Russian Thinkers by Isaiah Berlin

First published: 1978

Type of work: Historical essays

Time of work: The nineteenth century

Locale: Primarily Russia

Principal Personages:

• Leo Tolstoy, an author well-known for his novels, short fiction, and other writings
• Aleksandr Herzen, a Russian writer and political philosopher
• Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian thinker known for his anarchist leanings
• Vissarion Belinsky, a prominent literary critic
• Ivan Turgenev, a well-known writer of prose fiction

Form and Content

While Isaiah Berlin’s writings have dealt primarily with political philosophy and the history of ideas, at times such categories have been broadly defined. Moreover, though problems and patterns in British and European thought have been his most prominent concerns, issues affecting Russia’s position in the wider context of Western intellectual life have fascinated him as well. Some of Berlin’s most celebrated and provocative pronouncements have dealt specifically with matters of this sort, where the ideas of Russian thinkers took on a wider significance largely through the operation of theoretical conceptions in unusual but appropriate settings.

The essays collected in Russian Thinkers were delivered or published between 1948 and 1970; several of them originally were public lectures, while others appeared as articles in academic journals or in other published formats. There is much continuity among the various works in this collection, while editorial selection has limited any effects of repetition or undue prolixity.

Many of the traits commonly associated with Berlin’s writing are in evidence in these essays. From outwardly modest beginnings major ideas take hold and sentences build breathlessly upon one another as new images and thoughts are constructed in what at times seems to be a tumultuous array of facts and concepts; the more informal though no less complex delivery found in his lectures has been preserved in those essays that have been taken from that format. At times Berlin appears attentive to the interests of his audience; some statements resound with dramatic effect, while others provide color and vividness to what otherwise might have been rather recondite matters. There is also a kind of boldness, and a willingness to take on vast and challenging topics; indeed, the author was hardly daunted by the large and perplexing tasks that he had set for himself. There are few reservations or modifications that he has felt constrained to make even amid sweeping judgments that go beyond the received wisdom about intellectual change in Russia. Still, Berlin displays a certain specific charm and an active sense of sympathy, where it is due, for the historical personages he treats.

Critical Context

Although most of Berlin’s other writings have dealt with other intellectual traditions, some affinities of subject matter may be found in various works. In his first major study, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939), he dealt with the philosophical ideas and assumptions that were prominent in the views of the most important single socialist thinker; problems of causation and determinism were of some significance in his evaluation of Marx and his theories. Issues that Berlin found salient in Tolstoy’s view of history were discussed against a much more general background in Historical Inevitability (1953). In other studies of Western thought, the distinction between monists and pluralists has often been raised, sometimes in a variety of contexts. Another problem that frequently arose in Berlin’s discussion of Russian intellectual life has been considered on a more extensive basis in Two Concepts of Liberty (1958). Elsewhere, Berlin has published several articles dealing with the Soviet intelligentsia and major issues in modern Russian culture, which concern developments during the twentieth century; in these, the author notes the contrast between Soviet thought, which had become rather constrained and muted, and the vigorous and wide-ranging activity of earlier generations. Although Berlin has preferred to present his works in the form of essays and lectures and thus has not attempted to provide a comprehensive or thoroughgoing assessment of major movements in modern ideas, his studies of important Russian thinkers form part of a wider body of writings which provide penetrating and far-reaching interpretations of significant intellectual currents of the modern centuries.

Bibliography

The Christian Science Monitor. Review. June 28, 1978, p. 19.

Hausheer, Roger. “Isaiah Berlin and the Emergence of Liberal Pluralism,” in European Liberty: Four Essays on the Occasion of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Erasmus Prize Foundation, 1983.

The New Leader. Review. LXI (September 25, 1978), p. 17.

Ryan, Alan, ed. The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, 1979.

The Times Educational Supplement. Review. July 7, 1978, p. 28.

The Washington Post Book World. Review. June 18, 1978, p. E6.