The Hedgehog and the Fox

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 first, ‘Filosofiya istorii L. N. Tolstogo’, by V. N. Pertsev, in ‘Voina i mir’: sbornik, ed. V. P. Obninsky and T. I. Polner (Moscow, 1912), 129–53, 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 Russkaya mysl′, July 1911, section 2, 78–103, is much more laboured, but in the end seems to me to establish nothing at all. Very different is Arnold Bennett’s judgement, of which I 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.’ The Journals of Arnold Bennett, ed. Newman Flower (London etc., 1932–3), ii (1911–21) 62. As for the inevitable efforts to relate Tolstoy’s historical views to those of various latter-day Marxists – Kautsky, Lenin, Stalin etc. – they belong to the curiosities of politics or theology rather than to those of literature.

¹ P. A. Vyazemsky, ‘Vospominaniya o 1812 god’, Russkii arkhiv 7 (1869), columns 181–92, 01–016, esp. 185–7.

¹ ‘Accursed questions’ – a phrase which became a cliché in nineteenth-century 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. [Although ‘voprosy’ was widely used by the 1830s to refer to these issues, it seems that the specific phrase ‘proklyatye voprosy’ was coined in 1858 by Mikhail L. Mikhailov when he used it to render ‘die verdammten Fragen’ in his translation of Heine’s poem ‘Zum Lazarus’ (1853/4): see ‘Stikhotvoreniya Geine’, Sovremennik 1858 no. 3, 125; and Heinrich Heines Sämtliche Werke, ed. Oskar Walzel (Leipzig, 1911–20), iii 225. Alternatively, Mikhailov may have been capitalising on the fact that an existing Russian expression fitted Heine’s words like a glove, but I have not yet seen an earlier published use of it. Ed.]

² Instructions to her legislative experts.

¹ L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1928–64) [hereafter T] xlvi 4–28 (18–26 March 1847).

² ibid. – Hume: 113, 114, 117, 123–4, 127 (11–27 June 1852); Thiers: 97, 124 (20 March, 17 June 1854).

³ ibid. – Rousseau: 126, 127, 130, 132–4, 167, 176 (24 June 1852 to 28 September 1853), 249 (‘Journal of daily tasks’, 3 March 1847); Sterne: 82 (10 August 1851), 110 (14 April 1852); Dickens: 140 (1 September 1852).

⁴ ibid. 123 (11 June 1852).

⁵ ibid. 141–2 (22 September 1852).

⁶ ‘Filosoficheskie zamechaniya na rechi Zh. Zh. Russo’ (1847), T i 222, where the next two quotations also appear.

¹ V. N. Nazar′ev, ‘Lyudi bylogo vremeni’, L. N. Tolstoi v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1955), i 52.

² ibid. 52–3.

³ N. N. Gusev, Dva goda s L. N. Tolstym […] (Moscow, 1973), 188.

¹War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 1 (end), T xii 238; Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (London, 1942: Macmillan) [hereafter W] 1248. [Because the Maudes’ subdivisions of the text vary from edition to edition of their translation, and also differ from those in T, references to W are given by page alone.]

¹ ibid. vol. 4, part 1, chapter 4 (beginning), T xii 14; W 1039–40.

² On the connection of this with Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme see Paul Boyer (1864–1949) chez Tolstoï: entretiens à Iasnaïa Poliana (Paris, 1950), 40.

¹War and Peace, vol. 2, part 3, chapter 1, T x 151; W 453.

¹ Cf. the profession of faith in his celebrated – and militantly moralistic – introduction to an edition of Maupassant, whose genius, despite everything, he admires: ‘Predislovie k sochineniyam Gyui de Mopassana’ (1893–4), T xxx 3–24. He thinks much more poorly of Bernard Shaw, whose social rhetoric he calls stale and platitudinous (diary entry for 31 January 1908, T lvi 97–8).

¹ Empire chairs of a certain shape are to this day called ‘Talleyrand armchairs’ in Russia.

¹War and Peace, epilogue, part 2, chapter 1, T xii 298–300; W 1307–9.