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A review by ybuss
The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History by Isaiah Berlin
4.0
I missed like 2/3 of the content of his book because I'm not cultured enough, but I like reading an idea that is well defined, which is surely the case with this book. (And I read War and Peace not so long ago). Comparing the dude with Maistre is a very uncommon pov, which leads to a lot of reflection.
The end of the book just left me in a really weird/sick mood. I guess I'm a fox that would like to be a hedgehog, always looking for some sort of universal. This is why that last paragraph throws me off guard:
Tolstoy’s sense of reality was until the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to constructout of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world, and he dedicated all of his vast strength of mind and will to the lifelong denial of this fact. At once insanely proud and filled with self-hatred, omniscient and doubting everything, cold and violently passionate, contemptuous and self-abasing, tormented and detached, surrounded by an adoring family, by devoted followers, by the admiration of the entire civilised world, and yet almost wholly isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.
The end of the book just left me in a really weird/sick mood. I guess I'm a fox that would like to be a hedgehog, always looking for some sort of universal. This is why that last paragraph throws me off guard:
Tolstoy’s sense of reality was until the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to constructout of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world, and he dedicated all of his vast strength of mind and will to the lifelong denial of this fact. At once insanely proud and filled with self-hatred, omniscient and doubting everything, cold and violently passionate, contemptuous and self-abasing, tormented and detached, surrounded by an adoring family, by devoted followers, by the admiration of the entire civilised world, and yet almost wholly isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.