István Csicsery-Rónay, Jr. — The Classical Historical Novel and the Mythology of liberal Nationalism: Scott, Manzoni, Eötvös, Kemény, Tolstoy.

CHAPTER VI: WAR AND PEA CE

For Eric Auerbach, the difference between Western European critical realism and the realism of the great nineteenth-century Russians is one of provenance. The Russian style originated not in the irony of a consolidated bourgeoisie intent on hegemony and at the same time dis­ illusioned with its own social relations. Rather, it is based on a Christian and traditional patriarchal concept of the creatural dignity of every human individual regardless of social rank and position, and hence, fundamentally related rather to old Chris­tian than modern occidental realism. The enlightened active bourgeoi­sie, with its assumption of economic and intellectual leadership, which everywhere else underlay modern culture in general, and modem realism in particular, seems to have scarcely existed in Russia (Auerbach 521).

Russian novelists were not compelled to confront the great variety of competing regional, social, and cultural interests that went into the fabric of Western bourgeois realism. According to Auerbach, their unifor­mity of landcsape and language, and their patriarchal Orthodox social traditions, made of the Russians a “great homogeneous national family” (522). Because of this national intimacy, the Russian novelists focused their attention on personal psychology, the intensity of experience in individuals responding to events and interactions outside them — and not the “laws of motion” of rapidly changing social relations (523).

The impetus to develop this committed and passionate style of realism came from such intense responses by members of the conservative Russian intelligentsia to the sudden and rapid changes they observed in nineteenth-century Russian conditions. To their eyes, these changes appeared to ori­ginate from alien Western European thought introduced to Russia by “Wes­ternizing” intellectuals, the traditional Russian view of disturbances in the social order since the reign of Peter the Great. Thus, if French critical realism was a form of polemic against the instrumentalization of values and the destruction of ethical norms, Russian realism was a polemic against the same values seen not as historical developments internal to Russian society, but “unnatural,” alien forces.

This antagonism concealed a paradox. For the alien Western ideas that had disrupted the traditional, putatively “organic” development of Russian society had also introduced to the Russians the very idea of development. The significant difference for our discussion between European and Russian styles of realism is that the Western realists directed their irony against the bad faith of their own class and institutions, while Russians directed it against the foreign elements in themselves, the historical and ideological artifices they had adopted in their own minds, which they believed interfered with the purity of their natural ethical- religious responses.

We can take Auerbach’s observation as a good starting point for considering War and Peace as the last innovation of the classical historical novel.¹ From one perspective, War and Peace is an enormous critique of Western European values after 1850. Specifically, it attacks the rhetorical empiricism that inspired Europeans’ satisfaction with their material progress, and shaped their ethical and aesthetic discourse. In the dis­cursive commentaries interpolated in the narrative, Tolstoy argues against the leading schools of Liberal historiography, most particularly the two major “progressivist” schools, the Positivism associated with Buckle and Hegelian idealism. In place of their covering laws, he proposes two dis­tinct (and ultimately contradictory) conceptions of historical meaning: history as the concrete experiences of individuals, and as the behavior of large, homogeneous masses.

Tolstoy’s diffusion of the action throughout the novel corresponds to this substitution of all-explaining abstractions with concrete parti­culars. The protagonists of War and Peace do not undergo the Western realist plot’s dramatic transformation of conditions, which is the basis for rhetorical empiricism (i.e., the representation of social life as an analogue to the world of matter under controlled conditions). Tolstoy frees his characters to float in response to the changes in their envi­ronments. None of their “enlightenments” are final; none of their reso­lutions are secure; none of their circumstances are fixed against the currents of time. Many years after completing the novel, Tolstoy spoke again of the atmosphere of changefulness that pervades War and Peace:

When a man has lived for a long time — as I have, with forty years of conscious life behind me –, he understands how false, how impossible every sort of adaptation to life is. For nothing is stable in it. It is like trying to adapt to flowing water. Every individu­al, family, society — everything changes, diminishes, and is trans­formed, like a cloud, and before a man can grow accustomed to one state of affairs in society, it has vanished, and another has taken its place. (qtd. in Eichenbaum 231-32)

This task that Tolstoy had set for himself in writing War and Peace, of disproving the Western rationalistic ideology of progress and its aes­thetic reflections in the novel (the plot, and the reconstruction of society that closes the plot), and of supplying a true conception of history, caused him enormous methodological problems. As he noted in his article, “Some Words about War and Peace,” the result was “not a novel, even less … a poem, and still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it was expressed” (Gibian 1366). To prove his personal conception of the history of 1805-1812 through the experience of individuals and the actions of the army, Tolstoy felt he first had to confront and refute the explanations of Western (and Westernizing) Liberal historians. First, he constructed a fiction to represent the private sphere, a constantly changing constella­tion of individual lives. Then he engaged the putatively false notions of history di­rectly, and attempted to invalidate them on their own terms, in their own quasi-philosophical language.

The latter strategy sometimes led Tolstoy to adopt precisely those premises he had ruled out in composing the fictional action. Isaiah Berlin, Boris Eichenbaum, and E.B. Greenwood have written extensively on the inconsistencies in Tolstoy’s historical theorizing.² We will consider these points specifically later in the discussion, but I wish to raise here only the initial “ontological” problem in the writing of War and Peace: the squaring of Tolstoy’s theory of the inaccessibility of histo­rical meaning to consciousness with the desire to write a historical novel. If the seat of truth is intuition and the human heart, or the ineffable spirit of the army, both inaccessible to language, intellect, and social institutions, what was the reason for reading and writing many thousands of pages about the true explanation of history, and for criticizing the false ones?

For Rousseau, whom Tolstoy revered above all modern thinkers, there had been no dilemma. History for him was a dismal satire, at best. True growth lay only in the development of the individual’s moral conscience. While visiting Lucerne in 1857, Tolstoy was outraged by the conduct of a group of English burghers who, after listening with pleasure to a poor Tyrolean singer, refused to give him money. Tolstoy wrote in his journal:

One could write the history of civilization, basing oneself on these facts. There it is, this familiar civilization. Rousseau wasn’t tal­king nonsense in his discourse on the evil civilization has done to manners…. Where is the original spontaneous sentiment of man? It is not to be found, and it disappears just as civilization, that is to say, the interested, rational, egoistic association of men, spreads. (qtd. in Greenwood 53)

If, for the Rousseauian Tolstoy, history was merely a record of the corruption of peoples by civilization, what good could have come of try­ing to reinterpret something that falsifies a priori? But as early as 1853 Tolstoy was writing of precisely such a wish to correct Russian history by giving “every historical event a human explanation” (qtd. in Eichenbaum 236). His first version of what was to become War and Peace was to have been entitled “All’s well that ends well,” a comic novellas about family life set against the events of 1812, which were to act as an ironic background. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair was to have been his model, and he intended to avoid mentioning all the historical figures of the time, even Kutuzov.

Neither Napoleon, neither Kutuzov, nor Talleyrand will be my heroes; I will write the history of people much freer than the statesmen, of people who lived in the most favorable conditions for fighting and choosing between good and evil … people who are free of poverty, ignorance, and independent people who lack those flaws that are necessary for leaving traces on the pages of chronicles. (201)

How did this satirical project turn into War and Peace , that grandi­ose attempt to synthesize stories of individuals’ intimate changes with a world-historical drama, complete with world-historical figures, armies and nations, spelled by critical commentaries on historiography and cur­rent trends in the philosophy of history? With reference to Scott, we mentioned Hegel’s injunction against using satire as a model for describing historical change, since the satirist must dismiss historical change as irrelevant when seen in the light of universal aesthetic and ethical standards. Tolstoy’s awareness of social life, and his love for his “overflo­wing” characters, would not fit into the restrictions of such satire. By the same token, Tolstoy was not able to dismiss the political exigencies of his age.

Tolstoy was not a Liberal, in the sense that Manzoni, Eötvös, and Kemény were. His desire for social and political reform, and his support for the emancipation of the peasantry, was anticapitalist and deeply conservative. Nevertheless, every intellectual of his age had been touched by Liberal ideology. The influence of Rousseau, Maistre, and Proudhon, traced by Berlin and Eichenbaum, can be attributed to Tolstoy’s need to polemicize against doctrinaire Liberal capitalism. He was so opposed to the moral-philosophical premises of late Liberalism that he cheerfully invoked the theories of the Russian Hegelian historians, Urusov and Po­godin, against the positivism of Buckle, without thinking through how their theories were no less mechanistic than the opponent’s. Liberalism had helped to determine the intellectual vocabulary of the Nineteenth Century, and Tolstoy, who strove to master his age completely, did not escape its influence,

But beyond mere cultural osmosis, Tolstoy was deeply interested in many of the problems that had given European, and particularly Eastern European, Liberalism its stamp. Reform of social conditions, particularly the emancipation and education of the serfs, creation of an integrated democratic economy, and the extension of rights, were Tolstoy’s ideological goals to the end of his life. Already in the 1850s he was active in agi­tating within the aristocracy for the liberation of the serfs. His concern was partly philanthropic, but also partly inspired by the fear of a mass peasant uprising, like those in Poland in 1846, and the destruction of Russian civil order. Like his precursors among historical novelists, Tol­stoy considered his age at a critical historical juncture. Liberal reforms had to be carried out because both morality and social-historical forces demanded them. The body-politic would not survive the chaos if the rulers did not cede some authority to the ruled. The choice was between compromise and anarchy, moral heroism (which, like Kutuzov’s, required wise renunciation) and moral catastrophe, In an 1856 letter to D.N. Bludov, Tolstoy wrote in words strikingly like those of Eötvös and Kemény:

The time is not right for thinking about historical justice and the advantages of one class, we must save the whole edifice from the firestorm that might swallow it up at any moment. It is clear to me that at present the question poses itself to the landlords thus: life or land… If the serfs are not free in six months -­- the firestorm will erupt. Everything stands ready for it, all it lacks is a treacherous hand to smuggle in the torch of revolt, and the fire will flare up everywhere. (qtd. in Eichenbaum 253)

Tolstoy became increasingly curious about the Decembrists, one of whose cardinal beliefs was that Liberal reforms were urgently needed to avoid a second Pugachov uprising. This preventive motivation for reform remained with Tolstoy even after the reforms of 1861, when his humanitarian ideals became more prominent, and his moral-political vision more international.³

The tone of the original satirical project changed considerably in the late 1850s. Tolstoy began to work on a novel depicting a Decembrist returning from exile in Siberia to the Russian society of the present in the 1850s. The situation implied a historical-ideological irony: a reformer returning to see a society essentially unchanged by his acts, but moving closer and closer to violent confrontation,. The critical focus implicit in the Decembrist novel, which Tolstoy abandoned because its historical setting “was a period of error and unhappiness” for his hero, yielded to a heroic focus when he picked up the project again, and traced his hero’s life back to 1812. But again Tolstoy had to break off; “among the half­ historical, half-social, half-invented great characters of the great era, the personality of my hero was being pushed into the background, and the foreground was being occupied, with equal interest for me, by old and young people and by men and women of that time” (Gibian 1364). 1812 had been too unambiguously heroic a time for Tolstoy to develop it. He began the pro­ject for a third time, setting it in 1805, during his Decembrist protagonists’ formative years.

Thus War and Peace grew out of two vastly different approaches to the history of 1812. One was to be a critical tale, exalting the virtues of everyday life and individual consciousness, the other a historical novel describing the development of Russian society and politics, culminating in the heroic age of the Napoleonic invasion. The thread that joined the two projects, and the two dissimilar notions of historical meaning, was a nationalist theme: how “Russia had saved Europe” from itself (First Epilogue, Chap. 3).

The Enchanted Circle of Rationalism

The Russia of 1805 in War and Peace is a satellite of Western European rationalism. At Mlle Scherer’s soiree that opens the novel, Andrey perceives he is in an “enchanted circle” of perverse relations. The languages and social codes of the aristocratic society are alien in several respects. They are not Russian, but French and German. They are mechanical systems based on conventions and abstractions — the salon language of the French, the “science of strategy” of the German generals. Foreign ways of thought are especially alienating when on Russian soil, where they have been artificially implanted, but since they corrupt the natural affections and honest experience of anyone that uses them, they are alien even in their lands of origin. Liberating Europe — including France and Germany — from its bondage to rationalism, and thus saving authentic human life from abstraction, is the world-historical task that has fallen to Russia in War and Peace.

French is introduced immediately as the language of false feeling. Petersburg good society meets at Mlle Scherer’s salon to perform the ritu­als of conventional social life. The Russian capital is but a mock-up of the French. So deeply ingrained is the artificiality and foreignness in social life that the characters are already participating in a tradition of alienation, thinking and living in patterns that have nothing to do with natural Russian identity. Prince Vassily, for one, “spoke in that refined French which our grand.fathers not only spoke but thought….” (Bk. I, § 1)⁴

French social language is based on artifice — conscious, perceptible distance from deeply felt personal sentiments. Irony, saying what one does not mean, and ambiguity, uttering messages not intended to be understood, are the most valued social qualities. Converse at Anna Pavlovna’s is a mechanical game of interlocking formulas so transparent that the interlocutors need not even pretend to mean anything; the purpose of the game is to keep the system of artifices working smoothly. Prince Vassily, in the first chapter the most imposing character, speaks “like a wound-up clock, by force of habit [saying] things he did not even wish to be believed.” In a wonderful mock-heroic simile, Anna Pavlovna manipulates her guests

as a foreman of a spinning mill, when he has set the hands to work, goes round and notices here a spindle that has stopped or there one that creaks or makes more noise than it should, and hastens to check the machine or set it in proper motion, so Anna Pavlovna moved about her drawing room, approaching now a silent, now a too noisy group, and by a word or a slight rearrangement kept the conversational ma­chine in steady, proper and regular motion.

