of his characters as they zig and zag, as they live out their intentions or fall to fate's control.

Freedom is what War and Peace is about, although Tolstoy does not formally declare this intention until nearly twelve hundred pages are done. By that time, after we have felt the looseness of his style, the emphasis on freedom of the mind is no surprise. The feeling of freedom takes time to establish. A novel that is tightly plotted can get to its point in a few sentences, but these are the books that raise the suspicions of those wary readers who hate the artificiality of art. For an author like Tolstoy to follow the rhythms of life, especially the easygoing lives of the leisured class, means taking time.

The idea of freedom, which Tolstoy talks about in the Second Epilogue, is evident in the way that this book came to be, having ended up a far, far different thing than it was when he first thought of it. It originally spanned over fifty years—at the pace War and Peace as we know it unravels, that would come out to nearly five thousand pages. When the idea first came to Tolstoy, the character Pierre Bezukhov was to be a veteran of the Decembrist uprising, returning to Moscow in 1856 after being exiled in Siberia for thirty years for his part in the uprising. That led the story back to 1825, but writing about the uprising raised the broader question: Who were these revolutionaries? They were Russian noblemen who had tried to overthrow the government to gain freedom for the country's peasants. What gave them the idea to act against their own self-interests? Searching for the answer to that question took Tolstoy even deeper into the past.

Eventually, the sections taking place in 1856 and 1825 were dropped from the novel. Instead, the action begins in 1805, when the major characters are young adults and the Russian aristocracy is first being politicized by the threat of Napoleon, and concludes in 1820, when Pierre is just starting to discuss the ideas that later led to the Decembrist uprising. This flexibility led the book in directions that could not have been anticipated when Tolstoy started it—directions that the readers do not see coming. Reluctant readers might not buy the idea that the book is a "thrill-ride," but it certainly plays out unlike any other novel, which in itself should cut short most objections to reading it.

To get the full effect, readers need to take their time unraveling this book, which is not the same thing as saying that it is difficult to understand. The language is not difficult, and the situations are clear enough, but the wealth of details just will not be understood as quickly as busy people want. Of course, there will always be readers who think that any novel that does not happen in their own towns, within their own lifetimes, is irrelevant to their lives. They foolishly think that human nature has somehow become different as the times have changed, or that it is significantly different from one place to another. There isn't much that will change these people's minds, because they will always find excuses to hate reading.

It is one of the great ironies of literature that many people will not touch War and Peace because they do not consider themselves to be fans of history. They feel that history is not real or relevant. These people could have sat down with Leo Tolstoy and, language problems aside, gotten along just fine. He disliked history, too—at least, the way that historians present it. The novel's long, winding road leads to its Second Epilogue, where Tolstoy addresses the problems with historical interpretation of the past and how he thinks events should be recorded as time passes. It is almost beyond worth mentioning to say that anyone who feels that she or he cannot understand history has not had it presented to them in the right way before. They might have been told about "heroic" deeds that were obviously done out of desperation, not good character, or heroic figures with despicable personal lives, or "common" people who are more interesting than the focal subjects of history. Overgeneralization makes historians liars, a fact that bothered Tolstoy as much as it bothers people who feel that reading stories based in the past are not worth the effort.

Sometimes people feel that they are not qualified to read War and Peace because they do not know enough about its time and setting. The book certainly mentions a lot of historical detail, but it also explains the significance of the details. If it did not explain the references within the novel, it would not have to be so frighteningly long—that is what all of those hundreds of pages are for. All one should do before starting is to take out a map, find France, find Moscow, and know that in 1812, the French army marched across Europe and Russia to Moscow, then quickly turned around and marched back to France. Any further knowledge of the events of the time—why they advanced, why they retreated, who the principle actors were—would be nice, but it is not necessary.

There will always be people who do not want to read—whatever their reasons, and there are millions of them, they feel that reading is not worth their time, and, if you haven't heard it all your life, War and Peace takes time to read. But it is not much more reader-friendly than books a fraction of its size. It is not much more difficult to figure out what is going on than it is to catch up with the characters on a soap opera, and it is, in the end, a better experience: soap operas do not consider the questions of reality and freedom that make non-readers shun novels in the first place.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Maude praises Tolstoy for his artistry, for "clearness of form and vividness of colour," for showing things as his characters saw them, and for presenting the soul of man "with unparalleled reality."

Nothing can be simpler than most of the occurrences of War and Peace. Everyday events of family life: conversations between brother and sister, or mother and daughter, separations and reunions, hunting, holiday festivities, dances, card-playing, and so forth, are all as lovingly shaped into artistic gems as is the battle of Borodino itself. Whatever the purpose of the book may be, its success depends not on that purpose, but on what Tolstoy did under its influence, that is to say it depends on a highly artistic execution.

If Tolstoy succeeds in fixing our gaze on what occupied his soul, it is because he had full command of his instrument—which was art. Not many readers probably are concerned about the thoughts that directed and animated the author, but all are impressed by his creation. Men of all camps—those who like as well as those who dislike his later works—unite in tribute to the extraordinary mastery shown in this remarkable production. It is a notable example of the irresistible and all-conquering power of art.

But such art does not arise of itself, nor can it exist apart from deep thought and deep feeling. What is it that strikes everyone in War and Peace? It is its clearness of form and vividness of colour. It is as though one saw what is described and heard the sounds that are uttered. The author hardly speaks in his own person; he brings forward the characters and then allows them to speak, feel, and act; and they do it so that every movement is true and amazingly exact, in full accord with the character of those portrayed. It is as if we had to do with real people, and saw them more clearly than one can in real life.

Similarly, Tolstoy usually describes scenes or scenery only as reflected in the mind of one of his characters. He does not describe the oak that stood beside the road or the moonlight night when neither Natasha nor Prince Andrew could sleep, but he describes the impressions the oak and the night made on Prince Andrew. The battles and historic events are usually described not by informing us of the author's conception of them, but by the impression they produce on the characters in the story. Tolstoy nowhere appears behind the actors or draws events in the abstract; he shows them in the flesh and blood of those who supplied the material for the events.

In this respect, the work is an artistic marvel. Tolstoy has seized not some separate traits but a whole living atmosphere, which vanes around different individuals and different classes of society.

The soul of man is depicted in War and Peace with unparalleled reality. It is not life in the abstract that is shown, but creatures fully defined with all their limitations of place, time, and circumstance. For instance, we see how individuals grow. Natasha running into the drawing-room with her doll, in Book I, and Natasha entering the church, in Book IX, are really one and the same person at two different ages, and not merely two different ages attributed to a single person, such as one often encounters in fiction. The author has also shown us the intermediate stages of this development. In the same way Nicholas Rostov develops; Pierre from being a young man becomes a Moscow magnate; old Bolkonsky grows senile, and so forth.

In judging such a work one should tread with caution, but we think a Russian critic judged well when he said that the meaning of the book is best summed up in Tolstoy's own words: "There is no greatness without simplicity, goodness and truth."

Source: Aylmer Maude, "Life of Tolstoy," reprinted in Tolstoy: The Critical Heritage, Edited by A. V. Knowles, Rout-edge & Kegan Paul, 1978, pp. 225-32.

An English poet and novelist, Bayley is best known for his critical studies of Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin, and Thomas Hardy. In the following excerpt from his Tolstoy and the Novel, Bayley discusses the depiction of characters and historical events and the themes of life and death in War and Peace.

Pushkin's tale, The Captain's Daughter, which describes the great rebellion of Pugachev in 1773 during Catherine's reign, is the first imagined relation of an episode from Russian history, but it is no more a historical novel than is War and Peace. It strikes us at first as a rather baffling work, with nothing very memorable about it. Tolstoy himself commented, as if uneasily, on its bareness, and observes that writers cannot be so straightforward and simple any more. Certainly Pushkin's way of imagining the past is the very opposite of Tolstoy's. War and Peace has a remarkable appearance of simplicity, but this simplicity is the result of an emphasis so uniform and so multitudinous that we sometimes feel that there is nothing left for us to think or to say, and that we cannot notice anything that Tolstoy has not. The simplicity of Tolstoy is overpowering, that of Pushkin is neither enigmatic nor evasive, but rapid and light. He writes about the past as if he were writing a letter home about his recent experiences. The horrors of the rebellion cause him neither to heighten, nor deliberately to lower, his style. And he is just as prepared to "comment" as Tolstoy himself, though he does it through the narrator, who composes the book as a memoir. The Captain, Commandant of a fortress in the rebel country, is interrogating a Bashkir.

The Bashkir crossed the threshold with difficulty (he was wearing fetters) and, taking off his tall cap, stood by the door. I glanced at him and shuddered. I shall never forget that man. He seemed to be over seventy. He had neither nose nor ears. His head was shaven, instead of a beard, a few grey hairs stuck out, he was small, thin and bent, but his narrow eyes still had a gleam in them.

"Aha," said the Commandant, recognising by the terrible marks one of the rebels punished in 1741. "I see you are an old wolf and have been in our snares. Rebelling must be an old game to you, to judge by the look of your head. Come nearer; tell me, who sent you?"

The old Bashkir was silent and gazed at the Commandant with an utterly senseless expression.

"Why don't you speak?" Ivan Kuzmich went on. "Don't you understand Russian? Yulay, ask him in your language who sent him to our fortress."

Yulay repeated Ivan Kuzmich's question in Tartar. But the Bashkir looked at him with the same expression and did not answer a word.

"Very well," the Commandant said. "I will make you speak. Lads, take off his stupid striped gown and streak his back. Mind you do it thoroughly, Yulay."

