Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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

not susceptible to the methods of empirical investigation. The historicism of his time doubdess inAuenced the young Tolstoy as it did all inquiring persons of his time; but the metaphysical content he rejected

instinctively, and in one of his letters he described Hegel's writings

as unintelligible gibberish interspersed with platitudes. History alone

-the sum of empirically discoverable data-held the key to the mystery

of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only

history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical

problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinkP.r in

the nineteenth century. What is to be done? How should one live?

Why are we here? What must we be and do? The study of historical

connections and the demand for empirical answers to these prolclyatyt

'1Joprosy1 became fused into one in Tolstoy's mind, as his early diaries

and letters show very vividly.

In his early diaries we find references to his attempts to compare

Catherine the Great's Nalcaz1 with the passages in Montesquieu on

which she professed to have founded it.8 He reads Hume and Thie�

as well as Rousseau, Sterne, and Dickens.5 He is obsessed by the

thought that philosophical principles can only be understood in their

concrete expression in history.• 'To write the genuine history of

present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one's life.'7 Or

again : 'The leaves of a tree delight us more than the roots',8 with the

implication that this is nevertheless a superficial view of the world.

1 'Accursed questions' -a phrase which became a cliche! in nineteenthcentury Russia for those central moral and social issues of which every honest man, in particular every writer, must sooner or later become aware, and then

be faced with the choice of either entering the struggle or turning his back

upon his fellow-men, conscious of his responsibility for what he was doing.

a Instructions to her legislative experts.

a L. N. Tolstoy, Polrwe sobr(IJiit socbmmii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1918"64), vol.

46, pp. 4-18.

' ibid., PP· 97· I I ], 1 14-o 1 17, 123-+o 1 27.

1 ibid., pp. 1 26, 1 27, 130, 13 2-4-o 167, 1 76, 249; 82, 1 10; 14-o.

• Diary entry for 1 1 June 18§2.

7 Entry for 22 September 1 Bsz.

• N. N. Apoatolov, LIP TolslfiJ su1l s1rai1s11mi islmi (Moscow, 1928),

p. zo.

30

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

But side by side with this there is the beginning of an acute sense of

disappointment, a feeling that history, as it is written by historians,

makes claims which it cannot satisfy, because like metaphysical

philosophy it pretends to be something it is not-namely, a science

capable of arriving at conclusions which are certain. Since men cannot

solve philosophical questions by the principles of reason they try to

do so historically. But history is 'one of the most backward of sciences

-a science which has lost its proper aim'.1 The reason for this is

that history will not, because it cannot, solve the great questions

which have tormented men in every generation. In the course of

seeking to answer these questions men accumulate a knowledge . of

facts as they succeed each other in time: but this is a mere by-product,

a kind of 'side issue' which-and this is a mistake-is studied as an end

in itself. And again, 'history will never reveal to us what connections

there are, and at what times, between science, art, and morality,

between good and evil, religion and the civic virtues. What it will

tell us (and that incorrectly) is where the Huns came from, where they

lived, who laid the foundations of their power, etc. • And according to

his friend Nazariev, Tolstoy said to him in the winter of 1 846:

'History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered

up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names. The death