fact that they were 'ultimately' parts one of another with no loose
ends-the ideal of the seamless whole-all such doctrines he exploded
contemptuously and without difficulty. His. genius lay in the perception of specific properties, the almost inexpressible individual quality in virtue of which the given object is uniquely different from all
others. Nevertheless he longed for a universal explanatory principle;
that is, the perception of resemblances or common origins, or single
purpose, or unity in the apparent variety of the mutually exclusive
bits and pieces which composed the furniture of the world. 1 Li�e all
1 B. M. Eikhenbaum, Uv Tokwy (Leningrad, 1918-6o), vol. 1, pp. 11 3-4.
1 Here the parado:r: appeara once more; for the 'inlinitesimals', whose
... s
THE H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
very penetrating, very imaginative, very dear-sighted analysts who
dissect or pulverise in order to reach the indestructible core, and justify
their own annihilating activities (from which they cannot abstain in
any case) by the belief that such a core exists, he continued to kill
his rivals' rickety constructions with cold contempt, as being unworthy
of intelligent men, always hoping that the desperately-sought-for
'real' unity would presently emerge from the destruction of the shams
and frauds- the knock-kneed army of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury philosophies of history. And the more obsessive the suspicion that perhaps the quest was vain, that no core and no unifying principle
would ever be discovered, the more ferocious the measures to drive
this thought away by increasingly merciless and ingenious executions
of more and more false claimants to the title of the truth. As Tolstoy
moved away from literature to polemical writing this tendency
became increasingly prominent: the irritated awareness at the back
of his mind that no final solution was ever, in principle, to be found.
caused Tolstoy to attack the bogus solutions all the more savagely
for the false comfort they offered-and_ for being an insult to the
intelligence.1 Tolstoy's purely intellectual genius for this kind of
lethal activity was very great and exceptional, and all his life he looked
for some edifice strong enough to resist his engines of destruction
and his mines and battering rams; he wished to be stopped by an
immovable obstacle. he wished his violent projectiles to be resisted
by impregnable fortifications. The eminent reasonableness and tentative methods of Professor Kareev. his mild academic remonstrance.
were altogether too unlike the final impenetrable. irreducible, solid
bed-rock of truth on which alone that secure interpretation of life
could be built which all his life he wished to find.
The thin. 'positive' doctrine of historical change in War and Ptact
is all that remains of this despairing search. and it is the immense
superiority of Tolstoy's offensive over his defensive weapons that
integration is the task of the ideal historian, must be reasonably uniform to
make this operation possible; yet the sense of 'reality' consists in the sense of
their unique dilferences.
1 In our day French existentialists for similar psychological reasons have
struck out against all explanations as such because they are a mere drug to
still serious questions, shortlived palliatives for wounds which are unbearable
but must be borne, above all not denied or 'explained'; for all explaining is
explaining away, and that is a denial of the given-the existent-the brute facts.
49
RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S
has always made his philosophy of history-the theory of the minute
particles, requiring integration-seem so threadbare and anificial to
the average, reasonably critical, moderately sensitive reader of the
novel. Hence the tendency of most of those who have written about
War and Peace, both immediately on its appearance and in later years,
to maintain Akhsharumov's thesis 'that Tolstoy's genius lay in his
quality as a writer, a creator of a world more real than life itself; while
the theoretical disquisitions, even though Tolstoy himself may have
looked upon them as the most important ingredient in the book, in
fact threw no light either upon the character or the value of the work
itself, nor on the creative process by which it was achieved. This
anticipated the approach of those psychological critics who maintain
that the author himself often scarcely knows the sources of his own
activity: that the springs of his genius are invisible to him, the process
itselflargely unconscious, and his own oven purpose a mere rationalisation in his own mind of the true, but scarcely conscious, motives and methods involved in the act of creation, and consequently often a mere
hindrance to those dispassionate students of an and literature who are
engaged upon the 'scientific' -i.e. naturalistic-analysis of its origins
and evolution. Whatever we may think of the general validity of such
an outlook, it is something of a historical irony that Tolstoy should
have been treated in this fashion; for it is virtually his own way with
the academic historians at whom he mocks with such Voltairian irony.
And yet there is much poetic justice in it: for the unequal ratio of
critical to constructive elements in his own philosophising seems due
to the fact that his sense of reality (a reality which resides in individual
persons and their relationships alone) served to explode all the large
theories which ignored its findings, but proved insufficient by itself
to provide the basis of a more satisfactory general account of the facts.
And there is no evidence that Tolstoy himself ever conceived it possible
that this was the root of the 'duality', the failure to reconcile the two lives
lived by man.
The unresolved conflict between Tolstoy's belief that the attributes
of personal life alone were real and his doctrine that analysis of them
is insufficient to explain the course of history (i.e. the behaviour of
societies) is paralleled, at a profounder and more personal level, by
the conflict between, on the one hand, his own gifts both as a writer
and as a man and, on the other, his ideals-that which he sometimes
believed himself to be, and at all times profoundly believed in, and
wished to be.
so
THE H E D G E HOG AND THE FOX
If we may recall once again our division of artists into foxes and
hedgehogs: Tolstoy perceived reality in its multiplicity, as a collection
of separate entities round and into which he saw with a clarity and
penetration scarcely ever equalled, but he believed only in one vast,
unitary whole. No author who has ever lived has shown such powers
of insight into the variety of life-the differences, the contrasts, the
collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its
absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a
precision of concrete imagery to be found in no other writer. No one
has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact