Afterword

by Orlando Figes

In 1951, after reading War and Peace for the twelfth time, the Russian writer Mikhail Prishvin (1873–1954) noted in his diary that he felt, at last, that he understood his life. Like all great works of art, Tolstoy’s masterpiece has the capacity, on each successive reading, to transform our understanding of the world.

On any first reading, War and Peace is bound to dazzle with its immense panorama of humanity. The whole of life appears to be contained in its pages. Tolstoy presents us with a cast of several hundred characters. Yet to each one he brings such profound understanding of the human condition, with all its frailties and contradictions, that we recognize and love these characters as reflections of our own identity.

Tolstoy has an extraordinary clarity of expression – a quality which Anthony Briggs has happily maintained in this superb translation. Tolstoy might write longer novels than anybody else, but no other writer can recreate emotion and experience with such precision and economy. There are scenes in War and Peace – the unforgettable depiction of the Battle of Austerlitz, for example, or the ball where Natasha Rostov meets Prince Andrey – in which Tolstoy manages in a few words to sketch the mental images which allow us to picture ourselves at the scene and seemingly to feel the emotions of the protagonists. There are passages, like the death-scene of Prince Andrey, in which Tolstoy may give to his readers the extraordinary sensation that they too have felt the experience of death; and moments, like the wonderful description of the hunt, when Tolstoy lets them imagine what it is like to be a dog.

Tolstoy once said famously that War and Peace was not meant to be a novel at all. Like all great works of art, it certainly defies all conventions. Set against the historical events of the Napoleonic Wars, its complex narrative development is a long way from the tidy plot structure of the European novel in its nineteenth-century form. Tolstoy’s novel does not even have a clear beginning, middle and end, though it does, in one sense, turn on a moment of epiphany, the year of 1812, when Russia’s liberation from Napoleon is made to coincide with the personal liberation of the novel’s central characters.

While clearly still a novel, War and Peace can be understood, at another level, as a novelist’s attempt to engage with the truth of history. Tolstoy’s interest in history developed long before his career as a novelist. But history-writing disappointed him. It seemed to reduce the richness of real life. For whereas the ‘real’ history of lived experience was made up of an infinite number of factors and contingencies, historians selected just a few (for example, the political or the economic) to develop their theories and explanations. Tolstoy concluded that the histories of his day represented ‘perhaps only 0.001 per cent of the elements which actually constitute the real history of peoples’.¹ He was particularly frustrated by the failure of historians to illuminate the ‘inner’ life of a society – the private thoughts and relationships that make up the most real and immediate experience of human beings. Hence he turned to literature.

During the 1850s Tolstoy was obsessed with the idea of writing a historical novel which would contrast the real texture of historical experience, as lived by individuals and communities, with the distorted image of the past presented by historians. This is what he set out to achieve in War and Peace. Through the novel’s central characters Tolstoy juxtaposes the immediate human experience of historical events with the historical memory of them. For example, when Pierre Bezukhov wanders as a spectator on to the battlefield of Borodino he expects to find the sort of neatly arranged battle scene that he has seen in paintings and read about in history books. Instead, he finds himself in the chaos of an actual battlefield:

Everything Pierre saw on either hand looked so indistinct that, glancing left or right over the landscape, he could find nothing that quite lived up to his expectations. Nowhere was there a field of battle as such, the kind of thing he had expected; there was nothing but ordinary fields, clearings, troops, woods, smoking camp-fires, villages, mounds and little streams. Here was a living landscape, and try as he might he could not make out any military positioning. He could not even tell our troops from theirs. (Vol. III, Book II, ch. 21)

Having served as an officer in the Crimean War (1854–6), Tolstoy drew from his own experience to recreate the human truth of this celebrated battle, and to examine how its public memory could become distorted by the medium of written history. As Tolstoy shows, in the confusion of the battle nobody can understand or control what occurs. In such a situation, chance events, individual acts of bravery or calm thinking by the officers can influence the morale of the troops en masse and thus change the course of the battle; and this in turn creates the illusion that what is happening is somehow the result of human agency. So when the military dispatches are later written up, they invariably ascribe the outcome of the battle to the commanders, although in reality they had less influence than the random actions of the rank and file. By using these dispatches, historians are able to impose a rational pattern and ‘historical meaning’ on the battle, although neither was apparent at the time of fighting.

