tolstoy and ethical history: another look at war and peace
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Rethinking History: The Journalof Theory and PracticePublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrhi20
Tolstoy and ethical history:Another look at War and peaceBeverley Southgate aa Department of History, University of Chichester, UKPublished online: 01 May 2009.
To cite this article: Beverley Southgate (2009) Tolstoy and ethical history: Anotherlook at War and peace , Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 13:2,235-250, DOI: 10.1080/13642520902833841
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Tolstoy and ethical history: Another look
at War and peace
Beverley Southgate*
Department of History, University of Chichester, UK
This essay is concerned with Tolstoy’s attitude to history – both itsnature and its purpose – as that is revealed in War and peace. Tolstoy iscritical of historians who, he believes, exaggerate the role of ‘great men’:exemplified in particular by Napoleon, such men are far less in controlof events – are far less free – than they themselves might claim and thanappears from such reports as constitute historical evidence. Vividdescriptions of battles (based partly on the author’s own experience ofmilitary service) indicate an underlying chaos, of which only subsequentrationalisations can make any sense; and that is emblematic of the pastmore generally. Tolstoy’s own focus on the sufferings of ‘ordinary’people reveals his moral purpose – to examine the causes and conditionsof man’s continuing inhumanity to man. Despite an unresolvedinconsistency regarding freewill and determinism, that introduction ofan ethical dimension into historical studies may be of particular interesttoday.
Keywords: Tolstoy; ‘great men’; war; inhumanity; inevitability; ethics
Introduction
Leo Tolstoy is well known for his critique of conventional historians,1 whosework he considered deficient in a number of important respects. Influencedby such thinkers as Joseph de Maistre, Alexander Herzen, and Pierre JosephProudhon (Sampson 1973), he derided in particular historians’ scientific (orscientistic) aspirations and their reliance on the explanatory power of ‘greatmen’. In the context of the ethical concerns being currently discussed bysome theorists, I aim in this essay briefly to reconsider the profoundly moralfoundations and implications of his proposed historical reconfigurations, asidentified in his great work War and peace.
It is of course Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 that is at the centreof Tolstoy’s extraordinary study. Telling the stories of various characters
*Email: [email protected]
Rethinking HistoryVol. 13, No. 2, June 2009, 235–250
ISSN 1364-2529 print/ISSN 1470-1154 online
� 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13642520902833841
http://www.informaworld.com
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within a closely observed and detailed historical context, War and peace ishard to define in terms of conventional disciplinary categories. The authorhimself rejected as a proper description both ‘novel’ and ‘historicalchronicle’; a recent biographer has described the work as ‘a great historicalnovel’ constituting, in Homeric mode, ‘a great piece of national myth-making’ in which Russia’s history is rearranged and rewritten (Wilson 1989,22, 236, 245, 268); and, perhaps most helpfully, R.V. Sampson referred to itas a ‘‘‘novel’’ . . . meant to exemplify the correct method of presentinghistory’ (Sampson 1973, 161). At all events, despite some notoriousinaccuracies and manipulations, a philosophically self-conscious historicalstudy of sorts it quite patently is; and it is that literary genre that Tolstoyuses as a vehicle to discuss his over-riding interest in morality – and moreparticularly his fundamental concern with man’s inhumanity to man.
That moral concern arises in particular – as it does for so many throughthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries – from the personal experience ofwar. Peace permits the uninterrupted pursuit of everyday lives, theperpetuation of out-worn thoughts: it is, conversely, above all war (withits upheavals, and not least through its enforced intermixing of peoples andcultures, and thereby exposure to alternatives) that provokes rethinking and,where necessary, replacement of intellectual and moral foundations; as such,war directly affects even such a seemingly rarefied academic discipline as thephilosophy of history. From Thucydides’ introspective musings on thecauses and the conduct of the Peloponnesian War to the disillusionedresponse of Wyndham Lewis, confronted by two worldwide conflicts in thetwentieth century (Southgate 2008), historical theorising has flourished intimes of a perceived crisis in human behaviour; and Tolstoy’s own study ofNapoleon’s Russian campaign – which for him was recent history – led himtoo to wide-ranging cultural questioning. In particular, his detailedinvestigations of battles and their aftermath – with descriptions based inpart upon his own personal experiences in the Crimean War2 – exposedwhat he believed were serious inadequacies in the approach of conventionalhistorians.
