Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

Tolstoy arrives at one of his celebrated paradoxes: the higher soldiers

or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be

from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose

lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller

the effect of the words and acts of such remote personages, despite all

their theoretical authority, upon that history. In a famous passage

dealing with the state of Moscow in 1 8 1 2 Tolstoy observes that from

the heroic achievements of Russia after the burning of Moscow one

might infer that its inhabitants were absorbed entirely in acts of selfsacrifice-in saving their country, or in lamenting its destruction-in heroism, martyrdom, despair etc., but that in fact this was not so.

People were preoccupied by personal interests. Those who went about

their ordinary business without feeling heroic emotions or thinking

that they were actors upon the well-lighted stage of history were the

most useful to their country and community, while those who tried

to grasp the general course of events and wanted to take part in

history, those who performed acts of incredible self-sacrifice or

heroism, and participated in great events, were the most useless.1

Worst of all, in Tolstoy's eyes, were those unceasing talkers who

accused one another of the kind of thing 'for which no one could in

fact have been responsible'. And this because 'nowhere is the commandment not to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge so clearly written as in the courSe of history. Only unconscious activity bears

fruit, and the individual who plays a part in historical events never

understands their significance. If he attempts to understand them, he

is struck with sterility.'1 To try to 'understand' anything by rational

means is to make sure of failure. Pierre Bezukhov wanders about,

1 W11r 1111J Pt11u, vol. 4, part 1, chapter 4·

I ibid.

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

'lost' on the battlefield of Borodino, and looks for something which

he imagines as a kind of set piece; a battle as depicted by the historians

or the painters. But he finds only the ordinary confusion of individual

human beings haphazardly attending to this or that human want.l

That, at any rate, is concrete, uncontaminated by theories and abstractions; and Pierre is therefore closer to the truth about the course of events-at least as seen by men-than those who believe them to obey

a discoverable set of laws or rules. Pierre sees only a succession of

'accidents' whose origins and consequences are, by and large, untraceable and unpredictable; only loosely strung groups of events forming

· an ever varying pattern, following no discernible order. Any claim

to perceive patterns susceptible to 'scientific' formulas must be

mendacious.

Tolstoy's bitterest taunts, his most corrosive irony, are reserved for

those who pose as official specialists in managing human affairs, in

this case the western military theorists, a General Pfuel, or Generals

Bennigsen and Paulucci, who are all shown talking equal nonsense

at the Council of Orissa, whether they defend a given strategic or

tactical theory or oppose it; these men must be impostors since no

theories can possibly fit the immense variety of possible human

behaviour, the vast multiplicity of minute, undiscoverable causes and

effects which form that interplay of men and nature which history

purports to record. Those who affect to be able to contract this infinite

multiplicity within their 'scientific' laws must be either deliberate

charlatans, or blind leaders of the blind. The harshest judgment is

accordingly reserved for the master theorist himself, the great Napoleon,

who acts upon, and has hypnotised others into believing, the assumption that he understands and controls events by his superior intellect, or by flashes of intuition, or by otherwise succeeding in answering

correctly the problems posed by history. The greater the claim the

greater the lie : Napoleon is consequently the most pitiable, the most

contemptible of all the actors in the great tragedy.

This, then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to

expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events. Those who believe this turn out to be dreadfully mistaken. And side by side with these public faces

-these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent,

1 On the connection of this with Stendhal'a lA CAtlrlrttllt u Ptmnt see

p. 56, note 1.

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talking, writing, desperately and aimlessly i n order to keep u p appearances and avoid facing the bleak truths-side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence

and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life

which men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily

existence. When Tolstoy contrasts this real life-the actual, everyday,

'live' experience of individuals-with the panoramic view conjured

up by historians, it is dear to him which is real, and which is a coherent,

sometimes elegantly contrived, but always fictitious construction.

Utterly unlike her as he is in almost every other respect, Tolstoy is,

perhaps, the first to propound the celebrated accusation which

Virginia Woolf half a century later levelled against the public prophets

of her own generation- Shaw and Wells and Arnold Bennett-blind

materialists who did not begin to understand what it is that life truly

consists of, who mistook its outer accidents, the unimportant aspects

which lie outside the individual soul-the so-called social, economic,

political realities-for that which alone is genuine, the individual

experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the

colours, smells, tastes, sounds, and movements, the jealousies, loves,

hatreds, passions, the rare Rashes of insight, the transforming moments,

the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute

all there is-which are reality.

What, then, is the historian's task-to describe the ultimate data of

subjective experience-the persona! lives lived by men-the 'thoughts,

knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hates, passions' of which,

for Tolstoy, 'real' life is compounded, and only that? That was the

task to which Turgenev was perpetually calling Tolstoy-him and all

writers, but him in particular, because therein lay his true genius, his

destiny as a great Russian writer; and this he rejected with violent

indignation even during his middle years, before the final religious

phase. For this was not to give the answer to the question of what

there is, and why and how it comes to be and passes away, but to turn

one's back upon it altogether, and stifte one's desire to discover how

men live in society, and how they are affected by one another and by

their environment, arod to what end. This kind of artistic purismpreached in his day by Flaubert-this kind of preoccupation witl1 the analysis and description of the experience and the relationships and

problems and inner lives of individuals (later advocated and practised

by Gide and the writers he inftuenced, both in France and in England)

struck him as both trivial and hlse. He had no doubt about his own

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