The Anti-Historical Fiction

On Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace"

Apparently, the classics are having a moment. If you’re lucky, you can attend a Middlemarch book club at McNally Jackson to hear someone say that Lydgate is acting like a New York City “fuckboy,” and an extremely loud incorrect buzzer is going off somewhere because someone else has made a list of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ classics, and somehow Absalom, Absalom! is bad (when it’s undoubtedly the high point of American modernism.) Elsewhere, in some other corner of Substack I’ve been happily avoiding (but somehow gets emailed to me by Substack), you can learn that “there’s something almost rebellious about choosing to read” the big classics. Apparently these classics promise “no quick dopamine hits” (skill issue) and are some kind of statement on “what kind of relationship you want to have with culture.” Over here, some of us are reading classics out of a deep sense of shame for not having read them yet (we gotta bring shame back) and, god forbid, because we just enjoy reading as pure self-serving entertainment that means nothing at all to the wider culture or moment. I spent a month reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and I enjoyed it; is that not enough? Must I link it to the current political situation (unprecedented times!) or the war in Ukraine or the attention economy? Never! War and Peace is great enough to avoid a time peg; like all classics, it’s eternally relevant, and so it’s demeaning to use it as the foundation for some half-baked cultural commentary. Instead, let’s put it to use for some half-baked literary criticism!

Reading War and Peace relatively late, after some other, later ‘classics,’ fits it into that strange continuum of literature that Eliot describes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” changing both what came before it and what came after it. For a writer as conservative, old fashioned, and earnest as Tolstoy, there are lurking undercurrents of the future in Tolstoy’s work. Tolstoy’s attempt at a total recreation of a historical period – early 19th century Russian society, along with a couple Western European battlefields of the period – is a precursor to Proust’s modernist Remembrance of Lost Time (though Proust’s comb is just a bit finer). Even more surprising a bedfellow for Tolstoy is Kafka; there is a scene late in the novel where a character has a dream that perfectly prefigures the uncanny spiritual malaise of Kafka’s Trial and The Castle:¹

In a dream he saw himself lying in the same rom in which he lay in reality, but he was not wounded, but healthy. Many sorts of persons, insignificant, indifferent, appear before [him].² He talks with them, argues about something unnecessary. They are preparing to go somewhere. [He] vaguely recalls that it is all insignificant and that he has other, more important concerns, but he goes on, to their surprise, speaking some sort of empty, witty words. Gradually, imperceptibly, all these people disappear, and everything is replaced by the one question of the closed door. He gets up and goes to the door to slide the bolt and lock it. Everything depends on whether he does or does not manage to lock it. He walks, he hurries, his feet do not move, and he knows that he will not manage to lock the door, but still he painfully strains all his force. And a tormenting fear seizes him. And this fear is the fear of death: it is standing behind the door. But as he is crawling strengthlessly and awkwardly towards the door, this terrible something is already pushing against it form the other side, forcing it.

“Crawling strengthlessly³ and awkwardly” towards a door that “everything depends on” is about as close to a précis of the Kafkan predicament as you can get. It’s not the spiritual mode that Tolstoy is most often in – more typical would be someone seeing a blazing comet and deciding to change their life, or becoming overwhelmed by the sheer force of universal love – but modernity is still latent in the novel. Perhaps the most surprising linkage that appeared, though, was that between Tolstoy and the postmodernists, Thomas Pynchon in particular. Besides the shaggy formlessness of the novel (Tolstoy himself said it wasn’t “a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed,” and Tolstoy’s contemporaries like Flaubert and Henry James criticized the novel for being, as James put it, “a large loose baggy monster”) as an encyclopedic compendium of knowledge and research (the first systems novel?), Tolstoy’s attitude towards history itself is strangely postmodern. Tolstoy, whenever he can, reminds the reader that cause and effect is a meaningless construction, that human events cannot be narrativized without making foolish assumptions, and that things happen by happenstance and accident, rather than an orderly series of events, more than we’d like to admit. Take this passage from one of Pynchon’s bravura sections in Gravity’s Rainbow:

It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home—only the millions of last moments…nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

And compare it to Tolstoy in War and Peace, 100 years earlier:

The first method history consists in taking an arbitrary series of continuous events and examining it separately from others, whereas there is not and cannot be a beginning to any event, but one event always continuously follows another. […] Any conclusion of historical science, without the least effort on the part of criticism, falls apart like dust, leaving nothing behind, only as a result of the fact that criticism selects as an object for observation a larger or smaller discrete unit, which it always has the right to do, because any chosen historical unit is always arbitrary.

Sure, the language changed, but the sentiment didn’t – a total distrust of the ability to construct history out of human events, a sense of infinitesimal fragments failing to cohere. For Tolstoy, there are individuals, there are decisions, and there are sometimes a concatenation of these two things into an event, but putting them into any kind of recognizable pattern is a mug’s game. Perhaps that’s why he disowned the term novel for War and Peace - it is simply a portrait of certain people’s actions over a number of years, with no overarching claims to an encompassing grander story, even over 1200 pages.

