Tolstoy's philosophy of history. Formulate the main provisions of Tolstoy's philosophy of history. How Tolstoy’s philosophy of history is connected with the general world of the novel and the development of the plot. New military theorist

Aug 31 2014

Philosophy of history of Tolstoy. Philosophy of history - views on the origin, essence and change of historical events. The main provisions of Tolstoy's philosophy of history 1. believes that it is impossible to explain the origin of historical events by individual actions of individual people. The will of an individual historical person can be paralyzed by the desires or non-desires of the mass of people.

2. For a historical event to happen, billions of reasons must coincide, that is, the interests of individual people who make up the masses, just as the movement of a swarm of bees coincides when a general movement is born from the movement of individual quantities. This means that history is made not by individuals, but by their totality, the people. 3. Why do the infinitesimal values ​​of human desires coincide? Tolstoy was unable to answer this question.

“The event had to happen only because it had to happen,” writes Tolstoy. Fatalism in history, in his opinion, is inevitable. 4. T. correctly believes that .

and even the historical one does not play a leading role in history; it is connected with the interests of everyone who stands below it and next to it. 5. T. incorrectly asserts that personality does not and cannot play any role in history. “The Tsar is a slave of history,” says Tolstoy. So T. comes to the idea of ​​submission to fate and sees the task of a historical figure in following events. to the essay “Tolstoy’s Depiction of the Great Patriotic War of 1812” I. Introduction.

The depiction of the war of 1812 is the main one in T.’s novel “V and M”. II. Main part 1. What is it from the point of view of the history of Tolstoy’s philosophy. 2. T.’s attitude to war, revealed by various methods: A) through the thoughts of his favorite heroes B) by comparing the clear harmonious life of nature and the madness of people killing each other C) through the description of individual combat episodes 3. The variety of forms of struggle against Napoleon put forward by the people: A) patriotic copying is prohibited 2005 inspiration in the troops and among the peaceful population B) the scope and greatness of the partisan war 4. The people in the war of 1812: A) true, unostentatious love for the homeland, the hidden warmth of patriotism; B) perseverance in battle, selfless heroism, courage, endurance; C) deep conviction in the rightness of one’s cause 5. Indifference to the fate of the country and people on the part of secular circles: a) loud “patriotism” of Rastopgin’s posters; b) false patriotism of St. Petersburg salons c) careerism, egoism, vanity of some military men 6. Participation in the war of the main characters. The place they found in life as a result of the war. 7. The role of commanders in war III. Conclusion 1. The death of Napoleon's army as a consequence of a nationwide upsurge. 2. The triumph of peace over

Teacher's word

Before moving directly to the analysis of volume III, I would like to draw attention to the fact that volumes III and IV were written by L.N. Tolstoy later than the first (in 1867–1869). By this time, changes had occurred in the writer’s worldview, which were reflected in the work we are analyzing. Do you remember that just at this time L.N. Tolstoy is interested in people's life and takes steps towards rapprochement with the patriarchal peasants. Therefore, it is natural that people appear more and more often on the pages of the novel. Tolstoy's new views were also reflected in the views of individual heroes.

Changes in the writer's worldview somewhat changed the structure of the novel. It includes journalistic chapters that introduce and explain the artistic description of events and lead to their understanding.

In order to get closer to understanding the work of L.N. Tolstoy, it is necessary to understand some concepts inherent directly to him. In particular, Tolstoy had his own understanding of the philosophy of history. Let us turn to the text (volume III, part I, chapter I, and then part III, chapter I). Let's read and answer the question: what are the causes of the Patriotic War of 1812 according to Tolstoy?

Answer

“An event contrary to human reason and all human nature took place.”

What caused this extraordinary event? What were the reasons for it?

1. It is impossible to explain the origin of historical events by individual actions of individual people. The will of an individual historical person can be paralyzed by the desires or unwillingnesses of a mass of people.

2. For a historical event to occur, “billions of reasons” must coincide, i.e. the interests of individual people who make up the masses, just as the movement of a swarm of bees coincides when a general movement is born from the movement of individual quantities. This means that history is made not by individuals, but by their totality, the people. Thus, historical events occur when the interests of the people coincide.

