had happened to Russian writers and artists in the 1920s and ’30s. The Revolution had stimulated a great wave of creative energy in Russia, in all the arts; bold experimentalism was everywhere encouraged: the new controllers of culture did not interfere with anything that could be represented as being a ‘slap in the face’ to bourgeois taste, whether it was Marxist or not. The new movement in the visual arts – the work of such painters as Kandinsky, Chagall, Soutine, Malevich, Klyun, Tatlin, of the sculptors Arkhipenko, Pevsner, Gabo, Lipchitz, Zadkine, of the theatre and film directors Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Tairov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin – produced masterpieces which had a powerful impact in the West; there was a similar upward curve in the field of literature and literary criticism. Despite the violence and devastation of the Civil War, and the ruin and chaos brought about by it, revolutionary art of extraordinary vitality continued to be produced.

  I remember meeting Sergei Eisenstein in 1945; he was in a state of terrible depression: this was the result of Stalin’s condemnation of the original version of his film Ivan the Terrible, because that savage ruler, with whom Stalin identified himself, faced with the need to repress the treachery of the boyars, had, so Stalin complained, been misrepresented as a man tormented to the point of neurosis. I asked Eisenstein what he thought were the best years of his life. He answered without hesitation, ‘The early ’20s. That was the time. We were young and did marvellous things in the theatre. I remember once, greased pigs were let loose among the members of the audience, who leapt on their seats and screamed. It was terrific. Goodness, how we enjoyed ourselves!’

  This was obviously too good to last. An onslaught was delivered on it by leftist zealots who demanded collective proletarian art. Then Stalin decided to put an end to all these politico-literary squabbles as a sheer waste of energy – not at all what was needed for Five Year Plans. The Writers’ Union was created in the mid-1930s to impose orthodoxy. There was to be no more argument, no disturbance of men’s minds. A dead level of conformism followed. Then came the final horror – the Great Purge, the political show trials, the mounting terror of 1937–8, the wild and indiscriminate mowing down of individuals and groups, later of whole peoples. I need not dwell on the facts of that murderous period, not the first, nor probably the last, in the history of Russia. Authentic accounts of the life of the intelligentsia in that time are to be found in the memoirs of, for example, Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Lydia Chukovskaya, and, in a difference sense, in Akhmatova’s poem Requiem. In 1939 Stalin called a halt to the proscriptions. Russian literature, art and thought emerged like an area that had been subjected to bombardment, with some noble buildings still relatively intact, but standing bare and solitary in a landscape of ruined and deserted streets.

  Then came the German invasion, and an extraordinary thing happened. The need to achieve national unity in the face of the enemy led to some relaxation of the political controls. In the great wave of Russian patriotic feeling, writers old and young, particularly poets, whom their readers felt to be speaking for them, for what they themselves felt and believed – these writers were idolised as never before. Poets whose work had been regarded with disfavour by the authorities, and consequently published seldom, if at all, suddenly received letters from soldiers at the fronts, as often as not quoting their least political and most personal lines. Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, who had for a long time lived in a kind of internal exile, began to receive an astonishingly large number of letters from soldiers quoting from both published and unpublished poems; there was a stream of requests for autographs, for confirmation of the authenticity of texts, for expressions of the author’s attitude to this or that problem. In the end this impressed itself on the minds of some of the Party’s leaders. The status and personal security of these frowned-upon poets were, in consequence, improved. Public readings by poets, as well as the reciting from memory of poetry at private gatherings, had been common in pre-revolutionary Russia. What was novel was that when Pasternak and Akhmatova read their poems, and occasionally halted for a word, there were always, among the vast audiences gathered to hear them, scores of listeners who prompted them at once with lines from works both published and unpublished, and in any case not publicly available. No writer could help being moved by and drawing strength from this most genuine form of homage.

  The status of the handful of poets who clearly rose far above the rest was, I found, unique. Neither painters nor composers nor prose writers, nor even the most popular actors or eloquent, patriotic journalists, were loved and admired so deeply and so universally, especially by the kind of people I spoke to in trams and trains and the underground, some of whom admitted that they had never read a word of their writings. The most famous and widely worshipped of all Russian poets was Boris Pasternak. I longed to meet him more than any other human being in the Soviet Union. I was warned that it was very difficult to meet those whom the authorities did not permit to appear at official receptions, where foreigners could meet only carefully selected Soviet citizens – the others had had it very forcibly impressed upon them that it was neither desirable nor safe for them to meet foreigners, particularly in private. I was lucky. By a fortuitous concatenation of circumstances, I did contrive, very early during my stay, to call upon Pasternak at his country cottage in the writers’ village of Peredelkino, near Moscow.

  II

  I went to see him on a warm, sunlit afternoon in September 1945. The poet, his wife and his son Leonid were seated round a rough wooden table at the back of the dacha. Pasternak greeted me warmly. He was once described by his friend, the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, as looking like an Arab and his horse – he had a dark, melancholy, expressive, ver
y racé face, familiar from many photographs and from his father’s paintings. He spoke slowly in a low tenor monotone, with a continuous even sound, something between a humming and a drone, which those who met him almost always remarked upon: each vowel was elongated as if in some plaintive aria in an opera by Tchaikovsky, but with far more concentrated force and tension.

  Almost at once Pasternak said, ‘You come from England. I was in London in the ’30s – in 1935, on my way back from the Anti-Fascist Congress in Paris.’ He then said that during the summer of that year he had suddenly received a telephone call from the authorities, who told him that a congress of writers was in session in Paris and that he was to go to it without delay. He said that he had no suitable clothes – ‘We will see to that,’ said the officials. They tried to fit him out in a formal morning coat and striped trousers, a shirt with stiff cuffs and a wing collar, and black patent leather boots, which fitted perfectly. But he was, in the end, allowed to go in ordinary clothes. He was later told that André Malraux, the organiser of the congress, had insisted on getting him invited; Malraux had told the Soviet authorities that although he fully understood their reluctance to do so, yet not to send Pasternak and Babel’ to Paris might cause unnecessary speculation; they were very well-known Soviet writers, and there were not many such in those days so likely to appeal to European liberals. ‘You cannot imagine how many celebrities were there,’ Pasternak said – ‘Dreiser, Gide, Malraux, Aragon, Auden, Forster, Rosamond Lehmann, and lots of other terribly famous people. I spoke. I said to them “I understand that this is a meeting of writers to organise resistance to Fascism. I have only one thing to say to you: do not organise. Organisation is the death of art. Only personal independence matters. In 1789, 1848, 1917 writers were not organised for or against anything. Do not, I implore you, do not organise.”