These inadequacies no doubt all conspire together, but for the purposeof analysis may be seen to include, first, attitudes to supposedly great and‘heroic’ leaders; second, disproportionate belief in human agency andfreedom; and third, widespread complacency in the acceptance ofinhumanity and moral decline amidst the horrors of war. These all relate,either explicitly or implicitly, to historical theory and practice; and it will beconvenient to take each in turn.
Attitudes to ‘heroic’ leaders
Anyone writing about Napoleon is bound to confront the ‘great man’ issue –namely, to what extent one heroic leader can be held responsible for
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historical developments; for together with a few others such as Alexanderthe Great and Adolf Hitler, Napoleon has been treated by historians as anarchetypal ‘hero’ (or anti-hero) who, whether for good or ill, by force ofcharacter single-handedly changed the course of history. The ‘great man’theory of history had been promoted by Hegel in his Lectures on thephilosophy of history (1837) and by Thomas Carlyle in his lectures On heroes,hero-worship and the heroic in history (1841); it had been deliberatelyreinforced by Napoleon’s own nephew in his The history of Julius Caesar(1865); and, with its inbuilt justification for trampling down ‘many aninnocent flower’ that may stand in the way, it had been most recently used(in 1866) by Dostoevsky as the starting-point for Crime and punishment(Wilson 1989, 238–40, 245).3 By no means of course uniquely now, but in hisown time quite exceptionally, Tolstoy rejected any such ‘myth’ of individualagents’ potency.
Looking at his battles in detail, Tolstoy concluded that Napoleon’spersonal input into events was far less than regularly imputed to him byhistorians. To them, with their need to make sense of the past, he may haveseemed in retrospect to be directing events; but in fact the complicatedmovements of men and horses and supplies as they interacted on thebattlefield were so chaotic as to be out of anyone’s control:
Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all those movements – asthe figurehead of a ship may seem to a savage to guide the vessel – acted like achild who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it.(Tolstoy 1941, Book III, 253)4
Napoleon, in Tolstoy’s characterisation, liked to think of himself as a masterchess-player, deliberately moving his pieces in both attack and defence,responding rationally to the counter-moves of his opponent, and finallyhoming in for the kill. Having inspected his forces before battle, it is in thoseterms that he makes his decision: ‘The chessmen are set up, the game willbegin tomorrow!’ (II. 500).5 But in fact, war degenerates into somethingmore akin to ‘blindman’s buff’ (III. 334), a game in which two players areblindfolded and one, seeking to escape, runs straight into his opponent’sarms. Therefore, Napoleon was not so much a rational calculator, carefullydisposing his forces in an orderly and rule-bound manner, but more akin toa blind man blundering around helplessly in a situation over which he hadno control; he was deluding himself if he thought that he was in anymeaningful sense in charge of the situation.
In fact events are so chaotic that it is hard to descry any meaningful orderwithin them, or any human control over them. It is bad enough in peacetime,when a government administrator might think he is in control, only to findthat when a crisis occurs, ‘instead of appearing a ruler and source of power,[he] becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man’. As with a man holding onto a ship with a boathook, all goes well so long as ‘the sea of history remains
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calm’; but when a storm arises, and the sea starts heaving and the boathookno longer reaches, the delusion of control becomes impossible. The matter ismuch more problematic in war-time, when men are caught up in a veritablemaelstrom: in any battle, ‘The commander-in-chief is always in the midst of aseries of shifting events and so he never can at any moment consider thewhole import of an event that is occurring’. Retrospectively an ‘event’ mayseem to have a shape, with beginning, middle, and end, for ‘the law ofretrospection . . . regards all the past as a preparation for events thatsubsequently occur’. But at the time it is necessary to respond to a series ofoccurrences that lack any such form. One general is described as being
like a horse running downhill harnessed to a heavy cart. Whether he waspulling it or being pushed by it he did not know, but rushed along at headlongspeed with no time to consider what this movement might lead to. (III. 91, 8;II. 399; I. 341)
Despite everyone’s admirable intentions, then, the best-laid plans inevitablycome to nought. Tolstoy notes of one carefully calculated dispositionof forces, that ‘not a single column reached its place at the appointedtime’. Men
had started in due order and, as always happens, had got somewhere, but notto their appointed places . . . [A] few eventually even got to their right place,but too late to be of any use, and only in time to be fired at.
It is hardly surprising, then, that in the heat of battle, any reports made byNapoleon’s subordinates are ‘necessarily untrustworthy’, sometimes derivedfrom second-hand information, and always out of date (III. 234, 240; II.519, italics mine).
