The Hedgehog and the Fox

He died in 1821, the author of several theologico-political essays, but the definitive editions of his works, in particular of the celebrated Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, which in the form of Platonic dialogue dealt with the nature and sanctions of human government and other political and philosophical problems, as well as his Correspondance diplomatique and his letters, were published in full only in the 1850s and early 1860s by his son Rodolphe and by others. Maistre’s open hatred of Austria, his anti-Bonapartism, as well as the rising importance of the Piedmontese kingdom before and after the Crimean War, naturally increased interest in his personality and his thought at this date. Books on him began to appear and excited a good deal of discussion in Russian literary and historical circles. Tolstoy possessed the Soirées, as well as Maistre’s diplomatic correspondence and letters, and copies of them were to be found in the library at Yasnaya Polyana. It is in any case quite clear that Tolstoy used them extensively in War and Peace.¹ Thus the celebrated description of Paulucci’s intervention in the debate of the Russian General Staff at Drissa is reproduced almost verbatim from a letter by Maistre. Similarly Prince Vasily’s conversation at Mme Scherer’s reception with the ‘homme de beaucoup de mérite’² about Kutuzov is obviously based on a letter by Maistre, in which all the French phrases with which this conversation is sprinkled are to be found. There is, moreover, a marginal note in one of Tolstoy’s early drafts, ‘At Anna Pavlovna’s J. Maistre’, which refers to the raconteur who tells the beautiful Hélène and an admiring circle of listeners the idiotic anecdote about the meeting of Napoleon with the duc d’Enghien at supper with the celebrated actress Mlle Georges.³ Again, old Prince Bolkonsky’s habit of shifting his bed from one room to another is probably taken from a story which Maistre tells about the similar habit of Count Stroganov. Finally, the name of Maistre occurs in the novel itself,¹ as being among those who agree that it would be embarrassing and senseless to capture the more eminent princes and marshals of Napoleon’s army, since this would merely create diplomatic difficulties. Zhikharev, whose memoirs Tolstoy is known to have used, met Maistre in 1807, and described him in glowing colours;² something of the atmosphere to be found in these memoirs enters into Tolstoy’s description of the eminent émigrés in Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s drawing-room, with which War and Peace opens, and his other references to fashionable Petersburg society at this date. These echoes and parallels have been collated carefully by Tolstoyan scholars, and leave no doubt about the extent of Tolstoy’s borrowing.

Among these parallels there are similarities of a more important kind. Maistre explains that the victory of the legendary Horatius over the Curiatii – like all victories in general – was due to the intangible factor of morale, and Tolstoy similarly speaks of the supreme importance of this unknown quantity in determining the outcome of battles – the impalpable ‘spirit’ of troops and their commanders. This emphasis on the imponderable and the incalculable is part and parcel of Maistre’s general irrationalism. More clearly and boldly than anyone before him, Maistre declared that the human intellect was but a feeble instrument when pitted against the power of natural forces; that rational explanations of human conduct seldom explained anything. He maintained that only the irrational, precisely because it defied explanation and could therefore not be undermined by the critical activities of reason, was able to persist and be strong. And he gave as examples such irrational institutions as hereditary monarchy and marriage, which survived from age to age, while such rational institutions as elective monarchy, or ‘free’ personal relationships, swiftly and for no obvious ‘reason’ collapsed wherever they were introduced. Maistre conceived of life as a savage battle at all levels, between plants and animals no less than individuals and nations, a battle from which no gain was expected, but which originated in some primal, mysterious, sanguinary, self-immolatory craving implanted by God. This instinct was far more powerful than the feeble efforts of rational men who tried to achieve peace and happiness (which was, in any case, not the deepest desire of the human heart – only of its caricature, the liberal intellect) by planning the life of society without reckoning with the violent forces which sooner or later would inevitably cause their puny structures to collapse like so many houses of cards.