“The process of understanding history begins not with the exposition of ‘great’ men’s deeds. Tushin and other ‘unobtrusive individuals’ are the true representatives of the Russian nation”
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Leo even predicted how marriages made in Orwell’s Year of 1984 would end up …
In his 1922 masterpiece The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot writes:
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal. (33).
Considering that this year’s predictions for Best Picture nominee for the 2021 Oscars is Nomadland, an expansive portrait of the struggles of itinerant life in a post economic crisis America, Nechljudov’s journey of self-realisation seems more relevant than ever.
War and Peace is a work that lends itself well to television, as Tolstoy not only neatly breaks his story into short chapters, but approaches it from different angles, almost like a film director. One moment we feel that we have been "set on a mountain top and had a telescope put into our hands", as Virginia Woolf famously put it, while the next he brings his characters into such close focus we can almost feel them breathing.
Tolstoy's distant relative Prince Sergey Volkonsky, gave the author the idea of writing a novel about an ageing Russian military officer, returning to Moscow in the 1850s.
MICROBIOME NEWS: Gut bacteriophages associated with improved executive function and memory in flies, mice and humans.
“It’s according to Leo Tolstoy’s ideas, to do it with the help of all people around the world—vsem mirom—even the world’s hardest task can be done with the help of everyone.”
How Leo Tolstoy rewrote the history of Russia
Tolstoy had the unerring ability to see what we see, writes Rosamund Bartlett. So who cares if his view of history was subjective?
Rosamund Bartlett
As one of the longest novels ever written, vast in scope and intellectually challenging, War and Peace is an intimidating prospect. But it is also a great story, as becomes clear during our first encounter on the page with Pierre and Natasha, two of the most engaging literary characters ever to have been created.
At the beginning of the novel, Leo Tolstoy's alter-ego Pierre Bezukhov, an absent-minded bear of a man, bumbles his way into a Petersburg high-society salon, says all the wrong things, picks up someone else's hat on the way out, and then goes on to behave with even greater impropriety at a wild officers' party.
Meanwhile, the irrepressible Natasha is all of 13 years old when we first meet her at home in Moscow a few chapters later. So anxious is she to grow up that she bestows a disarming kiss on the lips of the young officer Boris Drubetskoy, believing their lives will be forever intertwined.
Writer Leo Tolstoy and wife Sofia, who dutifully made multiple copies of his manuscripts. RIA Novosti
The most emotionally open and spontaneous of all his fictional creations, Pierre and Natasha are central to the sprawling narrative canvas Tolstoy unfolds before us, which tells of Napoleon's war with Russia in 1805 and its recurrence in 1812, when the French army invaded and briefly occupied Moscow. They are also key figures in Andrew Davies' new adaptation of the novel for the BBC, which whittles down myriad convoluted plot lines into six succinct episodes, starring Lily James, Jim Broadbent, Gillian Anderson and Greta Scacchi.
War and Peace is a work that lends itself well to television, as Tolstoy not only neatly breaks his story into short chapters, but approaches it from different angles, almost like a film director. One moment we feel that we have been "set on a mountain top and had a telescope put into our hands", as Virginia Woolf famously put it, while the next he brings his characters into such close focus we can almost feel them breathing.
Safety in numbers
But it is Tolstoy's unerring ability to see what we see, both during the humdrum times in our lives, and at moments of crisis, that transcends boundaries of both time and nationality. It is why E.M. Forster readily conceded that no English novelist had ever "given so complete a picture of man's life, both on its domestic and heroic side". And it is also why Alan Turing, the code-breaking hero of the Second World War, was able to find consolation in the pages of Tolstoy's novels during the harrowing final years of his life, after being convicted for indecency as a homosexual. It was particularly in War and Peace that Turing recognised himself and his problems: great literature has the ability to reassure us that we are not alone.
Tolstoy was 35, recently married, and the father of a newborn baby when he began War and Peace in 1863. He was already a well-known writer, but he had come to prominence writing short works of fiction, as well as some celebrated pieces of reportage from Sevastopol, where he had fought as an artillery officer in the Crimean War against the British and French. No one, not least the author himself, could have predicted that he would spend the next six years working on one of the longest novels ever written. By 1869, when he finally completed War and Peace, he and his wife Sofya, who had dutifully made multiple copies of his manuscripts, had three more children to bring up in their idyllic rural retreat at Yasnaya Polyana.
It had all begun with Tolstoy's interest in Russian history, and in particular the fate of the Decembrists, former noble officers and veterans of the Napoleonic Wars who staged an abortive uprising in 1825, three years before the writer was born. They had hoped to bring about political reform of the tsarist autocracy, but instead were punished with either execution or lifelong exile in Siberia.
