All his life, at every moment, he possessed the faculty of seeing phenomena in the detached finality of each separate instant, in perfectly distinct outline, as we see only on rare occasions, in childhood, or on the crest of an all-renewing happiness, or in the triumph of a great spiritual victory.
To see things like that, our eye must be directed by passion. For it is passion that by its flash illuminates an object, intensifying its appearance.
Such passion, the passion of creative contemplation, Tolstoy constantly carried within him. It was precisely in its light that he saw everything in its pristine freshness, in a new way, as if for the first time. The authenticity of what he saw differs so much from what we are used to that it may appear strange to us. But Tolstoy was not seeking that strangeness, was not pursuing it as a goal, still less did he apply it to his works as a literary method.
I was struck, while working on the translation of War and Peace, by the impression that I was translating two books at the same time. Not two books in alternation, as one might expect from the title, but two books simultaneously. One is a very deliberate and self-conscious work, expressive of the outsize personality of its author, who is everywhere present, selecting and manipulating events, and making his own absolute pronouncements on them: “On the twelfth of June, the forces of Western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began—that is, an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature.” It is a work full of provocation and irony, and written in what might be called Tolstoy’s signature style, with broad and elaborately developed rhetorical devices—periodic structure, emphatic repetitions, epic similes. The other is an account of all that is most real and ordinary in life, all that is most fragile and therefore most precious, all that eludes formulation, that is not subject to absolute pronouncements, that is so mercurial that it can hardly be reflected upon, and can be grasped only by a rare quality of attention and self-effacement. And it is written in a style that reaches the expressive minimum of a sentence like Kápli kápali, “Drops dripped”—which makes silence itself audible. It seems to me that the incomparable experience of reading War and Peace comes from the shining of the one work through the other—an effect achieved by artistic means of an unusual sort.
The first thing a reader today must overcome is the notion of War and Peace as a classic, the greatest of novels, and the model of what a novel should be. In 1954, Bertolt Brecht wrote a note on “Classical Status as an Inhibiting Factor” that puts the question nicely. “What gets lost,” he says of the bestowing of classical status on a work (he is speaking of works for the theater), “is the classic’s original freshness, the element of surprise…of newness, of productive stimulus that is the hallmark of such works. The passionate quality of a great masterpiece is replaced by stage temperament, and where the classics are full of fighting spirit, here the lessons taught the audience are tame and cozy and fail to grip.”
The first readers of War and Peace were certainly surprised, but often also bewildered and even dismayed by the book. They found it hard to identify the main characters, to discover anything like a plot, to see any connection between episodes, to understand the sudden leaps from fiction to history, from narration to philosophizing. There seemed to be no focus, no artistic unity to the work, no real beginning, and no resolution. It was as if the sheer mass of detail overwhelmed any design Tolstoy might have tried to impose on it. Such observations were made by Russian critics, including Tolstoy’s great admirer, Ivan Turgenev, and when the book became known in translation, they were repeated by Flaubert and by Henry James, who famously described War and Peace as a “large loose baggy monster.”
Another cause of surprise for its first readers was the language of War and Peace. The book opens in French—not with a few words of French (as in those English versions that do not eliminate the French altogether), but with a whole paragraph of French, with only a few phrases of Russian at the end. This mixing of French and Russian goes on for another five chapters or more, and occurs frequently throughout the rest of the book. There are also some long letters entirely in French, as well as official dispatches, and quotations from the French historian Adolphe Thiers. There are passages in German as well. For all of them Tolstoy supplied his own translations in footnotes, as we do. But that made the question still more problematic, because Tolstoy’s translations are occasionally inaccurate, perhaps deliberately so. The amount of French in the text is smaller than some early critics asserted—not a third, but only about two percent. But there is also a great deal of gallicized Russian, either implying that the speaker is speaking in French, or showing that upper-class ladies like Julie Karagin are unable to write correctly in their own language. And there are other heterogeneous elements in the composition: Tolstoy’s map and commentary on the battlefield of Borodino, and his own interpolated essays, which repeatedly disrupt the fictional continuum.
The formal structure of War and Peace and the texture of its prose are indeed strange. Those who did not simply declare the book a failure, dismissing the newness, the “passionate quality” and “fighting spirit” of what Tolstoy was doing as artistic helplessness and naïveté, often said that it succeeded in spite of its artistic flaws. But that is a false distinction. War and Peace is a work of art, and if it succeeds, it cannot be in spite of its formal deficiencies, but only because Tolstoy created a new form that was adequate to his vision.
It is equally mistaken to go to the other extreme and declare, as more recent critics have done, that, far from being a magnificent failure, War and Peace is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century realism, simple and artless, a direct transcription of life. Tolstoy was well aware of the perplexities his book caused and addressed them in an article (included here as an appendix) entitled “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace,” published in the magazine Russian Archive in 1868, before the final parts of the book had appeared in print. “What is War and Peace?” he asked.
It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed. Such a declaration of the author’s disregard of the conventional forms of artistic prose works might seem presumptuous, if it were premeditated and if it had no previous examples. The history of Russian literature since Pushkin’s time not only provides many examples of such departure from European forms, but does not offer even one example to the contrary. From Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoevsky’s Dead House, there is not a single work of artistic prose of the modern period of Russian literature, rising slightly above mediocrity, that would fit perfectly into the form of the novel, the epic, or the story.