Begun as a novel of the aristocracy and completed as a national epic, the gigantic and disparate work seems unfinished in some places.! Even though it was read over a hundred times, by the author, his wife and professional proofreaders, the text bristles with errors. It is a little
t At the provocation of the critics who had complained of his digressions, Tolstoy deleted all the philosophical considerations at the head of each section of War and Peace, when preparing the third edition in 1873. The chapters on the theory of warfare were relegated to an appendix at the end, the long passages in French were replaced by Russian translations, and the hook was divided into four parts instead of six. This order was maintained in the fourth edition (1880), hut for the fifth (1886), Countess Tolstoy, with Strakhov's assistance, rcplaccd all the deleted or displaced passages and the conversations and letters in French: it had become clear that the style of the work, and even its meaning, had suffered from such brutal cutting. Thus, except for the division into four parts, which was retained, the book reverted to its 1868-69 form. Four more editions were published during Tolstoy's lifetime.
silver icon that Princess Marya gives her brother Andrey as he is going off to war, but it is a little golden icon that the French soldiers remove from his neck when they pick him up wounded at Austcrlitz. Natasha Rostov is thirteen years old in August 1805, fifteen in 1806 and sixteen in 1809. After gambling away his money late in December, Nicholas Rostov leaves Moscow in mid-November. Minor characters change their first names from one chapter to the next. Pierre Bczukhov sees the comet of 1812 in February 1811. . . . But the very fact that most readers fail to notice these lapses proves the power of Tolstoy's art as a storyteller.
His style is perfectly suited to his purpose. As his sole aim is to seize life in all its fullness and diversity, he pays no heed to the harmony of his sentences: he spins them out, cripples them with adjectives, loads them down with subordinates. His superabundant conjunctions are by no means a result of carelessness, but rather of a painstaking search for exactitude. By piling up his modifiers, the author laboriously but inevitably approaches the impression he wants to produce. He is like a painter trying to cover a wall with a three-haired miniaturist's brush. Nose to the canvas, he lays on his infinitesimal strokes with myopic doggedness, covcrs them over, sharpens them, scratches them out, puts them in again; and when he has finished, the myriad dots of color converge, at a distance, into a fresco. The margins of his drafts are full of trial adjectives, as a painter mixes trial colors on the edge of his palette. To portray Napoleon giving the order to begin the battle of Austerlitz, he writes on a sheet of paper: "firm, refreshed, intelligent and light- hearted"; "healthy, gay, refreshed"; "light-hearted, happy, bright"; "with something like a reflection of well-earned contentment on his face." Then, with the help of these guidelines, he builds his sentence: "Feeling refreshed and light-hearted, in that happy mood in which everything seems possible and everything succeeds, he [Napoleon] mounted his horse and rode out on the field. . . .His cold face expressed the confident and merited happiness of young lovers whose passion is requited."13 Or he may jot down impressions on the wing, lest he forget the turn he wants the chapter to take later on: "Sonya, the blood rushing to her face. Her dark eyes of a faithful dog, thick braids wound around her face like a hound's ears . . . The old lackey . . . The old birch with drooping, motionless branches . . . Sound of the hunting horn . . . Baying of the dogs . . ." And from these gropings emerge the admirable pages of the Rostovs' hunt.
In the dialogue, every character's language corresponds to his social position, temperament, associates and age. The landscape is never set up behind the characters like a cyclorama, but reflects their moods and takes part in their action. rlTie impact of heart on heart, army on army: when he looks up from the last page of the book, the reader feels lost, as though the thread of his own life had been cut. And yet he is not blinded, he has had no revelation, heard no prophecy. Here, Tolstoy is not a visionary; he is not waving a torch above the abyss, like Dostoyev- sky; lie does not turn his people inside-out like gloves, he does not scare us with our own shadows. Ilis exploration never goes beyond what is directly perceptible to ordinary mortals. But he responds more intensely than ordinary mortals to the appeal of beings and things. Instead of bringing us closer to the Beyond, he brings us closcr to the Ilere-and- Now. Men and plants, stones and animals are 011 the same plane for him. He observes a piece of carrion as attentively as a flower. The fatigue in the eyes of an aged horse is as significant to him for the comprehension of the universe as the fatuous conceit shining in die captain's face. The paradox is that this pantheistic process of creation, binding together pure and impure, great and small, beautiful and ugly, animate and inanimate, suffuses the entire work with the majesty of a second Genesis.
