1 War and Peace, vol. 2, part 3, chapter 1, T x 151; W 453.
1 Cf. the profession of faith in his celebrated – and militantly moralistic – introduction to an edition of Maupassant, whose genius, despite everything, he admires: ‘Predislovie k sochineniyam Gyui de Mopassana’ (1893–4), T xxx 3–24. He thinks much more poorly of Bernard Shaw, whose social rhetoric he calls stale and platitudinous (diary entry for 31 January 1908, T lvi 97–8).
1 Empire chairs of a certain shape are to this day called ‘Talleyrand armchairs’ in Russia.
1 War and Peace, epilogue, part 2, chapter 1, T xii 298–300; W 1307–9.
1 One of Tolstoy’s Russian critics, M. M. Rubinshtein, referred to above (9/1), 80 ff., says that every science employs some unanalysed concepts, to explain which is the business of other sciences; and that ‘power’ happens to be the unexplained central concept of history. But Tolstoy’s point is that no other science can ‘explain’ it, since it is, as used by historians, a meaningless term, not a concept but nothing at all – vox nihili [‘the voice of nothing’].
2 [‘The obscure through the more obscure’, i.e. explaining something obscure in terms of something even more obscure.]
1 War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 2, T xii 239; W 1249.
2 See V. B. Shklovsky, op. cit. (7/3), chapters 7 and 8, and also K. Pokrovsky, ‘Istochniki romana “Voina i mir” ’, in Obninsky and Polner, op. cit. (9/1), 113–28.
1 War and Peace, epilogue, part 2, chapter 1, T xii 297; W 490.
2 ‘Neskol′ko slov po povodu knigi: “Voina i mir”’ (1868), T xvi 5–16.
1 War and Peace, vol. 3, part 3, chapter 1, T xi 264–7; W 909–11.
1 op. cit. (8/2), 34, 40.
2 N. I. Kareev, ‘Istoricheskaya filosofiya v “Voine i mire”’, Vestnik Evropy 22 no. 4 (July–August 1887), 227–69.
3 ibid. 230; cf. War and Peace, vol. 3, part 1, chapter 1, T xi 16; W 665 (‘There are two sides to the life of every man’).
1 B. M. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy (Leningrad, 1928–60), i 123–4.
2 Here the paradox appears once more; for the ‘infinitesimals’, whose 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 differences.
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, short-lived 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.
1 For example, both Shklovsky (passim) and Eikhenbaum (i 259–60) in the works cited above (7/3, 40/1).
1 ‘On n’a pas rendu justice à Rousseau […]. J’ai lu tout Rousseau, oui, tous les vingt volumes, y compris le Dictionnaire de musique. Je faisais mieux que l’admirer; je lui rendais une culte véritable’; ‘Justice has not been done to Rousseau […]. I have read all of Rousseau, yes, all twenty volumes, including the Dictionary of Music. I did better than admire him, I truly worshipped him’: loc. cit. (20/2).
1 ibid. (‘il n’y a point de panache à la guerre’).
1 See Adolfo Omodeo, Un reazionario: il conte J. de Maistre (Bari, 1939), 112, note 2.
2 ‘Chitayu Maistr′a’, T xlviii 66.
1 See Eikhenbaum, op. cit. (40/ 1), i 308–17.
2 War and Peace, vol. 3, part 2, chapter 6, T xi 127, 128; W 782, 783.
3 ibid. vol. 1, part 1, chapter 3, T x 13–16; W 10–13. For the note see T xiii 687.
1 ibid. vol. 4, part 3, chapter 19, T xii 167; W 1182.
2 S. P. Zhikharev, Zapiski sovremennika: dnevnik chinovnika (Moscow, 1934), ii 112–13.
1 Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (1821), seventh conversation: OEuvres complètes de J. de Maistre (Lyon/Paris, 1884–7) [hereafter OC] v 33–4; Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal etc., 1993) [hereafter SPD] (from which the translations of this conversation in the notes are taken) 222–3. ‘People talk a lot about battles without knowing what they are really like. In particular, they tend to consider them as occurring at one place, whereas they cover two or three leagues of country. They ask you seriously: How is it that you don’t know what happened in this battle, since you were there? Whereas it is precisely the opposite that would often have to be said. Does the one on the right know what is happening on the left? Does he even know what is happening two paces from him? I can easily imagine one of these frightful scenes. On a vast field covered with all the apparatus of carnage and seeming to shudder under the feet of men and horses, in the midst of fire and whirling smoke, dazed and carried away by the din of firearms and cannon, by voices that order, roar and die away, surrounded by the dead, the dying, the mutilated corpses, seized in turn by fear, hope and rage, by five or six different passions, what happens to a man? What does he see? What does he know after a few hours? What can he know about himself and others? Among this crowd of warriors who have fought the whole day, there is often not a single one, not even the general, who knows who the victor is. I will restrict myself to citing modern battles, famous battles whose memory will never perish, battles that have changed the face of Europe and that were lost only because such and such a man thought they were lost; they were battles where all circumstances being equal and without a drop of blood more being shed on either side, the other general could have had a Te Deum sung in his own country and forced history to record the opposite of what it will say.’
1 ibid. 35; SPD 223. ‘Have we not even seen won battles lost? […] In general, I believe that battles are not won or lost physically.’
2 ibid. 29; SPD 220. ‘In the same way, an army of 40,000 men is physically inferior to another army of 60,000, but if the first has more courage, experience and discipline, it will be able to defeat the second, for it is more effective with less mass. This is what we can see on every page of history.’
3 ibid. 31 (omitted by mistake in SPD). ‘It is opinion that loses battles, and it is opinion that wins them.’
1 ibid. 32; SPD 221. ‘What is a lost battle? […] It is a battle one believes one has lost. Nothing is more true. One man fighting with another is defeated when he has been killed or brought to earth and the other remains standing. This is not the way it is with two armies; the one cannot be killed while the other remains on its feet. The forces are in equilibrium, as are the deaths, and especially since the invention of gunpowder has introduced more equality into the means of destruction, a battle is no longer lost materially, that is to say because there are more dead on one side than the other. It was Frederick II, who understood a little about these things, who said: To win is to advance. But who is the one who advances? It is the one whose conscience and countenance makes the other fall back.’