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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Revised and updated reissue of an enthralling, intimate biography of Isaiah Berlin, major intellectual figure and remarkable witness to the crises of the twentieth century "Reading Ignatieff's Isaiah Berlin, you feel you are understanding not only Isaiah Berlin, but the history... I do not see how there could be a more insightful, more erudite, biography of this remarkable man" The Times Literary Supplement "A work of literature and an eloquent portrait... Though Berlin will be the subject of many future studies, one cannot imagine anyone feeling the need to improve on this biography" Observer "Enthralling... An affectionate and admiring, but none the less independently-minded portrait... A serious book, but also a vivid, lively and uplifting one" Evening Standard Isaiah Berlin was one of the great public intellectuals of his time. A magnetic speaker and beacon of liberal philosophy, he gained first-hand experience of some of the pivotal events of the twentieth century and crossed paths with luminaries from Virginia Woolf to Sigmund Freud. Declining to write an autobiography, Berlin instead agreed to give extensive interviews to acclaimed writer Michael Ignatieff in the final decade of his life. The result is a magisterial biography that penetrates deeply into Berlin's life and thought while capturing his vivid style of conversation. Reissued in this updated edition, it traces Berlin's journey to become one of his era's most vigorous defenders of liberty and individuality in the face of tyranny and dogma.
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For Zsuzsanna
Contents
Illustrations
Frontispiece: Isaiah Berlin by Steve Pyke, 14 June 1990
Riga, 1910
Petrograd, 1917, aged 8
33 Upper Addison Gardens, London, 1923, on his 14th birthday
London in the 1920s: Isaiah, Aunt Ida and Uncle Yitzhak Samunov, Marie and Mendel Berlin
Pelican Essay Club, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 1931
Isaiah and friends at a Commem. Ball, New College Garden, 22 June 1934
British Information Services identification card
Shirley Morgan, Isaiah and Hershey Bar, Oxford, 1946
Anna Akhmatova by Ida Nappelbaum, 28 September 1945
In the 1940s
Marie and Mendel Berlin, late 1940s
Isaiah and Mendel Berlin, Venice, 1947
By Cecil Beaton, July 1955
In the 1950s
Isaiah and Aline on the Queen Mary, January 1956
Stuart Hampshire, Isaiah and Nicolas Nabokov by Dominique Nabokov, summer 1969
By Cliva Barda, December 1974
At Headington House, 1958, with Peter and Philippe Halban
Bathing at Paraggi, summer 1958
On holiday in Paraggi
With contributors to his first Festschrift, Wolfson College, Oxford, 2 June 1979
With Andrei Sakharov at Headington House by Pat Utechin, 21 June 1989
Aline with the author and the first edition of this book at its launch, British Academy, London, 26 October 1998
By Deborah Elliot, in the Codrington Library, All Souls, January 1988
Preface to the Second Edition
Since the first edition of this book appeared in 1998, twenty-five years ago, four volumes of Isaiah Berlin’s letters have been published, edited by Henry Hardy, Jennifer Holmes and Mark Pottle, and Hardy has produced further definitive editions of Berlin’s work. Berlin’s papers have been deposited in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where they have been catalogued and foliated. A steady stream of articles, books and commentary have explored Berlin’s ideas. In this new edition, I have tried to incorporate as much of this new material as possible. I have corrected errors, added references to the letters in the notes, tried to clarify Berlin’s relations with important figures, and incorporated at least some lessons from the commentary on and criticism of his work. In a few instances I have added new details about his personal life. Returning to this book after a long absence, I am struck, once again, by how lucky I was to have known him.
In preparing this edition, I worked with Henry Hardy, Berlin’s editor. He reviewed every page and every endnote with me, and I cannot thank him enough for his fastidious commitment to accuracy. This biography now stands on the secure foundations of his exemplary editorial work. The responsibility for any remaining errors is mine.1
mi
december 2022
1
Albany
Albany is set back behind a small carriage yard off Piccadilly, opposite Hatchards bookshop and Fortnum & Mason’s. It was established in the late eighteenth century as a residence for gentlemen with estates in the country who wished to have a pied-à-terre in town. In the long lobby leading to the garden there is a bust of Byron, who lived there in 1816, and plaques to other Victorian worthies, Lord Melbourne, Lord Chancellor Eldon and Viscount Palmerston. All the male English institutions – the public schools, the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, the London clubs, the Inns of Court – have a family resemblance, and Albany belongs to that family. The corridor is high, cold and austere; the mosaic tiles gleam underfoot; and there are burnished boards high on the walls, listing the secretaries of the management committee, running continuously back to 1799.
His rooms lie at the end of the covered wooden walkway that extends the length of the garden. Framed between sashed curtains, gentlemen can be seen taking tea in their drawing rooms. All of his life has been spent in places just like this, in the walled gardens and high-windowed rooms of English institutional privilege.
He answers the bell himself and allows himself to be kissed, in the Russian fashion, once on each cheek and once for good measure. It is a declaration of our common Russian ancestry, the formal beginning and ending to all our meetings. He always wears the same sober, dark-coloured suit, with a buttoned waistcoat and cuffed trousers. The tailoring is conservative, the worsted of the best quality. His 2black lace-up shoes are well polished and fissured with tiny cracks of age. He usually wears one particular tie with a pattern of Penny Black stamps. Dangling from his waistcoat pocket, at the end of a chain, is a lorgnette-like pair of pearl magnifiers, which he places on top of his glasses in order to read small print.
He leads me into a cosy room with a view of the walkway and a fine set of eighteenth-century French etchings on the walls. Embossed invitations line the mantelpiece. He slowly settles down into the battered white easy chair next to the fire. The phone is at his elbow, and it rings often. When it does, the same sequence of gestures ensues. He mutters, ‘With pleasure, with pleasure, now let me see’, cups the receiver between neck and shoulder, retrieves his diary from his waistcoat pocket, pushes his glasses above his eyebrows, places his pince-nez on the bridge of his nose, fingers the diary pages, ponders, then says, ‘Wednesday at 3 p.m.’, scribbles, re-pockets his diary, puts down the phone, blinks and says, ‘Now where were we?’ His social network stretches from Jerusalem to Washington, from his generation to my own; the web encompasses academe, publishing, politics and the arts, and a good part of his life now is spent keeping up with its intrigues, dramas, fallings-out and comings back together.
