Critical Insights: War and Peace Tolstoy's Dialogue with His Readers
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
9/9/2014 Salem Press Critical Insights: War and Peace Tolstoy's Dialogue with His Readers War and Peace has been delighting and confusing readers ever since it first was published. Its initial readers were often befuddled by some aspects of the book. They were confused and/or irritated by its large cast of characters, the boundless scale of its time and space, and perceived lack of focus. While it is now recognized as a unique classic of world literature, it had to go through a process of acceptance from the reading public. War and Peace does things readers don't expect a novel—or any narrative—to do. In looking at the dialogue between Tolstoy and his first audience, we can learn a lot, not just about War and Peace itself, but also about how—and why—we read. War and Peace was not always regarded as one of the greatest works of literature, included in the list of books that everyone is supposed to love. Furthermore, to appreciate the initial dialogue between War and Peace and its first readers, we need to undo all the ways in which this epic historical fiction has conditioned our reading (and viewing, if we include film epics like Gone with the Wind, Lord of the Rings, etc.) with huge casts and multiple plot lines, inasmuch as the book made it possible for subsequent artists to work on a much larger scale. As much as anything else, Tolstoy's groundbreaking book greatly expanded popular expectations as to what could be attempted by a novelist. They also had much to learn about themselves, a central mission of art. So let us first return to the way in which people read literature in the middle of the nineteenth century. It will then be clearer how Tolstoy had to educate his audience in many respects if War and Peace were to become a classic, one now often recognized as the greatest novel of all time. For an example of one common misconception, we typically regard a novel as a single object, a completed fact; after all, we typically pick one volume—admittedly, in this case, a heavy one—off the shelf at a time. But earlier readers and their writers more thought of large scale fictions as processes whose composition and thorough consideration could only take place over some substantial passage of time. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it became customary for writers to publish their novels in consecutive issues of the same periodical. Reading a given book may then have been stretched out as much as a year, sometimes more. And this often happened with as-yet unfinished novels. In other words, this practice created the possibility that popular and critical reaction had at least the prospect of influencing the further course of the narrative. Writers and publishers were acutely aware of how the ongoing publication was being received. Of course, writers often read portions of a “work in progress,” usually doing this in order to elicit helpful feedback, but this is typically to a friendly audience of acquaintances, while serial publication exposed a text to possibly hostile criticism. Reviews often appeared with each installment and, of course, the journal or magazine could track much the same with sales. Tolstoy began to publish War and Peace in The Russian Herald in 1865, well before he had completed his narrative—it later will be clear why the term “novel” is avoided in this overview of its reception. In all likelihood, he had not made a final decision as to how it would end. At first, he titled it simply, “1805.” Clearly, this was not going to work for the bulk of the future text, which depicts ensuing years, especially the fall of 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia. Later, he considered altering this to (in an obvious nod to Shakespeare's play of the same name), “All's Well that Ends Well.” This feature alone forecasts a dénouement quite at variance with what eventually transpired; one draft ends with a double wedding and some of the major characters, who do not survive the canonical version, still alive. In other words, as the narrative was making its first appearance, the writer obviously still was mulling over different outcomes, each of which would have transformed everything preceding it. However, there was another wrinkle. Serial publication requires patience on the part of the reader. Even if a one had the time and the will to read the entirety, he or she would have to be patient and wait until all the installments were in print. Something similar is true for television series these days, where one can watch on a week-by-week basis or wait until the end of the year when the complete “season” is available. But at least that reader normally http://literature.salempress.com/doi/abs/10.3331/CIWP_0006 1/7 9/9/2014 Salem Press could be assured of future issues. This expectation, a tacit contract made between a writer and his audience, was violated the next year when Tolstoy abruptly