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PENGUIN BOOKS

RUSSIAN THINKERS

Sir Isaiah Berlin OM is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. In the course

of his academic career he has been President of the British Academy, Professor

of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford and the first

President of Wolfson College, Oxford. He is an Honorary Fellow of four

Oxford Colleges, and has received Honorary Doctorates from a number of

universities around the world. His work covers a wide variety of subjects and

apart from his work in the fields of philosophy and political studies he

has made some notable contributions to Russian studies; some of his most

acclaimed essays are to be found in this volume. His superb translations of

Turgenev's First Love and A Month in the Country are both published in

Penguin Classics. Among his many other publications are Karl Marx (1939),

The Age of Enlightenment (1956), Four Essays on Liberty (1969), Vico and Herder

(1976), Against the Current (1979), Personal Impressions (1980), The Crooked

Timber of Humanity (1990), The Magus of the Nonh (1993), on). G. Hamann,

and The Sense of Reality (1996). His latest book is The Proper Study of Mankind

(1997), an anthology of essays drawn from previous volumes. Russian Thinkers

was first published as a collection in 1978.

In 1977 Sir Isaiah received the Jerusalem Prize for his defence of human

liberty. He has also been awarded the Erasmus Prize (1983) for his contribution to European culture, and the Agnelli Prize (1987) for his writings on the ethical aspects of modem industrial societies.

Henry Hardy, in addition to co-editing this volume, has edited seven other

books by Isaiah Berlin: Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal

Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Magus of the Nonh, The Sense

of Reality and The Proper Study of Mankind (co-edited with Roger Hausheer).

From 1985 to 1990 he was Senior Editor, Political and Social Studies, at

Oxford University Press. He is now a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford,

where he is working on a collection of Isaiah Berlin's letters.

Aileen Kelly, introducer and co-editor of this volume, received her D.Phil. in

Russian Studies from Oxford and is now a Lecturer in Slavonic Studies at

Cambridge University and a Fellow of King's College. She is the author of

Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Prychology and Politics of Utopianism, and is

currendy working on a study of Alexander Herzen.

ISAIAH BERLIN

'R!!Jsian Thinkers

Edited by

Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly

With an Introduction by

Aileen Kelly

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First published in Great Britain by The Hogarth Press Ltd I 978

First published in the United States of America by

The Viking Press I97B

Published in Pelican Books I979

Reprinted in Penguin Books I 994

3 5 7 9 IO 8 6 4

President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1955

Henry Hardy, 1978

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Berlin, Isaiah, Sir.

Russian thinkers.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Russia-lntellectual life---18o1-1917-

Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Intellectuals-

Russia-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Hardy,

Henry. II. Kelly, Aileen. Ill. Title.

(DK189.2.B47 1979)

947' .07

78-2082.3

ISBN o 14 oz.zz6o x

Printed in England by Clays Ltd,

St lves pic

Set in Caslon

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the

publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than

that in which it is published and without a similar condition

including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Contents

Autlwr' s Prifau

pagt vii

Editorial Prtfau

Introduction: A Complex Vision by Ailttn Ktl/y

xiii

Russia and I 848

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Herun and Bakunin on Individual Liberty

A Remarkable Decade

I The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia

1 1 4

II German Romanticism in Petersburg

and Moscow

IJ6

I II Vissarion Belinsky

I 50

IV Alexander Herun

1 86

Russian Populism

2 1 0

Tolstoy and Enlightenment

2J8

Fathers and Children

261

lndt11

J06

Author's Preface

The essays collected in this volume, the first of four, were written, or

delivered as lectures, on various occasions over almost thirty years, and

therefore possess less unity of theme than if they had been conceived

in relation to one another. I am naturally most grateful to the editor

of these collected papers, Dr Henry Hardy, for his conviction that

they are worth exhuming, and for the meticulous and unremitting

care with which he has seen to it that some of their blemishes, in

particular inaccuracies, inconsistencies and obscurities, have been, so far

as possible, eliminated. Naturally, I continue to be solely responsible

for the shortcomings that remain.

I owe a great debt also to Dr Aileen Kelly for furnishing this

volume with an introduction: in particular, for her deep and sympathetic understanding of the issues discussed and of my treatment of them. I am also most grateful to her for the great trouble to which,

in the midst of her own work, she has gone in checking and, on

occasion, emending, vague references and excessively free translations.

Her steady advocacy has almost persuaded me that the preparation of

this volume may have been worthy of so much intelligent and devoted

labour. I can only hope that the result will prove to have justified the

expenditure of her own and Dr Hardy's time and energy.

A number of these essays began life as lectures for general audiences,

not read from a prepared text. The published versions were based on

transcripts of the spoken words, as well as the notes for them, and, as I

am well aware, they bear the marks of their origin in both their style

and their structure.

The original texts remain substantially unaltered: no attempt has

been made to revise them in the light of anything published subsequently on the history of Russian ideas in the nineteenth c:entury, since nothing, so far as I know, has appeared in this (somewhat

sparsely cultivated) field to cast serious doubt on the central theses of

these essays. I may, however, be mistaken about this; if so, I should

like to assure the reader that this is due to ignorance on my pan rather

than unshakeable confidence in the validity of my own opinions.

VII

RUSSIAN THINKERS

Indeed, the entire burden of these collected essays, so far as they can

be said to display any single tendency, is distrust of all claims to the

possession of incorrigible knowledge about issues of fact or principle

in any sphere of human behaviour.

ISAIAH BERLIN

July I977

viii

Editorial Preface

This is one of five volumes in which I have brought together, and

prepared for reissue, most of the published essays by Isaiah Berlin

which had not hitherto been made available in a collected form.1 His

many writings were scattered, often in obscure places, most were out

of print, and only half a dozen essays had previously been collected

and reissued.2 These five volumes, together with the list of his

publications which one of them (Against the Current) contains, 3 and a

new volume on j. G. Hamann, 4 have made much more of his work

readily accessible than before.

The present volume comprises ten essays on nineteenth-century

Russian literature and thought. The details of their original publication are as follows. 'Russia and I 848' appeared in the Slavonic Review 26 (I948); The Hedgehog and the Fox' first appeared, in a shorter

form, as 'Lev Tolstoy's Historical Scepticism' in Oxford Slavonic

Papers 2 (I95I), and was reprinted with additions under its present

title in I953 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in London, and by Simon

and Schuster in New York; 'Herzen and Bakunin on Individual

Liberty' was published in Ernest j. Simmons (ed.), Continuity and

Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts,

I 9 55: Harvard University Press); the four esays collectively entitled

I This volume was first published in London and New York in 1978. The

other volumes are Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (London, 197 8;

New York, 1979), Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London,

1979; New York, 1980), Persona/Impressions (London, 1980; New York,

198 1) and The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas

(London, 1990; New York, 1991).

z Four Essays on Liberty (London, 1969; New York, 1970) and Vico atld

Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London and New York, 1976).

Other collections have appeared only in translation.

3 Its currently most up-to-date version appears in the 1991 impression of

the Oxford University Press paperback edition.

4 The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism, edited by Henry Hardy (London, 1993; New York, 1994).

R USS IA N T H I NKERS

'A Remarkable Decade', reprinted here from the version published

as 'A Marvellous Decade' in Encounter 4 No 6 (June I955), 5 No I 1

(November 1955), 5 No 12 (December 1955) and 6 No 5 (May 1956),

originated as the Northcliffe Lectures for 19 54 (delivered at U niversity College, London), which were also broadcast later that year on the Third Programme of the BBC; 'Russian Populism' is the

introduction to Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (London, 1960:

Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York, 1960: Knopf), and also

appeared in Encounter 15 No 1 (July 1960); 'Tolstoy and Enlightenment', the P.E.N. Hermon Ould Memorial Lecture for I960, was published first in Encounter I 6 No 2 (February 1961 ), and subsequently in Mightier Than The Sword (London, 1964: Macmillan);

'Fathers and Children', the Romanes Lecture for I 970, was published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1972 (reprinted with corrections, 1973), and has also appeared in the New York Review of

Books ( 1 B October, 1 and 15 November, 1973) and as the introduction to Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, translated by Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth, 197 5: Penguin). I am grateful to the

publishers concerned for allowing me to reprint these essays.

'A Remarkable Decade', 'Russian Populism' and 'Tolstoy and

Enlightenment' have been left without references, as they originally

appeared. A few passages- chiefly translations- were rewritten by

the author for this volume. Otherwise, apart from necessary corrections, and the addition of missing references, the essays are reprinted essentially in their original form.

Those who know the author's work in this field will notice that two

important items are missing. The first is the introduction to an

English translation of Alexander Herzen's From the Other Shore and

The Russian People and Socialism (London, 1956; revised edition,

Oxford, 1979); the second is the introduction to Constance Garnett's

translation of Herzen's memoirs, My Past and Thoughts (London and

New York, 1968). Both of these pieces overlap to some extent with

the two essays on Herzen in this volume. The first does not appear in

any of the five volumes; the second is included in Against the Current,

where it is equally at home.1

1 Readers may like to have a list of other pieces in this area which do not

appear here. There are three radio talks: 'The Man Who Became a Myth'

(Belinsky), Listener 38 (1947); 'The Father of Russian Marxism'

EDI T ORIAL PREFACE

I have many debts of gratitude, and can mention only the weightiest here. First and foremost, the great bulk of the detailed editorial work on this volume was undertaken by Dr Aileen Kelly, without

whose specialist knowledge of the Russian language and of

nineteenth-century Russian culture my task would have been impossible. During an unusually busy time she devoted many hours to the search for answers to my queries, and my obligation and gratitude to her are very great. Isaiah Berlin himself was unfailingly courteous, good-humoured and informative in response both to my

persistent general advocacy of the whole project, which he regarded

throughout with considerable, and mounting, scepticism, and to my

often over-meticulous probings into points of detail. Lesley

Chamberlain gave valuable help with 'Herzen and Bakunin on

Individual Liberty'. Pat Utechin, Isaiah Berlin's secretary, was an

indispensable source of help and encouragement at all stages.

HENRY HARDY

February 1994

P OSTSCRIPT 1997

Since the above Preface was written I have edited two further volumes

of essays by Isaiah Berlin: The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas

and their History (London, 1996; New York, 1997), which mainly

comprises previously unpublished work; and The Proper Study of

Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, co-edited with Roger Hausheer

(London, 1997), a selection drawn from previous volumes which aims

to represent the best of Berlin's work, across its whole range.

H.H.

(Piekhanov), Listmer 56 ( 1956); and ' The Role of the Intelligentsia', Listmer

79 ( 1968). There are three contributions to Foreign Affairs on modern Russia,

which, though they do not strictly belong in this company, have many points

of contact with the essays included here: these pieces are 'Generalissimo

Stalin and the Art of Government', Foreign Affairs 30 ( 1952), and two articles

in Foreign Affairs 36 ( 1957), ' The Silence in Russian Culture' and ' The Soviet

Intelligentsia'. 'Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956', mainly

about Akhmatova and Pasternak, is to be found in Pmonallmpt7!ssions. For

book reviews and other smaller pieces, I refer readers to the bibliography

already cited.

Introduction

A COMPLEX VISION

Aileen Kelly

Do not look for solutions in this book-there

arc none; in general modern man has no solutions.

Alexander Herzen, Introduction to From the Other Shore

In an attempt to explain the Russian revolution to Lady Ottoline

Morrell, Bertrand Russell once remarked that, appalling though

Bolshevik despotism was, it seemed the right sort of government for

Russia: 'If you ask yourself how Dostoevsky's characters should be

governed, you will understand.'

The view that despotic socialism was no more than Russia deserved

would be accepted by many western liberals as not unjust, at least with

regard to the 'devils' of Dostoevsky's novel, the Russian radical

intelligentsia. In the degree of their alienation from their society and

of their impact on it, the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth

century were a phenomenon almost sui generis. Their ideological

leaders were a small group with the cohesivenes-; and sense of mission

of a religious sect. In their fervent moral opposition to the existing

order, their single-minded preoccupation with ideas, and their faith in

reason and science, they paved the way for the Russian revolution, and

thereby achieved major historical significance. But they are all too

often treated by English and American historians with a mixture of

condescension and moral revulsion; because the theories to which they

were so passionately attached were not their own, but borrowed from

the west and usually imperfectly understood; and because in their

fanatical passion for extreme ideologies they are held to have rushed,

like Dostoevsky's devils, to blind self-destruction, dragging their

country, and subsequently much of the rest of the world, after them.

The Russian revolution and its aftermath have done much to strengthen

xiii

R U S SIAN THIN K E R S

the belief, deeply entrenched in the Anglo-Saxon outlook, that a

passionate interest in ideas is a symptom of mental and moral disorder.

One liberal voice has strongly and consistently dissented from this

view of the Russian intelligentsia-a voice of remarkable distinction.

Isaiah Berlin is one of the most outstanding liberal thinkers of this

century: his Four Essays 011 Libtrty are contributions of the first importance to the study of the fundamental problems of political philosophy.

His originality as a thinker derives from a combination of a liberalism

in the English tradition with a wholly European fascination with ideas

and their effects on political practice: his writings are penetrated with

the conviction that liberal values are best understood and defended by

those who seek to understand the part played by ideas in action, and in

particular the intellectual and moral attractions of what he calls the

'great despotic visions' of the right and left. His distinctive contribution

to English intellectual life has been an effective opposition to the last

half-century of relative indifference to intellectual movements in

Europe. In essays and lectures, masterpieces of vivid and lucid exposition, he has acquainted a wide audience with great European intellectual traditions, with the ideas and personalities of some of the most original thinkers of the post-Renaissance world, and, in the -essays

collected together for the first time in this book, with the phenomenon

of the Russian intelligentsia.

Isaiah Berlin's approach to the intelligentsia has been directed by his

interest in the way in which ideas are 'lived through' as solutions to

moral demands. In contrast to the majority of studies on this subject,

which set out to j udge political solutions in the light of historical hindsight, he is above all concerned with the social and moral questions which the intelligentsia posed, the dilemmas that they sought to resolve.

Though his essays on Russian subjects stand by themselves, with no

need of philosophical annotation or cross-reference, they are also a

substantial contribution to the central theme of all his writings on

intellectual history, and their originality can best be appreciated if they

are approached within this wider framework.

The central concern of Berlin's writings has been the exploration of

what he sees as one of the m_ost fundamental of the open issues on

which men's moral conduct depends: are all absolute values ultimately

compatible with one another, or is there no single final solution to the

problem of how to live, no one objective and universal human ideal?

In wide-ranging studies he has explored the psychological and historical

roots and consequences of monist and pluralist visions of the world.

xiv

INT R ODUCTION

He has argued that the great totalitarian structures built on Hegelian

and Marxist foundations are not a terrible aberration, but rather a

logical development of the major assumption in all the central currents

of western political thought: that there is a fundamental unity underlying all phenomena, deriving from a single universal purpose. This can be discovered, according to some, through scientific inquiry,

according to others, through religious revelation, or through metaphysical speculation. When discovered, it will provide men with a final solution to the question of how to live.

Though the most extreme forms of this faith, with their dehumanising visions of men as instruments of abstract historical forces, have led to criminal perversions of political practice, he emphasises that the faith

itself cannot be dismissed as the product of sick minds. It is the basis of

all traditional morality and is rooted in 'a deep and incurable metaphysical need', arising from man's sense of an inner split and his yearning for a mythical lost wholeness. This yearning for absolutes is

very often the expression of an urge to shed the burden of responsibility

for one's fate by transferring it to a vast impersonal monolithic whole

'nature, or history, or class or race, or the "harsh realities of our time",

or the irresistible evolution of the social structure, that will absorb and

integrate us into its limitless, indifferent, neutral texture, which it is

senseless to evaluate or criticise, and against which we fight to our

certain doom'.

Berlin believes that precisely because monistic visions of reality

answer fundamental human needs, a truly consistent pluralism has been

a comparatively rare historical phenomenon. Pluralism, in the sense in

which he uses the word, is not to be confused with that which is

commonly defined as a liberal outlook-according to which all extreme

positions are distortions of true values and the key to social harmony

and a moral life lies in moderation and the golden mean. True

pluralism, as Berlin understands it, is much more tough-minded and

intellectually bold: it rejects the view that all conflicts of values can be

finally resolved by synthesis and that all desirable goals may be reconciled. It recognises that human nature is such that it generates values which, though equally sacred, equally ultimate, exclude one another,

without there being any possibility of establishing an objective hierarchical relation between them. Moral conduct therefore may involve making agonising choices, without the help of universal criteria,

between incompatible but equally desirable values.