In front of him on the coffee table are spread a cluster of tins containing salted almonds and a type of Finnish crispbread, which he spirits along to dinner parties in his suit pockets. On the bookcase nearest his chair rises a ziggurat of chocolate bars. He is an inveterate nibbler, popping nuts and chocolate into his mouth as he talks, leaning forward in his chair to forage in the tins with his right hand. The left arm usually remains curled in, close to his body.
Next to the tins is a newly published book, often from a former student (‘I never read anything any more,’ he sighs), a plump manuscript of his, revised by his editor Henry Hardy and awaiting his reaction (‘I can’t bear to read myself, let alone anybody else’). But each morning he avidly peruses The Times. The faces stare up from its obituary pages – the wife of a Law Lord, a professor of physics, and once a 3woman he loved.1 He lingered over her face: ‘Wildly untruthful she was. Wildly. But desirable to the last degree.’ He shakes his head. ‘All I seem to do at my age is attend funerals.’ In teasing mode, I report that in Paris they say, ‘Mais Berlin est mort, n’est-ce pas?’ ‘Perhaps I am,’ he says with a small smile.
In the pictures of him in the 1930s – walking in Magdalen Gardens, standing in a slanting beam of light in All Souls quad – he is a plump, small-shouldered figure in a three-piece suit, with curly black hair and dark eyes behind thick glasses, his right hand cupping his left arm at the elbow. He half turns away from the camera or strikes a mock-solemn pose. His oldest friends say he has changed little: ‘a baby elephant’ who grew larger but was always ‘exactly the same’, Stephen Spender said to me.2 In the earliest picture of him, taken by a Riga society photographer in 1910, his eyes are striking – large, dark, playful, intelligent, already amused. He has kept the certainties he began with, as the loved only surviving child of a prosperous Jewish merchant’s family. The same gaze still meets the world eighty-seven years later.
His voice is astonishingly rapid and, for the uninitiated, nearly incomprehensible. Joseph Brodsky once said that his English was just like his Russian, only faster, ‘courting the speed of light’.3 He seems to bubble and rattle like a samovar on the boil. Virginia Woolf, who first met him at a dinner in New College in November 1933, wrote afterwards that he looked like a Portuguese Jew, adding after a later meeting that he talked with the vivacity and assurance of a young Maynard Keynes.4 The genealogy of his vocal mannerisms is the story of how all the layers of his identity settled into his voice. In the earliest tapes of his lectures, the voice is a Russian impersonation of strangulated Oxford upper-class diction, all tight lips and clipped vowel sounds (with the addition of unrolled r’s), unconsciously borrowed from the beau idéal of the 1930s, his lifelong friend and rival, Maurice Bowra. Old friends like George Weidenfeld also hear some of David Cecil in the melodic gabbling, the helter-skelter pace. It is ironic that 4the voice which two generations of British radio listeners took to be the voice of the Oxford intellect should actually have been a Riga Jew’s unconscious impersonation of his English contemporaries. Over time, it went from being an impersonation to being the man himself. Now, in the last quarter of his life, Russian recidivism has occurred. Old Slavic and Jewish sonorities have re-asserted themselves and the delivery has slowed from a gabble to a confidential murmur.
The voice is the despair of typists and stenographers: there seems nothing to cling to, no pauses, no paragraphing, no full stops. Yet after a time one learns that the murmur has an arcane precision all its own. There are sentences always; paragraphs seldom. Even if the subordinate clauses open up a parenthesis that seems to last for ever, they do close, eventually, in a completed thought. Each sentence carries clarity along its spine with qualification entwined around it. The order is melodic, intuitive and associational rather than logical. This darting, leaping style of speaking is a style of thinking: he outlines a proposition and anticipates objections and qualifications as he speaks, so that both proposition and qualification are spun out in one and the same sentence simultaneously. Since he dictates his work, the way he writes and the way he talks are identical: ornate, elaborate, old-fashioned, yet incisive and clear. Judging from school compositions, he was writing and talking like this when he was twelve.
Inarticulate intelligences have to struggle across the gulf between word and thought; with him, word and thought lead each other on unstoppably. He suspects his own facility and thinks that inarticulate intelligence may be deeper and more authentic, but his facility is one secret of his serenity. Words come at his bidding and they form into sentences and paragraphs as quickly as he can bring them on. Since the Romantics, the life of the mind has been associated with solitude, anguish and inner division. With him, it has been synonymous with wit, irony and pleasure.
To love thinking, as he does, you must be quick, but you must also be sociable. He hates thinking alone and regards it as a monstrosity. 5With him, thinking is indistinguishable from talking, from striking sparks, from bantering, parrying and playing. His talk is famous, not only because it is quick and acute, but because it implies that thought is a joint sortie into the unknown. What people remember about his conversation is not what he said – he is no wit and no epigrams have attached themselves to his name – but the experience of having been drawn into the salon of his mind. This is why his conversation is never a performance. It is not his way of putting on a show; it is his way of being in company.
He will tell you that he is ‘intolerably ugly’. Certainly it is a noble rather than a handsome face, but age has thinned him down, greying the hair around his balding head, exposing the eyebrows, the expressive nose and the strong cheek- and jaw-lines. When he is not pursing his lips into a frown or a mock expression of disapproval, they have a fine, full shape. He looks now as if he was always supposed to look like this, as if his whole life was leading him towards this appearance of rabbinical wisdom. But it is an ironic result, since he is by conviction and temperament as unrabbinical as it is possible for an old Jew to be.
Ageing has been a gentle gradient so far, but it is getting steeper. He has the small-shouldered stoop of an old man. His hearing is less good than it used to be: he finds it hard to follow the ebb and flow of talk around the long, baize-covered table where the fellows gather for All Souls elections; and he finds large dinner parties a trial; but concerts give him and his wife, Aline, as much pleasure as ever. Every performance is inventoried in his mind in a receding series, stretching back to the Salzburg of the 1930s, to the Queen’s Hall, to auditoria long demolished, and performers – Kempff, Schnabel, Solomon, Lipatti – long departed.
