No man in his senses, during this century at any rate, would ever dream of denying Tolstoy’s intellectual power, his appalling capacity to penetrate any conventional disguise, that corrosive scepticism in virtue of which Prince Vyazemsky tarred War and Peace with the brush of netovshchina (negativism) – an early version of that nihilism which Vogüé and Albert Sorel later quite naturally attribute to him. No one who reads his journals and letters, or indeed War and Peace itself, can doubt that the author himself, at any rate, regarded this problem as the heart of the entire matter – the central issue round which the novel is built…. Tolstoy’s interest in history and the problem of historical truth was passionate, almost obsessive, both before and during the writing of War and Peace. Berlin has a deep appreciation of Tolstoy’s philosophical insights and rigorous logical thinking he clearly thinks that there is a substantive and important philosophy of history embedded in this great novel.Īnd yet there is surely a paradox here. In “The Hedgehog and the Fox” Berlin provides a close study of the philosophy of history that is interwoven into War and Peace. Berlin is a brilliant interpreter of nineteenth-century Russian thought, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace is one of the most important novels of that period. Isaiah Berlin’s essay The Hedgehog and the Fox is a particularly interesting combination of philosophical analysis and literary criticism.

Isaiah berlin tolstoy