This permanent possibility of moral uncertainty is, in his view, the

RUSSIAN THINKERS

price that must be paid for recognition of the true nature of one's freedom: the individual's right to self-direction, as opposed to direction by state or church or party, is plainly of supreme importance if one holds

that the diversity of human goals and aspirations cannot be evaluated by

any universal criteria, or subordinated to some transcendent purpose.

But he maintains that, although this belief is implicit in some humanist

and liberal attitudes, the consequences of consistent pluralism are so

painful and disturbing, and so radically undermine some of the central

and uncritically accepted assumptions of the western intellectual tradition, that they are seldom fully articulated. In seminal essays on Vico, Machiavelli and Herder, and in 'Historical Inevitability', he has shown

that those few thinkers who spelt out the consequences of pluralism

have been consistently misunderstood, and their originality undervalued.

In his Four Essays on Liberty he suggests that pluralist visions of the

world are frequently the product of historical claustrophobia, during

periods of intellectual and social stagnation, when a sense of the intolerable cramping of human faculties by the demand for conformity generates a demand for 'more light', an extension of the areas of

individual responsibility and spontaneous action. But, as the dominance

of monistic doctrines throughout history shows, men are much more

prone to agoraphobia: and at moments of historical crisis, when the

necessity of choice generates fears and neuroses, men are eager to trade

the doubts and agonies of moral responsibility for determinist visions,

conservative or radical, which give them 'the peace of imprisonment, a

contented security, a sense of having at last found one's proper place in

the cosmos'. He points out that the craving for certainties has never

been stronger than at the present time; and his Four Essays on Liberty

are a powerful warning of the need to discern, through a deepening

of moral perceptions-a 'complex vision' of the world-the cardinal

fallacies on which such certainties rest.

Like many other liberals Berlin believes that such a deepening of

perceptions can be gained through a study of the intellectual background to the Russian Revolution. But his conclusions are very different from theirs. With the subtle moral sense which led him to radically

new insights into European thinkers, he refutes the common view that

the Russian intelligentsia were, to a man, fanatical monists: he shows

that their historical predicament strongly predisposed them to both

types of vision of the world, the monist and the pluralist-that the

fascination of the intelligentsia derives from the fact that the most

INTRODUCTION

sensitive among them suffered simultaneously, and equally acutely,

from historical claustrophobia and from agoraphobia, so that at one

and the same time they were both strongly attracted to messianic

ideologies and morally repelled by them. The result, as he reveals, was

a remarkably concentrated self-searching which in many cases produced

prophetic insights into the great problems of our own time.

The causes of that extreme Russian agoraphobia which generated a

succession of millenarian political doctrines are well known: in the

political reaction following the failure of the revolution of 1 825, which

had sought to make Russia a constitutional state on the western model,

the small westernised intellectual elite became deeply alienated from

their backward society. With no practical outlet for their energies, they

channelled their social idealism into a religiously dedicated search for

truth. Through the historiosophical systems of Idealist philosophy,

then at the height of its influence in Europe, they hoped to find a

unitary truth which would make sense of the moral and social chaos

around them and anchor them securely in reality.

This yearning for absolutes was one source of that notorious consistency which, as Berlin points out, was the most striking characteristic of Russian thinkers-their habit of taking ideas and concepts to their

most extreme, even absurd, conclusions: to stop before the extreme

consequences of one's reasoning was seen as a sign of moral cowardice,

insufficient commitment to the truth. But Berlin emphasises that there

was a second, conflicting motivation behind this consistency. Amongst

the westernised minority, imbued through their education and reading

with both Enlightenment and romantic ideals of liberty and human

dignity, the primitive and crushing despotism of Nicholas I produced a

claustrophobia which had no parallel in the more advanced countries

of Europe. As a result the intelligentsia'ssearch for absolutes began with a

radical denial of absolutes-of tradi tiona! and accepted faiths, dogmas and

institutions, political, religious and social; since these, they believed,

had distorted man's vision of himself and of his proper social relations.

As Berlin shows in his essay 'Russia and 1 848', the failure of the

European revolutions in 1 848 had the effect in Russia of accelerating

this process : it resulted among the intelligentsia in a profound distrust of

western liberal and radical ideologues and their social nostrums. For the

most morally sensitive among the intelligentsia, intellectual consistency

implied above all a process which they called 'suffering through' the

truth, the stripping off, through a painful process of inner liberation, of

all the comforting illusions and half-truths which had traditionally

xvii

R U S SIAN THINKERS

concealed or justified forms of social and moral despotism. This led to

a critique, with far-reaching implications, of the unquestioned assumptions at the base of everyday social and political conduct. This consistency, with the tensions engendered by its compound of faith and scepticism, and the insights to which it led, is the central theme of

Berlin's essays on Russian thinkers.

In a number of vivid portraits of individual thinkers, he shows that

the most outstanding members of the intelligentsia were continually

torn between their suspicion of absolutes and their longing to discover

some monolithic truth which would once and for all resolve the problems of moral conduct. Some surrendered to the latter urge: Bakunin began his political career with a famous denunciation of the tyranny of

dogmas over individuals, and ended it by demanding total adherence to

his own dogma of the wisdom of the simple peasant; and many of the

young 'nihilist' iconoclasts of the 186os accepted without question the

dogmas of a crude materialism. In other thinkers the battle was more

serious and sustained. The critic Belinsky is often cited as the archexample of the intelligentsia's inhuman fanaticism: from Hegelian principles he deduced that the despotism of Nicholas I was to be

admired, contrary to all the instincts of conscience, as the expression of

cosmic harmony. But Berlin points out, in an intensely moving study

of Belinsky, that if the longing for faith led him briefly to defend such

a grotesque proposition, his moral integrity soon drove him to reject

this blinkered vision for a fervent humanism which denounced all the

great and fashionable historiosophical systems as molochs, demanding

the sacrifice of living individuals to ideal abstractions. Belinsky

epitomises the pariLdox of Russian consistency: their desire for an ideal

which would resist all attempts at demolition led the intelligentsia to

apply themselves to the work of demolition with an enthusiasm and

lucidity which exposed the hollowness of those assumptions about

society and human nature on which the belief in absolute and universal

solutions is based. In an essay on the populist tradition which dominated

Russian radical thought in the nineteenth century, Berlin shows that

the populists were far ahead of their time in their awareness of the

dehumanising implications of contemporary liberal and radical theories

of progress, which placed such faith in quantification, centralisation,

and rationalisation of productive processes .

. Most of the intelligentsia regarded their destructive criticism as a

mere preliminary, the clearing of the ground for some great ideological

construction; Berlin sees it as thoroughly relevant to our own time,

xviii

INTR O D U CTION

when only a consistent pluralism an protect human freedom from the

depredations of the systematisers. Such a pluralism, he shows, was

fully articulated in the ideas of a thinker whose originality has hitherto

been largely overlooked-Alexander Herzen.

The founder of Russian populism, Herzen was known in the west as

a Russian radical with a Utopian faith in an archaic form of socialism.

Isaiah Berlin, in two essays on Herzen, and in introductions1 to his

greatest works, From the Other Shore and My Past and Thoughts, has

transformed our understanding of him, firmly establishing him as 'one

of Russia's three moral preachers of genius', the author of some of the

most profound of modern writings on the subject of liberty.

Like other members of the intelligentsia, Herzen had begun his

intellectual career with a search for an ideal, which he found in

socialism; he believed that the instincts of the Russian peasant would

lead to a form of socialism superior to any in the west. But he refused

to prescribe his ideal as a final solution to social problems, on the

grounds that a search for such a solution was incompatible with respect

for human liberty. At the beginning of the 184os he was attracted, like

Bakunin, to the Young Hegelians, with their belief that the way to

freedom lay through negation of the outworn dogmas, traditions and

institutions to which men habitually enslaved themselves and others.

H� espoused this rejection of absolutes with a thoroughgoing consistency equalled only by Stirner, deriving from it a deeply radical humanism. He attributed the failure of liberating movements in the

past to a fatally inconsistent tendency to idolatry on the part even of the

most radical iconoclasts, who liberate men from one yoke only to

enslave them to another. Rejection of specific forll!S of oppression never

went far enough: it failed to attack their common source-the tyranny

of abstractions over individuals. As Berlin shows, Herzen's attacks on

all deterministic philosophies of progress demonstrate how well he

understood that 'the greatest of sins that any human being can perpe-trate is to seek to transfer moral responsibility from his own shoulders to an unpredictable future order', to sanctify monstrous crimes by faith

in some remote Utopia.

Berlin emphasises that Herzen's own predicament was a very

modern one, in that he was torn between the conflicting values of

equality and excellence: he recognised the injustice of elites but valued

1 Not included in this volume. The introduction to My Past a,uJ Thoughts is

one of the essays in Against the Curren/, a forthcoming volume of the selection.

xix

RUSSIAN THIN K E R S

the- intellectual and moral freedom, and the aesthetic distinction, of

true aristocracy. But while refusing, unlike the ideologists of the left,

ro sacrifice excellence to equality, h� understood, with J. S. Mill,

something which has only become dear in our own day: that the

common mean between these values, represented by 'mass societies', is

not the best of both worlds, but more frequently, in Mill's words, an

aesthetically and Nhically repellent 'conglomerated mediocrity', the

submergence of the individual in the mass. With great conviction and

in a language as vivid and committed as Herzen's own, Berlin has

perceived and conveyed to the English reader the originality of

Herzen's belief that there are no general solutions to individual and

specific problems, only temporary expedients which must be based on

an acute sense of the uniqueness of each historical situation, and on a

high degree of responsiveness to the particular needs and demands of

diverse individuals and peoples.

Berlin's exploration of the self-searching of Russian thinkers includes studies of two writers-Tolstoy and Turgenev. These studies refute a widespread misconception about the relations between Russian

writers and thinkers: namely, that in Russia literature and radical

thought form two distinct traditions related only by mutual hostility.

Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's well-known aversion to the intelligentsia

is frequently quoted to emphasise the gulf between Russia's great

writers, who were concerned with exploring men's spiritual depths, and

the intelligentsia, materialists concerned only with the external forms

of social existence. In his essays on Tolstoy and Turgenev Berlin

shows that their art can be understood only as a product of the same

moral conflict as that experienced by the radical intelligentsia. The

essays have a dual significance: as works of criticism they offer insights

which should make a fundamental difference to our understanding of

two of Russia's greatest writers; as studies of conflicts between two

opposing visions of reality they are a significant contribution to the

history of ideas.

In his famous study of Tolstoy's view of history, 'The Hedgehog

and the Fox', and in the less well-known essay, 'Tolstoy and Enlightenment', Berlin shows that the relation between Tolstoy's artistic vision and his moral pread:.ing may be understood as a titanic struggle

between the monist and pluralist visions of reality. Tolstoy's 'lethal

nihilism' led him to denounce the pretensions of all theories, dogmas

and systems to explain, order or predict the complex and contradictory

phenomena of history and social existence, but the driving force of this

INTR O D U C T I ON

nihilism was a passionate longing to discover one unitary truth,

encompassing all existence and impregnable to attack. He was thus

constantly in contradiction with himself, perceiving reality in its

multiplicity but believing only in 'one vast, unitary whole'. In his art

he expressed an unsurpassed feeling for the irreducible variety of

phenomena, but in his moral preaching he advocated simplification,

reduction to one single level, that of the Russian peasant or the simple

Christian ethic. In some of the most psychologically delicate and

revealing passages ever written on Tolstoy, Berlin shows that his

tragedy was that his sense of reality was too strong to be compatible

with any of the narrow ideals he set up; the conclusions articulated in

Herz.en's writings were demonstrated in the tragedy of Tolstoy's life:

his inability, despite the most desperate attempts, to harmonise opposing

but equally valid goals and attitudes. Yet his failure, his inability to

resolve his inner contradictions, gives Tolstoy a moral stature apparent

even to those most mystified or repelled by the content of his preaching.

Few writers would seem to have less in common than Tolstoy, the

fanatical seeker after truth, and Turgenev, a writer of lyrical prose, the

poet of 'the last enchantments of decaying country houses'. But in his

essay on Turgenev Berlin shows that though by temperament he was a

liberal, repelled by dogmatic narrowness and opposed to extreme

solutions, he had been deeply inRuenced in his youth by the moral

commitment of his contemporaries and their opposition to the injustices

of autocracy. He fully accepted his friend Belinsky's belief that the

artist cannot remain a neutral observer in the battle between justice and

injustice, but must dedicate himself, like all decent men, to the search

to establish and proclaim the truth. The effect of this was to tum

Turgenev's liberalism into something quite distinct from the European

liberalism of that time, much less confident and optimistic, but more

modem. In his novels, which chronicled the development of the

intelligentsia, he examined the controversies of the middle years of the

nineteenth century between Russian radicals and conservatives,

moderates and extremists, exploring with great scrupulousness and

moral perception the strengths and weaknesses of individuals and

groups, and of the doctrines by which they were possessed. Berlin

emphasises that the originality of Turgenev's liberalism lay in the

conviction which he shared with Herzen (even though he thought that

Herzen's populism was his last illusion) as against Tolstoy and the

revolutionaries (even though he admired their single-mindedness), that

there was no final solution to the central problems of society. In an age

xxi

RUS SIAN THINKERS

when liberals and radicals alike were complacent in their faith in the

inevitability of progress, when political choices seemed mapped out in

advance by inexorable historical forces-the laws governing economic

markets, or the con8ict of social classes-which could be made to

assume responsibility for their results, Turgenev perceived the hollowness of the certainties invoked by liberals to justify the injustices of the existing order, or by radicals to justify its merciless destruction. He thus

anticipated the predicament of the radical humanist in our century,

which one of the most morally sensitive political thinkers of our time,

Leszek Kolakowski, has described as a continual agony of choice

between the demands of Solltn and Stin, value and fact:

The same question recurs repeatedly, in different versions: how can

we prevent the alternatives of Sollm-Stin from becoming polarizations of utopianism-opportunism, romanticism-conservatism, purposeless madness versus collaboration with crime masquerading as sobriety? How can we avoid the fatal choice between the Scylla of

duty, crying its arbitrary slogans, and the Charybdis of compliance

with the existing world, which transforms itself into voluntary

approval of its most dreadful products? How to avoid this choice,

given the postulate-which we consider essential-that we are never

able to measure truly and accurately the limits of what we call

'historical necessity'? And that we are, consequendy, never able to

decide with certainty which concrete fact of social life is a component of historical destiny and what potentials are concealed in existing reality.

Kolakowski's formulation of this dilemma of our time is surely

valid. Yet Turgenev, a thinker of a very different type, faced it over

a century ago. Before proponents of one-sided visions, conservative

or Utopian, possessed the technological equipment for experiments on

limidess human material, it was not so difficult as it is now to defend

the view that one or other extreme vision, or even a middle way between

them, was the whole answer. Isaiah Berlin has shown that, at a time

when liberals, as well as the ideologists of the left, were still confident

of the sufficiency of their systems, Turgenev had attained a more

complex vision and had embodied it in his art.

There is no doubt with which of the three figures with whom he

deals in most detail Berlin's greatest sympathies lie. He shows us that,

for all Tolstoy's moral grandeur, his blindness at those moments when

he relinquishes the humane vision of his art for a domineering dogmatism is repellent; and that Turgenev, for all the clarity of his vision, xxii

INTR O D U CT I ON

his intelligence and sense of reality, lacked the courage and moral

commitment which he so much admired in the radical intelligentsia:

his vacillation between alternatives was too often a state of 'agreeable

and sympathetic melancholy', ultimately dispassionate and detached.

It is with Herz.en that Berlin has the greatest affinity (although he

points out that there was substance in Turgenev's assertion that

Herzen never succeeded in ridding himself of one illusion- his faith i n

the 'peasant sheepskin coat'); he ended his Inaugural Lecture, 'Two

Concepts of Liberty', with a quotation from an author whom he did

not identify: 'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and

yet stand for them unRinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man

from a barbarian.' Herzen, who, as he shows, had the subtle vision of a

Turgenev together with a self-sacrificing commitment to the truth

which was the equal of Tolstoy's, was in this sense both brave and

civilised. In his understanding that 'one of the deepest of modern

disasters is to be caught up in abstractions instead of realities', he

possessed to a very high degree that consistent pluralism of outlook

which for Berlin is the essence of political wisdom.

