Critical Insights: War and Peace Tolstoy's Dialogue with His Readers

Home , Afanasy Fet, Mikhail Kutuzov, Nikolai Leskov

9/9/2014 Salem Press

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. As is perhaps inevitable with a historical novel, some readers found Tolstoy's depiction of the first decade of the century wanting. A veteran of that period, A. S. Norov, claimed that no one at a St. Petersburg salon like Anna Scherer's would have called Napoleon the “Antichrist”: “Not one of these salons bears the slightest resemblance to that described by Count Tolstoy” (3; Knowles 151). However, it is clear that Norov's hackles were up more due to Tolstoy's rendition of the major Russian generals of the time: “I cannot read this novel which purports to be historical without feeling my patriotism deeply insulted” (Knowles 150). In addition to former soldiers, the critic M. P. Pogodin and the great novelist Ivan Turgenev opposed his portraits of such notable figures as the politicians Mikhail Speransky and Count Fyodor Rastopchin and the generals Prince Mikhail Kutuzov and Prince Pyotr Bagration (Knowles 19–20). Pyotr Vyazemsky, Pushkin's contemporary, also questioned the portrayal of Tsar Alexander I (Knowles 23). Some, like N. D. Akhsharumov, found the many battle scenes “not so interesting” and not particularly true to the Napoleonic Era, that they were “rather general and could have taken place in any war at any time” (Knowles 98). On the other hand, many readers praised precisely these scenes. Tolstoy's unprecedented intrusion of passages of pure, usually historical, philosophy was certain to raise at least eyebrows, if not skepticism—even if they are relatively restrained in the first half of the work. An unsigned review winced at “the extremely un-new and curious philosophy of the author himself […] about history which make[s] everyone involuntarily wonder whether the count is joking” (Knowles 136). The great writer Nikolai Leskov reported that he had heard that some readers were calling Tolstoy, “an idiot, a madman, a realist [sic!], a troll” (Knowles 20–21). Turgenev described the philosophy as “childish,” but Nikolai Strakhov, the most prominent critic of the period, later concluded, “War and Peace reaches the highest peaks of human thought and feeling, peaks not usually climbed by man” (Knowles 164–65). A common complaint, one shared by many readers today, is that War and Peace is not only long, but, worse, slow. Characteristic is Pavel Annenkov's observation, at about the midpoint of the text, that:

whatever has taken place in the novel, in the strict meaning of the word, has not moved at all or, if it has, only with incredible apathy and slowness. The big wheel of the novel's mechanism has scarcely changed its position; it has not put any real part into action and has merely let the small wheels move with inscrutable speed through their extraneous work. The big wheel of the novel in our opinion can only be the plot and the central idea of the work which is inextricably connected with it. The plot is nowhere to be seen, not even in the scenes of political and social life however remarkable they might be (Knowles 103).

Nevertheless, elsewhere in the same essay, he then wrote of “the burning pages of this remarkable novel” and wondered, “surely all of this is all marvelous from start to finish” (Knowles 105). Much of this problem is due to the sheer mass—Annenkov's term was “chaos”—of its details (Knowles 100). Botkin opined at the very outset that “there were certainly too many of them” (Knowles 19). Annenkov keenly perceived:

the unceasing analysis of the author which tells us the real meaning of almost every movement he has his characters make, their every look, word and even their clothes because in this peculiar world people express themselves far more through elusive signs, hints and all sorts of little ways than through simple human speech, behavior or the natural play of expression on the face (Knowles 110).

In effect, Tolstoy's narrative was immediately received as being packed with useful information, keen insights into human behavior, not just of the beginning of the century, but of all time. Many readers wrote of him as a painter and a psychologist. But readers, like Virginia Woolf, were discomfited; although she praised him as “the greatest of all novelists—for what else can we call the author of War and Peace?,” she also admitted that “there is an element of fear which makes us […] wish to escape from the gaze Tolstoi fixes on us” (Bloom 34).9 The major problem with confronting War and Peace on first glance, was what to make of it. Notably Tolstoy insisted that Katkov not define it as a novel. The first installment was introduced as simply, “‘1805,’ by Count Leo Tolstoy.” No genre was specified. Nor could one be specified, for what Tolstoy offered was sui generis, “of its own kind.” While we will discuss the virtues to this tactic, the immediate downside—at the same time a virtue— http://literature.salempress.com/doi/abs/10.3331/CIWP_0006 3/7 9/9/2014 Salem Press was that readers did not know what to expect, hence they were not sure how to read “1805.” Let us return to Botkin's first comment: “the thread is still not at all clear; this is because of the predominance of detail” (Knowles 89). More likely, it was the other way around, unable to discern the structuring theme, he and other readers did not know how to handle all of the information Tolstoy provided. An unsigned review made a strikingly similar complaint:

These pictures and characters are not united by any controlling idea or anything which would give an inner life or a logic to the events: everything is mixed up into a general mass where one can see neither the reasons for not the consequences of the events or the appearance of heroes or facts […]. we can see in [first 3 volumes] no unity, nothing definite which would tell us a little of the novel's idea or objectives (Knowles 134–35).

