The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  As for Tolstoy, to him such mystical conservatism was peculiarly detestable, since it seemed to him to evade the central question by merely restating it, concealed in a cloud of pompous rhetoric, as the answer. Yet he, too, in the end, presents us with the vision, dimly discerned by Kutuzov and by Pierre, of Russia in her vastness, and what she could and what she could not do or suffer, and how and when – all of which Napoleon and his advisers (who knew a great deal but not of what was relevant to the issue) did not perceive; and so (although their knowledge of history and science and minute causes was perhaps greater than Kutuzov’s or Pierre’s) were led duly to their doom. Maistre’s paeans to the superior science of the great Christian soldiers of the past and Tolstoy’s lamentations about our scientific ignorance should not mislead anyone as to the nature of what they are in fact defending: awareness of the ‘deep currents’, the raisons de coeur, which they did not indeed themselves know by direct experience; but beside which, they were convinced, the devices of science were but a snare and a delusion.

  Despite their deep dissimilarity and indeed violent opposition to one another, Tolstoy’s sceptical realism and Maistre’s dogmatic authoritarianism are blood brothers. For both spring from an agonised belief in a single, serene vision, in which all problems are resolved, all doubts stilled, peace and understanding finally achieved. Deprived of this vision, they devoted all their formidable resources, from their very different, and indeed often incompatible, positions, to the elimination of all possible adversaries and critics of it. The faiths for whose mere abstract possibility they fought were not, indeed, identical. It is the predicament in which they found themselves and that caused them to dedicate their strength to the lifelong task of destruction, it is their common enemies and the strong likeness between their temperaments that made them odd but unmistakable allies in a war which they were both conscious of fighting until their dying day.

  VIII

  Opposed as Tolstoy and Maistre were – one the apostle of the gospel that all men are brothers, the other the cold defender of the claims of violence, blind sacrifice, and eternal suffering – they were united by inability to escape from the same tragic paradox: they were both by nature sharp-eyed foxes, inescapably aware of sheer, de facto differences which divide and forces which disrupt the human world, observers utterly incapable of being deceived by the many subtle devices, the unifying systems and faiths and sciences, by which the superficial or the desperate sought to conceal the chaos from themselves and from one another. Both looked for a harmonious universe, but everywhere found war and disorder, which no attempt to cheat, however heavily disguised, could even begin to hide; and so, in a condition of final despair, offered to throw away the terrible weapons of criticism, with which both, but particularly Tolstoy, were over-generously endowed, in favour of the single great vision, something too indivisibly simple and remote from normal intellectual processes to be assailable by the instruments of reason, and therefore, perhaps, offering a path to peace and salvation.

  Maistre began as a moderate liberal and ended by pulverising the new nineteenth-century world from the solitary citadel of his own variety of ultramontane Catholicism. Tolstoy began with a view of human life and history which contradicted all his knowledge, all his gifts, all his inclinations, and which, in consequence, he could scarcely be said to have embraced in the sense of practising it, either as a writer or as a man. From this, in his old age, he passed into a form of life in which he tried to resolve the glaring contradiction between what he believed about men and events, and what he thought he believed, or ought to believe, by behaving, in the end, as if factual questions of this kind were not the fundamental issues at all, only the trivial preoccupations of an idle, ill-conducted life, while the real questions were quite different. But it was of no use: the Muse cannot be cheated. Tolstoy was the least superficial of men: he could not swim with the tide without being drawn irresistibly beneath the surface to investigate the darker depths below; and he could not avoid seeing what he saw and doubting even that; he could close his eyes but not forget that he was doing so; his appalling, destructive sense of what was false frustrated this final effort at self-deception as it did all the earlier ones; and he died in agony, oppressed by the burden of his intellectual infallibility and his sense of perpetual moral error, the greatest of those who can neither reconcile, nor leave unreconciled, the conflict of what there is with what there ought to be.

  Tolstoy’s sense of reality was until the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world, and he dedicated all of his vast strength of mind and will to the lifelong denial of this fact. At once insanely proud and filled with self-hatred, omniscient and doubting everything, cold and violently passionate, contemptuous and self-abasing, tormented and detached, surrounded by an adoring family, by devoted followers, by the admiration of the entire civilised world, and yet almost wholly isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.

  1 Le Roman russe (Paris, 1886), p. 282.

  2 Archilochus fragment 201 in M. L. West (ed.), Iambi et Elegi Graeci, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1971).

  3 For the purpose 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.

  4 See E. I. Bogoslovsky, Turgenev o L. Tolstom (Tiflis, 1894), p. 41; quoted by P. I. Biryukov, L. N. Tolstoy: biografiya, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1921), vol. 2, pp. 48–9.

  5 ibid.