It is often said of the Russians that their national peculiarity consists in

expressing in a particularly extreme fashion certain universal characteristics of the human condition; and for many the historical significance of the Russian intelligentsia derives from the fact that they embodied the human thirst for absolutes in a pathologically exaggerated

form. Berlin's essays present us with a very different and much more

complex interpretation of the intelligentsia's 'universality', showing

that for a variety of historical reasons they embodied not one, but at

least two fundamental, and opposing, human urges. The urge to assert

the autonomy of the self through revolt against necessity continually

clashed with their demand for certainties, leading them to sharp

perceptions of moral, social and aesthetic problems which in this

century have come to be regarded as of central importance.

That this aspect of their thought has aroused so little attention in

the west is due in some measure to the glaring intellectual defects of the

writings of most members of the intelligentsia. The repetitiousness, the

incoherence, the proliferation of half-digested ideas from foreign

sources in the writings of men like Belinsky, together with the political

disasters for which they are held responsible, have led the majority of

western scholars fervently to echo Chaadaev's famous pronouncement

that if Russia has some universal lesson to give to the world, it is that its

xxiii

R U S SIAN THINKER S

example is at all costs to be avoided. But with an acute instinct for

quality, helped by a total absence of that condescension which is the

frequent concomitant of historical hindsight, Isaiah Berlin has discerned behind the formal shortcomings of the intelligentsia's writings a moral passion worthy of attention and respect. The essays in this book

are a vindication of the belief which he has preached to his English

audience over many years: that enthusiasm for ideas is not a failing or

a vice; that on the contrary, the evils of narrow and despotic visions of

the world can be effectively resisted only through an unswerving moral

and intellectual clarity of vision that can penetrate to and expose the

hidden implications and extreme consequences of social and political

ideals.

As he points out in his Four Essays on Liberty, no philosopher has

ever succeeded in finally proving or refuting the determinist proposition that subjective ideals have no influence on historical events: but the essays in this book, with their deep perception of the moral essence

of a man as the source of his humanity, of the way in which ideals are

'lived through' in inner conflicts, argue more powerfully than any

logical demonstration in support of the belief which penetrates all

Isaiah Berlin's writings: that men are morally free and are (more often

than the determinists who hold the field believe) able to influence

events for good or evil through their freely held ideals and convictions.

AILEEN KELLY

xxiv

T H .E year 1 848 is not usually considered to be a landmark in Russian

history. The revolutions of that year, which seemed to Herzen like

a life-giving storm on a sultry day, did not reach the Russian Empire.

The drastic changes of policy on the part of the imperial government

after the suppression of the Decembrist rising in 1825 seemed all too

effective: literary storms like the Chaadaev affair in 1836, the loose

student talk for which Herzen and his friends were punished, even

minor peasant disorders in the early 40s in remote provincial districts,

were easily disposed of; in 1848 itself not a ripple disturbed the peace

of the vast and still expanding empire. The gigantic straitjacket of

bureaucratic and military control which, if not devised, was reinforced and pulled tighter by Nicholas I, appeared despite frequent cases of stupidity or corruption to be conspicuously successful.

There was nowhere any sign of effective independent thought or

action.

Eighteen years earlier, in 1830, the news from Paris had put new

life into Russian radicals; French Utopian socialism made a deep

impression on Russian social thought; the Polish rebellion became the

rallying point of democrats everywhere, very much as did the republic

in the Spanish civil war a century later. But the rebellion was crushed,

and all embers of the great conflagration, at any rate so far as open

expression was concerned, were by 1848 virtually stamped out-in St

Petersburg no less than in Warsaw. To observers in western Europe,

sympathetic and hostile alike, . the autocracy seemed unshakeable.

Nevertheless the year 1848 is a turning-point in the development of

Russia as of Europe, not only because of the decisive part played in

subsequent Russian history by revolutionary socialism, heralded by the

Manifesto composed by Marx and Engels to celebrate its birth; but

more immediately because of the effect which the failure of the

European revolution was destined to have upon Russian public opinion,

and in particular upon the Russian revolutionary movement. At the

time, however, this could scarcely have been foreseen: well might a

sober p(>lirical observer-a Granovsky or Koshelev-feel gloomy about

R U S SIAN THINKERS

the possibility of even moderate reforms; revolution seemed too remote

to contemplate.

It seems unlikely that anyone in the 184os, even among the bolder

spirits, except perhaps Bakunin and one or two members of the

Petrashevsky circle, counted on the possibility of an immediate revolution in Russia. The revolutions that broke out in Italy, France, Prussia and the Austrian Empire had been made by more or less

organised political parties, openly opposed to the existing regimes.

These were composed of, or acted in coalition with, radical or socialist

intellectuals, were led by prominent democrats identified with recognised political and social doctrines and sects, and found support among the liberal bourgeoisie, or from frustrated national _movements at

various stages of development and animated by different ideals. They

tended also to draw a good deal of strength from disaffected workers

and peasants. None of these elements was articulate or organised in

Russia in any sense resembling the situation in the west. Parallels

between Russian and western European development are always liable

to be superficial and misleading, but if a C!)mparison is to be drawn at

all the eighteenth century in Europe offers a closer analogy. The

opposition of Russian liberals and radicals which, after the severe

repressions following the Decembrist rising, began to grow bolder and

more articulate in the middle 30s and early 40s, resembled the guerrilla

warfare against the Church and absolute monarchy conducted by the

Encyclopedists in France or by the leaders of the German Aufkliirung,

far more than the mass organisations and popular movements in western

Europe of the nineteenth century. The Russian liberals and radicals of

the 30s and 40s, whether they confined themselves to philosophical or

aesthetic issues, like the circle gathered round Stankevich, or concerned

themselves with political and social issues, like Herzen and Ogarev,

remained isolated lumieres, a small and highly self-conscious intellectual

elite; they met and argued and influenced each other in the drawingrooms and salons of Moscow or St Petersburg, but they had no popular support, no widely extended political or social framework either in the

form of political parties or even in the kind of unofficial but widespread

middle-class opposition which had preceded the great French Revolution. The scattered Russian intellectuals of this period had no middle class to lean upon, nor could they look for help from the peasantry.

'The people feel the need of potatoes, but none whatever of a constitution-that is desired only by educated townspeople who are quite powerless,' wrote Belinsky to his friends in 1846. And this was

R U S S IA AND 1 8 4 8

echoed thirteen years later by Chernyshevsky in a characteristic

hyperbole: 'There is no European country in which the vast majority

of the people is not absolutely indifferent to the rights which are the

object of desire and concern only to the liberals.'1 While this was

scarcely true of most of western Europe, then or earlier, it reflected

the backward state of Russia accurately enough. Until the economic

development of the Russian Empire created industrial and labour

problems and with them a middle class and a proletariat of the western

type, the democratic revolution remained a dream: and when such

conditions finally materialised, as they did with increasing tempo in

the last decades of the nineteenth century, the revolution did not lag

far behind. The 'Russian 1 848' occurred in that country in 1905,

by which time the middle class in the west was no longer revolutionary

or even militantly reformist; and this time-lag of half a century was·

itself a powerful factor in causing the final cleavage between liberal

and authoritarian socialism in 1 9 1 7, and the fatal divergence of paths

between Russia and Europe which followed. Perhaps F. I. Dan was

right in supposing that this was the parting of the ways which Herzen

had in mind when, addressing Edgar Quinet, he declared, 'You [will

go] by way of the proletariat towards socialism; we by way of socialism

to freedom.'2 The difference in the degree of political maturity

between Russia and the west at this period is vividly described in the

introduction to Letttrs from Franct and Italy which Herzen composed

in his Putney exile. His topic is the revolution of 1 848 in western

Europe:

The liberals, those political Protestants, became in their turn the

most fearful conservatives; behind the altered charters and con"'

stitutions they have discovered the spectre of socialism and have

grown pale with terror; nor is this surprising for they . . . have

something to lose, something to be afraid of. But we [Russians] are

not in that position at all. Our attitude to all public affairs is much

simpler and more naive.

The liberals are afraid of losing their liberty-we have none;

they are nervous of interference by governments in the industrial

sphere-with us the government interferes with everything anyhow;

they are afraid oflosing their personal rights-we have yet to acquire

them.

1 Quoted by F. I. Dan, Proislthozlulenit 6o/s�iZIIffl (New York, 1946),

PP· 36, 39·

1 Ko/oltol, No z 1o (1 December 1 865); referred to by Dan, ibid.

R U S S IAN T H I NK E R S

The extreme contradictions of our still disordered existence, the

lack of stability in all our legal and constitutional notions, on the

one hand makes possible the most unlimited despotism, serfdom and

military settlements, and on the other creates conditions in which

such revolutionary steps as those of Peter I and Alexander II are

less difficult. A man who lives in furnished rooms finds it far

easier to move than one who has acquired a house of his own.

Europe is sinking because it cannot rid itself of its cargo-that

infinity of treasures accumulated in distant and perilous expeditions.

In our case, all this is artificial ballast; out with it and overboard,

and then full sail into the open sea ! We are entering history full of

strength and energy at precisely the moment when all political

parties are becoming faded anachronisms, and everyone is pointing,

some hopefully, others with despair, at the approaching thundercloud of economic revolution. And so we, too, when we look at our neighbours, begin to feel frightened of the coming storm, and

like them, think it best to say nothing about this peril . . . But you

have no need to fear these terrors; calm yourselves, for on our

estate there is a lightning conductor-communal owntrship of tht /and/1

In other words, the total absence of elementary rights and liberties,

the seven dark years which followed 1 848, so far from inducing

despair or apathy, brought home to more than one Russian thinker the

sense of complete antithesis between his country and the relatively

liberal institutions of Europe which, paradoxically enough, was made

the basis for subsequent Russian optimism. From it sprang the

strongest hope of a uniquely happy and glorious future, destined for

Russia alone.

Herzen's analysis of the facts was quite correct. There was no

Russian bourgeoisie to speak of: the journalist Polevoy and the highly

articulate literary tea merchant, Botkin, friend of Belinsky and Turgenev, and indeed Belinsky himself, were notl'lble exceptions-social conditions for drastic liberal refonns, let alone revolution, did not exist.

Yet this very fact, which was so bitterly lamented by liberals like

Kavelin and even Belinsky, brought its own remarkable compensation.

In Europe an international revolution had broken out and failed, and

its failure created among idealistic democrats and socialists a bitter

sense of disillusion and despair. In some cases it led to cynical detachment, or else a tendency to seek comfort either in apathetic resignation, 1 A. I. Herzen, 8o6rt1t1it sochifltflii o tridtst�ti tomt�lh (Moscow, 19S+-6S),

vol. ), pp. 1 3-1 +·

R U SS I A AND 1 8 48

or in religion, or in the ranks of political reaction; very much as the

failure of the revolution of 1 90 5 in Russia produced the call to

repentance and spiritual values of the J?ekhi group. In Russia, Katkov

did become a conservative nationalist, Dostoevsky turned to orthodoxy,

Botkin turned his back upon radicalism, Bakunin signed a disingenuous

'confession'; but in general the very fact that Russia had suffered no

revolution, and no corresponding degree of disenchantment, led to a

development very different from that of western Europe. The important fact was that the passion for reform - the revolutionary fervour and the belief in the feasibility of change by means of public pressure,

agitation, and, as some thought, conspiracy-did not weaken. On the

contrary, it grew stronger. But the argument for a political revolution,

when its failure in the west was so glaring, clearly became less convincing. The discontented and rebellious Russian intellectuals of the next thirty years turned their attention to the peculiarities of their

own internal situation; and then, from ready-made solutions, imported

from the west and capable only of being artificially grafted on to the

recalcitrant growth provided by their own countrymen, to the creation

of new doctrines and modes of action adapted carefully to the peculiar

problems posed by Russia alone. They were prepared to learn and more

than learn-to become the most devoted and assiduous disciples of the

most advanced thinkers of western Europe, but the teachings of Hegel

and the German materialists, of Mill, Spencer and Comte, were

henceforth to be transformed to fit specifically Russian needs. Bazarov,

in Turgenev's Fathers and Childrm, for all his militant positivism

and materialism and respect for the west, has far deeper roots in Russian

soil, not without a certain self-conscious pride, than the men of the

1 84os with their genuinely cosmopolitan ideal: than, for example, the

imaginary Rudin, or indeed the supposed original of Rudin-Bakunin

himself, for all his pan-Slavism and Germanophobia.

The measures taken by the Government to prevent the 'revolutionary disease' from infecting the Russian Empire, did no doubt play a decisive part in preventing the possibility of revolutionary outbreaks:

but the important consequence of this 'moral quarantine' was to

weaken the influence of western liberalism; it forced Russian intellectuals in upon themselves and made it more difficult than before to escape from the painful issues before them into a kind of vague search

for panaceas from the west. There followed a sharp settling of internal

moral and political accounts: as hope receded of marching in step with

western liberalism, the Russian progressive movement tended to

R U S SIAN T H I N KERS

become increasingly inward-looking and uncompromising. The most

crucial and striking fact is that there was no inner collapse on the part

of the progressives, and both revolutionary and reformist opinion,

though it grew more nationalist, often took on a grimmer tone. It

favoured self-consciously harsh, anti-aesthetic, exaggeratedly materialistic, crude, utilitarian forms, and continued to be self-confident and optimistic, inspired by the later writings of Belinsky rather than

Herzen. There is not, even at the lowest point-during the 'seven year

long night' after 1 848-that flatness and apathy which is so noticeable

in France and Germany during these years. But this was bought at

the price of a deep schism within the intelligentsia. The new men,

Chemyshevsky and the left-wing populists, are divided by a much

wider gap from the liberals, whether of the west or of their own

country, than any of their predecessors. In the years of repression,

1 848-56, lines of demarcation grew much more real; frontiers between

the Slavophils and the Westerners, which had hitherto been easily

crossed and re-crossed, became dividing walls; the framework of

frie:tdship and mutual respect between the two camps-'the Janus with

two faces but one heart'-which had made it possible for radicals like

Belinsky and Herzen to argue furiously but in an atmosphere of deep

regard, in some cases even of affection, with Katkov or Khomyakov

or the Aksakov brothers, no longer existed. When Herzen and

Chicherin met in London in 1 8 59, Herzen saw in him not an

opponent but an enemy, and with reason. There was an even more

painful process of polarisation in the radical camp itself. The quarrel

between the moderates of Kolokol (Tht Btl/) and the St Petersburg

radicals in the 6os grew bitter. Despite the continued existence of a

common enemy-the Imperial police state-the old solidarity was

fatally broken. Chernyshevsky's meeting with Herzen in London was

a stiff, awkward and almost formal affair. The gulf between what

became the left- and the right-wing oppositions grew steadily wider;

and this despite the fact that the left wing regarded western ideals far

more critically than before, and like the right looked for salvation to

native institutions and a specifically Russian solution, losing faith in

universal remedies, compounded out of liberal or socialist doctrines

imported from the west.

Thus it came about that, when at last direct western influence had

again reasserted itself in the form of the orthodox Marxism of the

Russian social democrats of the 1 89os, the revolutionary intelligentsia

was unbroken by the collapse of liberal hopes in Europe in 1 849-5 1 .

RUSSIA AND 1 8 48

Its beliefs and principles were preserved from contamination by the

very hostility of the regime, and remained free from the danger,

prevalent among their old allies in the west, of growing soft and blurred

as a result of too much successful compromise, mingled with disillusion.

Consequently, during the time of almost universal malaise among

socialists, the Russian left-wing movement retained its ideals and its

fighting spirit. It had broken with liberalism out of strength and not

out of despair. It had created and nurtured its own tough-minded,

radical, agrarian tradition, and it was an army ready to march. Some

of the factors responsible for this trend-the independent development

of Russian radicalism as it was born in the stonns of 1 848-9-may be

worth recalling.

Tsar Nicholas I remained all his life obsessed by the Decembrist

rising. He saw himself as the ruler appointed by Providence to save

his people from the horrors of atheism, liberalism and revolution; and

being an absolute autocrat in fact as well as in name, he made it the

first aim of his government to eliminate every form of political

heterodoxy or opposition. Nevertheless, even the severest censorship,

the sharpest political police, will tend to relax its attention to some

degree after twenty years of relative quiet; in this case the long peace

had been disturbed only by the Polish rebellion, with no signs of

serious internal conspiracy anywhere, and no greater dangers to the

regime th;m a few small and localised peasant disorders, two or three

groups of radical-minded university students, a handful of westernising

professors and writers, with here and there an odd defender of the

Roman Church like Chaadaev, or an actual convert to Rome like the

eccentric ex-professor of Greek, the Redemptorist Father Pecherin.