With the exception of Pierre and Andrey, the guests are all experienced poseurs, who have long since ceased to be aware of their natural feelings. The soiree itself is a pose, masquerading as a gathering of notables paying a social call on Anna Pavlovna’s invalid mother, whom they utterly ignore. In this world, anything can be turned into an inten­tionally artificial sign-system, even the simplest work: Andrey’s wife, the “little princess,” uses her knitting, “sticking the needle into her work as if to testify that the interest and fascination of the story pre­vented her from going on with it.” When everything becomes meaningful only because of its place in a system of artifices, there is no reason even to pretend to make individual utterances signify anything. The idiotic Prince Hippolyte is a “natural” within the conventions; one can’t “be sure whether what he said was very witty or very stupid.”

Sincerity, speaking what one feels to be true, is the antagonist of the conventional system, since it gives individuals priority over rules of civility. The language of false feeling blocks out the language of true feeling. Even as the tale develops, and the French invasion forces most of the characters to recognize their solidarity with their coun­trymen and their Russian feelings, French continues to be used by the most blinded characters for moral subterfuge. Hélène cannot contemplate her wish to divorce Pierre in order to marry one or the other of her lovers, without thinking in French: “Hélène [spoke], changing from Russian, in which she always felt that her case did not sound quite clear, into French which suited it better” (Bk. XI, §5). The mayor of Mos­cow, Rastopchin, is so devoted to French culture that at first he cannot conceive fighting against Frenchmen: “How can we fight the French…? Can we arm ourselves against our teachers and divinities? Look at our youths, look at our ladies! The French are our Gods: Paris is our Kingdom of Hea­ven” (Bk. VIII, §3).  And it is the French culture that Rastopchin ido­lizes that permits the greatest transgression in the novel, the sacrifice of the young dissident, Vereschtchagin. Invoking le bien publique, the re­lativistic mantra of the French revolutionary civil administration, Rastopchin plays Caiaphas, Judas, and Pilate to Vereschtchagin’s Christ, re­manding him to the angry crowd as a scapegoat to save himself. While esca­ping through the back door and rattling away in his carriage, Rastopchin consoles himself that the public good sometimes requires sacrifices. (Iro­nically, this is Pierre’s defense of Napoleon in the matter of the Due d’Enghien in the opening chapter.) The narrator remarks: “Since the world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed such a crime against his fellow man without comforting himself with this same idea, This idea is le bien publique, the hypothetical welfare of other people” (Bk. XI, §12),

If French is the language of false feeling, mechanical convention, sterile peace, then German is the language of false knowledge applied to war. German and Austrian generals trained in the principles of the Hofkriegsrath control the Russian military in 1805. They have the Czar’s ear, and maintain their ascendancy until the magic spell is broken with the battle of Borodino. The Germans consider war a laboratory for the “science of strategy”: they prepare for battles by identifying and weighing forces and abstractions: topography, troop-strength, and mobi­lity, ignoring the concrete element of their human armies. War is an intellectual exercise for them, in which soldiers are to be manipulated like chess-pieces by players at an Olympian distance. The German staff is so far from experiencing death and life existentially and immediately, it cannot conceive of the army’s mysterious power, which Tolstoy, drawing on Urusov, calls “morale.”

Invariably, the German science of strategy fails. Like a conventional social discourse, its formulas interlock and reinforce one another on paper, separated from experience. But against Napoleon’s superior power (which is solidly based on his army’s morale), they are as ineffectual as paper. For Tolstoy, it was in the nature of the wars of 1805-1812 that Czar Alexander and the Russians could only respond to Napoleon’s constant positive decisions and actions. This proves, of course, to be their strength, embodied in Kutuzov’s wise passivity. The German generals, on the other hand, are as aggressive as Napoleon. They try to res­pond to Napoleon’s actions with their own positive actions.

Their attempts to outdecide and outact Napoleon consistently precipitate disaster. This is the cause of Mack’s catastrophe at Ulm, where “instead of an offensive, the plan of which, carefully prepared in accord with the modern science of strategics, had been handed to Kutuzov when he was in Vienna by the Hofkriegsrath,” Kutuzov must hurry to save his Russian army from being surrounded and decimated like the Austrian comman­der’s (Bk. II, §6). Weierother’s rigid deployment at Austerlitz fails to account for a chance development, the onset of fog on the battlefield — while Napoleon makes use of it. Similarly, rather than withdrawing from the indefensible Drissa camp, Pfuhl fortifies it, and necessitates the Russian retreat to Moscow.

The Russians finally reject the certainty of the “men of theory” not because they are invariably unsuccessful, but because they exploit the Russian people without regard for their lives, or for the purpose of defending Russia in the first place. The system’s purpose is to prove itself, not to keep sight of individual lives and feelings. On the re­treat to Borodino, Andrey and Pierre overhear the conversation of two German generals, Woltzogen and Klausewitz.

“Der Krieg muss in Raum verlegt werden. Der Ansicht kann ich nicht genug Preis geben….” said one of them.

“Oh, ja.” said the other, “der Zweck ist nur dein Feind zu schwachen, so kann man gewiss nicht den Verlust der Privat-Personen ih Achtung nehmen.”

“Oh, no,” agreed the other.

”Extend widely!” said Prince Andrey with an angry snort, when they had ridden past. “In that ‘extend’ were my father, son, and sister, at Bald Hills. That’s all the same to him. That’s what I was saying to you — those gentlemen won’t win the battle tomorrow but will only make all the mess they can, because they have nothing in their Ger­man heads but theories not worth an empty eggshell, and haven’t in their hearts the one thing needed tomorrow — that which Timokhin has. They have yielded up all of Europe to him, and have now come to teach us. Fine teachers!” (Bk. X, §25)

The scientific strategists’ system ignores the values associated with living on one’s native ground, among one’s family and compatriots. Since they follow and abstract ideal pattern of warfare, they need no verifica­tion in reality. Having lost Germany, they can be even freer with land not their own. But to persuade the Russians to permit them to continue their game, they resort to hypocritical pretense. The final rejection of German strategy comes when Bennigsen calls for the defense of “Russia’s ancient and sacred capital,” by moving the whole Russian army from one flank of the French army to the other in the middle of the night.

“Russia’s ancient and sacred capital! “[Kutuzov] suddenly said, repeating Bennigsen’s words in an angry voice and thereby drawing at­tention to the false note in them. “Allow me to tell you, your excellency, that that question has no meaning for a Russian…. Such a question cannot be put; it is senseless! The question I have asked these gentlemen to meet to discuss is a military one. The question is that of saving Russia. Is it better to give up Moscow without a battle, or by accepting battle to risk losing the army as well as Moscow? That is the question on which I want your opinion….” (Bk. XI, §3)

Rationalism and Egotism: Napoleon in History

Rationalism begins with the assumption that the individual mind is capable of understanding truth through its inherent intellectual processes. Common to all its forms is a belief in the individual’s access to universal truth, once the illusions of contingent matter and emotional pro­jections are stripped away from pure thought. With the Enlightenment, the rationalistic world-view was extended to include history. With the rise of Napoleon and the Liberal historians of the Restoration period in France, reason appeared incarnate in history, both in the predictable lawlike behavior of historical forces, and in heroic, catalytic indivi­duals embodying new forces of change.

As the cognizing ego is the center of reflective reason, the ego acting on its knowledge is the center of rational action. In society, all this is merely writ large. The ego’s function is performed by the he­roic leader, for whom the constraints of “maintaining society,” to use Hegel’s phrase, are like the body’s illusion-world. Just as the scientist or industrialist of the bourgeois age forms matter into an instrument by organizing it, and thus transcends it, the hero uses nations and armies as his instruments to transcend the “raw material” of society, and, god­like, to shape the course of human lives.

This was the monumental vision of rationalistic history begun by the French Revolution and elaborated by the cult of Napoleon. It gave the Liberal historians fighting the reaction a quasi-mystical notion of the conjunction of law and ego. For Tolstoy writing in the 1860s, Napoleon represented the incarnation of rationalism. As the novel’s Napoleon approaches Russia, and then moves further and further into Russian terri­tory, he is stripped of personal qualities, and becomes increasingly re­presentative of Tolstoy’s conception of the action of egoism and rationa­lism in history.

Napoleon’s first appearance in the book, on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, shows him at the height of his glory. Tolstoy’s description of the young Emperor invests him with some of the admiration felt by Pierre and Andrey at this point in the tale.

He sat motionless, looking at the heights visible above the mist, and his cold face wore that special look of confident, self-complacent happiness that one sees on a boy happily in love. The marshals stood behind him, not venturing to distract his attention. He looked now at the Pratzen Heights, now at the sun floating up out of the mist.

When the sun had entirely emerged from the fog, and fields and mist were aglow with dazzling light — as if he had only awai­ted this to begin the action — he drew the glove from his shapely white hand, made a sign with it to the marshals, and ordered the action to begin. (Bk. III, §13)

Napoleon’s posture is romantically heroic — despite the contrary undertones, the “cold face,” the “shapely white hand.” In this moment, theatricality and affectation fuse with history and grace. During his visit to the hospital tent where the wounded Russian officers are being treated, Napoleon carries himself with great martial dignity, bestowing the victorious warrior’s epic respect on the vanquished heroes. But Andrey breaks the trance. Before Andrey’s wounding, Napoleon had appeared as the epitome of grandeur, Andrey’s ideal. Now, seen in the light of mortality, grandeur and the hero shrink to a human scale. “So insignifi­cant at that moment seemed all the interests that engrossed Napoleon, so mean did his hero himself with his paltry vanity and joy in victory appear, compared to the lofty, equitable, and kindly sky which he had seen and understood, that he could not answer him.”

At Austerlitz, Napoleon is both grand and pompous, a hero and a vain mortal. But he is fully a hero. He lords it over Europe, and can be compared adversely only with the sky in Andrey’s vision of eternal truth,. When Napoleon crosses the mystical line between Europe and Russia, however, Tolstoy’s descriptions focus increasingly on Napoleon’s pettiness. At Vilna, he gloats over his usurpation of the palace that had lately been the Czar’s western residence. When he meets the Czar’s ambassador, Col. Balashov, Napoleon struts like a foolish dandy, and slips into petu­lant, histrionic rages. Tolstoy slices him up with ridiculous metonymies. He appears in dandified, finicky dress, his “plump, white neck” stands out against his uniform, he smells of eau-de-cologne, there is jerk in his walk, his stomach protrudes “involuntarily,” and he possesses the stateliness “one-sees in men of forty who live in comfort” (Bk. IX, §6).

Napoleon as usurper is all vanity and pose, his grandeur vanishes as soon as he enters the first land not bound to him by fealty to rationalism and the cult of the hero. He has unshakeable confidence in his own correctness, with none of the doubt that dignifies War and Peace‘s nonhistorical characters. He “does not condescend to prepare what he has to say but is sure he will always say the right thing and say it well” (Ibid.) Thus, once over the Niemen, Napoleon undergoes a transformation in Tolstoy’s descriptions. While in Europe, his grandeur had been only slightly tainted by his mortal pettiness, in Russia his world-historical role merely exaggerates his vanity. On the eve of Borodino, Tolstoy has the dandy Emperor perform for the eyes of the historians (one of whom, de Beausset, was actually present at the scene described) who require grand heroics for their aestheticized, monumentalizing chronicles. De­ Beausset has brought from Paris an idealized portrait of Napoleon’s son, the young King of Rome, depicting him playing stick-and-ball with a globe of the earth.

With the natural capacity of an Italian for changing the expression of his face at will, he drew nearer to the portrait and assumed a look of passive tenderness. He felt that what he now said and did would be historical, and it seemed to him that it would now be best for him — whose grandeur enabled his son to play stick and ball with the terrestrial globe — to show, in contrast to that gran­deur, the simplest paternal tenderness. His eyes grew dim, he moved forward, glanced around at a chair (which seemed to place itself under him), and sat down on it before the portrait. At a single gesture from him everyone went out on tiptoe, leaving the great man to himself and his emotion. (Bk. X, § 26)

Napoleon here is a hypocrite, an actor transforming the reality of tens of thousands of lives into theater. He is an entirely external man, a bundle of fashionable metonymies, clothes, gestures, elegant phrases. He has nothing of the depths of the Russian characters, for his egotism leaves no space for spontaneity or choice. He has raised impulse to the level of infallible inspiration, but at the same time he requires the constant acknowledgement of his servants to maintain his position. He orders the King of Rome’s portrait to be shown to the officers of the Old Guard, who respond with ecstatic reinforcement.

