Single-Minded Pursuits

...On the other hand, there are essays on Turgenev, Belinsky and Bakunin, along with interesting chapters on German Romanticism, Russian Populism and the impact on Russia of the abortive European revolts of 1848...

...But to govern themselves doesn't enter their heads...

...This is a false and purblind and shallow view of life...

...Had I been aware of this novitiate myself when I went to Mexico in 1940 to interview Trotsky and remarked that dialectical materialism was "unscientific," I would have been less astonished to see the old man leap to his feet and shout at me: "The interview is terminated...

...He alone discerned the terrible future Russia was heading toward...

...As an old Socialist (and Trotskyist), he seems to stand a little bit in awe of his subject...

...By equality they understand equality of oppression...

...This, in turn, made it possible for him (and Howe) to believe Selden Rodman, our guest columnist, is the author of'Mexican Journal as well as two soon to be produced plays...

...The value of freedom, like that of civilization or education—none of which is 'natural' or obtainable without great effort—consists in the fact that without it the individual personality cannot realize all its potentialities—cannot live, act, enjoy, create in the illimitable fashions which every moment of history affords, and which differ in unfathomable ways from every other moment of history, and are wholly incommensurable with them...

...And Howe does admit Trotsky's intellectual dishonesty in pretending that it was the workers who were making the decisions in 1917-20, rather than the hard-core Bolshevik leaders—thus providing both the sanction for destroying democratic dissent and the formula that would later be used so easily for rationalizing the Stalinist plunge into totalitarianism...

...The truly free man creates his own morality," and those who idealize the masses are most to be feared: "The masses want to stay the hand which impudently snatches from them the bread which they have earned...

...Long forgotten was the sick student in Odessa nurturing his intellectual pride to cover up frequent fainting spells and fits of nausea...

...I used to know a watchman who worked on the boulevard...

...And the purpose of life is to live it...

...With searing perception Herzen pointed out that the most horrible crimes are committed in the name of empty abstractions...

...I say "exhausting" only because I find the organization and the style of this highly praised book irritating...

...He did so not merely because he considered this an attempt to force nature into a straightjacket fashioned by German pedants, but because he found such systems morally revolting and esthetically tawdry...

...and what he sees is not the one, but always with an ever growing minuteness, in all its teeming individuality, with an obsessive, inescapable, incorruptible, all-penetrating lucidity which maddens him, the many...

...No one will deny at this late date that Trotsky was a brilliant orator, a devastating polemicist (with a genius for making an enemy of a friend every time he scored a point), a superb organizer in situations where his power was absolute, a clever literary critic, a man of great courage...

...The opening piece, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," presents Sir Isaiah's provocative thesis that all great writers may be divided between those who make individuals pawns in a single chess game, vision or system (Dante, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Proust), and those who see life in its totality but controlled by no moral or esthetic purpose (Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, Pushkin, Joyce...

...Writers &WJiting SINGLE-MINDED PURSUITS BYSELDEN RODMAN i was walking along the street with a younger member of our commune, Grigory Sokolovsky, a boy about myage...

...Sokolovsky, on that very day, made the acquaintance of several workers, returning from his search all on fire...

...Such men...

...But how?' '"That's it, how?' " 'We must find workers, not wait for anybody or ask anybody, but just find workers and set to it.' " 'I think we can find them,' said Sokolovsky...

...Because his novels revealed the new Jacobins undistoned by moral passion, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky denounced Turgenev as a cold-hearted traitor—and pursued their own obsessive visions to the bitter end...

...I think I'll look him up...

...Never remembered was the boy who stole books from his benefactors to buy candy and was told by his teacher: "You are the top boy in my class and you are a moral monster...

...In fact, brushing aside the Nazi eruption as just a by-product of the "mounting crisis of capitalism," Trotsky ignored its initial thrust: a middle-class revolt against the extremes of Left and Right...

...There is no extended treatment of Dostoevsky at all...

...he is not, he is remote from being, a hedgehog...

...oing back beyond the Revolution, to the intellectual climate of Russia in the 19th century, the indispensable source book for readers in English from now on is bound to be Isaiah Berlin's exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, Russian Thinkers (Viking, 312 pp., $14.95...