As a result of this, in the middle 40s the liberal journals, such as

Ottchestvmnye zapiski (Notts of tht Fatherland) or Sovrtmmnik (Tht

Conttmporary), took courage and began to print, not indeed articles in

open opposition to the government-with the existing censorship and

under the sharp eye of General Dubelt of the political police, this was

out of the question-but articles ostensibly concerned with conditions

in western Europe or in the Ottoman Empire, and written in an

apparently dispassionate manner; but containing, for those who could

read between the lines, vague hints and concealed allusions critical of

the existing regime. The centre of attraction to all progressive spirits

was, of course, Paris, the home of all that was most advanced and

freedom-loving in the world, the home of socialists and Utopians, of

Leroux and Cabet, of George Sand and Proudhon-the centre of a

RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S

revolutionary art and literature, which i n the course of time were

bound to lead humanity towards freedom and happiness.

Saltykov-Shchedrin, who belonged to a typical liberal circle of the

40s, says in a famous passage of his memoirs:•

In Russia, everything seemed finished, sealed with five seals and

consigned to the Post Office for delivery to an addressee whom it

was beforehand decided not to find; in France, everything seemed

to be beginning . . . our (French] sympathies became particularly

intense towards 1 848. With unconcealed excitement we watched

all the periptteias of the drama provided by the last years of Louis

Philippe's reign. With passionate enthusiasm we read The History

of Ten Years, by Louis Blanc . . . : Louis Philippe and Guizot,

Duchatel and Thiers-these men were almost personal enemies,

perhaps more dangerous than even L. V. Dubelt.

The Russian censorship had evidently not at this period reached its

maximum severity; the censors were themselves at times inclined

towards a timid kind of right-wing liberalism; in any case they were

often no match for the ingenuity and, above all, unending persistence

of the 'disloyal' historians and journalists, and inevitably they let

through a certain amount of 'dangerous thought'. Those zealous

watchdogs of autocracy, the editors Bulgarin and Grech, who acted

as virtual agents of the political police, often denounced such oversights in private reports to their masters. But the Minister of Education, Count Uvarov, author of the celebrated patriotic triple watchword 'Orthodoxy, autocracy and the people', who could scarcely be accused of liberal leanings, was nevertheless anxious not to acquire

the reputation of a bigoted reactionary, and turned a blind eye to the

less blatant manifestations of independent writing. By western

standards, the censorship was exceptionally severe; Belinsky's letters,

for example, make quite plain the extent to which the censors managed

to mutilate his articles; nevertheless, liberal journals contrived to

survive in St Petersburg, and that in itself, to those who remembered

the years immediately following 1 82 5 and knew the temper of the

Emperor, was remarkable enough. The limits of freedom were, of

course, exceedingly narrow; the most arresting Russian social document of this period, apart from the writings of the emigres, was Belinsky's open letter to Gogol denouncing his book Selected Extracts

1 'Za rubezhom', Pobrot Jolmmit Jocltirmrii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1933-

1 94 1 ), vol. 14. p. 16z.

R U S S IA AND 1 84 8

from a Corrtspondtnct with Frimds, and that remained unpublished in

Russia in its full version until 19 I 7. And no wonder, for it was an

exceptionally eloquent and savage onslaught on the regime, inveighing

violently against the Church, the social system and the arbitrary

authority of the Emperor and his officials, and accusing Gogo! of

traducing the cause of liberty and civilisation as well as the character

and the needs of his enslaved and helpless country. This celebrated

philippic, written in I 84-7, was secretly circulated in manuscript far

beyond the confines of Moscow or St Petersburg. Indeed, it was

largely for reading this letter aloud at a private gathering of disaffected

persons that Dostoevsky was condemned to death and so nearly

executed two years later. In I 843 subversive French doctrines were,

so Annenkov tells us, openly discussed in the capital : the police official,

Liprandi, found forbidden western texts openly displayed in the bookshops. In the year I 847, Henen, Belinsky and Turgenev met Bakunin and other Russian political emigre. in Paris-their new moral

and political experiences found some echo in the radical Russian press;

this year marks the highest point of relative toleration on the part of

the censorship. The revolution of I 848 put an end to all this for

some years to come.

The story is familiar and may be found in Shilder.1 Upon receipt

of the news of the abdication of Louis Philippe and the declaration of

a republic in France, the Emperor Nicholas, feeling that his worst

forebodings about the instability of European regimes were about to

be fulfilled, decided to take immediate action. According to Grimm's

(almost certainly apocryphal) account, as soon as he heard the disastrous news from Paris, he drove to the palace of his son, the future Tsar Alexander II, where an eve-of-Lent ball was in progress.

Bursting into the ballroom, he stopped the dancers with an imperious

gesture, cried 'Gentlemen, saddle your horses, a republic has been

proclaimed in France !' and with a group of courtiers swept out of the

room. Whether or not this dramatic episode ever occurred-Shilder

does not believe it-it conveys the general atmosphere accurately

enough. Prince Petr Volkonsky at about this time told V. I. Panaev

that the Tsar seemed bent on declaring a preventive war in Europe

and was only stopped by lack of money. As it was, large reinforce-

1 N. K. Shilder, lmptrator Nikolay PtrOJi, tgo :r.Aiu' i tsarslfJIJtJatrit

(St Petenburg, 1903), 'Primechaniya i prilozheniya ko vtoromu tomu'

('Notes and Supplements to Volume 2'), pp. 619-2 1 .

R U SS IAN T H I N K E R S

ments were sent to guard the 'western provinces', i.e. Poland. That

unhappy country, broken not only by the savage repression of the

rebellion of 1 83 1 , but by the measures taken after the Galician

peasant rising in 1 846, did not stir. But Polish liberty was being

acclaimed, and Russian autocracy denounced, as a matter of course,

at every liberal banquet in Paris and elsewhere; and, although this

awoke no echo in Warsaw, then under the heel of Paskevich, the

Tsar suspected treason everywhere. Indeed, one of the principal

reasons why such importance was attached to the capture of Bakunin

was the Tsar's belief that he was in close touch with Polish emigreswhich was true-and that they were plotting a new Polish mutiny in which Bakunin was involved- which was false-although Bakunin's

extravagant public utterances may have lent some colour to such a

supposition. Bakunin at the time of his imprisonment seems to have

been entirely unaware of this obsession on the part of the Tsar and

therefore ignorant throughout of what was expected of him. He failed

to include the non-existent Polish plot in his otherwise imaginative

and altogether too accommodating confession. Soon after the outbreak

in Berlin, the Tsar published a manifesto, i n which he declared that

the wave of mutiny and chaos had fortunately not reached the impregnable frontiers of the Russian Empire; that he would do everything in his power to stop this spreading of the political plague, and that he

felt certain that all his loyal subjects would, at such a moment, rally

to him in order to avert the danger to the throne and to the Church.

The Chancellor, Count Nesselrode, caused an inspired commentary

on the Tsar's manifesto to appear in the 'Journal de St Pltershourg,

seeking to mitigate its bellicose tone. Whatever the effect on Europe,

in Russia the commentary seems to have deceived no one: it was

known that Nicholas had drafted the manifesto with his own hand,

and had read it to Baron Korf with tears in his eyes. Korf too was

apparently almost reduced to tears1 and at once destroyed the draft

which he had been commissioned to prepare, as unworthy. The heirapparent, Alexander, when he read the manifesto to a meeting of guards officers, was overcome by emotion; Prince Orlov, the head of

the gendarmerie, was no less deeply moved. The document stimulated

a genuine surge of patriotic feeling, although this does not appear to

have lasted long. The Tsar's policy corresponded to some degree with

1 See Shilder, op. cit. (p. 9, note I above), on which the account of this

episode is based.

J O

R U S S IA AND 1 84 8

popular feeling, at any rate among th e upper and official �. I n

1 849, Russian armies, commanded by Paskevich, crushed the revolution in Hungary; Russian influence played a major part in the suppression of the revolution in the other provinces of the Austrian Empire and in Prussia; the power of Russia in Europe, and the terror

and hatred which it inspired in the breast of every liberal and constitutionalist beyond its borders, reached their zenith. Russia was to the democrats of this period very much what the fascist powers were

in our own time: the arch-enemy of freedom and enlightenment, the

reservoir of darkness, cruelty and oppression, the land most frequently,

most violently denounced by its own exiled sons, the sinister power,

served by innumerable spies and informers, whose hidden hand was

discovered in every political development unfavourable to the growth

of national or individual liberty in Europe. This wave of liberal

indignation confirmed Nicholas in his conviction that, by his example,

no less than by his exertions, he had saved Europe from moral and

political ruin: his duty had at all times been plain to him; he carried

it out methodically and ruthlessly, unmoved by either flattery or

abuse.

The effect of the revolution on internal affairs in Russia was

immediate and powerful. All plans for agrarian reform, and in particular all proposals for the alleviation of the condition of the serfs, both private and state-owned, not to speak of plans for their liberation

to which the Emperor had at one time given much sympathetic

consideration, were abruptly dropped. For many years it had been a

commonplace, and not in liberal circles alone, that agricultural slavery

was an economic as well as a social evil. Count Kiselev, whom

Nicholas trusted and had invited to be his 'Agrarian Chief of Staff',

held this view strongly, and even the landowners and the reactionary

bureaucrats who did their best to put difficulties in the pa.th of positive

reform had not, for some years, thought it profitable to question the

evil of the system itself. Now, however, the lead given by Gogo! in his

unfortunate Selected Extracts from a Correspondence with Friends was

followed in one or two government-approved school textbooks which

went further than the most extreme Slavophils, and began to represent

serfdom as divinely sanctioned, and resting on the same unshkeable

foundation as other patriarchal Russian institutions-as sacred in its

own way as the divine right of the Tsar himself. Projected reforms of

local government were likewise discontinued. The 'hydra of revolution' was threatening the Empire, and internal enemies, as so often I I

R U SS IAN T H I N K E R S

in the history of Russia, were therefore to be handled with exemplary

severity. The first step taken was connected with censorship.

The steady stream of secret denunciation which issued from

Bulgarin and Grech at last had its effect. Baron Korf and Prince

Menshikov almost simultaneously, it appears, compiled memoranda

giving instances of the laxity of the censorship and the dangerous

liberal tone to be found in the periodical press. The Emperor declared

himself shocked and indignant that this had not been detected earlier.

A committee under Menshikov was immediately set up with instructions to look into the activities of the censors and tighten up existing regulations. This committee summoned the editors of SfJ'IJT"tmmnik

and of Otechesroennye zapisn and reproved them strongly for 'general

unsoundness'. The latter changed its tone, and its editor-publisher

Kraevsky produced in 1 849 a him pmstmt article denouncing western

Europe and all its works, and offering the government a degree of

sycophantic adulation at that time unknown even in Russia, and

scarcely to be found in Bulgarin's subservient St'Utrnaya pchela (Tht

Northern Btt). As for SD'UT"tmmnilt, its most effective contributor

Belinsky, whom nothing could corrupt or silence, had died early in

1 848.1 Henen and Bakunin were in Paris, Granovsky was too mild

and too unhappy to protest. Of major literary figures in Russia

Nekrasov was left almost alone to continue the fight; by displaying

his extraordinary agility and skill in dealing with officials, and by

lying low for a good many months, he managed to survive and even

publish, and so formed the living link between the proscribed radicals

of the 405 and the new and more fanatical generation, tried and

hardened by persecution, which carried on the struggle in the sos and

6os. The Menshikov Committee was duly superseded by a secret

committee (the Emperor was in the habit of submitting critical issues

to secret committees, which often worked at cross-purposes in ignor-

1 There is a story still to be found in the latest Soviet lives of the great

critic that at the time of his death a warrant had gone out for his arrest, and

it is true that Du belt later said that he regretted his death, as otherwise 'we

would have rotted him in a fortress' (M. K. Lemke, NiltolllffJsltit zho11tiormy

i liltroturo s826-s855 gotiw, 2nd ed. [St Petersburg, 1909], p. 190). But

Lemke has conclusively shown that no such warrant had ever been signed and

that the invitation to Belinsky to visit Dubelt, which had largely inspired the

story, was due mainly to a desire of the Third Department to get a specimen

of his handwriting in order to compare it with

letter circulating at the time (ibid., pp. 1 87-90).

1 2.

R U S S I A AND 1 84 8

ance of each other's existence) headed by Buturlin, and later by

Annenkov-commonly known as the 'Second of April Committee'.

Its duty was not that of pre-<:ensorship (which continued to be performed by censors under the direction of the Ministry of Education) but of scrutinising matter already published, with instructions to report

any trace of'unsoundness' to the Emperor himself, who undertook to

execute the necessary punitive measures. This committee was linked

with the political police through the ubiquitous Dubelt. It worked

with blind and relentless zeal, ignoring all other departn:ents and

institutions, and at one point, in an excess of enthusiasm, actually

denounced a satirical poem approved by the Tsar himself.1 By going

with a fine comb through every word published in the none too

numerous periodical press, it succeeded in virtually stiBing all forms of

political and social criticism- indeed everything but the conventional

expressions of unlimited loyalty to the autocracy and the Orthodox

Church. This proved too much even for Uvarov, and, on the plea of

ill-health, he resigned from the Ministry of Education. His successor

was an obscure nobleman- Prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov,8 who had

submitted a memorandum to the Tsar, pointing out that one of the

mainsprings of disaffection was undoubtedly the freedom of philosophical speculation permitted in the Russian universities. The Emperor accepted this thesis and appointed him to his post with

express instructions to reform university teaching by introducing

stricter observance of the precepts of the Orthodox faith, and in

particular by the elimination of philosophical or other dangerous

leanings. This medieval mandate was carried out in the spirit and

the letter and led to a 'purge' of education which exceeded even the

notorious 'purification' of the University of Kazan ten years earlier

by Magnitsky. 1 848 to 1 855 is the darkest hour in the night of

Russian obscurantism in the nineteenth century. Even the craven and

sycophantic Grech, torn by anxiety to please the authorities,

whose letters from Paris in 1 848 denounce the mildest liberal measures

of the Second Republic with a degree of scorn hardly equalled by

Benkendorf himself-even this poor creature in his autobiographfl

written in the sos complains with something approaching bitter-

1 Shilder, op. cit. (p. 9, note 1 above).

• 'Shikhmatov is Shakhmat [checkmate) to all education' was a popuJar

pun in St Petenburg.

• N. I. Grech, Ztlpisli o moti zhizni (Moscow, 1930).

1 3

R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S

ness about the stupidities of the new double censorship. Perhaps

the most vivid description of this literary 'White Terror' is the

well-known passage in the memoirs of the populist writer Gleb

Uspensky.1

One could not move, one could not even dream; it was dangerous

to give any sign of thought-of the fact that you were' not afraid; on

the contrary, you were required to show that you were scared,

trembling, even when there was no real ground for it-that is what

those years have created in the Russian masses. Perpetual fear . . .

was then in the air, and crushed the public consciousness and robbed

it of all desire or capacity for thought • . . There was not a single

point oflight on the horizon- 'You are lost,' cried heaven and earth,

air and water, man and beast-and everything shuddered and fled

from disaster into the first available rabbit hole.

Uspensky's account is borne out by other evidence, perhaps most

vividly by the behaviour of Chaadaev. In 1 848, this remarkable man,

no longer a 'certified lunatic', was still living in Moscow. The

Te/esltop debacle of 1 836 had spread his fame. He seemed unbroken

by his misfortune. His pride, his originality, and his independence, the

charm and brilliance of his conversation, but above all his reputation

as a martyr in the cause of intellectual liberty, attracted and fascinated

even his political opponents. His salon was visited by both Russian

and eminent foreign visitors, who testify that until the blow fell in

1 848, he continued to express his pro-western sympathies with an

uncompromising and (considering the political atmosphere) astonishing

degree of freedom. The more extreme members of the Slavophil

brotherhood, especially the poet Y azykov, 1 attacked him from time

to time, and on one occasion virtually denounced him to the political

police. But his prestige and popularity were still so great that the

Third Department did not touch him, and he continued to receive a

variety of distinguished personalities, both Russian and foreign, in his

weekly salon. In 1 847 he expressed himself strongly against Gogol's

Selected Extracts from a Correspondence with Friends and i n a letter

to Alexander Turgenev damned it as a symptom of megalomania on

the part of that unhappy genius. Chaadaev was not a liberal, still

less a revolutionary: he was, if anything, a romantic conservative, an

1 G. I. Uspensky, Sod1iM11iya (St Petersburg, 1 889), vol. 1, pp. 175-6.

1 See the account in M. K. Lemke, op. cit. (p. u, note 1 above), p. 451.

R U S SIA AND 1 8 4 8

admirer of the Roman Church and the western tradition, and an

aristocratic opponent of the Slavophil obsession with eastern orthodoxy and Byzantium; he was a figure of the right, not the left, but he was an avowed and fearless critic of the regime. He was admired

above all for his individualism, his unbreakable will, his incorruptible

purity and strength of character, and his proud refusal to bend to

authority. In 1 849, this paladin of western civilisation suddenly wrote

to Khomyakov that Europe was in chaos, and in deep need of Russian

help, and spoke with much enthusiasm of the Emperor's bold initiative

in crushing the Hungarian revolution. While this might have been

put down to the horror of popular risings felt by many intellectuals at

this time, this is not the end of the story. In 1 8 5 1 , Herzen published

a book abroad containing a passionate encomium of Chaadaev.1 As

soon as he heard of it, Chaadaev wrote to the head of the political

police, saying that he had learnt with annoyance and indignation that

he had been praised by so notorious a miscreant, and followed this with

sentiments of the most abject loyalty to the Tsar as an instrument of

the divine will sent to restore order in the world. To his nephew and

confidant, who asked him 'Pourquoi cette bassesse gratuite?', he

merely observed that, after all, 'One must save one's skin.' This act

of apparently cynical self-abasement on the part of the proudest and

most liberty-loving man in Russia of his time is tragic evidence of the

effect of protracted repression upon those members of the older

generation of aristocratic rebels who, by some miracle, had escaped

Siberia or the gallows.

