Most critics regard Tolstoy's philosophical exegesis in the Second Epilogue as unliterary, boring, and outside the intentions of the novel. They regard the didactic passages liberally sprinkled throughout the book as redundant. Yet Tolstoy's interest in history is the most serious and intense aspect of War and Peace and provides the novel with its underlying unity. The Second Epilogue, therefore, deserves our attention because it reveals Tolstoy's obsessive and passionate search for truth; this quest not only gave force to his major novels, but provided him with the philosophic focus of his life.
Isaiah Berlin has discussed Tolstoy's theory of history in a brilliant essay, and the Analysis in these Notes is based on his work with the quoted statements taken from his book The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953).
Tolstoy's interest in history derives from his desire to penetrate first causes, to answer for himself the burning question of the meaning of human life and death."History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space — and sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimension, empirically experienced, physical environment — this alone contains the truth, the material out of which genuine answers — answers needing for their apprehension no special senses or faculties which normal human beings did not possess — might be constructed" (p. 11). Life consists of innumerable events and history chooses only an insignificant arbitrarily patterned part of these events with which to document a special theory as the primary cause of social or political change. What then is the"real" history of human beings?
Tolstoy says that the"inner" events of human beings are the most real and immediate experiences;"they, and only they, are what life, in the last analysis, is made of"; hence the routine political historians who write history as a series of public events"are talking shallow nonsense" (p. 15).