3. Why do the infinitesimal values ​​of individual human desires coincide? “Nothing is a reason. All this is just a coincidence of the conditions under which every vital, organic, spontaneous event takes place.” “Man inevitably fulfills the laws prescribed to him.” “...The event had to happen only because it had to happen,” writes Tolstoy. “Fatalism in history,” in his opinion, is inevitable.

4. Tolstoy's fatalism is associated with his understanding of spontaneity. History, he writes, is “the unconscious, general, swarm life of humanity.” Any act committed, seemingly unconsciously, spontaneously “becomes the property of history.” And the more unconsciously a person lives, the more, according to Tolstoy, he will participate in the commission of historical events. The preaching of spontaneity, the refusal of conscious, rational participation in events is one of Tolstoy’s features.

5. Tolstoy claims that personality does not and cannot play any role in history. According to Tolstoy, the spontaneity of the movement of the masses cannot be guided, and therefore the historical figure can only submit to the direction of events prescribed from above. "The king is a slave of history." So Tolstoy comes to the idea of ​​submission to fate and sees the task of a historical figure in following events. Do you agree with this point of view?

When analyzing Volume III of the novel “War and Peace,” we will need to prove that the Patriotic War of 1812 raised the entire Russian people to fight the enemy. It will be important for us to see a nationwide patriotic upsurge and the unity of the bulk of Russian society, the people and most of the nobles in the fight against the invaders.

Exercise

Let us analyze the episode of the crossing of the Napoleonic army across the Neman (Part I, Chapter II).

Answer

In the scene of the crossing of the Neman, Tolstoy depicts Napoleon and his army at the very beginning of the campaign to Russia. There is also unity in the French army - both among the soldiers themselves and between them and their emperor. “On all the faces of these people there was one common expression of joy at the beginning of the long-awaited campaign and delight and devotion to the man in a gray frock coat standing on the mountain.”

Question

What is this unity based on?

Answer

The glory of the conqueror of the world led Napoleon. Somewhat earlier, Tolstoy noted that there was “the love and habit of the French emperor for war, which coincided with the disposition of his people, a passion for the grandeur of the preparations, and the costs of preparation, and the need for such benefits that would repay these costs...” (Part I, Chapter I).

But this unity is fragile. Then Tolstoy will show how it will disintegrate at the decisive moment. This unity is expressed in the soldiers' blind love for Napoleon and Napoleon's acceptance of it for granted. Not finding a ford, the lancers fell into the water, drowned and still “tried to swim forward to the other side and, despite the fact that there was a crossing half a mile away, they were proud that they were swimming and drowning in this river under the gaze of a man sitting on a log and didn’t even look at what they were doing.”

The unity of the Russian people is based on something else - on hatred of the invaders who cause them grief and ruin, on love and affection for their native land and the people living on it.

Literature

T.G. Brage. A system of lessons for the holistic study of the novel “War and Peace.” // L.N. Tolstoy at school M., 1965. – P. 301–323.

G.Ya. Galagan. L.N. Tolstoy. // History of Russian literature. Volume three. Leningrad: Nauka, 1982.

Andrey Ranchin. Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy. // Encyclopedias for children “Avanta+”. Volume 9. Russian literature. Part one. M., 1999.

It may seem strange that the author of the most famous historical novel in the history of mankind did not like history. All his life he had a negative attitude towards history as a science, finding it unnecessary and meaningless, and simply towards history as the past, in which he saw the continuous triumph of evil, cruelty and violence. His internal task has always been to free himself from history, to enter a sphere where he can live in the present. Tolstoy was interested in the present, the current moment. His main moral maxim at the end of his life was “Do what you must, and come what may,” that is, do not think about the past or the future, free yourself from the pressure that the memory of the past and expectation have over you . In the later years of his life, he noted with great satisfaction the weakening of his memory in his diary. He stopped remembering his own life, and this pleased him endlessly. The weight of the past ceased to hang over him, he felt liberated, he perceived the passing of the memory of the past (in this case, the personal past) as liberation from a heavy burden. He wrote:

“How can one not rejoice at the loss of memory? Everything that I have worked out in the past (at least my inner work in the scriptures), I live and use all of this, but I don’t remember the work itself. Marvelous. Meanwhile, I think that this is a joyful change for all old people: life is all concentrated in the present. How good!”