cut off further serial publication of the text. While the mixed initial reviews and public responses to “1805” played a role, the writer was persuaded by his wife that there was more to be gained from publication of the whole narrative in the form of books, rather than piecemeal in journal installments.1 In the meantime, he had substantially rethought the entire project. He rewrote the already serialized first book of the novel and published it as a separate volume under the title, 1805, in June 1866, then published the first three books (volumes), roughly the first half, in 1868, followed by the other three books—six in all—the following year, now under its famous title. War and Peace was an instant a best seller. An English– speaking reader can gauge the scale and nature of Tolstoy's revisions by comparing the standard text with Andrew Bromfield's translation of the “original version.”2 “1805” attracted much attention as soon as it began to appear in The Russian Herald. Notable amongst early responses is how much its first readers took its major characters to heart. What they had to say about Piere Bezukhov, Nikolai Rostov, Natasha, and, in particular, Prince Andrei rivaled in volume Tolstoy's descriptions. Clearly, this text was meaningful to them. But there were some revealing misimpressions of what Tolstoy was doing. Amongst the earliest responses to the initial appearance of “1805,” the prominent critic V. P. Botkin wrote to Afanasy Fet, one of Russia's leading poets and Tolstoy's closest friend, In spite of the fact that I have read more than half of it, the thread is still not at all clear; this is because of the predominance of detail. Besides this, why is there all that conversation in French? It is enough to say that the conversation takes place in French. It is all quite superfluous and has an unpleasant effect (Knowles 89).3 In other words, objections were raised starting with the very first line of the text: “Eh bien, mon prince, Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des estates, de la famille Buonaparte” (3).4 If Tolstoy's aim was to create aversion to the normal means of high society conversation and correspondence, if not the Court in St. Petersburg in general, of the turn of the nineteenth century, he succeeded. Just the same, Botkin's suggestion, normally followed by other writers, was ignored. As an anonymous reviewer wrote, this practice “strikes the reader as something odd” (Knowles 91). Notably, this unknown critic estimated the portion of French in the text at about a third, when the actual figure is closer to two percent—a tellingly hysterical response.5 Of course, related to this common concern was Tolstoy's nearly complete focus on members of the aristocracy, who, indeed, conducted most of their conversation and correspondence in that tongue. N. D. Akhsharumov, in 1867, complained that: the author describes almost exclusively the upper classes and that beyond the tight circle of counts, princes and princesses all talking in French we see not only none of the common people but no other classes either…. A far from complete picture of the epoch (Knowles 99). The great satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin similarly criticized the text for paying so much attention to the elite, while others of Russia's left-wing radicals complained that Tolstoy had not attacked such social ills as, especially, the institution of serfdom (Knowles 22).6 This perspective persisted. Upon appearance of the complete text in 1869, another anonymous critic accused it of being “an apologia for gluttonous aristocrats, sanctimony, hypocrisy and vice” (Troyat 316). But this verdict was by no means unanimous. Rather surprisingly, Dmitri Pisarev, the most prominent radical critic, praised it as “the best work on the pathology of Russian society” (Maude 1099).7 Art often works as a kind of Rorschach test: interpretations are often the result of projective reading, which tells us more about the reader than the text. It should be noted that many Russian intellectuals of the mid-1860s believed that writers were obligated to address the faults of society and use their works to promote reforms. Artists who followed the line of “art for art's sake,” like Tolstoy's close friend Fet, were ostracized. This did not exclude moments of striking insight. Having read only half of the work, one anonymous critic wondered if Tolstoy would “take his novel up to the [eighteen] twenties and show the origins of those thinking people who were created by our intercourse with Europe,” in other words, the Westernizers who believed that Russia should follow European models of culture (Knowles 134).8 He could not have known that this was precisely where Tolstoy would go http://literature.salempress.com/doi/abs/10.3331/CIWP_0006 2/7 9/9/2014 Salem Press about five hundred pages later when he depicts Pierre becoming involved with the incipient secret movement to install constitutional—i.e., limited—monarchy in Russia, the future Decembrists.