Page references are mostly given as plain numerals. Cross-references to notes (in this volume, unless otherwise stated) are given in the form ‘123/4’, i.e. ‘page 123, note 4’.
Tribute should be paid to Berlin’s friend Julian Asquith,3 from whom he learned of the fragment that gave the book its title. I am extremely grateful to Aileen Kelly for invaluable help with the text and references during the preparation of the first edition of Russian Thinkers. Thanks in connection with the present edition are also due to Al Bertrand, Ewen Bowie, Quentin Davies (John Bowle’s literary executor, for allowing me to reprint Bowle’s parody), Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Eva Papastratis, John Penney and above all Mary Merry.
Henry Hardy
Heswall, May 2012
1 Letter to Morton White, 2 May 1955. This may be sincere, but the intellectual influence of the book has surely been significantly enhanced by its felicitous title.
2 Oxford Slavonic Papers 2 (1951), 17–54.
3 George Weidenfeld (b. 1919), joint founder in 1948 of the publishing house Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
4 The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London, 1953: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York, 1954: Simon and Schuster).
1 Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London, 1978: Hogarth Press; New York, 1978: Viking; 2nd ed., revised by Henry Hardy, London etc., 2008: Penguin Classics).
2 The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London, 1997: Chatto and Windus; New York, 1998: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
3 ‘Le hérisson et le renard’, in the French edition of Russian Thinkers – Les Penseurs russes (Paris, 1984: Albin Michel). There was a thirty-year delay in the publication of this translation. On 3 December 1954 Berlin wrote to his friend Rowland Burdon-Muller: ‘Aline came in to continue with the translation of The Hedgehog and the Fox, on which she seems fanatically intent. This flatters me, but I wonder if any publisher is rash enough to publish it.’
4 London, 1996: Phoenix.
1 ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’ (‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, 1784), Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1900– ), viii 23, line 22.
2 First published in the New Yorker, 9 November 1998, 54. © The New Yorker Collection 1998 Charles Barsotti from cartoonbank.com. All right reserved.
3 Julian Edward George Asquith (1916–2011), 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith, who read classics at Balliol College, Oxford, 1934–8, was a British colonial administrator.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
MY THANKS ARE DUE TO Professor S. Konovalov and the Clarendon Press for permission to reproduce the portions of this essay which originally appeared in 1951 under a somewhat different title in the second volume of Oxford Slavonic Papers. I have considerably revised the original version, and added two further sections (VI and VII). I should like to thank Mr Richard Wollheim for reading the new sections and suggesting improvements, and Mr J. S. G. Simmons for supplying me with a valuable reference, and for his care in seeing the earlier version through the press.
Oxford, July 1953
I. B.
To the memory of Jasper Ridley
The Hedgehog and the Fox
A queer combination of the brain of an English chemist
with the soul of an Indian Buddhist.
E. M. de Vogüé1
I
THERE IS A LINE among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’2 Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.
Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous: like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation. Thus we have no doubt about the violence of the contrast between Pushkin and Dostoevsky; and Dostoevsky’s celebrated speech about Pushkin has, for all its eloquence and depth of feeling, seldom been considered by any perceptive reader to cast light on the genius of Pushkin, but rather on that of Dostoevsky himself, precisely because it perversely represents Pushkin – an arch-fox, the greatest in the nineteenth century – as being similar to Dostoevsky, who is nothing if not a hedgehog; and thereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into a dedicated prophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was indeed the centre of Dostoevsky’s own universe, but exceedingly remote from the many varied provinces of Pushkin’s protean genius. Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature is spanned by these gigantic figures – at one pole Pushkin, at the other Dostoevsky; and that the characteristics of other Russian writers can, by those who find it useful or enjoyable to ask that kind of question, to some degree be determined in relation to these great opposites. To ask of Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Blok how they stand in relation to Pushkin and to Dostoevsky leads – or, at any rate, has led – to fruitful and illuminating criticism. But when we come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask this of him – ask whether he belongs to the first category or the second, whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of one or of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded of heterogeneous elements – there is no clear or immediate answer.