5. The Night at Arzamas
The long and laborious convalescence l>cgan: after being delivered of War and Peace, Tolstoy started reading gluttonously. Ilis meditations in the course of writing his book, on human destiny, the role of the individual in history and the comparative merits of reason and instinct naturally turned him in the direction of the philosophers. He devoured Kant and Schopenhauer—and was blinded by the latter, then little- known in Russia. How could Fet dare to say that the German thinker was only "so-so"? Never had anyone written anything more profound or true about the sufferings of man, struggling with all his "will to live" against the forces of destruction—or about chastity, the negation of the species, as the means to perfect happiness. Ah, the bitter vigor of this Teuton, his savage pessimism, his aspirations to oriental serenity.
"Do you know what my summer has been?" Tolstoy said to Fet. "One continuous roar of approval of Schopenhauer, a series of spiritual joys such as I have never known before. I wrote awav for his complete works and I have read them and am reading them again. Certainly, no student ever learned as much in his entire course of study as I have in this one summer."
And, true enough, he was rather like an old student who had fallen behind in his work and was filling in the gaps in his education, a chunk at a time, first-come-first-served, in greedy gulps. He momentarily thought of translating Schopenhauer into Russian so that his compatriots could discover him, too, and even asked Fet to help him with this labor of love; but in the end, he contented himself with buying a portrait of the great man and hanging it up in his study.* Now that
•Thirteen years later, in 1882, he made a violent attack upon Schopenhauer's pessimism in Confession. "Pessimism, and that of Schopenhauer in particular, has always seemed to me to be not only a sophism, but a form of nonsense, and a vulgar form at that," he wrote, in 1889, to Edward Rod.
his own characters had abandoned him, he was thinking more and more of the mystery of lifc-aftcr-dcath. "lie engaged in long and laborious meditations," wrote Sonya. "Often he said his brain hurt him, some painful process was going on inside it, everything was over for him, it was time for him to die."1
His mind had become habituated to such sornl>cr preoccupations: there had been the death of his brother Nicholas nine years before, which he still remembered with mixed feelings of grief and horror; there were the more recent deaths of Dyakov's wife, of Elizabeth Tolstoy (Alexandra's sister), of his father-in-law, Dr. Behrs, in 1868; and lastly, of course, there were the deaths of the characters of War and Peace—such as Prince Andrey, into whom he had put a great deal of himself. Had he been worn out or in poor health, he might have accepted the idea of his destruction more readily. But at the peak of physical and intellectual power he had now reached, his whole being shuddered at the thought of the gaping void. His expanding lungs, the powerful, regular thud of his heart, his iron muscles, the amorous resources of his loins, his keen mind, the success of War and Peace, the land he owned and the land he planned to buy, Sonya, the children, the house, the dogs, horses, peasants, trees, everything conspired to make him unable to accept death. To be sure, there were his headaches and his stomach pains, but these were the minute crcakings of a prodigiously well-functioning machine. What was there to worry about? Of coursc: the very fact that he had nothing to worry about! He was afraid of being stabbed in the back. I lis fear was animal, visccral, chilling. It came upon him all of a sudden—he began to tremble, sweat broke out on his forehead, he felt a presence behind his back. Then the jaws of the vise loosened, the shadow passed on, life tumbled in upon him, the tiniest vein in his body rejoiced at the new surge of blood. But he knew that one day it would come back.