And this was the ideal of human life in history - humanity, which does not remember the endless evil that it has committed against itself, has forgotten it and cannot think about retribution.

With such an attitude towards the past, it is extremely interesting how and how Tolstoy ended up on the territory of historical prose. In addition to War and Peace, he had several more historical plans that remained unfinished and unrealized. His first negative comments about history as a science appeared from his university years, at Kazan University, which, as we know, he did not graduate from. Tolstoy always excelled in languages ​​there, but history was not good for him. And his diaries record a misunderstanding of why he was forced to take these strange disciplines: he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t remember numbers and dates and the like.

And despite his generally deeply negative attitude towards history, he begins with a story about himself, with “Childhood”, with a story about his own past. Tolstoy describes childhood through the eyes of a child. This is far from the first work in the history of world literature about childhood and memories of childhood, but it is the first or one of the first attempts to reconstruct the view of a child, to write from the present, when an adult describes how he perceived his life as a child. This move was brilliant and unexpected for that time, both from an artistic point of view and based on the task that Tolstoy set for himself. But the goal was to describe an idyllic past, and the world he was describing was based on serfdom, and an adult could not help but be aware of the horror, evil and violence underlying the idyllic picture he was recreating. Tolstoy creates the image of a boy who does not see this evil due to his age and is able to perceive the world around him as an idyll. The autobiographical nature of “Childhood” should not be taken too literally: Tolstoy’s childhood was least of all idyllic; it was apparently quite terrible, and it is characteristic that the death of his mother, the main defining event of his childhood, was shifted from two years to eleven. That is, in “Childhood” the mother is still alive; the main catastrophe, the loss has not yet been experienced. Tolstoy lost his mother first and then his father as a child. But what he brings to literature is the reconstruction of the experience of an instantaneous experience of the present. The “Sevastopol Stories” are constructed in the same way, which shocked readers and brought Tolstoy the glory of the most famous Russian writer. This is a report about something happening right before the eyes of the author.

And Tolstoy is slowly feeling his way to his main historical novel, also from direct journalistic reporting. As you know, “War and Peace” begins with: the first approach to “War and Peace” is the story of the exiled Decembrists. That is, the Decembrists were amnestied in 1856, and in 1856, Tolstoy, as he claimed, began to write this novel - we know that the surviving chapters were written in 1860, but he probably made the first approaches to this topic earlier. This is still a living historical experience, a sharp, immediate, today’s reflection on the people who experienced it. The Dec-Brists always interested Tolstoy. Describing the returning Decembrist, he, as he later admitted, decided to talk about the experience of his mistakes and delusions, that is, about 1825, about the main and decisive event in the life of the hero and Russian history of the first half of the 19th century. Having started talking about 1825, he had to go deeper into the root of these events - to show where the people of 1825 came from. And he moved from describing the victories of Russian weapons in 1812 to 1805 - to the first defeats, from which 1812 grew. That is, Tolstoy moved away, moved away from the present deeper and deeper, and so the novel from modern became historical.

At the same time - and this is very significant - the novel did not become truly historical for the author himself. Tolstoy spoke of his book as a work in which the action was to develop right up to the era of its creation, that is, he was interested in a continuing life. He tried to recreate not distant historical events, but the passage of time itself. The first part of the novel was published in the magazine “Russian Messenger” under the title “1805”. This is, apparently, the first work in the history of world literature in which a chronological marker, the year number, is included in the title. (Hugo’s novel “Nineteen Hundred and Three” began to be published nine years later.) But this is not even important, but the fact that the name, indicated by the number of the year, century, or the definition of the era, usually indicates the specifics of the historical period that will be described. This is not today's time, this is 1793, the golden age, the era of the Renaissance, what has passed and ended. Tolstoy's narrative, Tolstoy's narrative was structured in such a way that the reader knew from the very first moment that it would go further and the name would change. The center, the focus, shifted from depicting a specific year to describing the movement of time as such.

