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
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
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
Copyright 1948, 1951, 1953 by Isaiah Berlin
Copyright© Isaiah Berlin, 1955. 1956, 1960, 1961, 1972, 1978
'Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty' copyright©
President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1955
This selection and editorial matter copyright ©
Henry Hardy, 1978
Introduction copyright© Aileen Kelly, 1978
All rights reserved
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
IX
Introduction: A Complex Vision by Ailttn Ktl/y
xiii
Russia and I 848
The Hedgehog and the Fox
22
Herun and Bakunin on Individual Liberty
82
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
v
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'
X
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
XV
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
XX
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
I
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
2
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.
3
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 +·
4
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
s
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 .
6
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
7
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.
8
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 .
9
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.
14
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).
J6
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.
19
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.
21
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).
22
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
23
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.
25
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.
26
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.
27
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
29
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.
30
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 .
32
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
33
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.
34
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.
35
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
36
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 .
37
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
39
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.
40
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
43
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.
45
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
46
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