18
PARTISAN REVIEW
that in the perfect world you won't need justice, in a perfect world you
won't need mercy. Maybe. But in that case we can't begin to conceive
of what such a world would be like.
Krauze:
. . .
You have been speaking of the collision of values on socio–
logical grounds. There have been individual lives that embody within
themselves these multiple tensions. We have just mentioned Tolstoy.
Was he really identified or, so to speak, integrated with the absolute
principles he preached?
Berlin:
Let me tell a story from which you can draw your own conclu–
sions. Late in 1904 Tolstoy was in Moscow, occupied in antiwar prop–
aganda during the Russo-Japanese war, which he naturally hated. He
was surrounded by pacifist followers. They were, I imagine, busily
drafting pamphlets and letters of protest against the cruelty, wicked–
ness, and violence of war.
One day Tolstoy, thus engaged, was sitting in his room when
someone came in and said (I quote from memory: the story is told in
the reminiscences of one of his children): "Lev Nikolayevitch, Port
Arthur has been surrendered." He leaped to his feet and said: "In my
day this would never have happened." "Why, what would have hap–
pened, Lev Nikolayevitch?" "We would have fought and fought, we
would never have given it up ." This was an instinctive reaction.
Tolstoy admired and liked seeing well-turned-out officers in uniform.
He wrote wonderfully about battles and wars. His beliefs sometimes
conflicted with his habits, his tastes, his deepest instincts: he tried to
alter them but never succeeded.
I was told another, equally illuminating, story by a Soviet scholar
whose uncle had been a follower of Tolstoy, and from time to time
stayed in Tolstoy's house in the country. One of Tolstoy's habits was to
read the letters that he received in the late afternoon and then dictate
answers, usually on the dictating machine that Edison had given him.
The letters were usually handed to him on a silver salver by a footman
in white gloves. One day the footman brought the letters without the
silver salver, in his gloved hands. Tolstoy said sternly: "Where is the
salver? This is what it's made for," and sent the man back to fetch it.
He was and remained a Russian count. A contrite aristocrat, yes; he
tried to assimilate himself to the lives of his peasants-he ate simple
food, he wore a peasant's smock, he drove a plough-but it was no
good. The man who really told the truth about this was Turgenev, in
his last novel,
Virgin Soil,
in which the hero is an idealistic young man,
a member of the gentry with intellectual interests, who moves among
