the unconscious agent of some historical trend, a relatively insignificant
element in the vast whole composed of a very large number of such
elements. War and Ptau, Kareev tells us, 'is a historical poem on
the philosophical theme of the duality of human life'- and
Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to
happen by the combination of such obscure entitles as the 'power' or
'mental activity' assumed by naive historians; indeed he was, in
Kareev's view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as 'heroes', 'historic forces', 'moral forces',
'nationalism', 'reason' and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or
class, or metaphysical bias. So far so good, and Tolstoy is judged to
have shown deeper insight-'greater realism'-than most historians. He
was right also in demanding that the infinitesimals of history be
integrated. But then he himself had done just that by creating the
individuals of his novel who are not trivial precisely to the degree to
which in their characters and actions, they 'summate' countless others,
who between them do 'move history'. This is the integrating of
infinitesimals, not, of course, by scientific, but by 'artistic-psychological' means. Tolstoy was right to abhor abstractions, but this had led him too far, so that he ended by denying not merely that history
was a natural science like chemistry-which was correct-but that it
was a science at all, an activity with its own proper concepts and
generalisations; which, if true, would abolish all history as such.
Tolstoy was right to say that the impersonal 'forces' and 'purposes'
of the older historians were myths, and dangerously misleading myths,
but unless we were allowed to ask what made this or that group of
individuals-who, in the end, of course, alone were real-behave thus
and thus, without needing first to provide separate psychological
analyses of each member of the group and then to 'integrate' them all,
we could not think about history or society at all. Yet we did do this,
and profitably, and to deny that we could discover a good deal by social
observation, historical inference and similar means was, for Kareev,
tantamount to denying that we had criteria for distinguishing between
46
THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX
historical truth and falsehood which were less or more reliable-and
that was surely mere prejudice, fanatical obscurantism. Kareev declares
that it is men, doubtless, who make social forms, but these forms-the
ways in which men live-in their turn affect those born into them ;
individual wills may not be all-powerful, but neither are they totally
impotent, and some are more effective than others: Napoleon may
not be a demigod, but neither is he a mere epiphenomenon of a
process which would have occurred unaltered without him; the
'important people' are less important than they themselves or the
more foolish historians may suppose, but neither are they shadows;
individuals, besides their intimate inner lives which alone seem real
to Tolstoy, have social purposes, and some among them have strong
wills too, and these sometimes transform the lives of communities.
Tolstoy's notion of inexorable laws which work themselves out whatever men may think or wish is itself an oppressive myth ; laws are only statistical probabilities, at any rate in the social sciences, not hideous
and inexorable 'forces' -a concept the darkness of which, Kareev
points out, Tolstoy himself in other contexts exposed with such
brilliance and malice, when his opponent seemed to him too naive or
too clever or in the grip of some grotesque metaphysic. But to say
that unless men make history they are themselves, particularly the
'great' among them, mere 'labels', because history makes itself, and
only the unconscious life of the social hive, the human ant-hill, has
genuine significance or value and 'reality'- what is this but a wholly
unhistorical and dogmatic ethical sceptil;ism? Why should we accept
it when empirical evidence points elsewhere?
Kareev's objections are very reasonable, the most sensible and
clearly formulated of all that ever were urged against Tolstoy's view
of history. But in a sense he missed the point. Tolstoy was not primarily
engaged in exposing the fallacies of histories based or. this or that
metaphysical schematism, or those which sought to explain too much
in terms of some one chosen element particularly dear to the author
(all of which Kareev approves), or in refuting the possibility of an
empirical science of sociology (which Kareev thinks unreasonable of
him) in order to set up some rival theory of his own. Tolstoy's concern
with history derives from a deeper source than abstract interest in
historical method or philosophical objections to given types of historical
practice. It seems to spring from something more personal, a bitter
inner conflict between his actual experience and his beliefs, between
his vision of life, and his theory of what it, and he himself, ought to
47
R U S S IAN T H I NK E R S
be , if the vision was to be bearable at all; between the immediate
data which he was too honest and too intelligent to ignore, and the
need for an interpretation of them which did not lead to the childish
absurdities of all previous views. For the one conviction to which his
temperament and his intellect kept him faithful all his life was that all
previous attempts at a rational theodicy-to explain how and why what
occurred occurred as and when it did, and why it was bad or good that
it should or should not do so- all such efforts were grotesque absurdities,
shoddy deceptions which one sharp, honest word was sufficient to blow
away. The Russian critic, Boris Eikhenbaum, who has written the
best critical work on Tolstoy in any language,1 in the course of it
develops the thesis that what oppressed Tolstoy most was his lack of
positive convictions: and that the famous passage in Anna Karmina
in which Levin's brother tells him that he- Levin- had no positive
beliefs, that even communism, with its artificial, 'geometrical', symmetry, is better than total scepticism of his- Levin's- kind, in fact refers to Lev Nikolaevich himself, and to the attacks on him by his
brother Nikolay Nikolaevich. Whether or not the passage is literally
autobiographical-and there is little in Tolstoy's writing that, in one
way or another, is not-Eikhenbaum's theory seems, in general, valid.
Tolstoy was by nature not a visionary; he saw the manifold objects
and situations on earth in their full multiplicity; he grasped their
individual essences, and what divided them from what they were not,
with a clarity to which there is uo parallel. Any comforting theory
which attempted to collect, relate, 'synthesise', reveal hidden subst.rata and concealed inner connections, which, though not apparent to the naked eye, nevertheless guaranteed the unity of all things-the