Tolstoy's vision of history

Last month, the one hundredth death anniversary of the great novelist Leo Tolstoy was commemorated in many parts of the world. By the time he died at the age of 82 in 1910, he had become a worldwide phenomenon; his death was written about and commented upon throughout the world.

As a novelist, short story writer, playwright, cultural analyst, educator, visionary Tolstoy exerted a profound influence on the thought and imagination of his times and beyond. His thinking had a profound impact on Mahatma Gandhi and his non-violence movement. Anyone who reads the letters exchanged between Gandhi and Tolstoy would come to see their close bond of interests and vision.

Tolstoy is generally regarded as the greatest novelist, although some would wish to bestow that title on his fellow-countryman Dostoevsky. Virginia Woolf, whose styles and representational strategies were very different from Tolstoy said, ‘There remains the greatest of all novelists - for what else can we call the author of War and Peace’. E.M. Forster, despite his criticism of certain aspects of the novel called ‘the greatest novel ever written.’

The novelists John Galsworthy and Hugh Walpole used the same words to characterize this novel. Ernest Hemingway called it ‘the best book I know.’ Percy Lubbock, the author of the highly influential The Craft of Fiction, despite his adverse comments on the form and structure of the novel called it a magnificent work. Few novels continue to be as consequential as War and Peace.

‘War and Peace’ is a domestic novel that unfolds within the framework of war, an historical novel, a prose poem with metaphysical propensities, a depiction of the life of the aristocracy and a national epic. Both in the narrative and exegetical segments, Tolstoy sought to expound his theory of history. It is this aspect of his ambition that I wish to explore.

Tolstoy’s writings have had a great influence on modern Sinhala literature. Martin Wickremasinghe, Ediriweera Sarchchandra and Gunadasa Amarasekera – the three most brilliant modern Sinhala writers – were great admirers of Tolstoy’s works. Hs novels such as ‘War and Peace’, ‘Anna Karenina’ ‘Kreutzer Sonata’, his short stories, his critical works have been translated into Sinhala. Prasanna Vithanages film ‘Ananta Rathriya’ is based on Tolstoy’s novel ‘Resurrection’. Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ has become point of reference in discussions of Sinhala fiction although not many seem to have read the entire novel.

In today’s column, I wish to focus on the vision of history that Leo Tolstoy projected through his works. This topic is important in view of the fact that the relationship between fiction and history has been thrown into sharp relief by Gunadasa Amarasekera in his chain of novels, the ninth and the final, was published last month. These novels foreground in complex and interesting ways the intersections of fiction and history – a theme that was dear to Tolstoy.

Commenting on Gunadasa Amarasekera’s chain of novels tat had its origin in ‘Gamanaka Mula’ I made the following observation in my book, ‘Sinhala Novel and the Public Sphere.’ in his portrayal of the moral predicament of the protagonist, Amarasekera is also demonstrating the fact that the protagonist should not be regarded as a sovereign individual who is self-contained and self-present and who has total autonomy over all his actions.

What Amarasekera is pointing to is the complex way in which the protagonist is also shaped by the social and historical forces operative in society and the formulations of Lukacs that were referred to earlier enable us to comprehend this aspect more fully.

He is making it clear that morality needs to be understood in a wide political context. In other words, the two sets of issues, the one dealing with the social and historical, and the other with the individual moral predicament are vitally connected.

Leo Tolstoy’s approach history would endorse this line of thinking. Many essays and books have been written that aim to explore the perspective on history formulated by Tolstoy. However, in my judgment, Sir Isaiah Berlin’s classic essay, ‘The Fox and the Hedgehog’, written some six decades ago, is still the most stimulating and insightful. In this essay Berlin makes a distinction between the fox and the hedgehog.

Citing a line from a Greek poet he says, ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Using this line, Berlin divides thinkers into two categories. Dante, Plato, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche are hedgehogs; Shakespeare, Aristotle, Erasmus, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes. According to Berlin, the problem with Tolstoy is that he was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog.

That is to say, ‘his gifts and achievements are one thing, and his beliefs, and consequently his interpretation of his achievement, another.’ He explores this theme incisively in relation to his novel ‘War and Peace’. Tolstoy’s vision of history is at the center of Berlin’s exegesis.

The novel ‘War and Peace’ deals centrally with the topic of history. He wrote it over a period of time and made many revisions. Scholars have compared these different drafts and have chosen to formulate certain ideas and offer various speculations related to his vision and craft. Two intersecting theme underwrite the experience of war and peace – the flow of history ad the dynamics of human psychology.

