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PARTISAN REVIEW
since it would require the outside intervention of a decision to integrate
according to a particular idea or intuition. Moreover, one would still
have to make room for that same Necessity whose presence the infinite
number of incidents reveals without explaining.
Even more powerful (and I would like to add, more illuminating)
is the conflict that Tolstoy unveiled when he tried to express the verity
that could reconcile for man the experiences of war and peace. Isaiah
Berlin expresses it this way. For the great Russian, only the private lives
of individuals, made up of feelings, passions, thoughts, and "natural"
relationships is real. Public life and history are abstractions, if not lies.
But the sphere of private life is also the realm of illusion.
It
is precisely
the experience of his own spontaneity and freedom, the indubitable real–
ness of his own interests and motives, that prevents man, be he com–
mander-in-chief, simple soldier, or hi storian, from admitting the exist–
ence of an inexorable Necessity that dominates every individual will and
eludes all reason. The "natural" life of individuals certainly does not
explain History; it does not tell us what is the very real "power" that
manifests itself in the movements of peoples, the disasters of war, and
the outcomes of battles. Moreover, it is not even the ground of truth;
an individual who has lived through historical upheavals has learned
at least one thing, that truth oannot be found in one's private life, but
in the recognition of that which infinitely overshadows it. This is what
Prince Andre is made aware of.
From his analysis of Tolstoy's ideas on history, Mr. Berlin drmvs
the dramatic image of a Tolstoy divided against himself, in revolt against
his more authentic nature: he "was by nature a fox, but believed in
being a hedgehog," as Mr. Berlin puts it. The image is borrowed from
a fragment of Archilochu s, which says: "The fox knows many things,
but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Knowing many things very
sharply, Tolstoy could not rest until he had also learnecl the "one big
thing" that really mattered to him. Endowed by nature with a power
of "almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatabl e individuality
of the individual," his implacable craving for the absolu te leads him
to "expelling everything that does not submit to some very general, very
simple standard." This, according to Mr. Berlin, is th e root of Tolstoy's
powerful contradictions.
That there are contradictions in Tolstoy it is easy to concede. But
that they come from his wanting to be something he was not is doubt–
ful. As a matter of fact, there seems to be a marvelous harmony and
consistency, rather than a conflict, between his sense of the irreducible
individuality of every object and every being, and his yearning for a