For Tolstoy, egotism and rationalism attain their world-historical peak in Napoleon. In both the cult of reason and the cult of the ego, inscrutable nature is subsumed and ordered by human artifice. This sup­pression of nature also entails the suppression of human nature. More­over, Napoleon is simultaneously so petty and so all-powerful, that the incongruity forces Tolstoy into a contradictory description of his role in history. For one moment, Napoleon is permitted a passing shadow of conscience, as he watches the carnage at Borodino. Without this scene, Tolstoy might have created a character transcending the common run of humanity in the purity of his pride, an affectless psychopath who had succeeded in putting himself past human choice. But Tolstoy’s design would have been compromised were Napoleon to be seen as an archetypal Antichrist. Just as his counterpart, Kutuzov, is rife with base traits, Napoleon must still have the spark of humanity if he is to be judged by Tolstoy’s ethical norms, Watching, high above the battlefield,

The terrible spectacle of the battlefield covered with dead and wounded, together with the heaviness of his head and the news that some twenty generals he knew personally had been killed or wounded, and the consciousness of the impotence of his once mighty arm, produ­ced an unexpected impression on Napoleon who usually liked to look at the killed and wounded, thereby, he considered, testing his strength of mind. This day the horrible appearance of the battle­ field overcame that strength of mind which he thought constituted his merit and his greatness. He rode hurriedly from the battlefield and returned to the Shevardino knoll, where he sat on his campstool, his sallow face swollen and heavy, his eyes dim, his nose red, and his voice hoarse, involuntarily listening, with downcast eyes, to the sound of the firing. With painful dejection he awaited the end of this action, in which he regarded himself as a participant and which he was unable to arrest. A personal, human feeling for a brief mo­ment got the better of the artificial phantasm of life he had served so long. He felt in his own person the sufferings and death he had witnessed on the battlefield. The heaviness of his head and chest reminded him of the possibility of suffering and death for himself. At that moment he did not desire Moscow, or victory, or glory (what need had he for any more glory?). The one thing he wished for was rest, tranquillity and freedom. But when he had been on the Semenovsk heights the artillery commander had proposed to him to bring several batteries of artillery up to those heights to strengthen the fire on the Russian troops crowded in front of Knyazkovo. Napoleon had assented and had given orders that news should be brought him of the ef­ fect those batteries produced. ( Bk. X,§ 37)

Caught in the web of his own past performances and among the circumstances he had pretended to control, Napoleon appears to see the same truth that Tolstoy had presented through his fictional characters’ flux of epiphanies, concentrated in Andrey’s vision at Austerlitz. The Emperor drops his unreal sense of power, sees through his “artificial phantasm of life,” and feels as an individual facing the irrational mystery of death. For a moment he is present, aware of life, feeling remorse.

But only for a moment.

He returns swiftly to the “artificial reality of imaginary great­ness.” After this, to the end of his life, Napoleon acts for the sake of an abstract historical projection, rather than from natural human affections. “Never to the end of his life,” remarks the narrator, “could he understand goodness, beauty or truth, or the significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to grasp their meaning” (Ibid.).

Tolstoy’s Napoleon becomes abstract in proportion to the richness of detail his characterization acquires. Unlike Kutuzov, whose sloth, and taste for French romances and Wallachian mistresses bring into relief the suprapersonal quality of his affinity with the Russian people, Napoleon’s concrete attributes ultimately add up to an undialectical and unrelieved picture of vanity and egotism. Tolstoy gives neither psychological, nor historical depth to Napoleon’s ambition, as he does to Kutuzov’s passivity. Many critics have noted that Tolstoy tendentiously distorted the facts about Napoleon that he had gleaned from his research.⁵ It may be, as Eichenbaum believes, that Tolstoy envied Napoleon his greatness and singlemindedness, and felt, in his own ambition to perfect himself, that he was competing with the amoral, Promethean hero that had lain the foundation for the adulation accorded contemporary dictators like Bismarck and Napoleon (Greenwood 73).

From the perspective of the realistic historical novel, the single most important motive for Tolstoy’s representation of Napoleon in War and Peace as a petty egotist raised to world-historical prominence is that Napoleon embodied rationalistic dictatorship, the rule of one ego over millions of lives. Tolstoy quotes Napoleon’s recollections of the Russian campaign written on St. Helena as proof of the despots unregenerate world-historical egotism. In the context of Book X, it appears as a refutation of Bonapartist historians’ claims for their hero’s morality and magnanimity, but in the larger context of the novel, it is the pivotal, damning evi­dence against Western ideology, and proof of what Russia had rescued Europe from in 1812.

The Russian war should have been the most popular war of modern times: it was a war of good sense, for real interests, for the tranquillity and security of all; it was purely pacific and conservative.

It was a war for a great cause, the end of uncertainties and the beginning of security. A new horizon and new labors were opening out, full of well-being and prosperity for all. The European system was already founded; all that remained was to organize it.

Satisfied on these great points, and with tranquillity every­where, I too should have had my Congress and my Holy Alliance. Those ideas were stolen from me. In that reunion of great sovereigns we should have discussed our interests like one family, and have rendered account to the people as clerks to master.

Europe would soon have been, in fact, but one people, and anyone who traveled anywhere would have found himself always in the common fatherland. I should have demanded the freedom of all navigable ri­vers for everybody, that the seas should be common to all, and that the great standing armies should be reduced henceforth to mere guards for the sovereigns.

On retuming to France, to the bosom of the great, strong, mag­nificent, peaceful and glorious fatherland, I should have proclaimed her frontiers immutable; all future wars purely defensive, all aggrandizement anti-national. I should have associated my son in the Empire, my dictatorship would have been finished, and his constitutional reign would have begun.

Paris would have been the capital of the world, and the French the envy of the nations.

My leisure then, and my old age, would have been devoted, in company with the Empress and during the royal apprenticeship of my son, to leisurely visiting, with our own horses and like a true coun­try couple, every corner of the Empire, receiving complaints, redres­sing wrongs, and scattering public public buildings and benefactions on all sides and everywhere. (Bk. X, §38)

Napoleon’s vision of history made from above, true to rationalistic egotism, has human artifice in control of nature. The European system would have ended uncertainty and created security. Organization, prosperity, system, security, well-being, benefactions: all are words the ego uses to rationalize its faith in its own actions and understanding. Even in theory such words lead to self-contradiction: “defensive wars”; one fatherland shared by all nations but with France as primus inter pares; sovereigns giving account of their works to their peoples as clerks to masters, but with retired Emperors “scattering benefactions”; an international system composed of unalterable nations, etc. When applied in practice, they lead to contradictions of a more barbarous sort. Tolstoy cites Napoleon’s self-consoling observation that far fewer French soldiers perished in the Russian campaign that soldiers of other nations,.

It is possible to conceive, as many Bonapartist historians did, Napoleon’s vision of a European system under a constitutional Emperor, held together by the balance of competing national interests, as no less contradictory than any other, and indeed more rational than most. For Tolstoy, however, the very intent to organize society according to putative economic and political laws rather than ethical precepts disclosed the mechanistic limits of the rationalistic mind. In the action of War and Peace, Tolstoy’s alternative to authoritarian abstraction lay in the concrete, personal experience of characters whose lives and affec­tions are entangled in history involuntarily and arationally, as human beings are caught up in nature.

Consciousness, History and Metonymy: Syntagmatic Form in War and Peace

Tolstoy wished to contrast the “real” texture of individual and communal life with the “unreal” image presented by historians and by the idealists’ claims to discern the necessity behind human conduct (Berlin 6). The primary tool of this realism was metonymy. Roman Jakobsen has associated each plane of the Saussurean linguistic co-ordinate system with its own particular values and world-view.⁶ The dominance of the metaphoric plane tends to emphasize closed, systematic, “vertical” relations among language parts. Its favored forms articulate a fund, or pool, of similar elements, the meaning of which lies in their mutual redundancy. Its literary epitome is lyric verse, the ordered repetition or variation of a single phonological figure;⁷ by extension, the lyric’s concentrated imagery tends toward metaphoric redundancy. The poem’s tropes act, in general, as reinforcements of an underlying metaphorical premise (Wicker 23-28).

Metonymic dominance tends to accent the sequential, “horizontal” re­lations among language parts. Elements are linked by association, and are not subsumed by a single class to which they uniformly belong. Instead, they operate through the accentuation of their differences. Jakobsen as­sociates metonymy with epic and realistic narrative, for both are based on the linking of episodes; realistic narrative, moreover, is characterized by the underlying trope of the “reality effect,” itself a metapho­ric link between the continguous spatial relations of the episodes — the characters’ movements through their “object-worlds” — with similar sequences and patterns in a real world conceived as an empirically known combination of effects in experience of innumerable real situations related only by contiguity. Both realism in fiction and empiricism seek to draw their plausible pictures of how things really are by heaping up concrete details and instances with a maximum of metonymic proximity (demonstration) and a minimum of metaphoric motivation (explanation).

The redundancy of metonymy leads to a counter-redundancy, a negation of metaphoric uniformity; the repeated dissimilar situations, ob­jects, spaces, and horizons are drawn from a metaphorical fund of elements sharing only difference (Lotman 190). Thus, while “lyrical novels” tend to concen­trate their significant episodes into a single plot, character, point of view, and a single metaphorical-symbolic “meaning,” realistic novels (those that strive to evoke the experience of social reality in the re­ality effect as part of the fiction’s theme) tend to diffuse significant episodes, retarding the dovetailing and epilogical raveling up of plot, keeping the resolutions separate for as long as possible. Moreover, since the metonymic plane uses difference as its theme, metonymic fiction makes uses of critical thought in order to keep the valeur of unlike things and characters clear and irreduceable, dialectically posed against one another.

When a writer like Tolstoy emphasizes the metonymic properties of history, the succession of differences, his image of history tends to represent change per se, the chronicler’s accretion of particulars, the “one damn thing after another” so despised by scientific and philosophi­cal historians. Barthes cites Nietzsche’s admonition that the fact of change or contiguous difference — like any other fact — cannot exist until “meaning” gives it a position in a structure of values. (Barthes, “Historical Discourse” 153). Meaning in this formulation is a function of the metaphorical axis, manifested in the redundancy of certain historical elements, including change itself, which translate into constancy of value among the variable events of time. Within this framework, War and Peace is doubtless one of the most thorough- going pieces of modem historical writing in the metonymic mode. Tolstoy strove to avoid using any forming category that might have confined the dynamism of his image of historical change. He opposed the totalistic­ systematic view of historians he associated with Western European mate­rialism on several levels of the text, building both the fictional and historical action (and to some extent, even the metahistorical commentary) on the association of fractions intended to evoke the fluidity and incomprehensibility of the whole, to stress its ceaseless transformings, and the characters’ experience of being “in the middest.” The ascendancy of the contiguous is so pronounced in War and Peace that the story’s element of “what comes next” — in most novels subjected in the end by the plot’s telos to the work’s metaphoric “action” — is set free to “overflow” without resolution (Eichenbaum 221).

Barthes writes that the syntagm is a combination of signs using space as a support (Barthes, “Elements” 58). Syntagmatic form posits infinite extension in space in which elements are seen as proximal. E.M, Forster, writing in Aspects of the Novel, makes the pertinent comments that “space is the lord of War and Peace ;” the novel’s serenity derives “from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them” (Forster 39). It is from the evocation of comprehensive, encompassing space then, the province of contiguous objects, that the parts of War and Peace gain their metaphoric meaning for Forster. Russia’s expanse — the cause of the Russian’s victory over Bonaparte — is a metaphoric pool of which the novel’s actions, events, relations and thoughts are members. Tolstoy constructs his novel through metonymy on every level of the works: the weave of the several fictional and historical characters’ autonomous plots; the individual characters’ lives, seen, as it were, in discrete moments; the characters’ several epiphanies, decisions and confrontations, each of which is believed to be decisive at the moment, only to be supplanted and criticized by another partial consciousness; in the constant change in historical conditions to which the characters respond; the use of motifs or “markers” to identify character traits; the use of metonymy for reality effect; the use of real and fictional documents to “move” historical material as well as to accentuate the par­tial knowledge of historical observers; and finally, in the composition of this work which is “not a novel, still less … a poem, still less a historical chronicle,” the use of fictional action, historiography, meta­commentary, philosophical discourse and polemical criticism in contiguous relations.⁸

Both in the representation of relations among the characters and within the characters themselves Tolstoy develops the image of autonomous characters meeting syntagmatically, plausibly, each meeting the outcome of the sheer density of the actors’ moves rather than because of a meta­phoric “fate.” The leading figures of War and Peace appear in parts of the intimated whole of their lives. In a sense, they are different cha­racters each time we meet them. Except for Andrey, none of them are given a final raveling up at death, a vantage from which we might see the whole pattern of their lives. (Other characters whose deaths are significant in the book, old Count Bezuhov, the little princess, Hélène and Petya, are too flat to share in the “dialectics of the soul,” Chernishevsky’s phrase for Tolstoy’s theme [qtd. in Eichenbaum 233]). Even with Andrey, however, death is not an end-point. His dying vision presages a transcendent “new life.” Pierre commits himself totally to several incompatible roles, from bastard-aris­tocrat to savior of mankind; he performs several kinds of nearly involun­tary actions, from throwing a policeman into a river tied to the back of a bear to saving a child’s life in the Moscow conflagration. And yet none of Pierre’s situations are definitive. Even the seeming attainment of enlightenment under Platon Karataev’s influence, so consonant with the novel’s metahistorical theme, proves to be only one phase among the many. By the end of the tale, we see Pierre as a budding Decembrist, implicating himself in social reform and political agitation, as if he had never en countered Platon’s and Kutuzov’s wise renunciation.