Two soldiers began undressing the Bashkir. The unfortunate man's face expressed anxiety. He looked about him like some wild creature caught by children. But when the old man was made to put his hands round the soldier's neck and was lifted off the ground and Yulay brandished the whip, the Bashkir groaned in a weak, imploring voice, and, nodding his head, opened his mouth in which a short stump could be seen instead of a tongue.

When I recall that this happened in my lifetime, and that now I have lived to see the gentle reign of the Emperor Alexander, I cannot but marvel at the rapid progress of enlightenment and the diffusion of humane principles. Young man! If ever my notes fall into your hands, remember that the best and most permanent changes are those due to the softening of manners and morals, and not to any violent upheavals.

It was a shock to all of us.

The tone of the commentary, and the lack of exaggerated horror, are exactly right. In his late story, Hadji Murad, Tolstoy has the same unobtrusive brilliance of description, but—too intent on the art that conceals art—he is careful to avoid the commentary, and so he does not achieve the historical naturalness and anonymity of this narrative. He is too careful in a literary way—almost a Western way—to avoid being shocked...

[The] passage gives us an insight, too, into the reason why all the great nineteenth-century Russians are so good on their history. They feel continuingly in touch with it—horrors and all—in a direct and homely way. They neither romanticise it nor cut themselves off from it, but are soberly thankful (as Shakespeare and the Elizabethans were thankful) if they are spared a repetition in their own time of the same sort of events. Scott subtitled his account of the '45 "Tis' Sixty Years Since," and Pushkin was almost exactly the same distance in time from Pugachev, but their attitudes to the rebellion they describe could hardly be more different. Pushkin borrows greatly from Scott...But he does not borrow Scott's presentation of rebellion as Romance, safely situated in the past and hence to be seen—in contrast to the prosaic present—as something delightful and picturesque. Nor does he see the past as something over and done with, and thus the novelist's preserve. Unemphatically placed as it is, the comment of the narrator in the penultimate chapter—"God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless!"—strikes like a hammerblow. It is a comment out of Shakespeare's histories, not Scott's novels.

Tolstoy also borrows from Scott, in particular from the device of coincidence as used in historical romance ("Great God! Can it really be Sir Hubert, my own father?") without which the enormous wheels of War and Peace could hardly continue to revolve. Tolstoy avails himself of coincidence without drawing attention to it. It is a convenience, and not, as it has become in that distinguished descendant of Tolstoy's novel—Dr. Zhivago—a quasi-symbolic method. Princess Mary's rescue by Nicholas Rostov, and Pierre's by Dolokhov, are obvious instances, and Tolstoy's easy and natural use of the device makes a satisfying contrast to the expanse of the book, the versts that stretch away from us in every direction. It also shows us that the obverse of this boundless geographical space is the narrow dimension of a self-contained class; the rulers of War and Peace, its deux cents families ["two hundred families"], are in fact all known to one another (we are told halfway through that Pierre "knew everyone in Moscow and St. Petersburg") and meet all over Russia as if at a soiree or a club. Kutuzov and Andrew's father are old comrades in arms; Kutuzov is an admirer of Pierre's wife; and hence Andrew gets the entree to Austerlitz and Pierre to Borodino—and we with them.

Yet Tolstoy's domestication by coincidence gives us an indication why we have from The Captain's Daughter a more authentic feel of history than from War and Peace. Pushkin respects history, and is content to study it and to exercise his intelligence upon it: to Tolstoy, it represents a kind of personal challenge—it must be attacked, absorbed, taken over. And in "Some Words about War and Peace" [see excerpt dated 1868], Tolstoy reveals the two ways in which this takeover of history is to be achieved. First, human characteristics are invariable, and "in those days also people loved, envied, sought truth and virtue, and were earned away by passion"—i.e. all the things I feel were felt by people in the past, and consequently they are all really me. Second, "There was the same complex mental and moral life among the upper classes, who were in some instances even more refined than now"—i e. my own class (which chiefly interests me) and which was even more important then, enjoyed collectively the conviction that I myself do now: that everything stems from and depends upon our own existence. To paraphrase in this way is, of course, unfair, but I am not really misrepresenting Tolstoy. All his historical theories, with their extraordinary interest, authority and illumination, do depend upon these two swift annexatory steps, after which his historical period is at his feet, as Europe was at Napoleon's.

Let us return for a moment to the extract from The Captain's Daughter quoted above. The day after the events described, the fortress is taken by Pugachev, and the old Bashkir sits astride the gallows and handles the rope while the Commandant and his lieutenant are hanged. Nothing is said about the Bashkir's sentiments, or whether this was his revenge on the Russian colonial methods the Commandant stood for, and whether it pleased him. The hero, Ensign Grinyov, is himself about to be hanged, but is saved by the intervention of his old servant; he sees the Commandant's wife killed, and finally "having eaten my supper with great relish, went to sleep on a bare floor, exhausted both in mind and body." Next day he observes in passing some rebels pulling off and appropriating the boots of the hanged men.

I have unavoidably given these details more emphasis than they have in the text: the point is that this conveys exactly what the hero's reaction to such events would have been at that time. It is not necessarily Pushkin's reaction, but he has imagined—so lightly and completely that it hardly looks like imagination at all: it is more like Defoe and Richardson than Scott—the reactions of a young man of Grinyov's upbringing, right down to the fervent plea that manners and methods may continue to soften and improve. Now let us take a comparable episode in War and Peace, the shooting of the alleged incendiarists by the French in Moscow. Pierre, like Grinyov, is waiting—as he thinks—for execution; and his eye registers with nightmare vividness the appearance and behaviour of the people round him. He ceases to be any sort of character at all, but is merely a vehicle for the overpowering precision of Tolstoyan detail, and Tolstoy concedes this by saying "he lost the power of thinking and understanding. He could only hear and see." But here Tolstoy is not being quite truthful. Pierre is also to feel an immense and generalized incredulity and horror, which his creator compels the other participants to share. "On the faces of all the Russians, and of the French soldiers and officers without exception, he read the same dismay, horror, and conflict that were in his own heart." Even the fact that he has himself been saved means nothing to him.

The fifth prisoner, the one next to Pierre, was led away—alone. Pierre did not understand that he was saved, that he and the rest had been brought there only to witness the execution. With ever-growing horror, and no sense of joy or relief, he gazed at what was taking place. The fifth man was the factory lad in the loose cloak. The moment they laid hands on him, he sprang aside in terror and clutched at Pierre. (Pierre shuddered and shook himself free.) The lad was unable to walk. They dragged him along holding him up under the arms, and he screamed. When they got him to the post he grew quiet, as if he had suddenly understood something. Whether he understood that screaming was useless, or whether he thought it incredible that men should kill him, at any rate he took his stand at the post, waiting to be blindfolded like the others, and like a wounded animal looked around him with glittering eyes. Pierre was no longer able to turn away and close his eyes. His curiosity and agitation, like that of the whole crowd, reached the highest pitch at this fifth murder. Like the others, this fifth man seemed calm; he wrapped his loose cloak closer and rubbed one bare foot with the other.

When they began to blindfold him he himself adjusted the knot which hurt the back of his head; then when they propped him against the bloodstained post, he leaned back and, not being comfortable in that position, straightened himself, adjusted his feet, and leaned back again more comfortably. Pierre did not take his eyes from him and did not miss his slightest movement.

Probably a word of command was given and was followed by the reports of eight muskets; but try as he would, Pierre could not afterwards remember having heard the slightest sound of the shots. He only saw how the workman suddenly sank down on the cords that held him, how blood showed itself in two places, how the ropes slackened under the weight of the hanging body, and how the workman sat down, his head hanging unnaturally and one leg bent under him. Pierre ran up to the post. No one hindered him. Pale frightened people were doing something around the workman. The lower jaw of an old Frenchman with a thick moustache trembled as he untied the ropes. The body collapsed. The soldiers dragged it awkwardly from the post and began pushing it into the pit. They all plainly and certainly knew that they were criminals who must hide the traces of their guilt as quickly as possible.

The concluding comment is not that of a man of the age, but that of Tolstoy himself (it shows, incidentally, how impossible it is to separate Tolstoy the moralist from Tolstoy the novelist at any stage of life) and though the description is one of almost mesmeric horror, yet it is surely somehow not completely moving, or satisfactory. This has nothing to do with the moral comment however. I think the explanation is that it is not seen by a real character, or rather by a character who retains his reality at this moment. It is at such moments that we are aware of Pierre's lack of a body, and of a past—the two things are connected—and we are also aware of Tolstoy's need for such a person, with these assets, at these moments. If any member of the Rostov or Bolkonsky families had been the spectator, the scene would have been very different. It would have been anchored firmly to the whole selfhood of such a spectator, as are the deeds of the guerrillas which Petya hears about in their camp...

The point is that a character like this makes us aware of the necessary multiplicity of human response, of the fact that even at such a scene, some of the soldiers and spectators must in the nature of things have been bored, phlegmatic, or actively and enjoyingly curious. But Tolstoy wants to achieve a dramatic and metaphoric unity of response, as if we were all absorbed in a tragic spectacle; to reduce the multiplicity of reaction to one sensation—the sensation that he had himself felt on witnessing a public execution in Paris. For this purpose Pierre is his chosen instrument. He never becomes Tolstoy, but at these moments his carefully constructed physical self—his corpulence, spectacles, good-natured hang-dog look, etc.—become as it were the physical equivalent of Tolstoy's powerful abstract singlemindedness, they are there not to give Pierre a true serf, but to persuade us that the truths we are being told are as solid as the flesh, and are identified with it. We find the same sort of physical counterpart of an insistent Tolstoyan point in Karataev's roundness. It is one of the strange artificialities of this seemingly so natural book that Tolstoy can juggle with the flesh as with truth and reason, forcing it to conform to the same kind of willed simplicity.