It is of course on these deficient reports that Napoleon has to base hisown instructions, and the inevitable result is that any orders he gives bear norelation to any reality on the ground: they ‘had either been executed beforehe gave them, or could not be and were not executed’, and ‘For the mostpart things happened contrary to . . . orders’. When, for example, ‘the armyretreated, [that] does not prove that Napoleon caused it to retreat, but thatthe forces which influenced the whole army . . . acted simultaneously on himalso’; and he was in truth, as Tolstoy concludes, nothing more than a ‘mostinsignificant tool of history’ (II. 519–20; III. 279, 360, italics mine).
That is not of course how Napoleon or anyone else want to seethemselves, and they do their utmost to reverse the situation and makehistory their tool. Thus, those who have taken part in a battle generallydescribe it ‘as they would like it to have been, as they have heard it describedby others, and as sounds well, but not at all as it really was’. Self-delusion isrampant. One Russian general naturally wanted to take the credit for anoperation that had proved successful, even though that success had beenachieved only by pure chance:
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The general had so wished to do this, and was so sorry he had not managed todo it, that it seemed to him as if it had really happened. Perhaps it might reallyhave been so? Could one possibly make out amid all that confusion, what didor did not happen?
On another occasion we are told how Prince Andrew listened to a discussionheld with officers –
and to his surprise found that no orders were really given, but that PrinceBagration tried to make it appear that everything done by necessity, byaccident, or by the will of subordinate commanders, was done, if not by hisdirect command at least in accord with his intentions. (I. 257, 236)
In one way or another – and with enormous implications forhistoriography – we are virtually bound to deceive both ourselves andothers. This can happen even in everyday life in peacetime, when we mis-remember the past and fail to distinguish between our actual experiencesand things we might have just imagined. Thus, Sonya claimed to haveforeseen Prince Andrew’s death, and genuinely believed that she had doneso: ‘what she had invented then seemed to her now as real as any otherrecollection’. And such self-delusions are yet more likely under the stressof war: so Tolstoy describes the Russian officer Nicolai Rostov in glowingterms, as ‘a truthful young man [who] would on no account have told adeliberate lie’. However, although, as he later recounted his experiences, he‘began his story meaning to tell everything just as it happened . . .imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably he lapsed into falsehood’ (III.184; I. 316, italics mine). That inevitability of distortion on the part ofparticipants clearly has important implications for the validity ofsubsequent histories that are supposedly based on reliable eye-witnessaccounts; and it impacts in particular on descriptions of those who claimto have played a major role in the events in question.
Since, then, ‘No battle . . . takes place as those who planned itanticipated’, what are we to make of those orderly narratives providedby historians, with their descriptions of ‘wars and battles carried out inaccordance with previously formed plans’? We have to conclude that anysuch idealised descriptions are simply false. Historians are bound to use‘the letters of the sovereigns and the generals . . . memoirs, reports,projects, and so forth’; and from these (no doubt respectable) sources,they deduce aims and developments that never in fact existed; they ‘havewritten the history of the beautiful words and sentiments of variousgenerals, and not the history of the events’ (III. 242–3, 340, 342). It is easierto make sense of the past – to cast over it a tidy narrative – when theevents of that past are perceived as having been rationally planned andexecuted by a few outstanding ‘great men’, whose own evidence helpfullysupports that picture; but such accounts bear no relation whatever to anyhistorical ‘truth’.
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Human agency and freedom
Both history and morality presuppose a belief in humans’ ability to act withat least a modicum of freedom: without free will, history becomes simply thestory of an unfolding providential plan or of an inevitable developmentevolving according to some natural law; without free will, humans areliberated from all responsibility for their actions, and the concept ofmorality is rendered meaningless. In this respect there is, at the very heart ofWar and peace, an unresolved contradiction. Tolstoy on the one hand wishesto insist on the individual’s ability to act autonomously, but on the otherhand reserves his highest praise for the man who bows to the inevitability ofthe ‘fate’ that governs history. This ambivalence or ambiguity, between ourseemingly instinctive wish for, and consciousness of, freedom, and ourrecognition of scientific laws that preclude its possibility by indicating thenecessity of human actions – ‘the insoluble mystery presented by theincompatibility of freewill and inevitability’ (III. 523, italics mine) – is widelyexperienced; and its exploration becomes for Tolstoy one of history’s mainconcerns.
