Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

the theoretical disquisitions, even though Tolstoy himself may have

looked upon them as the most important ingredient in the book, in

fact threw no light either upon the character or the value of the work

itself, nor on the creative process by which it was achieved. This

anticipated the approach of those psychological critics who maintain

that the author himself often scarcely knows the sources of his own

activity: that the springs of his genius are invisible to him, the process

itselflargely unconscious, and his own oven purpose a mere rationalisation in his own mind of the true, but scarcely conscious, motives and methods involved in the act of creation, and consequently often a mere

hindrance to those dispassionate students of an and literature who are

engaged upon the 'scientific' -i.e. naturalistic-analysis of its origins

and evolution. Whatever we may think of the general validity of such

an outlook, it is something of a historical irony that Tolstoy should

have been treated in this fashion; for it is virtually his own way with

the academic historians at whom he mocks with such Voltairian irony.

And yet there is much poetic justice in it: for the unequal ratio of

critical to constructive elements in his own philosophising seems due

to the fact that his sense of reality (a reality which resides in individual

persons and their relationships alone) served to explode all the large

theories which ignored its findings, but proved insufficient by itself

to provide the basis of a more satisfactory general account of the facts.

And there is no evidence that Tolstoy himself ever conceived it possible

that this was the root of the 'duality', the failure to reconcile the two lives

lived by man.

The unresolved conflict between Tolstoy's belief that the attributes

of personal life alone were real and his doctrine that analysis of them

is insufficient to explain the course of history (i.e. the behaviour of

societies) is paralleled, at a profounder and more personal level, by

the conflict between, on the one hand, his own gifts both as a writer

and as a man and, on the other, his ideals-that which he sometimes

believed himself to be, and at all times profoundly believed in, and

wished to be.

so

THE H E D G E HOG AND THE FOX

If we may recall once again our division of artists into foxes and

hedgehogs: Tolstoy perceived reality in its multiplicity, as a collection

of separate entities round and into which he saw with a clarity and

penetration scarcely ever equalled, but he believed only in one vast,

unitary whole. No author who has ever lived has shown such powers

of insight into the variety of life-the differences, the contrasts, the

collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its

absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a

precision of concrete imagery to be found in no other writer. No one

has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact

quality of a feeling-the degree of its 'oscillation', the ebb and flow,

the minute movements (which Turgenev mocked as a mere trick on

his part) -the inner and outer texture and 'feel' of a look, a thought,

a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire

period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations.

The celebrated life-likeness of every object and every person in his

world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every

ingredient of it in its fullest individual essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were; never as a mere datum, however vivid, within some stream of consciousness, with blurred edges, an outline, a shadow, an

impressionistic representation : nor yet calling for, and dependent on,

some process of reasoning in the mind of the reader; but always as a

solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space-an event fully present to the senses

or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and

firmly articulated.

Yet what he believed in was the opposite. He advocated a single

embracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not many

levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level-in War and

Peact, to the standard of the good man, the single, spontaneous, open

soul: as later to that of the peasants, or of a simple Christian ethic

divorced from any complex theology or metaphysic, some simple,

quasi-utilitarian criterion, whereby everything is interrelated directly,

and all the items can be assessed in terms of one another by some

simple measuring rod. Tolstoy's genius lies in a capacity for marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the

presence o.f the object itself, and not of a mere description of it,

5 1

RU SSIAN T H IN K E R S

employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality o f a

particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which

relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences-'the

oscillations of feeling'-in favour of what is common to them all. But

then this same writer pleads for, indeed preaches with great fury,

particularly in his last, religious phase, the exact opposite: the necessity

of expelling everything that does not submit to some very general, very

simple standard : say, what peasants like or dislike, or what the gospels

declare to be good.

