Tolstoy and his theory about "Great Men"

I was reading the newspaper this weekend and trying to decide what makes it such a chore. It used to be my favorite part of the weekend. To sit on a quiet Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and pore over ripples of information, strange and interesting tidbits unfolding in unpredictable ways. Now it’s tedious. And I figured out why. Every newspaper, and I’m talking every one, has decided to attribute the tilt of the earth to one man. You know his name. And it’s so boring, so intellectually exhausting, to try to absorb news through this lens that I didn’t realize how boring and exhausting it was until I came upon Tolstoy again this summer, and on his theory of “Great Men.”

Tolstoy, who in 1869 gave us the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace, followed by the second greatest novel ever written, Anna Karenina, 1878, was a careful observer of humans and how we operate in the joints and seams of history. Tolstoy took the position that the big events of history (for instance, the Napoleonic Wars and French invasion of Russia in 1812) do not depend on individual leaders. To the contrary, the so-called “Great Men” like Napoleon, who imagine they are in command of situations, are really pawns of powers entirely out of their control. Neither Napoleon nor Czar Alexander I “decided” the shape of those events. That the French tried to invade and occupy Russia in 1812 and failed miserably was simply not of their doing. Why? How? Tolstoy believed great historical events are so complex in character, so intricate and mysterious, if not overdetermined in their causes, that no one reason—certainly no one man—can be singled out to explain them.

And this is arguably one of Tolstoy’s greatest contributions to 19th-century thought. He both predicted and argued against the gobbledygook that was to come—that all there is, all there is, is the individual, the Great Man, and the earth’s resources should be turned into a factory for Great Men. It’s the Individual, stupid. Ayn Rand and The Fountainhead say it’s so; Tolstoy and War and Peace say it isn’t so, it can’t be so, and it never was so.

But how does the superior novelist know this?

Let’s go another Tolstoy idea. Everything passes. Sickness, old age, and death destroy the body. All human relationships are perpetual struggles of love and hate against indifference. Fame is a figment of the imagination. Wealth, power, prestige are as permanent as a moment of sunshine; they can disappear with a single cloud. To find the meaning of life in any of these conditions or all of them is the “vanity of vanities.” To look for meaning here is not to find it. And this notion—this line of reasoning— led Tolstoy to the verge of suicide in his fifties, which is an odd fact if you consider he’d already become the most famous novelist in Russia, arguably the world; he was named “the other Czar” (such was his popularity) and had achieved what few will ever achieve—the ultimate merging of ego, artistic will, and recognition. In short, Tolstoy was a Great Man. And the message he wanted to impart is that there is no such thing. Great Men are on the list of things that don’t exist, despite what the 21st and 20th centuries would have you believe.

And so, it always ends in a paradox. It takes the Great Man to tell us there is no such thing. This church we’ve built to the individual is a boring and tedious place to live. It’s full of shallow and confused ideas. To find a better one, we should go outside again and see how small we are in the landscape of things. To do this. To become humble again—to admit we don’t know and we don’t know, and we don’t know, and we don’t know—is the only place left to go. And then hopefully our newspapers become interesting again, and I can go back to enjoying my Saturday morning cup of coffee.