  6 Letter to Tolstoy of 11 July 1883.

  7 ‘He repeats himself and he philosophises.’ Gustave Flaubert, Lettres inédites à Tourguéneff (Monaco, 1946), p. 218.

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

  9 See the severe strictures of A. Vitmer, a very respectable military historian, in his 1812 god v ‘Voine i mire’ (St Petersburg, 1869), and the tones of mounting indignation in the contemporary critical notices of A. S. Norov, A. P. Pyatkovsky and S. Navalikhin. 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.

  10 See V. B. Shklovsky, Mater’yal i stil’ v romane L’va Tolstogo ‘Voina i mir’ (Moscow, 1928), passim, but particularly chapters 7 and 8. See below, p. 457.

  11 Razbor ‘Voiny i mira’ (St Petersburg, 1868), pp. 1–4.

  12 e.g. Professors Il’in, Yakovenko, Zenkovsky and others.

  13 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 pamyati L. N. Tolstogo, ed. V. P. Obninsky and T. I. Polner (Moscow, 1912), 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), 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, 3 vols (London, 1932–3), vol. 2, 1911–21, p. 6a.) 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.

  14 See article by M. de Poulet in Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti (1869, No 144).

  15 ‘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, p. 125; and p. 225 in Heinrich Heines Sämtliche Werke, ed. Oskar Walzel (Leipzig, 1911–20), vol. 3. 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. H.H.]

  16 Instructions to her legislative experts.

  17 L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1928–64), vol. 46, pp. 4–28 (18–26 March 1847).

  18 ibid., pp. 97, 113, 114, 117, 123–4, 127 (20 March to 27 June 1852).

  19 ibid., pp. 126, 127, 130, 132–4, 167, 176, 249; 82, 110; 140 (126–76: 24 June 1852 to 28 September 1853; 249: ‘Journal of daily tasks’, 3 March 1847; 82, 110: 10 August 1851, 14 April 1852).

  20 ibid., p. 123 (11 June 1852).

  21 ibid., pp. 141–2 (22 September 1852).

  22 ibid., vol. 1, p. 222.

  23 ibid.

  24 ibid.

  25 V. N. Nazariev, ‘Lyudi bylogo vremeni’, L. N. Tolstoy v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1955), vol. 1, p. 52.

  26 ibid., pp. 52–3.

  27 N. N. Gusev, Dva goda s L. N. Tolstym … (Moscow, 1973), p. 188.

  28 War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 1.

  29 War and Peace, vol. 4, part 1, chapter 4.

  30 ibid.

  31 On the connection of this with Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme see p. 472 below, note 1.

  32 War and Peace, vol. 2, part 3, chapter 1.

  33 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’, op. cit (p. 445 above, note 2), vol. 30, pp. 3–24). He thinks much more poorly of Bernard Shaw, whose social rhetoric he calls stale and platitudinous (diary entry for 31 January 1908, ibid., vol. 56, pp. 97–8).

  34 War and Peace, epilogue, part 2, chapter 1.

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

  36 One of Tolstoy’s Russian critics. M, M. Rubinshtein, referred to above on p. 441, note 3, says that every science employs some unanalysed concepts, to explain which is the business of other sciences; and that ‘power’ happens to be the unexplained central concept of history. But Tolstoy’s point is that no other science can ‘explain’ it, since it is, as used by historians, a meaningless term, not a concept but nothing at all – vox nihili.

  37 War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 2.

  38 See V. B. Shklovsky, op. cit. (p. 440 above, note 5), chapters 7 and 8, and also K. V. Pokrovsky, ‘Istochniki romana “Voina i mir”’, in Obninsky and Polner, op. cit. (p. 441 above, note 3).

  39 War and Peace, vol. 4, part 2, chapter 1.

  40 ‘Neskol’ko slov po povodu knigi: “Voina i mir”’, Russkii arkhiv 6 (1868), columns 515–28.

  41 War and Peace, vol. 3, part 3, chapter 1.

  42 op. cit. (p. 441 above, note 1).

  43 N. I. Kareev, ‘Istoricheskaya filosofiya v “Voine i mire”’, Vestnik evropy 22 No 4 (July-August 1887), 227–69.

  44 ibid., p. 230. Cf. War and Peace, vol. 3, part 1, chapter 1 (‘the two sides to the life of every man’).

  45 B. M. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy (Leningrad, 1928–60), vol. 1, pp. 123–4.

  46 Here the paradox appears once more; for the ‘infinitesimals’, whose integration is the task of the ideal historian, must be reasonably uniform to make this operation possible; yet the sense of ‘reality’ consists in the sense of their unique differences.

  47 In our day French existentialists for similar psychological reasons have struck out against all explanations as such because they are a mere drug to still serious questions, short-lived palliatives for wounds which are unbearable but must be borne, above all not denied or ‘explained’; for all explaining is explaining away, and that is a denial of the given – the existent – the brute facts.