This violent contradiction between the data of experience from

which he could not liberate himself, and which, of course, all his life

he knew alone to be real, and his deeply metaphysical belief in the

existence of a system to which they must belong, whether they appear

to do so or not, this conflict between instinctive j udgment and theoretical conviction-between his gifts and his opinions-mirrors the unresolved conflict between the reality of the moral life with its sense

of responsibility, joys, sorrows, sense of guilt and sense of achievement

-all of which is nevertheless illusion; and the laws which govern

everything, although we cannot know more than a negligible portion

of them-so that all scientists and historians who say that they do

know them and are guided by them are lying and deceiving- but which

nevertheless alone are real. Beside Tolstoy, Gogo! and Dostoevsky,

whose abnormality is so often contrasted with Tolstoy's 'sanity', are

well-integrated personalities, with a coherent outlook and a single

vision. Yet out of this violent conflict grew War and Peace: its

marvellous solidity should not blind us to the deep cleavage which

yawns open whenever Tolstoy remembers, or rather reminds himselffails to forget-what he is doing, and why.

I V

Theories are seldom born i n the void. And the question of the roots

of Tolstoy's vision of history is therefore a reasonable one. Everything

that Tolstoy writes on history has a stamp of his own original personality, a first-hand quality denied to most writers on abstract topics.

On these subjects he wrote as an amateur, not as a professional; but

let it be remembered that he belonged to the world of great affairs:

he was a member of the ruling class of his country and his time, and

knew and understood it completely; he lived in an environment

exceptionally crowded with theories and ideas, he examined a great

deal of material for W or and Peace (though, as several Russian scholars

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THE H E D G E HOG AND THE FOX

have shown,1 not as much as is sometimes supposed), he travelled a

great deal, and met many notable public figures in Germany and

France.

That he read widely, and was influenced by what he read, cannot

be doubted. It is a commonplace that he owed a great deal to Rousseau,

and probably derived from him, as much as from Diderot and the

French Enlightenment, his analytic, anti-historical ways of approaching social problems, in particular the tendency to treat them in terms of timeless, logical, moral, and metaphysical categories, and not look

for their essence, as the German historical school advocated, in terms

of growth, and of response to a changing historical environment. He

remained an admirer of Rousseau, and late in life still recommended

Emile as the best book ever written on education.2 Rousseau must have

strengthened, if he did not actually originate, his growing tendency to

idealise the soil and its cultivatCJrs-the simple peasant, who for Tolstoy

is a repository of almost as rich a stock of'natural' virtues as Rousseau's

noble savage. Rousseau, too, must have reinforced the coarse-grained,

rough peasant in Tolstoy with his strongly moralistic, puritanical

strain, his suspicion of, and antipathy to, the rich, the powerful, the

happy as such, his streak of genuine vandalism, and occasional bursts

of blind, very Russian rage against western sophistication and refinement, and that adulation of 'virtue' and simple tastes, of the 'healthy'

moral life, the militant, anti-liberal barbarism, which is one of

Rousseau's specific contributions to the stock of Jacobin ideas. And

perhaps Rousseau influenced him also in setting so high a value upon

family life, and in his doctrine of superiority of the heart over the head,

of moral over intellectual or aesthetic virtues. This has been noted

before, and it is true and illuminating, but it does not account for

Tolstoy's theory of history, of which little trace can be found in the

profoundly unhistorical Rousseau. Indeed in so far as Rousseau seeks

to derive the right of some men to authority over others from a theory

of the transference of power in accordance with the Social Contract,

Tolstoy contemptuously refutes him.

We get somewhat nearer to the truth if we consider the influence

1 For example, both Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum in the works cited above

(p. 26, note 3, and p. 4-B, note 1 ).

1 'On n'a pas rendu justice l Rousseau . . . J'ai lu tout Rousseau, oui,

tous les vingt volumes, y compris le Dictionnairt tit musiyue. Je faisais mieux

que }'admirer; je lui rendais une culte v�ritable . . .' (see P· s6, note I below).

5 3

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

upon Tolstoy o f his romantic and conservative Slavophil contemporaries. He was close to some among them, particularly to Pogodin and Samarin, in the mid-6os when he was writing War and Ptatt,

and certainly shared their antagonism to the scientific theories of

history then fashionable, whether to the metaphysical positivism of

Comte and his followers, or the more materialistic views of Chernyshevsky and Pisarev, as well as those of Buckle and Mill and Herbert Spencer, and the general British empiricist tradition, tinged by French

and German scientific materialism, to which these very different

figures all, in their various fashions, belonged. The Slavophils (and

perhaps especially Tyutchev, whose poetry Tolstoy admired so deeply)