Count Lyov Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a beautiful and fierce novel that recounts the lives of numerous Russian aristocrats both in peace and in war during the Napoleonic battles and the invasion of Russia. Within their various lives there is also an accounting of the cultural, intellectual, and religious thoughts and changes of the times, but perhaps the largest overarching goal of the text is how it is attempting to approach and indeed redefine the study of history.
Throughout War and Peace, Tolstoy strays from the narrative story of the novel and devotes whole chapters to a philosophical discussion on the study of history. He posits that historians tend to focus on either an “arbitrarily selected series of continuous events” or upon “the actions of some one man – a king or commander.” In this way according to Tolstoy, historians fail in any genuine study of history because both of these methods fail to avoid basic fallacies of causation and correlation. Instead Tolstoy claims that one must engage in studying “the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved.” By engaging with history in this way Tolstoy immediately democratizes history and dethrones those people who are revered, chronicled, and exalted with power, wealth, fame, position, and importance in more classical historical approaches. Tolstoy flips the paradigm and states that those people of power and command are not the cause of great history but rather the effect. They are both enthroned and empowered by the mass of the many just as they are also dethroned and oftentimes executed by the masses too. In this way history can be viewed as a continuous amalgamation of infinitesimal decisions and emotions, personal motivations and private occupations of all involved. The small, everyday man making his small, everyday decisions creates the obtuse power and control that we see rise and fall in a monumental figure like Napoleon.
This type of a theory towards history explains, at least in part, why War and Peace is so lengthy a novel. Tolstoy is occupied with cataloging the small and minute details of various people in the society at a time of great historical significance. These details bring to light the underlying motivators and drivers of larger cultural and mass movements and decisions which can ultimately result in national conflicts and conflagrations as well as broad prosperity and lasting peace. For Tolstoy then the literary and poetic impetus is not only artistic or beautiful but also historically significant, deeply practical, and relevant to all of life. This novel then should be required reading for all poets and writers for it not only justifies the craft and art and labor of all writers and poets but is ardently defending it and elevating it to the grandest and most esteemed cause of all political and historical accomplishments! In 1821 Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his essay A Defense of Poetry, makes bold claims regarding poets and the true power inherent in poetry.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Tolstoy, some 44 years later, advances Shelley’s claim that much further by breathing new life and granular detail into these lines while also impregnating it with grand and historical significance. War and Peace is a rigorous and thorough defense of Shelley’s Defense of Poetry. The undercarriage of the novel is premised on the fact that indeed poets ARE the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” and that history and all the world must pay attention to all of the seemingly mundane details of everyday life and the daily goings of the everyday man. Within these ordinary details lie hidden, in plain sight and with common knowledge no less, the keys and universal laws of all human activity. In America, some 30 years before War and Peace, Ralph Waldo Emerson eloquently spoke similar ideas in his powerful oration called An American Scholar.
The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself.
Perhaps in a more rugged, individualistic tone, Emerson echoes the same empowered and democratic notions as Shelley and Tolstoy. Like both the American Transcendentalists and the English Romantics before him, Tolstoy and War and Peace are proclaiming that the ordinary and the insignificant are the poetic and is exactly where the heartbeat of all the world resides, including the grandiose histories of nations, peoples, and the world.