Being renowned for acuteness of mind means that his friends watch him – and he watches himself – for any signs of falling off. As far as he is concerned, falling off is occurring daily. ‘I can’t remember a thing,’ he will say, and then, just to confound his fears, he will set about (‘Wait, wait, here it comes’) retrieving the name of a conductor 6in a Salzburg festival programme in August 1932. His memory is freakish, so unusually fine-grained as to seem scarcely human, and so effortlessly in command of his past that he gives the impression of having accumulated everything and lost nothing.
He always claims that he does not find himself in the least interesting. This is artful and disingenuous, since many of his best stories are about himself, but it is true that he seems self-contained rather than self-absorbed. He does listen, at least sometimes, to other human beings and appears to hear what they say, though it is a curious and not especially warm form of listening, more like a pause between his own talk. He is often criticised by activist friends for being more interested in inner experience than in public commitment. But that is the man: more curious about the varieties of human self-deception than about realpolitik.
His only noticeable form of narcissism is hypochondria. He likes being mildly, curably ill. He loves doctors, regimes, nursing homes; he will take to his bed at the slightest provocation. Students remember him conducting tutorials from his bed, the covers scattered with books, papers, cups of tea and biscuits. On the night table of the small single bed where he sleeps now, next to his wife’s room, there is a platoon of pill bottles, ointments, boxes, tumblers of water. He will tell you he is faring badly, but the truth is that he has benefited from an almost complete dispensation from the ills of the flesh. His good fortune, in this and almost every other respect, is maddening. To the degree that luck is a real category shaping lives, he is one of the luckiest men alive.
The thought of writing his memoirs fills him with dismay. ‘Never,’ he says and then shudders with comic finality. Besides, he fears his own candour and does not want it to find its way into print. But if he wasn’t going to write his own life, then who, said his friends, would capture some of his talk before it was lost? That was how this book began in September 1987. I was not a former student or surrogate son: he seems to have been born without a paternal instinct. I was 7simply there, initially, to interview him. I taped his talk, hour after hour, like a servant taking buckets to a fountain. When he agreed to a biography, after we had worked together for several years, it was his decision that it be published posthumously, and that he should not read a word of it. ‘Apres moi le déluge,’ he said.
The afternoons at Albany continued for a decade. Beneath the continuous low murmur of his voice, the tape recorder on the low coffee table also picked up the click of almonds in their tins and registered the chimes of the French clock on the mantelpiece as it sounded the hours. One question from me would set him talking for an hour as he roved back and forward, telling and re-telling the old stories, sweeping across decades, past famous faces, pausing over obscure people for the simple pleasure of proving to himself that they had not been forgotten. The ambition was to enfold all his experience – literally every last letter and bus ticket, every remembered joke and remark – into a crisp, economical story which, once elaborated, polished and given its punchline, could then be filed away in the labyrinthine archive of his mind, safe from the ruin of time. It was a virtuoso display of a great intelligence doing battle with loss.
I heard the same stories many times, as if repetition proved that he had mastered his life, penetrated its darkest corners and dispelled its silences. It became obvious why he never wrote an autobiography: his stories had done the trick. They both saved the past and saved him from introspection.
His candour about his past, like the candour about his illnesses, was very Russian. He told me everything, but only when I learned to ask the right questions. He let me read his letters, and they turned out to be as spontaneous as his talk. He was prodigal with words and time. To an obscure graduate student in Oregon he would expound his distinction between two concepts of liberty with the same gusto that he devoted to sharing gossip with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. In this endless flow of verbal facility, it seemed as if he genuinely believed that he could be personal with almost anyone. 8
He was candid about sex; more than candid about his friends; candid about his failings. He liked to say that his success – professorships, a knighthood, the Order of Merit – depended upon a systematic overestimation of his abilities. ‘Long may it continue,’ he always said.
Self-denigration came naturally, but it was also a pre-emptive strike against criticism. ‘I am an intellectual taxi; people flag me down and give me destinations and off I go’ was all he would ever offer when pressed to say what his intellectual agenda had been. Yet this was wrong. Many of his essays were demanded of him by chance and circumstances, but he accepted only the assignments that fitted his own itinerary. There is no doubt that there was an itinerary and, when he had completed it, the result was a unique and coherent body of work. To use the distinction he made famous, the range of his work may make him seem like a fox, who knows many things; in reality he was a hedgehog, who knew one big thing. One purpose of this book is to elaborate what this one big thing was.
To know one big thing he had to master all the strands within himself. He took three conflicting identities, Russian, Jewish and English, and braided them together into a character at one with itself. He might have suppressed any element of what he was. In the duress of exile, many do survive by suppressing some part of who they are. But he suppressed nothing, allowed all the claims within to be answered, and in so doing forged a liberal temperament that may be as important a legacy as his work.
It is often said that his equanimity, together with his liberalism, are the products of privilege. He has had a lucky and privileged life – parents who adored him, an exile that did not scar him, election to All Souls at twenty-three, marriage to a gifted, supportive and wealthy woman – these have enabled him to make manifest what is often frustrated in others. But make it manifest he did, when others might have thrown their advantages away. There is in his temperament some impalpable source of health and well-being. He is well in his skin, at home in the world, at ease even with the advancing prospect of his 9own death. This cool, even cold serenity seems mysterious, unapproachable, unavailable to me; and in all our afternoons together, it is this that I most wish to understand. To be an intellectual is often to be unhappy: his happiness is an achievement worth seeking to explain.
‘Do you wish you could live for ever?’ he once asked me. His mother lived until she was ninety-one. I told him the idea filled me with horror. He heard me out, then said, ‘All of my friends think the same. But I do not. I wish it would continue indefinitely. Why not?’ Albert Einstein met him once and remarked afterwards that he seemed like ‘a kind of spectator in God’s big but mostly not very attractive theatre’.5 He has never tired of life’s theatre and he imagines himself watching its lighted stage for ever.
