(Second of two parts; click here to read Part 1)
So he was prodded into a creative quest, a resolution to his fears, and that quest culminated in War and Peace. We need not know all the history, which Feuer helps clarify, to appreciate her book. As she notes about Tolstoy’s manuscripts from then:
[they] make it clear that the Decembrist novel plan was still uppermost in his intentions, and that its fundamentally political conception still dominated his thinking. But as the novel grew under his hands it took on a life of its own and began to exert a force that often opposed Tolstoy’s thoughts and intentions.
Tolstoy was in Paris in 1857, surveying the ultimate effects of the French Revolution, as he perceived it, and there began reading Proudhon and reflecting on Rousseau. He witnessed a guillotining and was so appalled he left Paris–convinced that he had seen the epitome of barbarism released by the Revolution. It had produced, ultimately, a despot who seized the crown and placed it on his own head, Napoleon, and as Tolstoy wrote about the advance of Napoleon into Russia in War and Peace, he saw in it an analogue to the revolutionary fervor that began entering Russia in 1856, at the time of the release of the Decembrists.
That fervor, he believed, meant the annihilation of the aristocracy, the class to which he belonged and which, in its independence even from the czar, had become the keeper of Russian history and tradition. He mistrusted, even deplored, those who gained power solely by intellect, such as merchants and monks, and never fairly depicted any such person in his fiction. He did not believe people of their kind could experience life in a panoramic sense or understand, for instance, the relationship of serf to land or landowner, much less engage in independent thought. Their intellectuality tended toward theory or took off in the direction of the ruble–or so Tolstoy denigrated their lack of intellectual objectivity. He wrote at the time that the liberals were talking the same kind of “trash” as the landowners, only in French. By now he despised everything French.
In his fears for the annihilation of the aristocracy, he was absolutely accurate, only off by a few decades. And if he had seen the revision even of history that the Soviets practiced, he would have seen his worst nightmares made flesh. For after the bodies were carted off, the wisdom of tradition that had been established over centuries was wiped out. The “liberal conservatism” that Tolstoy practiced was akin to the later views of one who hoped to help form a new government once the revolution began, but was finally forced to flee the country, V. D. Nabokov, the writer’s father.
The first chapters of the Decembrist novel–all that was written of it–were incorporated into the early drafts of War and Peace, as Feuer ably documents. In its early scenes this novel depicted a weary Decembrist, in return from exile, stopping to visit an aristocrat on his estate–variously called Volkonsky or Bolkonsky. The aristocrat has served in the government, but in a world-weariness of his own has retreated to the country. Politics are discussed. Tolstoy meant to be “instructive” to his contemporaries, Feuer says:
He wrote as an artist for whom one fact–if the right one–was enough, as a moralist distrustful of historians’ explanations . . . and as a prophet whose mission was to inspire people, or nations, to salvation’s change of heart.
Feuer’s view of the political exigencies of the Decembrist novel being carried into War and Peace is not entirely original, as she admits, but an extension of the discoveries of one of the sagest Tolstoy scholars, the Formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum. By the time Feuer visited Yasnaya Polyana, more careful work had been done on the drafts of War and Peace by Evelina Zaidenshnur, however, so Feuer was able to carry forward Eikhenbaum’s suppositions (and further intuitions by Eikhenbaum’s Formalist colleague, Viktor Shklovsky) into what now seems an airtight case: Tolstoy did not merely bring the political concerns of his Decembrist novel into War and Peace; these were the primary motivation behind its genesis.
But as the novel changed under Tolstoy’s hand, one of its less palatable characters becoming impossible for him to depict, that character split into Anatole Kuryagin. Then Pierre Bezukhov, meant to be a revolutionary, appeared out of the character’s other half. Over a year later, as Tolstoy started drafting battle scenes in “The Olmutz-Austerlitz Manuscript,” a person similar to Prince Andrey appeared.
