da História

Lev Tolstoy

For, as Lev Tolstoy told us himself, history is a deaf man who answers questions nobody wished to ask in the first place. As he also said, history – the Napoleonic stuff, leaders, generals, great conflicts, revolutions and grand destinies – isn't true history at all. That's lived in the heart and home, in happy and unhappy families, among the trivialities and the dull domestic detail. in the end it is lived only in the self, the only place where anything's really ever lived. Yes, Tolstoy was an annoying old prophet, who died in his eighties at an obscure railway station, following the fate of his most famous character, as if that too were written in the Book of Destiny above.
Malcolm Bradbury, in To the Hermitage