Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

fought in 1 81 2,1 indignantly complained of inaccuracies of fact; and

since then damning evidence has been adduced of falsification of

historical detail by the author of War and Ptact,3 done apparently

with deliberate intent, in full knowledge of the available original

sources and in the known absence of any counter-evidence-falsification perpetrated, it seems, in the interests not so much of an artistic as of an 'ideological' purpose. This consensus of historical and aesthetic

criticism seems to have set the tone for nearly all later appraisals of

the 'ideological' content of War and Peace. Shelgunov at least honoured

it with a direct attack for its social quietism, which he called the 'philosophy of the swamp'; others for the most part either politely ignored it, or treated it as a characteristic aberration which they put down to

a combination of the well-known Russian tendency to preach (and

thereby ruin works of art) with the half-baked infatuation with

general ideas characteristic of young intellectuals in countries remote

from centres of civilisation. 'It is fortunate for us that the author is a

better artist than thinker' said the critic Dmitri Akhsharumov,• and

for more than three-quarters of a century this sentiment has been

echoed by most of the critics of Tolstoy, both Russian and foreign,

both pre-revolutionary and Soviet, both 'reactionary' and 'progressive',

by most of those who look on him primarily as a writer and an artist,

and of those to whom he is a prophet and a teacher, or a martyr, or a

social inRuence, or a sociological or psychological 'case'. Tolstoy's

theory of history is of equally little interest to Vogue and Merezhkovsky, to Stefan Zweig a'nd Percy Lubbock, to Biryukov and 1 A. A. Fet, Moi fJOipominaniya (Moscow, 1 890), part 2, p. 175.

I Se e the severe strictures of A. Vitmer, a very respectable military

historian, in his I8I2 god fl 'Yoint i mirt' (St Petersburg, 1 869), and the

tones of mounting indignation in the contemporary critical notices of A. S.

Norov, A. P. Pyatkovsky and S. Navalikhin. The lint served in the campaign

of 1 8 1 2 and, despite some errors of fact, makes criticisms of substance. The

last two are, as literary critics, almost worthless, but they seem to have taken

the trouble to veriljr some of the relevant facts.

a See V. B. Shklovsky, Mattr'yal i Jtil' fl romant L'fla Toiitogo 'Yoina i mir'

(Moscow, 1928), pa11im, but particularly chapter 7· See below, p. 42.

• Raz6or 'Yoiny i mira' (St Petersburg, 1 868), pp. 1 -4.

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THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX

E. J. Simmons, not to speak of lesser men. Historians of Russian

thought1 tend to label this aspect of Tolstoy as 'fatalism', and move

on to the more interesting historical theories of Leontiev or Danilevsky. Critics endowed with more caution or humility do not go as far as this, but treat the 'philosophy' with nervous respect; even

Derrick Leon, who treats Tolstoy's views of this period with greater

care than the majority of his biographers, after giving a painstaking

account of Tolstoy's reflections on the forces which dominate history,

particularly of the second section of the long epilogue which follows

the end of the narrative portion of War and Ptoct, proceeds to follow

Aylmer Maude in making no attempt either to assess the theory

or to relate it to the rest of Tolstoy's life or thought; and even

so much as this is almost unique.1 Those, again, who are mainly

interested in Tolstoy as a prophet and a teacher concentrate on the

later doctrines of the master, held after his conversion, when he had

ceased to regard himself primarily as a writer ·and had established

himself as a teacher of mankind, an object of veneration and pilgrimage.

Tolstoy's life is normally represented as falling into two distinct parts:

first comes the author of immortal masterpieces, later the prophet of

personal and social regeneration; first the aristocratic writer, the difficult, somewhat unapproachable, troubled novelist of genius; then the 1 e.g. Professon Ilin, Yakovenko, Zenkovsky and others.

1 Honourable exceptions to this are provided by the writings of the Russian

writers N. I. Kareev and B. M. Eikhenbaum, as well as those of the French

scholars E. Haumant and Albert Sorel. Of monographs devoted to this subject

I know of only two of any worth. The lint, 'Filosofiya istorii L. N. Tolstogo',

by V. N. Pertsev, in 'Voina i mir: sburnik pll11lJati L. N. Tolrtogo, ed. V. P.

Obninsky and T. I. Polner (Moscow, 1912), after taking Tolstoy mildly

to task for obscurities, exaggerations and inconsistencies, swiftly retreats into

innocuous generalities. The other, 'Filosofiya istorii v romane L. N. Tolstogo,

"Voina i mir" ', by M. M. Rubinshtein, in Rtmltaya mysl' Ouly 191 1),

pp. 78-103, is much more laboured, but in the end seems to me to establish

nothing at all. (Very dilferent is Arnold Bennett's judgement, of which I

have learnt since writing this: 'The last part of the Epilogue is full of good

ideas the johnny can't work out. And of course, in the phrase of critics, would

have been better left out. So it would; only Tolstoy couldn't leave it out. It

was what he wrote the book for.' Tile Joumals of ../mold Btfllltll, ed.

