War And Peace

On this reading, War and Peace appears as a national epic – the revelation of a ‘Russian consciousness’ in the inner life of its characters. In narrating this drama, however, Tolstoy steps out of historical time and enters the time-space of cultural myth. He allows himself considerable artistic licence. For example, the aristocracy’s return to native forms of dress and recreations actually took place over several decades in the early nineteenth century, whereas Tolstoy has it happen almost overnight in 1812. But the literary creation of this mythical time-space was central to the role which War and Peace was set to play in the formation of the national consciousness.

When the first part of the novel appeared, in 1865—6, educated Russia was engaged in a profound cultural and political quest to define the country’s national identity. The emancipation of the serfs, in 1861, had forced society to confront the humble peasant as a fellow-citizen and to seek new answers to the old accursed questions about Russia’s destiny in what one poet (Nikolay Nekrasov) called the ‘rural depths where eternal silence reigns’.² The liberal reforms of Tsar Alexander II (Emperor of Russia 1855—81), which included the introduction of jury trials and elected institutions of local government, gave rise to hopes that Russia, as a nation, would emerge and join the family of modern European states. Writing from this perspective, Tolstoy saw a parallel between the Russia of the 1860s and the Russia that had arisen in the wars against Napoleon.

War and Peace was originally conceived and drafted as a novel about the Decembrists, a group of liberal army officers who rose up in a failed attempt to impose a constitution on the Tsar in December 1825. In this original version of the novel the Decembrist hero returns after thirty years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the early years of Alexander II’s reign. But the more Tolstoy researched into the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots were to be found in the war of 1812. This was when these officers had first become acquainted with the patriotic virtues of the peasant soldiers in their ranks; when they had come to realize the potential of Russia’s democratic nationhood. Through this literary genesis, War and Peace acquired several overlapping spheres of historical consciousness: the real-time of 1805—20 (the fictional setting of the novel); the living memory of this period (from which Tolstoy drew in the form of personal memoirs and historical accounts); and its reflection in the political consciousness of 1855—65. Thus the novel can and should be read, not just as an intimate portrait of Russian society in the age of the Napoleonic Wars, but as a broader statement about Russia, its people and its history as a whole. That is why the Russians will always turn to War and Peace, as Mikhail Prishvin did, to find in it the keys to their identity.

English readers will learn more about the Russians by reading War and Peace than they will by reading perhaps any other book. But they will also find in it the inspiration to make them think about the world and their own place in it. For War and Peace is a universal work and, like all the great artistic prose works of the Russian tradition, it functions as a huge poetic structure for the contemplation of the fundamental questions of our existence.

Above all, War and Peace will move readers by virtue of its beauty as a work of art. It is a triumphant affirmation of human life in all its richness and complexity. That is why one can return to it and always find new meanings and new truths in it.

NOTES

1 Cited in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1994), pp. 32—3.

2 From ‘Silence’ (1857) in N. A. Nekrasov, Sochineniia (3 vols., Moscow, 1959), Vol. I, p. 201.

a

[Author’s note] This was the attack of which Thiers says: ‘The Russians behaved valiantly and – a rarity in warfare – two bodies of infantry were observed marching resolutely against each other without either of them giving way until they clashed.’ And Napoleon on St Helena said, ‘Some Russian battalions showed no fear.’

b

[Author’s note] History of the Year 1812: The Character of Kutuzov, and Reflections on the Unsatisfactory Results of the Battles at Krasnoye, by Bogdanovich.