Stoppard 's fate of Russian Utopianism-2

LONDON, Dec. 4 (UPI) -- A special UPI Life & Mind series -- Second of three parts

The literary critic Belinsky.

With the exception of the skeptics such as Herzen and Turgenev, Tom Stoppard's revolutionary exiles are brilliant, dynamic -- and wrong.

They are wrong, as we have seen, in their pessimism about Russian creativity. They are also wrong about what is needed to transform Russia into a free country. And a crucial figure in this exploration of what is wrong is the literary critic Belinsky, who died young but not so young that he had failed to entertain doubts about the ideas of his milieu.

His head demands social engineering, but his heart, as we learn in a flashback placed after the others have heard of his death, is with real engineering. "I'm sick of utopias," he says. "Do you know what I like to do best when I'm at home? -- Watch them build the railway station in St. Petersburg. My heart lifts to see the tracks going down."

Belinsky is Stoppard's vibrating reed. Russia and common sense pull him in one direction, while the ideas of the radical intelligentsia pull him in the other, and this conflict between Russianness and enlightenment, which they all experience, is for him a kind of personal Calvary.

The conflicts of ideas that take places between other protagonists take place inside Belinsky, something dramatized in his being a shy and bumbling figure. He is in himself a complete battleground of the forces that are tearing the country apart. "For me," he remarks, "suffering and thinking are the same thing!"

The defect of Bakunin -- many people have it -- is that he can only hold one idea in his head at a time, whereas with Belinsky, ideas are always rubbing against each other inside his head. When in thrall to his Germans, Bakunin sneers at "the clever fools in France" who thought reason and experiment could solve everything, but Belinsky knows that reason, like everything else, has both its importance in the world, and its limits.

Bakunin in his youth rejects French rationalism only to go overboard for German subjective idealism. Belinsky responds by making a distinction: the way clocks work is the same for everybody, while other things such as culture -- and indeed perhaps liberty itself -- are different for everybody. Hence, says Belinsky, homing in on the human essence of the matter, "the divine spark in man is not reason, after all ..." The poet (he goes on) with his innerness creates the national literature that speaks the universal idea of humanity itself, but he speaks it differently at each stage of its history.

Russia's tragedy is to lack such a literature. It is like a gigantic child "with a tiny head stuffed full of idolatry for everything foreign."

Belinsky is torn between the idea that everything has a (limited) place in the culture of a country, on the one hand, and the dominant idea of the intelligentsia that some activity - literature, philosophy, revolution -- can transform the nation.

"In Russia," he remarks, "there's no division of labor. Literature must do it all." He knows perfectly well that this cannot be, yet he cannot resist his own version of the idea. Literature, he is saying in 1835, can replace, can actually become ... Russia. Russia may be a cultural backwater, but a great artist can change all that. Art could stand for the country itself.

Here then is one more intoxicated reformer of his nation finding another of those Archimedean points, which he hopes can supply the leverage that can change the world.

But all that this conviction actually does for Belinsky is to turn his literary criticism into political righteousness. He becomes infuriated by that fact that Gogol has written in praise of Nicholas I. This righteousness is the reason why the radicals of the mid-century created what the historian Aileen Kelly describes as an enfeebling kind of self-censorship. It meant that everyone presented in art or poetry had to turn into an exemplar of something. Anything else was a betrayal of the cause. But as Belinsky knew perfectly well, an artist with a message is merely a huckster.

It is, then, the elementary fact of the division of labor that most clearly reveals how universal is the predicament of these utopian radicals. Theirs was a desperate search for any leverage that would help them transform their country for the better. They wanted to get rid of autocracy and create liberal democracy and constitutionalism. It was in pursuit of this admirable aim that they lost their grip on political reality without making any serious impact on Russia itself.

Can we pinpoint the fundamental mistake the utopians made as they found themselves helpless on the tides of history?

They certainly wanted power -- socially transforming power. And that kind of power is only to be found if society is a system. No doctrine that seeks to transform a whole society can take any other form.

The archetypal version of this mode of thought was, of course, that of Marx, who even thought of history as nothing else but a succession of systems or stages of history. A "system" here means a structure in which each of the elements (literature, enterprise, government, law etc.) plays the role assigned to it. Systems are rigid, and operate on deterministic principles.

"Capitalism" is a system in this sense, and failing to understand what a free economy is all about because they had turned it into something called "the capitalist system" is why Marxists have so consistently misunderstood the modern world. For the Russian radicals, the "ancien regime" and "Russian autocracy" were also systems, and the trick of transforming them was to find the Archimedean point on which to base the new movement. The result would be, of course, -- another system! It could be nothing else. The problem of the radicals was that they had rationalism's Midas touch.

Yet Belinsky can also cry, in another mood: "What have these theoretical models to do with us? We're so big and backward." "Big and backward" is a pretty good summary of the reasons why Bolshevism was so disastrous for Russia.

The radicals dreamed, then, of a system. In the future, literature was to serve liberty, work to supply needs, government to keep the system working, and so on. But in all versions of utopia, one activity - we may call it "ideology" - was to supply what one might call the "architectonics" of the business.

Ideology was the knowledge that would determine the whole process. The problem was that this guiding knowledge was no use unless it could be guaranteed to be true, but the ideas that actually took the fancy of the radicals changed from decade to decade like sartorial fashion.

It's easy to see why Belinsky had a problem with the crucial fact that the elements of a culture cannot do each other's work, because the problem is with us still. In a modern democracy, the thing called "public opinion" plays the part of "ideology" and (often in its crudest form, such as polling surveys) is taken seriously by governments. More specifically, the supremacy of opinion means that every social vocation is tempted to bid for the power of social transformation.

Many judges and lawyers today, for example, are not content with merely declaring in complex circumstances what the law is. They often want to become the fountains of social justice itself. Quite a few clergymen have lost interest in relating our lives to some transcendent realm, and taken to pontificating on public policy as if they were politicians. Schoolteachers have often lost faith in learning; they want to become the inspirers among the young of a better kind of society.

Indoctrination thus replaces scholarship. And governments themselves, not content with making the laws and public policies under which we live not infrequently give advice to individuals and institutions about what they ought to be doing.

With so much good advice and higher doctrine around, we ought to be living in -- well, in utopia -- but in fact all of these professions, in moving beyond their competence are merely amplifying insignificant noise amid the cacophony of an opinionated society.

Herzen points to this illusion as it flourished amid the exiles when he describes "...men who walk across London to give a piano lesson redrawing the frontiers of Europe on the oilskin table-tops of back-street restaurants, toppling emperors like so many sauce bottles ... and Marx in his proud retreat in the British Museum, anathematizing everyone else..."

Today it is clergymen without a congregation pontificating about foreign policies for the nation. This is what Hegel called abstract universality, and it means that the callings and vocations of society lose the moral and intellectual limitation that make them real, without attaining the wisdom of philosophy.

Indeed, philosophy suffers worst of all, because it turns into ideology, and here again, Belinsky utters the pure milk of Stoppardian social thought. "When philosophers start talking like architects, get out while you can," Belinsky cries, "chaos is coming. When they start laying down rules for beauty, blood in the streets is from that moment inevitable."

(This is the second of a three-part UPI Life & Mind special. Part three will move on Dec. 5. UPI will then move the entire review on Dec.6.)

(Kenneth Minogue is Emeritus Professor of political science at the University of London and author or "A Very Short Introduction to Politics.)