This was the atmosphere in which the famous Petrashevsky case

was tried. Its main interest consists in the fact that it is the only

serious conspiracy under the direct influence of western ideas to be

found in Russia at that time. When Herzen heard the news, it was

'like the olive branch, which the dove brought to Noah's Ark'- the

first glimmering of hope after the Rood.2 A good deal has been written

about this case by those involved in it-among them Dostoevsky, who

was sent to Siberia for complicity in it. Dostoevsky, who in later years

detested every form of radicalism and socialism (and indeed secularism

in general) plainly tried to minimise his own part in it, and perpetrated

a celebrated caricature of revolutionary conspiracy in The Posussed.

1 Du Jlotlop�mml ties iJiti rlr?oluliotllltlirts til Ruuit (Paris, 1 8 5 1).

I A. I. Herzen, Soln-t111it sod1i1U11ii (see p. of.. note 1 above), vo]. 10,

P· 33 5·

I S

R U SS I AN T H I N KE R S

Baron Korf, one of the committee of inquiry into the Petrashevsky

affair, later said that the plot was not as serious or as widespread as

had been alleged-that it was mainly 'a conspiracy of ideas'. In the

light of later evidence, and in particular of the publication by the

Soviet Government of three volumes of documents, 1 this verdict may

be doubted. There is, of course, a sense in which there was no formal

conspiracy. All that had happened was that a certain number of

disaffected young men gathered together at regular intervals in two

or three houses and discussed the possibility of reform. It is also true

that in spite of the devotion of Butashevich-Petrashevsky himself to

the ideas of Fourier (the story that he set up a small phalanstery on

his estate for his peasants, who set fire to it almost immediately as an

invention of the devil, is unsupported by evidence) these groups were

not united by any clear body of principles accepted by them all: so,

for instance, Mombelli went no further than the desire to create

mutual aid institutions, not so much for the workers or peasants as

for members of the middle class like himself; Akhsharumov, Evropeus,

Pleshcheev were Christian Socialists; A. P. Milyukov's only crime

was apparently to have translated Lamennais. Balasoglo was a kindly

and impressionable young man, oppressed by the horrors of the Russian

social order-no more and no less than, for example, Gogo! himselfwho desired reform and improvement on mildly populist lines similar to the ideas of the more romantic Slavophils, and indeed not too unlike

the neo-medievalist nostalgia of such English writers as Cobbett, or

William Morris. Indeed, Petrashevsky's encyclopedic dictionary,

which contained 'subversive' articles disguised as scientific information,

resembles nothing so much as Cobbett's famous grammar. Nevertheless, these groups differed from the casual gatherings of such radical men of letters as Panaev, Korsh, Nekrasov and even Belinsky. Some,

at any rate, of the participants met for the specific purpose of considering concrete ideas of how to foment a rebeliion against the existing regime.

These ideas may have been impracticable, and may have contained

in them much that was fantastic drawn from the French Utopians

and other 'unscientific' sources, but their purpose was not the reform

but the overthrow of the regime, and the establishment of a . revolutionary government. Dostoevsky's descriptions in A Writer's Diary and elsewhere make it clear that Speshnev, for example, was by

1 Dtlo ptlrt�shtllltfl (Moscow/Leningrad, 1937, 19-f.l, 19S 1).

RU S S I A AND 1 8 4 8

temperament and intention a genuine revolutionary agitator, who

believed in conspiracy at least as seriously as Bakunin (who disliked

him) and attended these discussion groups with a practical purpose.

The portrait of him as Stavrogin in The Possessed strongly stresses

this aspect. Similarly, Durov and Grigoriev and one or two others

certainly seem to have believed that the revolution might break out

at any moment; while they realised the impossibility of organising a

mass movement, they put their faith, like Weitling and the groups

of German communist workers, and perhaps Blanqui at this period,

in the organisation of small cells of trained revolutionaries, a professional elite which could act efficiently and ruthlessly and seize the leadership when the hour struck -when the oppressed elements would

rise and crush the knock-kneed army of courtiers and bureaucrats

that alone stood between the Russian people and its freedom. No

doubt much of this was idle talk, since nothing remotely resembling

a revolutionary situation existed in Russia at this time. Nevertheless,

the intentions of these men were as concrete and as violent as those

of Babeuf and his friends, and, in the conditions of a tightly controlled

autocracy, the only possible means of practical conspiracy. Speshnev

was quite definitely-a Communist, influenced not merely by Dezamy

but perhaps also by the early works of Marx-for example, the anti

Proudhonist Misere de Ia philosophie. Balasoglo states in his evidencel

that one of the things which attracted him to Petrashevsky's discussion

group was that, on the whole, it avoided liberal patter and aimless

discussion and concerned itself with concrete issues, and conducted

statistical studies with a view to direct action. Dostoevsky's contemptuous references to the tendency of his fellow conspirators poliheral'nichat'-to play at being liberal-look mainly like an attempt to whitewash himself. In fact, the principal attraction of this circle for

Dostoevsky probably consisted precisely in that which had also

attracted Balasoglo-namely, that the atmosphere was serious and

intense, not amiably liberal, gay, informal and intimate, and given to

literary and intellectual gossip, like the lively evenings given by the

Panaevs, Sollogub or Herzen, at which he seems to have been snubbed

and had suffered acutely. Petrashevsky was a remorselessly earnest

man, and the groups, both his own and the subsidiary, even more

secret groups which sprang from it-as well as allied 'circles', for

example that to which Chernyshevsky belonged as a university student

1 Shilder, op. cit. (p. 9• note 1 above), vol. 2.

1 7

R U S S I AN TH I N K E R S

-meant business. The conspiracy was broken up i n April 1 849• and the

Petrashevtsy were tried and sent into exile.

Between 1 849 and the death of Nicholas I in the last months of

the Crimean war, there is not a glimmering of liberal thought. Gogo!

died an unrepentant reactionary, but Turgenev, who ventured to

praise him as a satirical genius in an obituary article, was promptly

arrested for it. Bakunin was in prison, Herzen lived abroad, Belinsky

was dead, Granovsky was silent, depressed and developing Slavophil

sympathies. The centenary of Moscow University in 1 855 proved a

dismal affair. The Slavophils themselves, although they rejected the

liberal revolution and all its works, and continued a ceaseless campaign

against western inRuences, felt the heavy hand of official repression ;

the Aksakov brothers, Khomyakov, Koshelev and Samarin, fell under

official suspicion much as I van Kireevsky had done in the previous

decade. The secret police and the special committees considered all

ideas to be dangerous as such, particularly that of a nationalism which

took up the cause of the oppressed Slav nationalities of the Austrian

Empire, and by implication thereby placed itself in opposition to the

dynastic principle and to multi-racial empires. The battle between

the Government and the various opposition parties was not an ideological war, like the long conRict fought out in the 1 870s and 8os between the left and the right, between liberals, early populists and

socialists on one side, and such reactionary nationalists as, for instance,

Strakhov, Dostoevsky, Maikov, and above all Katkov and Leontiev

on the other. During 1 848-55, the Government, and the party (as it

was called) of 'official patriotism', appeared to be hostile to thought

as such, and therefore made no attempt to obtain intellectual supporters;

when volunteers offered themselves, they were accepted somewhat

disdainfully, made use of, and occasionally rewarded. If Nicholas I

made no conscious effort to fight ideas with ideas, it was because he

disliked all thought and speculation as such; he distrusted his own

bureaucracy so deeply, perhaps because he felt that it presupposed the

minimum of intellectual activity required by any form of rational

organisation.

'To those who lived through it, it seemed that this dark tunnel

was destined to lead nowhere,' wrote Herzen in the 6os. 'N evertheless, the effect of these years was by no means wholly negative.' And this is acute and true. The revolution of 1848 by its failure, by

discrediting the revolutionary intelligentsia of Europe which had been

put down so easily by the forces of law and order, was followed by a

1 8

R U S S I A AND 1 8 4 8

mood o f profound disillusionment, by a distrust of the very idea of

progress, of the possibility of the peaceful attainment of liberty and

equality by means of persuasion or indeed any civilised means open to

men of liberal convictions. Herzen himself never wholly recovered

from this collapse of his hopes and ideas. Bakunin was disoriented by

it; the older generation of liberal intellectuals in Moscow and St

Petersburg scattered, some to drift into the conservative camp, others

to seek comfort in non-political fields. But the principal effect which

the failure of 1 848 had had on the stronger natures among the

younger Russian radicals was to convince them firmly that no real

accommodation with the Tsar's government was possible-with the

result that during the Crimean war a good many of the leading

intellectuals were close to being defeatist: nor was this by any means

confined to the radicals and revolutionaries. Koshelev in his memoirs,

published in Berlin in the 8os, 1 declares that he and some of his friends

- nationalists and Slavophils-thought that a defeat would serve

RusSia's best interests, and dwells on public indifference to the outcome of the war-an admission far more shocking at the time of its publication, during the full tide of pan-Slav agitation, than the facts

themselves can have been during the Crimean war. The Tsar's

uncompromising line precipitated a moral crisis which finally divided

the tough core of the opposition from the opportunists: it caused the

former to turn in more narrowly upon themselves. This applied to

both camps. Whether they were Slavophils and rejected the west like

the Aksakovs and Samarin, or materialists, atheists and champions of

western scientific ideas like Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Pisarev,

they became increasingly absorbed in the specific national and social

problems of Russia and, in particular, in the problem of the peasanthis ignorance, his misery, the forms of his social life, their historical origins, their economic future. The liberals of the 40s may have been

stirred to genuine compassion or indignation by the plight of the

peasantry: the institution of serfdom had long been an acute public

problem and indeed a great and recognised evil. Yet, excited as they

were by the latest social and philosophical ideas which reached them

from the west, they felt no inclination to spend their time upon

detailed and tedious researches into the actual condition of the

peasantry, upon the multitude of unexplored social and economic data

which had been so superficially described by Custine, or later in

1 A. I. Koshelev, Zopisli (Berlin, 1 884), pp. 81-4.

R U S S I AN T H IN K E R S

greater detail by Haxthausen. Turgenev had done something to

awaken interest in the day-to-day hyt1 of the peasants by the realism

of his Sportsman's Sketches. Grigorovich had moved both Belinsky

and Dostoevsky by his tragic but, to a later taste, lifeless and overwrought descriptions of peasants in The Yillage, and in Anton Goremyka, published in I 84 7. But these were ripples on the surf.lce. During the

period of enforced insulation �fter I 849, with Europe in the arms of

reaction, and only Herren's plaintive voice faintly audible from afar,

those socially conscious Russian intellectuals who had survived the

turmoil directed their sharp and fearless analytical apparatus upon the

actual conditions in which the vast majority of their countrymen were

living. Russia, which a decade or two earlier was in considerable

danger of becoming a permanent intellectual dependency of Berlin

or of Paris, was forced by this insulation to develop a native social and

political outlook of her own. A sharp change in tone is now noticeable;

the harsh, materialistic and 'nihilistic' criticism of the 6os and 70s

is due not merely to the change in economic and social conditions,

and the consequent emergence of a new class and a new tone in

Russia as in Europe, but in at least equal measure to the prison walls

within which Nicholas I had enclosed the lives of his thinking subjects.

This led to a sharp break with the polite civilisation and the nonpolitical interests of the past, to a general toughening of fibre and exacerbation of political and social differences. The gulf between the

right and the left-between the disciples of Dostoevsky and Katkov

and the followers of Chernyshevsky or Bakunin-all typical radical

intellectuals in I 848 -had grown very wide and deep. In due course

there emerged a vast and growing army of practical revolutionaries,

conscious-all too conscious-of the specifically Russian character of

their problems, seeking specifically Russian solutions. They were

forced away froo the general current of European development (with

which, in any case, their history seemed to have so little in common)

by the bankruptcy in Europe of the libertarian movement of I 848 :

they drew strength from the very harshness of the discipline which

the failure in the west had indirectly imposed upon them. Henceforth

the Russian radicals accepted the view that ideas and agitation wholly

unsupported by material force were necessarily doomed to impotence;

and they adopted this truth and abandoned sentimental liberalism

without being forced to pay for their liberation with that bitter,

1 Approximately, 'way of life'.

2.0

R U S S I A AND 1 84 8

personal disillusionment and acute frustration which proved too much

for a good many idealistic radials in the west. The Russian radials

learnt this lesson by means of precept and example, indirectly as it

were, without the destruction of their inner resources. The experience

obtained by both sides in the struggle during these dark years was a

decisive factor in shaping the uncompromising character of the later

revolutionary movement in Russia.

The Hedgehog and the Fox

A queer combination of the brain of an Englilh chelllist

with the eoul of an Indian Buddhist.

E. M. de Vogili

T H a R I! 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. '1 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 dt facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause,

related by 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, allembracing, 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,

t 'IT0M• orB' O>tc!nnje, aM' EXWOS b1 ,.,.E-ya. Archilochus frag. :zor in

M. L. West (ed.), l11m6i tt Eltgi Gr��tci, vol. 1 {Oxford, 197 1).

THE H E D G E HO G AND THE FOX

hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere,

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 a 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 Gogo),

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.

The question does not, somehow, seem wholly appropriate; it seems

to breed more darkness than it dispels. Yet it is not lack of information

that makes us pause: Tolstoy has told us more about himself and his

views and attitudes than any other Russian, more, almost, than any

other European writer; nor can his art be called obscure in any

normal sense: his universe has no dark corners, his stories are luminous

with the light of day; he has explained them and himself, and argued

about them and the methods by which they are constructed, more

articulately and with greater force and sanity and lucidity than any

R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

other writer. I s h e a fox o r a hedgehog? What are we to say? Why is

the answer so curiously difficult to find? Does he resemble Shakespeare

or Pushkin more than Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike

either, and is the question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd?

What is the mysterious obstacle with which our inquiry seems faced?

I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to this question,

since this would involve nothing less than a critical examination of the

art and thought of Tolstoy as a whole. I shall confine myself to

suggesting that the difficulty may be, at least in part, due to the fact

that Tolstoy was himself not unaware of the problem, and did his

best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis I wish to offer is that

Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog; that his

gifts and achievement are one thing, and his beliefs, and consequently

his interpretation of his own achievement, another; and that consequently his ideals have led him, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, into a systematic misinterpretation of what

he and others were doing or should be doing. No one can complain

that he has left his readers in any doubt as to what he thought about

this topic: his views on this subject permeate all his discursive writings

-diaries, recorded ohiter dicta, autobiographical essays and stories,

social and religious tracts, literary criticism, letters to private and

public correspondents. But the conflict between what he was and

what he believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history

to which some of his most brilliant and most paradoxical pages are

devoted. This essay is an attempt to deal with his historical doctrines,

and to consider both his motives for holding the views he holds and

some of their probable sources. In short, it is an attempt to take

Tolstoy's attitude to history as seriously as he himself meant his

readers to take it, although for a somewhat different reason-for the

light it casts on a single man of genius rather than on the fate of all

mankind.

