reality-the land, the peasants, traditional ways of life. At least they
believed in the primacy of spiritual values and the futility of trying
to change men by changing the more superficial sides of their life
by political or constitutional reform. But the Slavophils also believed
in the Orthodox Church, in the unique historical destiny of the Russian
people, the sanctity of history as a divinely ordained process, and therefore the justification of many absurdities because they were native and ancient, and therefore instruments in the divine tactic; they lived
by a Christian faith in the great mystical body-at once community
and church-of the generation of the faithful, past, present, and yet
unborn. Intellectually Tolstoy repudiated this, temperamentally he
responded to it all too strongly. He understood well only the nobility
and the peasants; and the former better than the latter; he shared
many of the instinctive beliefs of his country neighbours; like them
he had a natural aversion to all forms of middle-class liberalism: the
bourgeoisie scarcely appears in his novels. His attitude to parliamentary
democracy, the rights of women, universal suffrage, was not very
different from that of Cobbett or Carlyle or Proudhon or D. H.
Lawrence. He shared deeply the Slavophil suspicions of all scientific
and theoretical generalisations as such, and this created a bridge which
made personal relations with the Moscow Slavophils congenial to
him. But his intellect was not at one with his instinctive convictions.
As a thinker he had profound affinities with the eighteenth-century
philosopher. Like them he looked upon the patriarchal Russian state
and Church, which the Slavophils defended, as organised and hypocritical conspiracies. Like the great thinkers of the Enlightenment he looked for values not in history, nor in the sacred missions of nations
or cultures or churches, but in the individual's own personal experience.
;l
R U S S IAN TH INKERS
Like them, too, ht! bdieved in eternal (and not in historically evolving)
truths and values, and rejected with both hands the romantic notion of
race or nation or culture as creative agents, still more the Hegelian
conception of history as the self-realisation of self-perfecting reason
incarnated in men or in movements or in institutions (ideas which
had deeply influenced his generation) -all his life he looked on this as
cloudy metaphysical nonsense.
This clear, cold, uncompromising realism is quite explicit in the
notes and diaries and letters of his early life. The reminiscences of
those who knew him as a boy or as a student in the University of
Kazan reinforce this impression. His character was deeply conservative, with a streak of caprice and irrationality; but his mind remained calm, logical, and unswerving; he followed the argument easily and
fearlessly to whatever extreme it led him -a typically, and sometimes
fatally, Russian combination of qualities. What did not satisfy his
critical sense, he rejected. He left the University of Kazan because
he decided that the professors were incompetent and dealt with trivial
issues. Like Helvetius and his friends in the mid-eighteenth century,
Tolstoy denounced theology, history, the teaching of dead languagesthe entire classical curriculum-as an accumulation of data and rules that no reasonable man could wish to know. History particularly
irritated him as a systematic attempt to answer non-existent questions
with all the real issues carefully left out: 'history is like a deaf man
replying to questions which nobody puts to him', he announced to
a startled fellow-student, while they were both locked in the university detention room for some minor act of insubordination. The first extended statement of his full 'ideological' position belongs to the
I 86os: the occasion for it was his decision to compose a treatise on
education. All his intellectual strength and all his prejudice went into
this attempt.
In 1 86o, Tolstoy, then thirty-two years old, found himself in one
of his periodic moral crises. He had acquired some fame as a writer:
Sebastopol, Childhood, Adolescence and Youth, two or three shorter tales,
had been praised by the critics. He was on terms of friendship with
some of the most gifted of an exceptionally talented generation of
writers in his country-Turgenev, Nekrasov, Goncharov, Panaev,
Pisemsky, Fet. His writing struck everyone by its freshness, sharpness,
marvellous descriptive power, and the precision and originality of its
images. His style was at times criticised as awkward and even barbarous; but he was unquestionably the most promising of the younger 2.42
TOLSTOY AND E N L I G HTEN M ENT
prose writers; he had a future; yet his literary friends felt reservations
about him. He paid visits to the literary salons, both right- and leftwing (political divisions had always existed and were becoming sharper in Petersburg and Moscow), but he seemed at ease in none of them.
He was bold, imaginative, independent. But he was not a man of
letters, not fundamentally concerned with problems of literature and
writing, still less of writers; he had wandered in from another, less
intellectual, more aristocratic and more primitive world. He was a
well-born dilettante; but that was nothing new: the poetry of Push kin
and his contemporaries, unequalled in the history of Russian literature,
had been created by amateurs of genius. It was not his origin but his
unconcealed indifference to the literary life as such -to the habits or
problems of professional writers, editors, publicists-that made his
friends among the men of letters feel uneasy in his presence. This
worldly, clever young officer could be exceedingly agreeable; his love
for writing was genuine and very deep; but at literary gatherings he
was contemptuous, formidable and reserved; he did not dream of
opening his heart in a milieu dedicated to intimate, unending selfrevelation. He was inscrutable, disdainful, disconcerting, arrogant, a little frightening. He no longer, it was true, lived the life of an
aristocratic officer. The wild nights on which the young radicals looked
with hatred and contempt as characteristic of the dissipated habits of
the reactionary jeunesse diJree no longer amused him. He had married
and settled down, he was in love with his wife, and became for a time
a model (if occasionally exasperating) husband. But he did not trouble
to conceal the fact that he had far more respect for all forms of real
life-whether of the free Cossacks in the Caucasus, or that of the rich
young Guards officers in Moscow with their race-horses and balls
and gypsies- than for the world of books, reviews, critics, professors,
political discussions, and talk about ideals, opinions, and literary values.
Moreover, he was opinionated, quarrelsome and at times unexpectedly
savage; with the result that his literary friends treated him with
nervous respect, and, in the end, drew away from him; or perhaps he
abandoned them. Apart from the poet Fet, who was an eccentric and
deeply conservative country squire himself, Tolstoy had no intimates