He often refers to the mechanical analogy of clockwork, using that inrelation both to individual events and to the more general course of history.For the former, there is a particularly vivid description of the RussianArmy at Austerlitz, where it is likened to a mechanical clock, in whichsprings and cogs, pulleys and levers interact to produce certain requiredeffects. So when, at the instigation of the Emperor, the Army startedmoving, it
was like the first movement of the main wheel of a large tower-clock. Onewheel slowly moved, another was set in motion, and a third, and wheels beganto revolve faster and faster, levers and cogwheels to work, chimes to play,figures to pop out, and the hands to advance with regular motion. (I. 336–7)
Once the initial step had been taken on the periphery, individual partswithin, long dormant, were triggered into life, and the whole ground intoaction with a slow but sure inevitability.
That inevitability in the movements of an army is paralleled in events asthey developed after the retreat from Moscow: ‘The tightly coiled springwas released, the clock began to whirr and the chimes to play’. And caughtup in that situation the Russian commander-in-chief Kutuzov, unable anylonger to ‘check the inevitable movement . . . gave the order to do what heregarded as useless and harmful – gave his approval, that is, to theaccomplished fact’ (III. 233). Within a course of events that were unfoldingin a quasi-mechanical way, Kutuzov appeared to have no more choice thanthe serried ranks of soldiers caught up within the confines of their variousdeployments; so he simply went along with what had been otherwisedetermined.
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Indeed, from that predetermined course of events there was no escape foranyone. On his entry into Moscow, Napoleon made various pronounce-ments and issued specific instructions.
But strange to say all these measures, efforts, and plans . . . did not affect theessence of the matter but, like the hands of a clock detached from themechanism, swung about in an arbitrary and aimless way without engagingthe cogwheels. (III. 249)
They lay somehow outside what was actually taking place, outside themechanism of what was actually happening, and therefore had no ability toimpinge on them or alter them.
In the more general context of historical development, individual battlesthemselves become seen as small parts of a larger mechanism – a remorselessongoing process in which and by which all humans ere entrapped. The battle ofAusterlitz, for example, which seemed at the time such a great and exceptionalevent, takes its place as one small part of an infinitely wider picture: for all the‘passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear,and enthusiasm’ then experienced, it constituted nothing more significant than‘a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history’ (I. 337).
In this mechanistically oriented universe, one’s understanding ofmechanics – of how the universe is actually constituted – takes on additionalimportance. Tolstoy periodically reiterates his belief that humans do wellsimply to accept a degree of inevitability in their lives. Individuals play theirown (however small) part in a grand design that transcends their ownindividuality; and there can be moral virtue in recognising the part thatsmall cogs play in the smooth working of a machine. Those who do notunderstand mechanics may think that a small shaving, that falls into amachine by chance and gets tossed around in it, is actually an importantcomponent; but in fact it is hindering the machine’s working, whereas ‘thesmall connecting cog-wheel which revolves quietly is one of the mostessential parts’ of it. Historians who fail to understand this will leave out ofaccount such quietly modest commanders as Dokhturov, of whom Tolstoyclearly approves. In such cases historical silence can be the clearesttestimony to a man’s merit; he is one, like his compatriot Konovnitsyn,who exemplifies those ‘unnoticed cog-wheels that, without clatter or noise,constitute the most essential part of the machine’ (III. 270, 274).
The concept of some predetermined (or even providentially ordered) destinyis revealed most clearly in the case of Kutuzov – a man much maligned (andnot least by historians), but of whom Tolstoy holds the highest opinion. ForKutuzov, as Tolstoy explains, ‘understands that there is something strongerand more important than his own will – the inevitable course of events’:
By long years of military experience he knew, and with the wisdom of ageunderstood, that it is impossible for one man to direct hundreds of thousands
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of others struggling with death, and he knew that the result of a battle isdecided not by the orders of a commander-in-chief, nor the place where thetroops are stationed, not by the number of cannon or of slaughtered men.
Rather, there was some ‘intangible force’ which he watched and guided‘in as far as that was in his power’ (II. 447, 526, italics mine).6
It was after Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow that (as we noted above)Kutuzov finally lacked the power to guide events, when (as with the Iraqiretreat along ‘The highway of death’ from Kuwait in 1991) the pressuresupon him to attack and harry the retreating army proved irresistible, and hewas finally unable any longer to check what was already an inevitableoutcome.
