THE HEDGEHOG AND THE FOX

AN ESSAY ON TOLSTOY'S VIEW OF HISTORY

By ISAIAH BERLIN, Henry Hardy

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and Henry Hardy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15600-2

Contents

Foreword by Michael Ignatieff..............................................ixEditor's Preface...........................................................xiiiAuthor's Note..............................................................xviiThe Hedgehog and the Fox...................................................1Appendix to the Second Edition.............................................91Index......................................................................117

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Hedgehog and the Fox

A queer combination of the brain of an English chemistwith the soul of an Indian Buddhist.

E. M. de Vogüé

I

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poetArchilochus which says: 'The fox knows many things, but thehedgehog knows one big thing.' Scholars have differed about thecorrect interpretation of these dark words, which may mean nomore than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by thehedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words canbe made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepestdifferences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be,human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm betweenthose, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision,one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in termsof which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal,organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are andsay has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursuemany ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected,if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological orphysiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that arecentrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered ordiffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of avast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves,without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit theminto, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing,sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical,unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artisticpersonality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; andwithout insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without toomuch fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongsto the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius,Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varyingdegrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus,Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, thedichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimatelyabsurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should itbe rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous: like all distinctionswhich embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of viewfrom which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuineinvestigation. Thus we have no doubt about the violence of thecontrast between Pushkin and Dostoevsky; and Dostoevsky'scelebrated speech about Pushkin has, for all its eloquence anddepth of feeling, seldom been considered by any perceptivereader to cast light on the genius of Pushkin, but rather on thatof Dostoevsky himself, precisely because it perversely representsPushkin – an arch-fox, the greatest in the nineteenth century – asbeing similar to Dostoevsky, who is nothing if not a hedgehog;and thereby transforms, indeed distorts, Pushkin into a dedicatedprophet, a bearer of a single, universal message which was indeedthe centre of Dostoevsky's own universe, but exceedingly remotefrom the many varied provinces of Pushkin's protean genius.Indeed, it would not be absurd to say that Russian literature isspanned by these gigantic figures – at one pole Pushkin, at theother Dostoevsky; and that the characteristics of other Russianwriters can, by those who find it useful or enjoyable to ask thatkind of question, to some degree be determined in relation tothese great opposites. To ask of Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Blokhow they stand in relation to Pushkin and to Dostoevsky leads – or,at any rate, has led – to fruitful and illuminating criticism. Butwhen we come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask this ofhim – ask whether he belongs to the first category or the second,whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of oneor of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded ofheterogeneous elements – there is no clear or immediate answer.The question does not, somehow, seem wholly appropriate; itseems to breed more darkness than it dispels. Yet it is not lack ofinformation that makes us pause: Tolstoy has told us more abouthimself and his views and attitudes than any other Russian, more,almost, than any other European, writer. Nor can his art be calledobscure in any normal sense: his universe has no dark corners,his stories are luminous with the light of day; he has explainedthem and himself, and argued about them and the methods bywhich they are constructed, more articulately and with greaterforce and sanity and lucidity than any other writer. Is he a fox ora hedgehog? What are we to say? Why is the answer so curiouslydifficult to find? Does he resemble Shakespeare or Pushkin morethan Dante or Dostoevsky? Or is he wholly unlike either, and isthe question therefore unanswerable because it is absurd? Whatis the mysterious obstacle with which our enquiry seems faced?

I do not propose in this essay to formulate a reply to thisquestion, since this would involve nothing less than a criticalexamination of the art and thought of Tolstoy as a whole. I shallconfine myself to suggesting that the difficulty may be, at least inpart, due to the fact that Tolstoy was himself not unaware of theproblem, and did his best to falsify the answer. The hypothesis Iwish to offer is that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed inbeing a hedgehog; that his gifts and achievement are one thing,and his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his ownachievement, another; and that consequently his ideals have ledhim, and those whom his genius for persuasion has taken in, intoa systematic misinterpretation of what he and others were doingor should be doing. No one can complain that he has left hisreaders in any doubt as to what he thought about this topic: hisviews on this subject permeate all his discursive writings – diaries,recorded obiter dicta, autobiographical essays and stories, socialand religious tracts, literary criticism, letters to private and publiccorrespondents. But the conflict between what he was and whathe believed emerges nowhere so clearly as in his view of history,to which some of his most brilliant and most paradoxical pagesare devoted. This essay is an attempt to deal with his historicaldoctrines, and to consider both his motives for holding the viewshe holds and some of their probable sources. In short, it is anattempt to take Tolstoy's attitude to history as seriously as hehimself meant his readers to take it, although for a...