As a novelist, Tolstoy was interested most of all in the inner life of Russian society during the Napoleonic Wars. In War and Peace he presents this period of history as a crucial watershed in the culture of the Russian aristocracy. The war of 1812 is portrayed as a national liberation from the cultural domination of the French – a moment when Russian noblemen like the Rostovs and Bolkonskys struggled to break free from the foreign conventions of their society and began new lives on Russian principles. Tolstoy plots this transformation in a series of motifs. In Tolstoy’s text the novel opens, for example, in the French language of the Petersburg salon – a language that Tolstoy gradually reveals to be false and artificial (the novel’s most idealized characters, such as Princess Marya and the peasant Karatayev, speak exclusively in Russian, or, like Natasha, speak French only with mistakes). Tolstoy shows the aristocracy renouncing haute cuisine for Spartan lunches of rye bread and cabbage soup, adopting national dress, settling as farmers on the land and rediscovering their country’s native culture, as in the immortal scene when Natasha, a French-educated young countess, dances to a folk song in the Russian style.

On this reading, War and Peace appears as a national epic – the revelation of a ‘Russian consciousness’ in the inner life of its characters. In narrating this drama, however, Tolstoy steps out of historical time and enters the time-space of cultural myth. He allows himself considerable artistic licence. For example, the aristocracy’s return to native forms of dress and recreations actually took place over several decades in the early nineteenth century, whereas Tolstoy has it happen almost overnight in 1812. But the literary creation of this mythical time-space was central to the role which War and Peace was set to play in the formation of the national consciousness.

When the first part of the novel appeared, in 1865–6, educated Russia was engaged in a profound cultural and political quest to define the country’s national identity. The emancipation of the serfs, in 1861, had forced society to confront the humble peasant as a fellow-citizen and to seek new answers to the old accursed questions about Russia’s destiny in what one poet (Nikolay Nekrasov) called the ‘rural depths where eternal silence reigns’.² The liberal reforms of Tsar Alexander II (Emperor of Russia 1855–81), which included the introduction of jury trials and elected institutions of local government, gave rise to hopes that Russia, as a nation, would emerge and join the family of modern European states. Writing from this perspective, Tolstoy saw a parallel between the Russia of the 1860s and the Russia that had arisen in the wars against Napoleon.

War and Peace was originally conceived and drafted as a novel about the Decembrists, a group of liberal army officers who rose up in a failed attempt to impose a constitution on the Tsar in December 1825. In this original version of the novel the Decembrist hero returns after thirty years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the early years of Alexander II’s reign. But the more Tolstoy researched into the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots were to be found in the war of 1812. This was when these officers had first become acquainted with the patriotic virtues of the peasant soldiers in their ranks; when they had come to realize the potential of Russia’s democratic nationhood. Through this literary genesis, War and Peace acquired several overlapping spheres of historical consciousness: the real-time of 1805–20 (the fictional setting of the novel); the living memory of this period (from which Tolstoy drew in the form of personal memoirs and historical accounts); and its reflection in the political consciousness of 1855–65. Thus the novel can and should be read, not just as an intimate portrait of Russian society in the age of the Napoleonic Wars, but as a broader statement about Russia, its people and its history as a whole. That is why the Russians will always turn to War and Peace, as Mikhail Prishvin did, to find in it the keys to their identity.

English readers will learn more about the Russians by reading War and Peace than they will by reading perhaps any other book. But they will also find in it the inspiration to make them think about the world and their own place in it. For War and Peace is a universal work and, like all the great artistic prose works of the Russian tradition, it functions as a huge poetic structure for the contemplation of the fundamental questions of our existence.

Above all, War and Peace will move readers by virtue of its beauty as a work of art. It is a triumphant affirmation of human life in all its richness and complexity. That is why one can return to it and always find new meanings and new truths in it.

CHAPTER 1

‘Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now nothing more than estates taken over by the Buonaparte family.¹ No, I give you fair warning. If you won’t say this means war, if you will allow yourself to condone all the ghastly atrocities perpetrated by that Antichrist – yes, that’s what I think he is – I shall disown you. You’re no friend of mine – not the “faithful slave” you claim to be … But how are you? How are you keeping? I can see I’m intimidating you. Do sit down and talk to me.’

These words were spoken (in French) one evening in July 1805 by the well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honour and confidante of the Empress Maria Fyodorovna, as she welcomed the first person to arrive at her soirée, Prince Vasily Kuragin, a man of high rank and influence. Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for the last few days and she called it la grippe – grippe being a new word not yet in common currency. A footman of hers in scarlet livery had gone around that morning delivering notes written in French, each saying precisely the same thing:

If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor sick lady is not too unnerving, I shall be delighted to see you at my residence between seven and ten. ANNETTE SCHERER

‘My goodness, what a violent attack!’ replied the prince, who had only just come in and was not in the least put out by this welcome. Dressed in his embroidered court uniform with knee-breeches, shoes and stars across his chest, he looked at her with a flat face of undisturbed serenity. His French was the elegant tongue of our grandparents, who used it for thought as well as speech, and it carried the soft tones of condescension that come naturally to an eminent personage grown old in high society and at court. He came up to Anna Pavlovna and kissed her hand, presenting to her a perfumed and glistening bald pate, and then seated himself calmly on the sofa.