Ironically, at the same time Tolstoy is promoting the claim for a more democratic account of history, he is also writing one of the most quintessential pieces of literature on the nature and life of the aristocracy. Nearly every single character in War and Peace is part of the aristocracy or attempting to rise into the aristocracy. The novel provides an illustrious and accurate account of the lives, concerns, and activities of various members of the aristocracy while hardly mentioning with considerable attention or detail any peasants at all. Can it be deduced then that Tolstoy regards the infinitely small decisions of the aristocracy as perhaps more powerful than the ordinary decisions from those of the peasant class? Personally I think that Tolstoy, through his gargantuan and sole focus on the aristocracy, did balance his democratic views of history with liberal doses of education, culture, and class. And although from today’s landscape we may view this as backwards thinking, I think that when placed within the historical context, Tolstoy is a man of his time regarding his views towards the aristocracy. I suspect he would have agreed with Thomas Jefferson when he stated, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” A few years after War and Peace was first serialized in 1865, the Fourteenth Amendment was to be passed in America granting citizenship, but not voting rights, to all persons born in America. A year later the Fifteenth Amendment would pass granting freed male slaves and non-white men the right to vote. In this way, War and Peace is perhaps a product of its time, focusing, like the founding fathers of America, simultaneously and perhaps with contradiction, upon the great power of democracy as well as the necessity for aristocracy. At it’s root, the word aristocracy is Greek and breaks down into two main parts – aristos which means best and kratia which means power. The term indicated a government ruled by its best citizens, an idea which I suspect few would disagree with. However what is the best? What determines the best? Historically of course the aristocracy soon devolved into meaning simply the wealthiest, not necessarily the best. Those wealthy best then became the land owners and would pass down the inheritance of the nobility which would then go on to dominate and control Europe for centuries. The scarcity of land relative to the population, among other key factors, eventually led to various revolutions in the middle to late Nineteenth century across Europe, as well as the terrible rise of Marxist ideology, and the jealousy and envy of the promise of land and freedom during the manifest destiny occurring in the more free and democratic America. Just as Shelley describes how works of poetry are “mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,” Tolstoy in War and Peace was in many respects also illustrating “the gigantic shadows” of class and wealth disparity that soon enough Europe and especially Mother Russia would be facing head-on.
Frighteningly we can begin to see the seeds and justifications of communism and authoritarian oppression in Tolstoy’s plebeian analysis of history with the focus upon the infinitely small in War and Peace. Any state-run authority can more easily justify ordering the everyday man to work in a factory, to ration his food, and to sacrifice his leisure and profits, because those infinitely small actions are what actually decides the success and greatness of a nation, its military, and its culture. And none other than Tolstoy, the greatest writer ever and a homegrown Russian no less, proves it to be true! As each citizen sacrifices for his country and abstains from his own success for the supposed greater success of his country, the way is paved for oppression, destitution, and even genocide. In a sense then it is no wonder that Russia is where communism rooted itself and spread like a cancer upon the body of the world. Their great Tolstoy and his incredible ideas could be easily abused and misused, misunderstood and manipulated to serve the state and the powerful few, ironically the new form of aristocracy under communism, all in the name of history, greatness, art, the grand yet small everyman, and of course Mother Russia.
However at the time of its writing and its publication, War and Peace was a product of Russian literature that existed in suspense between various worlds and possible ideologies. The text lives in a brief pocket of time when Russia, although still a monarchy, was also being influenced by the democratic ideals of America, the chaotic excesses of revolution in France, and was still a generation or two before the horrific communist dictatorships of the early 20th century. War and Peace then paints a picture of a Russia that could have been. A Russia that perhaps like the rest of Europe, could have gradually and steadily balanced its way out of monarchy and a degraded aristocracy into a capitalist democracy where freedom, innovation, wealth, and abundance could flourish more easily. But unfortunately history, and as Tolstoy would likely say, the infinitesimal decisions of the Russian everyman, charted a different course altogether, perhaps in part interestingly enough to the widespread popularity and profound contributions War and Peace itself made in Russia and across the globe.
