Theodore Dalrymple

Almost every intellectual claims to have the welfare of humanity, and particularly the

welfare of the poor, at heart: but since no mass murder takes place without its

perpetrators alleging that they are acting for the good of mankind, philanthropic

sentiment can plainly take a multiplicity of forms.

Summer 2001

Almost every intellectual claims to have the welfare of humanity, and particularly the welfare of the poor, at heart: but since no mass murder takes place without its

perpetrators alleging that they are acting for the good of mankind, philanthropic

sentiment can plainly take a multiplicity of forms.

Two great European writers of the nineteenth century, Ivan Turgenev and Karl Marx,

illustrate this diversity with vivid clarity. Both were born in 1818 and died in 1883, and

their lives paralleled each other almost preternaturally in many other respects as well.

They nevertheless came to view human life and suffering in very different, indeed

irreconcilable, ways—through different ends of the telescope, as it were. Turgenev saw

human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings,

and moral strengths and weaknesses; Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an

avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly

conditioned by their circumstances. Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men;

where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People. These two ways of looking at the

world persist into our own time and profoundly affect, for better or for worse, the

solutions we propose to our social problems.

The resemblances between the careers of these men begin with their attendance at Berlin

University at overlapping times, where both were deeply affected—even intoxicated—by

the prevailing Hegelianism. As a result, both considered careers as university teachers of

philosophy, but neither ever held a university post. They had many acquaintances in

common in Berlin, including Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian aristocrat who later became a

revolutionary anarchist, the philosopher Bruno Bauer, and the radical poet Georg

Herwegh. They shared a carelessness with money, perhaps because they were both born

into easy circumstances and therefore assumed that money would never be a problem.

Both started their writing careers as romantic poets, though more of Turgenev’s poetry

than Marx’s was published.

Their literary influences and tastes were similar. Each read widely in the Greek and Latin

classics; each could quote Shakespeare in the original. Both learned Spanish in order to

read Calderón. (Turgenev, of course, also learned it to speak the native language of the

great, but unsatisfactory, love of his life, the famous prima donna Pauline Viardot.) The

two men were in Brussels at the outbreak of the 1848 revolution against the July

monarchy in France, and both left to observe the events elsewhere. Turgenev’s closest

Russian friend, Pavel Annenkov, to whom he dedicated some of his work, knew Marx

well in Brussels—and left an unflattering description of him.

The secret police spied upon both men, and both lived most of their adult lives, and died,

in exile. Each fathered a child by a servant: a youthful indiscretion in Turgenev’s case, a

middle-aged one in Marx’s. Unlike Marx, however, Turgenev acknowledged his child and

paid for her upbringing.

Both men were known for their sympathy with the downtrodden and oppressed. But for

all their similarities of education and experience, the quality of each man’s compassion

could not have been more different: for while one’s, rooted in the suffering of

individuals, was real, the other’s, abstract and general, was not.

To see the difference, contrast Turgenev’s 1852 story “Mumu” with Marx’s Communist Manifesto, written four years earlier. Both works, almost exactly equal in length, took

shape in difficult circumstances: Marx, expelled from France for revolutionary activity,

was residing in Brussels, where he had no wish to be and no income, while Turgenev was

under house arrest at Spasskoye, his isolated estate southwest of Moscow, for having

written his Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, an implicitly anti-serfdom—and therefore

subversive—book. The censor who allowed it to be published was dismissed and stripped

of his pension.

“Mumu” is set in Moscow in the days of serfdom. Gerasim is a deaf and dumb serf of