I I

Tolstoy's philosophy of history has, on the whole, not obtained the

attention which it deserves, whether as an intrinsically interesting view

or as an occurrence i n the history of ideas, or even as an element in the

development of Tolstoy himself.! Those who have treated Tolstoy

1 For the purpose of this essay I propose to confine myself almost entirely

to the explicit philosophy of history contained in War and Ptau, and to

ignore, for e:umple, St6astopol Storits, Th Couacls, the fragments of the

T H E H E D G E HOG AND THE FOX

primarily as a novelist have at times looked upon the historical and

philosophical passages scattered through War and P�ace as so much

perverse interruption of the narrative, as a regrettable liability to

irrelevant digression characteristic of thiS' great, but excessively

opinionated, writer, a lop-sided, home-made metaphysic of small or

no intrinsic interest, deeply inartistic and thoroughly foreign to the

purpose and structure of the work of art as a whole. Turgenev, who

found Tolstoy's personality and an: antipathetic, although in later

years he freely and generously acknowledged his genius as a writer,

led the attack. In letters to Pavel Annenkov1 Turgenev speaks of

Tolstoy's 'charlatanism', of his historical disquisitions as 'farcical', as

'trickery' which takes in the unwary, injected by an 'autodidact' into

his work as an inadequate substitute for genuine knowledge. He

hastens to add that Tolstoy does, of course, make up for this by his

marvellous artistic genius; and then accuses him of inventing 'a system

which seems to solve everything very simply; as, for example, historical

fatalism: he mounts his hobby-horse and is off! only when he touches

earth does he, like Antaeus, recover his true strength'.t And the same

note is sounded in the celebrated and touching invocation sent by

Turgenev from his death-bed to his old friend and enemy, begging him

to cast away his prophet's mantle and return to his true vocation-that

of 'the great writer of the Russian land'. 3 Flaubert, despite his 'shouts

of admiration' over passages of Wtir and P�ace, is equally horrified : 'il

se repete et il philosophise,'f. he writes in a letter to Turgenev who had

sent him the French version of the masterpiece then almost unknown

outside Russia. In the same strain Belinsky's intimate friend and

correspondent, the philosophical tea-merchant Vasily Botkin, who

was well disposed to Tolstoy, writes to the poet Afanasy Fet: 'Literary

specialists . . . find that the intellectual element of the novel is very

weak, the philosophy of history is trivial and superficial, the denial of

the decisive influence of individual personalities on events is nothing

unpublished novel on the Decembrists, and Tolstoy's own scattered reflections

on this subject except in so far as they bear on vieWll expressed in War at�tl

P�ac�.

1 See E. I. Bogoslovsky, Turg�11tr1 DL. TDisiDifl (Tiflis, I 894), p. +I; quoted

by P. I. Biryukov, L. N. TDistoy (Berlin, 19zr), vol. :z, pp. 48-9.

I ibid.

1 Letter to Tolstoy of I I July 1 883.

' Gustave Flaubert, Lnms i"'Jit�s J T()llrgul•�ff (Monaco, I9+6), p. :z 18.

R U SSIAN TH I N K E R S

but a lot o f mystical subtlety, but apart from this the artistic gift of the

author is beyond dispute-yesterday I gave a dinner and Tyutchev was

here, and I am repeating what everybody said. '1 Contemporary

historians and military specialists, at least one of whom had himself

fought in 1 81 2,1 indignantly complained of inaccuracies of fact; and

since then damning evidence has been adduced of falsification of

historical detail by the author of War and Ptact,3 done apparently

with deliberate intent, in full knowledge of the available original

sources and in the known absence of any counter-evidence-falsification perpetrated, it seems, in the interests not so much of an artistic as of an 'ideological' purpose. This consensus of historical and aesthetic

criticism seems to have set the tone for nearly all later appraisals of

the 'ideological' content of War and Peace. Shelgunov at least honoured

it with a direct attack for its social quietism, which he called the 'philosophy of the swamp'; others for the most part either politely ignored it, or treated it as a characteristic aberration which they put down to

a combination of the well-known Russian tendency to preach (and

thereby ruin works of art) with the half-baked infatuation with

general ideas characteristic of young intellectuals in countries remote

from centres of civilisation. 'It is fortunate for us that the author is a

better artist than thinker' said the critic Dmitri Akhsharumov,• and

for more than three-quarters of a century this sentiment has been

echoed by most of the critics of Tolstoy, both Russian and foreign,

both pre-revolutionary and Soviet, both 'reactionary' and 'progressive',

by most of those who look on him primarily as a writer and an artist,

and of those to whom he is a prophet and a teacher, or a martyr, or a

social inRuence, or a sociological or psychological 'case'. Tolstoy's

theory of history is of equally little interest to Vogue and Merezhkovsky, to Stefan Zweig a'nd Percy Lubbock, to Biryukov and 1 A. A. Fet, Moi fJOipominaniya (Moscow, 1 890), part 2, p. 175.

I Se e the severe strictures of A. Vitmer, a very respectable military

historian, in his I8I2 god fl 'Yoint i mirt' (St Petersburg, 1 869), and the

tones of mounting indignation in the contemporary critical notices of A. S.

Norov, A. P. Pyatkovsky and S. Navalikhin. The lint served in the campaign

of 1 8 1 2 and, despite some errors of fact, makes criticisms of substance. The

last two are, as literary critics, almost worthless, but they seem to have taken

the trouble to veriljr some of the relevant facts.

a See V. B. Shklovsky, Mattr'yal i Jtil' fl romant L'fla Toiitogo 'Yoina i mir'

(Moscow, 1928), pa11im, but particularly chapter 7· See below, p. 42.

• Raz6or 'Yoiny i mira' (St Petersburg, 1 868), pp. 1 -4.

THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX

E. J. Simmons, not to speak of lesser men. Historians of Russian

thought1 tend to label this aspect of Tolstoy as 'fatalism', and move

on to the more interesting historical theories of Leontiev or Danilevsky. Critics endowed with more caution or humility do not go as far as this, but treat the 'philosophy' with nervous respect; even

Derrick Leon, who treats Tolstoy's views of this period with greater

care than the majority of his biographers, after giving a painstaking

account of Tolstoy's reflections on the forces which dominate history,

particularly of the second section of the long epilogue which follows

the end of the narrative portion of War and Ptoct, proceeds to follow

Aylmer Maude in making no attempt either to assess the theory

or to relate it to the rest of Tolstoy's life or thought; and even

so much as this is almost unique.1 Those, again, who are mainly

interested in Tolstoy as a prophet and a teacher concentrate on the

later doctrines of the master, held after his conversion, when he had

ceased to regard himself primarily as a writer ·and had established

himself as a teacher of mankind, an object of veneration and pilgrimage.

Tolstoy's life is normally represented as falling into two distinct parts:

first comes the author of immortal masterpieces, later the prophet of

personal and social regeneration; first the aristocratic writer, the difficult, somewhat unapproachable, troubled novelist of genius; then the 1 e.g. Professon Ilin, Yakovenko, Zenkovsky and others.

1 Honourable exceptions to this are provided by the writings of the Russian

writers N. I. Kareev and B. M. Eikhenbaum, as well as those of the French

scholars E. Haumant and Albert Sorel. Of monographs devoted to this subject

I know of only two of any worth. The lint, 'Filosofiya istorii L. N. Tolstogo',

by V. N. Pertsev, in 'Voina i mir: sburnik pll11lJati L. N. Tolrtogo, ed. V. P.

Obninsky and T. I. Polner (Moscow, 1912), after taking Tolstoy mildly

to task for obscurities, exaggerations and inconsistencies, swiftly retreats into

innocuous generalities. The other, 'Filosofiya istorii v romane L. N. Tolstogo,

"Voina i mir" ', by M. M. Rubinshtein, in Rtmltaya mysl' Ouly 191 1),

pp. 78-103, is much more laboured, but in the end seems to me to establish

nothing at all. (Very dilferent is Arnold Bennett's judgement, of which I

have learnt since writing this: 'The last part of the Epilogue is full of good

ideas the johnny can't work out. And of course, in the phrase of critics, would

have been better left out. So it would; only Tolstoy couldn't leave it out. It

was what he wrote the book for.' Tile Joumals of ../mold Btfllltll, ed.

Newman Flower, 3 vols [London, 1932·3), vol. z, 191 1-192 1, p. 6z.) As

for the inevitable efforts to relate Tolstoy's historical views to those of various

latter-day Marxiats-Kautsky, Lenin, Stalin etc.-they belong to the curiosities

of politics or theology rather than to those ofliterature.

RU SS IAN TH INKERS

sage-dogmatic, perverse, exaggerated, but wielding a vast inRuence,

panicularly in his own country-a world institution of unique importance. From time to time attempts are made to trace his later period to its roots in his earlier phase, which is felt to be full of presentiments of the later life of self-renunciation; it is this later period which is regarded as important; there are philosophical, theological, ethical,

psychological, political, economic studies of the later Tolstoy in all his

aspects.

And yet there is surely a paradox here. Tolstoy's interest in history

and the problem of historical truth was passionate, almost obsessive,

both before and during the writing of War and Ptact. No one who

reads his journals and letters, or indeed War and Ptact itself, can

doubt that the author himself, at any rate, regarded this problem as

the hean of the entire matter-the central issue round which the novel

is built. 'Charlatanism', 'superficiality', 'intellectual feebleness' -surely

Tolstoy is the last writer to whom these epithets seem applicable:

bias, perversity, arrogance, perhaps; self-deception, lack of restraint,

possibly; moral or spiritual inadequacy-of this he was better aware.

than his enemies; but failure of intellect-lack of critical power-a

tendency to emptineSs-liability to ride off on some patently absurd,

superficial doctrine to the detriment of realistic description or analysis

of life-infatuation with some fashionable theory which Botkin or Fet

can easily see through, although Tolstoy, alas, cannot-these charges

seem grotesquely unplausible. No man in his senses, during this century

at any rate, would ever dream of denying Tolstoy's intellectual power,

his appalling capacity to penetrate any conventional disguise, that

corrosive scepticism in virtue of which Prince Vyazemsky applied

to him the archaic Russian tenn 'netovshchik'1 ('negativist')-an early

version of that nihilism which Vogue and Alben Sorel later quite

naturally attribute to him. Something is surely amiss here: Tolstoy's

violently unhistorical and indeed anti-historical rejection of all effons

to explain or justify human action or character in terms of social or

individual growth, or 'roots' in the past; this side by side with an

absorbed and life-long interest in history, leading to artistic and philosophical results which provoked such queerly disparaging comments from ordinarily sane and sympathetic critics-surely there is something

here which deserves attention.

1 SeeM. De-Pule, 'V oina iz-za "Voiny i mira" ', Srmkt-Peterlmrgykie vedumasti,

18�, No 144 (17 May), 1 .

THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX

III

Tolstoy's interest in history began early in his life. It seems to have

arisen not from interest in the past as such, but from the desire to

penetrate to first causes, to understand how and why things happen

as they do and not otherwise, from discontent with those current

explanations which do not explain, and leave the mind dissatisfied,

from a tendency to doubt and place under suspicion and, if need be,

reject whatever does not fully answer the question, to go to the root

of every matter, at whatever cost. This remained Tolstoy's attitude

throughout his entire life, and is scarcely a symptom either of'trickery'

or of 'superficiality'. And with this went an incurable love of the

concrete, the empirical, the verifiable, and an instinctive distrust of

the abstract, the impalpable, the supernatural- in short an early

tendency to a scientific and positivist approach, unfriendly to romanticism, abstract formulations, metaphysics. Always and in every situation he looked for 'hard' facts-for what could be grasped and verified by the normal intellect uncorrupted by intricate theories divorced from

tangible realities, or by other-wordly mysteries, theological, poetical,

and metaphysical alike. He was tormented by the ultimate problems

which face young men in every generation-about good and evil, the

origin and purpose of the universe and its inhabitants, the causes of

all that happens; but the answers provided by theologians and metaphysicians struck him as absurd, if only because of the words in which they were formulated-words which bore no apparent reference to

the everyday world of ordinary common sense to which he clung

obstinately, even before he became aware of what he was doing, as

being alone real. History, only history, only the sum of the concrete

events in time and space-the sum of the actual experience of actual

men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual,

three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environmentthis alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers-answers needing for their apprehension no special senses or

faculties which normal human beings did not possess-might be constructed. This, of course, was the spirit of empirical inquiry which animated the great anti-theological and anti-metaphysical thinkers of

the eighteenth century, and Tolstoy's realism and inability to be taken

in by shadows made him their natural disciple before he had learnt of

their doctrines. Like Monsieur Jourdain, he spoke prose long before

he knew it, and remained an enemy of transcendentalism from the

R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

beginning to the end of his life. H e grew up during the heyday of

the Hegelian philosophy which sought to explain all things in terms

of historical development, but conceived this process as being ultimately

not susceptible to the methods of empirical investigation. The historicism of his time doubdess inAuenced the young Tolstoy as it did all inquiring persons of his time; but the metaphysical content he rejected

instinctively, and in one of his letters he described Hegel's writings

as unintelligible gibberish interspersed with platitudes. History alone

-the sum of empirically discoverable data-held the key to the mystery

of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only

history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical

problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinkP.r in

the nineteenth century. What is to be done? How should one live?

Why are we here? What must we be and do? The study of historical

connections and the demand for empirical answers to these prolclyatyt

'1Joprosy1 became fused into one in Tolstoy's mind, as his early diaries

and letters show very vividly.

In his early diaries we find references to his attempts to compare

Catherine the Great's Nalcaz1 with the passages in Montesquieu on

which she professed to have founded it.8 He reads Hume and Thie�

as well as Rousseau, Sterne, and Dickens.5 He is obsessed by the

thought that philosophical principles can only be understood in their

concrete expression in history.• 'To write the genuine history of

present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one's life.'7 Or

again : 'The leaves of a tree delight us more than the roots',8 with the

implication that this is nevertheless a superficial view of the world.

1 'Accursed questions' -a phrase which became a cliche! in nineteenthcentury Russia for those central moral and social issues of which every honest man, in particular every writer, must sooner or later become aware, and then

be faced with the choice of either entering the struggle or turning his back

upon his fellow-men, conscious of his responsibility for what he was doing.

a Instructions to her legislative experts.

a L. N. Tolstoy, Polrwe sobr(IJiit socbmmii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1918"64), vol.

46, pp. 4-18.

' ibid., PP· 97· I I ], 1 14-o 1 17, 123-+o 1 27.

1 ibid., pp. 1 26, 1 27, 130, 13 2-4-o 167, 1 76, 249; 82, 1 10; 14-o.

• Diary entry for 1 1 June 18§2.

7 Entry for 22 September 1 Bsz.

• N. N. Apoatolov, LIP TolslfiJ su1l s1rai1s11mi islmi (Moscow, 1928),

p. zo.

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

But side by side with this there is the beginning of an acute sense of

disappointment, a feeling that history, as it is written by historians,

makes claims which it cannot satisfy, because like metaphysical

philosophy it pretends to be something it is not-namely, a science

capable of arriving at conclusions which are certain. Since men cannot

solve philosophical questions by the principles of reason they try to

do so historically. But history is 'one of the most backward of sciences

-a science which has lost its proper aim'.1 The reason for this is

that history will not, because it cannot, solve the great questions

which have tormented men in every generation. In the course of

seeking to answer these questions men accumulate a knowledge . of

facts as they succeed each other in time: but this is a mere by-product,

a kind of 'side issue' which-and this is a mistake-is studied as an end

in itself. And again, 'history will never reveal to us what connections

there are, and at what times, between science, art, and morality,

between good and evil, religion and the civic virtues. What it will

tell us (and that incorrectly) is where the Huns came from, where they

lived, who laid the foundations of their power, etc. • And according to

his friend Nazariev, Tolstoy said to him in the winter of 1 846:

'History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered

up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names. The death

of Igor, the snake which bit Oleg-what is all this but old wives'

tales? Who wants to know that Ivan's second marriage, to Temryuk's

daughter,, occurred on 2.1 August 1 562., whereas.his fourth, to Anna

Alekseevna Koltovskaya, oa:urr� in 1 572.

?'2

• • .

History does not reveal causes; it presents only a blank succession

of unexplained events. 'Everything is forced into a standard mould

invented by the historians: Tsar Ivan the Terrible, on whom Professor

Ivanov is lecturing at the moment, after 1 560 suddenly becomes

transformed from a wise and virtuous man into a mad and cruel

tyrant. How? Why? -You mustn't even ask . . . '1 And half a century

later, in 1 908, he declares to Gusev: 'History would be an excellent

thing if only it were true.'' The proposition that history could (and

should) be made scientific is a commonplace in the nineteenth century;

but the number of those who interpreted the term 'science' as meaning

1 ibid.

