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.' Tile Joumals of ../mold Btfllltll, ed.
Newman Flower, 3 vols [London, 1932·3), vol. z, 191 1-192 1, p. 6z.) As
for the inevitable efforts to relate Tolstoy's historical views to those of various
latter-day Marxiats-Kautsky, Lenin, Stalin etc.-they belong to the curiosities
of politics or theology rather than to those ofliterature.
27
RU SS IAN TH INKERS
sage-dogmatic, perverse, exaggerated, but wielding a vast inRuence,
panicularly in his own country-a world institution of unique importance. From time to time attempts are made to trace his later period to its roots in his earlier phase, which is felt to be full of presentiments of the later life of self-renunciation; it is this later period which is regarded as important; there are philosophical, theological, ethical,
psychological, political, economic studies of the later Tolstoy in all his
aspects.
And yet there is surely a paradox here. Tolstoy's interest in history
and the problem of historical truth was passionate, almost obsessive,
both before and during the writing of War and Ptact. No one who
reads his journals and letters, or indeed War and Ptact itself, can
doubt that the author himself, at any rate, regarded this problem as
the hean of the entire matter-the central issue round which the novel
is built. 'Charlatanism', 'superficiality', 'intellectual feebleness' -surely
Tolstoy is the last writer to whom these epithets seem applicable:
bias, perversity, arrogance, perhaps; self-deception, lack of restraint,
possibly; moral or spiritual inadequacy-of this he was better aware.
than his enemies; but failure of intellect-lack of critical power-a
tendency to emptineSs-liability to ride off on some patently absurd,
superficial doctrine to the detriment of realistic description or analysis
of life-infatuation with some fashionable theory which Botkin or Fet
can easily see through, although Tolstoy, alas, cannot-these charges
seem grotesquely unplausible. No man in his senses, during this century
at any rate, would ever dream of denying Tolstoy's intellectual power,
his appalling capacity to penetrate any conventional disguise, that
corrosive scepticism in virtue of which Prince Vyazemsky applied
to him the archaic Russian tenn 'netovshchik'1 ('negativist')-an early
version of that nihilism which Vogue and Alben Sorel later quite
naturally attribute to him. Something is surely amiss here: Tolstoy's
violently unhistorical and indeed anti-historical rejection of all effons
to explain or justify human action or character in terms of social or
individual growth, or 'roots' in the past; this side by side with an
absorbed and life-long interest in history, leading to artistic and philosophical results which provoked such queerly disparaging comments from ordinarily sane and sympathetic critics-surely there is something
here which deserves attention.
1 SeeM. De-Pule, 'V oina iz-za "Voiny i mira" ', Srmkt-Peterlmrgykie vedumasti,
18�, No 144 (17 May), 1 .
THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX
III
Tolstoy's interest in history began early in his life. It seems to have
arisen not from interest in the past as such, but from the desire to
penetrate to first causes, to understand how and why things happen
as they do and not otherwise, from discontent with those current
explanations which do not explain, and leave the mind dissatisfied,
from a tendency to doubt and place under suspicion and, if need be,
reject whatever does not fully answer the question, to go to the root
of every matter, at whatever cost. This remained Tolstoy's attitude
throughout his entire life, and is scarcely a symptom either of'trickery'
or of 'superficiality'. And with this went an incurable love of the
concrete, the empirical, the verifiable, and an instinctive distrust of
the abstract, the impalpable, the supernatural- in short an early
tendency to a scientific and positivist approach, unfriendly to romanticism, abstract formulations, metaphysics. Always and in every situation he looked for 'hard' facts-for what could be grasped and verified by the normal intellect uncorrupted by intricate theories divorced from
tangible realities, or by other-wordly mysteries, theological, poetical,
and metaphysical alike. He was tormented by the ultimate problems
which face young men in every generation-about good and evil, the
origin and purpose of the universe and its inhabitants, the causes of
all that happens; but the answers provided by theologians and metaphysicians struck him as absurd, if only because of the words in which they were formulated-words which bore no apparent reference to
the everyday world of ordinary common sense to which he clung
obstinately, even before he became aware of what he was doing, as
being alone real. History, only history, only the sum of the concrete
events in time and space-the sum of the actual experience of actual
men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual,
three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environmentthis alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers-answers needing for their apprehension no special senses or
faculties which normal human beings did not possess-might be constructed. This, of course, was the spirit of empirical inquiry which animated the great anti-theological and anti-metaphysical thinkers of
the eighteenth century, and Tolstoy's realism and inability to be taken
in by shadows made him their natural disciple before he had learnt of
their doctrines. Like Monsieur Jourdain, he spoke prose long before
he knew it, and remained an enemy of transcendentalism from the
29
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
beginning to the end of his life. H e grew up during the heyday of
the Hegelian philosophy which sought to explain all things in terms
of historical development, but conceived this process as being ultimately
not susceptible to the methods of empirical investigation. The historicism of his time doubdess inAuenced the young Tolstoy as it did all inquiring persons of his time; but the metaphysical content he rejected
instinctively, and in one of his letters he described Hegel's writings
as unintelligible gibberish interspersed with platitudes. History alone
-the sum of empirically discoverable data-held the key to the mystery
of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only
history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical
problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinkP.r in
the nineteenth century. What is to be done? How should one live?
Why are we here? What must we be and do? The study of historical
connections and the demand for empirical answers to these prolclyatyt
'1Joprosy1 became fused into one in Tolstoy's mind, as his early diaries
and letters show very vividly.
In his early diaries we find references to his attempts to compare
Catherine the Great's Nalcaz1 with the passages in Montesquieu on