‘First things first,’ he said. ‘How are you, my dear friend? Put my mind at rest.’ His voice remained steady, and his tone, for all its courtesy and sympathy, implied indifference and even gentle mockery.

‘How can one feel well when one is … suffering in a moral sense? Can any sensitive person find peace of mind nowadays?’ said Anna Pavlovna. ‘I do hope you’re staying all evening.’

‘Well, there is that reception at the English Ambassador’s. It’s Wednesday. I must show my face,’ said the prince. ‘My daughter is coming to take me there.’

‘I thought tonight’s festivities had been cancelled. I must say all these celebrations and fireworks are becoming rather tedious.’

‘If they had known you wanted the celebration cancelled, it would have been,’ said the prince with the predictability of a wound-up clock. Sheer habit made him say things he didn’t even mean.

‘Stop teasing me. Come on, tell me what’s been decided about Novosiltsev’s dispatch?² You know everything.’

‘What is there to tell?’ replied the prince in a cold, bored tone. ‘What’s been decided? They’ve decided that Bonaparte has burnt his boats, and I rather think we’re getting ready to burn ours.’

Prince Vasily always spoke languidly, like an actor declaiming a part from an old play. Anna Pavlovna Scherer was just the opposite – all verve and excitement, despite her forty years. To be an enthusiast had become her special role in society, and she would sometimes wax enthusiastic when she didn’t feel like it, so as not to frustrate the expectations of those who knew her. The discreet smile that never left her face, though it clashed with her faded looks, gave her the appearance of a spoilt child with a charming defect that she was well aware of, though she neither wished nor felt able to correct it, nor even thought it necessary to do so.

Then suddenly in the middle of this political discussion Anna Pavlovna launched forth in great excitement. ‘Oh, don’t talk to me about Austria!³ Perhaps it’s all beyond me, but Austria has never wanted war and she still doesn’t want war. She’s betraying us. Russia alone must be Europe’s saviour. Our benefactor is aware of his exalted calling and he’ll live up to it. That’s the one thing I do believe in. The noblest role on earth awaits our good and wonderful sovereign, and he is so full of decency and virtue that God will not forsake him. He will do what has to be done and scotch the hydra of revolution, which has become more dreadful than ever in the person of this murdering villain.⁴ We alone must avenge the blood of the righteous. And whom can we trust, I ask you? England, with that commercial spirit of hers, cannot understand the lofty soul of our Emperor Alexander, and never will. She has refused to evacuate Malta.⁵ She keeps on looking for an ulterior motive behind our actions. What did they say to Novosiltsev? Nothing. They didn’t understand, they’re not capable of understanding, how altruistic our Emperor is – he wants nothing for himself but everything for the good of mankind. And what have they promised? Nothing. And what little they have promised, they won’t carry out. Prussia has already declared that Bonaparte is invincible and that the whole of Europe is powerless to oppose him … I for one don’t believe a single word from Hardenberg or Haugwitz. That much-vaunted Prussian neutrality is just a trap. I put my faith in God and the noble calling of our beloved Emperor. He’ll be the saviour of Europe!’

She stopped suddenly, amused at her own passionate outburst.

‘I think if they had sent you instead of our dear Wintzengerode,’⁶ said the prince with a similar smile, ‘an onslaught like that from you would have got the King of Prussia to agree. You are so eloquent. May I have some tea?’

‘Yes, of course. By the way,’ she added, calming down, ‘there are two very interesting men coming here tonight – the Vicomte de Mortemart, a Montmorency through the Rohan line, one of the best French families. He’s the right kind of émigré, one of the genuine ones. And the Abbé Morio – such a profound thinker. Do you know him? He’s been received by the Emperor. Have you heard?’

‘Oh, it will be a pleasure to meet them,’ said the prince. ‘But tell me,’ he added, with studied nonchalance, as if an idea had just occurred to him, though this question was the main reason for his visit, ‘is it true that the Dowager Empress wants Baron Funke to become First Secretary in Vienna? They do say he’s a miserable creature, that baron.’

