The Hedgehog and the Fox

This, of course, was the spirit of empirical enquiry 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 M. Jourdain, he spoke prose long before he knew it, and remained an enemy of transcendentalism from the beginning to the end of his life. He 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 doubtless influenced the young Tolstoy, as it did all enquiring 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 thinker 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 proklyatye voprosy¹ 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 Nakaz² with the passages in Montesquieu on which she professed to have founded it.¹ He reads Hume and Thiers² as well as Rousseau, Sterne and Dickens.³ He is obsessed by the thought that philosophical principles can be understood only in their concrete expression in history.⁴ ‘To write the genuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one’s life.’⁵ Or again: ‘The leaves of a tree delight us more than the roots’,⁶ with the implication that this is nevertheless a superficial view of the world. 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’. 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. 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.’ According to his friend Nazar′ev, Tolstoy said to him in the winter of 1846: ‘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 21 August 1562, whereas his fourth, to Anna Alekseevna Koltovskaya, occurred in 1572 […]?’¹