•
CONCERNING TOLSTOY
427
of education and historical progress. Nothing came of it, of course,
for he returned armed with more of those "simplifications" that cut
under their assumptions. But if the Westernizers found no comfort in
Tolstoy, neither did the Slavophils. The latter's ideology, with its
forced and artificial doctrine of superiority to the West, was also
aligned with plebeian social tasks; at bottom it represented the dis–
comfiture of a small and weak plebeian class in a semifeudal society,
a discomfiture idealized through national messianism.
It
was an ob–
scurantist ideology .incompatible with Tolstoy's belief in self-improve–
ment and in the possibility of human perfection. Moreover, in Tol–
stoy's approach to western culture there was no distress, no anger, no
hostility. He was never put off by it, for he considered European cul–
ture to be a neutral sphere the products of which he could appropriate
at will, ·and in any order he pleased, without in the least committing
himself to its inner logic. He felt no more committed by his use of
western ideas than the French-speaking gentry in
War and Peace
feel
obligated to import the social institutions of France along with its lan–
guage. Thus Tolstoy was able to sort out western tendencies to suit
himself, as in
War and Peace,
where he is to some extent indebted for
his conception of Napoleon to certain French publicists of the 1850's
and 60's, who in their endeavor to deflate the pretensions of Napoleon
III went so far in their polemics as also to blot out the image or" his
illustrious ancestor. Again, in that novel he is partly indebted for his
so-called organic idea of war to Proudhon's book
La Guerre et la Paix,
which came out in a Russian translation in 1864. (Tolstoy had met
Proudhon in Brussels in March, 1861.) And the arbitrary way in
which he helped himself to the ideas of western thinkers is shown by
the fact that he entirely ignored Proudhon's enthusiastic affirmation
of Napoleon's historical role. The West was the realm of the city, a
realm so strange to Tolstoy that he could regard it as neutral territory.
The city was essentially unreal to him; he believed in the existence
solely of the landowners and of the peasants. The contrast between
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, which Merezhkovsky and after him Thomas
Mann have presented in terms of the abstract typology of the "man of
spirit" .as against the "man of nature," is more relevantly analyzed
in terms of the contradiction between city and country, between the
alienated intellectual proletariat of the city and the unalienated
patriciate-peasantry of the country.
Much has been written concerning the influence of Rousseau on
Tolstoy, but here again it is necessary to keep in mind that in western
literature we perceive the Rousseauist ideas through the colored screen
