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 somewhatdifferent reason – for the light it casts on a single man of geniusrather than on the fate of all mankind.

II

Tolstoy’s philosophy of history has, on the whole, not obtainedthe attention which it deserves, whether as an intrinsically interestingview or as an occurrence in the history of ideas, or even asan element in the development of Tolstoy himself. Those whohave treated Tolstoy primarily as a novelist have at times lookedupon the historical and philosophical passages scattered throughWar and Peace as so much perverse interruption of the narrative,as a regrettable liability to irrelevant digression characteristicof this great, but excessively opinionated, writer, a lopsided,home-made metaphysic of small or no intrinsic interest, deeplyinartistic and thoroughly foreign to the purpose and structureof the work of art as a whole. Turgenev, who found Tolstoy’spersonality and art antipathetic, although in later years he freelyand generously acknowledged his genius as a writer, led the attack.In letters to Pavel Annenkov, Turgenev speaks of Tolstoy’s’charlatanism’, of his historical disquisitions as ‘farcical’, as ‘trickery’which takes in the unwary, injected by an ‘autodidact’ intohis work as an inadequate substitute for genuine knowledge. Hehastens to add that Tolstoy does, of course, make up for this byhis marvellous artistic genius; and then accuses him of inventing’a system which seems to solve everything very simply; as, forexample, historical fatalism: he mounts his hobby-horse and isoff! Only when he touches earth does he, like Antaeus, recoverhis true strength.’ The same note is sounded in the celebratedand touching invocation sent by Turgenev from his deathbed tohis old friend and enemy, begging him to cast away his prophet’smantle and return to his true vocation – that of ‘the great writerof the Russian land’. Flaubert, despite his ‘shouts of admiration’over passages of War and Peace, is equally horrified: ‘il se répète etil philosophise’, he writes in a letter to Turgenev, who had senthim the French version of the masterpiece then almost unknownoutside Russia. In the same strain Belinsky’s intimate friend andcorrespondent, the philosophical tea-merchant Vasily Botkin,who was well disposed to Tolstoy, writes to the poet Afanasy Fetthat literary specialists

find that the intellectual element of the novel is very weak, thephilosophy of history is trivial and superficial, the denial of thedecisive influence of individual personalities on events is nothingbut a lot of mystical subtlety, but apart from this the artistic giftof the author is beyond dispute – yesterday I gave a dinner andTyutchev was here, and I am repeating what everybody said.

Contemporary historians and military specialists, at least one ofwhom had himself fought in 1812, indignantly complained of inaccuraciesof fact; and since then damning evidence has been adducedof falsification of historical detail by the author of War andPeace, done apparently with deliberate intent, in full know ledgeof the available original sources and in the known absence of anycounter-evidence – falsification perpetrated, it seems, in the interestsnot so much of an artistic as of an ‘ideological’ purpose.

This consensus of historical and aesthetic criticism seems tohave set the tone for nearly all later appraisals of the ‘ideological’content of War and Peace. Shelgunov at least honoured it with adirect attack for its social quietism, which he called ‘the philosophyof the swamp’; others for the most part either politely ignored it,or treated it as a characteristic aberration which they put downto a combination of the well-known Russian tendency to preach(and thereby ruin works of art) with the half-baked infatuationwith general ideas characteristic of young intellectuals in countriesremote from centres of civilisation. ‘It is fortunate for us thatthe author is a better artist than thinker,’ said the critic NikolayAkhsharumov, and for more than three-quarters of a centurythis 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 lookon him primarily as a writer and an artist, and of those to whomhe is a prophet and a teacher, or a martyr, or a social influence, ora sociological or psychological ‘case’. Tolstoy’s theory of historyis of equally little interest to Vogüé and Merezhkovsky, to StefanZweig and Percy Lubbock, to Biryukov and E. J. Simmons, notto speak of lesser men. Historians of Russian thought tend tolabel this aspect of Tolstoy as ‘fatalism’, and move on to the moreinteresting historical theories of Leont’ev or Danilevsky. Criticsendowed with more caution or humility do not go as far as this,but treat the ‘philosophy’ with nervous respect; even DerrickLeon, who treats Tolstoy’s views of this period with greater carethan the majority of his biographers, after giving a painstakingaccount of Tolstoy’s reflections on the forces which dominatehistory, particularly of the second section of the long epiloguewhich follows the end of the narrative portion of War and Peace,proceeds to follow Aylmer Maude in making no attempt eitherto assess the theory or to relate it to the rest of Tolstoy’s life orthought; and even so much as this is almost unique. Those, again,who are mainly interested in Tolstoy as a prophet and a teacherconcentrate on the later doctrines of the master, held after hisconversion, when he had ceased to regard himself primarily as awriter and had established himself as a teacher of mankind, anobject of veneration and pilgrimage. Tolstoy’s life is normallyrepresented as falling into two distinct parts: first comes theauthor of immortal masterpieces, later the prophet of personaland social regeneration; first the aristocratic writer, the difficult,somewhat unapproachable, troubled novelist of genius, thenthe sage – dogmatic, perverse, exaggerated, but wielding a vastinfluence, particularly in his own country – a world institutionof unique importance. From time to time attempts are made totrace his later period to its roots in his earlier phase, which is feltto be full of presentiments of the later life of self-renunciation;it is this later period which is regarded as important; there arephilosophical, theological, ethical, psychological, political, economicstudies of the later Tolstoy in all his aspects.

