isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

IN SEARCH OF AN IDEAL 53
success, their imperviousness to banality, and the self-immolating
integrity with which they searched for truth. Uspensky, the
Narodnik, had risen above Narodnik prejudices and illusions:
'A lonely figure, the martyr of his own fearless thought, he looks
with painfully penetrating eyes above the heads of his contemporaries
and comrades ... into the face of the future.' Belinsky,
'the godfather of modern Russian literature' held that 'nothing
that appears and succeeds at once and is met with ... unconditional
praise can be important or great-significant and great
is only that which divides opinion ... which matures and grows
through genuine struggle, which asserts itself ... against living
resistance'. In Dobrolyubov the critic valued the extreme sensitivity
to any false note and the impatience with platitudes, even
when they were innocuous. Nothing was more embarrassing
to Dobrolyubov than to have to listen to a man who argued
heatedly about the inhumanity of cannibalism or the usefulness
of education. Dobrolyubov's satire, Bronstein concluded, would
remain acutely topical 'as long as the great heroism for petty
affairs raised its head so high ... and as long as it was
considered a social merit to preach the rudiments of a cheap
liberalism' . 1
This summary of Bronstein's literary criticism may, through
inevitable compression, give a somewhat exaggerated idea of the
maturity of his writings. His style, over-elaborate, over-rhetorical,
and over-witty, was still adolescent; but his judgement was,
on the whole, mature. To the biographer the value of these
essays is enhanced by the many flashes of the author's implied
self-analysis and self-portrayal. However, the young Bronstein
epitomized more directly his own outlook in an invocation to the
twentieth century (written early in IgoI, under the title 'On
Optimism and Pessimism, on the Twentieth Century, and on
Many Other Things'). 2 There he analysed various types of optimism
and pessimism and stated his preference for the view
which was pessimistic about the present but optimistic about the
future. It is, Bronstein argues, the man who holds this view who
opens new vistas to the human mind and makes history. More
than once this peculiar optimist has had to brave a Holy Inquisition.
'More than once has the collective Torquemada devoted
exclusive attention to him.' Yet he, the optimist, rises
I Ibid., PP· I 2, 29-3 I. ' Ibid., pp. 74-79.