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 on 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 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, 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 Karenina in which Levin’s brother tells him that he – Levin – has 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.1 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 no parallel. Any comforting theory which attempted to collect, relate, ‘synthesise’, reveal hidden substrata and concealed inner connections, which, though not apparent to the naked eye, nevertheless guaranteed the unity of all things, the 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.2 Like all very penetrating, very imaginative, very clear-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 nineteenth-century 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 and 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 Kareev, his mild academic remonstrance, were altogether too unlike the final impenetrable, irreducible, solid bedrock 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 Peace is all that remains of this despairing search, and it is the immense superiority of Tolstoy’s offensive over his defensive weapons that has always made his philosophy of history – the theory of the minute particles, requiring integration – seem so threadbare and artificial 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 upon either the character or the value of the work itself, or 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 itself largely unconscious, and his own overt 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 art and literature who are engaged upon the ‘scientific’ – 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 Voltairean 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.