Tolstoy's was neither the first nor that last book of its size, just one in an unfamiliar format. As a result, most of the first responses to Tolstoy's narrative were mixed, ambivalent. This may account for most of the other concerns Akhsharumov voiced:

We cannot place this work categorically in any of the usual literary genres. It is neither a chronicle nor a historical novel. Although in form it is fairly close to the latter, in content it lacks any dramatic unity; the action has no central place; an opening, an intrigue, and a denouement are all missing; also it is clearly unfinished, but its general sense does not suffer in any way from these faults, and which we therefore cannot call faults. On the other hand, it seems to us that a more strict framework would have been inhibiting and in order to be complete would have demanded things which the author neither had nor should have had in mind (Knowles 91).

How a historical chronicle could even be considered as a model is hard to imagine, given that the original text, like the canonical version, begins in medias res with dramatized dialogue. That the historical novel, which it certainly is in some respects, was passed over, we take as further evidence of Akhsharumov's disorientation. Especially interesting is his suspicion that these innovations might rather be useful, that the normal restrictions imposed by generic definitions might be “inhibiting.” Very likely, Tolstoy was hoping for such unguarded responses. Disoriented, War and Peace's first readers made telling errors in their grasp of the text. One of the anonymous reviewers, previously cited here, complained:

One just cannot make out either the basic idea behind the work or why and for whom the author brings in all those poor little Nikolenkas, Natashas, Mimis and Borises, on whom it is impossible to focus one's attention amid all the descriptions of military actions and a kind of fictional relating of the times in which it seems the work's main interest lies. One does not even know whether these characters figure as heroes or whether in their individual insignificance they form but the background (Knowles 90).

We should note that “Mimi” is not a character but a doll. The reviewer then ventured to guess that “some of them (Anatole Kuragin, Dolokhov, etc.) appear to be the main personages in the story” (Knowles 90). Evidently, Natasha, Pierre, Prince Andrei, and Princess Marya all escaped his or her notice. This, at least, was followed by a correct guess, that the first two installments were “but the prologue for some huge epic” (Knowles 90). To some extent, Tolstoy responded positively to these criticisms. He virtually eliminated all of the French from last edition of the novel he personally supervised in 1873. However, he not only largely stuck to his guns, he increased the unique contour—some would say eccentricity—of his text. For example, he considerably expanded his authorial intrusions into the narrative. These wax over the last three volumes and culminate with the latter half of the first epilogue and the entirety of the second, where Tolstoy drops all pretense of continuing his narrative. What other work of art concludes with an extensive and head-spinning essay, let alone one on the nature of the universe? In 1868, Tolstoy could no longer be content to respond by continuing or rewriting War and Peace. In a virtually unprecedented move, he answered his critics, while his story was as yet unfinished, with an essay, “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace.” Writing in The Russian Archive, another prominent journal, the http://literature.salempress.com/doi/abs/10.3331/CIWP_0006 4/7 9/9/2014 Salem Press writer outlined and replied to the most pressing concerns. He began by boldly stating that the work was not “a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle,” but rather “what the writer wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed” (1217). With this virtually meaningless reply, Tolstoy stonewalled his critics, both here and in the narrative, where its eccentricities subsequently waxed, not waned. He was similarly defiant with his defense of his depiction of the Napoleonic Era, including: 1) his failure to address social ills of that time; 2) the—for many, excessive—use of French; and 3) his critique of the histories of the period, while falsely denying his use of actual personages—beyond such historical figures who bear their own names in the text—as prototypes for his fictional characters.10 He had a lot to say about each of these concerns, especially that of historical verisimilitude—but nothing more regarding the major issue, that of generic definition. War and Peace would have to be accepted as is. The “dialogue” we have described was best summarized by Strakhov's 1870 announcement, “the great work is finished”:

War and Peace has suffered the fate of everything truly great. The truly great is often not recognized by people at all; sometimes it fascinates them and overcomes them with its power but almost without exception it is not understood. The usual course of events is the people feel its greatness, but do not understand it… The inexpressible charm of the story struck everyone and overcame them, but there was at the same time a general bewilderment caused by the inability to grasp what the work was all about. One could say that War and Peace is the least understood of all the works in Russian literature (Knowles 164).

