After the fall of Sevastopol the Commander of the Artillery, Kryzhanóvski, sent me the reports of the officers of artillery from all the bastions, and asked me to draw up a report from these (more than twenty) separate accounts. I am sorry I did not take copies of them. It would have been the best example of the naïve, inevitable, military falsehoods from which reports are made. I imagine that many of my comrades who drew up those reports will laugh on reading these lines, at the recollection of how they, by order of their superior, wrote what they could not know. All who have had experience of war know how capable Russians are of doing their work in a war and how little fit they are to describe it with the boastful falsity indispensable for that purpose. Everyone knows that in our armies that duty of drawing up reports and dispatches is generally carried out by men of foreign birth.
I say all this to show the inevitability of falsehood in military descriptions which serve as material for military historians, and thus to show how unavoidable are frequent disagreements between artists and historians in their understanding of historical events. But besides this necessary error in the narration of historical events, I noticed in the histories of the epoch on which I was engaged (probably as a result of the habit of grouping events to express them briefly, and of conforming to the tragic import of those events) a special kind of high-flown diction in which the falsehood and perversion extended not merely to the occurrences but also to the interpretation and significance of them. Often when studying the two chief historical works on that epoch, Thiers and Mikhaylóvski-Danílevski, I felt perplexed that such books could have been printed and read. To say nothing of the fact that they present the same events in a most serious, significant tone, citing the sources they have drawn on, and are yet in diametrical opposition to one another, in these histories I came across such accounts that I did not know whether to laugh or to cry, remembering that these books are the chief memorials of that epoch and have had millions of readers. I will give a single example from the work of the famous historian Thiers. After telling how Napoleon brought with him forged paper rubles, he says: Relevant l’emploi de ces moyens par un acte de bienfaisance digne de lui et de l’armée française, il fit distribuer des secours aux incendiés. Mais les vivres étant trop précieux pour être donnés longtemps à ces étrangers, la plupart ennemis, Napoléon aima mieux leur fournir de l’argent, et il leur fit distribuer des roubles papier. [Dignifying the use of these means by an act of charity worthy of himself and of the French army, he ordered help to be given to the victims of the fire. But provisions being too scarce to be given for long to foreigners, most of whom were enemies, Napoleon preferred to supply them with money’, and had paper rubles distributed among them.]
This passage when taken by itself amazes one, I will not say by its immorality but simply by its stupidity; but in the whole book it does not surprise one, for it is quite in accord with the general high-flown, pompous style, devoid of any direct meaning.
So the tasks of artist and historian are quite different, and the reader should not be surprised when my book disagrees with an historian in the descriptions of events or persons.
But an artist must not forget that the popular conception of historical persons and events is not based on fancy but on historical documents in as far as the historians have been able to group them, and therefore, though he understands and presents them differently, the artist like the historian should be guided by historical material. Wherever in my novel historical persons speak or act, I have invented nothing, but have used historical material of which I have accumulated a whole library during my work. I do not think it necessary to cite the titles of those books here, but could cite them at any time in proof of what I say.
(6) Finally, the sixth and for me most important consideration relates to the small significance that in my conception should be ascribed to so called great men in historical events.
Studying so tragic an epoch, so rich in the importance of its events, so near to our own time, and regarding which so many varied traditions survive, I arrived at the evident fact that the causes of historical events when they take place cannot be grasped by our intelligence. To say (which seems to everyone very simple) that the causes of the events of 1812 lay in Napoleon’s domineering disposition and the patriotic firmness of the Emperor Alexander I is as meaningless as to say that the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire were that a certain barbarian led his people westward and a certain Roman emperor ruled his state badly, or that an immense hill that was being leveled toppled over because the last laborer struck it with his spade.
The cause of such an event in which millions of people fought one another and killed half a million men cannot be the will of one man. Just as one man could not have leveled the hill, so no single man could cause five hundred thousand to die. But what were the causes? One historian says it was the aggressive spirit of the French and the patriotism of the Russians. Others speak of the democratic element that Napoleon’s hordes carried abroad and of Russia’s need to form relations with Europe, and so forth. But why did millions of people begin to kill one another? Who told them to do it? It would seem that it was clear to each of them that this could not benefit any of them, but would be worse for them all. Why did they do it? Endless retrospective conjectures can be made, and are made, of the causes of this senseless event, but the immense number of these explanations, and their concurrence in one purpose, only proves that the causes were innumerable and that not one of them deserves to be called the cause.
Why did millions of people kill one another when it has been known since the world began that it is physically and morally bad to do so? Because it was such an inevitable necessity that in doing it men fulfilled the elemental zoological law which bees fulfill when they kill one another in autumn, and which causes male animals to destroy one another. One can give no other reply to that terrible question.
This truth is not only evident, but is so innate in every man’s consciousness that it would not be worth while proving it, were there not another sentiment in man which convinces him that he is free at each moment that he commits an action.
Taking a wide view of history we are indubitably convinced of a sempiternal law by which events occur. Looking at it from a personal point of view we are convinced of the opposite.
A man who kills another, Napoleon who orders the crossing of the Niemen, you or I handing in a petition to be admitted to the army or lifting or lowering our arm, are all indubitably convinced that our every action is based on reasonable grounds and on our own free will, and that it depends on us whether we do this or that. This conviction is so inherent in us and so precious to each of us that in spite of the proofs of history and the statistics of crime (which convince us of absence of freedom in the actions of other people) we extend the consciousness of our freedom to all our actions.
The contradiction seems insoluble. When committing an act I am convinced that I do it by my own free will, but considering that action in its connection with the general life of mankind (in its historical significance) I am convinced that this action was predestined and inevitable. Where is the error?
Psychological observations of man’s capacity for retrospectively supplying a whole series of supposedly free reasons for something that has been