Leaving aside for the moment the vexed question of Tolstoy’s denial of freedom of will on the metaphysical plane, each of his character’s every choice in the work is autonomous. Their many epiphanies, decisions, and confrontations — those moments in the action that readers expect to interpret as decisive situations revealing the tenor of the work’s while meaning, like Diltheyan “impression points” (Kermode, “Genesis” 16) — are never conclusive. Each character’s transformation is partial, each moment of consciousness is partial, a piece of the continuum extending before and after the time­ slice of 1805-1812 represented in the pages of the book.

The historical events surrounding the fictional action remain ob­scure to the fictional actors. They cannot divine the meaning of events because they are always in the midst of a process moving them from one historical syntagm to another. Only suprahistorical characters can sense the course of future events, the ironic diplomat Bilibin before Napoleon’s “transgression” into Russia, and Kutuzov after it; the former, because he knows how Russians and their allies behave vis a vis one another, the latter because of his mystical synchronization with the Russian spirit. The fictional characters always respond to partial knowledge, usually in the form of particularly powerful objects (parts of space) or lyrical moments (parts of time). Their awareness is heightened and clarified by a form of point-consciousness, focusing all their energies on pri­vileged fragments. But they can never exfoliate from their piece of par­tial knowledge to full understanding, Pierre’s fascination with Hélène’s stunning white shoulders binds him to his exploitative belle dame sans merci until his meeting with the Mason Bazdaev gives him a broader vista.

Later, his dabbling in numerology leads him to associate Napoleon with the apocalyptic number-symbol of the Antichrist, the Beast 666, whom, now that he possesses this privy knowledge, he feels duty-bound to assassinate. Only when a healthy, living, and continuing part of life, a single unknown child trapped in one of the thousands of housefires in French-occupied Moscow distracts him from his goal, is Pierre set free from the hypnotizing abstract symbol. Andrey, too, ties his life to specific objects. The sky at Austerlitz, of course, illuminates his sense of petty mortality. The sight of the great oak tree bursting into leaf on his Bogucharovo estate completes the spiritual transformation begun at another heightened moment, when Andrey overheard Natasha’s enchanting song. (The song-scene itself is a great metonymic moment, in which the characters are conti­guous — Andrey’s window is directly below Natasha’s — without any other connection between them than the song, which means something different for each of them.)

In his chapter of “Details in War and Peace,” Schklovsky identifies several aspects of Tolstoy’s rhetoric of concrete details, which he be­lieves act as” particularizing” effects, used by Tolstoy to freshen aspects of reality that have been flattened by convention, in accord with the Formalists’ notion of ostranenie, or estrangement. “When it is neces­sary for Tolstoy to ‘make strange’ death or war, then he need only ‘parti­cularize’ it, to make it not war in general or killing in general, but the killing of a real man; moreover, Tolstoy, having mastered the technique, is able to evoke and actualize it with minimal artistic expenditure (Gibian 1434).

In another context, this use of particularizing metonymic technique brings about Tolstoy’s characteristic reality effect. He does not let his readers forget that the whole can never be presented in toto, and that therefore it must be depicted through the part that implies the whole. The technique naturally tends to be critical and ironic when applied to the incomplete consciousness of those characters who believe they are fully aware of their role in history, e.g., Speransky’s laugh, or Napoleon’s dandy man­ners. But it also allows a great tonnage of historical material to move quickly through the work, emphasizing the dynamism of history’s flow. Tolstoy similarly incorporates — often without transforming them at all — historical documents and correspondence to concentrate the meaning of historical events into the language of the ones observing them at the time, e.g., Bilibin’s letter to Andrey, Napoleon’s St. Helena memoires, and the frequent quotations from contemporary historians. The “real” image of history thus seems to require “real” documentation side-by-side with fiction.

Finally, Tolstoy gave his work sytagmatic form by composing it in such a way that the fictional world (itself a metonymy for the whole historical life of Russia in 1805-1812) is only a particular part of the whole work, that further includes metacommetary, polemical criticism, and philosophical discourse. Although in his historical glosses and critiques of the historical accounts of 1812 Tolstoy intended to explain all the fictional action, at least to the extent of denying any other explanation, there is no leveling metaphorical meaning in War and Peace that will blur the lines between contiguous fictional and philosophical sections. The allegedly comprehensive (albeit ineffable) metahistorical content is also marked by this consistent antimetaphoric style; the panoramic omniscience is balanced, and contradicted, as it were, by the fictional action’s elaborate detailing of the dialectics of the soul. Thus the contradiction between Pierre’s quietist enlightenment under Platon’s tutelage as a pri­ oner of war, and his pre-Decembrist reform-mindedness after the war, might be reconciled after a fashion by a deeper, irreduceable syntagmatic opposition between war and peace, and each sphere’s appropriate con­ cerns.

This lack of resolution at the heart of War and Peace caused Henry James’ famous confusion: “what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” (Gibian 1395). James demanded from the artist, “that divine explanatory genius,” that he provide a “deep-breathing economy and an organic form,” an image of what counts in life and what does not, a metaphoric example of the discovery process of human values. That is, at bottom, a Socratic enterprise, a dialectical romance, in the course of which truth is purified of false­hood, illusion stripped away from reality. Tolstoy, however, was evoking a counter-tradition, a pre-Socratic, Heraclitean dialectic. In Heraclitus’ tradition, transformations are unceasing and nonprogressive; they produce no Laplacean point outside the flux from which to observe reality. Eichenbaum’s view is widely accepted that Tolstoy’s choice for the title of his work was influenced by Proudhon’s La Guerre et la Paix. But it has also, at the very least, a great coincidental affinity for one of Heraclitus’ most famous fragments: “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger….” (Kirk & Raven 191). The Heraclitean logos is manifest in the constant play of oppositions. The underlying unity of things cannot be identified, it can only be recognized in the dialectic of all aspects of creation taken together. The similarities of Heraclitean thought to Tol­stoy’s War and Peace have yet to be explored.⁹ What most concerns our present discussion is a relationship of contiguity: nothing is itself un­less it is seen next to its opposite. The transformations of all things, furthermore, are spatial and temporal changes of position within the dia­lectic of contradictions. No point of view can disclose a self-identical, metaphorical unity behind the contradictions, neither as myth, nor as scientific explanation.

The Narrative Spiral: The Ideology of the Concrete in War and Peace

Turgenev, among others, considered Tolstoy’s use of metonymy as sham:

…Tolstoy impresses the reader with the toe of Alexander’s boot, the laugh of Speransky. He forces the reader to believe that he knows everything about his subject, if indeed he goes down to these minute details, but in reality he knows only these small details. It is a trick and nothing more, but the public has fallen for it. ¹⁰

For Turgenev Tolstoy’s metonymies depend on an illusion every bit as contingent and ideologically determined as the ones he criticized. In fact, they are peculiarly complicit in the very same ideological activity as the objects of criticism. They can be read as extrapolations of the manners of elegant society, in which a hint is sufficient to represent much that remains wittily and discreetly — and often misleadingly -­ unsaid. Furthermore, unlike Scott’s early use of the concrete to intro­duce the unfamiliar, Tolstoy requires prior intimate knowledge of the concrete world he “estranges.”

By basing the fictional action on the techniques of concrete, metonymic description, Tolstoy faced two difficulties, and his attempt to resolve them figured forth the underlying contradictions of Tolstoy’s ideology of history in War and Peace. First: how does the concrete –­ whether as a moment of authentic feeling in life, or particularized detail in a work of art — mean anything? Second: how can the human moti­vation he wished to give history in the concrete experience of fictional characters explain the historical action, when those characters do not, and true to the realist storytelling technique of the classical histori­cal novelist, cannot, influence the historical action?

Previous historical novelists had already encountered these problems to some degree, they inhere in the realist’s attempt to describe great social-historical experiences through the perceptions and actions of fictional individuals. But none of Tolstoy’s predecessors had distanced himself as much as Tolstoy had from the Liberal ideology underlying the realistic historical novelist’s technique. Those artists who viewed na­tional historical progress through periodic social collisions selected dramatic conflict as their aesthetic paradigm. In the novels of Scott, Manzoni, Eötvös, and Kemény, the dramatic construction of plot implied that history was a dramatic form in reality — a view particularly appro­priate in revolutionary periods (Jameson, Marxism and Form 259-60). As many commentators have observed — most particularly Eichenbaum — Tolstoy wished to construct his novel of 1812 not as a social novel centered on a dramatic personal conflict, but as a national epic, a modern Iliad (Gibian 1445). In his wide-angled scope, the crises and dramatic epiphanies that might have served earlier historical novelists for a dozen novels, themselves become concrete elements in the flux of history. The dramatic totality of movement, repeated hundredfold, becomes merely one of the objects of the epic’s totality of objects.

Tolstoy originally conceived War and Peace as a conflict between rationalistic Western despotism of the abstract ego and the intuitive Russian consciousness of the concrete feeling life. He preserved that op­position in the early parts of the novel by focusing exclusively on the Russian consciousness. Napoleon is at first only a distant topic of conversation at a Petersburg soiree, or a flicker of images at Austerlitz. As long as the struggle appeared to be going on only in the Russian mind, it appeared resolvable within Russian minds.

Before he resorts to extensive historical criticism after Book IX, Tolstoy represents the opposition through concrete images from the cha­racters’ everyday lives, a technique favoring the intuitive side of the antagonism, valuing moments of great awareness of concrete presence in the world over intellectual systematization. In each of the major battle­ pieces, to take one example of Tolstoy’s technique, the narrative moves by way of a spiral descent, both in the action and the focus of consciousness, from the abstract “map consciousness” of rationalist projection to the fictional characters’ intimate confrontations with their own mortality. The first battle-description of the novel, the skirmish at Enns, begins with a wide vista opening from the heights, from which the Russian bat­teries stand guard over a bridge spanning the Danube. An officer scanning with his field glasses observes a little town below him, a cathedral, a bridge over a river, over which masses of Russian troops are streaming, ships on the water, a pine forest, a convent, and in the far distance another hill on which French scouts can be discerned. The description moves from one ridge to the other, as if told by the field glasses, pau­sing briefly to take in the valley where the skirmish will take place. The Russian officers enjoying this panoramic view are far from moral consciousness: they eat comfortably, joke about the nunnery, and approve the Russians looting the local castle. Even as the French begin to fire from their own promontory at the Russian troops down below, the Russian of­ficers’ anxiety for their men does not dispel the gaiety of their perspective in the bright sunlight, from which the troops can be seen “as if only a stone’s throw away” (Bk. II, §5).

The perspective narrows in the subsequent chapter through the character of General Nezvitsky, who has ridden down from the observation post to command the Russian hussars to set fire to the bridge once all the troops have crossed it. On the bridge, the narrator is in the thick of things; in the crush of the convoy pressed into the narrow passage, soldiers do not make way for the general, their only concern is to get themselves across as quickly as possible. Instead of a panorama, Nezvitsky sees only individual horses, wagons, soldiers, impedimenta; instead of strategy or fantasy, he hears soldiers’ banter, shouts, noise.

When only Denisov’s hussars are left on the French-held bank, the Russians are at their lowest, deepest point of awareness in the spiral. They must look up  to see the advancing French infantrymen rising on the ridges above them, and who, we might infer, are experiencing a similar spiral descent. Future possibilities, projections, and wishes shrink to clear awareness of the present, sharpened by the closeness of death, and brightened by comradeship.

“One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And what is there? who is there? — there beyond that field, that tree, that roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but no one wants to know. You fear and yet you long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will have to learn what lies on the other side of death. But you are strong, healthy, cheerful and excited, and are surrounded by other such excitedly animated and healthy men.” So thinks, or at any rate feels, anyone who has come in sight of the enemy, and that feeling gives a particular glamor and glad keenness of impression to everything that takes place at such moments.

As the French infantry nears and cannonballs whistle past the hus­sars, they momentarily break formation when they are anticlimactically commanded to retreat by their officers, who are convinced that they were meant only to guard the last Russian soldiers crossing the bridge. When the hussars return to the battlefield to complete their task, rather than returning to the disembodied, extraverted point of view that preceded the Russians’ first stand, Tolstoy follows the consciousness of Nicolai Rostov after it has been dislodged from the point-concentration of the moment of truth. When Nicolai, now “absorbed by his private problems,” returns to the firing line, he hardly takes note of the wounding of two of his comrades. Without the group-consciousness he shared with his squadron, his sense of mortality becomes even more concrete and sharp. He loses track of the struggle; time stops; his mind becomes only the objects he sees lit by his wish to be present and to continue to be in the world.

Nicholas Rostov turned away and, as if searching for something, gazed into the distance, at the waters of the Danube, at the sky, and at the sun. How beautiful the sky looked; how blue, how calm, how deep! How bright and glorious was the setting sun! With what soft glitter the waters of the distant Danube shone. And fairer still were the faraway blue mountains beyond the river, the nunnery, the mysterious gorges, and the pine forests veiled in mist to their sum­mits… There was peace and happiness … “I should wish for nothing else, nothing, if only I were there, thought Rostov. “In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness; but here … groans, suffering, fear, and thus uncertainty and hurry… There — they are shouting again, and again all are running back some­ where, and I shall run with them, and it, death, is here above me and around…. Another instant and I shall never again see the sun, this water, that gorge!”