Strakhov's declaration holds true for so many of the greatest genre-redefining masterpieces: The Ninth Symphony, Le sacre de printemps, The Illiad, Doctor Faustus, Hamlet, and on and on. These are sui generis works that require audiences to adjust to their demands, not the other way around, thus educating them to new, creative potentials.11 As Vladimir Nabokov, author of another genre-exploding masterpiece, Pale Fire, put it, “every new writer evolves a new type of reader” (Nabokov 316). As an example of this process of adjustment and self-education, we cite the case of the great, albeit more conventional, novelist, Ivan Turgenev. His initial response to Tolstoy's new work in 1865 was that “the novel strikes me as positively bad, boring, and unsuccessful.” (Bloom 25) Things were somewhat improved three years later when he wrote, the same month that Tolstoy published his defiant essay, “I read Tolstoy's novel with pleasure, although I remain dissatisfied with a lot.” (Bloom 25) In another letter at about the same time, he wrote Annenkov about the work being: “a puppet comedy and charlatanism … there is no real development in any of the characters (which by the way you noticed yourself) … And how wearisome are those deliberate and insistent repetitions of one and the same trait …” But then he reached an unexpected conclusion, “Despite all this, though, there are things in this novel which no one in Europe save Tolstoy could have written and which have aroused in me the chill and fever of ecstasy” (Knowles 182). Two months later, he told Fet, “There are things in it that are unbearable, and things that are wonderful; and the wonderful things, which generally predominate, are so magnificently good that we have never had anything better written by anybody and it is doubtful that anything as good has ever been written” (Knowles 182). Nevertheless, the following year, he reported to a friend, “he produces on me the impression of an elephant at the zoo: clumsy, even preposterous, but enormous—and how intelligent!” (Knowles 182). In effect, Turgenev's comparison of Tolstoy to an elephant anticipates probably the most famous reaction to the latter's work, that of the American writer Henry James (1908), who referred to War and Peace as a “loose, baggy monster,” obviously flinching at the Russian's challenge to the genre of the novel: “his example for others dire: disciples not elephantine he can only mislead and betray” (Maude 1114). Turgenev continued, albeit in fits and starts, to adjust to Tolstoy's challenge. Shortly after the first French translation (1879), he told the French public it is “one of the most remarkable books of our time” and that he had made his peace with its unusual form:

The manner in which Count Tolstoy develops his theme is as new as it is original […] this is a great work by a great writer (Bartlett 179).

NOTES

http://literature.salempress.com/doi/abs/10.3331/CIWP_0006 5/7 9/9/2014 Salem Press 1. As Janet Tucker discusses in this volume, Tolstoy created a gap in The Russian Herald's publication schedule, first by running late with his installments, then by breaking off the arrangement altogether. The journal's publisher was thus especially glad to accept Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. 2. This is a translation of Evelina E. Zaidenshnur's reconstruction of the text Tolstoy initially completed in December 1866, capped with “The End”; it was initially published in Literaturnoe Nasledstvo 94 (1983) and republished by Igor Zakharov, Moscow, 2007. Cf. Hugh McLean's cautions regarding this edition (2008). Tolstoy returned to conventional publication practice a decade later, when he had Anna Karenina appear first in serial form, 1873–1877, followed by the complete novel in 1878. 3. Citations from this volume will be cited with the editor's name and page number only. 4. The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation renders this passage as “Well, my prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than possessions, estates, of the Buonaparte family.” All references to the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation are by page numbers only. 5. See Sara Marie Stefani's study of such foreign culture in the text later in this volume. 6. See Anne Hruska's study of the class system and the status of Russia's many peasants in the text, earlier in this volume. 7. Citations from the Norton Critical Edition will be made with the translator's name and page number only. 8. See Janet Tucker's essay on the theme later in this volume. 9. Citations from Harold Bloom's collection will be made by the editor's name and page number only. 10. Some of this is summarized in my capsule biography of Tolstoy earlier in this volume. Tolstoy's article is included in some translations; e.g., 1217–24 of the Pevear & Volokhonsky, 1089–96 of the Maude, and 124–33 of Knowles' compendium. Tolstoy also took a swipe at his erstwhile friend Turgenev: “there is not a single work of artistic prose in the modern period of Russian literature, rising slightly above mediocre, that would fit perfectly into the form of the novel, the epic, or the story” (1217). 11. For the essential statement on War and Peace's generic innovation, see Morson, from whom this phrase is borrowed.

WORKS CITED

Bartlett, Rosamund. Tolstoy: A Russian Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Bloom, Harold, ed. Leo Tolstoy. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2002. Knowles, A.V., ed. Tolstoy: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. McLean, Hugh. “Review of Leo Tolstoy, 2007, War and Peace. Original Version. Trans. Andrew Bromfield.” Tolstoy Studies Journal 20 (2008): 82–87. Morson, Gary Saul. Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Ed. Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1980. Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Ed. George Gibian. Trans. Aylmer Maude. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996. Norton Critical Edition Ser. ______. War and Peace. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. ______. War and Peace, Original Version. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. New York: Ecco, 2007. Troyat, Henri. Tolstoy. Trans. Nancy Amphoux. New York: Harmony Books, 1967.

Brett Cooke

Article Citation Cooke, Brett. "Tolstoy's Dialogue with His Readers." Critical Insights: War and Peace. Ed. Cooke Brett. Salem Press, 2014. Salem Literature Web. 09 Sep. 2014.

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