For Pierre's size and corpulence, Karataev's roundness, are not true characteristics of the flesh, the flesh that dominates the life of Tolstoy's novels. The process makes us realise how little a sense of the flesh has to do with description of physical appearance. It is more a question of intuitive and involuntary sympathy. Theoretically, we know much more about the appearance of Pierre and Karataev than about, say, that of Nicholas Rostov and Anatole Kuragin. But it is the latter whom we know in the flesh. And bad characters, like Napoleon and Anatole, retain the sympathy of the flesh. Napoleon, snorting and grunting with pleasure as he is massaged with a brush by his valet; unable to taste the punch on the evening before Borodino because of his cold; above all, at Austerlitz, when "his face wore that special look of confident, self-complacent happiness that one sees on the face of a boy happily in love"—the tone is overtly objective, satirical, even disgusted, but in fact Tolstoy cannot withhold his intuitive sympathy with, and understanding of, the body. Physically we feel as convinced by, and as comfortable with, these two, as we feel physically uncommitted with Pierre and Karataev.

Anatole was not quick-witted, nor ready or eloquent in conversation, but he had the faculty, so invaluable in society, of composure and imperturbable self possession. If a man lacking in self-confidence remains dumb on a first introduction and betrays a consciousness of the impropriety of such silence and an anxiety to find something to say, the effect is bad. But Anatole was dumb, swung his foot, and smilingly examined the Princess's hair. It was evident that he could be silent in this way for a very long time. "If anyone finds this silence inconvenient, let him talk, but I don't want to," he seemed to say.

Inside Anatole, as it were, we "sit with arms akimbo before a table on the corner of which he smilingly and absentmindedly fixed his large and handsome eye;" we feel his sensations at the sight of the pretty Mile Bourrienne; and when his "large white plump leg" is cut off in the operating tent after Borodino, we seem to feel the pang in our own bodies.

But with Prince Andrew, who is lying wounded in the same tent, we have no bodily communication.

After the sufferings he had been enduring, Prince Andrew enjoyed a blissful feeling such as he had not experienced for a long time. All the best and happiest moments of his life—especially his earliest childhood, when he used to be undressed and put to bed, and when leaning over him his nurse sang him to sleep and he, burying his head in the pillow, felt happy in the mere consciousness of life—returned to his memory, not merely as something past but as something present.

We assent completely, but it is from our own experience, not from our knowledge of Prince Andrew. Like Pierre, he does not have a true body: there is this difference between both of them and the other characters, and it is not a difference we can simply put down to their being aspects of Tolstoy himself. The difference is not total...but it is significant, for no other novel can show such different and apparently incompatible kinds of character living together. It is as if Becky Sharp and David Copperfield, Waverley and Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy, together with Onegm and Julien Sorel, Rousseau's Emile and Voltaire's Candide and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and many more, were all meeting in the same book, taking part in the same plot, communicating freely with one another. For in addition to drawing on his own unparalleled resources of family and class experience, Tolstoy has borrowed every type of character from every kind of novel: not only does he know a lot of people at first-hand—he has absorbed all the artificial ways of describing them.

Moreover, his genius insensibly persuades us that we do actually in life apprehend people in all these different ways, the ways imagined by each kind of novel, so that we feel that Pierre and Andrew are bound to be seekers and questioners because the one has no past and the other no roots in life, forgetting that Tolstoy has deprived them of these things precisely in order that they should conform to the fictional, Bildungsroman, type of the seeker. Andrew is a son from a Bildungsroman with a father from a historical novel, from Scott or The Captain's Daughter. Old Bolkonsky (who was closely modelled on Tolstoy's own grandfather, together with recollections he had heard about Field Marshal Kamensky) is entirely accessible to us, as much in what we imagine of his old military days, "in the hot nights of the Crimea," as in what we see of his patriarchal life at Bald Hills. But his son, as does happen in life, is distant. We receive vivid perceptions through him (see the childhood passage) but they remain generalized Tolstoy: they are not connected specifically with him. What was he like as a child at Bald Hills? When did he meet the Little Princess, and how did his courtship of her proceed?

We share this uncertainty about Andrew with Natasha, and—more significantly—with her mother. Embedded in life, the Rostovs cannot really believe that the marriage will take place, any more than they can believe they will die. When Natasha sings, her mother remembers her own youth and reflects that "there was something unnatural and dreadful in this impending marriage of Natasha and Prince Andrew." It is like a marriage of life with death.

Like Death, Andrew remains a stranger to the Rostovs. They cannot see him as a complete being any more than we can—any more than his own son can on the last page of the novel. He has become a symbolic figure, by insensible stages and without any apparent intention on Tolstoy's part. Natasha fights for his life, as life struggles against death, and when he dies old Count Rostov—that champion of the flesh—has to realise death too, and is never the same again. Not only death is symbolised in him, but dissatisfaction, aspiration, change, all the cravings of the spirit, all the changes that undermine the solid kingdom of the flesh, the ball, the supper, the bedroom. Tolstoy's distrust of the spirit, and of the changes it makes, appears in how he handles Andrew, and how he confines him with the greatest skill and naturalness to a particular enclave.

This naturalness conceals Tolstoy's laborious and uncertain construction of Andrew, which is intimately connected with the construction of the whole plot. First he was to have died at Austerlitz. Tolstoy decided to keep him alive, but that it was a risk to do so is shown by the uncertainty and hesitations of the ensuing drafts. His attitude of controlled exasperation towards the Little Princess was originally one of settled rudeness, culminating in a burst of fury when she receives a billet from Anatole. His rudeness is that of Lermontov's Pechorin and Pushkin's Onegin; it must have been difficult to head him off from being a figure of that kind. When he first sees Natasha he is bewitched because she is in fancy dress as a boy (an incident later transferred to Nicholas and Sonya), but in another version he takes no notice of her at all. Tolstoy's bother is to avoid nailing down Andrew with the kinds of apercu he is so good at: he must not be open to the usual Tolstoyan "discoveries." (It would be out of the question, for instance, for Pierre to perceive that Andrew doesn't really care about the beauties of nature, as the "I" of Boyhood and Youth suddenly realises about his great friend and hero Nekhludyov who is something of a Prince Andrew figure.) Such stages of illumination would be all wrong, as would be any particular aspect of Natasha (fancy dress, etc.), which would reveal something further about him by their attraction for him. Her attraction must be symbolic of life itself.

At last Tolstoy—remembering an experience of his own—hit on the way to convey this. Andrew hears Natasha and Sonya talking together at night as they lean out of the window below his, and in this way her reality—her sense of her family and her happy sense of herself that make up this reality—comes before him in the right abstract and ideal way, in a way that could not have been conveyed by Natasha herself in a direct confrontation with him. Natasha's own reactions presented an equal difficulty. In one version she is made to tell Sonya that Prince Andrew was such a charming creature that she has never seen and could never imagine anyone comparable! This clearly will not do, and neither will another version in which she says she doesn't like him, that "there is something proud, something dry about him." In the final version the magical ball takes over, and removes the need for any coherent comment from her. Indeed, Tolstoy ingeniously increases her reality by this method, implying her readiness for life that can take even the shadowy Prince Andrew in its stride; that is then dashed by the prospect of a year's delay; and finally pours itself helplessly into an infatuation with a "real man" (real both for us and for her)—Anatole Kuragin.

Natasha's mode of love presents a marked contrast with that of Pushkin's Tatiana, so often compared with her as the same type of vital Russian heroine. Natasha's love is generalised, founded on her own sense of herself and—less consciously— on her almost explosive expectancy, her need not to be wasted. Onegin, whom Tatiana loves, is like Andrew an unintimate figure, but for quite different reasons. He gets what reality he has from the delighted scrutiny of Pushkin, and the devoted scrutiny of Tatiana. His own consciousness is nothing. As Nabokov observes, "Onegin grows fluid and flaccid as soon as he starts to feel, as soon as he departs from the existence he had acquired from his maker in terms of colourful parody." Significantly, Natasha's love is solipsistic, in herself, typical of Tolstoyan samodovolnost ["self-satisfaction"], it does not need to know its object, and its object is correspondingly unknowable in terms of objective scrutiny. But when Tatiana sees the marks that Onegin's fingernail has scratched in the margins of his books and realises that he is nothing but a parody, a creature of intellectual and social fashion—it does not destroy her love for him, it actually increases it! Finding the loved person's underlinings in a book is almost as intimate as watching them asleep. The two heroines are alike in the vigour of their affections, but it is a very different kind of affection for all that. In Onegin, Pushkin presents an object for us to enjoy, and for his heroine to love. In Andrew, Tolstoy creates the symbolic figure of a spectator of life, in the presence of whom Natasha can show what life there is in herself.

Andrew is created for death. He looks towards death as something true and real at last; and after all the false starts, alterations and reprieves, he achieves his right end. Of course this is something of a Tolstoyan post hoc ergo propter hoc ["faulty reasoning"], but it is a fact that all the characters in War and Peace—from the greatest to the least— get exactly what their natures require. The book is a massive feat of arbitration, arrived at after countless checks and deliberations: though its huge scale gives an effect of all the random inevitability of life, it also satisfies an ideal. It is an immensely audacious and successful attempt to compel the whole area of living to acknowledge the rule of art, proportion, of what is "right." What Henry James deprecatingly called "a wonderful mass of life" is in fact a highly complex patterning of human fulfilment, an allotment of fates on earth as authoritative as Dante's in the world to come. It is significant that the first drafts of the novel earned the title, "All's well that ends well."