In community with his comrades, Nicolai did not fear death. Alone, without the structure of consciousness that, writ large, functions as the morale of the army, Nicolai perceives the presence of the world as the be-all and end-all. A similar awareness comes to Andrey at Auster- litz, Natasha after the hunt at Otradnoe, and Pierre on the forced march from Moscow.

In the last chapters of the Enns skirmish, Tolstoy leaps back to the panoramic sweep of the “map consciousness,” which is now redeemed. Ku­tuzov hurriedly retreats to save his army of 35, 000 men from being encircled like Gen. Mack’s Austrian army. By leaping up to Kutuzov’s world­ historical level from Rostov’s animated private concerns, Tolstoy not only sets the two levels in ironic contrast, but also gives the novel’s first inkling of Kutuzov’s almost superhuman concern for saving the lives of 35, 000 Rostovs feeling the same fearful awareness of mortality and love for life.

Tolstoy adopts a similar narrative technique in all the novel’s battle-pieces. The reader gently descends from abstraction, and its qua­lities of distance, encompassing scope, coolness, and separation from immediate sensation, to the presence of life and death: immediacy, personal emotion, physical closeness, visceral fear, love and confusion.

The battle of Schöngrabern begins with Andrey high on Tushin’s battery, from which the “whole field could be seen” ( Bk. II, §12). The French troops are “on the opposite hill.” Still in Napoleon’s thrall, An­drey examines the disposition of troops with an eye toward making dramatic and decisive tactical suggestions to him commander, Gen. Bagration. The opportunity never presents itself, since neither Bagration nor his sub­ rdinate officers have any control over the army under fire. Andrey and Bagration descend with the reader into the thick, where, as at Enns, Ni­colai Rostov acts as the agent of immediate perception of concrete experience, described in words nearly identical to those quoted above from Bk. II, §5. Here, too, Nicolai loses his group-solidarity with the hussars — in this case by being unhorsed — finding himself utterly con­founded about his place in relation to the battle lines. Once again, Nicolai retreats, running for his life, as the whole Russian army does until after Borodino.

Austerlitz and Borodino are presented in the same manner. They begin with maps: Weierother’s fait accompli for the troop placements on the eve of Austerlitz, presented to the general staff literally in the form of a map; and in Book X, Tolstoy himself, ironically carried away by the heat of his debate with historians over the “true meaning” of the battle, gives a bird’s eye view of the troop placements at Borodino. The focus then narrows, but still remains relatively panoramic: Nicolai on picket duty high above the battlefield at Austerlitz (Bk. II, §13); Pierre atop the knoll at Gorki where he sees the “enormous panorama which, rising like an amphitheater, extended before him in the clear, rarefied atmosphere” (Bk, X, §21). As always, the French occupy the opposite pro­ montory,.

At Borodino, Tolstoy deepens the contrast of levels by playing Pierre off against Napoleon. Both are, at first, mere observers: one a world-his­torical general, the other an insignificant, fictitious civilian. But Pierre descends into the action and even engages in victorious hand-to­ hand combat with a terrified French officer, while Napoleon remains above, distant, abstracted, viewing the carnage as it were a chess game. Elsewhere on the battlefield, Andrey’s hussars, like Denisov’s at Enns, wait in the zone between life and death, commanded to stay in formation under the French cannonade. Again, like Nicolai made aware of the proximity of death, Andrey, fated to be mortally wounded by a French grenade landing near him, suddenly perceives only the concrete presence of the world through his single-minded desire to live:

“Can this be death?” thought Prince Andrey, looking with a quite new, envious glance at the grass, the wormwood, and the streamlet of smoke that curled up from the rotating black ball. “I cannot, I do not wish to die, I love life — I love this grass, this earth, this air..,” (Bk. X, §36)

Each of the major characters suffers a similar sort of destruction of his or her illusory systems of control. Each experiences existentially the dialectical spiral from map-consciousness to awareness of immediate being. The map permits them to manipulate others, and themselves in others, only as long as they reject spontaneity and contact. On the world­ historical level, the Russians’ alien rationalism collapses when it comes into conflict with their need for self-preservation. On the intimate le­vel, the characters’ dialectic of feeling, their movement from abstract illusion to disillusionment and concrete awareness to new illusions, refleets the same process: Pierre’s numerological fanaticism yields to the spontaneous rescue of a stranger’s child, Andrey’s cold cynicism after Austerlitz dissolves under the influence of Natasha’s singing.

Natasha and Princess Marya represent the passive feminine consciousness idealized by Russian patriarchal ideology, and determined by their limited possibilities for initiating action. Since they can only respond to circumstances, they are less prone to become entangled in rationalis­tic control-systems, but they, too, experience the dissolution of their faith in abstraction. Natasha’s “calm and continuous” daydreams of the absent Andrey during their engagement are upset by Anatole Kuragin’s insistent erotic proximity. Princess Marya, in her turn, accepts her half-mad father’s rules, and refuses Anatole’s suit in order to support the old man and fulfill the role he has mapped out for her. Only after his death and her rescue by Nicolai does she acquire a sense of the presence of things, after which “a new life force took possession of her and compelled her to speak and act apart from her own will” (Bk. XII, §2).

As the work of writing War and Peace progressed, it became increasingly difficult for Tolstoy to treat the world-historical dimension of the events of 1805-1812 as a realm of merely equal weight with the every­ day lives of the fictional characters. Tolstoy was bothered by the his­torical success of the forces of abstraction — how much so is amply evi­denced by the increase of historical glosses not integrated in the fic­tional action in the course of the novel. In Eichenbaum’s view, Tolstoy ceased to believe in his initial premise as he became more versed in the problems of the philosophy of history.

The epoch, which pushed Tolstoy into historical questions that were burning issues of the day, caused what had so recently attracted and inspired him, to lose value in his own eyes. Those critics who said that Tolstoy found the going hard in the last volumes and was hurrying to take leave of his characters were not wrong, During Tolstoy’s struggle in the 1860s he conceived and began his novel; but as a man of his period, albeit an archaist … he changed in the course of his work and became so infected by the 1860s that he be­gan to feel he was a historian and a publicist teaching his contemporaries and dictating the truth to them (Gibian 1443).

The satirical play of foolish world-history against the richness of individual experience began to weaken as the French troops approached ever nearer the Russian borders; when they crossed over, it collapsed entirely. The sticking point was the role of Napoleon. Not his amora­lity and egoistic world view, the personal, relatively “everyday” aspect, but the fact that he could not be accommodated by the Rousseauian schema Tolstoy had devised for his novel. As long as Napoleon remained in the background, far from Russia, he remained in the background of the tale’s concerns. In the tradition of the classical historical novel, he was not permitted to usurp the social base of the novel’s action. But as he approached Russia as the historical records required, Tolstoy brought him ever more into the foreground. As an absence, Napoleon represented to Russia the absolute conquest of Europe by rationalistic despotism. Even for Tolstoy — perhaps especially for Tolstoy, if Eichenbaum is right¹¹ — Napoleon was an extraordinary world-historical individual.

In scenes like Napoleon’s reception of the ambassador, Balashov, at Vilna, and his affectless musings over the battlefield of Borodino, Tolstoy strove to locate the source of this extraordinariness in Napoleon’s absolute moral depravity, his alienation “from everything human.” But the problem would not disappear, however petty Napoleon’s personal mo­tives were made to seem. He became for Tolstoy, as for Pierre, an Antichrist, from whose Satanic pride and lack of empathy Russia had been called upon to save Europe. By the time the novel had developed into a confrontation between Napoleon’s French and the army of Russia, world views like rationalism and Christian love lost the quality of abstraction, and gained the character of curiously concrete entities capable of emana­ting such historical actors as Bonaparte and the Russian army. By claiming that the Russian national character had been responsible for Napoleon’s defeat in 1812, and that it was a Russian victory, Tolstoy attributed Russia’s power to two contradictory “active abstractions:” Christian universalism and Russian nationalism (Greenwood 62-63).

At the outset, while Napoleon is not yet a threat to Russia, the two do not diverge. Tolstoy does not engage the nationalist theme at all while the Russan army fights for the Prussians and Austrians. But when the ra­tionalism of Europe comes face to face with Russia on Russian ground, the nationalistic aspect becomes ascendant. Tolstoy felt compelled to ex­plain the meaning of the Russian victory against an extraordinary world­ historical force. Clearly, neither the common-sense of history nor the technique of historical realism could propose concrete individual expe­rience as the conqueror of the incarnation of a world-view. In order to keep the two themes, Christian universalism and nationalism, simultaneously valid, Tolstoy created a literary paradox. He admitted into the tale in Book IX the historico-philosophical principle of Providence, a Provi­dence at the same time without prejudice against the French and yet par­tial to the Russians.

The Logic of Providence in War and Peace

Tolstoy took pains to argue the Providential determinism of history with a logical consistency totally opposed to the lessons of the fictional action’s “overflowing” emotional indeterminacy. After works like Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox and Eichenbaum’s famous commentary, “Tolstoy’s Essays as an Element of Structure” (Gibian 1443-44), we may assume as much familiarity with the discursive historical commentary in War and Peace as with the fictional action. Consequently, I wish here to recapitulate the thrust of Tolstoy’s metacommentary very briefly and syllogistically, in order to emphasize the rationalistic foundation for Tolstoy’s anti-rationalistic arguments.

The main argument is directed against traditional historians. Rather than accepting that history is continuous, “arising from an innumerable multitude of individual wills,” rationalistic historians, according to Tolstoy, try to arrive at historical laws by examining arbitrary series or units of history: “the sayings and doings” of certain important political and cultural figures, and their influence. As explanations of decisive historical events, like the French Revolution and the Napoleanic Wars, they are meaningless, for they posit that a less comprehensive class (the influence of individuals, of genius, of ideas) causes much more com­prehensive classes (nations, humanity) to behave in certain ways. (Let me note as an aside that Tolstoy as a discursive writer criticizes conventio­nal historians for practicing the sort of explanation by selection Tur­genev criticized in Tolstoy, namely, the use of metonymies (heroes, Alexander’s boot) that give the illusion that their writers know all the rest, whereas they know only the part they represent.)

Each of these illusive historical explanations is formulated within the ethical parameters of the historians’ own ideologies. These determine what classes of events are to be studied, what individuals, and what goals are to be considered the “good of humanity.” These parameters — or structures of value — differ from culture to culture, and also within cul­tures. Moreover, they undergo constant change in dialectical relation to other, conflicting or diverging historical world-views, and the course of human historical events. Since all parameters of historical thought are relative, all historical explanations are half-truths, at best.

Since, writes Tolstoy, no one can contest that all actions and motions must have causes, and furthermore, causes commensurate with the resulting effects — the precondition for something to be “lawful” –­ several important reversals of conventional historical values follow:

1. that none of the causes ascribed by historians to great histori­cal events are the true ones, and that
2. the true causes cannot be formulated as to origin or goal, since human action and intellect are themselves part of the historical conti­nuum; therefore
3. the cause and goal, and ultimately the covering law, of histo­ry, are inaccessible to human consciousness; yet they exist, because they are in effect. This line of reasoning might have passed for histo­rical Deism, but for Tolstoy’s important corollary syllogism:

Since history is the story of the movement of peoples and humanity, and, as we have seen, individuals are not the causes of, or the forces behind, these movements, individual freedom is illusory, and the actions of individuals — of Napoleon, no less than the Russian muzhik — are determined by the true force of history. Consequently, the true cause of historical movement, although not comprehensible, can be located in in the mass, the total determinateness of all determined individuals. Therefore, historical movements are caused by the unconscious mass, the agent of Providence.

The first argument, that the guidance of Providence is unintelligible, is an extravagant variation on the ontological proof of God in His mani­festation as historical Providence. Starting out from mechanics, Tolstoy hitched himself to the line of argument he most opposed, which had es­tablished the positivistic line of European thought from Newton, through Voltaire and Condillac, to Comte and Buckle. Tolstoy wished to prove a prime-mover of even minute human acts through the rational interconnec­tions, the lawfulness, of the world, which is conceivable by human reason (as the logic of Tolstoy’s argument was meant to illustrate), even if the purpose and precise lineaments of the “iron law” are not.

Tolstoy argued metonymically against metonymic historians. He claimed to have proved a prime historical mover through its signs in the “iron laws” of history while he condemned other historians who chose different sets of signs, such as charismatic influence or historical dialectics, rather than mechanics. In the process, Tolstoy denied the privileged place of individual consciousness and existential experience, since these only give rise to the illusion that human beings are capable of understanding history, while he affirmed that the knowledge that such an unintelligible principle of meaning in history existed could be arrived at through the fictional plot’s bogey, ratiocination. The abstraction of reason was ne­cessary to denounce the illusions of individual experience and power.

When the tale reaches the end of 1812, the novel’s vision of the hu­man part of history has come 180° around from that of the 1805 chapters. For Greenwood and Schklovsky, the source of Tolstoy’s immense inconsistency is his attempt to conceive history via a spurious analogy to metaphysi­cal physics, a physics who implications, moreover, run full counter to to Rousseau’s critique of despotism in Chapter III of the Social Contract.

