Isaiah Berlin - The Hedgehog and the Fox

1N. V. Shelgunov, ‘Filosofiya zastoya’ (review of War and Peace ), Delo 1870 no. 1, ‘Sovremennoe obozrenie’, 1–29.

2[More literally: ‘Fortunately, the author […] is a poet and an artist ten thousand times more than a philosopher.’] N. D. Akhsharumov, Voina i mir, sochinenie grafa L. N. Tolstogo, chasti 1–4: razbor (St Petersburg, 1868), 40.

3e.g. Professors Il′in, Yakovenko, Zenkovsky and others. [When invited to provide initials or forenames (see index), and to identify the specific works in question, IB responded that their omission was deliberate. Yakovenko did not hold a professorship.]

1Honourable exceptions to this are provided by the writings of the Russian writers N. I. Kareev and B. M. Eikhenbaum, as well as those of the French scholars E. Haumant and Albert Sorel. Of monographs devoted to this subject I know of only two of any worth. The first, ‘Filosofiya istorii L. N. Tolstogo’, by V. N. Pertsev, in ‘ Voina i mir ’: sbornik, ed. V. P. Obninsky and T. I. Polner (Moscow, 1912), 129–53, after taking Tolstoy mildly to task for obscurities, exaggerations and inconsistencies, swiftly retreats into innocuous generalities. The other, ‘Filosofiya istorii v romane L. N. Tolstogo, “Voina i mir”’, by M. M. Rubinshtein, in Russkaya mysl′, July 1911, section 2, 78–103, is much more laboured, but in the end seems to me to establish nothing at all. Very different is Arnold Bennett’s judgement, of which I learnt since writing this: ‘The last part of the Epilogue is full of good ideas the johnny can’t work out. And of course, in the phrase of critics, would have been better left out. So it would; only Tolstoy couldn’t leave it out. It was what he wrote the book for.’ The Journals of Arnold Bennett, ed. Newman Flower (London etc., 1932–3), ii (1911–21) 62. As for the inevitable efforts to relate Tolstoy’s historical views to those of various latter-day Marxists – Kautsky, Lenin, Stalin etc. – they belong to the curiosities of politics or theology rather than to those of literature.

1P. A. Vyazemsky, ‘Vospominaniya o 1812 god’, Russkii arkhiv 7 (1869), columns 181–92, 01–016, esp. 185–7.

1‘Accursed questions’ – a phrase which became a cliché in nineteenth-century 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. [Although ‘voprosy’ was widely used by the 1830s to refer to these issues, it seems that the specific phrase ‘proklyatye voprosy’ was coined in 1858 by Mikhail L. Mikhailov when he used it to render ‘die verdammten Fragen’ in his translation of Heine’s poem ‘Zum Lazarus’ (1853/4): see ‘Stikhotvoreniya Geine’, Sovremennik 1858 no. 3, 125; and Heinrich Heines Sämtliche Werke, ed. Oskar Walzel (Leipzig, 1911–20), iii 225. Alternatively, Mikhailov may have been capitalising on the fact that an existing Russian expression fitted Heine’s words like a glove, but I have not yet seen an earlier published use of it. Ed.]

2Instructions to her legislative experts.

1L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1928–64) [hereafter T] xlvi 4–28 (18–26 March 1847).

2ibid. – Hume: 113, 114, 117, 123–4, 127 (11–27 June 1852); Thiers: 97, 124 (20 March, 17 June 1854).

3ibid. – Rousseau: 126, 127, 130, 132–4, 167, 176 (24 June 1852 to 28 September 1853), 249 (‘Journal of daily tasks’, 3 March 1847); Sterne: 82 (10 August 1851), 110 (14 April 1852); Dickens: 140 (1 September 1852).

4ibid. 123 (11 June 1852).

5ibid. 141–2 (22 September 1852).

6‘Filosoficheskie zamechaniya na rechi Zh. Zh. Russo’ (1847), T i 222, where the next two quotations also appear.