Despite that belated capitulation to the inevitable, Kutuzov was latercriticised and openly accused of blundering: he had held out too long againstthe pressures from all sides. Tolstoy strongly defends him: ‘Such is the fate,not of great men . . . but of those rare and always solitary individuals whodiscerning the will of Providence submit their personal will to it.’7 He hadhad his eye on something beyond apparent short-term expediency: he ‘aloneamid a senseless crowd understood the whole tremendous significance ofwhat was happening’. That was bound to prove less than endearing to themass of people who lacked such vision, so ‘he repeatedly expressed his realthoughts with the bitter conviction that he would not be understood’. Sureenough, Tolstoy laments, ‘The hatred and contempt of the crowd punishessuch men for discerning the higher laws’ (III. 360–2).
That talk of ‘higher laws’, to which even as supposedly ‘free’ individualswe are somehow subject, leaves us with an ambiguity, but leads convenientlyto our next section, which deals with Tolstoy’s concern with inhumanity; forhe notes how, unlike Napoleon who had renounced his own humanity and‘never anywhere . . . showed human dignity’, Kutuzov actually ‘devoted allhis powers not to slaying and destroying men but to saving and showing pityon them’ (III. 360, 363, italics mine).
Man’s inhumanity to man
Despite an evident ambiguity lying at its heart, Tolstoy’s ultimate concern inWar and peace is with morality: as an imaginative narrator (i.e. historian) ofgreat personal and national events, it is his ethical dimension that ultimatelyshines through – his concern, that is, with how humans might live better andavoid in future such inhumanity as he bears witness to.
Such issues, as we have seen, often become more clearly identified in timeof war – become more sharply focused – and it is in the context of war thatTolstoy challenges accepted values, as these have been transmitted byhistorians; for reverting to the concept of the ‘great’ man, emphasis hastraditionally been placed on the heroic exploits of men at war: it is not for
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nothing that national kings dress up formally in army uniforms, and thatmilitary commanders (with their ubiquitous statues) are held up asexemplary figures. However, it is this widespread, militarily oriented,evaluation that Tolstoy brings into question. ‘Not only’, he contrarilyasserts, ‘does a good army commander not need any special qualities, [but]on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best humanattributes – love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt’ (II.308, italics mine).
Thus Napoleon himself, in particular, praised as he was ‘by half theworld . . . had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity’.8 It was onlyafter he was forced to recognise his own impotence – his own inability toaffect the course of events at Borodino (which, likened in modern times toHiroshima, he described as ‘the most terrible of all my battles’) – that hebegan to have doubts about the value of his whole enterprise. His celebratedstrength of mind, which he liked to test by viewing the dead and wounded,was finally overcome as he surveyed ‘the terrible spectacle of the battlefield’and became conscious of ‘the impotence of his once mighty army’. He
could not stop what was going on before him and around him and wassupposed to be directed by him and to depend on him, and from its lack ofsuccess this affair, for the first time, seemed to him unnecessary and horrible.(II. 539–40, 525, italics mine)
For others, that realisation of the horror of war comes earlier. When theRussian Emperor Alexander goes round a battlefield, he sees a woundedsoldier being moved on a stretcher and hears him groan:
‘Gently, gently! Can’t you do it more gently?’ said the Emperor, apparentlysuffering more than the dying soldier, and he rode away.
Rostov saw tears filling the Emperor’s eyes, and heard him, as he was ridingaway, say . . . ‘What a terrible thing war is: what a terrible thing!’ (I. 334)
It is terrible not least because men feel compelled to repudiate their naturalhuman feelings towards one another, and to become totally detached fromone another. Pierre Bezukhov notices how, amidst ‘the stirring anddeafening noise of the drums’, one corporal’s face changed, and even thesound of his voice – and ‘he recognised that mysterious, callous force whichcompelled people against their will to kill their fellow men’ (III. 261–2). Itwas precisely that change in which Tolstoy says that he was most interested –‘in what way and under the influence of what feeling one soldier killsanother’ (Tolstoy 1982, 1).
Such transformations in people can be quite sudden, and can work bothways: that is to say, as Tolstoy also shows, people can just as easily beconverted by good example to a more humane disposition. During theevacuation from Moscow, as he describes, carts were being used to transport
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possessions and were being efficiently loaded by the family’s servants, whenNatasha was overwhelmed by compassion for the wounded soldiers whowere being brought in, and insisted that the carts be reallocated for use bythem. The servants were at first uncomprehending, and bemused by hercounter-instructions; but as they too re-thought the whole situation, ‘It nolonger seemed strange to them but on the contrary it seemed the only thingthat could be done’, and they set about unloading the carts with great energy(III. 59).