At the end of our afternoons, he often accompanies me out. I help him into his coat, while he fits his lame left arm in first, then throws the coat over the right with a heave of his shoulders. He plumps a brown fedora on to his head, places his umbrella on his right arm and leads the way out into the glare and noise of Piccadilly. He walks slowly on the backs of his heels, his feet pointing out, precisely, very upright, his head turning this way and that to take in every detail of the unfolding scene. ‘Look,’ he will say of a bright-haired Amazon with a backpack striding past us. ‘She must be a Norwegian. Terrifyingly blonde.’ He pauses and inspects rain-gear in Cordings men’s shop, staring down at thick corduroy plus-fours, in yellow and green, and other garments of the country gentry, with friendly curiosity. He passes the entrance to the Méridien Hotel, and surveys an American businessman, whose otherwise expressionless, late-twentieth-century face is distinguished by an elaborate brown moustache, which wings away from his cheeks. As the man passes out of earshot, Isaiah cups his hand over his mouth in an elaborate stage-whisper. ‘Amazing moustache,’ he says, then adds, as if to himself, ‘Life is inexhaustible.’
At Piccadilly Circus we part, he towards the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall, to take tea with a Russian scholar wanting to hear about his night with Anna Akhmatova. In front of the stand selling sex 10magazines, London policemen’s helmets in plastic and piles of the Evening Standard, I embrace him; he stands back, bows ironically, briskly turns and is gone, ducking between two taxis, pointing his umbrella into the thick of the traffic to make it stop, whistling soundlessly to himself.
2
Riga
H is memory of his birthplace was framed by two sphinxes, standing guard at the entrance to the Albertstraße (now Alberta iela) apartment, reclining plaster figures with paws, breasts and a pharaoh’s headdress. They are still there – mossy with damp and chipped with age in Soviet times, now splendidly restored in the new Latvia – guarding the entrance to the Art Nouveau apartment block where he was born, on the top floor, on 6 June 1909.1 In his parents’ bed, in all likelihood, with a German doctor and a nurse in attendance, his father pacing up and down the parquet outside, chloroform oozing beneath the door.
He may have been lucky to survive. After many hours of labour, the German doctor delivering the child placed forceps on the infant’s left arm and yanked him into the world so violently that the ligaments were permanently damaged. For the rest of his life, photographs often show him cradling the weakened left arm with his right.
Isaiah was not the firstborn. His mother had had a stillborn daughter in 1907 and been told she should never risk having children again. His parents greeted his arrival with the astonishment reserved for miracles. These facts – the stillborn sister, the longed-for realisation of his parents’ wishes, the injury at birth, an only child – are vitally important, though interpreting their significance is not easy. He himself never liked interpreting them at all. But there is a story in the Bible that might be taken as an oblique fable about his own beginnings. It is the story of Hannah, the barren woman who goes to the temple to 12pray for a son, and who is so distraught that the high priest takes her for mad: ‘And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the Lord, and wept sore.’2 In her desperation, Hannah promised that if God would grant her a son, she would give him into His service. Her faith – her primitive, intense desire for a child – was eventually rewarded. She and her husband Elkanah had a child, who grew up to become the prophet Samuel. Isaiah’s mother, Mussa Marie Berlin, was intensely moved by these verses and by the promise of hope that they contained, for they spoke so directly to her own desperation: having lost one child, having been told she should never give birth again. She was at the relatively advanced age of twenty-nine when her deliverance came. It is easy to see why, whenever Berlin himself recalled the biblical verses about the desperate faith of Hannah, his eyes would fill with tears.
Tears came easily when watching a film or when quoting the Gettysburg Address, but for all that, he paid close attention to his own emotional truth. Towards his mother’s memory, he maintained something like awe at her strength of character, mixed with irritation at the tidal force of her claim upon him. Towards his mild, competent and affectionate father, he developed a relation that was a complex mixture of love and condescension. Towards Riga he maintained something close to indifference. Too far back perhaps, or too Baltic. There was little nostalgia in him and, despite being an exile, he never radiated any obvious sense of loss. Nursery rhymes and popular songs from his childhood came back at his bidding and he sang them cheerfully in a musical whisper. But there wasn’t much that he seemed to grieve for. The past did not make painful claims.
The first six years of his life were spent in the apartment on Albertstraße. His Latvian governess would take him out on leading strings, between the sphinxes, down the street to the public garden, grandly called the Esplanade, where ancient Crimean veterans sunned themselves and re-lived Inkerman and Sevastopol. Riga was then the capital of Livonia, a province of the tsarist empire. The Russian imperial presence consisted of a garrison, a detachment of cavalry, 13an Orthodox cathedral of recent construction, a small administration of clerks and copyists presided over by a governor with a staff, retinue and carriage. The Russians had done little to alter Riga’s older identity as a Hanseatic trading town, with German as the language of culture and commerce. There was a Bourse, largely controlled by German-speaking merchants, and a grandly columned DeutscheOper. Young Wagner had been chef d’orchestre in Riga in the 1830s and Bruno Walter had begun his conducting career there in 1898. In the Riga of 1909, Russian was the language of administration, but the number of Russians in the city was small, and the languages one would have heard in the streets, besides German, would have been Latvian and Yiddish.
At the top of the social pyramid of tsarist Riga were the Baltic barons, Russian-speaking Germans – the Korffs and Benckendorfs, Keyserlings and Budbergs: family dynasties built on service to Peter the Great and to succeeding tsars. They owned the great estates of the region and the grand houses of the town. Beneath them came the German merchants of the Bourse and the foreign timber-traders. Next came the Jewish merchants and professional classes; beneath them came the Jewish artisans who lived in the Red Dvina ghetto. At the bottom were the Latvians: recently urbanised country people, with a peasant culture. They represented the majority, yet were disenfranchised in their own land. In Riga, they were domestic servants, labourers and governesses.
Albertstraße was in new Riga, across the canal from the cobbled streets of the Hanseatic old town, in a development of Art Nouveau apartment houses in the Paris style. Sergei Eisenstein’s father Mikhail – a converted Riga Jew – had designed some of these blocks, and Eisenstein himself spent his early years in Riga.3 There were Jewish schools in the new Riga district, but it was not an especially, or even exclusively, Jewish neighbourhood.
Riga lay outside the Pale of Settlement, the area of the Western and Polish provinces of the Russian empire where Jews had been 14confined by statute since the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century.4 As long as they stayed put, Riga Jews were exempt from the humiliating restrictions of tsarist rule: the laws forbidding them to own land; to enter certain trades; to change their names to Christian ones; the laws banning them from the Gymnasium and the universities.5
Even when they travelled out of Riga none of the Pale restrictions applied to the Berlin family. Isaiah’s father was a Merchant of the First Guild, a small elite given honorary citizenship in the empire and exempted from the laws that applied to lesser Jews. They were free to travel and trade throughout the empire. While the sawmills and timber yards of Mendel Berlin’s business were located in the Jewish ghetto and employed ghetto workers, for the child born in the building between the sphinxes the ghetto remained terra incognita.
