The Hedgehog and the Fox

But although Tolstoy and the Slavophils may have fought a common enemy, their positive views diverged sharply. The Slavophil doctrine derived principally from German Idealism, in particular from Schelling’s view (despite much lip-service to Hegel and his interpreters) that true knowledge could not be obtained by the use of reason, but only by a kind of imaginative self-identification with the central principle of the universe – the soul of the world – such as artists and thinkers have in moments of divine inspiration. Some of the Slavophils identified this with the revealed truths of the Orthodox religion and the mystical tradition of the Russian Church, and bequeathed it to the Russian symbolist poets and philosophers of a later generation. Tolstoy stood at the opposite pole to all this. He believed that only by patient empirical observation could any knowledge be obtained; that this knowledge is always inadequate, that simple people often know the truth better than learned men, because their observation of men and nature is less clouded by empty theories, and not because they are inspired vehicles of the divine afflatus. There is a hard cutting edge of common sense about everything that Tolstoy wrote which automatically puts to flight metaphysical fantasies and undisciplined tendencies towards esoteric experience, or the poetical or theological interpretations of life which lay at the heart of the Slavophil outlook, and (as in the analogous case of the anti-industrial romanticism of the West) determined both its hatred of politics and economics in the ordinary sense, and its mystical nationalism. Moreover, the Slavophils were worshippers of historical method as alone disclosing the true nature – revealed only in its impalpable growth in time – of individual institutions and abstract sciences alike.

None of this could possibly have found a sympathetic echo in the very tough-minded, very matter-of-fact Tolstoy, especially the realistic Tolstoy of the middle years; if the peasant Platon Karataev has something in common with the agrarian ethos of the Slavophil (and indeed pan-Slav) ideologists – simple rural wisdom as against the absurdities of the over-clever West – yet Pierre Bezukhov in the early drafts of War and Peace ends his life as a Decembrist and an exile in Siberia, and cannot be conceived in all his spiritual wanderings as ultimately finding comfort in any metaphysical system, still less in the bosom of the Orthodox or any other established Church. The Slavophils saw through the pretensions of Western social and psychological science, and that was sympathetic to Tolstoy; but their positive doctrines interested him little. He was against unintelligible mysteries, against mists of antiquity, against any kind of recourse to mumbo-jumbo: his hostile picture of the Freemasons in War and Peace remained symptomatic of his attitude until the end. This can only have been reinforced by his interest in the writings of, and his visit in 1861 to, the exiled Proudhon, whose confused irrationalism, puritanism, hatred of authority and bourgeois intellectuals, and general Rousseauism and violence of tone evidently pleased him. It is more than possible that he took the title of his novel from Proudhon’s La Guerre et la paix, published in the same year.