BOO KS
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Iem of History. Tolstoy started wondering about History when in his
early twenties he said, "To write the genuine history of present-day
Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one's life." No less than Hegel,
no. less than the positivistic and idealistic historians of his time and
after, Tolstoy saw history as the only place where truth could be found.
The meaning of life, the why of human actions and events, had to be
looked for in the concreteness of historical facts, of individual and col–
lective experiences as they actually occur in space and time, not in
metaphysical speculations. "Like Marx," Berlin writes, "Tolstoy saw
clearly:
that if history was a science, it must be possible to discover and formu–
late a set of true laws of history which, in conjunction with the data
of empirical observation, would make prediction of the future (and
'retrodiction' of the past) as feasible as it had become, say, in geology
or astronomy. But he saw more clearly than Marx and his followers that
this had, in fact , not been achieved, and said so with his usual dogmatic
candour, and reinforced his thesis with arguments designed to show that
the prospect of achieving this goal was non-existent; and clinched the
matter by observing that the fulfillment of this scientific hope would
end human life as we knew it: "if we allow that human life can be
ruled by reason, the possibility of life (i.e., as a spontaneous activity in–
volving consciousness of free will) is destroyed."
To "positivistic" historians, Tolstoy, in 1852, at twenty-four, ad–
dressed the contemptuous remark: "History is nothing but a collection
of fables and useless trifl es. ... Who wants to know that Ivan's second
marriage, to Temyruk's daughter, occurred on August 21, 1562, whereas
his fourth, to Anna Alekseyevna Koltovskaya, occurred in 1572? . . ."
His objection to "idealistic" history-writers, on the other hand, was the
ineliminable contrast between the explanation in terms of general ideas
and all-embracing causes promised by them, and the sudden intervention
(which they could not but acknowledge) of individual will and chance
at the decisive moment. Finally, Tolstoy judged all historians according
to one single scathing criterion: "The greater the claim, the greater the
lie." And he concluded: "The new history is like a deaf man replying to
questions which nobody puts to him...." The reverse of which was
true too, of course: history, for Tolstoy, had also the peculiarity of re–
maining deaf to the questions one puts to it, the important ones : why
things happen as they do? why do men act the way they act? what is
the meaning of life? how should one live?
To sum it up, Tolstoy did not deny that the historian could list
facts: (but "no more than 0.01 per cent of all the facts that actually
constitute the history of peoples") according to a chronological and
systematic order, or that he could construct explanations based on a
