1 For the purposes of this essay I propose to confine myself almost entirely to the explicit philosophy of history contained in War and Peace, and to ignore, for example, Sevastopol Stories, The Cossacks, the fragments of the unpublished novel on the Decembrists, and Tolstoy’s own scattered reflections on this subject except in so far as they bear on views expressed in War and Peace.
1 Letters of 14 February and 13 April 1868: I. S. Turgenev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem (Moscow/Leningrad, 1960–8), Pis′ma, vii 64, 122.
2 ibid. 122.
3 Letter to Tolstoy of 29 June 1883, ibid. xiii 180.
4 ‘He repeats himself and he philosophises.’ Letter of 21 January 1880, Gustave Flaubert, Lettres inédites à Tourguéneff, ed. Gérard Gailly (Monaco, 1946), 218 (‘cris d’admiration’ ibid.).
1 A. A. Fet, Moi vospominaniya (Moscow, 1890), part 2, 175.
2 See the severe strictures of A. Vitmer, a very respectable military historian, in his 1812 god v ‘Voine i mire’: po povodu istoricheskikh ukazanii IV toma ‘Voiny i mira’ grafa L. N. Tolstogo (St Petersburg, 1869), and the tones of mounting indignation in the contemporary critical notices of S. Navalikhin (‘Izyashchnyi romanist i ego izyashchnye kritiki’, Delo 1868 no. 6, ‘Sovremennoe obozrenie’, 1–28), A. S. Norov (“‘Voina i mir” (1805–1812) s istoricheskoi tochki zreniya i po vospominaniyam sovremennikov (po povodu sochineniya grafa L. N. Tolstogo: “Voina i mir”)’, Voennyi sbornik 1868 no. 11, 189–246) and A. P. Pyatkovsky (‘Istoricheskaya epokha v romane gr. L. N. Tolstogo’, Nedelya 1868: no. 22, cols 698–704; no. 23, cols 713–17; no. 26, cols 817–28). The first served in the campaign of 1812 and, despite some errors of fact, makes criticisms of substance. The last two are, as literary critics, almost worthless, but they seem to have taken the trouble to verify some of the relevant facts.
3 See Viktor Shklovsky, Mater′yal i stil′ v romane L′va Tolstogo ‘Voina i mir’ (Moscow, 1928), passim, but particularly chapters 7 and 8. See also 47 below.
1 N. V. Shelgunov, ‘Filosofiya zastoya’ (review of War and Peace), Delo 1870 no. 1, ‘Sovremennoe obozrenie’, 1–29.
2 [More literally: ‘Fortunately, the author […] is a poet and an artist ten thousand times more than a philosopher.’] N. D. Akhsharumov, Voina i mir, sochinenie grafa L. N. Tolstogo, chasti 1–4: razbor (St Petersburg, 1868), 40.
3 e.g. Professors Il′in, Yakovenko, Zenkovsky and others. [When invited to provide initials or forenames (see index), and to identify the specific works in question, IB responded that their omission was deliberate. Yakovenko did not hold a professorship.]
1 Honourable exceptions to this are provided by the writings of the Russian writers N. I. Kareev and B. M. Eikhenbaum, as well as those of the French scholars E. Haumant and Albert Sorel. Of monographs devoted to this subject I know of only two of any worth. The first, ‘Filosofiya istorii L. N. Tolstogo’, by V. N. Pertsev, in ‘Voina i mir’: sbornik, ed. V. P. Obninsky and T. I. Polner (Moscow, 1912), 129–53, after taking Tolstoy mildly to task for obscurities, exaggerations and inconsistencies, swiftly retreats into innocuous generalities. The other, ‘Filosofiya istorii v romane L. N. Tolstogo, “Voina i mir”’, by M. M. Rubinshtein, in Russkaya mysl′, July 1911, section 2, 78–103, is much more laboured, but in the end seems to me to establish nothing at all. Very different is Arnold Bennett’s judgement, of which I learnt since writing this: ‘The last part of the Epilogue is full of good ideas the johnny can’t work out. And of course, in the phrase of critics, would have been better left out. So it would; only Tolstoy couldn’t leave it out. It was what he wrote the book for.’ The Journals of Arnold Bennett, ed. Newman Flower (London etc., 1932–3), ii (1911–21) 62. As for the inevitable efforts to relate Tolstoy’s historical views to those of various latter-day Marxists – Kautsky, Lenin, Stalin etc. – they belong to the curiosities of politics or theology rather than to those of literature.
1 P. A. Vyazemsky, ‘Vospominaniya o 1812 god’, Russkii arkhiv 7 (1869), columns 181–92, 01–016, esp. 185–7.
1 ‘Accursed questions’ – a phrase which became a cliché in nineteenth-century Russia for those central moral and social issues of which every honest man, in particular every writer, must sooner or later become aware, and then be faced with the choice of either entering the struggle or turning his back upon his fellow men, conscious of his responsibility for what he was doing. [Although ‘voprosy’ was widely used by the 1830s to refer to these issues, it seems that the specific phrase ‘proklyatye voprosy’ was coined in 1858 by Mikhail L. Mikhailov when he used it to render ‘die verdammten Fragen’ in his translation of Heine’s poem ‘Zum Lazarus’ (1853/4): see ‘Stikhotvoreniya Geine’, Sovremennik 1858 no. 3, 125; and Heinrich Heines Sämtliche Werke, ed. Oskar Walzel (Leipzig, 1911–20), iii 225. Alternatively, Mikhailov may have been capitalising on the fact that an existing Russian expression fitted Heine’s words like a glove, but I have not yet seen an earlier published use of it. Ed.]
2 Instructions to her legislative experts.
1 L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow/Leningrad, 1928–64) [hereafter T] xlvi 4–28 (18–26 March 1847).
2 ibid. – Hume: 113, 114, 117, 123–4, 127 (11–27 June 1852); Thiers: 97, 124 (20 March, 17 June 1854).
3 ibid. – Rousseau: 126, 127, 130, 132–4, 167, 176 (24 June 1852 to 28 September 1853), 249 (‘Journal of daily tasks’, 3 March 1847); Sterne: 82 (10 August 1851), 110 (14 April 1852); Dickens: 140 (1 September 1852).
4 ibid. 123 (11 June 1852).
5 ibid. 141–2 (22 September 1852).
6 ‘Filosoficheskie zamechaniya na rechi Zh. Zh. Russo’ (1847), T i 222, where the next two quotations also appear.
1 V. N. Nazar′ev, ‘Lyudi bylogo vremeni’, L. N. Tolstoi v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1955), i 52.
2 ibid. 52–3.
3 N. N. Gusev, Dva goda s L. N. Tolstym […] (Moscow, 1973), 188.
1 War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 1 (end), T xii 238; Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (London, 1942: Macmillan) [hereafter W] 1248. [Because the Maudes’ subdivisions of the text vary from edition to edition of their translation, and also differ from those in T, references to W are given by page alone.]
1 ibid. vol. 4, part 1, chapter 4 (beginning), T xii 14; W 1039–40.
2 On the connection of this with Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme see Paul Boyer (1864–1949) chez Tolstoï: entretiens à Iasnaïa Poliana (Paris, 1950), 40.