As is well known, Tolstoy drafted the prefaces to War and Peace. In one of them he made a startling confession. “...I knew,” writes Tolstoy, “that no one would ever say what I had to say. Not because what I had to say was very important for humanity, but because certain aspects of life, insignificant for others, only I, due to the peculiarities of my development and character... considered important.” And he continued: “I... was afraid that my writing would not fit any mold...”, and “the need to describe significant persons of the 12th year would force me to be guided by historical documents, and not by the truth...” In this strikingly interesting quote It is worth paying attention to two circumstances. Firstly, the reasoning that maybe what I want to say is not of great importance, but no one except me will say it - this is the standard beginning of any non-fiction narrative: I’m talking about what I personally saw, about my own experience, interesting precisely because of its uniqueness. Tolstoy attributes the uniqueness of personal experience to a work of art. This in itself is a very unusual move. Secondly, let us note the extravagant contrast: “not with historical documents, but with the truth.” How does the author know the truth, if not from historical documents? That is, both of these paradoxical rhetorical moves absolutely unambiguously indicate that this past, described from 1805 to 1820, in which the epilogue takes place, is available to Tolstoy in living experience, this is his personal individual experience.

Tolstoy was born in 1828, 16 years after the War of 1812, 23 years after the beginning of the novel, 8 years after the action takes place in the epilogue. Meanwhile, people who read War and Peace always talk about the effect of immersion in historical reality. What artistic means were used to achieve this effect? There are several significant points here that I would like to draw attention to, which are very important for Tolstoy’s attitude to history in general. One of these circumstances is the transformation of the country’s history, national history, into family history. Bolkonsky and Volkonsky: one letter is changed - and we get Tolstoy’s family on the mother’s side. The Rostov surname differs from the family name a little more, but if we rummage through the drafts, initially these characters bore the surname Tolstoy, then Prostov, but the Prostov surname was probably too reminiscent of the moralistic comedies of the 18th century, as a result the letter “p” " disappeared - the Rostovs appeared. Yes, the simple hussar Nikolai Rostov bears little resemblance to the liberal aristocrat - Tolstoy's father, and the educated, secular and multilingual Maria Nikolaevna Volkonskaya bears little resemblance to the devout Princess Marya, immersed in religious issues. But the point is the reader’s feeling that this is a family chronicle.

But the line of Nikolai Rostov and Princess Marya is still secondary in the novel. More interesting is how this effect is achieved on the main line. We know that both of Tolstoy’s famous novels - “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” - are built on the opposition of a rude, sincere, very kind, ugly, complex, neurotic person and the ideal image of a beautiful aristocrat. This is how Tolstoy saw himself and his idealized idea of ​​what he should have been like. He gives two of his alter egos, splitting it between the heroes. This is the author’s personal history, which he only projects into the historical past. Each of the characters in “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” (and Vronsky, and Levin, and Prince Andrei, and Pierre) is Tolstoy’s emotional story, and in both cases it is a story of competition for a woman, this love story. And initially the heroine falls in love with an aristocrat, and then finds her true self, herself and her future in love for that person, who in this case is a projection of the biographical Tolstoy.

The fact that Levin is an autobiographical character and a projection of Tolstoy’s personality is well known, but this can be said about Pierre with the same degree of certainty. And it is interesting that, although the action of the novel takes place at the beginning of the 19th century, in fact, the whole story of Natasha Rostova is a description in real time of the various love experiences of Tolstoy’s sister-in-law Tatyana Andreevna Bers, in her marriage to Kuzminskaya: her story of infatuation with Anatol Shostak - Tolstoy even didn’t bother to change his name - and then the story of her affair with Tolstoy’s brother Sergei. (Tatyana Bers begged Tolstoy not to write about the circumstances of her personal life, saying that no one would marry her if Tolstoy described her, but this did not make the slightest impression on Lev Nikolayevich.) Moreover, the novel was begun when many of the events described in it had not yet occurred: Tolstoy described them “as they came.” According to the testimony of Tolstoy’s son Ilya Lvovich, Tolstoy was in love with his sister-in-law (platonically, of course, but Sofya Andreevna was very jealous of her husband’s sister) and described the history of their complex relationship. The story of the development of his personality and his beloved heroine, which happened right before the eyes and in the soul and imagination of the author, spilled out onto the pages of the historical novel. That is, time is united, compressed, folded, the present is projected into the past, and they turn out to be inseparable. This is a single complex of the directly experienced present, presented as the reality of the past.

