The Hedgehog and the Fox

¹ One of Tolstoy’s Russian critics, M. M. Rubinshtein, referred to above (9/1), 80 ff., says that every science employs some unanalysed concepts, to explain which is the business of other sciences; and that ‘power’ happens to be the unexplained central concept of history. But Tolstoy’s point is that no other science can ‘explain’ it, since it is, as used by historians, a meaningless term, not a concept but nothing at all – vox nihili [‘the voice of nothing’].

² [‘The obscure through the more obscure’, i.e. explaining something obscure in terms of something even more obscure.]

¹War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 2, T xii 239; W 1249.

² See V. B. Shklovsky, op. cit. (7/3), chapters 7 and 8, and also K. Pokrovsky, ‘Istochniki romana “Voina i mir” ’, in Obninsky and Polner, op. cit. (9/1), 113–28.

¹

War and Peace, epilogue, part 2, chapter 1, T xii 297; W 490.

² ‘Neskol′ko slov po povodu knigi: “Voina i mir”’ (1868), T xvi 5–16.

¹War and Peace, vol. 3, part 3, chapter 1, T xi 264–7; W 909–11.

¹ op. cit. (8/2), 34, 40.

² N. I. Kareev, ‘Istoricheskaya filosofiya v “Voine i mire”’, Vestnik Evropy 22 no. 4 (July–August 1887), 227–69.

³

ibid. 230; cf. War and Peace, vol. 3, part 1, chapter 1, T xi 16; W 665 (‘There are two sides to the life of every man’).

¹ B. M. Eikhenbaum, Lev Tolstoy (Leningrad, 1928–60), i 123–4.

² Here the paradox appears once more; for the ‘infinitesimals’, whose integration is the task of the ideal historian, must be reasonably uniform to make this operation possible; yet the sense of ‘reality’ consists in the sense of their unique differences.

¹ In our day French existentialists, for similar psychological reasons, have struck out against all explanations as such because they are a mere drug to still serious questions, short-lived palliatives for wounds which are unbearable but must be borne, above all not denied or ‘explained’; for all explaining is explaining away, and that is a denial of the given – the existent – the brute facts.

¹ For example, both Shklovsky (passim

) and Eikhenbaum (i 259–60) in the works cited above (7/3, 40/1).

¹ ‘On n’a pas rendu justice à Rousseau […]. J’ai lu tout Rousseau, oui, tous les vingt volumes, y compris le Dictionnaire de musique. Je faisais mieux que l’admirer; je lui rendais une culte véritable’; ‘Justice has not been done to Rousseau […]. I have read all of Rousseau, yes, all twenty volumes, including the Dictionary of Music. I did better than admire him, I truly worshipped him’: loc. cit. (20/2).

¹ ibid. (‘il n’y a point de panache à la guerre’).

¹ See Adolfo Omodeo, Un reazionario: il conte J. de Maistre (Bari, 1939), 112, note 2.

²

‘Chitayu Maistr′a’, T xlviii 66.

¹ See Eikhenbaum, op. cit. (40/ 1), i 308–17.

²War and Peace, vol. 3, part 2, chapter 6, T xi 127, 128; W 782, 783.

³ ibid. vol. 1, part 1, chapter 3, T x 13–16; W 10–13. For the note see T xiii 687.

¹ ibid. vol. 4, part 3, chapter 19, T xii 167; W 1182.

² S. P. Zhikharev, Zapiski sovremennika: dnevnik chinovnika (Moscow, 1934), ii 112–13.