And yet there is surely a paradox here. Tolstoy’s interest inhistory and the problem of historical truth was passionate,almost obsessive, both before and during the writing of Warand Peace. No one who reads his journals and letters, or indeedWar and Peace itself, can doubt that the author himself, at anyrate, regarded this problem as the heart of the entire matter – thecentral issue round which the novel is built. ‘Charlatanism’,’superficiality’, ‘intellectual feebleness’ – surely Tolstoy is the lastwriter 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 awarethan his enemies; but failure of intellect, lack of critical power,a tendency to emptiness, liability to ride off on some patentlyabsurd, superficial doctrine to the detriment of realistic descriptionor analysis of life, infatuation with some fashionable theorywhich Botkin or Fet can easily see through, although Tolstoy, alas,cannot – these charges seem grotesquely unplausible. No man inhis senses, during this century at any rate, would ever dream ofdenying Tolstoy’s intellectual power, his appalling capacity topenetrate any conventional disguise, that corrosive scepticism invirtue of which Prince Vyazemsky tarred War and Peace withthe brush of netovshchina (negativism) – an early version of thatnihilism which Vogüé and Albert Sorel later quite naturally attributeto him. Something is surely amiss here: Tolstoy’s violentlyunhistorical and indeed anti-historical rejection of all efforts toexplain or justify human action or character in terms of social orindividual growth, or ‘roots’ in the past; this side by side with anabsorbed and lifelong interest in history, leading to artistic andphilosophical results which provoked such queerly disparagingcomments from ordinarily sane and sympathetic critics – surelythere is something here which deserves attention.

III

Tolstoy’s interest in history began early in his life. It seems tohave arisen not from interest in the past as such, but from thedesire to penetrate to first causes, to understand how and whythings happen as they do and not otherwise, from discontentwith those current explanations which do not explain, and leavethe mind dissatisfied, from a tendency to doubt and place undersuspicion and, if need be, reject whatever does not fully answerthe question, to go to the root of every matter, at whatever cost.This remained Tolstoy’s attitude throughout his entire life, andis scarcely a symptom either of ‘trickery’ or of ‘superficiality’.With it went an incurable love of the concrete, the empirical,the verifiable, and an instinctive distrust of the abstract, theimpalpable, the supernatural – in short an early tendency toa scientific and positivist approach, unfriendly to romanticism,abstract formulations, metaphysics. Always and in everysituation he looked for ‘hard’ facts – for what could be graspedand verified by the normal intellect, uncorrupted by intricatetheories divorced from tangible realities, or by other-worldlymysteries, theological, poetical and metaphysical alike. He wastormented by the ultimate problems which face young men inevery generation – about good and evil, the origin and purposeof the universe and its inhabitants, the causes of all that happens;but the answers provided by theologians and metaphysiciansstruck him as absurd, if only because of the words in which theywere formulated – words which bore no apparent reference tothe everyday world of ordinary common sense to which he clungobstinately, even before he became aware of what he was doing,as being alone real. History, only history, only the sum of the concreteevents in time and space – the sum of the actual experienceof actual men and women in their relation to one another andto an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physicalenvironment – this alone contained the truth, the material outof which genuine answers – answers needing for their apprehensionno special sense or faculties which normal human beings didnot possess – might be constructed.
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