There is one more, no less significant technique. In the epilogue of War and Peace we are dealing with a conventional, completely ordinary ending to a historical novel. How do novels end? Weddings. "War and Peace" ends with two weddings. Moreover, Tolstoy said that a wedding is an unsuccessful ending for a novel, because life does not end with a wedding, it continues further. Nevertheless, his novel ends with two weddings, and, as expected in a romantic epilogue, we see how the heroes live happily. Contrary to what is written in the first sentence of Anna Karenina, we see two happy families who are happy in completely different ways. But nevertheless, watching the happiness of Pierre and Natasha, we know exactly what will happen to them next. Heroes don't control their own future. Natasha says to Pierre: if only he had never left! She does not know that in a short time her husband will be sent into exile, she will have to go after him, and so on. But the reader already knows this. History seems to have stopped, for the heroes it does not exist, but the depiction of this family happiness is filled with the deepest irony contained in the dynamics of time. Natasha asks her husband, knowing that the main person for him was Platon Karataev: what would he say about what Pierre is doing now, about joining a secret society? And Pierre says: “No, he wouldn’t approve... What he would approve of is our family life.” But nevertheless, he is ready to sacrifice family life for the sake of political chimeras and destroy his family, the children he loves so much, his wife for the sake of abstract, unrealistic ideals.

But the difference between Pierre and Nikolai... In their dispute, as always, the non-intellectual Nikolai is right (Tolstoy did not like intellectuals, although he was one himself), and not the intellectual Pierre. But Pierre turns out to be a historical man: he enters history in 1825, he becomes a character in big history. Tolstoy seems to be simultaneously writing a historical novel about 1812 (today we know about the war of 1812 and imagine it in the image created by Tolstoy; he imposed his model of 1812 on us, not only the Russian, but also the world reader), but, on the other hand, we are talking about a description of his own family, his own experiences at the current moment. And it was precisely this combination that Tolstoy’s other important historical plans lacked.

What else you should pay attention to: for all the uniqueness of Tolstoy’s experience, he was a man of his time. The time when the novel about the Decembrists begins is 1860. In 1859, the two most important books of the 19th century were published - Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and Marx's Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. From the point of view of the authors of these two books, history is driven by colossal impersonal forces. Biological history, the evolution of mankind or the history of economic formations is a process in which the individual has no significance or role. How do both of these books begin? I will give short quotations from the preface to Political Economy and from the preface to the Origin of Species. What does Marx write? “My special subject was jurisprudence, which, however, I studied only as a subordinate discipline along with philosophy and history. In 1842-1843, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I had to speak out for the first time about the so-called material interests...”, “The first work that I undertook to resolve the doubts that overwhelmed me was a critical analysis of Hegel’s philosophy of law...”, “What I began in Paris I continued the study of this latter in Brussels...", "Frederick Engels, with whom I, since the appearance of his brilliant sketches for the criticism of economic categories... maintained a constant written exchange of opinions, came by a different route to the same result as I; and when in the spring of 1845 he also settled in Brussels, we decided to jointly develop our views ...” - and so on.

The story about the change of economic formations begins with the fact that the author writes himself into history, this is his personal history, the formation of his worldview is part of history. How does Darwin's Origin of Species begin? “While traveling on Her Majesty's ship Beagle as a naturalist, I was struck by certain facts concerning the distribution of organic beings in South America and the geological relations between the former and modern inhabitants of that continent,” “On my return home I In 1837, I came to the idea that perhaps something could be done to resolve this issue by patiently collecting and pondering all sorts of facts...”, “... I expanded this sketch in 1844 into a general outline...” - and so Further.

That is, the authors tell the history of species or the history of economic formations, adding their own personal history there - how they came to understand their themes, what happened to them, and so on. In the same way, Tolstoy writes his own history into the history of 1812, because the history of society, economic formation, biological species is the history of man. We learn history by moving away from ourselves into the depths of time; from our present situation we go back, unwinding this tangle. This is Tolstoy’s philosophy of history - as set out in War and Peace. From here he has access to the past: through himself, Tolstoy finds out how it really was. Not from historical documents, which he, of course, studied extremely carefully, but they are only a guide, important for the accuracy of details and so on. And most importantly, he learns by rewinding the current moment. This is how the restoration of the past occurs.

