AUTHOR: LEO TOLSTOY
DATE: 1869
War and Peace, regarded as among the finest novels of world literature, tells the story of several aristocratic families as they adapt to their life in Russia in the years leading up to and after the Napoleonic invasion of 1812. Tolstoy said of his book that it is ‘not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle’. Written in the realist style, it does, however, contain elements of all three. Epic in scale and wrapped in existential angst, it is a study of a world in flux. Through his expansive cast of characters, Tolstoy examines how individuals respond under the pressures of war, political and social upheaval, and spiritual uncertainty. A century and a half after its publication, it stands as a monumental literary achievement that continues to speak of the human condition and how we may rise and fall in the face of an uncertain world. ‘Seize the moments of happiness,’ he writes at one point, ‘love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.’
Tolstoy was born in 1828, just a few years after the events that he narrates. Born into an aristocratic family, he was a rather dissolute youth. In 1851, faced with significant gambling debts, he joined the army and saw action in the Crimean War and was present at the almost year-long siege of Sevastopol. Although recognized for his military service, these experiences deeply traumatized him. Leaving the army and embarking on extensive travels around Europe, he became increasingly radical in his views, which were rooted in his fundamentalist Christian beliefs. He came to question the legitimacy of government, espousing various anarchist points of view and was a noted pacifist and advocate of non-violence.
No less a figure than Gandhi would say of him that his ‘life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of non-resistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in selfsuffering.’ Although he was yet to fully explore some of these views at the time of writing War and Peace, he was nonetheless much removed from the fast-living young aristocrat from before his army days.
ANNA KARENINA
In opposition to the world at large, Tolstoy considered his true first novel to be not War and Peace but Anna Karenina, another multifaceted epic set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century imperial Russian high society. Similarly acclaimed as a high water-mark of global literature, it repeated the trick of taking a psychologically engaging drama and infusing it with a sense of universal truth. As the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold commented, ‘We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art, we are to take it as a piece of life.’
The novel begins in St Petersburg in 1805, at a time when Napoleon’s domination of Western Europe was starting to ring alarm bells in the East. The book is in some senses the story of a clash of cultures, of two great civilizations under the sway of contrasting leaders: Napoleon and Tsar Alexander. Fittingly, the action starts at the party of a society hostess, the very epitome of ordered, civilized society. But it is not long before it becomes apparent that the book’s many characters are little more than flotsam and jetsam cast about by the tides of history. In Tolstoy’s own words: ‘Every action of theirs [great men], that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.’
The novel explores the stories of nearly six hundred characters from all walks of life – from civilians to servicemen, peasants to nobility. But it is for its high-born characters that it is best known. The likes of the central protagonist Pierre Bezukhov, the wealthy but socially awkward illegitimate son of a count (a figure whom Tolstoy based partly on himself), Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, his best friend who leaves his family to fight against Napoleon, and Natasha Rostov, the kindly and beautiful daughter of a noble family who grows close to both Pierre and Andrei.
For its Russian readership, the novel has become absorbed into the national psyche. The story of Russia’s ultimate defeat of the invader from the West, culminating in the wretched Battle of Borodino depicted so evocatively by Tolstoy, informs Russia’s sense of itself even now. During the Second World War the book was distributed to Soviet troops, many of whom were reported to be more moved by its descriptions of war than by the battle scenes they were witnessing first-hand. To understand the background to perpetual East–West tensions, War and Peace is not a bad place to start.
But the book quickly won admirers far from Russia’s borders, based on its universality. Comprising 361 chapters, it depicts life in all its glory, from ballrooms to battlefields. It would be difficult to read it and not feel connection with at least some of what goes on. As Henry James once said of Tolstoy, he was a ‘monster harnessed to his great subject – all of life’.
‘History is the life of nations and of humanity,’ Tolstoy wrote. ‘To seize and put into words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible.’ And yet somehow he succeeded. As evidence of the book’s reach across time, it is worth noting that Nelson Mandela identified it as his favourite novel during his long years in prison.
Tolstoy’s fellow Russian, the writer Isaak Babel (1894–1940), encapsulated Tolstoy’s ability to transcend from the specific to the universal, to take the chaos of Napoleonic Russia and frame it to speak of the human soul. ‘If the world could write by itself,’ Babel said, ‘it would write like Tolstoy.’