In his old age Tolstoy said, "when the characters in novels and stories do what from their spiritual nature they are unable to do, it is a terrible thing." To live, as the novel understands and conveys life, is what Prince Andrew would not have been able to do. It is impossible to imagine him developing a relation with Natasha, or communicating with her as Pierre and Natasha communicate in the last pages of the novel. For him, Natasha represents life. It is his destiny as a character to conceptualise what others embody. He perceives through metaphor and symbol, as he sees the great oak-tree, apparently bare and dead, coming again into leaf. A much more moving instance of this, to my mind, than the rather grandiloquent image of the oaktree, is his glimpse of the two little girls as he visits the abandoned house at Bald Hills on his retreat with his regiment.

two little girls, running out from the hot-house carrying in their skirts plums they had plucked from the trees there, came upon Prince Andrew. On seeing the young master, the elder one, with frightened look, clutched her younger companion by the hand and hid with her behind a birch tree, not stopping to pick up some green plums they had dropped.

Prince Andrew turned away with startled haste, unwilling to let them see that they had been observed. He was sorry for the pretty frightened little gift, was afraid of looking at her, and yet felt an irresistible desire to do so. A new sensation of comfort and relief came over him when, seeing these girls, he realized the existence of other human interests entirely aloof from his own and just as legitimate as those that occupied him. Evidently these girls passionately desired one thing—to carry away and eat those green plums without being caught—and Prince Andrew shared their wish for the success of their enterprise. He could not resist looking at them once more. Believing their danger past, they sprang from their ambush, and chirruping something in their shrill little voices and holding up their skirts, their bare little sunburnt feet scampered merrily and quickly across the meadow grass.

We can see from this passage exactly why Andrew "loved" Natasha—it resembles the scene where he hears the two of them talking by the window—and why the word "love" in the novel has no meaning of its own apart from the continuous demands and rights of life. He loves the idea of life more than the actuality. When he rejoins his soldiers he finds them splashing about naked in a pond, and he is revolted at the sight of "all that healthy white flesh," doomed to the chances of war. Nor do we ever have a greater sense, by contrast, of what life means, than when Andrew, after all his intimations of death, "the presence of which he had felt continually all his life"—in the clouds above the battlefield of Austerlitz and in the birchtree field before Borodino—confronts Natasha and the Princess Mary on his deathbed.

In one thin, translucently white hand he held a handkerchief, while with the other he stroked the delicate moustache he had grown, moving his fingers slowly. His eyes gazed at them as they entered.

On seeing his face and meeting his eyes, Princess Mary's pace suddenly slackened, she felt her tears dry up and her sobs ceased. She suddenly felt guilty and grew timid on catching the expression of his face and eyes.

"But in what am I to blame?" she asked herself. "Because you are alive and thinking of the living, while I" his cold stern look replied.

In the deep gaze that seemed to look not outwards but inwards there was an almost hostile expression as he slowly regarded his sister and Natasha.

I have suggested that Andrew is not subject to "discoveries," and to Tolstoy's intimate kinds of examination, but this is not entirely true. Tolstoy's genius for character, as comprehensive and apparently involuntary as Shakespeare's, and with far more opportunity for detailed development than Shakespeare has within the limits of a play, could not avoid Andrew's becoming more than a centre of reflection and of symbol. The sheer worldliness of Tolstoy's observation keeps breaking in. We learn, for example, that Andrew befriends Boris, whom he does not much care for, because it gives him an apparently disinterested motive for remaining in touch with the inner ring where preferment is organised and high-level gossip exchanged. And Tolstoy notes that his exasperated criticism of the Russian military leadership both masks and gives an outlet to the tormenting jealousy that he feels about Natasha and Kuragin. But these are perceptions that could relate to someone else: they are not wholly him. What is? I observed that the scene with the two little girls reveals his attitude to life, and so it does; but the deeper and less demonstrated veracity in it is Andrew's niceness, a basic quality that we recognise and respond to here, though we have hardly met it before at first-hand. In the same way the deathbed quotation above shows something else about him that we recognise—in spite of the change in him, he is still the same man who used to treat the Little Princess with such cold sarcasm: The life he disliked in her, he is fond of in his sister and adores in Natasha, but now that it is time to leave it, his manner is much the same as of old. Though he has only grown a moustache on his deathbed, we seem to recognise that coldly fastidious gesture of stroking it.

"There, you see how strangely fate has brought us together," said he, breaking the silence and pointing to Natasha "She looks after me all the time."

Princess Mary heard him and did not understand how he could say such a thing. He, the sensitive, tender Pnnce Andrew, how could he say that, before her whom he loved and who loved him? Had he expected to live he could not have said those words in that offensively cold tone. If he had not known that he was dying, how could he have failed to pity her and how could he speak like that in her presence? The only explanation was that he was indifferent, because something else, much more important, had been revealed to him.

The conversation was cold and disconnected, and continually broke off.

"Mary came by way of Ryazan," said Natasha.

Prince Andrew did not notice that she called his sister Mary, and only after calling her so in his presence did Natasha notice it herself.

"Really?" he asked.

"They told her that all Moscow has been burnt down, and that..."

Natasha stopped. It was impossible to talk. It was plain he was making an effort to listen, but could not do so.

"Yes, they say it's burnt," he said. "It's a great pity," and he gazed straight before him, absently stroking his moustache with his fingers.

"And so you have met Count Nicholas, Mary?" Prince Andrew suddenly said, evidently wishing to speak pleasantly to them. "He wrote here that he took a great liking to you," he went on simply and calmly, evidently unable to understand all the complex significance his words had for living people.

Apart from the theme of death, the passage is full of the multitudinous meaning—like the significance of Natasha's use of the name Mary—which has been building up throughout the book. It is checked once by Tolstoy's remark—"he was indifferent because something else, much more important, had been revealed to him." Certainly Andrew may think so, but Tolstoy announces the fact with just a shade too much determination: the surface of almost helpless mastery is disturbed. For where death is concerned, Tolstoy in War and Peace was under the spell of Schopenhauer. Life is a sleep and death an awakening. "An awakening from life came to Prince Andrew together with his awakening from sleep. And compared to the duration of life, it did not seem to him slower than an awakening from sleep compared to the duration of a dream." As Shestov points out, the second sentence comes almost verbatim from The World as Will and Idea. In Andrew, Tolstoy has deliberately created the man who fits this conception of death. With his usual confidence, Tolstoy annexes death through Andrew, to show that it must be something because life is so much something. Yet life and death cannot understand one another.

—"Shall I live? What do you think?"

"I am sure of it!—sure!" Natasha almost shouted, taking hold of both his hands in a passionate movement.

Natasha "almost shouts" her belief because she can do nothing else—she cannot believe in anything but life. Even when after the last change in Andrew she sees he is dying, she goes about "with a buoyant step"—a phrase twice repeated. This has a deep tragic propriety, for the two are fulfilling their whole natures. Only old Count Rostov is touching. He cries for himself at Andrew's death, because he "knows he must shortly take the same terrible step," and he knows this because his old assurance—his samodovolnost—has gone.

He had been a brisk, cheerful, self-assured old man, now he seemed a pitiful, bewildered person...he continually looked round as if asking everybody if he was doing the right thing. After the destruction of Moscow and of his property, thrown out of his accustomed groove, he seemed to have lost the sense of his own significance and to feel there was no longer a place for him in life.

As Isaiah Berlin points out, Tolstoy's conception of history resembles in many ways that of Marx, whom he had never heard of at the time he was writing War and Peace, and this applies to his sense of personal history as well as the history of nations. His imaginative grasp of the individual life is such that freedom does indeed become the recognition of one's personal necessity, and "to each according to his needs" is not only the ideal of society but seems in War and Peace the law of life and death...

Source: John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel, Viking Press, 1967, pp. 66-68, 68-72, 73-82.

Christian is an English educator, translator, and critic specializing in Russian literature. He wrote Tolstoy's "War and Peace," which is a book-length study of the work. In the following excerpt from that book, Christian analyzes characterization in War and Peace.

The subject [of characterization in War and Peace] is complicated by the sheer number and variety of the dramatis personae, but we can narrow it down from the very start by drawing a general distinction between the treatment of historical and non-historical characters in the novel. It is a fact that the generals and statesmen, the great historical names of the period of the Napoleonic wars, are almost without exception flat and static figures. Little or nothing is revealed of their private lives. We do not see them in intimate relationships with other people. Their loves, their hobbies, their personal dramas are a closed book to us. This is not accidental. As Prince Andrei reflects at Drissa in 1812:

Not only does a good commander not need genius or any special qualities, on the contrary, he needs the absence of the highest and best human qualities—love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic, inquiring doubt. He must be limited. God forbid that he should be humane, love anyone, pity anyone, or think about what is nght and what is not.

Their thoughts are rarely scrutinized either through interior monologue or by extended description from the author. Some characters, such as Arakcheev, for example, use only direct speech. Nothing is conveyed of their thought processes or the motives behind the words they utter. Nor do they develop with the action of the story. The statesmen and the generals in War and Peace are either bearers of a message or bureaucratic Aunt-Sallies for Tolstoy to knock down. This fact illustrates the unity which exists between Tolstoy's ideas and their expression through his characters. Static characters generally speaking deserve static treatment Theme and style are as one.