What is clear in reading his literary texts as well his commentarial observations is that he entertained serious doubts about the much-vaunted theories of history that sought to explain the diversity, heterogeneity of historical events by unified and singular theories.

He regarded with utter disdain the system-mongering that was current at the time. On the other hand, he placed a great deal of emphasis on the role of chance in everyday life. He makes this point not only in the epilogues, but also through characters such as Prince Andrei.

What Tolstoy wished to emphasize was the fact that historical events were products of both chance and manifold and complicated lines of causality. In ‘War and Peace’, the author often presses into service the phrase ‘for some reason’, signposting the important function attributed to chance in human affairs

Many critics have written about the conflict of free will and determinism in ‘War and Peace’ and other writings. Berlin thought that Tolstoy was arguing fr determinism.

To my mind, the situation is more complex and merits closer analysis. The term determinism has been deployed somewhat loosely. If by determinism we mean that there are iron laws of history, they are relatively simple and that they shape human behavior Tolstoy was not a determinist.

He focused on the idea of events and demonstrated, for example in the battle scenes, that they are the confluence of a broad range of natural occurrences and human volitions.

In the first and second epilogues in War and Peace, Tolstoy discusses the counter-productivity of seeking to reduce the plurality of forces that shape events to a unity one.

As one astute critic has observed, ‘the Tolstoyan world is one in which the chance upsets plans, systems are always hazardous, and the narratives we construct are always at war with the lives we lead. How must we make decisions in a universe of uncertainty, where responsibility is so difficult to determine, and yet where, ultimately, lives and actions must be judged as good or bad.’

He tension between freedom and necessity that Tolstoy highlights is central to a proper understanding of his vision of history. His ruminations on history in the third book of war and peace, and is dealt at great length in the second epilogue. Writers such as Flaubert and Turgenev were unhappy with these extended speculations. He did not deviate from his chosen path. Tolstoy once remarked, ‘my ideas on the limits of freedom and necessity….are the fruit of a whole life-time’s intellectual activity…

Tolstoy sought to resolve the tension between necessity and freedom in the textuality of ‘War and Peace’. Certain critics such as Percy Lubbock were quick to find a divergence between narrative and disquisition. However, a careful examination of the novel would demonstrate that it is not the case. Tolstoy discusses this issue at length in the later chapters of the novel and when we observe very intently, for example his hunting scene, we would realize how he aimed to resolve the tension arising from this duality.

In the last chapters, Tolstoy, in dealing with this issue, resorts increasingly to abstract vocabulary, ad one that offers a sharp contrast to the dramatic portions of the work however, Tolstoy defended his position. He said that, ‘what I have expressed in the epilogue of the novel….is not the momentary fancy of my mind but the inevitable conclusions of seven years of work, which I had to do.’

Tolstoy enunciated a view of history that centered on the idea of event. (interestingly, the concept of event has become central in modern cultural theory. Theorists with different theorists such as Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou and Ranciere) have given it a place of centrality.

His considered view was that everyone and everything that involved with an event cause it and give rise to it. This idea of event sheds light on the interplay of necessity and freedom.

Tolstoy remarked, ‘however long or short a period of time we select however explicable or unfathomable the causes of the act may be to us, we can never conceive of complete free will, nor of complete necessity in any action. It is in the light of this statement that we need to re-think his idea of event and how it relates to his vision of history. The necessity that Tolstoy had in mind was not the impersonal force of history but the actions of other people.

An event comes into being as a consequence of a large number of people influenced by a large number of conditions creating it. For him, thoughts and actions of heroic figures such as napoleon and simple individuals like Tushin are of equal importance. It is to the deciphering of this confluence of forces that Tolstoy as a novelist and thinker devoted his energies.

When one examines such characters as Pierre, Natasha, Sonya, Nicholas, Prince Andrew, Princess Mary, one realizes that although they labor under the delusion that they are the masters of their destiny, their lives are in fact shared chance accidents, unanticipated forces.

Tolstoy was very sceptical of the rule of reason in life. One reason why he depicts napoleon in unflattering terms is that he was the victim of two illusions – that men of superior power can rule the world ad that reason guides life. As Tolstoy remarked, ‘If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then the possibility of life is destroyed.’

On the basis of my reading of Tolstoy’s works and on my reflections on them, I wish to point out six important features. First, he discarded the great man theory of history which was current at the time, and which still has a formidable following.

