On Gods, Heroes and Men. A Comparison of Tolstoy and Vico's Philosophies of History

While proceeding toward the end of War and Peace a reader can find itself startling and struggling to understand what kind of work is actually dealing with. The fictional narration is not yet concluded when L. Tolstoy (1828–1910) starts to lose himself in philosophical discussions regarding the nature of history as a science. Suddenly words such as god, heroes and men start to fill the pages recalling in the mind the language of a philosopher with at his back a history of long oblivion, the Italian G. Vico (1668–1744). The common terminology is only the triggering point for approaching a possible comparison between two authors that are so distant for time, context, interests, life and styles. A deep reading of their works however reveals some points of contact especially in a critique of their contemporary historicism, in their common interests on history as an objective science, on the analyses of events recollection and invention of tradition, in their overlapping instances of heterogeneity of ends and their reference to divine providence. A specific and different investigation might be necessary in order to understand whether those concepts somehow traveled along about one century and half from one to the other or whether they are just floating ideas of historical discourse. Nevertheless, starting from their commonalities the paper offers a clue on their inevitable divergences and a possible development of some of their central concepts. Being Tolstoy a writer of the ungraspable and indeterminate, concepts related to complex thinking will emerge during the reading.