In 1856, as part of his liberalisation of Russian society after the disastrous defeat in the Crimean War, the new tsar Alexander II gave an amnesty to the surviving Decembrists. Among them was Tolstoy's distant relative Prince Sergey Volkonsky, who first gave the author the idea of writing a novel about an ageing Decembrist returning to Moscow in the 1850s.
Breathing life into a story
Tolstoy soon discovered that he needed to write about the Decembrists' experience fighting for the Russian army in 1812 in order to bring their story to life, and that, in turn, led him back to 1805, when Russia first went to war with Napoleon, and lost. Eventually, Tolstoy ended up concentrating on the events leading up to the French invasion in 1812 and its immediate aftermath, and never brought his story into the present day.
As a member of Russia's titled aristocracy himself – he was born Count Tolstoy - the author was also determined to celebrate the values of his class in the face of their erosion by the radical new plebeian intelligentsia.
War and Peace followed other novels which dealt with the Napoleonic Wars – such as Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and Hugo's Les Miserables – but it was the first to chronicle the French invasion of Russia, and Tolstoy undertook exhaustive research in order to provide a realistic backdrop to his depiction of historical events.
His sources ranged from patriotic Russian and French official histories, to the memoirs of serving officers and foreign ambassadors, while elderly friends and relatives shared their personal memories, and helped track down the unpublished correspondence of people who had lived in Moscow in 1812.
Tolstoy also did some primary research of his own. The Battle of Borodino was the decisive day of confrontation between Napoleon's Grand Army and the Russian forces led by General Kutuzov. It's also a pivotal moment in War and Peace, coming roughly halfway through.
In order to get the details of the battle right, Tolstoy spent two days wandering around the village and surrounding fields where it had taken place. By sketching out a plan of the battlefield, and establishing the movements of the 250,000 soldiers who had taken part, he was able to work out such vital details as exactly in whose eyes the sun had shone when it came up on that fateful day.
Discursive commentary
The 20 chapters Tolstoy eventually devoted to the Battle of Borodino combine the lofty perspectives of historical figures with the ground-level viewpoint of his fictional characters, such as his other alter-ego Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, who is in charge of a regiment, and Pierre, a civilian caught up in the maelstrom. There is also discursive commentary from the author himself through the mouthpiece of his narrator.
The death toll at Borodino was enormous; in a single day, the Russian army lost as many as 44,000 men, and the French 58,000. Technically the victory was Napoleon's, as he was able to march on to Moscow after Kutuzov withdrew, but his forces were fatally weakened. "The direct consequence of the Battle of Borodino," writes Tolstoy's narrator, "was Napoleon's groundless flight from Moscow, his retreat along the old Smolensk road, the defeat of the 500,000-strong invasion, and the defeat of Napoleonic France, on which had been laid for the first time the hand of an opponent whose spirit was stronger."
In other words, all of Napoleon's military strategies came to nothing when pitted against Russian patriotism.
Tolstoy was quite unabashed about authorial pronouncements of this kind. Indeed, in two epilogues he goes on to articulate a highly idiosyncratic philosophy about the forces behind historical events. Tolstoy took issue with the sort of conventional accounts which suggested that events were determined by the actions of great leaders. The writer scoffed at the vain assumption that any one individual could have such power. He believed that the course of history, like the lives of his characters Pierre and Natasha, was unpredictable, and could not be altered by human strategies and machinations. Scientists, professional historians and military leaders who believed otherwise did not command his respect.
Sustained invective
To support his views, Tolstoy champions characters who ultimately desist from engaging in intellectual inquiry. His whole novel can be read as a sustained invective against abstract thought, which emerges as the province of social upstarts – among them Napoleon himself – representing the egalitarian ideas of the French Revolution. Even the French language, whose foreign alphabet steadily invades the Russian text along with Napoleon's troops until they abandon Moscow, is portrayed as a morally dubious instrument of communication.
It is a spectacularly subjective view of history, but such has been the great novelist's myth-making power that his version of events was generally accepted by readers for at least a century. Modern-day historians like Dominic Lieven perform an important service by reminding us that Tolstoy got parts of the history wrong, and was also extremely selective about what he depicted: the messy final stages of the war in 1813 and 1814, which would be considered crucial by historians, are simply missed out.
In 1879, when the first French translation of the novel appeared, Turgenev went out of his way to make a case for his younger contemporary, a generous gesture from a novelist whose relations with Tolstoy had mostly been fractious. In the passionate appeal he published in a Paris newspaper, Turgenev urged French readers to not be "put off by certain longueurs and the oddity of certain judgements". War and Peace, he declared, would provide them with "a more direct and faithful representation of the character and temperament of the Russian people, and about Russian life generally, than they would have obtained if they had read hundreds of works of ethnography and history". Turgenev's assessment still stands.
Rosamund Bartlett is the author of Tolstoy: A Russian Life. Her translation of Anna Karenina will be published by Oxford World's Classics in April. The BBC production of War and Peace launched in January.
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