the time, are forgotten because, having been foiled by unfavourable
turns of events, they were not, because they could not be, carried out,
and for this reason now seem historically unimportant. After disposing
of the heroic theory of history, Tolstoy turns with even greater
savagery upon scientific sociology, which claims to have discovered
laws of history, but cannot possibly have found any, because the
number of causes upon which events turn is too great for human
knowledge or calculation. We know too few facts, and we select them
at random and in accordance with our subjective inclinations. No
doubt if we were omniscient we might be able, like Laplace's ideal
observer, to plot the course of every drop of which the stream of
history consists, but we are, of course, pathetically ignorant, and the
areas of our knowledge are incredibly small compared to what is
uncharted and (Tolstoy vehemently insists on this) unchartable.
Freedom of the will is an illusion which cannot be shaken off, but,
as great philosophers have said, it is an illusion nevertheless, and it
derives solely from ignorance of true causes. The more we know
about the circumstances of an act, the farther away from us the act
is in time, the more difficult it is to think away its consequences; the
more solidly embedded a fact is in the actual world in which we
live, the less we can imagine how things might have turned out if
something different had happened. For by now it seems inevitable:
to think otherwise would upset too much of our world order. The
more closely we relate an act to its context, the less free the actor
seems to be, the less responsible for his act, and the less disposed we
are to hold him accountable or blameworthy. The fact that we shall
never identify all the causes, relate all human acts to the circumstances which condition them, does not imply that they are free, only that we shall never know how they are necessitated.
Tolstoy's central thesis-in some respects not unlike the theory of
the inevitable 'self-deception' of the bourgeoisie held by his contemporary Karl Marx, save that what Marx reserves for a class, Tolstoy sees in almost all mankind-is that there is a natural law
whereby the lives of human beings no less than that of nature are
determined; but that men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek
to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for
what occurs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues or
heroic vices, and called by them 'great men'. What are great men�
4 1
R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough
to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would
rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified
in their name, than recognise their own insignificance and impotence
in the cosmic .Row which pursues its course irrespective of their wills
and ideals. This is the central point of those passages (in which
Tolstoy excelled) in which the actual course of events is described,
side by side with the absurd, egocentric explanations which persons
blown up with the sense of their own importance necessarily .give
to them; as well as of the wonderful descriptions of moments of
illumination in which the truth about the human condition dawns
upon those who have the humility to recognise their own unimportance
and irrelevance. And this is the purpose, too, of those philosophical
passages where, in language more ferocious than Spinoza's, but with
intentions similar to his, the errors of the pseudo-sciences are exposed.
There is a particularly vivid simile1 in which the great man is likened
to the ram whom the shepherd is fattening for slaughter, Because the
ram duly grows fatter, and perhaps is used as a bell-wether for the rest
of the .Rock, he may easily imagine that he is the leader of the .Rock,
and that the other sheep go where they go solely in obedience to his
will. He thinks this and the .Rock may think it too. Nevertheless
the purpose of his selection is not the role he believes himself to play,
but slaughter-a purpose conceived by beings whose aims neither he
nor the other sheep can fathom. For Tolstoy Napoleon is just such
a ram, and so to some degree is Alexander, and indeed all the great
men of history. Indeed, as an acute literary historian has pointed out,1
Tolstoy sometimes seems almost deliberately to ignore the historical
evidence and more than once consciously distorts the facts in order
to bolster up his favourite thesis. The character of Kutuzov is a case
in point. Such heroes as Pierre Bezukhov or Karataev are at least
imaginary, and Tolstoy had an undisputed right to endow them with
all the attributes he admired-humility, freedom from bureaucratic
or scientific or other rationalistic kinds of blindness. But Kutuzov
was a real person, and it is all the more instructive to observe the steps
by which he transforms him from the sly, elderly, feeble voluptuary,
1 W11r 11trJ Pt11u, epilogue, part 1, chapter 2.
1 See V. B. Shklovsky, op. cit. (p. 26, note 3 above), chapten 7-9, and alJo
K. V. Polaovsky, 'lstochnilci romana "Voina i mir"', in Obninsky and Polner,
op. cit. (p. 27, note 2 above).
T H E H E D G E HO G AND THE FOX
the corrupt and somewhat sycophantic courtier of the early drafts of
War and P�ac� which were based on authentic sources, into the unforgettable symbol of the Russian people in all its simplicity and intuitive wisdom. By the time we reach the celebrated passage-one
of the most moving in literature-in which Tolstoy describes the
moment when the old man is woken in his camp at FiJi to be told
that the French army is retreating, we have left the facts behind us,
and are in an imaginary realm, a historical and emotional atmosphere
for which the evidence is flimsy. but which is artistically indispensable
to Tolstoy's design. The final apotheosis of Kutuzov is totally unhistorical for all Tolstoy's repeated professions of his undeviating devotion to the sacred cause of the truth. In War and P�ac� Tolstoy
treats &cts cavalierly when it suits him, because he is above all
obsessed by his thesis-the contrast between the universal and allimportarit but delusive experience of free will, the feeling of responsibility, the values of private life generally, on the one hand; and on the other, the reality of inexorable historical determinism, not, indeed,
experienced directly, but known to be true on irrefutable theoretical
grounds. This corresponds in its turn to a tormenting inner conflict,
one of many, in Tolstoy himself, between the two systems of value,
the public and the private. On the one hand, if those feelings and
immediate experiences. upon which the ordinary values of private
individuals and historians alike ultimately rest are nothing but a vast