tous les vingt volumes, y compris le Dictionnairt tit musiyue. Je faisais mieux
que }'admirer; je lui rendais une culte v�ritable . . .' (see P· s6, note I below).
5 3
R U S SIAN T H I N K E R S
upon Tolstoy o f his romantic and conservative Slavophil contemporaries. He was close to some among them, particularly to Pogodin and Samarin, in the mid-6os when he was writing War and Ptatt,
and certainly shared their antagonism to the scientific theories of
history then fashionable, whether to the metaphysical positivism of
Comte and his followers, or the more materialistic views of Chernyshevsky and Pisarev, as well as those of Buckle and Mill and Herbert Spencer, and the general British empiricist tradition, tinged by French
and German scientific materialism, to which these very different
figures all, in their various fashions, belonged. The Slavophils (and
perhaps especially Tyutchev, whose poetry Tolstoy admired so deeply)
may have done something to discredit for him historical theories
modelled upon the natural sciences, which, for Tolstoy no less than
for Dostoevsky, failed to give a true account of what men did and
suffered. They were inadequate if only because they ignored man's
'inner' experience, treated him as a natural object played upon by
the same forces as all the other constituents of the material world, and
taking the French Encyclopedists at their word, tried to study social
behaviour as one might study a beehive or an ant-hill, and then
complained because the laws which they formulated failed to explain
the behaviour of living men and women. These romantic medievalists
may moreover have strengthened Tolstoy's natural anti-intellectualism
and anti-liberalism, and his deeply sceptical and pessimistic view of the
strength of non-rational motives in human behaviour, which at once
dominate human beings and deceive them about themselves-in short
that innate conservatism of outlook which very early made Tolstoy
deeply suspect to the radical Russian intelligentsia of the 50s and 6os,
and led them to think of him uneasily as being after all a count,
an officer and a reactionary, not one of themselves, not genuinely
enlightened or rlvolti at all, despite his boldest protests against the
political system, his heterodoxies, his destructive nihilism.
But although Tolstoy and the Slavophils may have fought a common
enemy, their positive views diverged sharply. The Slavophil doctrine
derived principally from German Idealism, in particular from Schelling's
view, despite much lip-service to Hegel and his interpreters, that true
knowledge could not be obtained by the use of reason, but only by a
kind of imaginative self-identification with the central principle of the
universe-the soul of the world, such as artists and thinkers have in
moments of divine inspiration. Some of the Slavophils identified this
with the revealed truths of the Orthodox religion and the mystical
54
T H E H E D G E H O G A N D T H E F O X
tradition of the Russian Church, and bequeathed i t to the Russian
symbolist poets and philosophers of a later generation. Tolstoy stood
at the opposite pole to all this. He believed that only by patient
empirical observation could any knowledge be obtained; that this
knowledge is always inadequate, that simple people often know the
truth better than learned men, because their observation of men and
nature is less clouded by empty theories, and not because they are
inspired vehicles of the divine affiatus. There is a hard cutting edge
of common sense about everything that Tolstoy wrote which automatically puts to Right metaphysical fantasies and undisciplined tendencies towards esoteric experience, or the poetical or theological
interpretations of life, which lay at the heart of the Slavophil outlook,
and (as in the analogous case of the anti-industrial romanticism of the
west), determined both its hatred of politics and economics in the
ordinary sense, and its mystical nationalism. Moreover, the Slavophils
were worshippers of historical method as alone disclosing the true
nature- revealed only in its impalpable growth in time-of individual
institutions and abstract sciences alike. None of this could possibly
have found a sympathetic echo in the very tough-minded, very matterof-fact Tolstoy, especially the realistic Tolstoy of the middle years; if the peasant Platon Karataev has something in common with the
agrarian ethos of the Slavophil (and indeed pan-Slav) ideologistssimple rural wisdom as against the absurdities of the over-clever westyet Pierre Bezukhov in the early drafts of War and Ptau ends his life as a Decembrist and an exile in Siberia, and cannot be conceived
in all his spiritual wanderings as ultimately finding comfort in any
metaphysical system, still less in the bosom of the Orthodox, or any
other, established, Church. The Slavophils saw through the pretensions of western social and psychological science, and that was sympathetic to Tolstoy; but their positive doctrines interested him little. He was against unintelligible mysteries, against mists of antiquity, against
any kind of recourse to mumbo-jumbo: his hostile picture of the freemasons in War and Peace remained symptomatic of his attitude to the end. This can only have been reinfor-ced by his interest in the
writings of, and his visit in 1 861 to, the exiled Proudhon, whose
confused irrationalism, puritanism, hatred of authority and bourgeois
intellectuals, and general Rousseauis.m and violence of tone evidently
pleased him. It is more than possible that he took the title of his novel
from Proudhon's La Gutrrt tt Ia paix published in the same year.
If the classical German Idealists had had no direct effect upon
55
R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
Tolstoy, there was at least one German philosopher for whom h e did
express admiration. And indeed it is not difficult to see why he found
Schopenhauer attractive: that solitary thinker drew a gloomy picture
of the impotent human will beating desperately against the rigidly
determined laws of the universe; he spoke of the vanity of all human
passions, the absurdity of rational systems, the universal failure to
understand the non-rational springs of action and feeling, the suffering
to which all flesh is subject, and the consequent desirability of reducing
human vulnerability by reducing man himself to the condition of the
utmost quietism, where, being passionless, he cannot be frustrated or
humiliated or wounded. This celebrated doctrine reflected Tolstoy's
later views-that man suffers much because he seeks too much, is
foolishly ambitious and grotesquely over-estimates his capacities; from
Schopenhauer, too, may come the bitter emphasis laid on the familiar
contrast of the illusion of free will with the reality of the iron laws
which govern the w:orld, in particular the account of the inevitable
suffering which this illusion, since it cannot be made to vanish, must
necessarily cause. This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the