...If there is, then, no cosmic destiny for which men must sacrifice themselves, and everything passes in the end to death and dust, why is personal liberty worth pursuing...

...The autobiography (seemingly Howe's only source) tells something of how the brilliant, egocentric child failed to relate in any way to the successful farming operation of his hard-working parents, but it glosses over the disorganized school years when the "loner" mostly learned how to win debating points and conceal his motives from his friends, his parents, his girlfriend—and himself...

...Frenchmen fight like heroes for freedom and without a thought drag you to jail if you don't agree with their opinions...

...Sir Isaiah worries the dilemma almost to death without resolving it: "Tolstoy himself, too, knows the truth is there, and not 'here'—not in the regions susceptible to observation, discrimination, constructive imagination, not in the power of microscopic perception and analysis of which he is so much the greatest master of our time...

...I wonder, however, why Sir Isaiah refuses to place Tolstoy squarely among the "foxes," as his two great novels and shorter works of fiction obviously do, and why he takes so over-seriously the novelist's lifelong effort to superimpose on these a "hedgehog's" unitary vision of redemption to be accomplished somehow, sometime by the peasants' innate health and goodness...

...History is the autobiography of a madman," he noted...

...Against the despotic view of the French Revolution and Hegelian metaphysics—that man could be considered a puppet in the ultimate (and inevitable) achievement of some cosmic, benign destiny —Herzen cried No...

...Finally, Howe does not explain what made Trotsky the fanatic he was...

...for he has not, do what he might, a vision of the whole...

...the masses love authority...

...They are blinded by the arrogant glitter of power, they are offended by thosewho stand alone...

...Moreover, his praise of the self-serving The History of the Russian Revolution as an objective account of what happened in October and after appears unjustified in light of present information...

...They are the real thing!' " By the time the search for "workers" desperate enough to fulfill Marx's scenario ended in Petrograd 17 years later, Leon Trotsky, who was to include this revealing conversation in his autobiography, was already known to the world as part of the legend he helped create: the legend of the selfless, farsighted revolutionists who were there when the proletariat spontaneously threw off its shackles...

...The purpose of the singer is the song...

...The rediscovery and impassioned presentation of Alexander Herzen as the noblest advocate of individual liberty is Berlin's outstanding achievement...

...Herzen's answer is paraphrased by Berlin: "Why does a singer sing...

...He belongs to the Bible sect...

...Obscured by the glory of 1917 and the pathos of his fall from grace was the politically religious fanatic in his Siberian cell, described by a fellow prisoner as a man who "thirsted for power and loved giving orders...

...They are indifferent to individual freedom, liberty of speech...

...They want a social government to rule for their benefit, and not, like the present one, against it...

...Merely in order that, when he has stopped singing, his song might be remembered, so that the pleasure his song has given may awaken a longing for that which cannot be recovered...

...Like Herzen, Turgenev—to whom Berlin devotes his splendid final chapter—believed that "one must open men's eyes, not tear them out...

...Nonetheless, a remarkable wealth of knowledge and perception is marshaled in Russian Thinkers to make these giants come alive again—and through their ideas alone...

...but he has not, himself, seen it face to face...

...No nation in the world, Herzen adds, has shed so much blood for freedom as the French, "the most abstract and religious people in the world...

...But Howe is less than frank in assessing Trotsky's role in the massacring of the sailors in the Kronstadt uprising, that last desperate attempt to achieve a plural society...

...that a mere "united front" of Socialists and Communists in 1932-3 would have saved the Weimar Republic and short-circuited World War II...

...Questionable, too, is Howe's genuflection to Trotsky's views in the '30s?how keenly he grasped the character of Nazism," etc...

...The account of the young revolutionary's Ukrainian upbringing and Odessa apprenticeship is perfunctory...

...Irving Howe knows these things well enough, but he fails to make the case against Trotsky as clearly as he might in his new book, Leon Trotsky (Viking, 208 pp., $7.95...

...It'sabouttimewestarted,' Isaid...

...Yes, it's about time,' he answered...

...Tolstoy's thought is discussed in three widely separated chapters and Herzen's in two...