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clear vision of the whole that embraces this richness and multiplicity.
What is important to recognize is that what Tolstoy was seeking, and,
almost in spite of himself, finding, was not an abstract principle or a
theodicy but a simple vision of simple, elemental facts. This he persisted
in seeking until the very end in the characteristic Tolstoyan fashion by
assaulting and denying what to him appeared false in the light, precisely,
of the "untranslatable individuality of the individual." He was above all,
in his own dogmatic way, an enemy of dogmatism. Mr. Berl in makes
this point quite clea r. A fox, a hedgehog, or both, what Tolstoy attacked
in his polemic, and deflated in his artistic representation, was the dom–
inant nineteenth-century idea that man could obtain the true laws of
history, thereby justifying his demiurgical claim that he could direct
events and
make
history. The symbol of this insolent claim, he very
pointedly saw embodied in Napoleon, "the
Weltgeist
on horseback."
Once this is agreed upon, the contradictions with which Tolstoy found
himself confronted appear as a seri es of passionate probings into the
limits
of historical knowledge and historical action.
The "one big thing" that Tolstoy got to know in the course of his
probings, :Mr. Berlin points out over and over again, and especially where
he touches upon Tolstoy's sC'nse of the "inexorable power of the present
moment."
It
is the fact that \ve are what we arc and find ourselves in
a definite point of time and space and in a definite social environment,
all of us together, determining and limiting each other with our thoughts
no less than with our actions, and no one of us with the power or the
knowledge to control our situation. This limit is as certain as the hardest
"fact"; and "being
in
history," for T olstoy, signifies that or nothing
at all.
Tolstoy undoubtedly saw that if one refused to explain what hap–
pened by Providence or by the constructions of a simple rationalism, one
ended by glimpsing a Necessity that was neither "ideal" nor physical,
and which revealed itself in actual experience. It was not the concept
of Destiny, but destiny itsclf, the reality of which is proved by the fact
that it can be grasped by no formula; a destiny th at struck not from
h eaven but from earth, never so awesome as when, in the course of hu–
man events, it took the form of man himself. "Power expresses the fact
tha t we depend on others," T olstoy wrote in an article in which he tried
to explain the import of the ideas he had expressed in
War and Peace.
Nicola Chiaromonte