It is important to note as well that Tolstoy’s historical paradigm was not random, arbitrary, or even just circumstantial. According to Tolstoy, things don’t “just happen” as the saying goes. Napoleon didn’t lose the pivotal Battle of Borodino simply because he had the flu or he failed to make this military decision over that decision, or he was stationed farther away from the battlefield and so couldn’t communicate quickly enough with his generals. Oh no! The reasons for success and failure are not isolated to peculiar, odd, or unusual people, events, or circumstances. History does not focus itself down to one man, one event, or one anomaly. According to Tolstoy’s theories, there are laws and permutations underneath all of this, which are actually driving the men, the events, the anomalies. Napoleon lost the Battle of Borodino, his Russian campaign, and ultimately his entire empire because of the larger and also more infinitesimally minute accumulation of actions and peoples, ideas and decisions which eventually result in these various “reasons” mentioned above which more classical approaches to history reference and obsess over. Something deeper, more powerful, lies underneath. History and civilization are not random rolls of the dice. There is no luck involved in this calculus. It is not simply a matter of what Tolstoy calls “chance and genius.” In the First Chapter of the First Epilogue Tolstoy writes:
The words chance and genius do not denote any really existing thing and therefore cannot be defined. Those words only denote a certain stage of understanding of phenomena. I do not know why a certain event occurs; I think that I cannot know it; so I do not try to know it and I talk about chance. I see a force producing effects beyond the scope of ordinary human agencies; I do not understand why this occurs and I talk of genius.
In this way Tolstoy is destroying the concept of randomness or fate, and by doing so he is also implying the existence of a higher law, some form of an historical determinism. It wasn’t by chance then that Russia destroyed Napoleon, the greatest army at the time. Likewise Napoleon himself didn’t rise to his incredible power by chance either. No it was all determined by higher, and perhaps subtler, laws and movements of history and humanity. Russia was the victor against France for fundamental reasons. This concept also makes War and Peace a patriotic story of the greatness of Russia and her countrymen while simultaneously furthering these innovative views of both a democratic as well as deterministic approach to history. But what are the laws behind this historical determinism? Tolstoy is not so clear regarding this. In fact in the Second Chapter of the First Epilogue he admits that he does not know the larger universal law holding history together.
Only by renouncing our claim to discern a purpose immediately intelligible to us, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond our ken, may we discern the sequence of experiences in the lives of historic characters and perceive the cause of the effect they produce (incommensurable with ordinary human capabilities), and then the words chance and genius become superfluous.
Like Tolstoy, I also like to consider that history is not a random fate or some unknown will of the gods the likes of which we find throughout Homer’s ancient Greek poems, or simply a matter of luck and happenstance. Instead history is determined by more universal, human values, some larger overarching universal laws which do shape and direct the events of man. Now Tolstoy never exactly lays out what those laws may be. After thoroughly dissecting and then rejecting the typical notions of the universal laws of history, he does finally conclude that power is a fundamental factor, however even this is incomplete for Tolstoy’s rigor.
Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event; physically it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity is inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event is neither in the one nor in the other but in the union of the two. Or in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable to the phenomena we are examining.
In the last analysis we reach the circle of infinity- that final limit to which in every domain of thought man’s reason arrives if it is not playing with the subject.
Because he concludes that the real cause of an event is found “in the union” between the wielder and submitter to power, Tolstoy also concludes that there must be something greater acting as the catalyst so that this power dynamic can function as it does. Perhaps unfortunately, the final truths and ultimate answers to this something greater, this ultimate universal law of mankind remains enshrouded in mystery. For Tolstoy it may be a concept surpassing understanding. The answer leads to an answer which circles upon itself again. Tolstoy references science to further illustrate his dilemma.
Electricity produces heat, heat produces electricity. Atoms attract each other and atoms repel one another.
Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of atoms, we cannot say why this occurs, and we say that it is so because it is inconceivable otherwise, because it must be so and that it is a law. The same applies to historical events. Why war and revolution occur we do not know. We only know that to produce the one or the other action, people combine in a certain formation in which they all take part, and we say that this is so because it is unthinkable otherwise, or in other words that it is a law.
This logical impasse poses a great problem for Tolstoy, and interestingly it is never resolved in his Epilogues. The final words of War and Peace submit that we must “recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.” To this ominous ending, I would like to venture my own estimation of what perhaps is this law, factor, or “dependence,” determining our history, our powers, and motivating whatever free will and reason we possess. In short, I assert the determining factor for the fate of man both individually as well as collectively lies in virtue.
