central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the
cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they
can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of
which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually
perceives is meaningless chaos-a chaos of which the heightened form,
the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an
intense degree, is war.
The best avowed of all Tolstoy's literary debts is, of course, that
to Stendhal. In his celebrated interview in 1 90 1 with Paul Boyer,1
Tolstoy coupled Stendhal and Rousseau as the two writers to whom
he owed most, and added that all he had learnt about war he had learnt
from Stendhal's description of the battle of Waterloo in La Chartrtuu
dt Parme, where Fabrice wanders about the battlefield 'understanding
nothing'. And he added that this conception-war 'without panacht' or
'embellishments' -of which his brother Nikolay had spoken to him,
he later had verified for himself during his own service in the Crimean
War. Nothing ever won so much praise from active soldiers as
Tolstoy's vigntttes of episodes in the war, his descriptions of how
1 See PaMI Boytr (r864-1949) d1tZ Tolitoi' (Pari!, 1950), p. 40.
s6
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
battles appear to those who are actually engaged in them. No doubt
Tolstoy was right in declaring that he owed much of this dry light to
Stendhal. But there is a figure behind Stendhal even drier, even more
destructive, from whom Stendhal may well, at least in part, have
derived his new method of interpreting social life, a celebrated writer
with whose works Tolstoy was certainly acquainted and to whom he
owed a deeper debt than is commonly supposed; for the striking
resemblance between their views can hardly be put down either to
accident, or to the mysterious operations of the Ztitgtist. This figure
was the famous Joseph de Maistre; and the full story of his in8uence
on Tolstoy, although it has been noted by students of Tolstoy, and by
at least one critic of Maistre,1 still largely remains to be written.
v
On I· November a 865, in the middle of writing /.Par and Ptau,
Tolstoy wrote down in his diary 'I am reading Maistre',1 and on 7
September 1 866 he wrote to the editor Bartenev, who acted as a kind
of general assistant to him, asking him to send the 'Maistre archive',
i.e. his letters and notes. There is every reason why Tolstoy should
have read this now relatively little read author. Count Joseph de
Maistre was a Savoyard royalist who had first made a name for
himself by writing anti-revolutionary tracts during the last years of
the eighteenth century. Although normally classified as an orthodox
Catholic reactionary writer, a pillar of the Bourbon Restoration and a
defender of the pre-revolutionary status quo, in particular of papal
authority, he was a great deal more than this. He held grimly unconventional and misanthropic views about the nature of individuals and societies, and wrote with a dry and ironical violence about the incurably savage and wicked nature of man, the inevitability of perpetual slaughter, the divinely instituted character of wars, and the overwhelming part played in hurpan affairs by the passion for self-immolation which, more than natural sociability or artificial agreements, creates
armies and civil societies alike; he emphasised the need for absolute
authority, punishment and continual repression if civilisation and
order were to survive at all. Both the content and the tone of his
1 See Adolfo Omodeo, u, rtazio,ario (Bari, 1939), p. 1 1 %, note %.
1 'Chitayu "Maistre" ', quoted by B. M. Eikhenbaum, op. cit. (p. 48,
note 1 above), vol. z, p. 309·
57
R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
wnung are closer to Nietzsche, d'Annunzio, and the heralds of
modern fascism than to the respectable royalists of his own time, and
caused a stir in their own day both among the legitimists and in
Napoleonic France. In I 803 Maistre was sent by his master, the King
of Savoy, then living in exile in Rome as a victim of Napoleon and
soon forced to move to Sardinia, as his semi-official representative to
the Court of St Petersburg. Maistre, who possessed considerable social
charm as well as an acute sense of his environment, made a great
impression upon the society of the Russian capital as a polished
courtier, a wit and a shrewd political observer. He remained in St
Petersburg from I 803 to I 8 I 7, and his exquisitely written and often
uncannily penetrating and prophetic diplomatic dispatches and letters,
as well as his private correspondence and the various scattered notes
on Russia and her inhabitants, sent to his government as well as to his
friends and consultants among the Russian nobility, form a uniquely
valuable source of information about the life and opinions of the ruling
circles of the Russian Empire during and immediately after the
Napoleonic period.
He died in I 82 I , the author of several theologico-political essays,
but the definitive edition of his works, in particular of the celebrated
Soirees de Saint-Pitershourg, which in the form of Platonic dialogue
dealt with the nature and sanctions of human government and other
political and philosophical problems, as well as his Corrtspondance
diplomatique and his letters, was published in full only in the 50s and
early 6os by his son Rodolphe and by others. Maistre's open hatred
of Austria, his anti-Bonapartism, as well as the rising importance of
the Piedmontese kingdom before and after the Crimean War, naturally
increased interest in his personality and his thought at this date. Books
on him began to appear and excited a good deal of discussion in Russian
literary and historical circles. Tolstoy possessed the Soirees, as well as
Maistre's diplomatic correspondence and letters, and copies of them
were to be found in the library at Yasnaya Polyana. It is in any case
quite clear that Tolstoy used them extensively in War and Peact.1
Thus the celebrated description of Paulucci's intervention in the
debate of the Russian General Staff at Drissa is reproduced almost
verbatim from a letter by Maistre. Similarly Prince Vasily's conversation at Mme Scherer's reception with the 'homme de beaucoup de merite' about Kutuzov, is obviously based on a letter by Maistre, in
1 See Eikhenbaum, op. cit. (p. 48, note I above).
sa
THE H ED G E H O G AND THE FOX
which all the French phnses with which this conversation is sprinkled
are to be found. There is, moreover, a marginal note in one of
Tolstoy's early drafts, 'At Anna Pavlovna's J. Maistre', which refers
to the rarmte11r who tells the beautiful Helene and an admiring circle
of listeners the idiotic anecdote about the meeting of Napoleon with