Totally Tolstoy
Jan. 6th, 2010 09:21 pmThe Guardian has a couple of good pieces, one in today's G2 and the other in the Books Blog, on Leo Tolstoy. The reason? This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the great man's death and, to mark the occasion, Jay Parini, the author of the blog entry, has made a film about the days leading upto Tolstoy's death in a railway station in the middle of nowhere.
Intriguingly, in his piece, Parini mentions Berlin's famous essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, but his conclusions really don't accord with my rather hazy memories of what I thought Berlin was getting at in his essay. I thought that Berlin classified Tolstoy as a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog; as someone fascinated by many different ideas and interpretations who, against his natural inclinations, wanted to be shaped by a single big idea. But this is just a minor quibble.
More significantly, I also seem to have misread Berlin's interpretation of Tolstoy's driving wannabe-hedgehogism. I thought that Berlin's view was that Tolstoy was principally interested in the sweep of history; how small, apparently inconsequential events were picked up and used to form a historical verdict on events, whereas events were actually driven by individuals who were true to their essential natures. Hence the significance, in War and Peace, of Napoleon and his marshals, who are determined to control every aspect of the war from their central positions, while General Kutuzov has so much faith in the Russian people and so little regard for his Prussian aides, with their love of tactics and strategy and order, that he falls asleep in staff meetings.
But Parini says that Tolstoy's big idea was actually about God. Which is not completely incompatible with my memories of Berlin's comments about history, but it isn't what I took away from the essay. I would go and reread Russian Thinkers but, unfortunately, it's towards the bottom of a big stack of books, just under Michael Frayn's The Human Touch and immediately on top of Anna Karenina, and I can't be bothered to dig it out.
Still, I can't disagree with Parini's final sentiment: "Tolstoy was a writer who could not write a line that did not come from a deep centre. He wrote with power and conviction, and his work is everlasting." Plus, of course, Lev Nikolayevich was also a vegetarian...
Intriguingly, in his piece, Parini mentions Berlin's famous essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, but his conclusions really don't accord with my rather hazy memories of what I thought Berlin was getting at in his essay. I thought that Berlin classified Tolstoy as a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog; as someone fascinated by many different ideas and interpretations who, against his natural inclinations, wanted to be shaped by a single big idea. But this is just a minor quibble.
More significantly, I also seem to have misread Berlin's interpretation of Tolstoy's driving wannabe-hedgehogism. I thought that Berlin's view was that Tolstoy was principally interested in the sweep of history; how small, apparently inconsequential events were picked up and used to form a historical verdict on events, whereas events were actually driven by individuals who were true to their essential natures. Hence the significance, in War and Peace, of Napoleon and his marshals, who are determined to control every aspect of the war from their central positions, while General Kutuzov has so much faith in the Russian people and so little regard for his Prussian aides, with their love of tactics and strategy and order, that he falls asleep in staff meetings.
But Parini says that Tolstoy's big idea was actually about God. Which is not completely incompatible with my memories of Berlin's comments about history, but it isn't what I took away from the essay. I would go and reread Russian Thinkers but, unfortunately, it's towards the bottom of a big stack of books, just under Michael Frayn's The Human Touch and immediately on top of Anna Karenina, and I can't be bothered to dig it out.
Still, I can't disagree with Parini's final sentiment: "Tolstoy was a writer who could not write a line that did not come from a deep centre. He wrote with power and conviction, and his work is everlasting." Plus, of course, Lev Nikolayevich was also a vegetarian...