greater the lie : Napoleon is consequently the most pitiable, the most
contemptible of all the actors in the great tragedy.
This, then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to
expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events. Those who believe this turn out to be dreadfully mistaken. And side by side with these public faces
-these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent,
1 On the connection of this with Stendhal'a lA CAtlrlrttllt u Ptmnt see
p. 56, note 1.
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R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
talking, writing, desperately and aimlessly i n order to keep u p appearances and avoid facing the bleak truths-side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence
and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life
which men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily
existence. When Tolstoy contrasts this real life-the actual, everyday,
'live' experience of individuals-with the panoramic view conjured
up by historians, it is dear to him which is real, and which is a coherent,
sometimes elegantly contrived, but always fictitious construction.
Utterly unlike her as he is in almost every other respect, Tolstoy is,
perhaps, the first to propound the celebrated accusation which
Virginia Woolf half a century later levelled against the public prophets
of her own generation- Shaw and Wells and Arnold Bennett-blind
materialists who did not begin to understand what it is that life truly
consists of, who mistook its outer accidents, the unimportant aspects
which lie outside the individual soul-the so-called social, economic,
political realities-for that which alone is genuine, the individual
experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the
colours, smells, tastes, sounds, and movements, the jealousies, loves,
hatreds, passions, the rare Rashes of insight, the transforming moments,
the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute
all there is-which are reality.
What, then, is the historian's task-to describe the ultimate data of
subjective experience-the persona! lives lived by men-the 'thoughts,
knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hates, passions' of which,
for Tolstoy, 'real' life is compounded, and only that? That was the
task to which Turgenev was perpetually calling Tolstoy-him and all
writers, but him in particular, because therein lay his true genius, his
destiny as a great Russian writer; and this he rejected with violent
indignation even during his middle years, before the final religious
phase. For this was not to give the answer to the question of what
there is, and why and how it comes to be and passes away, but to turn
one's back upon it altogether, and stifte one's desire to discover how
men live in society, and how they are affected by one another and by
their environment, arod to what end. This kind of artistic purismpreached in his day by Flaubert-this kind of preoccupation witl1 the analysis and description of the experience and the relationships and
problems and inner lives of individuals (later advocated and practised
by Gide and the writers he inftuenced, both in France and in England)
struck him as both trivial and hlse. He had no doubt about his own
36
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
superlative skill in this very art-and that it was precisely this for
which he was admired; and he condemned it absolutely. In a letter
written while he was working on War and Peace he said with bittern� that he had no doubt that what the public would like best would be his scenes of social and personal life, his ladies and his gentlemen,
with their petty intrigues and entertaining conversations and marvellously described small idiosyncrasies.• But these are the trivial 'flowers'
of life, not the 'roots'. Tolstoy's purpose is the discovery of the truth,
and therefore he must know what history consists of, and recreate
only that. History is plainly not a science, and sociology, which
pretends that it is, is a fraud; no genuine laws of history have been
discovered, and the concepts in current use-'cause', 'accident', 'genius'
-explain nothing: they are merely thin disguises for ignorance. Why
do the events the totality of which we call history occur as they do?
Some historians attribute events to the acts of individuals, but this is
no answer: for they do not explain how these acts 'cause' the events
they are alleged to 'cause' or 'originate'. There is a passage of savage
irony intended by Tolstoy to parody the average school histories of his
time, sufficiently typical to be worth reproducing in fulclass="underline" 1
Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man. He had such
and such mistresses, and such and such ministers, and he governed
France badly. The heirs of Louis XIV were also weak men, and
also governed France badly. They also had such and such favourites
and such and such mistresses. Besides which, certain persons were
at this time writing books. By the end of the eighteenth century
there gathered in Paris two dcrzen or so persons who started saying
that all men were free and equal. Because of this in the whole of
France people began to slaughter and drown each other. These
people killed the king and a good many others. At this time there
was a man of genius in France-Napoleon. He conquered everyone
everywhere, i.e. killed a great many people because he was a great
genius; and, for some reason, he went off to kill Africans, and killed
1 Cf. the profession of faith in his celebrated-and militantly moralisticintroduction to an edition of Maupassant whose genius, despite everything, he admires ('Predislovie k sochineniyam Gyui de Mopassana', Po/not
sol!rt�t�it soclline11ii [ cf. p. 30, note 3 above], vol. 30, pp. 3-24). He thinks
much more poorly of Bernard Shaw, whose social rhetoric he calls stale and
platitudinous (diary entry for 3 I january I 908, ibid., voJ. 56, pp. 97-8).
• War a11ti Peace, epilogue, part z, chapter r .
37
R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
them so well, and was so clever and cunning, that, having arrived
in France, he ordered everyone to obey him, which they did.
Having made himself Emperor he again went to kill masses of
people in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And there too he killed a
great many. Now in Russia there was the Emperor Alexander who
decided to re-establish order in Europe, and therefore fought wars
with Napoleon. But in the year '07 he suddenly made friends with
him, and in the year ' 1 1 quarrelled with him again, and they both
again began to kill a great many people. And Napoleon brought six
hundred thousand men to Russia and conquered Moscow. But then
he suddenly ran away from Moscow, and then the Emperor
Alexander, aided by the advice of Stein and others, united Europe
to raise an army against the disturber of her pe;1ce. All Napoleon's
allies suddenly became his enemies; and this army marched against
Napoleon, who had gathered new forces. The allies conquered
Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to renounce the throne,
and sent him to the island of Elba, without, however, depriving him