• V. N. Nazariev, 'Lyudi bylogo vremeai', L. N. TolsiiJ 11 1101/fJiflifllllliytllA

s�lfltllllilflll (Moscow, I9§ S), vol. r, p. 52.

1 ibid., pp. §2·3·

' N. N. Guaev, D11t1gDU s L. N. TolsiJIII (Moecow', 1973), p. 188.

l•

R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

natural science, and then asked themselves whether history could be

transformed into a science in this specific sense, is not great. The most

uncompromising policy was that of Auguste Comte, who, following

his master, Saint-Simon, tried to turn history into sociology, with

what fantastic consequences we need not here relate. Karl Marx was

perhaps, of all thinkers, the man who took his programme most

seriously; and made the bravest, if one of the least successful, attempts

to discover general laws which govern historical evolution, conceived

on the then alluring analogy of biology and anatomy so triumphantly

transformed by Darwin's new evolutionary theories. Like Marx (of

whom at the time of writing War and Peau he apparently knew

nothing) Tolstoy saw clearly that if history was a science, it must be

possible to discover and formulate a set of true laws of history which,

in conjunction with the data of empirical observation, would make

prediction of the future (and 'retrodiction' of the past) as feasible as it

had become, say, in geology or astronomy. But he saw more clearly

than Marx and his followers that this had, in fact, not been achieved,

and said so with his usual dogmatic candour, and reinforced his thesis

with arguments designed to show that the prospect of achieving this

goal was non-existent; and clinched the matter by observing that the

fulfilment of this scientific hope would end human life as we knew it:

'if we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility

of life (i.e. as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free

will] is destroyed'.1 But what oppressed Tolstoy was not merely the

'unscientific' nature of history-that no matter how scrupulous the

technique of historical research might be, no dependable laws could

be discovered of the kind required even by the most undeveloped

natural sciences-but he further thought that he could not justify to

himself the apparently arbitrary selection of material, and the no less

arbitrary distribvtion of emphasis, to which all historical writing seemed

to be doomed. He complains that while the factors which determine

the life of mankind are very various, historians select from them only

some single aspect, say the political or the ..:conomic, and represent

it as primary, as the efficient cause of social change; but then, what of

religion, what of 'spiritual' factors, and the many other aspects-a

literally countless multiplicity-with which all events are endowed?

How can we escape the conclusion that the histories which exist

represent what Tolstoy declares to be 'perhaps only o·OOI per cent of

1 Wtlr tl11d Pttlct, epilogue, part 1, chapter 1 .

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E F O X

the elements which actually constitute the real history of peoples'?

History, as it is normally written, usually represents 'political' - public

-events as the most important, while spiritual-'inner'-events are

largely forgotten; yet prima facie it is they-the 'inner' events-that

are the most real, the most immediate experience of human beings;

they, and only they, are what life, in the last analysis, is made of;

hence the routine political historians are talking shallow nonsense.

Throughout the 5os Tolstoy was obsessed by the desire to write

a historical novel, one of his principal aims being to contrast the 'real'

texture of life, both of individuals and communities, with the 'unreal'

picture presented by historians. Again and again in the pages of War

and Peace we get a sharp juxtaposition of 'reality' -what 'really'

occurred-with the distorting medium through which it will later be

presented in the official accounts offered to the public, and indeed be

recollected by the actors themselves-the original memories having

now been touched up by their own treacherous (inevitably treacherous

because automatically rationalising and formalising) minds. Tolstoy is

perpetually placing the heroes of War and Peace in situations where

this becomes particularly evident.

Nikolay Rostov at the battle of Austerlitz sees the great soldier,

Prince Bagration, riding up with his suite towards the village of

Schongraben, whence the enemy is advancing; neither he nor his

staff, nor the officers who gallop up to him with messages, nor anyone

else is, or can be, aware of what exactly is happening, nor where, nor

why; nor is the chaos of the battle in any way made dearer either in

fact or in the minds of the Russian officers by the appearance of

Bagration. Nevertheless his arrival puts heart into his subordinates;

his courage, his calm, his mere presence create the illusion of which

he is himself the first victim, namely, that what is happening is somehow connected with his skill, his plans, that it is his authority that is in some way directing the course of the battle; and this, in its turn,

has a marked effect on the general morale all round him. The dispatches

which will duly be written later will inevitably ascribe every act and

event on the Russian side to him and his dispositions; the credit or

discredit, the victory or the defeat, will belong to him, although it is

clear to everyone that he will have had less to do with the conduct

and outcome of the battle than the humble, unknown soldiers who

do at least perform whatever actual fighting is done, i.e. shoot at each

other, wound, kill, advance, retreat, and so on.

Prince Andrey, too, knows this, most dearly at Borodino, where

R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

h e i s mortally wounded. H e begins to understand the truth earlier,

during the period when he is making efforts to meet the 'important'

persons who seem to be guiding the destinies of Russia; he then

gradually becomes convinced that Alexander's principal adviser, the

famous reformer Speransky, and his friends, and indeed Alexander

himself, are systematically deluding themselves when they suppose

their activities, their words, memoranda, rescripts, resolutions, laws

etc. to be the motive factors which cause historical change and determine the destinies of men and nations; whereas in fact they are nothing: only so much self-important milling ia the void. And so

Tolstoy arrives at one of his celebrated paradoxes: the higher soldiers

or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be

from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose

lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller

the effect of the words and acts of such remote personages, despite all

their theoretical authority, upon that history. In a famous passage

dealing with the state of Moscow in 1 8 1 2 Tolstoy observes that from

the heroic achievements of Russia after the burning of Moscow one

might infer that its inhabitants were absorbed entirely in acts of selfsacrifice-in saving their country, or in lamenting its destruction-in heroism, martyrdom, despair etc., but that in fact this was not so.

People were preoccupied by personal interests. Those who went about

their ordinary business without feeling heroic emotions or thinking

that they were actors upon the well-lighted stage of history were the

most useful to their country and community, while those who tried

to grasp the general course of events and wanted to take part in

history, those who performed acts of incredible self-sacrifice or

heroism, and participated in great events, were the most useless.1

Worst of all, in Tolstoy's eyes, were those unceasing talkers who

accused one another of the kind of thing 'for which no one could in

fact have been responsible'. And this because 'nowhere is the commandment not to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge so clearly written as in the courSe of history. Only unconscious activity bears

fruit, and the individual who plays a part in historical events never

understands their significance. If he attempts to understand them, he

is struck with sterility.'1 To try to 'understand' anything by rational

means is to make sure of failure. Pierre Bezukhov wanders about,

1 W11r 1111J Pt11u, vol. 4, part 1, chapter 4·

I ibid.

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

'lost' on the battlefield of Borodino, and looks for something which

he imagines as a kind of set piece; a battle as depicted by the historians

or the painters. But he finds only the ordinary confusion of individual

human beings haphazardly attending to this or that human want.l

That, at any rate, is concrete, uncontaminated by theories and abstractions; and Pierre is therefore closer to the truth about the course of events-at least as seen by men-than those who believe them to obey

a discoverable set of laws or rules. Pierre sees only a succession of

'accidents' whose origins and consequences are, by and large, untraceable and unpredictable; only loosely strung groups of events forming

· an ever varying pattern, following no discernible order. Any claim

to perceive patterns susceptible to 'scientific' formulas must be

mendacious.

Tolstoy's bitterest taunts, his most corrosive irony, are reserved for

those who pose as official specialists in managing human affairs, in

this case the western military theorists, a General Pfuel, or Generals

Bennigsen and Paulucci, who are all shown talking equal nonsense

at the Council of Orissa, whether they defend a given strategic or

tactical theory or oppose it; these men must be impostors since no

theories can possibly fit the immense variety of possible human

behaviour, the vast multiplicity of minute, undiscoverable causes and

effects which form that interplay of men and nature which history

purports to record. Those who affect to be able to contract this infinite

multiplicity within their 'scientific' laws must be either deliberate

charlatans, or blind leaders of the blind. The harshest judgment is

accordingly reserved for the master theorist himself, the great Napoleon,

who acts upon, and has hypnotised others into believing, the assumption that he understands and controls events by his superior intellect, or by flashes of intuition, or by otherwise succeeding in answering

correctly the problems posed by history. The greater the claim the

greater the lie : Napoleon is consequently the most pitiable, the most

contemptible of all the actors in the great tragedy.

This, then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to

expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events. Those who believe this turn out to be dreadfully mistaken. And side by side with these public faces

-these hollow men, half self-deluded, half aware of being fraudulent,

1 On the connection of this with Stendhal'a lA CAtlrlrttllt u Ptmnt see

p. 56, note 1.

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

talking, writing, desperately and aimlessly i n order to keep u p appearances and avoid facing the bleak truths-side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence

and irrelevance and blindness lies the real world, the stream of life

which men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily

existence. When Tolstoy contrasts this real life-the actual, everyday,

'live' experience of individuals-with the panoramic view conjured

up by historians, it is dear to him which is real, and which is a coherent,

sometimes elegantly contrived, but always fictitious construction.

Utterly unlike her as he is in almost every other respect, Tolstoy is,

perhaps, the first to propound the celebrated accusation which

Virginia Woolf half a century later levelled against the public prophets

of her own generation- Shaw and Wells and Arnold Bennett-blind

materialists who did not begin to understand what it is that life truly

consists of, who mistook its outer accidents, the unimportant aspects

which lie outside the individual soul-the so-called social, economic,

political realities-for that which alone is genuine, the individual

experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the

colours, smells, tastes, sounds, and movements, the jealousies, loves,

hatreds, passions, the rare Rashes of insight, the transforming moments,

the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute

all there is-which are reality.

What, then, is the historian's task-to describe the ultimate data of

subjective experience-the persona! lives lived by men-the 'thoughts,

knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hates, passions' of which,

for Tolstoy, 'real' life is compounded, and only that? That was the

task to which Turgenev was perpetually calling Tolstoy-him and all

writers, but him in particular, because therein lay his true genius, his

destiny as a great Russian writer; and this he rejected with violent

indignation even during his middle years, before the final religious

phase. For this was not to give the answer to the question of what

there is, and why and how it comes to be and passes away, but to turn

one's back upon it altogether, and stifte one's desire to discover how

men live in society, and how they are affected by one another and by

their environment, arod to what end. This kind of artistic purismpreached in his day by Flaubert-this kind of preoccupation witl1 the analysis and description of the experience and the relationships and

problems and inner lives of individuals (later advocated and practised

by Gide and the writers he inftuenced, both in France and in England)

struck him as both trivial and hlse. He had no doubt about his own

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

superlative skill in this very art-and that it was precisely this for

which he was admired; and he condemned it absolutely. In a letter

written while he was working on War and Peace he said with bittern� that he had no doubt that what the public would like best would be his scenes of social and personal life, his ladies and his gentlemen,

with their petty intrigues and entertaining conversations and marvellously described small idiosyncrasies.• But these are the trivial 'flowers'

of life, not the 'roots'. Tolstoy's purpose is the discovery of the truth,

and therefore he must know what history consists of, and recreate

only that. History is plainly not a science, and sociology, which

pretends that it is, is a fraud; no genuine laws of history have been

discovered, and the concepts in current use-'cause', 'accident', 'genius'

-explain nothing: they are merely thin disguises for ignorance. Why

do the events the totality of which we call history occur as they do?

Some historians attribute events to the acts of individuals, but this is

no answer: for they do not explain how these acts 'cause' the events

they are alleged to 'cause' or 'originate'. There is a passage of savage

irony intended by Tolstoy to parody the average school histories of his

time, sufficiently typical to be worth reproducing in full:1

Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man. He had such

and such mistresses, and such and such ministers, and he governed

France badly. The heirs of Louis XIV were also weak men, and

also governed France badly. They also had such and such favourites

and such and such mistresses. Besides which, certain persons were

at this time writing books. By the end of the eighteenth century

there gathered in Paris two dcrzen or so persons who started saying

that all men were free and equal. Because of this in the whole of

France people began to slaughter and drown each other. These

people killed the king and a good many others. At this time there

was a man of genius in France-Napoleon. He conquered everyone

everywhere, i.e. killed a great many people because he was a great

genius; and, for some reason, he went off to kill Africans, and killed

1 Cf. the profession of faith in his celebrated-and militantly moralisticintroduction to an edition of Maupassant whose genius, despite everything, he admires ('Predislovie k sochineniyam Gyui de Mopassana', Po/not

sol!rt�t�it soclline11ii [ cf. p. 30, note 3 above], vol. 30, pp. 3-24). He thinks

much more poorly of Bernard Shaw, whose social rhetoric he calls stale and

platitudinous (diary entry for 3 I january I 908, ibid., voJ. 56, pp. 97-8).

• War a11ti Peace, epilogue, part z, chapter r .

R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S

them so well, and was so clever and cunning, that, having arrived

in France, he ordered everyone to obey him, which they did.

Having made himself Emperor he again went to kill masses of

people in Italy, Austria and Prussia. And there too he killed a

great many. Now in Russia there was the Emperor Alexander who

decided to re-establish order in Europe, and therefore fought wars

with Napoleon. But in the year '07 he suddenly made friends with

him, and in the year ' 1 1 quarrelled with him again, and they both

again began to kill a great many people. And Napoleon brought six

hundred thousand men to Russia and conquered Moscow. But then

he suddenly ran away from Moscow, and then the Emperor

Alexander, aided by the advice of Stein and others, united Europe

to raise an army against the disturber of her pe;1ce. All Napoleon's

allies suddenly became his enemies; and this army marched against

Napoleon, who had gathered new forces. The allies conquered

Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to renounce the throne,

and sent him to the island of Elba, without, however, depriving him

of the title of Emperor, and showing him all respect, in spite of the

fact that five years before and a year after, everyone considered him

a brigand and beyond the law. Thereupon Louis XVIII, who

until then had been an object of mere ridicule to both Frenchmen

and the allies, began to reign. As for Napoleon, after shedding tears

before the Old Guard, he gave up his throne, and went into exile.

Then astute statesmen and diplomats, in particular Talleyrand, who

had managed to sit down before anyone else in the famous armchair1 and thereby to extend the frontiers of France, talked in Vienna, and by means of such talk made peoples happy or unhappy.

Suddenly the diplomats and monarchs almost came to blows. They

were almost ready to order their troops once again to kill each other;

but at this moment Napoleon arrived in France with a battalion,

and the French, who hated him, all immediately submitted to him.

But this annoyed the allied monarchs very much and they again

went to war with the French. And the genius Napoleon was

defeated and taken to the island of St Helena, having suddenly been

discovered to be an outlaw. Whereupon the exile, parted from his

dear ones and his beloved France, died a slow death on a rock, and

bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. As for Europe, a reaction

occurred there, and all the princes began to treat their peoples badly

once again.

Tolstoy continues:

1 Empire chain of a certain shape are to this day called 'Talleyrand armchain' in Russia.

T H E H E D G E H O G A N D T H E FOX

. . . the new history is like a deaf man replying to questions which

nobody puts to him . . . the primary question . . . is, what power is

it that moves the destinies of peoples? . . . History seems to presuppose that this power can be taken for granted, and is familiar to everyone, but, in spite of every wish to admit that this power is

familiar to us, anyone who has read a great many historical works

cannot help doubting whether this power, which different historians

understand in different ways, is in fact so completely familiar to

everyone.

He goes on to say that political historians who write in this way

explain nothing; they merely attribute events to the 'power' which

important individuals are said to exercise on others, but do not tell us

what the term 'power' means: and yet this is the heart of the problem.

The problem of historical movement is directly connected with the

'power' exercised by some men over others: but what is 'power'?

How does one acquire it? Can it be transferred by one man to another?

Surely it is not merely physical strength that is meant? Nor moral

strength? Did Napoleon possess either of these?