It is true that Tolstoy says that it is impossible to return to a belief in the direct intervention of the Deity in human affairs, but in his polemic against Buckle he makes the fatal mistake of asking the “essentialist question,” “What is power?” This gets him into such difficulties that he ends by writing of the “inevitability” of events in such a way as to imply that, though no direct interven­tion is observable, everything which occurs in time is in some mysterious way “the expression of the will of the Deity, not dependent on time” [Schklovsky]. Only in such a way can discrete events and periods be seen as part of a continuous whole. It is not just a mat­ter of causes in a purely physical world. The passions of men are connected in some obscure way left unexplained and are just as “de­termined” as the movements of that physical world. In yielding to their passions men are “but blind tools of the most melancholy law of necessity,” and that law is in some mysterious way identified with God’s will. (Greenwood 61)

This mode of ratiocination is consistent and unfalsifiable by any sort of experience. By using reasoning as an instrument with which to deny the ego’s simplest claims to freedom of will, the first element of’ rationalism, Tolstoy felt he had produced the critical apparatus for debunking Napoleon’s extraordinariness and for establishing a higher level of extraordinariness above Napoleon, that of the Russian nation. The problem remained of returning with these new principles to the novel’s fictional action, where their relevance had to be demonstrated.

The Russian Mass

While writing War and Peace Tolstoy was in the early phase of his idealization of the Russian peasant that was to develop into full-fledged Tolstoyism a few decades later. He had great patriarchal sympathy for peasant life, and, as we mentioned earlier, agitated strongly for the Emancipation in the 1850s. But very little about War and Peace, or about the historical documentation of the 1805-1812 period, involves the “mas­ses” of Russian peasants. As Tolstoy himself wrote in Draft 1 of the Introduction to the novel:

In my work there are only princes who speak and write in French, counts, and so forth, as if all Russian life were centered in those people. I agree that this is untrue and unliberal, and I can make only one, incontrovertible answer. The life of clerks, merchants, seminarists, and peasants is uninteresting and half-unintelligible to me; the life of the aristocrats of that time, thanks to the docu­ments of that period and for other reasons, is intelligible, inte­resting, and dear to me (Gibian 1365).

As a rule, Tolstoy does not portray the Russian national character in individual types. Eichenbaum calls the character of Platon “the exact outline of the Russian village idiot — with his characteristic behavior and even speech mannerisms;” he is “not a type, but an idealization” (Eichenbaum 258). Members of the nobility to whom Tolstoy refers as typical — especially Pierre and Natasha — are supranational in their complexity and contradictoriness. Nor do their contradictory feelings embody the variety of the Russian nation, the competing political and social factions in national conflict, as do the complex emotional lives of earlier characters from historical fiction, like Edward Waverley in Waverley, Fra Cristoforo in I Promessi Sposi, Lőrinc in Hungary in 1514, and Laczkó in The Fanatics. The conflict in War and Peace is between world-views, ideas not on a na­tional scale, but a continental one. Each of the Russian characters in the fictional action is complex to the extent that s/he includes both the Western and the Russian world-views. The battle between the alien and Russian “minds” is fought precisely for the souls of these complex cha­racters. Tolstoy differs in this from earlier realistic historical nove­lists by focusing on the experience of a single class representing the whole nation, rather than the typical representatives of conflicting classes or nationalities.

Only one of these world-views has a definite form in the fictional action of the novel. The rationalist egoist, system-mongering West challenges a vague, intuitive, shifting Russian world. While Tolstoy concen­trates on the feeling life of individuals, the tale happens metonymically, we give assent to a piece of the tale representing the whole history of the Napoleonic campaign in Russia. The conflict between the West and Rus­sia becomes familiar and relevant in the complexity of individual charac­ters. The Russian gentry mind is as much a battlefield as the Russian geo­graphy. But since the fictional characters were incapable of defeating the world-historical problem of Napoleon, the egotist who appeared not only as Europe’s conqueror but also its emanation, the individuality of the Western adversary led Tolstoy to seek a corresponding opposite in the con­cept of the nation in the mass; not as Eötvös had tried to use it, as a confluence of varied social interests, but rather a hypostasized, homoge­neous, unitary living being with its own consciousness, greater and more integrated than any individual’s consciousness. The historical role of this mass being was manifested in the army.

Tolstoy took the notion of the army as the superconsciousness of the nation from the theories of his friend, the Hegelian historian S.S. Urusov, who had argued that the army formed the essential social structure of all nations. Under its conditions of severe constraint, its extreme curtailment of individual freedom, emerged the most regulated, rule-go­verned behavior. The consciousness of this mass being, since free choice was denied it, lay in its spirit, or morale — the intuitive perceptions shared by each individual about his relation to the community’s collective goal (Sampson 117-18). Starting from these premises, Tolstoy claimed that the Rus­sian army’s extraordinary, undirected victory over the French army had not been a result of planning, strategy, or heroic charisma, but of morale, the mood of self-defense fighting an invader on one’s own soil. The mood is not conscious, and so not liable to the illusions of freedom: it is a “mysterious, indefinable bond which maintains throughout the army one and the same temper, known as ‘the spirit of the army’ and which constitutes the chief sinew of war” (Bk, X, §35)

The army acts for Tolstoy as a surrogate for, and ideal of, the na­tion. It inspires an esprit de corps lacking in mere civilian life, where the illusion of freedom fosters wasteful vanity. Nicolai swallows his sense of personal outrage to preserve the morale of his company in the episode with the thief, Telyanin; Andrey inspires his men with unexpected courage when he advances with the retrieved standard at Austerlitz; under fire, Denisov and Nicolai are unafraid of death only as long as they are in formation and not isolated from their comrades. Christian argues the point with characteristic generosity:

…Tolstoy’s interest in “the people” was not centered narrowly on the muzhik, whether as an object of affection or dislike. It broadened out during the writing of War and Peace until it reached the point where “the people” came to be identified with “the nation” –­ with all the men and women who consciously or unconsciously manifes­ted the spirit of the Russian people, all the soldiers, conscripts, and partisans who embodied the spirit of the Russian army. One can argue convincingly that on Tolstoy’s evidence in his novel, selfish interests predominated in peace-time Russia, class-divisions were pronounced, anti-national sentiment prevailed; but that under the impetus of an enemy invasion and a defensive war for the motherland the discordant elements grew together, and a greater national unity was achieved than ever before. The national heroism of 1812 was a truly popular phenomenon, popular in the widest and best sense of em­bracing all the people, masters and men. (Christian 149)

Christian describes here succinctly the ideological goal of all clas­sical historical novelists: the unification of warring national interests in the struggle with anachronistic and divisive historical forces. But the choice of the army to represent the Russian people, the Russian principle opposed to and victorious over the Western Napoleonic principle, created difficulties for Tolstoy as great as those created by focusing originally on the fictional characters’ private lives. For a drama between two armies driven, as Tolstoy tells his readers, by Providence and not by generals embodying world-views, is a conflict not of principles, but of quasi­ elemental forces. In the great Borodino battle-piece, Tolstoy again and again tells his readers that the French forces acted through their own will, independent of and even against that of Napoleon, just as the Rus­sian army acted independently of Kutuzov’s will. In this context, we see that the contradiction so often referred to by critics of War and Peace between Tolstoy’s view of Napoleon as a blind agent of Providence and the acme of evil irresponsibility is more than a rhetorical flaw.¹¹ If he is merely an agent, Napoleon is only a tool, or emanation of his nation and his amy. If he is a free agent, he is the embodiment of a principle that is capable of moving men to murder one another and to invade others’ lands. If the French nation and/or the French army is responsible for generating Napoleon, Tolstoy does not judge them. On the whole, the Russian and French soldiers are portrayed as being quite similar. All fear death in battle, all act in battle under the spur of self-preservation, courage, and fear rather than in response to orders. After the conclusion of com­bat, each nation’s soldiers are capable of good will and even solidarity with their captured enemies, e.g., Nicolai’s care for his French prisoner taken at Austerlitz, and Ramballe’s concern for Pierre during the occupa­tion of Moscow, and each is equally capable of stupidity and cruelty.

The very similar armies — first one traveling over the continent to invade the other’s territory, then vice-versa — do not elicit any principle of difference. Their world-views are not different, since they operate on a level too unconscious, immediate, and within the stream of history for principles to become articulated. At best, we have Tolstoy’s attempt to explain their relationship via mechanics and momentum, hardly an ethical frame of reference. Many critics hold that Tolstoy gained no ideological advantage from the primacy of the army in War and Peace; it did not help to clarify the role of the Russian nation in the world-histo­rical struggle of 1812, and was the cause of an irreparable aesthetic split in the novel.¹² What purpose did it serve Tolstoy to apply his newly acquired Urusovism to a novel originally intended to depict the individual experience of history? Primarily, it provided a medium, and a pretext, for the creation of an individual Russian to match Napoleon: namely, Kutuzov.

Kutuzovism

Tolstoy was increasingly fascinated with Napoleon as the novel proceeded, until the whole historical level of the action was dictated by Tolstoy’s response to him. Only in Napoleon’s egotism and arrogance can. the struggle between the West and Russia be seen as more than a naturalistic struggle of unconscious Leviathans. Tolstoy constructed the con­flict as one between two idealized, but incomparable, forces: Napoleon’s personality and principles, and the leaderless suprapersonal will of the Russian army.

The two sides are clearly not commensurate. A description of 1812 on this basis is conceivable, and the actual accounts of Kutuzov’s career might have served as evidence for it: his role would have been that of a senile and abjectly incompetent general, the opposite of Tolstoy’s version. Tolstoy would have gained no advantage from such a version, since an unarticulated mass would not have clarified the Russian nature that proved stronger than Napoleonic rationalism. Tolstoy required a conceptual oxymoron, an articulated undifferentiation, to be the principle with which to counter Western principles. The fictional characters, as we have seen, could not provide the important link between their own lives and histori­cal destiny — since as private responders they do not generate histori­cal events. Nor can the quietistic, idealized Karataev. It is difficult to imagine the peasant-mystic who so passively submits to his own death supplying the passion in battle that produced the Borodino victory. The link between the army and Napoleon, and between the natural mass of the nation and the Russian principle, is supplied by a character partly histo­rical, and partly fictional, the commander in chief, Kutuzov.

The early versions of War and Peace represent Kutuzov in agreement with the unanimously uncomplimentary sources. Traces of Kutuzov in the early parts of the final version betray some of the historical character’s ambiguity. While commanding troops away from Russian soil, his character is sketchy. He is justified in his reluctance to engage Napoleon at Schöngrabern, despite the Austrians’ insistence. But there is something drastic about his responses. He falls asleep at the Council of War where troop deployments are heatedly discussed on the eve of the battle. Later, he is said to have “fought” the Turkish campaign in the company of a Walla­chian mistress, and, as if in passing, forcing the besieged Turks to “eat horseflesh.”

Tolstoy gives shape to the full image of this “Russian of Russians” only when he is fighting on Russian soil. It is there that Kutuzov takes on a world-historical character. He has no plans for the engagement at Borodino, because he “despised knowledge and cleverness, and knew of some­ thing else that would decide the matter — something independent of cleverness and knowledge” (Bk. X, §15), He despises them because his “experience of life” draws wisdom from his knowledge of the spirit of the army, and further, “by divining the will of Providence” (Bk. XV, Chap. 2) and submitting his personal will to it.

Andrey alone, always slightly alienated from genuine Russian passions, and thus capable of some perspective on the matter, can articulate this principle of potent passivity.

The more he realized the absence of all personal motive in the old man — in whom there seemed only to remain the habit of passions, and in place of an intellect (grouping events and drawing conclusions) only the capacity to calmly contemplate the course of events — the more reassured he was that everything would be as it should. “He will not bring in any plan of his own. He will not devise or undertake anything,” thought Prince Andrey, “but he will hear everything, re­member everything, and put everything in its place. He will not hinder anything useful nor allow anything harmful. He understands that there is something stronger and more important than his own will — the inevitable course of events, and he can see them and grasp their significance, and seeing that significance can refrain from meddling and renounce his personal wish directed to something else. And above all,” thought Prince Andrey, “one believes in him because he’s Rus­sian, despite the novel by Genlis and the French proverbs….” (Bk. X, §16)

As a general, Kutuzov compares with Fabius Cunctator, whose qualities of caution and patience defeated Hannibal. But for Tolstoy, Kutuzov’s ge­nius lies in his particular motivation: in his lack of genius, the submission of his ego and personal projection-worlds to the real “course of events” guided by an unknowable Providence. He is a Zen master of the historical sphere. His success lies entirely in allowing the active ones to spend their energy in projecting. Tolstoy’s world-historical image of the Russians in War and Peace marks the greatest continuity, and also the greatest difference, of the novel with earlier realistic historical novelists’ works. In their no­vels, the nation was infused with and guided by a suprahistorical force: the English penchant for compromise, Scott’s gentlemanly dialectic; Man­zoni’s Christian humanism based on the all-embracing principle of charity and the historical success of Christian patience; Eötvös’ organic conception of the natural lives of nations, etc. But while earlier historical novelists conceived the unity of the nation as a synthesis of national and social elements in conflict within the national society, i.e., a resolu­tion of pre-national factionalism, the struggle in War and Peace is be­tween religious-ethical world views on a continental, suprnational scale. Nations in Tolstoy’s 1805-1812 constellate into continents, and these continents are not syntheses in War and Peace, but natural, self-consistent entities. The victory of the Russians is not a world-synthesis, but a negation. “Russia saved Europe” from the natural conclusion of its own inherent tendencies. Kutuzovism saved Europe from Bonapartism, the dictatorship of Reason.