In Berlin’s papers there is a manuscript, eighty-six pages long, written in a spidery hand in an accountant’s duplicate book, begun on 11 March 1946.6 It is his father’s call to his son to renew the connection to the family’s Riga past, to the Berlins, Volshonoks and Schneersons, the rabbis, scholars and merchant princes of Jewish Russia. I asked whether Isaiah was aware of his father’s memoir – he had no recollection of it whatsoever.
In photographs, Mendel Berlin appears as a small, plump, dapper man in well-tailored three-piece suits, with a tightly clipped moustache and thinning hair. In his son’s recollections, he came across as a gentle, intelligent, timid man ruled by his emotional and domineering wife; a businessman who dealt in timber before the Revolution and later also in pigs’ bristles. The loves of his life were not Talmud or the Psalms, but his wife, his successful son, light French comedies and the operettas of Franz Lehár.
While this suggests that Mendel was an assimilated European businessman who happened to be a Jew, his memoir created a different picture. It evoked the piety and yearning of the Pale city of Vitebsk, where he had lived since the age of three; he told how his maternal 15grandfather – a vague, otherworldly rabbi – used to devote all his waking hours to the study of holy books. Mendel remembered how, when he walked home from Hebrew school at night, he would detour around the local church lest his clothes brush the walls by accident. He recalled the numbing lessons in the Hebrew school; the sting of the rabbi’s correction when he forgot his Hebrew letters; the long black silk caftan and embroidered skullcap he wore in synagogue; the blast of the shofar, the ram’s horn, to mark the end of the fast on Yom Kippur. All of this brought the traditional Jewish world closer to Mendel’s beginnings than his son had led me to believe.
At my urging, Isaiah read his father’s memoir. All very unreliable, he said sternly, as if marking a deficient undergraduate essay. Pure ‘sentimental return to roots’, he insisted. Mendel ‘worked up’ all this Jewish feeling in old age.7 In 1946, when Mendel started the memoir, he was sixty-one, nearing the end of his professional life; he had been in exile in London for twenty-five years; the Soviet conquest of Latvia meant that he would never see Riga again; the Holocaust had turned his past to dust. It was hardly surprising that the roots he had sunk in England should suddenly have seemed insubstantial and that he should have attempted to salvage what he could of his deeper allegiances.
His son would have none of this. ‘He broke away from it completely.’ And ‘He was totally emancipated, didn’t eat kosher’ and ‘was bored by going to the synagogue’.8 When I pointed out that his father taxed him gently in the memoir for not knowing his Talmud, Isaiah shot back, ‘He didn’t either.’
Jewishness may be a central fact about Berlin, but he fashioned the kind of Jew he was and resented his father’s desire to define these claims on his behalf. By the time of their son’s birth, the Berlins had ascended to a world far removed from the pieties of Vitebsk. The distance was linguistic as well as social. In his own childhood, Berlin’s father had spoken Yiddish, but he never spoke it to his son. In Albertstraße, the first language was Russian, the second German. 16
The historian Lewis Namier once compared Eastern European Jewry to a block of ice, which started to thaw when the rays of European enlightenment began to shine upon it. As the block melted, the streams of Jewish life – Zionist, Bundist, secular and religious – then flowed into the river of bourgeois culture.9 The Berlins, Volshonoks and Schneersons of Riga were swept along in these currents of Jewish assimilation.
Berlin’s mother was a Volshonok and she grew up in an observant household in the Riga ghetto, but not even her Orthodox father was able to prevent her from receiving a European education and developing European yearnings to train as a singer – yearnings which, since she could not fulfil them herself, she poured into her son. Berlin’s father received a traditional Jewish education in the Hebrew schools of Vitebsk, but at fifteen he was brought to Riga by his adoptive paternal grandfather, the immensely wealthy timber trader Isaiah Berlin, known as ‘Shaya’ like his namesake three generations later. Shaya had no children of his own, and had adopted a nephew – Mendel’s father Dov Behr Zuckerman – as a small child, changing the boy’s name to ‘Berlin’. In Riga Mendel received home tutoring in Hebrew and also the secular German education of his time. When he showed promise, Shaya took him into his timber concern, where the languages of business were German and Russian. Soon he was travelling to Paris, London, Berlin.
Isaiah claimed that to be secular and sceptical, as he was, required no break with the family past. Yet consider these details from his father’s memoir: how, in 1904, travelling on the night-train from Paris to Menton, Mendel and his uncle put on their prayer shawls and performed their devotions while the gentiles slept. Or this: once a year Mendel journeyed to Lyubavichi, a small shtetl village in the Smolensk gubernia of western Russia, to consult the rabbi on business matters and seek his blessing. It seems odd: a figure in a business suit queuing outside a country synagogue alongside poor folk in need of comfort and advice. 17
The oracle in question was no ordinary rabbi.10 He was the leader of one of the most important sects of Hasidic Jews in Eastern Europe, established in the 1780s by Rabbi Shneur Zalman, and known as Lubavich after the village where the founder’s eldest son had come to live. The Hasidim sought renewal of an old, institutionalised faith through singing, dancing and other forms of direct and joyous communion with God. The Lubavicher and other Hasidim were fiercely resisted within traditional Jewish Orthodoxy for their focus on an individual’s personal relationship with God and his fellow man rather than on the intricacies of Jewish law, and for the extraordinary power and greatness attributed to their leaders.
Both Isaiah’s maternal great-grandmother and his adoptive paternal great-grandmother were Schneersons and thus lineal descendants of the sect’s founder. From birth, therefore, he belonged to Hasidism’s royal family. In the annual pilgrimage to Lyubavichi, a Berlin would have been received with honour. Mendel Berlin’s memoir took obvious pride in these Hasidic forebears. The son was more sceptical. Origins, he always said, are a fact, full stop, but nothing to be proud of. To take pride was to surrender to the dubious determinism of the blood. Mendel used to attribute his son’s memory and scholarly achievements to his rabbinical ancestors. Berlin thought this was absurd. As for the modern Lubavich Hasidim – with their three-quarter-length black frock-coats, wide-brimmed hats, beards and ringlets – he regarded them as alarming fanatics. Any mention of the Lubavich Hasidim, locked in violent conflict with the black population of Brooklyn, or giving their support to an intransigent struggle with the Palestinians over Hebron – would cause his face to tighten into a rare and uncharacteristic expression of dislike. Yet Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, their religious leader, was a (distant) cousin.