Andrey at first wasn’t linked to Natasha, nor was Pierre, until Tolstoy was well on the way to what became successful drafts of the actual novel. And as the work changed and grew, it became more a novel of social manners, as some say, or a critique of class structure, as Soviet critics were compelled to parrot. But as Feuer accurately points out, the aristocracy is never demeaned.
Feuer is primarily interested in the political genesis of War and Peace, as she admits, so she is not as forthcoming as I had hoped about what Tolstoy, after his false starts and hesitations, finally achieved. The scene of revision she quotes most fully, Pierre’s visit to his dying father, is primarily used as an illustration of how Tolstoy recognized the power of “limited third-person” point of view, the mastery of which (along with the “interior monologue”) Tolstoy was the first to achieve.
Though War and Peace is largely from an omniscient point of view, there is no other nineteenth-century novel like it, because the overseeing consciousness narrows to the confines of each character. In tracing this, Feuer quotes from the first draft of the encounter between Pierre, an illegitimate son, and his father, who has never acknowledged paternity until he’s on his deathbed: “How much they had to say to each other,” Tolstoy wrote, “this dying father and his frightened son!” He then reports on the perceptions and physical sensations of each, along with a lot of talk, and then Pierre takes his father’s hand and his father places his other hand on Pierre’s head and asks him why he hasn’t visited him. Pierre bends to his father’s face and sobs and says only, “I don’t know.” Then this: “And on the face of the dying man there appeared a smile expressing the knowledge that there was no need to say anything, that everything was now seen and felt otherwise, that all that was painful, grievous and terrible was over now. They said nothing more.”
In the final, published version, Pierre is led into his father’s room just as attendants are turning him in his bed.
At this moment when the count was being turned over, one of his arms fell back helplessly and he made a vain effort to move it. Either the count noticed the look of terror with which Pierre regarded his lifeless arm or some other idea flashed through his dying mind at that moment, at any rate he looked at the refractory arm, at the expression of terror on Pierre’s face, then again at the arm, and on his face there appeared a weak, martyr’s smile, a smile that ill accorded with his features, and seemed to make a joke of his own weakness. Unexpectedly, at the sight of this smile, Pierre felt a shuddering in his breast, a pinching sensation in his nose, and tears dimmed his eyes. They turned the sick man on his side, face to the wall. He sighed.
The artistic audacity! And we get only glimpses of the poetic power of the scene, viewing it as we do through a scumbled and muffling medium like translucent glass, since we receive it in translation. Here, as in so many parts of War and Peace (and most of Tolstoy’s fiction from the 1860s on), the reason for his brilliance seems to me apparent: the painterly gestures of his people. Or as a painter might say, his genius in revealing the “gesture of a pose.” More is communicated by the look on the count’s face and his flopping arm than two pages of character description. Feuer overlooks this.
To this writer, when Tolstoy realized the effect of such gestures in his fiction and peeled away his prose to further reveal them, he became Tolstoy. The crux of what he understood seems this: If he could picture an action as it ran its course or see on a face the right expression, rather than compose a package of prose to explain these, he was writing in another realm. The best of his work is mostly pictorial, and he anticipated what would overwhelm our century: movies, then television.
He was a blunt and engaging philosophical writer, as we can also trace, but he forsook that to get the look of a character or a scene right. He humbled himself and his prose to that–the moment each character was passing through–and so became the servant of each. Only genius, coupled with the iron-clad confidence that was perhaps the enduring legacy of his aristocratic upbringing, is able to stoop to such selflessness.
Tolstoy set aside his forceful, polemical, restless, sifting, contradicting intellect for his eye and the emotional repercussions of that eye on his heart. He became his characters’ eyes. He is Platon Karetaev as surely as Napoleon, and every person in between. He traveled from the dark of his fears and doubts down lanes of increasing light that opened onto traceries of brilliance. There he dropped his baggage of books and theories, the privileges of aristocracy and the rest, and set his plain peasant face toward the end of what we now know as War and Peace.
Larry Woiwode is the author of five novels and two collections of stories.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 17
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