War and Peace
Arguably, the greatest of all historical novels, Tolstoy’s War and Peace found its shape and eccentric structure – part historical chronicle, part family saga, and part philosophical disquisition on human existence, free will, and historical necessity – in Tolstoy’s assault on the historical practices of his day. In the process, Tolstoy pioneered the means and methods that historical novelists have drawn on ever since. In this month and next, I will consider Tolstoy’s conception of history and the historical novel as the foundation for an understanding of the aims and advantages of historical fiction.
One of the crucial factors in Tolstoy’s launching War and Peace was his experience teaching history to the children of serfs on his estate in the school he founded. He discovered that he was unable to rouse their interest in the distant past, but stories connected to 1812 and the French invasion succeeded in capturing their imagination. Reading extensively historical accounts of the period, Tolstoy was struck by their biases, misconceptions, and avoidance of the forces of ordinary life that Tolstoy was convinced contribute more to shaping events than any ruler, diplomat, or general. Tolstoy had participated in the siege at Sevastopol during the Crimean War, and the contrast between his experiences and historical accounts also contributed to this view. Historians, Tolstoy concluded, are as much storytellers as novelists in their selection of data for emphasis and significance. As novelists contrive noteworthy patterns of meaning, historians similarly distort when they concentrate on single causes for historical events when in fact there are infinite causes, each as valid as another, and when they attribute the determination of events to the will of so-called great men, like Tsar Alexander or Napoleon.
Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace, therefore, can be seen as a new kind of historical narrative that contrasts the reality of history as people experienced it with the unreal picture presented by historians. Tolstoy, therefore, alternates between a historical chronicle of events, involving actual historical figures, and a fictional narrative meant to represent the deeper significance and the inner meaning and impact of the past that is controlled, in Tolstoy’s view, by the collective will of ordinary individuals.
By first titling his opening section of War and Peace, “1805,” Tolstoy explicitly announced his intention of transporting his readers back in time to a particular historical moment. The evolving novel mixed invented characters and situations with historical events and figures, such as Napoleon, Kutuzov, and Alexander. However, Tolstoy’s initial readers criticized the relative absence of period descriptions, the evident anachronisms, and the incompleteness of its historical chronicle. Compared to other historical novelists, Tolstoy supplied scanty details of period customs, what people wore, ate, or what the interior of their houses looked like. Compared to historical accounts of the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino, a reader is struck with how much Tolstoy has left out or filtered through the limited perspectives of his characters. His fictional protagonists like Andrei and Pierre seem more like contemporaries than ancestors. Tolstoy also willingly violated the rules of historical accuracy by departing from sources and entering the thoughts of historical figures like Napoleon and Kutuzov while high jacking the historical record by having his fictional creations interact with historical figures. Famously, Andrei’s “death” is witnessed and commented upon by Napoleon at Austerlitz, while Nikolai’s comrade, Denisov, is shown proposing to Kutusov the guerrilla warfare strategy that ultimately defeated the French.
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy rather testily took on complaints about the historical accuracy and aim of War and Peace in “Some Words about War and Peace,” first published in 1868. In it he addressed the complaint that “the characteristics of the period” are insufficient by acknowledging that readers do not find in his novel
the horrors of serfdom, the immuring of wives, the flogging of grown-up sons, Saltykova, and so on [in other words what people think of as characteristics of the first decade of the 19th c. in Russia], but I do not think that these characteristics of the period as they exist in our imagination are correct, and I did not wish to reproduce them. On studying letters, diaries, and traditions, I did not find the horrors of such savagery to a greater extent than I find them now, or at any other period. In those days also people loved, envied, sought truth and virtue, and were carried away by passion; and there was the same complex mental and moral life among the upper classes, who were in some instances even more refined than now. If we have come to believe in the perversity and coarse violence of that period, that is only because the traditions, memoirs, stories, and novels that have been handed to us record for the most part exceptional cases of violence and brutality. To suppose that the predominant characteristic of that period was turbulence is as unjust as it would be for a man seeing nothing but the tops of trees beyond a hill, to conclude that there was nothing to be found in that locality but trees. That period had its own characteristics (as every epoch has) which resulted from the predominant alienation of the upper class from other classes, from the religious philosophy of the time, from peculiarities of education, from the habit of using the French language, and so forth. That is the character I tried to depict as well as I could.
Tolstoy makes clear that he is less interested in the exceptions than the rules – the universal points of connections in human nature and the human condition that link his past epoch with ours. Period detail is not as important, Tolstoy suggests, as more essential truths that reveal the universal in the particular historical moment. As to the divergence between his description of historical events and that given by historians, Tolstoy declares,
This was not accidental but inevitable. An historian and an artist describing an historic epoch have two quite different tasks before them. As an historian would be wrong if he tried to present an historical person in his entirety, in all the complexity of his relations with all sides of life, so the artist would fail to perform his task were he to represent the person always in his historical significance. Kutuzov did not always hold a telescope, point at the enemy, and ride a white horse. Rostopchin was not always setting fire with a torch to the Voronovski House (which in fact he never did), and the Empress Marya Fedorovna did not always stand in an ermine cloak leaning her hand on the code of laws, but that is how the popular imagination pictures them.
For an historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for an artist treating of man’s relation to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men.
An historian is sometimes obliged, by bending the truth, to subordinate all the actions of an historical personage to the one idea he has ascribed to that person. The artist, on the contrary, finds the very singleness of that idea incompatible with his problem, and tries to understand and show not a certain actor but a man.
The historian, Tolstoy argues, is dominated by a thesis, an interpretation of an historical character and events, selecting and emphasizing the details that support the thesis. The artist, Tolstoy declares, must resist such simplification and instead deal with the complexity, ambiguity, contradictions, and multiplicity of experience. In treating historical events, Tolstoy writes:
The historian has to deal with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event . . . . For the historian (to keep to the case of a battle) the chief source is found in the reports of the commanding officers and of the commander in chief. The artist can draw nothing from such sources; they tell him nothing and explain nothing to him. More than that: the artist turns away from them as he finds inevitable falsehood in them. To say nothing of the fact that after any battle the two sides nearly always describe it in quite contradictory ways, in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie, resulting from the need of describing in a few words the actions of thousands of men spread over several miles and subject to most violent moral excitement under the influence of fear, shame, and death.
Asserting a relativity of perspective in historical accounts that makes the absolute claims of historians erroneous, Tolstoy asks whether Napoleon’s view of the battle is more or less valid than the ordinary soldier’s? Is the historical novelist’s selection of details, even invention of them, more or less valid than what the historian selects to emphasize? Tolstoy concedes only this: “An artist must not forget that the popular conception of historical persons and events is not based on fancy but on historical documents in as far as the historians have been able to group them, and therefore, though he understands and presents them differently, the artist like the historian should be guided by historical material. Wherever in my novel historical persons speak or act, I have invented nothing, but have used historical material of which I have accumulated a whole library during my work.”
In my next post, I will look more closely at the charges Tolstoy levels at historians and the implications for the historical novel.
- Dr. Daniel S. Burt is a writer and college professor who teaches graduate literature courses at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he was a dean for nine years. He is the editor of The Chronology of American Literature (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), and the author of What Historical Novel Do I Read Next? Volumes 1-3 (Gale, 1997-2003), The Novel 100 (Facts on File, 2003), The Literary 100 (Facts on File, 2001), The Biography Book (Greenwood/Oryx, 2001), and the forthcoming Drama 100 (Facts on File, 2006). He lives with his wife on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
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