An exception to the rule that generals are flat characters might be made in the case of Kutuzov. Although he is a general, he is not, as Tolstoy understands him, arrogant or self-satisfied. The Kutuzov of War and Peace has some claim to be three-dimensional. It is not that he is shown by Tolstoy to have grown sufficiently in stature with the course of events to justify the remark—true though it may well have been in real life—that "In 1805, Kutuzov is still only a general of the Suvorov school; in 1812 he is the father of the Russian people." But his little acts of kindness, his friendly words to the soldiers who fought with him in his earlier campaigns, his unaffected behavior in the company of his inferiors, his present of some sugar lumps to the little girl at Fill, his request to have some poems read to him—all these small things reveal positive and humane qualities which more than balance his lethargy and lechery. Again it is in keeping with Tolstoy's purpose that a general who is not a poseur or an egoist or a careerist should emerge as a more rounded personality than any of his professional colleagues...

[Our] remarks will be confined to the fictitious or, rather, non-historical characters. Here again the range is enormous, and in order to restrict it as much as possible we shall concentrate mainly on the men and women who figure most prominently in War and Peace...Tolstoy's first step as a novelist was to draw thumbnail sketches of his future heroes and group their main characteristics together under such headings as wealth, social attributes, mental faculties, artistic sensibilities, and attitudes to love. In this respect, incidentally, his rough notes and plans are very different from those left by Dostoevsky, and illustrate an important difference of approach. Dostoevsky in the preliminary stages of his work is concerned with how to formulate his ideas (a generation earlier, Pushkin had tended to jot down first of all the details of his plots). But Tolstoy was interested primarily in the personalities of his characters—in the fact, for example, that Nikolai "is very good at saying the obvious;" that Natasha is "suddenly sad, suddenly terribly happy;" or that Berg has no poetical qualities "except the poetry of accuracy and order."

The problem of actually bringing his major characters on to the stage was one to which Tolstoy attached the greatest importance, and one which, as we have seen, gave him a great deal of difficulty. Broadly speaking, the problem was tackled in a fairly uniform manner, and the technique employed is clearly recognizable, though not of course invariable. All the main characters are introduced very early on. They are introduced with a minimum of biography and with a minimum of external detail (but such as there is typical and important, and likely to recur). Attention is drawn to their features, the expression on their faces, the expression in their eyes and in their smile, their way of looking or not looking at a person. This is a fact which has attracted the notice of most critics of Tolstoy's novels, and inspired Merezhkovsky to make his much-quoted mot "with Tolstoy we hear because we see" (and its corollary "with Dostoevsky we see because we hear"). From the very beginning, the fundamental characteristics of the men and women as they then are enunciated. There is little or no narration to elaborate these characteristics. Almost at once the men and women say something or make an impression on somebody, so that the need for any further direct description from the author disappears. Pierre, for example, is introduced with one sentence about his appearance (stout, heavily built, close cropped hair, spectacles); one sentence about his social status, and one sentence about his life to date. He is then portrayed through the impression he makes on other people present. He is summed up by four epithets which all refer to his expression (vzglyad)—clever, shy, observant, natural—and which at the same time distinguish him from the rest of the company and reveal the essence of his character as it then is. Similarly Prince Andrei is given a sentence or two of "author's description"—handsome, clear-cut, dry features, measured step, bored expression (vzglyad)—while the impression he makes on the company and his reaction to them is at once sharply contrasted with the mutual response of Prince Andrei and Pierre to one another. Virtually nothing is said about the earlier lives of these two men. What did Pierre do in Paris? Why did Prince Andrei marry Lisa? We are not told. Both men immediately catch the eye, for both are bored and ill at ease. They are introduced in fact into an environment which is essentially foreign to their real natures, although their way of life requires that they should move in this environment. Despite the fact that the manner of their first appearances attracts attention, there is nothing to suggest that they will be the main heroes of the novel, in the sense that no extra length or detail goes into their description. By contrast, Natasha and Nikolai are both introduced in their own domestic environment— home-loving creatures on their home ground—integrated in the family and, as it were, part of the furniture. But again they are presented with a minimum of external description (in which facial expressions are conspicuous); again their salient characteristics—Natasha's charm and vivacity, Nikolai's frankness, enthusiasm and impetuosity— are conveyed from the very start; and again we are told nothing about their earlier lives (for example, Nikolai's student days). This lack of biographical information is important in the sense that it enables us to be introduced to the characters as we usually meet people in real life—that is to say, as they now are, and without any knowledge of the forces which shaped them before we met them and made them what they are. It could even be argued that a novelist who introduces his heroes by reconstructing their past when that past plays no direct part in the novel, actually risks sacrificing, by the accumulation of historical detail such as we do not have about people whom we are meeting for the first time, that immediate lifelikeness which, in the case of Tolstoy's greatest characters, is so strikingly impressive.

Once the men and women have made their entrances, the author has to face another problem. Are they to remain substantially as they are, with the reader's interest diverted towards the details of the plot? Or are they to grow and change as the plot progresses? If they are to develop, must they do so because the passage of time and the inner logic of their own personalities dictate it? Or because of the pressure of the events which form the plot? Or because the author wishes to express an idea of his own through their medium? In War and Peace the main characters do grow and change, and they do so for all these reasons. In the course of the time span of the novel, the adolescents grow to maturity and the mature men reach early middle age. War and marriage make their impact on men and women alike, and experience teaches them what they failed to understand before. The Pierre of the opening chapter of the novel, with his self-indulgence, his agnosticism, and his admiration for Napoleon, is very different from the spiritually rejuvenated middle-aged man who has discovered a focus for his restless and dissipated energies, and who no longer has any illusions about the grandeur of power. The course of events brings Prince Andrei round from a cynical disillusionment in life, through a feeling of personal embitterment, to a belief in the reality of happiness and love; in the face of death, his vanity and ambition are humbled by the realization of the insignificance of this world, and he acquires a hitherto unknown peace of mind. Natasha acquires an unsuspected strength of character after her younger brother's death, and an unaccustomed staidness as the wife of Pierre—to some readers an astonishing violation of her nature, but to others a change which is fully comprehensible in the transition from adolescence to motherhood. Even Nikolai's impetuosity is curbed and experience gives him greater solidity and stability. These changes do not result from the fact that our knowledge of the main heroes gradually increases throughout the novel, as it inevitably does, and the picture of them grows fuller and fuller with each successive episode. They are changes of substance, qualitative rather than quantitative changes. Tolstoy's achievement in contriving the development of his main characters lies in the fact that all the reasons mentioned above for their development are so carefully interwoven that the reader is not conscious of many strands but only one. The characters change because they grow older and wiser. But the events which form the plot, and in particular the Napoleonic invasion, give them greater wisdom and experience, for characters and events are organically connected. And the state to which the main heroes come at the end of the novel—marriage, and the simple round of family life—the state which is the ultimate expression of Tolstoy's basic idea—is the natural outcome of the impact on them of the events they have experienced as they have grown older and their realization of the shallowness of society and the vain glory of war. The profoundly subjective basis of Tolstoy's art may be seen in the fact that Pierre and Natasha, Nikolai and Princess Marya, all achieve the state which he himself had achieved, however imperfectly, and which he sincerely believed to be the most desirable of all states. But this does not mean that their characters are distorted in order to force them into the channels which for him were the right ones. Pierre has so much of Tolstoy in him that he needs no forcing Natasha, we may remember, was from the very earliest draft of War and Peace "crying out for a husband," and needing "children, love, bed." Nikolai and Princess Marya, for all the difference between their personalities, interests and intellectual attainments, never seem likely to stray far from the family nest or to be seduced from the family estate by the allurements of le monde ["the world"].

Change and development are at the centre of Tolstoy's characterization, and the process is a consistent and logical one. But however great the changes in his main heroes may seem to be, it must not be forgotten that they occur within certain well-defined bounds, and that the characters themselves remain in the camp to which they have always belonged and continue to be what they have always been—some of the finest and most sympathetic representatives of the Russian landowning aristocracy.

There is no need to labour the point that Tolstoy's principal heroes change and develop. We can turn instead to the question how he achieved the effects he desired by the devices of characterization at his disposal. It seems to me that the essence of Tolstoy's technique is to show that at every stage jn the life of his heroes the likelihood of change is always present, so that at no time are they static, apathetic or inert, but constantly liable to respond to some new external or internal stimulus. Very often the stimulus is provided by a person from the opposite camp—a "negative" character, a selfish, complacent or static man or woman. These people act as temptations to the heroes; they are obstacles in their path which have to be overcome. Pierre, for example, is momentarily blinded by the apparent greatness of Napoleon. He is trapped into marriage with Helene, with whom he has nothing in common, and is in danger of being drawn into the Kuragin net. After their separation, he is reconciled with her again, only to bemoan his fate once more as a retired gentleman-in-waiting, a member of the Moscow English Club and a universal favourite in Moscow society. Prince Andrei, like Pierre, is deceived by the symbol of Napoleon, and like Pierre, he finds himself married to a woman who is as much his intellectual inferior as Helene is morally beneath Pierre. Natasha for her part is attracted at first by the social climber Boris Drubetskoy and later infatuated by the same Anatole Kuragin who had actually begun to turn Princess Marya's head. Julie Karagina looms for a while on Nikolai's horizon. From all these temptations and involvements, the heroes and heroines are saved, not by their own efforts but by the timely workings of Providence. Prince Andrei's wife dies. Pierre is provoked by Dolokhov into separating from his wife, and after their reconciliation he is eventually released by Helene's death. Natasha is saved from herself by the solicitude of her friends. By chance Princess Marya catches Anatole unawares as he flirts with Mile Bounenne. (Nikolai, to his credit, is never likely to obey his mother's wishes and marry Julie.) It seems as if fate is working to rescue them from the clutches of egocentricity. But it is not only external circumstances such as personal associations with people of the opposite camp which are a challenge to Tolstoy's heroes and heroines. There are internal obstacles against which they have to contend, without any help from Providence. Tolstoy made it a main object of his characterization to show his positive heroes at all important moments "becoming" and not just "being," beset with doubts, tormented by decisions, the victims of ambivalent thoughts and emotions, eternally restless. As a result, their mobility, fluidity and receptivity to change are constantly in evidence, as they face their inner problems. Princess Marya has to overcome her instinctive aversion to Natasha. Nikolai has to wage a struggle between love and duty until he finds in the end that they can both be reconciled in one and the same person. Pierre's inner disquiet and spiritual striving express his determination, now weak, now strong, to overcome in himself the very qualities of selfishness and laziness which he despises in other people. Outward and inward pressures are continually being exerted on Pierre, Prince Andrei, Princess Marya, Natasha, and Nikolai, and their lives are lived in a state of flux.