He rejected the notion that leaders like Napoleon shape historical events. Second,he was opposed to the widely held belief that the impact of history can be depicted through neatly formulated laws and generalities.

Third, he downplayed the influence of reason in history and the affairs of human beings. For him, napoleon represents the essence of reason, of planning, design; he believed that an individual human being through the careful exercise of the faculties of reason ad planning can inflect historical events.

Tolstoy rejected this view; hence his critical depiction of Napoleon. Fourth, Tolstoy sought to establish a balance between necessity and freedom. He did not side with either and aimed to demonstrate their complex interaction in the forward movement of history.

Fifth, he chose to focus on the idea of event that I discussed earlier. For him, an event represents the confluence of a plurality of forces that cannot be reduced to a single force or a unitary law. Tolstoy himself observed, ‘there can be no beginning to an event, for one event always flows uninterruptedly out of another’. Sixth, his understanding of the flow of history is marked by the play of antithesis and juxtapositions.

The very structure of war and peace bears testimony to this fact. He contrasts characters, their moods, situations, abstract notions, oppositional groups, throughout the novel.

He valued this device of antithesis very highly. Some Russian critics referred to Tolstoy’s penchant for rhyming situations; situations rhyme and thoughts reverberate, and images come together. It seems to me these representational features enable us to enter his understanding of history in a profitable way.

To my mind, this idea of event is crucial to figuring out both this social vision and representational strategies. It was his conviction that the most significant events are those that barely receive attention.

He seems to think that the happiest times experienced by Rostov, for example, are the ones he hardly can recall. It was his belief that the most significant moments do not lend themselves to the kind of character portrayal found in fiction. The way he fashioned his literary craft has to be understood in terms of this paradox.

Tolstoy always felt that a historian should capture the texture of a given moment. He devoted much energy to realize this goal.

The difference between an academic historian and a creative writer is that the latter, if he or she is successful, will be able to give us an intimate sense of the texture of society. Tolstoy made a concentrated effort to present to his readers the texture of the social milieu he is dealing with.

This effort is allied to his wonderful capacity for externalization of inward phenomena as evidenced in a passage like the following, as is evidenced by passages as the following.

‘The princess smiled. She rose with the same unchanging smile with which she had first entered the room – the smile of a perfectly beautiful woman. With a slight rustle of her white dress trimmed with moss and ivy, with a gleam of white shoulders, glossy hair, and sparkling diamonds, she passed between the men who made way for her, not looking at any of them but smiling at all….’

Many critics have faulted Tolstoy for not paying adequate attention to questions of form. Henry James characterized it as a ‘large loose baggy monster’

However, there is a certain rationale behind the form of the novel. In order to understand the nature of the form he sought, we need to pay attention to his conception of the flow of history, lives that impinge on each other, the juxtapositions and repetitions. As a critic once remarked, if life could write it would write just as Tolstoy did. Tolstoy sought to depict the way characters grew and evolved in his narratives. The growth of Natasha from a playful child to a mother full of responsibilities is reconfigured well by Tolstoy, this desire to present the evolution of characters has a bearing on the form of his novels.

There are many aspects of Tolstoy’s novels that cry out for detailed analysis. I decided to focus on his vision of history because it is indeed a topic that is of great relevance to Sinhala writers and readers. Martin Wickremasinghe in his trilogy as well as in his creative writings underlined the importance of history.

Gunadasa Amarasekera in his chain of nine novels has taken contemporary social history as his chosen subject; he has forced us to re-think the relationship between literature and history, literary sensibility and historical consciousness, in new and productive ways. It is in this context that Tolstoy’s vision of history assumes a great importance. We may not agree with everything that he says abut history and its role and the way it impacts society. However, by reading his novels carefully, paying close attention to his reconfiguration of history, we can indeed learn many important lessons.

In order to comprehend the nature and significance of Leo Tolstoy’s literary art, we have to focus on content as well as form, vision as well as technique, and in the final analysis they are all interconnected generating a complex unity.

Let us, for example, consider the meticulous attention he has paid to principles of movement, juxtaposition, repetition, reverberation, repetition, association in his verbal art.

He has the rare ability to depict how his characters respond to novel situations in terms of familiar experiences. For example, Nikolai Rostov, an avid sportsman perceives battle in relation to a hunt. When he flees away in battle, Tolstoy compares him to a hare running away before the dogs.

Tolstoy’s vision of history has to be understood in terms of his total literary endeavor.