  48 For example, both Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum in the works cited above (p. 440, note 5, p. 463, note 1).

  49 ‘On n’a pas rendu justice à Rousseau … J’ai lu tout Rousseau, oui, tous les vingt volumes, y compris le Dictionnaire de musique. Je faisais mieux que l’admirer; je lui rendais une culte véritable …’ (see p. 472 below, note 3).

  50 See Paul Boyer (1864–1949) chez Tolstoï (Paris, 1950), p. 40.

  51 See Adolfo Omodeo, Un reazionario (Bari, 1939), p. 112, note 2.

  52 ‘Chitayu “Maistre”’, quoted by B. M. Eikhenbaum, op. cit. (p. 463 above, note 1), vol. 2, p. 309.

  53 See Eikhenbaum, op. cit. (p. 463 above, note 1).

  54 War and Peace, vol. 3, part 2, chapter 6.

  55 ibid., vol. 1, part 1, chapter 3. For the note see op. cit. (p. 445 above, note 2), vol. 13, p. 687.

  56 War and Peace, vol. 4, part 3, chapter 19.

  57 S. P. Zhikharev, Zapiski sovremennika (Moscow, 1934), vol. 2, pp. 112–13.

  58 Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, seventh conversation: op. cit. (p. 266 above, note 1), vol. 5, pp. 33–4. ‘People talk a lot about battles without knowing what they are really like. In particular, they tend to consider them as occurring at one place, whereas they cover two or three leagues of country. They ask you seriously: How is it that you don’t know what happened in this battle, since you were there? Whereas it is precisely the opposite that would often have to be said. Does the one on the right know what is happening on the left? Does he even know what is happening two paces from him? I can easily imagine one of these frightful scenes. On a vast field covered with all the apparatus of carnage and seeming to shudder under the feet of men and horses, in the midst of fire and whirling smoke, dazed and carried away by the din of firearms and cannon, by voices that order, roar, and die away, surrounded by the dead, the dying, the mutilated corpses, seized in turn by fear, hope, and rage, by five or six different passions, what happens to a man? What does he see? What does he know after a few hours? What can he know about himself and others? Among this crowd of warriors who have fought the whole day, there is often not a single one, not even the general, who knows who the victor is. I will restrict myself to citing modern battles, famous battles whose memory will never perish, battles that have changed the face of Europe and that were only lost because such and such a man thought they were lost; they were battles where all circumstances being equal and without a drop of blood more being shed on either side, the other general could have had a Te Deum sung in his own country and forced history to record the opposite of what it will say.’ The translations in the notes are taken from Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal etc., 1993): page references to this version in subsequent notes follow those to the French original, in parentheses. This passage appears on pp. 222–3.

  59 ibid., p. 35 (223). ‘Have we not even seen won battles lost?… In general, I believe that battles are not won or lost physically.’

  60 ibid., p. 29 (220). ‘In the same way, an army of 40,000 men is physically inferior to another army of 60,000, but if the first has more courage, experience, and discipline, it will be abl
e to defeat the second, for it is more effective with less mass. This is what we can see on every page of history.’

  61 ibid., p. 31. ‘It is opinion that loses battles, and it is opinion that wins them.’

  62 ibid., p. 32 (221). ‘What is a lost battle?… It is a battle one believes one has lost. Nothing is more true. One man fighting with another is defeated when he has been killed or brought to earth and the other remains standing. This is not the way it is with two armies; the one cannot be killed while the other remains on its feet. The forces swing back and forth as do the deaths, and especially since the invention of gunpowder has introduced more equality into the means of destruction, a battle is no longer lost materially, that is to say because there are more dead on one side than the other. It was Frederick II, who understood a little about these things, who said: To win is to advance. But who is the one who advances? It is the one whose conscience and countenance makes the other fall back.’

  63 ibid., p. 33 (222). ‘It is imagination that loses battles.’

  64 Letter of 14 September 1812 to Count de Front: ibid., vol. 12, pp. 220–1. ‘Few battles are lost physically – you fire, I fire … the real victor, like the real loser, is the one who believes himself to be so.’

  65 War and Peace, vol. 3, part 2, chapter 25.

  66 Albert Sorel, ‘Tolstoï historien’, Revue bleue 41 (January–June 1888), 460–9. This lecture, reprinted in revised form in Sorel’s Lectures historiques (Paris, 1894), has been unjustly neglected by students of Tolstoy; it does much to correct the views of those (e.g. P. I. Biryukov and K. V. Pokrovsky in their works cited above (p. 439, note 2, and p. 457, note 2), not to mention later critics and literary historians who almost all rely upon their authority) who omit all reference to Maistre. Émile Haumant is almost unique among earlier scholars in ignoring secondary authorities and discovering the truth for himself; see his La Culture française en Russie (1700–1900) (Paris, 1910), pp. 490–2.