Leo Tolstoy

In a draft of his introduction to the novel, Tolstoy confessed that he was afraid he would be ‘guided by historical documents rather than by the truth’ in his description of the events and ‘important personages of 1812’ (WP, p. 1087). He managed to overcome these doubts because of his conviction ‘that nobody would ever tell what I had to tell’. He believed that ‘specific qualities’ of his ‘development and personality’ (WP, p. 1087) provided him with an access to historical knowledge better than any documents. This type of argumentation is typical of non-fiction, when an author explains the importance of his unique personal experience. Tolstoy used the same strategy in relation to the history of the Napoleonic wars. He searched for ‘general laws’ governing history, but believed that the way to discover these laws was to concentrate on ‘artistic representation of the memories’ (CW, XV, p. 132; XLVIII, p. 87). In Childhood, the Sebastopol stories and The Cossacks he described events as directly witnessed by the narrator. Now he needed to introduce events that took place before he was born as if they were personal recollections.

To achieve this goal, Tolstoy inscribed the national epic into a family chronicle. The transparent play with surnames and the exact reproduction of real first names and patronymics of his ancestors, together with the meticulous description of the everyday lives of both families, provided the necessary aura of authenticity. To be sure, the disenchanted aristocratic liberal Nikolai Tolstoy had little to do with the brave officer and passionate rural landowner Nikolai Rostov. Likewise, the educated and enlightened Maria Volkonsky did not resemble pious and humble Maria Bolkonsky. Tolstoy sought rather to achieve a general impression of the historical reconstruction of a family history, not to render all the details in the most accurate way.

The story of Nikolai and Maria, however, is only an auxiliary plot in the novel. Tolstoy used a more sophisticated approach in dealing with the main characters. He divided his authorial alter ego between Pierre Bezukhov, in whom dissipated habits, emotional and intellectual instability and lust competed with innate kindness, an ardent desire for moral goodness and admiration for the simple wisdom of the Russian peasant, and Prince Andrei with his quest for glory, Napoleonic ambitions and aristocratic arrogance. Each character had to resolve one of the two existential problems that tormented Tolstoy throughout his life: the power of sexuality and the fear of death. Pierre was to show the author and the reader how to handle erotic passions, Andrei how to deal with mortality.

In War and Peace these intractable existential problems are happily resolved. Pierre manages to tame his instincts in marriage. Prince Andrei, having nearly recovered from his mortal wound, chooses eternal universal life over personal existence and celestial over earthly human love. In Tolstoy’s early works, only simple and unreflective people were blessed with graceful exits. This time he awarded a radiant death to the character representing the lofty part of his soul, while the earthly part stayed alive to enjoy carnal pleasures in a way that is morally irreproachable. In the first version of the novel, which Tolstoy provisionally entitled All Is Well that Ends Well, Prince Andrei voluntarily cedes Natasha to his friend. In the final text, all ends even better: Tolstoy suggests that Pierre’s eventual success in the struggle between the author’s competing alter egos for the heart of the same woman is more than just a consequence of Prince Andrei’s death. It is a reassuring victory of the real over the ethereal, of this world over the next.

In the 1860s Tolstoy was not yet the avowed pacifist he later became. He abhorred the senseless loss of human life, but still regarded a fight against invaders as the natural and therefore legitimate instinct of a people protecting their own land. Reconciling his image of the war with his anarchist credo was difficult. Even the most consistent opponents of the state grudgingly agree that war is the prerogative of central authority. Tolstoy was never ready to compromise his beliefs or make partial concessions. He developed a provocative and controversial theory of historical process defined not ‘by power . . . but by the activity of all the people who participate in the events’ (WP, p. 1061). Rulers, leaders or military commanders only pretend to govern millions of individuals, but in fact succumb to the cumulative force of their wills.