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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.
Boris de Schloezer, a fine critic and philosopher, wrote in the preface to his French translation of War and Peace (1960) that Tolstoy’s one aim, from the beginning, was “to speak the truth” as perceived by his eye and his conscience.
“A historian and an artist, describing a historical epoch, have two completely different objects … For a historian, considering the contribution rendered by some person towards a certain goal, there are heroes; for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people.”
The difference lies not in the figures and events that are seen, but in the way of seeing them: the artist sees not heroes but people, not results but facts, and considers a person not in terms of a goal, but “in correspondence
(On the Iliad, translated by Mary McCarthy, New York, 1947), Rachel Bespaloff wrote: “Great common truths are disclosed to man only when he is alone: they are the revelation made by solitude in the thick of collective action.”
“Tolstoy’s universe, like Homer’s, is what our own is from moment to moment. We don’t step into it; we are there.”
He scorned fine writers, calling them “hairdressers,” yet we know from the many drafts he preserved that he constantly worked over his texts, revising and refining them, bringing them closer to what he wanted to express. Tolstoy’s prose is an artistic medium; it is all of a piece; it is not good or bad Russian prose, it is Tolstoyan prose.
We have made it a point to keep his repetitions, as well as other devices of formal rhetoric (for instance, chiasmus) that Tolstoy consciously used and that his translators have often ignored. Tolstoy once boasted that in writing War and Peace he had used every rhetorical device of the old Latin grammarians, which means they are not there by chance.
But if you want to know the truth … if you want to know whether I’m happy? No. Is she happy? No. Why is that? I don’t know …”
I know very well that Count Nikolai is too young ever to be able to be anything more than a friend to me, but this sweet friendship, these relations, so poetical and so pure, have been a need of my heart.
As for the marriage plan regarding me, I shall tell you, dear and excellent friend, that for me marriage is a divine institution to which one must conform oneself. However painful it may be for me, if the Almighty ever imposes upon me the duties of a wife and mother, I shall try to fulfill them as faithfully as I can, without troubling myself with the examination of my feelings regarding him whom he will give me for a husband.
Not just with you there in the center of affairs and of the world is there talk only of war, but here, in the midst of these rural labors and this calm of nature which city dwellers usually picture to themselves in the country, the noise of war makes itself heard and felt painfully.
I was witness to a heartrending scene … It was a convoy of recruits enlisted from our estate and being sent off to the army … You should have seen the state that the mothers, the wives, the children of these departing men were in, and heard the sobs on both sides! You would think that humanity has forgotten the laws of its divine Savior, who preached love and the forgiveness of transgressions, and that it finds its greatest merit in the art of mutual killing.
Andrei, if you had faith, you would have turned to God, asking that He give you the love you do not feel, and your prayer would have been answered.
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“Your Excellency, how light it feels!” he said, smiling respectfully. “What?” “It feels light, Your Excellency.” “What’s he talking about?” thought Prince Andrei. “Ah, the spring, probably,” he thought, looking about. “So it is, everything’s green already … so quickly! Birches, and bird cherry, and alders already beginning … But no sign of oaks. Ah, there’s one.” At the side of the road stood an oak. Probably ten times older than the birches of the woods, it was ten times as thick and twice as tall as any birch. It was an enormous oak, twice the span of a man’s arms in girth, with some limbs
broken off long ago, and broken bark covered with old scars. With its huge, gnarled, ungainly, unsymmetrically spread arms and fingers, it stood, old, angry, scornful, and ugly, amidst the smiling birches. It alone did not want to submit to the charm of spring and did not want to see either the springtime or the sun. “Spring, and love, and happiness!” the oak seemed to say. “And how is it you’re not bored with the same stupid, senseless deception! Always the same, and always a deception! There is no spring, no sun, no happiness. Look, there sit those smothered, dead fir trees, always the same;
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and deceptions.” Prince Andrei turned several times to look at this oak as he drove through the woods, as if he expected something from it. There were flowers and grass beneath the oak as well, but it stood among them in the same way, scowling, motionless, ugly, and stubborn. “Yes, it’s right, a thousand times right, this oak,” thought Prince Andrei. “Let others, the young ones, succumb afresh to this deception, but we know life—our life is over!” A whole new series of thoughts in connection with the oak, hopeless but sadly pleasant, emerged in Prince Andrei’s soul. During this journey it was
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The left side of the woods was dark, in the shade; the right side, wet, glossy, sparkled in the sun, barely swayed by the wind. Everything was in flower; nightingales throbbed and trilled, now near, now far. “Yes, here, in this woods, was that oak that I agreed with,” thought Prince Andrei. “But where is it?” he thought again, looking at the left side of the road, and, not knowing it himself, not recognizing it, he admired the very oak he was looking for. The old oak, quite transformed, spreading out a canopy of juicy, dark greenery, basked, barely swaying, in the rays of the evening sun.
Of the gnarled fingers, the scars, the old grief and mistrust—nothing could be seen. Juicy green leaves without branches broke through the stiff, hundred-year-old bark, and it was impossible to believe that this old fellow had produced them. “Yes, it’s the same oak,” thought Prince Andrei, and suddenly a causeless springtime feeling of joy and renewal came over him.