The name ‘Isaiah’ was given him by his parents as a mark of respect to his adoptive great-grandfather. This man, a grand merchant prince and a member of the Lubavich sect, was born near Vitebsk but moved to Riga in order to escape the Pale restrictions on Jewish 18business. He married Chayetta Schneerson, one of the granddaughters of the Zemach Zedek, a former leader of the Lubavich. Marriage into the royal Lubavich line gave Isaiah senior access to formidable networks of business and economic intelligence. Like any oracle, the rabbi was both the recipient and dispenser of useful confidential information. Isaiah Berlin senior, or Shaya as he was known, was thus a complex mixture of ancient piety and modern capitalist acumen. He set up in business supplying railway sleepers and pit-props for German and Russian industry. By the 1890s he owned 75,000 acres of forest in a broad swathe on either side of the River Dvina, stretching back into the Pale lands around Andreapol. In these forests, Jewish timber-cutters felled the pines, assembled them into rafts and poled them down the Dvina to the port of Riga, where Shaya Berlin’s sawmill in the Riga ghetto turned them into lumber for shipment to St Petersburg, Hamburg and London. By the turn of the century his sawmills and forests employed several hundred workers, most of them Jews.11
Before Shaya Berlin’s time, Baltic Germans controlled the export trade. Jews generally lacked the languages and culture necessary for success in foreign commerce. It was this most pious Hasid who made the breakthrough, by taking Isaiah’s father into the business and making him his chief negotiator in the European trade. By the turn of the century Shaya’s timber business was so substantial that he had been made a Merchant of the First Guild and granted honorary citizenship of the Russian empire, to be passed on to his heirs. Every morning the Russian governor would send a messenger to enquire after his well-being, and in the afternoon Berlin’s beadle was despatched from the sawmill to reciprocate. The old merchant rose early, toured his mill in a coach and pair, visited the exchange to gossip with his gentile colleagues, lunched, napped in his flat above the mill, and then descended to the office in the afternoon, to write letters and tell stories to his entourage. Evenings were spent in restaurants and clubs. He was soon wealthy enough to afford a royal progress through 19the spas and resorts of Europe every winter and spring, accompanied by rabbis, kosher butchers, accountants and by Mendel, then in his early twenties. In Menton, the old man dined and drank and enjoyed himself, on holiday from self-denial. Mendel passed the time reading Russian literature forbidden in the empire – Tolstoy’s banned works and the leaflets of the Russian social democrats – while the old man’s wife, Chayetta, languished upstairs, as she also did in Riga. Mendel once overheard her, alone in her room, singing to herself sadly in a minor key.
Shaya spent Passover in Bad Homburg, dining in the local kosher restaurant, then talking business in the cafes and pump-rooms with gentile businessmen, in a mixture of Yiddish and German. He attended synagogue in Frankfurt, where the Jews were so ostentatiously pious, Mendel noticed, that, not wishing to infringe the prohibition against labour on the Sabbath, they employed a gentile at the entrance to open and shut their umbrellas. Back in Riga, all Shaya’s employees had to attend his private synagogue on the Sabbath, and the master’s beadle would also appear at Albertstraße, bidding the family to its devotions. He was a hard paternalist of the old school.
Under the old man’s eye, Mendel rose to become the head of Shaya’s export business. He also began courting Mussa Marie Volshonok, his first cousin, daughter of a strict Hasid, Salman Izchok Volshonok, also employed in the Berlin timber business. Mussa Marie was a diminutive, dark-haired, plump woman whose defining features were inexhaustible vitality, a fine singing voice and a passionate, clinging temperament. While still a teenager, Mendel came courting, sometimes staying the night at her house and sleeping on a pair of chairs in the downstairs salon. She turned down his first proposal of marriage – to Mendel’s ‘consternation, horror and also shame’. When, several months later, she changed her mind and accepted him at last, he felt certain, as he sadly confessed in his memoir, ‘that mother accepted me only after calculating that she has after all to get married and she might do worse than accepting me’.12 He knew 20he was timid and not good-looking, but he had prospects – as Shaya Berlin’s heir – and he evidently doted on her.
The wedding took place in Riga on 14 (old style)/27 (new style) March 1906. She was twenty-four, he was twenty-one. With marriage, a new apartment in Albertstraße and additional income as an insurance agent for a London company, Mendel entered the happiest period of his life. But he also began to resent his adoptive grandfather’s tyrannies. The old man thought nothing of summoning his grandson by telegram in the middle of the night to German spa towns simply to translate a business letter. Now that Mendel was married, he disliked being at Shaya’s beck and call. But his period of servitude was coming to an end. In 1908 the old man died, at the age of sixty-seven, leaving Mendel the business, which he sold, using the proceeds to start a new timber partnership of his own.
When Isaiah was born the next year – and named after the departed patriarch – he came into the world at the highest point of his family’s fortunes. Mendel quickly became head of the Riga association of timber merchants and built up his volume of business with the London timber market.
The young Isaiah was smothered by his doting parents and never lost a taste for being spoiled. All his life he loved regression in all its cosiest forms, taking to his bed whenever possible, preferably in small, warmly heated rooms. At the same time, he did not believe that he was, as he put it, ‘mother-fixated’.13 If anything, it was he who dominated them both. There is something of the young domestic tyrant in the early photographs. Isaiah’s volubility, the non-stop talking, might have had its beginnings in being a preternaturally bright and bubbling only child, sure that no one – certainly no younger sister or older brother – would interrupt his chattering.
