Thousands of soldiers file past the reader over the ruined roads—the wounded on their stretchers, limping infantry', straying cavalry, peasant militiamen in white blouses with a cross on their caps: the people on the march, countless, unconscious, obscure, overpowering. It should l>e noted, however, that they do not appear until late in the book. Throughout nine-tenths of it, Tolstoy is hardly aware of their existence. Guided by caste, he chooses his heroes among the aristocracy: senior officers, socialites, landowners. And, on the whole, his people arc not tormented by democratic aspirations. The daydreams of Prince Audrey and Pierre Bezukhov are mild stuff in comparison with the liberal passion that was agitating some men's minds in Russia as early as the beginning of the nineteendi century. Well might Tolstoy say, "A work can not be a success unless one loves its governing idea, and the idea I loved in War and Peace was the people": of its two thousand pages, only two hundred arc concerned with commoners.12 It is as though the author had suddenly been reminded of their existence at the last moment. 'They burst upon the scene, a thick gray flood: the townspeople of Moscow, soldiers, peasants, heroic partisans. . . . Pierre Bezukhov, as a prisoner, meets the real Russia, the Russia of the eternal muzhik, in the remarkable Platon Karatayev. And even Platon Karatayev did not exist in the first two versions of Book IV of War and Peace. lie sprang to life in the third draft—patient, laughing, tireless, talking in proverbs, "able to do everything, neither very badly nor very well." 'Through him Pierre realizes that there is "an inner freedom that is not controlled by circumstance." Earlier, wandering through the deserted streets of Moscow, he had told himself that "wealth, power, life, all the things men organize and protect with such care, are valueless except for the joy with which one is able to abandon them." The Russian people strengthened this conviction. Another expression of their force is the partisan, Tikhon Sherbaty, robust, brave and skillful, able to split a wooden post with one blow of his ax or whittle a graceful spoon. Moral and physical resistance combined. An alloy stronger than bullets and bayonets.
The heroes whose names have gone down in history seem so tiny, alongside these unsung warriors. Inspired by this thought, Tolstoy turned his back upon the romanticism of Alexandre Dumas and Walter Scott and proclaimed himself the enemy of all great men. 'Throughout the book he scattered challenges to the idol-makers: "The history- book hero does not command the mass; he is constantly commanded by them." (Volume III, Book XIII, Chapter I.) "In historical chronicles, the so-called great men are mere labels used to designate events but having no closer relation to them than labels do." (Volume I, Book IX, Chapter I.) "The king is history's slave." (Volume II, Book IX,
Chapter I.) "Throughout this entire period Napoleon was like a child holding a pair of ribbons attached to the inside of a coach and imagining that he is driving the horses." (Volume II, Book XIII, Chapter X.)
In his determination to debunk traditional history, Tolstoy was edging back to the ideas he held in his University of Kazan days. As the historian Shcbalsky has said, this is "historical nihilism." But since individuals have no control over events, how does one explain war? After all, the people are not the ones who arc lusting to cut each other's throats! An embarrassing question for the novelist. To admit that Napoleon is capable of setting a massacre in motion is to admit that he possesses some power over history, and the attractive theory of the total ineffectiveness of the hero no longer holds water. To insist that a lone man cannot "compel five hundred thousand to die" is to admit that the five hundred thousand have determined, more or less consciously, to invade a neighboring country; and so another, no less attractive theory —that of the fundamental goodness of the people—must also fall by the wayside. Tolstoy took the easy way out of his dilemma in his article, Some Words about War and Peace: fatality. "Why did millions of men kill each other, when everyone has known since the beginning of time that it is morally and physically wrong to do so?" he writes. "Because the thing was so inevitable that in doing so they were obeying the same elementary zoological law as the bees when they kill cach other in the autumn, and all male animals who exterminate each other."
Having thus disposed of one problem, the author fails to see that another danger is lurking in its place. His opposition to personality worship drives him into apersonality worship. In refusing the unqualified deification of a man, he is forced to accept the unqualified deification of the people. The attention to shading, so dear to him in his study of character, is utterly lacking in his study of ideas. Suddenly, with the turn of a page, the novelist becomes a polemist, a moralist, a strategist. But the moment he forgets his dissertations and returns to his story, the spell that was momentarily snapped begins to work again ... a "Russian spell," in his own words. It would be interesting to count the number of times the word "Russian" occurs in War and Peace. The army marches "with a murmur of Russian voiccs and Russian thoughts," Natasha danccs "Russian-style," the diplomat Bilibin describes the campaign in French, "but with that essentially Russian candor that allows room for pitiless self-criticism and mockery."
Tolstoy was deeply attached to the ideas in War and Peace. But it is not his ideas that have guaranteed the posterity of the book; it is the fact that, in spite of the historical, military and philosophical considerations that encumber it, the book is a hymn to man and nature whose like lias not been seen in the literature of the world. If lolstoy could give such a convincing portrayal of Natasha's delight at the ball, the discussions of the German generals, Prince Andrcy's luminous musings as he lies on his back under the infinite sky, the jokes of soldiers on bivouac, the night-whisperings of young girls in front of an open window, the exuberant bounds of hunting dogs on the scent, the peasants' rebellion, the heroic thoughts of Nicholas Rostov, the somnolence of Kutuzov at staff meetings, Pierre's wedded bliss, Speransky's artificial laugh, a masquerade party in the country, a hair-raising troika race, the face of a little girl painted with a burnt-cork mustache, the icerie rites of the masons, Moscow in flames or the countryside under the snow, it is because his overwhelming love of life enabled him to experience every expression of it with equal intensity. And he treasures this many-faceted existence even more deeply when it is simple: to him, everything that is close to nature is good. lie respects the attraction between man and woman, he respects marriage and the family. He admires ordinary people, soldiers and peasants, with their danccs and dirt, their own peculiar speech and their bravery. The person in the book who best understands the sense of human destiny is not a scholar or philosopher but the illiterate Platon Karatavev. And the farther one strays from this bucolic reality, the more deeply enmeshed one becomes in the artificial and lecherous coils of the lords of society. There, in the glimmer of the candclabras, souls do not ring true. Tolstoy has nothing but contempt for these empty-headed puppets. "Man was built to be happy," thinks Pierre Bezukhov; "he carries his happiness inside him, in the satisfaction of his natural desires. . . . There is nothing really terrifying in life. . . . There is no situation in which man cannot be perfectly happy and free."