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Stoppard 's fate of Russian Utopianism-3
By Kenneth Minogue
LONDON, Dec. 5 (UPI) -- A special UPI Life & Mind series -- Third of three
parts
The philosopher Herzen.
Belinsky contains within himself all the materials needed to transcend the radical milieu, but he died young, and the synthesizing role of rising beyond the limitations of these often deranged enthusiasts goes, in the play as in the history of the period, to the irresistibly attractive figure of Alexander Herzen. In one of his more famous dicta (which Stoppard does not use) Herzen remarked: "we are not the doctors, we are the disease." It could go down as the epigraph for the whole experience.
Herzen shares the discontents of the utopians, but holds back in the face of their solutions. As Stoppard characterizes him in the list of characters -- "Herzen -- a would-be revolutionary."
Toward the end of the first play, we meet him mocking the pomposities of his circle, such as talk about the "Dialectic of History."
Hegel has become all the rage in Russia during the time Herzen was enduring internal exile, and he returns to find everybody talking Hegelian philosophy. At a fancy dress ball, Herzen encounters a 6-foot ginger cat lifting his glass to "Absolute Subjectivity." What kind of animal is the Dialectic of History? Herzen wonders, and decides that it is indeed a gigantic, and capricious, ginger cat. Against these grandiose theories, Herzen tells Belinsky that in Russia "we're not the plaything of an imaginative cosmic force, but of a Romanov with no imagination whatsoever, a mediocrity. He's the sort of person you see behind a post office counter who points to the clock at one minute past five and won't sell you a stamp ...."
Isaiah Berlin listed with admiration the qualities of the historical Herzen as admiring imagination, spontaneity, humanity, civilized feelings, natural generosity, courage, wide horizons, instinctive knowledge of what individual freedom is, and hatred of all forms of slavery or arbitrary rule ... "
It's a list impossible to cap, and one thing it made very clear: Herzen, in spite of his radicalism, was a man who detested system.
Detesting system is what made Herzen admire England. That was not at all the same thing as loving it: Russia and England are from the utopian point of view polar opposites. One was free, the other enslaved to a master. Yet both were in their different ways a contrast to France and Germany, which feature here as forms of system. Theirs is the corporate promise of a possibly satisfying system, but Herzen finds such a promise in the end unnerving. What he yearns for is the absence of system he finds in England. As Herzen puts it in the third play:
(To the English) "We're amusing when we wear a hat we brought from home, and even funnier when we put on a hat we bought in St. James's...
But their coarseness is the sinew of some kind of brute confidence that which is the reason England is home to every shade of political exile. They don't give us asylum out of respect for the asylum-seekers but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty, and they know it, and they did it without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it's liberty..."
So too did Herzen. This was the conviction that led him to repudiate the program of trying to solve political problems by utopian schemes (and also, though it is not treated in the Stoppard play, away from the pessimism and melancholy of pessimistic philosophers such as Schopenhauer).
Those who put their faith in structures lose heart when they decide, as many did in the 19th century, that structures would fail them. Herzen gave up hope that any system could be found and implemented that would reliably create a society of good human beings, but he did not, unlike many of his contemporaries, fall into despair. He found the human essence in the living experience of people responding to accident and chance. "People don't storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags," he tells Belinsky. "History zigzags because when people have had enough they storm the Bastille."
The basis of systems is necessity, but the world (as he learned from Darwin among others) is governed by chance. He sometimes called it "contingency", though he does not seem to have meant by that term what a modern historian would mean.
His contrast was between cause on the one hand and chance on the other. Freedom was thus the irruption of the uncaused into a structured framework of order, rather than the kind of coherence -- neither necessary nor fortuitous - of the events of a story or the exchanges in a conversation. Rather, as the Stoppardian Herzen puts it: "History knocks on a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance."
He had read Darwin, and been impressed by those chance mutations that happened to suit the environment and had led on to mankind. He appreciated the marvelous Englishness of Darwin's remark that the question of whether God exists is perhaps too large for the human intellect, "but we can all do our duty."
For Herzen, the business of life was to value human things and enjoy them. One of the most moving moments in the second of the three plays is when Herzen, talking to Bakunin, remembers the death of his mother and his son Kolya. Bakunin in sympathy, exclaims "Little Kolya, his life cut so short? Who is this Moloch ....?
"No, no, not at all" Herzen responds. "His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment...Where is the song when it's been sung?.. It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination..."
It is wisdom hard won, but it is what allows Herzen to rise above the level of his fellow radicals -- even the Turgenev. The skeptical side of Turgenev might be thought entirely in sympathy with Herzen, and indeed they are friends, but in Herzen's view, he has only understood the half of it. As Turgenev tells Herzen:
"To value what is relative to your circumstances, and let others value what's relative to theirs - you agree with me. That's why despite everything we're on the same side."
But Herzen won't have it: "But I fought my way here with loss of blood, because it matters to me and you're in my ditch, reposing with your hat over your face, because nothing matters to you very much - which is why despite everything we'll never be on the same side."
There are many points at which Herzen also speaks for Stoppard, but my guess is that this is a crucial one.
Herzen died in 1870, already something of a relic in the rapidly changing revolutionary scene. Bakunin lived on till 1876, having been anathematized by Marx at the First International in 1872.
In Turgenev's novel Rudin, however, the Bakunin figure dies (in an epilogue to the third edition) on the barricades of 1848, representing (as Aileen Kelly remarks) "a type only beginning to emerge among the intelligentsia ...: the Hamlet who seeks to resolve his inner divisions by assuming the role of a revolutionary Don Quixote."
The "superfluous men" of the time hesitated between a Hamlet-like temporizing with the old order, and a ruthless irrational thirst for action at any price. But this was where Herzen's repudiation of abstraction led him to avoid both horns of this dilemma. He valued Russian culture. He came to inspire many of the Slavophils of the coming generation.
In the end humanism was to fail. But for Herzen, the judgment of "failure" is abstract, and certainly does not cancel out the human qualities that went into the experience of living while the living of it was sweetened by hope. It was in disdaining mere human experiences that the radicals revealed themselves as the citizens of utopia - or "nowhere". This was a much more important kind of failure than merely suffering the disappointments of hope.
(Kenneth Minogue is Emeritus Professor of political science at the University of London and author or "A Very Short Introduction to Politics.)
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