1V. N. Nazar′ev, ‘Lyudi bylogo vremeni’, L. N. Tolstoi v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1955), i 52.

2ibid. 52–3.

3N. N. Gusev, Dva goda s L. N. Tolstym [ … ] (Moscow, 1973), 188.

1 War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 1 (end), T xii 238; Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (London, 1942: Macmillan) [hereafter W] 1248. [Because the Maudes’ subdivisions of the text vary from edition to edition of their translation, and also differ from those in T, references to W are given by page alone.]

1ibid. vol. 4, part 1, chapter 4 (beginning), T xii 14; W 1039–40.

2On the connection of this with Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme see Paul Boyer (1864–1949) chez Tolstoï: entretiens à Iasnaïa Poliana (Paris, 1950), 40.

1 War and Peace, vol. 2, part 3, chapter 1, T x 151; W 453.

1Cf. the profession of faith in his celebrated – and militantly moralistic – introduction to an edition of Maupassant, whose genius, despite everything, he admires: ‘Predislovie k sochineniyam Gyui de Mopassana’ (1893–4), T xxx 3–24. He thinks much more poorly of Bernard Shaw, whose social rhetoric he calls stale and platitudinous (diary entry for 31 January 1908, T lvi 97–8).

1Empire chairs of a certain shape are to this day called ‘Talleyrand armchairs’ in Russia.

1 War and Peace, epilogue, part 2, chapter 1, T xii 298–300; W 1307–9.

1One of Tolstoy’s Russian critics, M. M. Rubinshtein, referred to above (9/1), 80 ff., says that every science employs some unanalysed concepts, to explain which is the business of other sciences; and that ‘power’ happens to be the unexplained central concept of history. But Tolstoy’s point is that no other science can ‘explain’ it, since it is, as used by historians, a meaningless term, not a concept but nothing at all – vox nihili [‘the voice of nothing’].

2[‘The obscure through the more obscure’, i.e. explaining something obscure in terms of something even more obscure.]

1 War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 2, T xii 239; W 1249.

2See V. B. Shklovsky, op. cit. (7/3), chapters 7 and 8, and also K. Pokrovsky, ‘Istochniki romana “Voina i mir” ’, in Obninsky and Polner, op. cit. (9/1), 113–28.

1 War and Peace, epilogue, part 2, chapter 1, T xii 297; W 490.

2‘Neskol′ko slov po povodu knigi: “Voina i mir”’ (1868), T xvi 5–16.

1 War and Peace, vol. 3, part 3, chapter 1, T xi 264–7; W 909–11.

1op. cit. (8/2), 34, 40.

2N. I. Kareev, ‘Istoricheskaya filosofiya v “Voine i mire”’, Vestnik Evropy 22 no. 4 (July–August 1887), 227–69.

3ibid. 230; cf. War and Peace, vol. 3, part 1, chapter 1, T xi 16; W 665 (‘There are two sides to the life of every man’).

1B. M. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy (Leningrad, 1928–60), i 123–4.

2Here the paradox appears once more; for the ‘infinitesimals’, whose integration is the task of the ideal historian, must be reasonably uniform to make this operation possible; yet the sense of ‘reality’ consists in the sense of their unique differences.

1In our day French existentialists, for similar psychological reasons, have struck out against all explanations as such because they are a mere drug to still serious questions, short-lived palliatives for wounds which are unbearable but must be borne, above all not denied or ‘explained’; for all explaining is explaining away, and that is a denial of the given – the existent – the brute facts.

1For example, both Shklovsky ( passim ) and Eikhenbaum (i 259–60) in the works cited above (7/3, 40/1).

1‘On n’a pas rendu justice à Rousseau […]. J’ai lu tout Rousseau, oui, tous les vingt volumes, y compris le Dictionnaire de musique . Je faisais mieux que l’admirer; je lui rendais une culte véritable’; ‘Justice has not been done to Rousseau […]. I have read all of Rousseau, yes, all twenty volumes, including the Dictionary of Music . I did better than admire him, I truly worshipped him’: loc. cit. (20/2).