It is important for Tolstoy’s design that Kutuzov should appear to effect nothing; but he clearly acts as an obstacle, on the one hand, to the constant demand of the German generals to test their strategies in battle, on the other to his own soldiers’ straining to fight the invaders. Kutuzov effects the defeat of Napoleon by the Russian army by refusing to allow Napoleon to destroy it on his own terms in direct, active conflict. He is the ultimate responder of this nation of responders; his refusal to commit himself to action permits him, with his army, to inhabit an uncertain, metaphysical realm where anything that can happen can be used to advantage by those who do not interfere with the course of things. But the commander’s mythic stature is not a function of his generalship. That is merely the concrete historical manifestation of the fact that he is the mediator for Providence. He is specially endowed, as extraordinary an in­carnation of principle as Napoleon. Just as Bonaparte embodies the vicious extreme of individualism, Kutuzov embodies the virtuous extreme of egoless love. Because only he submits his personal will entirely to the God of Host and History, only Kutuzov can defeat the general who believes everything he does is right because he is the one doing it. Tolstoy fleshes out the contrast by using the same techniques to exalt Kutuzov as to debunk Napoleon. The French Emperor appears petty because of the concrete details attached to him, his all-too-human particulars that make his pretensions to transcend humanity appear ridiculous: his eau de cologne, his fat white hands and neck, his precious speech. The details that comprise Napoleon are satirical, the reader never sees details that signify Napo­.leon’s greatness. That quality, for Tolstoy, has nothing to do with Napo­leon’s personality — it is an arbitrary, and inscrutable, piece of the work of Providence.

Kutuzov, by contrast, is great in spite of the concrete particulars of his character. These are often the same as Napoleon’s, and equally incongruous with his world-historical stature. He is a decrepit womanizer with a fondness for French romances and bons mots; he too has a “fat white neck.” Worse, he shows many signs of senility, very different indeed from Napoleon’s nervous alertness: he falls asleep in Council, babbles nonsense, and seems to fear conflict. The crucial difference between the two generals is ego: Napoleon’s has hypertrophied, and, as if by some cosmic homeostasis, Kutuzov’s has atrophied and disappeared, permitting him to preserve and regenerate the strength of the Russian people. He is indeed like a Zen master with special knowledge: his nonsense (such as the reply to Rastopchin after abandoning Moscow that, he, Kutuzov, would not give up Moscow without a battle) is simply beyond conventional verbal sense: “that old man — who by experience of life had reached the conviction that thoughts and words serving as their expression are not what move people — [used] quite meaningless words that happened to enter his head” (Bk, XV, §2).

Kutuzov’s depiction has troubled many readers of War and Peace. Schklovsky, in particular, criticized Tolstoy’s falsification of histori­cal evidence to suit his ideological purposes (Berlin 28). Even in Berlin’s more generous and admiring assessment we can sense a feeling that Tolstoy has distorted fact to set up his own paradigm — thereby confounding the ori­ginal conception of the novel.

Such heroes as Pierre Bezuhov or Karataev are at least imaginary, and Tolstoy had an undisputed right to endow them with all the at­ tributes he admired…. But Kutuzov was a real person, and it is all the more instructive to observe the steps by which he trans­forms him from the sly, elderly, feeble voluptuary of the early drafts of War and Peace which were based on authentic sources, into the unforgettable symbol of the Russian people in all its simpli­city and intuitive wisdom. By the time we reach the celebrated passage … in which Tolstoy describes the moment when the old man is wo­ken in his camp at Fili to be told that the French army is retreating, we have left the realm of facts behind us, and are in an imaginary realm, a historical and emotional atmosphere for which the evidence is flimsy, but which is artistically indispensable for Tolstoy’s design. The final apotheosis of Kutuzov is totally unhistori­cal for all Tolstoy’s repeated professions of his undeviating devo­tion to the sacred cause of the truth. (28-29)

In creating Kutuzov, Tolstoy not only contradicts his professions to historical accuracy, but also his earlier aesthetic and ideological positions. Since the novel had been originally conceived to bestow human moti­vation on history to counter the abstract idealism of European historicism, the movement into “an imaginary realm” releases Tolstoy from the constraints not only of history, but of representing human motivations that Tolstoy once believed underlie it. Similarly, the value of “the actual life of men” in the concrete experiencing of the world is reduced to mere illusion when compared to the egoless, mystical mediator of Provi­dence who, even if he does not issue orders, controls the Russian army, the agent of Providence.

The Amoral Nationalism of War and Peace

There is much to be said for Lenin’s opinion that Tolstoy’s religious quetism is a form of Orientalism (Macherey 311). Even after the Germanic and French rationalistic world-view is expelled from Russia in War and Peace, an unresolved contradiction remains between gentry family life and peasant quietism. The former is embodied in its multitude of signs, objects, codes of behavior and speech. Hence the dense metonymic object-orientation of Tolstoy’s realism. The latter is — as befits a mystical principle -­ present in its absence. Platon Karataev has few objects or codes to de­flect him from the one truth, and he has no opportunity to change the ob­jects among which he lives, and so to exchange one set of illusions for another. Consequently, he does not suffer the minute, refined vacillations of emotion that the rich characters do. But even Platon is too positive a presence to be a sign of the process of reality beyond all human understanding. In War and Peace, the ideological conflict is not between ar­chaic and modern (as in Scott), feudal despotism and Christian universa­lism (as in Manzoni), or corruption and nurture as national tendencies (as in Kemény)  —  it is between Western realism’s “totality of objects,” the definition of reality through “material” objects, events, and signs that determine the relations within and among individuals and societies, and the radical denial that true knowledge can be gained from illusory “objectivity,” a denial common to most strains of Oriental thought. History, whe­ther considered as a positive science, a philosophical discourse, or the records of a community, has a place only where events and awareness of them are thought to give value and form to communal experience. In Ori­ ntal mysticism, considered very crudely, history as a record of events is not only not essential to knowledge about ultimate reality, it is an illusory knowledge about illusory phenomena.

By the end of War and Peace, Tolstoy appeared to have given ascendancy to some such Oriental view. None of the characters have made history intelligible for themselves, and the omniscient narrator has deduced through several kinds of arguments that history is necessarily unintelli­gible. Tolstoy appeared to have unified the concrete-existential fiction of the novel with the metahistorical ratiocinating of the commentaries by showing that they share in this unintelligibility. The true historical world is thus similar to the Tao. It manifests itself in myriad forms, languages, objects, mind-sets, and events, but it remains inscrutable to all but those who submit to it without thought, like Kutuzov.

Tolstoy does not seem to have had great familiarity with the Oriental tradition to which his own anti-system bears such resemblance. In all Asian cultures there are methods by way of which the inner meaning of things beyond events and memory can allegedy be known. Such techniques of meditation are built on traditions as elaborate and complex as Western scientific and historical thought. It is moot whether Tolstoy ever thought deeply about this counterhistorical Oriental ideology. In the end, he used it merely as a means for criticizing the rationalism that had depressed Russia in the world, and the peasantry in Russia. The ultimately unintel­ligible and inexplicable course of reality nonetheless serves Tolstoy, and the Russian nation, in his image of history, by granting them an example of its guardianship of the Russian nation against the imperialist inva­sion of the Forces of Reason.

Even when he rejects the Liberals’ methods, Tolstoy preserves the goal that every Liberal set for himself: the integration of his nation among the world community of nations. The doctrinaire Liberal conception of history was based on the notion that societies were free to choose their own political destinies, and that the French and, above all, English models of social-material progress were the most desirable models. Tolstoy established his nationalism on a different basis. He had the example of 1812 to demonstrate that Russia had been in touch with the flow of history as long as it rejected Western ideology. However mysterious that flow might be, it favors the nations that are most open to it, and least ambitious to raise themselves above others. Kutuzov’s victory over Napo­leon was a sign of how the motive force of life, inaccessible to anyone wishing to discover and control it, elects and exalts a nation.

Even the most venal of the Russians benefits from this providential election. Paradoxically, Tolstoy’s technique of realism, which hinges on “making strange” the image of objects, values, and institutions in order to clarify their ideological nature, can operate only in terms of the Russian gentry. Consequently, although they do little through their own talents to save the Russian people, it is mainly the nobles — the class that Tolstoy claimed was alone “intelligible, interesting, and dear” to him — whom we see benefiting from the election of the whole people. Where there is potential conflict between classes (as in the peasant mu­tiny against Princess Marya at Bogucharovo), it is dissolved by an appa­rent, and gratuitous, unification of interests: the unity of the historical Russian people against the alien invader, and behind it, the mystical oneness of the Russian spirit. Unlike the struggles depicted by earlier historical novelists, in which societies are fragmented within themselves among nations and classes whose interests must be synthesized and/or unified in the action of the novel, the basis for Russian national unity lies in pre-political, and in fact, preconscious, things: geography, tradition, popular mysticism, the cult of sacrifice, and cosmic privilege. Tolstoy differs further from his predecessors by depicting a period of great national strife not as a collision whose resolution will be (or should be) a unification of interests, but as the realization of national unity in itself; the strife is the achieved utopia of the Russian nation. In this period, the Russians are white against an alien black. The pros­pects after the Napoleonic Wars are the Reaction of the Holy Alliance, the dissensions of the Decembrists, and the lingering oppression of the serfs in Tolstoy’s own time. When, after completing War and Peace, Tolstoy set out to write a historical novel about Peter the Great, whose reign was full of internal conflict between anachronistic and modernizing ele­ments appropriate for the mode of historical fiction established by Scott, he could not finish the project (Eichenbaum 202-203). It is not farfetched to surmise that having achieved a myth of the cosmic unity of the Russian nation, Tolstoy found it difficult to contradict it with a history of its deepest divisions.

The classical historical novelists expected that the unity of interests among classes and nationalities would be created through an ethical synthesis. Because they believed this synthesis would bring a higher awareness of the shared humanity of the warring factions through their new understanding of shared social-political concerns, these novelists invoked an ideal nation-state to guard and foster the ethical goals of human progress. This was the function of Edward Waverley’s and Baron Brad­wardine’s gentry hospitality in Waverley, Renzo’s and Fra Cristoforo’s Christian forgiveness in I Promessi Sposi, of both democratic reformism and revolution in Hungary in 1514, and feminine nurture in The Fanatics. In the early half of the Nineteenth Century ethical progress was still thought to be capable of guiding material progress, and consequently the early historical novelists believed the ethical nation-state was a goal attainable in their own lifetimes, After 1848 that hope faded rapidly. In the work of most writers, typified by Kemény, the assumption that nations have the freedom to create their own history groans under the weight of deterministic ideology.

Lukács considered Tolstoy’s realism a return to the ethical faith of the pre-1848 writers. He based his contention on the notion of realism as a critical reflection: the representation of everyday life as the contradictions of a society embodied in the ethical conflicts within and among typical individuals.¹³ Lukács’ valuation may apply to the fictional sections of War and Peace separated from the whole work, but it is inapplicable to the historical ideology articulated in the novel. For Tolstoy abandons all claim to an ethical goal in his mythohistorical account of Russia’s providential election. Tolstoy, for whom moral universalism was to become the central concern of all cultural activity, created in War and Peace an image of history going over the head of ethics.

Critical realism focuses on characters’ freedom to choose, or lack of it, in a world of mediating institutions. The fictional action of War and Peace is dense with such choices. In later years, Tolstoy was to criticize Maupassant for having “no true, no moral attitude toward his subject.” As a storyteller, he believed Maupassant could pass, but in the novel, where the writer “must clearly discern between good and evil in life,” Maupassant failed to create a unified moral point of view, and hence, unity of aesthetic effect.¹⁴ But, as Eichenbaum implies, as Tolstoy’s interest in historical theory increased, so did his frustra­tion at linking the fictional world of private choices in War and Peace with the historical action. By the end of the novel, the two realms are almost entirely alienated from one another. The fictional world promises to overflow in the future as it did in the past. The everydays promise to continue the same dialectic of strife and happiness, “the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labor and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion … as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon Bonaparte, and apart from all possible re­forms” (Bk. VII, §1). In War and Peace, history determines private lives as Providence determines history. Since the fictional characters live in the realm of consciousness, where they sift their feelings and make their choices, Tolstoy finally deprives them of all but sentimental value in a naturalistic coup, by asserting that freedom of choice is illu­sory.

By taking history out of the realm of consciousness and into a pseudo-Taoistic providentialism, Tolstoy takes history out of the realm of freedom, and into the flow of circumstance and supernaturalism. A He­raclitean deity is not to be held to morality. When the spirit of the army runs so high that individual men take it on themselves to kill French soldiers and take up the cudgel of the “people’s war,” the rules of chivalrous behavior dissolve. Turning to guerilla war, the Russians merely employed “the best and simplest means to attain [their] end” (Bk. XIV, §1). Kutuzov and Karataev both represent potent passivi­ty, the freedom from judgement that sees through illusions of choice (Karataev: “Where there’s judgement … there’s falsehood.” Book X, §38). In his loving aspect, Platon is expected to serve as the representative of Providence; but such Providence merely fills the empty vessel from above. The worth of the nation is not determined by the choices made by the whole society, but by the totality of its submission to what is greater than itself.

