Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

by these gigantic figures-at one pole Pushkin, at the other Dostoevsky;

and that the characteristics of other Russian writers can, by those who

find it useful or enjoyable to ask that kind of question, to some degree

be determined in relation to these great opposites. To ask of Gogo),

Turgenev, Chekhov, Blok how they stand in relation to Pushkin and

to Dostoevsky leads-or, at any rate, has led - to fruitful and illuminating criticism. But when we come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask this of him -ask whether he belongs to the first category or the

second, whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of

one or of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded

of heterogeneous elements, there is no clear or immediate answer.

The question does not, somehow, seem wholly appropriate; it seems

to breed more darkness than it dispels. Yet it is not lack of information

that makes us pause: Tolstoy has told us more about himself and his

views and attitudes than any other Russian, more, almost, than any

other European writer; nor can his art be called obscure in any

normal sense: his universe has no dark corners, his stories are luminous

with the light of day; he has explained them and himself, and argued

about them and the methods by which they are constructed, more

articulately and with greater force and sanity and lucidity than any

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other writer. I s h e a fox o r a hedgehog? What are we to say? Why is

the answer so curiously difficult to find? Does he resemble Shakespeare

or Pushkin more than Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike

either, and is the question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd?

What is the mysterious obstacle with which our inquiry seems faced?

I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to this question,

since this would involve nothing less than a critical examination of the

art and thought of Tolstoy as a whole. I shall confine myself to

suggesting that the difficulty may be, at least in part, due to the fact

that Tolstoy was himself not unaware of the problem, and did his

best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis I wish to offer is that

Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog; that his

gifts and achievement are one thing, and his beliefs, and consequently

his interpretation of his own achievement, another; and that consequently his ideals have led him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what

he and others were doing or should be doing. No one can complain

that he has left his readers in any doubt as to what he thought about

this topic: his views on this subject permeate all his discursive writings

-diaries, recorded ohiter dicta, autobiographical essays and stories,

social and religious tracts, literary criticism, letters to private and

public correspondents. But the conflict between what he was and

what he believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history

to which some of his most brilliant and most paradoxical pages are

devoted. This essay is an attempt to deal with his historical doctrines,

and to consider both his motives for holding the views he holds and

some of their probable sources. In short, it is an attempt to take

Tolstoy's attitude to history as seriously as he himself meant his

readers to take it, although for a somewhat different reason-for the

light it casts on a single man of genius rather than on the fate of all

mankind.

I I

Tolstoy's philosophy of history has, on the whole, not obtained the

attention which it deserves, whether as an intrinsically interesting view

or as an occurrence i n the history of ideas, or even as an element in the

development of Tolstoy himself.! Those who have treated Tolstoy

1 For the purpose of this essay I propose to confine myself almost entirely

to the explicit philosophy of history contained in War and Ptau, and to

ignore, for e:umple, St6astopol Storits, Th Couacls, the fragments of the

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

primarily as a novelist have at times looked upon the historical and

philosophical passages scattered through War and P�ace as so much

perverse interruption of the narrative, as a regrettable liability to

irrelevant digression characteristic of thiS' great, but excessively

opinionated, writer, a lop-sided, home-made metaphysic of small or

no intrinsic interest, deeply inartistic and thoroughly foreign to the

purpose and structure of the work of art as a whole. Turgenev, who

found Tolstoy's personality and an: antipathetic, although in later

years he freely and generously acknowledged his genius as a writer,

led the attack. In letters to Pavel Annenkov1 Turgenev speaks of

Tolstoy's 'charlatanism', of his historical disquisitions as 'farcical', as

'trickery' which takes in the unwary, injected by an 'autodidact' into

his work as an inadequate substitute for genuine knowledge. He

hastens to add that Tolstoy does, of course, make up for this by his

marvellous artistic genius; and then accuses him of inventing 'a system

which seems to solve everything very simply; as, for example, historical

fatalism: he mounts his hobby-horse and is off! only when he touches

earth does he, like Antaeus, recover his true strength'.t And the same

note is sounded in the celebrated and touching invocation sent by

Turgenev from his death-bed to his old friend and enemy, begging him

to cast away his prophet's mantle and return to his true vocation-that

of 'the great writer of the Russian land'. 3 Flaubert, despite his 'shouts

of admiration' over passages of Wtir and P�ace, is equally horrified : 'il

se repete et il philosophise,'f. he writes in a letter to Turgenev who had

sent him the French version of the masterpiece then almost unknown

outside Russia. In the same strain Belinsky's intimate friend and

correspondent, the philosophical tea-merchant Vasily Botkin, who

was well disposed to Tolstoy, writes to the poet Afanasy Fet: 'Literary

specialists . . . find that the intellectual element of the novel is very

weak, the philosophy of history is trivial and superficial, the denial of

the decisive influence of individual personalities on events is nothing

unpublished novel on the Decembrists, and Tolstoy's own scattered reflections

on this subject except in so far as they bear on vieWll expressed in War at�tl

P�ac�.

1 See E. I. Bogoslovsky, Turg�11tr1 DL. TDisiDifl (Tiflis, I 894), p. +I; quoted

by P. I. Biryukov, L. N. TDistoy (Berlin, 19zr), vol. :z, pp. 48-9.

I ibid.

1 Letter to Tolstoy of I I July 1 883.

' Gustave Flaubert, Lnms i"'Jit�s J T()llrgul•�ff (Monaco, I9+6), p. :z 18.

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but a lot o f mystical subtlety, but apart from this the artistic gift of the

author is beyond dispute-yesterday I gave a dinner and Tyutchev was

here, and I am repeating what everybody said. '1 Contemporary

historians and military specialists, at least one of whom had himself

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