Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

metaphysical system, still less in the bosom of the Orthodox, or any

other, established, Church. The Slavophils saw through the pretensions of western social and psychological science, and that was sympathetic to Tolstoy; but their positive doctrines interested him little. He was against unintelligible mysteries, against mists of antiquity, against

any kind of recourse to mumbo-jumbo: his hostile picture of the freemasons in War and Peace remained symptomatic of his attitude to the end. This can only have been reinfor-ced by his interest in the

writings of, and his visit in 1 861 to, the exiled Proudhon, whose

confused irrationalism, puritanism, hatred of authority and bourgeois

intellectuals, and general Rousseauis.m and violence of tone evidently

pleased him. It is more than possible that he took the title of his novel

from Proudhon's La Gutrrt tt Ia paix published in the same year.

If the classical German Idealists had had no direct effect upon

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Tolstoy, there was at least one German philosopher for whom h e did

express admiration. And indeed it is not difficult to see why he found

Schopenhauer attractive: that solitary thinker drew a gloomy picture

of the impotent human will beating desperately against the rigidly

determined laws of the universe; he spoke of the vanity of all human

passions, the absurdity of rational systems, the universal failure to

understand the non-rational springs of action and feeling, the suffering

to which all flesh is subject, and the consequent desirability of reducing

human vulnerability by reducing man himself to the condition of the

utmost quietism, where, being passionless, he cannot be frustrated or

humiliated or wounded. This celebrated doctrine reflected Tolstoy's

later views-that man suffers much because he seeks too much, is

foolishly ambitious and grotesquely over-estimates his capacities; from

Schopenhauer, too, may come the bitter emphasis laid on the familiar

contrast of the illusion of free will with the reality of the iron laws

which govern the w:orld, in particular the account of the inevitable

suffering which this illusion, since it cannot be made to vanish, must

necessarily cause. This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the

central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the

cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they

can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of

which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually

perceives is meaningless chaos-a chaos of which the heightened form,

the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an

intense degree, is war.

The best avowed of all Tolstoy's literary debts is, of course, that

to Stendhal. In his celebrated interview in 1 90 1 with Paul Boyer,1

Tolstoy coupled Stendhal and Rousseau as the two writers to whom

he owed most, and added that all he had learnt about war he had learnt

from Stendhal's description of the battle of Waterloo in La Chartrtuu

dt Parme, where Fabrice wanders about the battlefield 'understanding

nothing'. And he added that this conception-war 'without panacht' or

'embellishments' -of which his brother Nikolay had spoken to him,

he later had verified for himself during his own service in the Crimean

War. Nothing ever won so much praise from active soldiers as

Tolstoy's vigntttes of episodes in the war, his descriptions of how

1 See PaMI Boytr (r864-1949) d1tZ Tolitoi' (Pari!, 1950), p. 40.

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battles appear to those who are actually engaged in them. No doubt

Tolstoy was right in declaring that he owed much of this dry light to

Stendhal. But there is a figure behind Stendhal even drier, even more

destructive, from whom Stendhal may well, at least in part, have

derived his new method of interpreting social life, a celebrated writer

with whose works Tolstoy was certainly acquainted and to whom he

owed a deeper debt than is commonly supposed; for the striking

resemblance between their views can hardly be put down either to

accident, or to the mysterious operations of the Ztitgtist. This figure

was the famous Joseph de Maistre; and the full story of his in8uence

on Tolstoy, although it has been noted by students of Tolstoy, and by

at least one critic of Maistre,1 still largely remains to be written.

v

On I· November a 865, in the middle of writing /.Par and Ptau,

Tolstoy wrote down in his diary 'I am reading Maistre',1 and on 7

September 1 866 he wrote to the editor Bartenev, who acted as a kind

of general assistant to him, asking him to send the 'Maistre archive',

i.e. his letters and notes. There is every reason why Tolstoy should

have read this now relatively little read author. Count Joseph de

Maistre was a Savoyard royalist who had first made a name for

himself by writing anti-revolutionary tracts during the last years of

the eighteenth century. Although normally classified as an orthodox

Catholic reactionary writer, a pillar of the Bourbon Restoration and a

defender of the pre-revolutionary status quo, in particular of papal

authority, he was a great deal more than this. He held grimly unconventional and misanthropic views about the nature of individuals and societies, and wrote with a dry and ironical violence about the incurably savage and wicked nature of man, the inevitability of perpetual slaughter, the divinely instituted character of wars, and the overwhelming part played in hurpan affairs by the passion for self-immolation which, more than natural sociability or artificial agreements, creates

armies and civil societies alike; he emphasised the need for absolute

authority, punishment and continual repression if civilisation and

order were to survive at all. Both the content and the tone of his

1 See Adolfo Omodeo, u, rtazio,ario (Bari, 1939), p. 1 1 %, note %.

1 'Chitayu "Maistre" ', quoted by B. M. Eikhenbaum, op. cit. (p. 48,

note 1 above), vol. z, p. 309·

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wnung are closer to Nietzsche, d'Annunzio, and the heralds of

modern fascism than to the respectable royalists of his own time, and

caused a stir in their own day both among the legitimists and in

Napoleonic France. In I 803 Maistre was sent by his master, the King

of Savoy, then living in exile in Rome as a victim of Napoleon and

soon forced to move to Sardinia, as his semi-official representative to

the Court of St Petersburg. Maistre, who possessed considerable social

charm as well as an acute sense of his environment, made a great

impression upon the society of the Russian capital as a polished

courtier, a wit and a shrewd political observer. He remained in St

Petersburg from I 803 to I 8 I 7, and his exquisitely written and often

uncannily penetrating and prophetic diplomatic dispatches and letters,

as well as his private correspondence and the various scattered notes

on Russia and her inhabitants, sent to his government as well as to his

friends and consultants among the Russian nobility, form a uniquely