In his memory, he dominated the scene around him. He was taken to see Chayetta Berlin, widow of Shaya, the founding father, some time in 1912. The room was an overheated, dimly lit salon, immaculate, gleaming and sad, at the end of which, in an armchair, 21sat a yellowed old lady, in flounced Victorian widow’s weeds with a kerchief on her head. His parents ushered him forward and bade him kiss her hand. She was the matriarch of the clan, and he the namesake of her dead husband. But there was something repugnant about the wrinkled old face, the darkness, the yellowed flesh. Isaiah refused. The shame of the parents was great, his victory complete. When they took their leave, the matriarch’s hand had still not been kissed. He never saw her again.
In another early memory, he also played the tiny tyrant. In 1912 his father’s sister, Evgenia, married Isaac Landoberg, a dashing adventurer, one-time boxer, gallery owner and man about town. Isaiah, aged three, was taken to the wedding reception, in a white silk suit. A dance band is playing: the couples swirl around him. He is placed on a table – exhibited to aunts and uncles, chucked under the chin, made a spectacle of. Someone is holding him up; the dancers whirl around him, the music grows louder and louder. Suddenly he is shouting, in infantile fury, ‘Ich hasse diese Schreimusik!’ – ‘I hate this screaming music!’14 He stamps his foot, and the adult world stops dancing.
Apart from these grand occasions, the Berlins lived quietly. They took family holidays at the Baltic resorts and winter cures at the German spas, but the general impression of their life in the Albertstraße flat is of a family turned in upon the child at its centre. In a letter written to the psychiatrist Anthony Storr, in 1978, Berlin himself pondered why it was that, having ‘received a full measure of parental love at all times’, he should have been plagued, all his life, with the feeling that his achievements were of ‘very little or no value’.15 Certainly this works as a warning against deducing the adult from the child; yet the self-doubt of which he speaks – however real it sometimes was – was also part of a carefully cultivated strategy of self-deprecation, intended to deflect and disarm criticism. Beneath this exterior, there was a quiet and unshakeable sense of self-worth. It cannot be irrelevant that he began life in front of an audience of two worshipping, overawed parents.
3
Petrograd and After
The certainties of Riga were short-lived. In June 1914 the Austrian Archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo. Isaiah was just five. The Russian and German empires mobilised against each other, and Riga Jewry was caught in between. Their language was German, their citizenship Russian. As the Russian forces were driven back, the Russian high command, believing the Jews were giving aid and comfort to the enemy, ordered them all deported behind the front lines. The Jews of Riga escaped deportation only by bribing the Governor General. Most refugees from the Pale fled eastwards, but some went north to Riga. Isaiah was out in the street with his governess when they came upon two old Jewish refugees, one a man, the other a woman, begging in the street. Isaiah had a rusk in his hand and held it out to the old man, only to see it snatched away by the woman. ‘He only eats once a day,’ she said, devouring the rusk before Isaiah’s frightened gaze.1
By May 1915 the Baltic was under German naval blockade and the timber trade was at a standstill. Mendel had managed to re-orient the business away from export to supplying the Russian railways, but still a large portion of his timber was sitting in local yards. When a fire wiped out his stock, Mendel was certain the German owner of the yard had started it deliberately. The German covered his tracks by denouncing Berlin to the police. By then imperial Russia was in full retreat along the eastern front and the German armies were within twenty-five miles of the city. 23
This was the context – a nasty dispute, tinged with anti-Semitic implications and the growing threat of German invasion – that led Mendel, in the summer of 1915, to despatch his wife and son by train to Andreapol, a small company town upriver on the Dvina, eight hours or more from Riga, where the family’s timber concessions were concentrated. Mendel himself went to Petrograd to secure compensation for his fire loss, in an atmosphere, so he hoped, ‘less poisoned’ than that of Riga.2
Andreapol, a logging town of about 1,000 inhabitants deep in the forests, was full of pious, practising Jews who worked as loggers, cutters, sawmill workers and timber stackers. But there was also a traditional Russian landowner, dying of tuberculosis, in a big house surrounded by a park; and Russian officers on leave from nearby regiments used to serenade young ladies with balalaikas or read them sentimental verse. One such officer read to Isaiah’s mother by the auburn light of an oil lamp. In both Isaiah’s and his mother’s memory, Andreapol became a sepia print of old Russia in its dying hours. Displacement to this new world was neither strange nor threatening: Andreapol was effectively owned by the Berlin timber firm, and everyone deferred to the young princeling.
In the Hebrew school, sitting on plank benches with timber-cutters’ children, Isaiah received his first formal religious instruction. It was also his first experience of schooling, and to the end of his life he could still remember the words of a song he learned with the other children, about the stove in the corner that kept a poor family warm. From an old rabbi he learned the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The rabbi too was never forgotten. Once he paused and said, ‘When you will get older, dear children, you will realise how much blood and tears are embodied in these letters.’ When Berlin told me this story, seventy-five years later, in the downstairs sitting room of his home in Oxford, Headington House, for a split second his composure deserted him and he stared out across the garden in tears. Then he looked back at me, equanimity restored, and said, ‘That is the history of the Jews.’324
In 1916 Mendel Berlin moved the family from Andreapol to Petrograd, where he now worked for the Russian government supplying timber for the railway system. Several members of the Berlin family soon joined them in Petrograd: Uncle Isaac and Aunt Evgenia Landoberg, Yitzhak and Ida Samunov. The young child found Uncle Isaac irresistibly romantic, because by then he was caught up in the socialist movement and came back to their flat with tales of revolvers, searches and derring-do. Aunt Ida, his mother’s sister, was a tender and highly intelligent soul, tiny in stature and warm in disposition, even more so – Isaiah eventually believed – than his mother.
From the family’s arrival in Petrograd in 1916 until their departure for England in 1921, Isaiah did not attend school. He educated himself in the library of the family’s rented flat on Vasilevsky Island in the north of the city. The apartment was above a small ceramics factory, and multicoloured fragments of ceramic mosaic littered the inner courtyard. There were maids and tutors, but few children to play with. Solitude allowed Isaiah’s precocity to flourish. He swears he read War and Peace and Anna Karenina at the age of ten. He loved the former, but could not make head or tail of the latter.
Isaiah’s Hebrew lessons continued, together with instruction in the Talmud. At the time, it all seemed an exercise in boredom. ‘Two men who seize a garment and tear it between them. To whom does it belong? And so on. I didn’t find it fascinating.’4 These were the Jewish tradition’s elementary lessons in the ambiguities of human justice, and if the child found them tiresome, the adult never forgot them.