Virtue is a lofty notion which is echoed by Ancient Israel, the classic Greeks all the way through the Stoics to the founding fathers of America. In Tolstoy’s writings we see it transposed from the individual seeking a life of virtue as Aristotle discusses at length for example, onto a larger multitude of people, a nation, and even the world over. The transposition of these values and laws of virtue from the individual to the masses is similar to how Plato also uses the greater state as a metaphor for the individual, furthering his own philosophical arguments throughout The Republic. The more virtuous wins the war and therefore wins in history. The greater the virtue, the greater the historical laws of determinism bend towards you. Of course the immediate question becomes what is virtue? And why do bad things happen to virtuous people while good things happen to vile people? For a moment however let us put those philosophical questions aside and consider simply that virtue is piety and piety is freedom (Side-note – this is of course a larger discussion which I would very much like to continue at length at a later date, and include our friends Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and perhaps Aquinas and others as well in the conversation. But that is as I say for another day so please bear with my quick summations here for the purposes of this article.). I do see justification for this idea of virtue and freedom being supported by Tolstoy himself. In the final lines of the First Chapter of the First Epilogue he states, “If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed.” Freedom, although as Tolstoy reminds us is limited and restricted within our bodies and in this world, is nevertheless a cornerstone not just for virtue but also for life itself. Freedom then, no matter its limitations, is a critical element that must govern or at least greatly contribute towards the laws of history and mankind. The more a man as well as a people bend towards freedom, the more they bend towards virtue, and it is that virtue which empowers all of mankind. For a larger discussion of the dynamics between freedom and reason in the Epilogue of War and Peace you can check out my earlier blog post here.
Looking at virtue in this manner, consider the outcomes of wars through time – Hitler losing to the greater freedom of the West, the USSR losing to the USA, the American Revolution shirking off an overbearing England, the Greeks defending themselves against the invading Persians, the Muslims unable to invade Europe, Rome falling only once it was corrupted and wayward by the free, albeit barbaric, roaming Gauls. Even the military accounts throughout the Old Testament illustrate this very concept time and time again that the more Israel was virtuous and pious, the more successful and powerful was the state of Israel.
It is also fascinating to consider that in 1917, nearly 50 years after the publication of War and Peace, we find Russia struggling deeply with the notions and concepts Tolstoy explicitly and implicitly lays out in this epic novel – the values and dynamics of Freedom and Virtue, Reason and Oppression, Fate and Determinism. It becomes even more interesting to note that again in nearly another 25 years during World War 2, we see Russia once again faced with another land invasion, this time by Hitler, a man even less virtuous and less free than Mother Russia at the time. And here again these values and greater determining laws of history work themselves out in the everyday, infinitesimal decisions and daily lives of all Russians lining up, uniting, and fighting to once again protect and defend their homeland against tyrannical invaders.
In this way then the more a nation is virtuous, the more successful and great and victorious it will be. For Tolstoy, greater laws of humanity and historical determinism decree this to be so. And the way a nation becomes more virtuous is by those individuals within that nation living a more virtuous and upright life. And they way those individuals live a more virtuous and upright life is by making decisions in their daily, everyday lives that lean towards Freedom and Piety. The principles of Freedom and Piety govern the laws of humanity. In this way the continuous and infinitesimal calculus is constructed, resulting ultimately in events of political and historical greatness, and providing the copious material for which Tolstoy could write the brilliant, epic novel that is War and Peace. It is those infinitesimal details that indicate the barometric pressure of virtue and poetry within a man, a family, a town, a nation, a people. Man, in all that he does, is imbued with great and real power. It burns off of him and catches fire to all that he touches and handles. Each man literally holds the destiny of not just his own life, but the fate of his nation, his people, even the world. Each of us is already a natural element of life. We are both directing as well as submitting to the great laws of creation fixed and rotating all around us. No matter who we are, or where we are, or what we are doing, each of us is carefully crafting all of our human existence and all of mankind’s greatness, stitching together ever further the infinite strain of uninterrupted being that is the poetry of our incredible human history.
Pingback: Real Human Progress – Civil Obedience to a Simple Liberty – A Musing Mario