Tolstoy was extremely worried about the problem of the disintegration of the Russian people into Europeanized nobility and the peasant masses that were alien to each other. He thought a lot about this and, having written about the manifestations of this disintegration in War and Peace, turns to the era when this disintegration occurs - to the time of Peter I. His next plan is a novel about the Peter the Great era, when Europeanization began Russian elite, creating an insurmountable split in society between the educated and uneducated classes. After some time, he gives up this idea; it doesn’t work out for him.

As Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya wrote to her sister Tatyana Andreevna Kuzminskaya (she read the first drafts), there are heroes, they are dressed, arranged, but not breathing. She said: well, maybe they’ll still breathe. Sofya Andreevna was well versed in what her husband wrote. She felt that she was short of breath. Tolstoy also wanted to include his family there, only on the paternal side: Count Tolstoy received the county from Peter I and so on, he was supposed to act in the novel. But the first crisis of working on the novel was due to the fact that Tolstoy could not imagine himself in this era. It was difficult for him to imagine the Petrine era as his own personal past. It was difficult for him to get used to the experiences of people of that time. He had enough artistic imagination, but he did not see himself living among the people of that time the way he saw himself among the heroes of War and Peace. Another idea was to bring out and show the meeting of exiled Decembrists and peasants in Siberia; to bring, so to speak, heroes and characters from history to geography, but by this time he, too, had lost interest in the life of the upper class.

It is interesting that, while intensely thinking about two historical novels, Tolstoy begins to write and delve into a novel, the action of which again takes place right now, in the current time. In 1873 he began work on Anna Karenina, which begins in 1872. The writing proceeds slowly, and as the work progresses, Tolstoy again reacts to the events taking place before his eyes: tours of foreign theaters, court intrigues - and most importantly, of course, the beginning of the Russian-Turkish War, which determines the fate of the heroes. At the end of the novel, Vronsky leaves for the war, but it had not yet begun when the novel began. That is, as it develops and moves, the novel absorbs the current larger story into itself, changing under its influence. Tolstoy works in the same range of switching modes between a love story, a history of adultery, a family history, and a journalistic reaction to current historical events. As they freeze, they become history; the report turns into a novel.

Already after Tolstoy’s spiritual crisis at the end of the 1870s, his previously formed idea that history as such is only a documentation of the evil and violence that some people do to others finally matures. In 1870, still between War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he read, in particular, for his novel about Peter, the history of pre-Petrine Russia as described by Sergei Mikhailovich Solovyov, the great Russian historian. And Tolstoy writes:

“In addition, reading about how they robbed, ruled, fought, ruined (this is the only thing that is discussed in history), you involuntarily come to the question: what was robbed and ruined? And from this question to another: who produced what was destroyed? Who and how fed all these people with bread? Who made the tunics, cloth, dresses, damask that tsars and boyars wore? Who caught black foxes and sables, which were given to ambassadors, who mined gold and iron, who bred horses, bulls, rams, who built houses, courtyards, churches, who transported goods? Who raised and gave birth to these people of the same root?<…>The people live, and among the functions of people’s life there is the need for people to ruin, rob, luxury and show off. And these are unfortunate rulers who must renounce everything human.”

The idea of ​​a novel about Peter I was temporarily transformed by Tolstoy into the idea of ​​a novel, which should be called “One Hundred Years.” He wanted to describe the hundred-year history of Russia from Peter I to Alexander I for a hundred years - what happens in a peasant hut, and what happens in a palace. And at the same time, he continued to think about a novel about the Decembrists in Siberia, which, together with the already written “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”, formed a picture of a monumental tetralogy that would describe the entire history of Russia from Peter the Great. th time and up to the moment when Tolstoy lived. All reigns, two centuries of Russian history. Nevertheless, the idea of ​​“One Hundred Years” is experiencing a crisis, because it is one thing to write a national history, and another thing to write the history of a gangster gang. By the 1880s, Tolstoy came to the conclusion that any government and any ruling class is just a gang, and the people, the people who actually create these values, live outside of history, there is no real history happening there, there is nothing to tell in such a complex narrative. And this connection between the palace and the peasant hut falls apart and does not hold together.