More fascinating were Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues underthe Sea, Mayne Reid’s cowboy adventures and Alexandre Dumas’s ThreeMusketeers – all in Russian translations. Late in his life, when asked what he had wanted to be when he was a child, Berlin said that he used to dream of being a scientist in a Jules Verne novel, undersea, watching the world of nature through a porthole. It is a fantasy of omniscient distance – exploring the depths, yet remaining immune from their dangers. 25
This childhood reading remained vivid to him throughout his life. In August 1956, when he visited the Lenin Library in Moscow, closely followed by the KGB, he signed out a number of Russian books and spent the morning reading them. When Isaiah left, the agent assigned to shadow him discovered that they were only dogeared original editions of two German adventure stories for children, translated into Russian.
Besides what he gleaned from reading, there were the scraps of knowledge tossed to him at his parents’ dinner table by his aunts and uncles. He remembered Uncle Isaac teaching him who Garibaldi and his Redshirts were; he recalled how his progressive Aunt Evgenia solemnly set out to demolish certain Hebrew myths about Mordecai and Esther. Unlike the retiring Mendel and Marie, Isaac and Evgenia were swept up in the rising tide of Petrograd politics in autumn 1916, but apart from the stories they brought back from the streets, the drastic events outside – the slow dissolution of a regime, the ongoing collapse of the imperial army – made no impression on a seven-year-old. The first political tremor he registered at all was the portentous black type of the newspaper headlines announcing Rasputin’s murder in late autumn of that year.
A whole regime was crumbling around him, and of course he had not the slightest inkling of it. He went for walks with his Jewish governess on the Nevsky Prospekt. He would gaze in the shop windows, at the toy stores with their English train sets and German stuffed bears, at the confectioneries, where his attention would be riveted by a certain type of chocolate bar, whose name – khvorost (brushwood) – and whose shape, like twigs piled on top of each other, he never forgot.
In the winter of 1916–17 his parents took him to hear the Russian bass Fedor Chaliapin singing the title role in Boris Godunov at the Mariinsky Theatre. What he liked best was the moment when Boris sees the ghost of Dmitry: Chaliapin fell to his knees, crawled under the table and drew the tablecloth over his head. Isaiah’s lifelong love 26of opera began here, with Boris, and with the spectacle of an adult mimicking animal terror, all seen in the safe frame of a theatre. Soon, of course, there was to be real fear in adults’ eyes, and none of it in the magic frame of suspended disbelief.
He was kept inside on the bright winter’s day in late February 1917 when the crowds began surging through Vasilevsky Ostrov towards the centre of the city. The family went to the windows to watch the large plywood banners inscribed with such slogans as ‘Land and Liberty!’, ‘All Power to the Duma!’, ‘Down with the Tsar!’, ‘Down with the War!’5 floating above the caps and kerchiefs of the crowd. When the first cordon of troops marched towards them in formation, the crowd did not give way. The military line wavered, broke, and then the crowd and army mingled together, tossing caps in the air, singing the Marseillaise in Russian, making common cause and setting off together across the Neva bridges for Winter Palace Square. He was seven-and-a-half when he saw this – the first euphoric morning of the February Revolution. His parents – like most liberal Jews – seemed to share the popular excitement, though Mendel and Marie were not the kind of people to throw on a coat, rush downstairs and join the crowd.
When it seemed safe to go out in the streets, Isaiah and his governess went for a stroll near their home. Isaiah was bending down to examine a battered Russian translation of Jules Verne, on sale from a bookseller who had laid out his wares on the snowy sidewalk, when the roadway suddenly filled with a small group of men, perhaps fifteen in all, sweeping past with a frightened person in their clutches. Afterwards, Isaiah learned that the man was a pharaon (‘pharaoh’), one of the municipal policemen who were the last people in uniform to remain loyal to the old regime. He had been spotted on the roof of a nearby building and had been dragged down into the street. All the seven-year-old had time to see was a man with a white face twisting and turning as he was borne away. The child could not know where they were taking him, but even then it seemed clear that he would not escape with his life. However brief the scene, it made an 27indelible impression. Much later, in the 1930s, when contemporaries were intoxicated with revolutionary Marxism, the memory of 1917 continued to work within Berlin, strengthening his horror of physical violence and his suspicion of political experiment, and deepening his lifelong preference for all the temporising compromises that keep a political order safely this side of terror.
Initially, the pharaony or pharaohs were among the only victims of revolution, and at first Berlin’s parents were swept along by the excitement. They avidly followed the proclamations of the Provisional Government, the speeches in the Duma by Milyukov, Guchkov and Rodzianko. But the liberals in whom the Berlins placed their trust still wanted to wage war. Milyukov renewed the Russian imperial claim on the Dardanelles, drastically misreading the war-weariness of the crowds of workers and soldiers who milled about the Petrograd streets. By the spring of 1917, demonstrators were already chanting, ‘Down with the capitalist ministers. Down with Milyukov-Dardanellsky.’6 By midsummer, the liberals’ hour had passed; order in the streets was visibly disintegrating and power was ebbing from the Duma towards the Petrograd Soviet and a small band of Maximalists, as the Bolsheviks were then known.
To escape the heat and the increasing tension and violence in the city, mother and son spent the summer of 1917 in a dacha in Staraya Russa, three hundred kilometres south of Petrograd. There were fancy-dress parties, tombolas, and afternoons in the park listening to an Italian orchestra playing at a bandstand. The Italians had left their sheet music behind in Italy. Each afternoon they announced first a Venetian, then a Finnish, then an Italian march. Isaiah gradually realised that it was the same tune, played over and over.
His circle of friends at Staraya Russa included Leonard Schapiro (also the son of a Riga timber merchant), who was later to become Professor of Russian Studies at the London School of Economics. The two little boys, eight-year-old Isaiah and nine-year-old Leonard, would sit on the dacha veranda or wander through the parks of the resort, 28talking earnestly about the art of Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst and other Russian painters of the time. Schapiro showed Berlin coloured postcards of their work and even modelled a plaster bust of the dying French Revolutionary hero, Jean Paul Marat.7 These summer conversations – of a scarcely credible precocity – laid down the earliest layer of cultural and artistic references that were to astonish his English contemporaries later on.
