Tolstoy is particularly irritated by references to the dominant influence of great men or of ideas. Great men, we are told, are typical of the movements of their age: hence study of their characters ‘explains’ such movements. Do the characters of Diderot or Beaumarchais ‘explain’ the advance of the West upon the East? Do the letters of Ivan the Terrible to Prince Kurbsky ‘explain’ Russian expansion westward? But historians of culture do no better, for they merely add as an extra factor something called the ‘force’ of ideas or of books, although we still have no notion of what is meant by words
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