Thus there are two contradictory moral ideologies in War and Peace: that of personal freedom, the dialectic of constant choice, movement, and growth, and that of submission to divine intention, potent passivity. The two cannot meet face to face, but they allegedly interfuse in the hypos­tasized Russian nation. The main characters are “typically Russian” in their strivings to go beyond human conventions, while the nation as a mass does everything as it must be done. Thus, the final proof of the theme of the novel, that “Russia saved Europe,” rests on the special, ineffable power of the Russians to join together honesty of experience (though the experience is illusory) with obedience to divine will (though the will is inscrutable).

With this form of historical vision Tolstoy overflows the thematic and generic boundaries of the realistic historical novel, surpassing any previous example of the genre in scope. At the same time, he creates its opposite, the “counter-realistic” historical novel. The realistic historical vision in the novel ends as soon as history is no longer seen to be a product of human choice. Realism’s dialectical play between social objects and individuals was transformed in the social novel into determinism by naturalist writers, just as the Liberal historical design was transformed by providential nationalism in Tolstoy. The problem of social ethics — the choices made by societies — is submerged by the glory of the nation, which in War and Peace is no longer a social-historical con­cept, but a mythopoeic one. Nor is war represented as a moral conflict dividing kindred peoples, to be expiated and resolved in a unity of inte­rests, a new nation, but as roles and scenes distributed by a demiurge in a cosmic process.

Turgenev in Paris suspected that Tolstoy had been influenced by the “Russian idea” espoused by Slavophiles, and criticized the novel’s fatalism in words strikingly like those Tolstoy would later use against Mau­passant. After reading the concluding volumes of War and Peace, Turgenev wrote:

…without saying anything more about the childish philosophy, it was unpleasant to see the reflection of the system even in the ima­ges Tolstoy draws…. How could he lose sight of the entire Decembrist element that played such a role in the 20s, and why is every single one of his decent people likewise some sort of blockhead -­- with a touch of madness? I fear lest Slavophilism, into whose hands he seems to have fallen, should spoil his beautiful and poetic talent, depriving him of influence of outlook…. The artist who loses his capacity to see black and white — left and right — already stands at the brink of destruction.

For Turgenev, Tolstoy seemed to be drawn to Slavophilism because it appeared to resolve the contradictions posed by the historical evolution of the Russian nation. On the one hand, it affirmed the special gifts of the Russian character, idealized in the peasant — an ideal most of the Russian Liberals of the 1860s used as a standard against which to mea­sure contemporary conditions. On the other hand, it gave those gifts a historical patent, a status above all others in the hierarchy of nations. Turgenev implies that had either of the terms of this “synthesis” been developed to its logical end, it would have revealed how shaky the ideal bridge was between two real escarpments. The peasant Karataev denies any basis for historical comparison among nations, for he denies judgement. In the same gesture, he denies also the concept of nationality. The his­torical philosophy of the development of the community of nations, simi­larly followed through, would either deny that hierarchies exist, as with Herder, or would dissolve the concept of nationality into a universal hu­manity, as Kant did in his polemic against Herder.¹⁴

As a result of this underlying contradiction, Tolstoy was led to in­voke a special structuring Providence above both the fictional action and the historical action — and even above the act of writing. By raising Russian history out of the traditional progressive dialectics shared by earlier historical novelists, Tolstoy depicts a nation not synthesized through internal conflict, but actualized in the struggle against what is alien.

Conclusion: The End of Nationalist Liberalism and the Realistic Historical Novel

With Tolstoy, the realistic historical novel breaks the ideological limits of the Liberal vision of the nation-state as a unifier of interests and the aesthetic conventions fostered by that ideology. By the end of War of Peace, the two foci of the traditional perspective of the realis­tic historical novel — the conflict of individuals and a horizon of national history and geography, whose mutual influence generates the move­ment of social change toward an ideal political future — become so alienated from one another that they split the narrative in half. The depiction of the richness of individual characters’ experience becomes so com­plete, the fictional characters move as if independently of the historical action, and are ultimately denied any importance on the historical level. The historical horizon expands into overt metaphysics in which individuals have no part.

Tolstoy’s attempt to make the hypostasized Russian mass embodied in the army represent the nation, in contrast to the ethically problematic image of the nation in Western Liberalism, takes the notion of nationality outside the narrower ideological boundaries of realistic historical novelists. This vision of the privileged Russian role in a providential grand design was a reaction to the turn Liberalism had taken in Europe after the revolutions of 1848. In the first half of the Nineteenth Cen­tury, the realistic historical novel’s heyday, Liberalism has performed an internationalizing function. It had purported to draw all European nations under a single theoretical and cultural umbrella. It had offered the goal of equal material progress for all nations willing to accept Liberal economic and political premises. With the reactions of the 1850s, this prospect became a nightmare. Its theoretical base, the need for a free market economy and national sovereignty, proved self-complicating as more and more national groups entered the competition for bourgeois nation­ statehood, and for control over limited European resources. Nationalism was no longer tied to the state, but to supranational economic empires. Scarcity of resources and the acceleration of industrialization turned Liberalism into an ideology of national competition.

After its successes in consolidating its control over Western European governments in 1848/9, the bourgeoisie as a class, and Liberalism, its major legitimating ideology, no longer conceived the nation-state as a necessary adjunct to its domination over European society.¹⁵ No longer directly endangered by working-class revolutions, capitalist wealth ceased to court the protection of the traditional European state. The bourgeoisie was ready as a class to expand its wealth — and hence, itself,  indefinitely, if necessary at the expense of the political li- mits of the state.

It had seemed to the classical Liberals that the competing economic and political interests of the pre-1848 European societies could be mediated by a political solution, the oft-invoked unification of interests in a national society participating in the free market, Hannah Arendt traces this hope to the French Revolution, in which the demands for the universal rights of man and for national sovereignty were expressed together as if the nation-state were the guarantor and mediator of universal huma­nity (Arendt 230). After 1848, Liberalism no longer required the mediation of the state: the market, grown to global scale with the exploitation of the colonies, would sustain the wealth necessary for global — and class -­ progress. The export of wealth to the colonies had preceded the export of the national state power which had, in fact, followed it in order to protect its wealth at home. Arendt points out that, at least in England, many radicals supported colonialism because they desired the radical in­fluence colonial peoples could practice on the mother country. Continuing the tradition of pre-revolutionary Liberals, these men wished to extend the idea of the state based on the unification of interests, projecting it onto an international scale, into a “nation no longer held together by a limited country” … a grand version of the United Kingdoms.¹⁶

But such views were in a minority among Western imperialists. Bour- geois class-interests dictated state interests, and the notions of Liberalism and nationalism became increasingly identified with the global rule of the bourgeoisie. The dramatic conflict between classes and groups within the classical Liberal ideal of the nation-state, which fostered the dramatic construction, concrete representations of everyday life and social dialects, and the historical motivation of character typical of the realistic historical novel, were gradually replaced by the stolid, reified class-relations within European bourgeois culture. These, in turn, gave rise to the deterministic atmosphere of the age’s novel of manners, and the historically-minded artists’ search for exotic pasts to monumentalize into romantic images as reified as the present. Apropos Salammbô, Flaubert sighed: “Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu etre triste pour resusciter Carthage.”¹⁷

In Eastern Europe, where the course of nationalism was not directed by existing wealth, but by the struggle for independence from Austria and Russia, and in the case of Russia, the prospect of great national power in the future, the ideal of the nation-state was transformed into a form of internationalism. Arendt names “tribal nationalism” (Arendt 227). In Hungary, where some form of nation-state had existed for a millennium, internationalism was conceived only as a threat. Among German and Slavic populations, on the other hand, the growing national consciousness sought to find its form not in nation-states — so beleaguered and precarious historically in Eastern Europe — but in “tribal” empires.

The new nationally conscious bourgeoisie of the smaller Slavic na­tions looked to Russia, “the mother of Slavs,”¹⁸ to exert its political gravitational pull and draw them under its protection in a Panslavic realm, thereby also counteracting the contrary pull of a Pangerman union of German ethnic groups in Central and Eastern Europe. Slavophile senti­ment in Russia was not always internationalistic, but Herder’s incredibly influential image of the peace-loving, courageous peasant Slavs exploited by the Germans encouraged the notion that the Slavs were a single tribe mercifully spared the violent state-formations of the West.¹⁹ The Slavophile idea was characterized, in Leonard Schapiro’s phrase, by an “in­tense faith that Russia could progress by some separate path to a higher state than Europe had achieved, without the intermediate state of bour­geois capitalism” (Schapiro 28). Thus the bourgeois ideologists of Russia conceived their country to be “the youngest of the great nations,”²⁰ and a model of historical virtue on a scale equal to, and greater than, all the individual bourgeois nation-states of Western Europe taken as a continental whole. Since, as the Slavophile Strakhov puts it, the “Russian spiritual order is simpler and more modest and represents a harmony, an equilibrium of forces that alone is in accord with true greatness, and the infringe­ment of which we feel clearly in the greatness of other nations,” Russia represents a supernational force superior to all “other nations.” War and Peace emerged from an intellectual climate in Russia that seemed to demand a myth of the Russian unity in the past contrary to European national histories of division and internal conflict. The Russian imperial role in European affairs required an imperial image of a nation given a special and “separate path” by historical Providence.

With the internationalizing of national economies under Western imperialism, the cultural imperialism of Russia and its growing power in Central Europe, along with the corresponding internationalization of the working class movements opposed to bourgeois class-rule, the ethical goals of nationalistic Liberalism were transformed into entirely economic ones, and the theme of the national unification of interests ceased to be relevant to national societies in Europe. With these conditions, the realistic historical novel ceased as well.

Notes to Chapter VI

1. Auerbach does not mention the fact that the Russian realists, and especially Tolstoy, found an “antidote” to French realism in that of England. The novels of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Trol­lope, were more sympathetic to Tolstoy than the French, with the exception of Stendhal. Their appreciation of the family, their concern with the ethical problems of egotism, and, aside from Dickens, their bourgeois-gentry point of view, made for stronger links between their techniques of realism and Tolstoy’s, than those of the French.

2. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox 29-30; Greenwood, 68-9; Eichenbaum, 200-203.

3. See in What is to be done then? (1882-86), Tolstoy’s warnings against the workers’ revolution with “its horrors of destruction and mur­der,” the “new Pugachov uprising,” quoted in Ibid, p. 256

4. All quotations from War and Peace in the text are from the Aylmer Maude translation.

5. Greenwood 68-75; Berlin 28-9; Berlin cites Schklovsky’s critique, p. 28.

6. Roman Jakobsen, “Deux aspects du langage et deux types d’aphasie” in Essais de linguistigue generale 62; Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology 58.

7. Jakobsen, “Linguistique et Poetique” in op. cit., 221 (citing G.M. Hopkins)

8. Tolstoy writing in his journal: “The mob wants to seize the whole truth, and since it is incapable of understanding it, it gladly believes in it. Goethe says: ‘Truth is repulsive, error attractive, since truth shows us as limited to ourselves, while error makes us seem omnipotent. — Moreover, truth is also repulsive because it is full of gaps, unintelligible, while error is coherent and consis­tent.” Qtd. in Eichenbaum 207.

9. A hint of their depth is indicated by the resemblance of Berlin’s chosen title for his work on Tolstoy, taken from Archilocus’ epi­gram, to Heraclitus’ double-epigram written a century after the Greek lyrist: “Lovers of wisdom must know a great many things in­ deed” (Frag. 49i which Cornford reads as sarcasm) and “Wisdom is one only” (Frag. 19). Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy 186-7.

10. Letter to I.P. Borisov, March 15/27, 1870, in Gibian, ed. 1388.

11. Eichenbaum writes that, at least by the mid-1870s, Tolstoy felt more affinity toward the heroic historical individuals like Napoleon than toward his maintaining individuals. As an illustration, he quotes from a letter Tolstoy wrote in 1874 while he was at work on Anna Karenina, in which he quotes Napoleon’s words. “For me, at least, whatever it is I do, I am always convinced that du haut de ces pyramides 40 siècles me contemplent, and that the whole will perish if I stop.” Eichenbaum comments: “Tolstoy did not quote Napoleon’s words by accident. He understood him deeply; he simultaneously envied and scorned him — not because of his despotism, but because of Waterloo and St. Helena. He did not condemn him from ethical considerations, but rather as a victor condemns the conquered. It was never ethics that led Tolstoy in his life and conduct: behind his ethics, as the true rule of conduct and incentive to work, stood the heroic vision of life. His ethics was, so to speak, the vulgar form of the heroic vision — the distortion of this vision, when he saw no way for it to be realized. ‘Do not resist evil with violence’ — this is a view Napoleon might have conceived himself in his old age: the view of a leader grown old in the midst of battles and victories, and who believes that the whole world has grown old and gentle with him.” (205

12. Cf. Eichenbaum in Gibian, ed. 1443; Greenwood, 59-60.

13. Lukács, “Tolstoy and the Development of Realism,” Studies in European Realism. 129; 189.

14. “Guy de Maupassant” in George J. Becker, ed. Documents of Modern Lite­rary Realism, 421.

15. I owe much of the following argument to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, Part Two.

16. The phrase is Dilke’s, qtd. by Arendt, 181-82.

17. Quoted by Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 256.

18. The phrase is that of Jan Kollar, the originator of the Panslav idea. Quoted in Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire, Vol. II, 160.

19. Leonard Schapiro, “The Pre-Revolutionary Intelligentsia and the Legal Order,” in Pipes, ed. The Russian Intelligentsia,19; Endre Kovács, Szemben a történelemmel [In opposition to history], 167.

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