The Hedgehog and the Fox

² Archilochus fragment 201 in M. L. West (ed.), Iambi et elegi graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Oxford, 1989). [The fragment was preserved in a collection of proverbs by the Greek Sophist Zenobius (5. 68), who says that it is found in both Archilochus and Homer – West, op. cit., vol. 2 (Oxford, 1992), ‘Homerus’ fragment 5. Since it is iambic rather than dactylic in metre, the attribution to Homer is likely to mean that it appeared in the (now thought pseudo-Homeric) comic epic poem Margites, probably written later than Archilochus’ poem. See e.g. C. M. Bowra, ‘The Fox and the Hedgehog’, Classical Quarterly 34 (1940), 26–9 (see 26), an article reprinted with revisions in Bowra’s On Greek Margins (Oxford, 1970), 59–66 (see 59), and evidently unknown to Berlin. In any event, the sentiment might well be a proverb deployed by both authors, though given Archilochus’ frequent use of animal encounters (on which see also 114–15 below), it is attractive to think it was used first, and given this metrical form, by him.]

¹ For the purposes of this essay I propose to confine myself almost entirely to the explicit philosophy of history contained in War and Peace, and to ignore, for example, Sevastopol Stories, The Cossacks, the fragments of the unpublished novel on the Decembrists, and Tolstoy’s own scattered reflections on this subject except in so far as they bear on views expressed in War and Peace.

¹ Letters of 14 February and 13 April 1868: I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (Moscow/Leningrad, 1960–8), Pis′ma, vii 64, 122.

² ibid. 122.

³ Letter to Tolstoy of 29 June 1883, ibid. xiii 180.

⁴ ‘He repeats himself and he philosophises.’ Letter of 21 January 1880, Gustave Flaubert, Lettres inédites à Tourguéneff, ed. Gérard Gailly (Monaco, 1946), 218 (‘cris d’admiration’ ibid.).

¹ A. A. Fet, Moi vospominaniya (Moscow, 1890), part 2, 175.

² See the severe strictures of A. Vitmer, a very respectable military historian, in his 1812 god v ‘Voine i mire’: po povodu istoricheskikh ukazanii IV toma ‘Voiny i mira’ grafa L. N. Tolstogo (St Petersburg, 1869), and the tones of mounting indignation in the contemporary critical notices of S. Navalikhin (‘Izyashchnyi romanist i ego izyashchnye kritiki’, Delo 1868 no. 6, ‘Sovremennoe obozrenie’, 1–28), A. S. Norov (“‘Voina i mir” (1805–1812) s istoricheskoi tochki zreniya i po vospominaniyam sovremennikov (po povodu sochineniya grafa L. N. Tolstogo: “Voina i mir”)’, Voennyi sbornik 1868 no. 11, 189–246) and A. P. Pyatkovsky (‘Istoricheskaya epokha v romane gr. L. N. Tolstogo’, Nedelya 1868: no. 22, cols 698–704; no. 23, cols 713–17; no. 26, cols 817–28). The first served in the campaign of 1812 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 verify some of the relevant facts.

³ See Viktor Shklovsky, Mater′yal i stil′ v romane L′va Tolstogo ‘Voina i mir’ (Moscow, 1928), passim, but particularly chapters 7 and 8. See also 47 below.

¹ N. V. Shelgunov, ‘Filosofiya zastoya’ (review of War and Peace), Delo 1870 no. 1, ‘Sovremennoe obozrenie’, 1–29.

² [More literally: ‘Fortunately, the author […] is a poet and an artist ten thousand times more than a philosopher.’] N. D. Akhsharumov, Voina i mir, sochinenie grafa L. N. Tolstogo, chasti 1–4: razbor (St Petersburg, 1868), 40.

³ e.g. Professors Il′in, Yakovenko, Zenkovsky and others. [When invited to provide initials or forenames (see index), and to identify the specific works in question, IB responded that their omission was deliberate. Yakovenko did not hold a professorship.]