their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing
upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what
they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking
to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, allembracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and
artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes;
and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too
much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the
first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal,
Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees,
t 'IT0M• orB' O>tc!nnje, aM' EXWOS b1 ,.,.E-ya. Archilochus frag. :zor in
M. L. West (ed.), l11m6i tt Eltgi Gr��tci, vol. 1 {Oxford, 197 1).
22
THE H E D G E HO G AND THE FOX
hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere,
Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.
Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the
dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic, and ultimately
absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it
be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions
which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from
which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation.
Thus we have no doubt about the violence of the contrast between
Pushkin and Dostoevsky; and Dostoevsky's celebrated speech about
Pushkin has, for all its eloquence and depth of feeling, seldom been
considered by any perceptive reader to cast light on the genius of
Pushkin, but rather on that of Dostoevsky himself, precisely because it
perversely represents Pushkin-an arch-fox, the, greatest in the nineteenth century- as a being similar to Dostoevsky who is nothing if not a hedgehog; and thereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into
a dedicated prophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was
indeed the centre of Dostoevsky's own universe, but exceedingly
remote from the many varied provinces of Pushkin's protean genius.
Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature is spanned
by these gigantic figures-at one pole Pushkin, at the other Dostoevsky;
and that the characteristics of other Russian writers can, by those who
find it useful or enjoyable to ask that kind of question, to some degree
be determined in relation to these great opposites. To ask of Gogo),
Turgenev, Chekhov, Blok how they stand in relation to Pushkin and
to Dostoevsky leads-or, at any rate, has led - to fruitful and illuminating criticism. But when we come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask this of him -ask whether he belongs to the first category or the
second, whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of
one or of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded
of heterogeneous elements, there is no clear or immediate answer.
The question does not, somehow, seem wholly appropriate; it seems
to breed more darkness than it dispels. Yet it is not lack of information
that makes us pause: Tolstoy has told us more about himself and his
views and attitudes than any other Russian, more, almost, than any
other European writer; nor can his art be called obscure in any
normal sense: his universe has no dark corners, his stories are luminous
with the light of day; he has explained them and himself, and argued
about them and the methods by which they are constructed, more
articulately and with greater force and sanity and lucidity than any
23
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
other writer. I s h e a fox o r a hedgehog? What are we to say? Why is
the answer so curiously difficult to find? Does he resemble Shakespeare
or Pushkin more than Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike
either, and is the question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd?
What is the mysterious obstacle with which our inquiry seems faced?
I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to this question,
since this would involve nothing less than a critical examination of the
art and thought of Tolstoy as a whole. I shall confine myself to
suggesting that the difficulty may be, at least in part, due to the fact
that Tolstoy was himself not unaware of the problem, and did his
best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis I wish to offer is that
Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog; that his
gifts and achievement are one thing, and his beliefs, and consequently
his interpretation of his own achievement, another; and that consequently his ideals have led him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what
he and others were doing or should be doing. No one can complain
that he has left his readers in any doubt as to what he thought about
this topic: his views on this subject permeate all his discursive writings
-diaries, recorded ohiter dicta, autobiographical essays and stories,
social and religious tracts, literary criticism, letters to private and
public correspondents. But the conflict between what he was and
what he believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history
to which some of his most brilliant and most paradoxical pages are
devoted. This essay is an attempt to deal with his historical doctrines,
and to consider both his motives for holding the views he holds and
some of their probable sources. In short, it is an attempt to take
Tolstoy's attitude to history as seriously as he himself meant his
readers to take it, although for a somewhat different reason-for the
light it casts on a single man of genius rather than on the fate of all
mankind.
I I
Tolstoy's philosophy of history has, on the whole, not obtained the
attention which it deserves, whether as an intrinsically interesting view
or as an occurrence i n the history of ideas, or even as an element in the
development of Tolstoy himself.! Those who have treated Tolstoy
1 For the purpose of this essay I propose to confine myself almost entirely
to the explicit philosophy of history contained in War and Ptau, and to
ignore, for e:umple, St6astopol Storits, Th Couacls, the fragments of the
T H E H E D G E HOG AND THE FOX
primarily as a novelist have at times looked upon the historical and
philosophical passages scattered through War and P�ace as so much
perverse interruption of the narrative, as a regrettable liability to
irrelevant digression characteristic of thiS' great, but excessively
opinionated, writer, a lop-sided, home-made metaphysic of small or
no intrinsic interest, deeply inartistic and thoroughly foreign to the
purpose and structure of the work of art as a whole. Turgenev, who
found Tolstoy's personality and an: antipathetic, although in later
years he freely and generously acknowledged his genius as a writer,
led the attack. In letters to Pavel Annenkov1 Turgenev speaks of