Newman Flower, 3 vols [London, 1932·3), vol. z, 191 1-192 1, p. 6z.) As

for the inevitable efforts to relate Tolstoy's historical views to those of various

latter-day Marxiats-Kautsky, Lenin, Stalin etc.-they belong to the curiosities

of politics or theology rather than to those ofliterature.

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RU SS IAN TH INKERS

sage-dogmatic, perverse, exaggerated, but wielding a vast inRuence,

panicularly in his own country-a world institution of unique importance. From time to time attempts are made to trace his later period to its roots in his earlier phase, which is felt to be full of presentiments of the later life of self-renunciation; it is this later period which is regarded as important; there are philosophical, theological, ethical,

psychological, political, economic studies of the later Tolstoy in all his

aspects.

And yet there is surely a paradox here. Tolstoy's interest in history

and the problem of historical truth was passionate, almost obsessive,

both before and during the writing of War and Ptact. No one who

reads his journals and letters, or indeed War and Ptact itself, can

doubt that the author himself, at any rate, regarded this problem as

the hean of the entire matter-the central issue round which the novel

is built. 'Charlatanism', 'superficiality', 'intellectual feebleness' -surely

Tolstoy is the last writer to whom these epithets seem applicable:

bias, perversity, arrogance, perhaps; self-deception, lack of restraint,

possibly; moral or spiritual inadequacy-of this he was better aware.

than his enemies; but failure of intellect-lack of critical power-a

tendency to emptineSs-liability to ride off on some patently absurd,

superficial doctrine to the detriment of realistic description or analysis

of life-infatuation with some fashionable theory which Botkin or Fet

can easily see through, although Tolstoy, alas, cannot-these charges

seem grotesquely unplausible. No man in his senses, during this century

at any rate, would ever dream of denying Tolstoy's intellectual power,

his appalling capacity to penetrate any conventional disguise, that

corrosive scepticism in virtue of which Prince Vyazemsky applied

to him the archaic Russian tenn 'netovshchik'1 ('negativist')-an early

version of that nihilism which Vogue and Alben Sorel later quite

naturally attribute to him. Something is surely amiss here: Tolstoy's

violently unhistorical and indeed anti-historical rejection of all effons

to explain or justify human action or character in terms of social or

individual growth, or 'roots' in the past; this side by side with an

absorbed and life-long interest in history, leading to artistic and philosophical results which provoked such queerly disparaging comments from ordinarily sane and sympathetic critics-surely there is something

here which deserves attention.

1 SeeM. De-Pule, 'V oina iz-za "Voiny i mira" ', Srmkt-Peterlmrgykie vedumasti,

18�, No 144 (17 May), 1 .

THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX

III

Tolstoy's interest in history began early in his life. It seems to have

arisen not from interest in the past as such, but from the desire to

penetrate to first causes, to understand how and why things happen

as they do and not otherwise, from discontent with those current

explanations which do not explain, and leave the mind dissatisfied,

from a tendency to doubt and place under suspicion and, if need be,

reject whatever does not fully answer the question, to go to the root

of every matter, at whatever cost. This remained Tolstoy's attitude

throughout his entire life, and is scarcely a symptom either of'trickery'

or of 'superficiality'. And with this went an incurable love of the

concrete, the empirical, the verifiable, and an instinctive distrust of

the abstract, the impalpable, the supernatural- in short an early

tendency to a scientific and positivist approach, unfriendly to romanticism, abstract formulations, metaphysics. Always and in every situation he looked for 'hard' facts-for what could be grasped and verified by the normal intellect uncorrupted by intricate theories divorced from

tangible realities, or by other-wordly mysteries, theological, poetical,

and metaphysical alike. He was tormented by the ultimate problems

which face young men in every generation-about good and evil, the

origin and purpose of the universe and its inhabitants, the causes of

all that happens; but the answers provided by theologians and metaphysicians struck him as absurd, if only because of the words in which they were formulated-words which bore no apparent reference to

the everyday world of ordinary common sense to which he clung

obstinately, even before he became aware of what he was doing, as

being alone real. History, only history, only the sum of the concrete

events in time and space-the sum of the actual experience of actual

men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual,

three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environmentthis alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers-answers needing for their apprehension no special senses or

faculties which normal human beings did not possess-might be constructed. This, of course, was the spirit of empirical inquiry which animated the great anti-theological and anti-metaphysical thinkers of

the eighteenth century, and Tolstoy's realism and inability to be taken

in by shadows made him their natural disciple before he had learnt of

their doctrines. Like Monsieur Jourdain, he spoke prose long before

he knew it, and remained an enemy of transcendentalism from the

29

R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

beginning to the end of his life. H e grew up during the heyday of

the Hegelian philosophy which sought to explain all things in terms

of historical development, but conceived this process as being ultimately