And yet Tolstoy felt himself bound to try and resolve their conflicts and bring them to a state which, if not final and irreversible, is a new and higher stage in their life's development. It is not a solution to all their problems, a guarantee that they will not be troubled in future. The peace of mind which Prince Andrei attains before his death might not have lasted long if he had lived. Pierre's uneasy religious equilibrium may not be of long duration. The very fact that we can easily foresee new threats to their security, new stimuli and new responses, is a proof of the depth, integrity and lifelikeness of the two finest heroes of Tolstoy's novel. But although there is not and cannot be any absolute finality about the state to which Tolstoy's men and women are brought, there is nevertheless an ultimate harmony, charity, and sense of purpose in their lives which represent the highest ideals of which they are capable, given the personalities with which they have been endowed and the beliefs of the author who created them.

The novelist who wishes to create a vivid illusion of immediacy and mobility in his heroes must avoid exhaustive character studies and biographical reconstructions concentrated in a chapter or series of chapters in his novels, whether at the beginning, in the middle or at the end. Many novelists begin with lengthy narrative descriptions of their main heroes...But Tolstoy, by dispensing largely with "pre-history" and allowing his men and women to reveal themselves little by little as the novel progresses, avoids the necessity for set characterization pieces, static and self-contained as they often are in other writers.

Another factor which aids the illusion of reality—and movement—is the continued interaction of all the elements which make up Tolstoy's novel—men and women, nature, and the world of inanimate objects. Very seldom is a person seen or described in isolation—-just as in real life, human beings cannot be divorced from the infinite number of animate and inanimate phenomena which make them what they are and determine what they do. Tolstoy is at pains, therefore, in striving after truthfulness to life in his characterization, to show the interdependence and interpenetration of man and nature. The stars, the sky, the trees, and the fields, the moonlight, the thrill of the chase, the familiar objects of the home all affect the mood and the actions of the characters no less than the rational processes of the mind or the persuasions of other human beings. That this is so in life is a commonplace; but there have been few authors with Tolstoy's power to show the multiplicity of interacting phenomena in the lives of fictitious men and women.

Movement is the essence of Pierre, Prince Andrei, and Natasha and this is shown both externally and internally. Externally, their eyes, their lips, their smile, are mobile and infectious; their expressions continually alter. Internally, their thoughts are in a state of turbulence and their mood is liable to swing violently from one extreme to another—from joy to grief, despair to elation, enthusiasm to boredom. There are times indeed when two incompatible emotions coexist uneasily and the character does not know whether he or she is sad or happy.

Princess Marya is not such a forceful or impulsive character as her brother or sister-in-law. Her qualities of gentleness, deep faith, long-suffering, humility, and addiction to good works are not combined with a searching mind or a vivacious personality. But she is, nevertheless, a restless person, and as such is clearly a favourite of Tolstoy (she even quotes his beloved Sterne!). The anxieties and disturbances in her relations with Anatole Kuragin, Mile Bourienne, and Natasha are evidence that she is a rounded and dynamic figure, and not, as it were, conceived in one piece. In the presence of Nikolai she is brought to life with all the magic of Tolstoy's art. Nikolai too, for all his apparent complacency and limited horizons, does not stand still. He has his moments of doubt, uncertainty, and fear just as he has his outbursts of uninhibited enthusiasm and emperor worship. He is given his own inner crisis to surmount when at Tilsit "a painful process was at work in his mind" as he tried to reconcile the horrors of the hospital he had recently visited, the amputated arms and legs and the stench of dead flesh, with his hero the Emperor Alexander's evident liking and respect for the self-satisfied Napoleon. The crisis, it is true, soon passes after a couple of bottles of wine. But it could never have been allowed to come to a head at all by his friend Boris Drubetskoy.

By contrast, the less prominent figures in War and Peace are not shown in the critical stages of their change and development. Even Sonya's conflict (she is described in an early portrait sketch in typically Tolstoy fashion as "generous and mean")—the conflict between her loyalty to the family and her love for Nikolai—emerges rather through Tolstoy's description of it than through the inner workings and sudden vacillations of her mind. Vera and Berg, Akhrosimova, Bolkonsky and many other minor figures, however vital and many-sided they might be as individuals, are fundamentally static characters who are fully-grown from the beginning. The ability to respond to change, the qualities of restlessness, curiosity, flexibility, and dynamism are essentially the perquisites of the main heroes of the novel, and in particular Pierre, Prince Andrei, and Natasha. And one may add that it is the growth and development of precisely these three people which reflects above all the changes in Tolstoy himself and those closest to him at Yasnaya Polyana, and is a convincing proof of the personal basis of Tolstoy's art.

In examining the characters of a novel with an historical setting, three questions immediately spring to mind. In the first place, do they emerge as individuals? Secondly, do they unmistakably belong to the historical environment in which they are made to move? And thirdly, do they embody universal characteristics which make them readily comprehensible to people of a different country and a different age? If we apply these questions to Pierre, Prince Andrei, and Natasha, the answer to the first is indisputably yes. There is nothing bookish, contrived, or externally manipulated about their actions. They can never be confused with any other characters. They have an outward presence and an inner life which mark them off as highly individualized personalities. To the second question the answer is less obvious and critical opinion is divided. For my own part, I am inclined to think that there is nothing about them specifically representative of their own age, which is not also representative of Tolstoy's own generation. They are the products of a class and a way of life which had not materially altered when Tolstoy began to write. That they experienced the impact in their homes of a great patriotic war is a fact which distinguishes their lives from the lives of Tolstoy's own contemporaries, but the development of their characters cannot be explained solely in terms of that particular war. Pierre might ask different questions from Levin or put the same questions in a different way, but his spiritual journey is fundamentally the same. Prince Andrei's reactions to war could have been those of one of the many obscure defenders of Sevastopol. Natasha's progress to motherhood, while it is not identical with Kitty's, is not peculiar to the first half rather than to the second half of the nineteenth century. The third question, however, like the first, is easily answered. In Tolstoy's heroes in War and Peace, there is a basic denominator of human experience which is common to all men and women regardless of class, country, age and intellectual attainment. Their mental, spiritual and emotional problems, their pleasures and pursuits, their enthusiasms, and their aversions are as relevant to England today as they ever were to Tolstoy's Russia. And it is ultimately this fact which ensures that War and Peace and especially the main heroes of War and Peace will always be a part of the literary heritage of the reading public throughout the world.

Characterization cannot be considered in isolation from the many other sides of a novelist's art...First there are the changes which occur in Tolstoy's characters themselves as the successive draft versions are written and discarded. Then there are the features which they inherit from their various historical and living prototypes. There are the ideas of the novelist himself which are transmitted to his heroes and heroines, so that they in turn express his own prejudices and beliefs and in Pierre's case, the gulf between what Tolstoy was and what he wanted himself to be. There is the question of the composition of the novel which is so designed that the character development should proceed pari passu ["at an equal pace"] with the development of the plot, and not fortuitously or independently of the main action. Finally there are the different linguistic devices at Tolstoy's disposal which play their part in characterization—interior monologue, the contrasting use of the French and Russian languages, speech mannerisms, irony...

In the final analysis, it is the characters which a novelist creates which are the greatest and most memorable part of his achievement. In War and Peace they range over the scale of good and evil and they are treated by the author with varying degrees of sympathy and dislike. In later life Tolstoy wrote to the artist N. N. Gay that in order to compose a work of art: "It is necessary for a man to know clearly and without doubt what is good and evil, to see plainly the dividing line between them and consequently to paint not what is, but what should be. And he should paint what should be as though it already was, so that for him what should be might already be."

This opinion was expressed some twenty years after War and Peace was written, but the first part of it at least is applicable to that novel. Tolstoy knew, as well as any man can, the dividing line between good and evil, although in War and Peace he devoted much more time to painting things as they are than as they should be. For a novelist, however, to know what is right and what is wrong is not the same thing as to concentrate virtue in one character and vice in another, or to pass an unqualified moral judgement on any of the people he creates. "The Gospel words 'judge not,'" Tolstoy wrote in 1857, "are profoundly true in art--relate, portray, but do not judge." Tolstoy's purpose in his first novel, as a creator of living characters, was to entertain and not to judge. One of the most interesting pronouncements he made about the function of an artist occurs in a letter which he wrote in 1865 while actively engaged on his novel, but which he never sent...The letter was addressed to the minor novelist Boborykin and contains some mild strictures on the latter's two latest novels. Tolstoy wrote:

Problems of the Zemstvo, literature, and the emancipation of women obtrude with you in a polemical manner, but these problems are not only not interesting in the world of art; they have no place there at all. Problems of the emancipation of women and of literary parties inevitably appear to you important in your literary Petersburg milieu, but all these problems splash about in a little puddle of dirty water which only seems like an ocean to those whom fate has set down in the middle of the puddle. The aims of an artist are incommensurate (as the mathematicians say) with social aims. The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably but to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations. If I were to be told that I could write a novel whereby I might irrefutably establish what seemed to me the correct point of view on all social problems, I would not even devote two hours work to such a novel, but if I were to be told that what I should write would be read in about twenty years time by those who are now children, and that they would laugh and cry over it and love life, I would devote all my own life and all my energies to it.