General, as opposed to national, historians seem to Tolstoy merely to

extend this category without elucidating it: instead of one country or

nation, many are introduced, but the spectacle of the interplay of

mysterious 'forces' makes it no clearer why some men or nations

obey others, why wars are made, victories won, why innocent men

who believe that murder is wicked kill one another with enthusiasm

and pride, and are glorified for so doing; why great movements of

human masses occur, sometimes from east to west, sometimes the

other way. Tolstoy is particularly irritated by references to the

dominant influence of great men or of ideas. Great men, we are told,

are typical of the movements of their age: hence study of their

characters 'explains' such movements. Do the characters of Diderot

or Beaumarchais 'explain' the advance of the west upon the east? Do

the letters of Ivan the Terrible to Prince Kurbsky 'explain' Russian

expansion westward? But historians of culture do no better, for they

merely add as an extra factor something called the 'force' of ideas or

of books, although we still have no notion of what is meant by words

like 'force'. But why should Napoleon, or Mme de Stael or Baron

Stein or Tsar Alexander, or all of these, plus the Contrat social,

'cause' Frenchmen to behead or to drown each other? Why is this

called an 'explanation'? As for the importance which historians of

culture attach to ideas, doubtless all men are liable to exaggerate the

R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

importance o f their own wares: ideas are the commodity i n which

intellectuals deal - to a cobbler there's nothing like leather-the professors merely tend to magnify their personal activities into the central

'force' that rules the world. Tolstoy adds that an even deeper darkness

is cast upon this subject by political theorists, moralists, metaphysicians.

The celebrated notion of the social contract, for example, which

some liberals peddle, speaks of the 'vesting' of the wills, i.e. the power,

of many men in one individual or group of individuals; but what kind

of act is this 'vesting'? It may have a legal or ethical significance, it may

be relevant to what should be considered as permitted or forbidden, to

the world of rights and duties, or of the good and the bad, but as a

factual explanation of how a sovereign accumulates enough 'power'as if it were a commodity-which enables him to effect this or that result, it means nothing. It declares that the conferring of power

makes powerful; but this tautology is too unilluminating. What is

'power' and what is 'conferring'? And who confers it and how is

such conferring done?1 The process seems very different from whatever it is that is discussed by the physical sciences. Conferring is an act, but an unintelligible one; conferring power, acquiring it, using it,

is not at all like eating or drinking or thinking or walking. We remain

in the dark: obscurum per obscurius.

After demolishing the jurists and moralists and political philosophers-among them his beloved Rousseau-Tolstoy applies himself to demolishing the liberal theory of history according to which

everything may turn upon what may seem an insignificant accident.

Hence the pages in which he obstinately tries to prove that Napoleon

knew as little of what actually went on during the battle of Borodino

as the lowliest of his soldiers; and that therefore his cold on the eve

of it, of which so much was made by the historians, could have made

no appreciable difference. With great force he argues that only those

orders or decisions issued by the commanders now seem particularly

crucial (and are concentrated upon by historians), which happened

to coincide with what later actually occurred; whereas a great many

1 OneofTolstoy's Russian critics, M. M. Rubinshtein, referred to on p. 27,

note z, 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- t:7ox 11inili.

T H E H E D G E H O G A N D T H E FOX

other exactly similar, perfectly good orders and decisions, which

seemed no less crucial and vital to those who were issuing them at

the time, are forgotten because, having been foiled by unfavourable

turns of events, they were not, because they could not be, carried out,

and for this reason now seem historically unimportant. After disposing

of the heroic theory of history, Tolstoy turns with even greater

savagery upon scientific sociology, which claims to have discovered

laws of history, but cannot possibly have found any, because the

number of causes upon which events turn is too great for human

knowledge or calculation. We know too few facts, and we select them

at random and in accordance with our subjective inclinations. No

doubt if we were omniscient we might be able, like Laplace's ideal

observer, to plot the course of every drop of which the stream of

history consists, but we are, of course, pathetically ignorant, and the

areas of our knowledge are incredibly small compared to what is

uncharted and (Tolstoy vehemently insists on this) unchartable.

Freedom of the will is an illusion which cannot be shaken off, but,

as great philosophers have said, it is an illusion nevertheless, and it

derives solely from ignorance of true causes. The more we know

about the circumstances of an act, the farther away from us the act

is in time, the more difficult it is to think away its consequences; the

more solidly embedded a fact is in the actual world in which we

live, the less we can imagine how things might have turned out if

something different had happened. For by now it seems inevitable:

to think otherwise would upset too much of our world order. The

more closely we relate an act to its context, the less free the actor

seems to be, the less responsible for his act, and the less disposed we

are to hold him accountable or blameworthy. The fact that we shall

never identify all the causes, relate all human acts to the circumstances which condition them, does not imply that they are free, only that we shall never know how they are necessitated.

Tolstoy's central thesis-in some respects not unlike the theory of

the inevitable 'self-deception' of the bourgeoisie held by his contemporary Karl Marx, save that what Marx reserves for a class, Tolstoy sees in almost all mankind-is that there is a natural law

whereby the lives of human beings no less than that of nature are

determined; but that men, unable to face this inexorable process, seek

to represent it as a succession of free choices, to fix responsibility for

what occurs upon persons endowed by them with heroic virtues or

heroic vices, and called by them 'great men'. What are great men�

4 1

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough

to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would

rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified

in their name, than recognise their own insignificance and impotence

in the cosmic .Row which pursues its course irrespective of their wills

and ideals. This is the central point of those passages (in which

Tolstoy excelled) in which the actual course of events is described,

side by side with the absurd, egocentric explanations which persons

blown up with the sense of their own importance necessarily .give

to them; as well as of the wonderful descriptions of moments of

illumination in which the truth about the human condition dawns

upon those who have the humility to recognise their own unimportance

and irrelevance. And this is the purpose, too, of those philosophical

passages where, in language more ferocious than Spinoza's, but with

intentions similar to his, the errors of the pseudo-sciences are exposed.

There is a particularly vivid simile1 in which the great man is likened

to the ram whom the shepherd is fattening for slaughter, Because the

ram duly grows fatter, and perhaps is used as a bell-wether for the rest

of the .Rock, he may easily imagine that he is the leader of the .Rock,

and that the other sheep go where they go solely in obedience to his

will. He thinks this and the .Rock may think it too. Nevertheless

the purpose of his selection is not the role he believes himself to play,

but slaughter-a purpose conceived by beings whose aims neither he

nor the other sheep can fathom. For Tolstoy Napoleon is just such

a ram, and so to some degree is Alexander, and indeed all the great

men of history. Indeed, as an acute literary historian has pointed out,1

Tolstoy sometimes seems almost deliberately to ignore the historical

evidence and more than once consciously distorts the facts in order

to bolster up his favourite thesis. The character of Kutuzov is a case

in point. Such heroes as Pierre Bezukhov or Karataev are at least

imaginary, and Tolstoy had an undisputed right to endow them with

all the attributes he admired-humility, freedom from bureaucratic

or scientific or other rationalistic kinds of blindness. But Kutuzov

was a real person, and it is all the more instructive to observe the steps

by which he transforms him from the sly, elderly, feeble voluptuary,

1 W11r 11trJ Pt11u, epilogue, part 1, chapter 2.

1 See V. B. Shklovsky, op. cit. (p. 26, note 3 above), chapten 7-9, and alJo

K. V. Polaovsky, 'lstochnilci romana "Voina i mir"', in Obninsky and Polner,

op. cit. (p. 27, note 2 above).

T H E H E D G E HO G AND THE FOX

the corrupt and somewhat sycophantic courtier of the early drafts of

War and P�ac� which were based on authentic sources, into the unforgettable symbol of the Russian people in all its simplicity and intuitive wisdom. By the time we reach the celebrated passage-one

of the most moving in literature-in which Tolstoy describes the

moment when the old man is woken in his camp at FiJi to be told

that the French army is retreating, we have left the facts behind us,

and are in an imaginary realm, a historical and emotional atmosphere

for which the evidence is flimsy. but which is artistically indispensable

to Tolstoy's design. The final apotheosis of Kutuzov is totally unhistorical for all Tolstoy's repeated professions of his undeviating devotion to the sacred cause of the truth. In War and P�ac� Tolstoy

treats &cts cavalierly when it suits him, because he is above all

obsessed by his thesis-the contrast between the universal and allimportarit but delusive experience of free will, the feeling of responsibility, the values of private life generally, on the one hand; and on the other, the reality of inexorable historical determinism, not, indeed,

experienced directly, but known to be true on irrefutable theoretical

grounds. This corresponds in its turn to a tormenting inner conflict,

one of many, in Tolstoy himself, between the two systems of value,

the public and the private. On the one hand, if those feelings and

immediate experiences. upon which the ordinary values of private

individuals and historians alike ultimately rest are nothing but a vast

illusion, this must, in the name of the truth, be ruthlessly demonstrated,

and the values and the explanations which derive from the illusion

exposed and discredited. And in a sense. Tolstoy does try to do this,

particularly when he is philosophising, as in the great public scenes

of the novel itself, the battle pieces, the descriptions of the movements

of peoples, the metaphysical disquisitions. But, on the other hand, he

also does the exact opposite of this when he contrasts with this panorama of public life the .superior value of personal experience, the

'thoughts, knowledge, poetry, music, love, friendship, hates, passions'

of which real life is compounded -when he contrasts the concrete

and multi-coloured reality of individual lives with the pale abstractions

of scientists or historians, particularly the latter, 'from Gibbon to

Buckle', whom he denounces so harshly for mistaking their own

empty categories for real facts. And yet the primacy of these private

experiences and relationships and virtues presupposes that vision of

life, with its sense of personal responsibility, and belief in freedom

and the possibility of spontaneous action, to which the best pages of

R U S S I AN T H IN K E R S

W or and Peact are devoted, and which i s the very illusion to be

exorcised, if the truth is to be faced.

This terrible dilemma is never finally resolved. Sometimes, as in

the explanation of his intentions which he published before the final

part of War and Peact had appeared,1 Tolstoy vacillates; the individual

is 'in some sense' free when he alone is involved: thus, in raising his

arm, he is free within physical limits. But once he is involved in

relationships with others, he is no longer free, he is part of the inexorable stream. Freedom is real, but it is confined to trivial acts. At other times even this feeble ray of hope is extinguished : Tolstoy

declares that he cannot admit even small exceptions to the universal

law; causal determinism is either wholly pervasive or it is nothing,

and chaos reigns. Men's acts may seem free of the social nexus, but

they are not free, they cannot be free, they are part of it. Science

cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is

no morality and no art, but it can refute it. 'Power' and 'accident' are

but names for ignorance of the causal chains, but the chains exist

whether we feel them or not; fortunately we do not; for if we felt

their weight, we could scarcely act at all; the loss of the illusion would

paralyse the life which is lived on the basis of our happy ignorance.

But all is well : for we never shall discover all the causal chains that

operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes

themselves infinitely small ; historians select an absurdly small portion

of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny

section. How would an ideal historical science operate? By using a kind

of calculus whereby this 'differential', the infinitesimals-the infinitely

small human and non-human actions and events-would be integrated,

and in this way the continuum of history would no longer be distorted

by being broken up into arbitrary segments.2 Tolstoy expresses this

notion of calculation by infinitesimals with great lucidity, and with his

habitual simple, vivid, precise use of words. Henri Bergson, who made

his name with his theory of reality as a flux fragmented artificially by

the natural sciences, and thereby distorted and robbed of continuity

and life, developed a very similar point at infinitely greater length, less

clearly, less plausibly, and with an unnecessary parade of terminology.

It is not a mystical '>r an intuitionist view of life. Our ignorance of

1 'Neskol'ko slov po povodu knigi: "Voina i mir" ', Rrmltii arltnifl 6 (I 868),

columns 5 I 5-28.

1 War and Ptau, vol. 3• part 3, chapter I .

THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX

how things happen is not due to some inherent inaccessibility of the

first causes, only to their multiplicity, the smallness of the ultimate

units, and our own inability to see and hear and remember and record

and coordinate enough of the available material. Omniscience is in

principle possible even to empirical beings, but, of course, in practice

unattainable. This alone, and nothing deeper or more interesting, is

the source of human megalomania, of all our absurd delusions. Since

we are not, in fact, free, but could not live without the conviction

that we are, what are we to do? Tolstoy arrives at no clear conclusion,

only at the view, in some respect like Burke's, that it is better to

realise that we understand what goes on as we do in fact understand it

- much as spontaneous, normal, simple people, uncorrupted by theories,

not blinded by the dust raised by the scientific authorities, do, in fact,

understand life-than to seek to subvert such commonsense beliefs,

which at least have the merit of having been tested by long experience,

in favour of pseudo-sciences, which, being founded on absurdly

inadequate data, are only a snare and a delusion. That is his case

against all forms of optimistic rationalism, the natural sciences, liberal

theories of progress, German military expertise, French sociology,

confident social engineering of all kinds. And this is his reason for

inventing a Kutuzov who followed his simple, Russian, untutored

instinct, and despised or ignored the German, French and Italian

experts; and for raising him to the status of a national hero which he

has, partly as a result of Tolstoy's portrait, retained ever since.

'His figures', said Akhsharumov in 1 868, immediately on the

appearance of the last part of War and Ptact, 'are real and not mere

pawns in the hands of an unintelligible destiny';1 the author's theory,

on the other hand, was ingenious but irrelevant. This remained the

general view of Russian and, for the most part, foreign literary critics

too. The Russian left-wing intellectuals attacked Tolstoy for 'social

indifferentism', for disparagement of all noble social impulses as a

compound of ignorance and foolish monomania, and an 'aristocratic'

cynicism about life as a marsh which cannot be reclaimed; Flaubert

and Turgenev, as we have seen, thought the tendency to philosophise

unfortunate in itself; the only critic who took the doctrine seriously

and tried to provide a rational refutation was the historian Kareev.1

1 op. cit. (p. 26, note 4 above).

1 N. I. Kareev, 'Istoricheskaya filosofiya v "Voine i mire" ', YtstTiiA: tflrrJPJ,

July t 887, pp. 227-69.

R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S

Patiently and mildly he pointed out that fascinating as the contrast

between the reality of personal life and the life of the social ant-hill

may be, Tolstoy's conclusions did not follow. True, man is at once

an atom living its own conscious life 'for itself', and at the same time

the unconscious agent of some historical trend, a relatively insignificant

element in the vast whole composed of a very large number of such

elements. War and Ptau, Kareev tells us, 'is a historical poem on

the philosophical theme of the duality of human life'- and

Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to

happen by the combination of such obscure entitles as the 'power' or

'mental activity' assumed by naive historians; indeed he was, in

Kareev's view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as 'heroes', 'historic forces', 'moral forces',

'nationalism', 'reason' and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or

class, or metaphysical bias. So far so good, and Tolstoy is judged to

have shown deeper insight-'greater realism'-than most historians. He

was right also in demanding that the infinitesimals of history be

integrated. But then he himself had done just that by creating the

individuals of his novel who are not trivial precisely to the degree to

which in their characters and actions, they 'summate' countless others,

who between them do 'move history'. This is the integrating of

infinitesimals, not, of course, by scientific, but by 'artistic-psychological' means. Tolstoy was right to abhor abstractions, but this had led him too far, so that he ended by denying not merely that history

was a natural science like chemistry-which was correct-but that it

was a science at all, an activity with its own proper concepts and

generalisations; which, if true, would abolish all history as such.

Tolstoy was right to say that the impersonal 'forces' and 'purposes'

of the older historians were myths, and dangerously misleading myths,

but unless we were allowed to ask what made this or that group of

individuals-who, in the end, of course, alone were real-behave thus

and thus, without needing first to provide separate psychological

analyses of each member of the group and then to 'integrate' them all,

we could not think about history or society at all. Yet we did do this,

and profitably, and to deny that we could discover a good deal by social

observation, historical inference and similar means was, for Kareev,

tantamount to denying that we had criteria for distinguishing between

THE H E D G E HOG AND T H E FOX

historical truth and falsehood which were less or more reliable-and

that was surely mere prejudice, fanatical obscurantism. Kareev declares

that it is men, doubtless, who make social forms, but these forms-the

ways in which men live-in their turn affect those born into them ;

individual wills may not be all-powerful, but neither are they totally

impotent, and some are more effective than others: Napoleon may

not be a demigod, but neither is he a mere epiphenomenon of a

process which would have occurred unaltered without him; the

'important people' are less important than they themselves or the

more foolish historians may suppose, but neither are they shadows;

individuals, besides their intimate inner lives which alone seem real

to Tolstoy, have social purposes, and some among them have strong

wills too, and these sometimes transform the lives of communities.

Tolstoy's notion of inexorable laws which work themselves out whatever men may think or wish is itself an oppressive myth ; laws are only statistical probabilities, at any rate in the social sciences, not hideous

and inexorable 'forces' -a concept the darkness of which, Kareev

points out, Tolstoy himself in other contexts exposed with such

brilliance and malice, when his opponent seemed to him too naive or

too clever or in the grip of some grotesque metaphysic. But to say

that unless men make history they are themselves, particularly the

'great' among them, mere 'labels', because history makes itself, and

only the unconscious life of the social hive, the human ant-hill, has

genuine significance or value and 'reality'- what is this but a wholly