Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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)

may have done something to discredit for him historical theories

modelled upon the natural sciences, which, for Tolstoy no less than

for Dostoevsky, failed to give a true account of what men did and

suffered. They were inadequate if only because they ignored man's

'inner' experience, treated him as a natural object played upon by

the same forces as all the other constituents of the material world, and

taking the French Encyclopedists at their word, tried to study social

behaviour as one might study a beehive or an ant-hill, and then

complained because the laws which they formulated failed to explain

the behaviour of living men and women. These romantic medievalists

may moreover have strengthened Tolstoy's natural anti-intellectualism

and anti-liberalism, and his deeply sceptical and pessimistic view of the

strength of non-rational motives in human behaviour, which at once

dominate human beings and deceive them about themselves-in short

that innate conservatism of outlook which very early made Tolstoy

deeply suspect to the radical Russian intelligentsia of the 50s and 6os,

and led them to think of him uneasily as being after all a count,

an officer and a reactionary, not one of themselves, not genuinely

enlightened or rlvolti at all, despite his boldest protests against the

political system, his heterodoxies, his destructive nihilism.

But although Tolstoy and the Slavophils may have fought a common

enemy, their positive views diverged sharply. The Slavophil doctrine

derived principally from German Idealism, in particular from Schelling's

view, despite much lip-service to Hegel and his interpreters, that true

knowledge could not be obtained by the use of reason, but only by a

kind of imaginative self-identification with the central principle of the

universe-the soul of the world, such as artists and thinkers have in

moments of divine inspiration. Some of the Slavophils identified this

with the revealed truths of the Orthodox religion and the mystical

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T H E H E D G E H O G A N D T H E F O X

tradition of the Russian Church, and bequeathed i t to the Russian

symbolist poets and philosophers of a later generation. Tolstoy stood

at the opposite pole to all this. He believed that only by patient

empirical observation could any knowledge be obtained; that this

knowledge is always inadequate, that simple people often know the

truth better than learned men, because their observation of men and

nature is less clouded by empty theories, and not because they are

inspired vehicles of the divine affiatus. There is a hard cutting edge

of common sense about everything that Tolstoy wrote which automatically puts to Right metaphysical fantasies and undisciplined tendencies towards esoteric experience, or the poetical or theological

interpretations of life, which lay at the heart of the Slavophil outlook,

and (as in the analogous case of the anti-industrial romanticism of the

west), determined both its hatred of politics and economics in the

ordinary sense, and its mystical nationalism. Moreover, the Slavophils

were worshippers of historical method as alone disclosing the true

nature- revealed only in its impalpable growth in time-of individual

institutions and abstract sciences alike. None of this could possibly

have found a sympathetic echo in the very tough-minded, very matterof-fact Tolstoy, especially the realistic Tolstoy of the middle years; if the peasant Platon Karataev has something in common with the

agrarian ethos of the Slavophil (and indeed pan-Slav) ideologistssimple rural wisdom as against the absurdities of the over-clever westyet Pierre Bezukhov in the early drafts of War and Ptau ends his life as a Decembrist and an exile in Siberia, and cannot be conceived

in all his spiritual wanderings as ultimately finding comfort in any