To make people laugh and cry and love life is a sufficient justification for even the greatest of novels...

Source: R. F. Christian, Tolstoy's "War and Peace:"A Study, Clarendon Press, 1962, pp. 167-68, 177-79.

In the following excerpt, Fadiman describes Tolstoy's writing as lacking in artistic style, suspense, and originality but also as clear, good, and able to express the ordinary and real.

In a way writing about War and Peace is a self-defeating activity. Criticism in our day has become largely the making of finer and finer discriminations. But War and Peace does not lend itself to such an exercise. If you say the book is about the effect of the Napoleonic Wars on a certain group of Russians, most of them aristocrats, you are not telling an untruth. But you are not telling the truth either. Its subject has been variously described—even Tolstoy tried his hand at the job— but none of the descriptions leaves one satisfied.

You can't even call the book a historical novel. It describes events that are part of history, but to say that it is about the past is to utter a half-turth. Ivanhoe, Gone With the Wind—these are historical novels. Kipling (a part of him, I mean) has suddenly become for us a historical novelist: Gandhi made him one. But the only sections of War and Peace that seem historical are the battle pieces. War is now apocalyptic; it was not so in Tolstoy's time. Austerlitz and Cannae are equally historical, equally antique, equally part of the springtime of war. Now our weapons think for us; that is the revolutionary change that has outmoded all previous narratives of conflict.

But, except for these battle pieces, War and Peace is no more a historical novel than is the Iliad. Homer is not history, not Greek history, not Trojan history, he is—Homer. So with Tolstoy.

No, you say little when you say that War and Peace has to do with the Napoleonic Wars, Borodino, the burning of Moscow, the retreat of 1812. As a matter of fact, the vaguer your critical vocabulary, the less precisely you describe the subject of War and Peace, the nearer you get to the truth. It is really—yes, let us use un-twentieth-century words—about Life and People and Love: those abhorred capital-letter abstractions that irritate our modern novelists and against which they persistently warn us...

Tolstoy is not an artist at all, as, let us say, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Faulkner, Proust, are artists. He does not appear, at least in translation, to have any "style." There is no such thing as a Tolstoyan sentence or a Tolstoyan vocabulary. The poor chap has no technique. He knows nothing of flashbacks, streams of consciousness, symbols, objective correlatives. He introduces his people flatly and blurts out at once their dominant characteristics. He has unending insight but no subtlety. Compared to such a great master as Henry James, or such a little master as Kafka, he seems deficient in sheer brain power, the power to analyze, the power to discriminate.

He never surprises you. All his characters are recognizable, most of them are normal. Even his villain, Anatole Kuragin, seems merely an impetuous fool compared to the monsters of labyrinthine viciousness that our Southern novelists can create with a touch of the pen.

He isn't even a good storyteller, if by a good storyteller one means a master of suspense. You do not read War and Peace in order to see "how it comes out," any more than you live your life in order to see how it will end. His people grow, love, suffer, die, commit wise or foolish actions, beget more people who are clearly going to pass through the same universal experiences; and that's about all there is to the "story." There are plenty of events, but they are not arranged or balanced or patterned. Tolstoy is not a neat writer, any more than your biography or mine is neat. He is as shapeless as the Russian land itself.

I found myself struck with the originality of War and Peace, but by a kind of reverse English. It is original because it is unoriginal. Kafka is original. Faulkner is original. Eudora Welty is original. In fact most of our most admired modern writing is original, full of strange people, strange feelings, strange ideas, strange confrontations. But Tolstoy portrays pleasant, lively, ordinary girls like Natasha. His book is crowded with people who are above the average in intelligence or wealth or insight—but not extraordinarily so. He balks at portraying genius: he makes of Napoleon a fatuity, and of the slow-thinking, almost vacant-minded Kutuzov the military hero of the war. And when he writes about war, he does not describe its horrors or its glories. He seizes upon the simplest of the truths about war and sticks to that truth: that war is foolish.

Tolstoy has a genius for the ordinary, which does not mean the commonplace. It is this ordinariness that to us moderns, living on a literary diet of paprika, truffles, and cantharides, makes him seem so unusual. When we read him we seem to be escaping into that almost forgotten country, the real world.

Another odd thing—Tolstoy does not seem to have any "personality." Many fine writers are full of personality, Hemingway for instance; but the very finest write books that seem to conceal themselves, books like the Iliad or Don Quixote or War and Peace. I do not mean that Tolstoy writes like an impersonal god, but that he seems to intrude into his book only in the sense that he and the book are one and the same. I believe this effect of desingularization springs from his instinctive refusal to load any scene or indeed any sentence with more meaning than it will bear. He has no "effects." He is unable to call attention to his own mastery. He knows what he is doing, but he does not know how to make you know what he is doing. The consequence is that, despite the enormous cast of characters, everything (once you have waded through the rather difficult opening chapters) is simple, understandable, recognizable, like someone you have known a long time. In our own day the good novelists tend to be not very clear, and the clear novelists tend to be not very good. Tolstoy is clear and he is good...

Source: Clifton Fadiman, "'War and Peace', Fifteen Years After," in Any Number Can Play, Harper & Row, 1957, pp. 361-69.

Fadiman became one of the most prominent American literary critics during the 1930s with his often caustic and insightful book reviews for the Nation and the New Yorker magazines. He also managed to reach a sizable audience through his work as a radio talk-show host from 1938 to 1948.

I hope merely to set Tolstoy's masterpiece before the reader in such a way that he will not be dismayed by its labyrinthine length or put off by its seeming remoteness from our own concerns.

War and Peace has been called the greatest novel ever written. These very words have been used, to my knowledge, by E. M. Forster, Hugh Walpole, John Galsworthy, and Compton Mackenzie; and a similar judgment has been made by many others...

Let us...try to discover together why it is a great novel.

The first thing to do is to read it. A supreme book usually argues its own supremacy quite efficiently, and War and Peace is no exception. Still, we may be convinced of its magnitude and remain puzzled by certain of its aspects—for no first-rate book is completely explicit, either.

On finishing War and Peace, what questions do we tend to ask ourselves? Here is a very simple one: What is it about?...

[We] are forced in the end to make the apparently vapid judgment that the subject of War and Peace is Life itself...

We do not know what Tolstoy had in mind as the main subject of War and Peace, for he stated its theme differently at different periods of his career. Looking back on it, as a fairly old man, he said that his only aim had been to amuse his readers...More seriously, Tolstoy at times spoke of War and Peace as a picture of the wanderings of a people.

But whatever he thought its subject was, he transcended it. In one sense he put into this book everything that interested him, and everything interested him. That he managed to make it more than a collection of characters and incidents is equivalent to saying that in addition to being a man with a consuming interest in life he was also an artist who was not content until he had shaped that interest into harmonious forms.

Now, there are some who would demur, who feel that it is precisely in this quality of form that War and Peace is defective...

Suppose we admit at once that there is no classic unity of subject matter as there is, for instance, in the Iliad...This simple unity Tolstoy does not have. But a profounder unity I think he does have. When we have come to feel this unity, the philosophical and historical disquisitions cease to seem long-winded and become both interesting in themselves and an integral part of the Tolstoyan scheme. We are no longer disturbed as we should be if such digressions appeared in a work of narrower compass. We accept the fact that mountains are never pyramids.

Let us see whether we can get this clear. In the course of one of his digressions Tolstoy writes, "Only by taking an infinitesimally small unit for observation (the differential of history, i.e., the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (i.e., finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history." [In] this sentence, perhaps, is concealed the theme of the book: the movement of history which Tolstoy must examine by observing "the individual tendencies of men," on the one hand, and by attempting to "integrate them," on the other. Putting it in another way, we may say that it is not enough for Tolstoy to examine the individual lives of his characters as if they were separate atoms. He must also sweep up all these atoms into one larger experience. Now, this larger experience is the Napoleonic campaign. But the campaign itself, which fuses or enlarges or focuses the lives of Andrew and Natasha and Pierre and the rest, must itself be studied, not merely as a background—that is how an ordinary historical novelist would study it—but as thoughtfully as Tolstoy studies each individual life. In order fully to understand this focusing experience he is forced to elaborate a theory of history to explain it. And so he is forced to understand the major historical characters, such as Napoleon, Kutuzov, and the others, who are the dramatic symbols of the experience.

The result of this integration may not please everyone, but the integration is there. When one reflects upon the task, one is driven to concede, I think, that Tolstoy, in his attempt to understand history through human beings and human beings through history, is undertaking the greatest task conceivable to the creative novelist of the nineteenth century, just as Milton, attempting to justify the ways of God to man, undertook the greatest poetical theme possible to a man of his century...

War and Peace is so vast that each reader may pick out for himself its literary qualities he most admires. Let us select three: its inclusiveness, its naturalness, its timelessness.

The first thing to strike the reader is the range of Tolstoy's interest and knowledge...