And Tolstoy gradually moves away from historical plans for a long time. His last idea of ​​this kind was the idea of ​​a novel about Alexander I, “Posthumous Notes of Elder Fyodor Kuzmich” (it appeared earlier, but Tolstoy returned to it in 1905). This is a legend about how Alexander I did not die in 1825, but fled from the palace and began to live in Siberia on a farmstead as the elder Fyodor Kuzmich. And Tolstoy, as Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich recalled, said that he was interested in the soul of Alexander I - “original, complex and two-faced, and if he really ended his life as a hermit, then redemption is probably It was full." What’s interesting here: this is a historical novel, but the essence of this novel is a person’s emergence from history. Alexander I, according to Tolstoy, according to the plan of the novel, renounces his own historicity. He goes to live in a space where there is no history. His life as an elder, where there is communication with God, and there is atonement for his sins as an emperor. Then, after reading Nikolai Mikhailovich’s book about Alexander I, Tolstoy became convinced that this was a legend, that it did not happen. And initially he said that “even though the impossibility of uniting the personalities of Alek-san-dr. and Kuzmich has been historically proven, the legend remains in all its beauty and truth. I started to write on this topic... but I will hardly bother to continue - there is no time, I have to get ready for the upcoming transition [to death]. And I really regret it. A lovely image.” Well, partly there was no time, but partly, apparently, it was still difficult for him to force himself to write a historical work when he stopped believing in the truth of what he was describing. Just writing about the legend was difficult. And the idea of ​​leaving history, overcoming historicity, going into a space where there is no history, continued to excite him until the last day of his life.

Let us note a number of Tolstoy’s statements that convey the main provisions of his philosophy of history:

“On June 12, the forces of Western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, ... - What caused this extraordinary event? What were the reasons for it?

(The writer is convinced that the origin of historical events cannot be explained by individual actions of individual people. The will of an individual historical person can be paralyzed by the desires or unwillingnesses of a mass of people.)

In order for a historical event to take place, “billions of reasons” must coincide, that is, the interests of individual people who make up the masses, just as the movement of a swarm of bees coincides when a general movement is born from the movement of individual quantities. This means that history is made not by individuals, but by people.

“To study the laws of history, we must completely change the subject of observation ... - which leads the masses” (Vol. III, Part III, Chapter 1). (Tolstoy argues that historical events occur when the interests of the people coincide.)

Why do the small values ​​of individual human desires coincide? Tolstoy was unable to answer this question: “Nothing is a reason. All this is only a coincidence of the conditions under which every vital, organic, spontaneous event takes place”, “man inevitably fulfills the laws prescribed to him”, “... the event had to happen only because it had to happen”, “fatalism in history "is inevitable. This is how the weakness of Tolstoy’s views is revealed.

Tolstoy's fatalism is connected with his understanding of spontaneity. History, he writes, is “the unconscious, general, swarm life of humanity.” Any committed unconscious act “becomes history.” And the more unconsciously a person lives, the more, according to Tolstoy, he will participate in the commission of historical events. The preaching of spontaneity, the refusal of conscious, intelligent participation in events is the weakness of Tolstoy’s views.

Correctly believing that a person, and even a historical one, that is, one who stands high “on the social ladder,” does not play a leading role in history, that she is connected with the interests of everyone who stands below her and next to her, Tolstoy is wrong asserts that personality does not and cannot play any role in history. According to Tolstoy, the spontaneity of the movements of the masses cannot be guided, and therefore the historical figure can only obey the direction of events prescribed from above. This is how Tolstoy comes to the idea of ​​submission to fate and reduces the task of a historical figure to following events.

When studying Volume III, one should see a nationwide patriotic upsurge and the unity of the bulk of Russian society in the fight against the invaders. If in the analysis of volumes II the focus was on an individual person with his individual, sometimes isolated from others, fate, then in the analysis of volumes III-IV we will see a person as a particle of mass. Tolstoy's main idea is that only then does an individual person find his final, real place in life when he becomes a part of the people.