While the personal stories of War and Peace’s main characters hew closer to traditional narratives – the marriage plot, the love triangle, inheritance drama, family tension, and Tolstoy’s interest in the spiritual journey towards Christian goodness – it’s in his battle scenes that chaos most often takes over. If history is distasteful to Tolstoy, military history is worth less than dirt. The closest thing we have today⁴ to the novel’s relationship with battle is how most people talk about sports. Not only are the generals discussed like famous athletes – Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky asserts, in the early 1800s, that Napoleon is a fraud who ain’t played nobody yet, “Bonaparte was a worthless little Frenchman who was successful only because there were no Potemkins and Suvorovs to oppose him” and “You’d have to be a do-nothing not to beat the Germans” – but the very idea of military planning and strategy is unfavorably compared to what happens on the actual battlefield, akin to so many discussions about clutch performances and simply ‘wanting it more.’ You can draw whatever you want on the chalkboard; what happens when the whistle blows is different. To borrow a football phrase, there are Xs and Os (strategy) and Jimmies and Joes (the personnel), and Tolstoy is a firm believer in the primacy of the latter. War cannot be adequately described by the movement of troops or orders made behind the lines, because those on the line move the ‘wrong’ way and the orders are always too late; what matters is how individuals respond to the changing tides of a battle, whether they run towards or away from artillery fire. “[I]n battle it is a matter of what is dearest to a man – his own life – and it sometimes seems that salvation lies in running back, sometimes in running forward, and these people, finding themselves in the very heat of battle, acted in conformity with the mood of of the moment.” It’s all about intangibles, as any old sports columnist would tell you.

Tolstoy’s intensely personal view of battle sees nearly every character come to the realization that they are, for no reason besides the directive of someone nominally in charge of them, trying to kill another human being, and usually they’re disgusted by this realization; only a base survival instinct keeps them killing, and most close encounters are as full of blunders as heroism. (Rarely do we see a character excited by the prospect of battle; when they are, they face just as much senseless death as anyone else.) As one character memorably thinks, facing a charge: “Who are they? Why are they running? Ca it be they’re running to me? Can it be? And why? To kill me? Me, whom everybody loves so?” This human-to-human relationship within battle, this possibility of understanding, is a kind of war that the ruling powers have tried their best to eliminate in the past century or so; if you can prevent your soldiers from seeing the ‘enemy,’ they remain the ‘enemy.’ So we get the barrages of artillery and trench warfare of World War I (the war that ended traditional war), and then the tanks and planes of the mid-century wars, all the way up to our current drone-based, maximally efficient force. What we get in War and Peace is battle at its most chaotic and real, a series of disconnected skirmishes between loosely organized constituent parts of an army; if your side wins enough of those, you get the glory in this life, a maelstrom sanded down into a digestible story, a story told “the way they would like it to have been, the way they have heard others tell it, the way it could be told more beautifully, but not at all the way it had been.”

All this talk about history and war and authorial attitude and I haven’t even named a main character; such is the bifurcation of Tolstoy’s novel, which dramatically telescopes between the minutely personal and the world-historical between chapters. The interpersonal dramas of War and Peace focus mainly on three variously unhappy families (wink, wink): the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, and the Rostovs. Yes, they are richly drawn characters who act in recognizably real, and thus frustrating, ways, who you come to care deeply for as their lives unfold; they’re also, because of the sheer scope of Tolstoy’s project, akin to atoms crashing into one another within a much larger organism, that grand non-event of the attempted destruction of ‘Europe’ by Napoleon and the French. The dominant strain of narrative concerns a classic Russian love triangle between Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov, and Natasha Rostov, although, crucially, none of them are all that jealous of any of the others, or even in any kind of competition. Given Tolstoy’s relative simplicity of character, all three characters, in their own ways, are seeking a higher form of goodness, each with a different kind of essential flaw – pride for Andrei, gluttony for Pierre, and inconstancy for Natasha. These characters, and many of the others in the novel, want to actively change their lives, but following Tolstoy’s theories of human determinism, have their lives changed by exterior forces and pure circumstance instead. Times of peace, small personal moments, are ruled just as much by indeterminacy as grand historical wars and the fates of nations; something beyond human comprehension is pulling unseen levers. In Tolstoy’s accounting of the long, long arc of humanity, a higher justice usually wins out, especially in the form of the traditional family, but war provides plenty of opportunities to cut short this movement toward an ultimate grace. Such is life.

Or, c’est la vie. War and Peace is an excellent novel with which to remind oneself that their French isn’t nearly as good as they think it is; there are only so many untranslated passages one can struggle through before resorting to the translator’s footnotes. Tolstoy’s use of French in the text is at once purposeful – the aristocracy of the time did mostly speak French before the invasion, and people communicated differently within Russian and French phrasing – and somewhat haphazard, with French characters, including Napoleon himself speaking in Russian (English, of course, in my version) at various points. Tolstoy, defending his work, essentially said that he used the words that were necessary, in whatever language suited the thought he needed to convey; in this way, Tolstoy’s polyglot phrasing is not so much an accident as a feature of his formless attention to relating the particulars of the era he’s attempting to recreate.

Like all great fictions, War and Peace is a failure, as reality can never be fully captured. War and Peace, for as much as it is about – combat, Masonry, farming (wouldn’t be Tolstoy without it), the Russian soul, love, Christianity, family, and many more voluminously researched things – is mostly about this failure of representation, about the inability to account for why things happen the way they do, on scales both small and large. Maybe you get something else from the classics, something edifying, something you can apply to the world around you, but the gift of War and Peace is the hard-won realization of the limits of our knowledge. To go back even further, to the Classics: the wisest man is the one who knows he knows nothing. Tolstoy knew he knew the least of all in creating War and Peace, and so revealed an elemental, timeless truth, whether it’s read as part a passing fad or just on a whim: who can know for sure why anything happens, anyway? Once you think you’ve got a bead on a moment, it’s already passed.

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You can get War and Peace anywhere, duh. But maybe try your local bookstore, local library, or online at Bookshop.org, where purchases support independent bookstores across the country.

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1. My translation was by the (in)famous duo of Pevear and Volokhonsky; I’ll give them credit, they render Tolstoy and Dostoevsky very differently!

2. Protecting you from spoilers!!

3. Making up an English word in translation is the kind of stuff that pisses off Pevear and Volokonsky haters the most. Till I learn Russian, can’t say for sure!

4. I get a rap on the wrist for bringing up the contemporary moment.