At first glance the inclusiveness seems so overpowering that one inclines to agree with Hugh Walpole when he says that War and Peace "contains everything," or with E. M. Forster who is no less sure that "everything is in it." Naturally, these statements cannot be literally true. But it is true to say that when we have finished War and Peace, we do not feel the lack of anything. It is only when one stops short and makes a list of the things Tolstoy leaves out that one realizes he is a novelist and not a god. We get very little awareness, for example, of the Russian middle class which was just beginning to emerge at the opening of the nineteenth century. Also, while Tolstoy does describe many peasants for us, the emphasis is thrown disproportionately on the aristocratic class with which he was most familiar. Another thing: obeying the literary conventions of his period, Tolstoy touches upon the sex relations of his men and women with great caution—and yet, so true and various is his presentation of love that we hardly seem to notice his omissions. That, after all, is the point: we do not notice the omissions, and we are overwhelmed by the inclusiveness...It is Tolstoy's attitude toward his own tremendous knowledge that makes him great rather than merely encyclopedic...

The key word here is "love." One of the most penetrating comments ever made about War and Peace is Mark Van Doren's, "I think he can be said to have hated nothing that ever happened." This exaggeration contains a profound truth. Tolstoy's love for his characters in War and Peace is very different from the mystic and, some would say, morbid sentimentality of his later years. It is more like the enthusiasm of a young man for everything he sees about him during the period of his greatest vigor...

At his best Tolstoy seems to write as if Nature herself were guiding his pen...

There is no formula to explain how Tolstoy does this. All we know is that he does it...

The constant impression of naturalness one gets from reading Tolstoy comes partly from his lack of obsessions. He does not specialize in a particular emotion, as Balzac, say, specializes in the emotions deriving from the desire for money. Perhaps we may say that if Tolstoy has an obsession, it is a passion for showing people merely living...

It is because his eye is always on the central current of life that his perceptions seem so inevitable...

Tolstoy's natural sympathy overleaps the boundary of sex; his women are as convincing as his men. Indeed, he has a special talent for the presentation of women at their most female...

We think of certain Tolstoyan scenes as other men would do them and then we realize the quality of his supremacy...

It is normal. Tolstoy is the epic poet of the conscious and the "normal," just as Dostoevski, complementing him, is the dramatic poet of the subconscious and the "abnormal." His instinct is always to identify the unnatural with the unpleasant...

This almost abnormal normality in Tolstoy makes him able to do what would seem a very easy thing but is really very hard: describe people engaged in nothing but being happy...

The inclusiveness of War and Peace. Its naturalness. Finally, its timelessness. ..

[Even] when his characters seem almost pure representatives of their class, they still have a permanent value as symbols...

Here is a book, too, that seems to deal with people caught in a particular cleft of history. As that limited epoch recedes, we might suppose the people should dim accordingly. Yet this is not the case. It is impossible to say just how Tolstoy manages to give the impression both of particularity and universality...

War and Peace may not have a classic form. But it does have a classic content. It is full of scenes and situations which, in slightly altered forms, have recurred again and again, and will continue to recur, in the history of civilized man...

It is as if the human race, despite its apparent complexity, were capable of but a limited set of gestures. To this set of gestures only great artists have the key...

Also the very looseness of the book's form, the fact that it has neither beginning nor end, helps to convey the sense of enduring life...

Has War and Peace, then, no defects? It has many. It is far from being a technically perfect novel, like Madame Bovary...There are also many places in the narrative where the pace lags. Certain characters in the crowded canvas tend to get lost in the shuffle and never become entirely clear...At times, so complex is the panorama that the reader has difficulty following the story, just as we have difficulty in following everything happening in a three-ring circus. Some of these defects seem to disappear on a second or third or fourth reading. Some are permanent. But none of them is so great nor are all of them taken together so great as to shake War and Peace from the pinnacle it occupies. Flaubert cannot afford to make mistakes. Tolstoy can...

The insights in Tolstoy are at their best enormously moving and exactly true. But they rarely give us that uneasy sense of psychic discovery peculiar to Dostoevski...

So far in these comments I have emphasized those qualities—inclusiveness, naturalness, timelessness—that make War and Peace universal rather than Russian. But part of its appeal for us, I think, derives from the fact that though there is nothing in the book that is incomprehensible to the American or the Western European, everything in it, owing to its Russian character, seems to us just a trifle off-center. This gives the novel a piquancy, even a strangeness at times, that it may not possess for the Russians...

There are certain central motives in War and Peace that are particularly (though not uniquely) Russian. The motive of moral conversion is a case in point...

In War and Peace, with varying degrees of success, the characters study themselves. All their critical experiences but lead them to further self-examination...

The purpose, if we may use so precise a word, of the regeneration experience is to enable the characters to attain to Pierre's state: "By loving people without cause, he discovered indubitable causes for loving them." In this sentence, a sort of moral equivalent of the James-Lange theory, lies the essence, the center, the inner flame, of the prerevolutionary Russian novel. It is only after one has pondered its meaning that one can understand what lies back of the sudden changes in Tolstoy's and Dostoevski's characters...

The conflict in the soul of the Russian aristocrat derived not only from the conflict of cultures within him but from the moral falsity of his social position. Although Tolstoy—and this is one of his omissions—does not lay great stress on it, the Russian upper class in varying degrees suffered from a guilt-feeling arising from the institution of serfdom...

Much of the soul-searching in War and Peace, though it would seem to pivot only on each individual's personal problems, is in part a result of this vague pervasive guilt-feeling. Perhaps, indeed, a large part of the genius of the prerevolutionary Russian novel comes from the conflict born of this sense of guilt.

Finally, the Russian sought spiritual regeneration because he found no outlet for his idealistic energies in the state itself...

I have made these perhaps hackneyed comments in order to show that Tolstoy is a Russian novelist first and a universal novelist only by accident of genius...He wrote as a Russian about Russian people—indeed about his own family, for many of the characters in War and Peace are transcripts from reality. But he wrote about them not only as Russians but as people. And therein lies part of the secret of his greatness.

There remains for us at least one more aspect of War and Peace to consider—that is, Tolstoy's view of men, war, history, and their interrelationships...

Tolstoy's theory of history is that there is no theory of history. Or, to put it more cautiously, if
there are grand laws determining the movement and flow of historical events, we can, in the present
state of our knowledge, only guess at them. Until our vision and our knowledge are so extended that
they reveal these underlying laws, the most intelligent thing for us to do is at least to deny validity
to all superficial explanations of historical experience.

In War and Peace, he attacks those theories which were popular in his own time...

It is part of the purpose of War and Peace to prove that there is no such thing as chance and no such thing as genius....

For Tolstoy, the fate of battles therefore is decided less by prefabricated strategies than by the absence or presence of what he calls "moral hesitation," or what we would call morale...

Were Tolstoy alive today, would he moderate his views because the character of warfare has changed so radically in the interim?...

Tolstoy, I think, would reply that any change is only apparent and only temporary. He would say that human nature is a constant, that it will rise to the surface despite all the deformation, the drill, the conditioning, the dehumanizing to which it may be subjected.

It is a constant, then, in war. It is a constant in peace. And it is a constant in War and Peace...

Source: Clifton Fadiman, reprinted as "War and Peace," in Party of One: The Selected Writings of Clifton Fadiman, The World Publishing Company, 1955, pp. 176-202.

In the following review, the reviewer praises Tolstoy for his accurate presentation of how people act and talk and points to Tolstoy's presentation of the moral imperfection of all and of the folly of self-will in historical events.

This book of Tolstoy's [ War and Peace] might be called with justice "The Russian Comedy," in the sense in which Balzac employed the word. It gave me exactly the same impression: I felt that I was thrown among new men and women, that I lived with them, that I knew them, that none of them could be indifferent to me, that I could never forget them. I entered into their souls, and it seemed almost as if they could enter into mine. Such a power in a writer is almost a miracle. How many novels have I not read, and, after having read them, and admired many qualities—the beauty of the style, the invention, the dialogues, the dramatic situations—have still felt that my knowledge of life had not increased, that I had gained no new experience. It was not so with War and Peace...

It would be difficult to give a proper definition of the talent of Tolstoy. First of all, he is an homme du monde. He makes great people, emperors, generals, diplomats, fine ladies, princes, talk and act as they do act and talk. He is a perfect gentleman, and as such, he is thoroughly humane. He takes as much interest in the most humble of his actors as he does in the highest. He has lived in courts: the Saint-Andres, the Saint-Vladimirs have no prestige for him—nor the gilded uniforms; he is not deceived by appearances. His aim is so high that whatever he sees is, in one sense, unsatisfactory. He looks for moral perfection, and there is nothing perfect. He is always disappointed in the end. The final impression of his work is a sort of despair...

[A] fundamental idea of fatalism pervades the book. Fate governs empires as well as men: it plays with a Napoleon and an Alexander as it does with a private in the ranks; it hangs over all the world like a dark cloud, rent at times by lighting. We live in the night, like shadows; we are lost on the shore of an eternal Styx; we do not know whence we came or whither we go. Millions of men, led by a senseless man, go from west to east, killing, murdering, and burning, and it is called the invasion of Russia. Two thousand years before, millions of other men came from east to west, plundering, killing, and burning, and it was called the invasion of the barbarians. What becomes of the human will, of the proud I, in these dreadful events? We see the folly and the vanity of self-will in these great historical events; but it is just the same in all times, and the will gets lost in peace as well as in war, for there is no real peace, and the human wills are constantly devouring each other...We are made to enjoy a little; to suffer much, and, when the end is approaching, we are all like one of Tolstoy's heroes, on the day of Borodino.

[Tolstoy's book] is by far the most remarkable work of imagination that has been lately revealed to us.

Source: "Tolstoy's 'Peace and War,'" in Nation, Vol. 40, No. 1021, January 22, 1885, pp. 70-71.