According to Tolstoy, not all classes of Russian society took part in the birth of the nation. Courtiers and bureaucrats, unlike landowners, officers, peasants and soldiers, did not spend their lives on the land and in the fresh air. The notion of a nation as an organic body was foreign to them. Prince Andrei’s initial infatuation with Mikhail Speransky, the mastermind of Alexander I’s reforms, ended as he observed the great statesman’s snow-white hands. The way of life and daily habits of a particular noble were far more important to Tolstoy than his political views. In the epilogue, Pierre joins the conspirators, while his brother-in-law Nikolai Rostov expresses his readiness to fight the rebels as his oath to the emperor commands him to do. Despite this, Nikolai and Pierre remain loving relatives, both deeply Russian in their convictions and loyalties.
In Childhood Tolstoy adopted the fictional worldview of a boy to create an idealized image of a noble estate. After the abolition of serfdom he gave an unashamedly nostalgic description of the serf economy. Nikolai is portrayed in the epilogue of War and Peace as a ruthless landowner, who abstains from beating his serfs only out of respect for the tender feelings of his wife. Still, ‘long after his death the memory of his administration was devoutly preserved among the serfs’, who remembered that he took care of them and put ‘the peasant’s affairs first and then his own’ (WP, p. 1013).
In a draft of his introduction to the novel, Tolstoy confessed that he was afraid he would be ‘guided by historical documents rather than by the truth’ in his description of the events and ‘important personages of 1812’ (WP, p. 1087). He managed to overcome these doubts because of his conviction ‘that nobody would ever tell what I had to tell’. He believed that ‘specific qualities’ of his ‘development and personality’ (WP, p. 1087) provided him with an access to historical knowledge better than any documents. This type of argumentation is typical of non-fiction, when an author explains the importance of his unique personal experience. Tolstoy used the same strategy in relation to the history of the Napoleonic wars. He searched for ‘general laws’ governing history, but believed that the way to discover these laws was to concentrate on ‘artistic representation of the memories’ (CW, XV, p. 132; XLVIII, p. 87). In Childhood, the Sebastopol stories and The Cossacks he described events as directly witnessed by the narrator. Now he needed to introduce events that took place before he was born as if they were personal recollections.
To achieve this goal, Tolstoy inscribed the national epic into a family chronicle. The transparent play with surnames and the exact reproduction of real first names and patronymics of his ancestors, together with the meticulous description of the everyday lives of both families, provided the necessary aura of authenticity. To be sure, the disenchanted aristocratic liberal Nikolai Tolstoy had little to do with the brave officer and passionate rural landowner Nikolai Rostov. Likewise, the educated and enlightened Maria Volkonsky did not resemble pious and humble Maria Bolkonsky. Tolstoy sought rather to achieve a general impression of the historical reconstruction of a family history, not to render all the details in the most accurate way.
The story of Nikolai and Maria, however, is only an auxiliary plot in the novel. Tolstoy used a more sophisticated approach in dealing with the main characters. He divided his authorial alter ego between Pierre Bezukhov, in whom dissipated habits, emotional and intellectual instability and lust competed with innate kindness, an ardent desire for moral goodness and admiration for the simple wisdom of the Russian peasant, and Prince Andrei with his quest for glory, Napoleonic ambitions and aristocratic arrogance. Each character had to resolve one of the two existential problems that tormented Tolstoy throughout his life: the power of sexuality and the fear of death. Pierre was to show the author and the reader how to handle erotic passions, Andrei how to deal with mortality.
In War and Peace these intractable existential problems are happily resolved. Pierre manages to tame his instincts in marriage. Prince Andrei, having nearly recovered from his mortal wound, chooses eternal universal life over personal existence and celestial over earthly human love. In Tolstoy’s early works, only simple and unreflective people were blessed with graceful exits. This time he awarded a radiant death to the character representing the lofty part of his soul, while the earthly part stayed alive to enjoy carnal pleasures in a way that is morally irreproachable. In the first version of the novel, which Tolstoy provisionally entitled All Is Well that Ends Well, Prince Andrei voluntarily cedes Natasha to his friend. In the final text, all ends even better: Tolstoy suggests that Pierre’s eventual success in the struggle between the author’s competing alter egos for the heart of the same woman is more than just a consequence of Prince Andrei’s death. It is a reassuring victory of the real over the ethereal, of this world over the next.
In the 1860s Tolstoy was not yet the avowed pacifist he later became. He abhorred the senseless loss of human life, but still regarded a fight against invaders as the natural and therefore legitimate instinct of a people protecting their own land. Reconciling his image of the war with his anarchist credo was difficult. Even the most consistent opponents of the state grudgingly agree that war is the prerogative of central authority. Tolstoy was never ready to compromise his beliefs or make partial concessions. He developed a provocative and controversial theory of historical process defined not ‘by power . . . but by the activity of all the people who participate in the events’ (WP, p. 1061). Rulers, leaders or military commanders only pretend to govern millions of individuals, but in fact succumb to the cumulative force of their wills.
At Yasnaya Polyana Tolstoy favoured beekeeping over other agricultural activities. He spent hours and days observing bees in their hives and comparing their seemingly chaotic, but perfectly choreographed, flights with the movement of human masses. In 1864 he sent Katkov a translation of Karl Vogt’s article on bees, which had been completed at his instigation by Elizaveta Bers, writing in the accompanying letter: ‘I’ve become an ardent beekeeper, and so I can judge’ (Ls, I, p. 185). Katkov never published the article. He expected a novel from his famous author, not an agricultural treatise. The progress of the novel was, however, slow and difficult. Rebuilding the hive of history was impossible without tracing the trajectories of individual bees. Tolstoy believed that ‘a month in the life of a single sixteenth-century peasant’ (CW, XVI, p. 126) was as legitimate a topic for historical research as was the history of the whole of Europe. His iconoclastic philosophy of history demanded equally unconventional psychology.
Tolstoy began by challenging the concept of ‘the person’ that traditionally constituted a foundation of literature and moral philosophy. In preparatory notebooks to his novel he claimed to have discovered the new law of ‘subordination of personality to its movement in time’, which ‘demands that we reject the inner conscience of the unmovable unity of our personality’ (CW, XV, pp. 233–4). Thoughts, feelings and decisions of a given individual have very little to do with his or her conscious preferences, but are the result of numerous impulses that keep any individual soul in constant flux.
When Pierre first sees Natasha after the war, he fails initially to recognize the woman he had loved all his life and from whom he had been separated for only a few short months. Her sufferings had made her an entirely different person. When Natasha smiles, however, her image in Pierre’s eyes is restored and his enduring love and longing revive. This episode is breathtakingly convincing and powerful precisely because of its psychological improbability. In the ensuing conversation Pierre tells Natasha how ‘shocked’ he was by the news of his wife’s death and how ‘very sorry’ for her he felt (WP, p. 987). However, a month and a dozen pages earlier he is described by Tolstoy as ‘remembering . . . that his wife is no more’ and repeating to himself ‘Oh how good! How splendid!’ (WP, p. 976). Pierre is not trying to deceive his beloved. He has forgotten his recent feelings and thoughts so completely because Natasha’s attentive gaze made him an entirely different person and parts of his previous experience have ceased to exist.