Prince Vasily wanted this post for his son, but other people were working through the Empress Maria Fyodorovna to get it for the baron. Anna Pavlovna half-closed her eyes to indicate that neither she nor anyone else could pass judgement on what the Empress might feel like doing or want to do. ‘Baron Funke has been recommended to the Dowager Empress by her sister,’ was all she said, in a dry, lugubrious tone. As she pronounced the name of the Empress, Anna Pavlovna’s face took on an expression of profound and sincere devotion mixed with respect and tinged with sadness, which invariably came upon her when she had occasion to mention her exalted patroness. She said that her Majesty had been gracious enough to show Baron Funke great respect, at which her face once again dissolved into sadness.

The prince said nothing and showed no feeling. Anna Pavlovna, with all the sensitivity and quick thinking of both a courtier and a woman, decided to rebuke the prince for daring to refer in such a way to a person recommended to the Empress, and at the same time to console him. ‘But, on the subject of your family,’ she said, ‘do you realize how much your daughter has delighted everyone in society since she came out? They say she’s as beautiful as the day is long.’

The prince bowed as a mark of his gratitude and respect.

‘I often think,’ Anna Pavlovna resumed after a short pause, edging closer to the prince and smiling sweetly to indicate that the political and social conversation was now at an end, and personal conversation was in order, ‘I often think that good fortune in life is sometimes distributed most unfairly. Why has fate given you two such splendid children? I don’t include Anatole, your youngest – I don’t like him,’ she commented in a peremptory tone and with raised eyebrows. ‘Such charming children. And I must say you seem to appreciate them less than anyone. You really don’t deserve them.’

And she smiled her exuberant smile.

‘What can I do? Lavater would have said that I have no paternity bump,’⁷ said the prince.

‘Oh, do stop joking. I wanted a serious talk with you. Listen, I’m not pleased with your younger son. Just between ourselves,’ her face went all gloomy again, ‘his name has been mentioned in her Majesty’s presence, and people are feeling sorry for you …’

The prince said nothing, while she gave him a knowing look, waiting in silence for his reply. Prince Vasily frowned.

‘What can I do?’ he said at last. ‘You know I’ve done everything a father could do to bring them up well, and they have both turned out to be idiots. At least Hippolyte’s a fool on the quiet – Anatole’s the rowdy one. That’s the only difference between them,’ he said, with an unusually awkward and forced smile, which gave a sharp twist to the lines round his mouth, making it surprisingly ugly and coarse.

‘Why do men like you have children? If you weren’t a father, I could find no fault with you,’ said Anna Pavlovna, looking up pensively.

‘I’m your faithful slave. I wouldn’t admit it to anyone else, but my children are the bane of my life. They’re the cross I have to bear. That’s how I explain it to myself. What would you …?’ He broke off with a gesture that signalled his resignation to a cruel fate. Anna Pavlovna thought things over.

‘That prodigal son of yours, Anatole, haven’t you thought of marrying him off? They do say,’ she went on, ‘that old maids have a mania for matchmaking. So far I’ve never been conscious of this failing in myself, but I do have a certain little person in my mind, someone who is very unhappy with her father – a relative of ours, the young Princess Bolkonsky.’

Prince Vasily made no reply, but being quick on the uptake and good at remembering things – qualities that came naturally to the denizens of high society – he gave a slight nod to show that he had noted her comment and was considering it.

‘No, listen, do you realize that boy’s costing me forty thousand roubles a year?’ he said, obviously unable to check the dismal drift of his thinking. He paused. ‘What will it be like in five years’ time if he carries on like this? You see what the benefits of fatherhood are … This princess of yours, is she rich?’

‘Her father’s a very rich man and a miser. He lives out in the country. You know, Prince Bolkonsky. He’s very well known. He retired under the late Emperor. They used to call him “the King of Prussia”. He’s a very clever man, but he’s a crank, not easy to get on with. Poor little thing, she’s as miserable as any girl could be. It was her brother who married Liza Meinen not too long ago. He’s one of Kutuzov’s adjutants. He’s coming here tonight.’

‘Listen, my dear Annette,’ said the prince, suddenly taking his companion’s hand and pressing it downwards for reasons best known to himself. ‘You set this up for me, and I’ll serve you like a faithful slave for ever. (Or slafe, with an ‘f’, as my village elder puts it when he writes to me.) She’s a girl from a good family, and she’s rich. That’s all I need.’

And with the freedom, familiarity and sheer style that were his hallmark, he took hold of the maid of honour’s hand, kissed it and gave it a little shake, easing back into his armchair and looking away from her.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Anna Pavlovna, thinking things over. ‘I’ll have a little talk with Lise, young Bolkonsky’s wife, this very evening. Perhaps something can be arranged. I’ll use your family to start learning the old maid’s trade.’