Such changing perceptions can even afflict combatants themselves. Asconditions for both sides deteriorate at the still indecisive battle ofBorodino, they begin to wonder what it’s all about:
To the men of both sides alike, worn out by want of food and rest, it beganequally to appear doubtful whether they should continue to slaughter oneanother . . . At any moment these men might have been seized with horror atwhat they were doing, and might have thrown up everything and run awayanywhere.
As an officer, Rostov begins to have ‘terrible doubts’, when he recalls hisvisit to the field-hospital, crammed full of men ‘with arms and legs torn offand in dirt and disease’; and he contrasts that picture in his mind with animage of ‘that self-satisfied Bonaparte’, and asks: ‘why those severed armsand legs and those dead men?’ (II. 543; I. 552, italics mine).
In this questioning of the continuing acceptance of military values,Tolstoy assigns a major role to his character Prince Andrew. Portrayedoriginally as a brave young officer enthusiastically leading his men, PrinceAndrew is badly wounded at the battle of Austerlitz. At that point, he isbrought to question all his former values and comes to realise theuncertainty and unimportance of everything he had thought to haveunderstood before. Later, he completely reassesses his attitude to war,repudiating ‘heroic’ values and any notion that war is simply a ‘game’:
If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when itwas worth while going to certain death . . . War is not courtesy but the mosthorrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play atwar . . . let war be war and not a game.9 As it is now, war is the favouritepastime of the idle and frivolous . . . [I]t is the highest class, respected byeveryone . . . [H]e who kills most people receives the highest rewards . . . [T]heykill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services forhaving killed so many people. (II. 487–8)
That is clearly the essence of Tolstoy’s own position – a position reachedfrom personal experience in a war later characterised as ‘completelypointless and manifestly avoidable . . . a completely futile waste of life’(Wilson 1989, 101, 108). His own repudiation of military values is implicitthroughout the book, and exemplified in sneering references to ‘a stick called
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a ‘‘marshal’s staff’’’, and to ‘that sort of victory which is defined by thecapture of pieces of material fastened to sticks, called standards’. He is clearthat traditional justifications for war (as still used in the twenty-first century)are nothing better than cynical political rhetoric: ‘Since the world began andmen have killed one another, no one has ever committed such acrime against his fellow-man without comforting himself with this sameidea . . . the hypothetical welfare of other people’ (III. 359; II. 545, italicsmine; III. 98).
‘Hypothetical’ is the key word there, and points up the self-delusionswith which, in the perpetration of inhuman acts, we continue to indulgeourselves. Ideals of glory and grandeur continue to be manipulated, butessentially ‘consist not merely in considering nothing wrong that one does,but in priding oneself on every crime one commits, ascribing to it anincomprehensible supernatural significance’ (III. 425). In the context of warand man’s inhumanity to man, Tolstoy’s ethical message, deliberatelyconveyed through the medium of ‘history’, resonates powerfully today andremains exemplary.
Conclusion: history’s nature and purpose
In our discussion of War and peace as an historically oriented work, the firstand second sections above are mainly concerned with aspects of history’snature, while the third considers a potential moral purpose. I shall concludewith a brief resume and some thoughts on the contemporary relevance ofTolstoy’s message.
First, then, it is clear that traditional historians and history are underattack from Tolstoy, and in ways that are particularly interesting in thenineteenth-century context of a developing orientation to the subject thatpromoted aspirations to reconstitute and represent the actual ‘truth’ aboutthe past. Tolstoy’s careful analysis of battles, which exposed their ultimatelyimpenetrable chaos, is emblematic of the past more generally; and thespurious nature of historians’ more ambitious (scientistically derived) claimsis thereby revealed; for as he explains, by various strategies historianscontrive to cast a seemingly simple and straightforward narrative overevents that by their very nature defy such simplistic treatment. Thosestrategies importantly include the assumption of a controlling intelligence –whether in the form of Providence or ‘genius’ or ‘greatness’ – that ensures anorderly development towards some rationally devised end. The apparentlychaotic behaviour of individuals then comes to be viewed from thehistorian’s perspective as actually a purposeful contribution to a pre-ordained plan, all making perfectly good sense in the longer term. That ishow history is written. The resultant histories, Tolstoy insists, are onlyinterpretations imposed retrospectively, with the benefit of hindsight and afilter that excludes as irrelevant anything that does not fit.
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Narratives are made acceptable through the historian’s proper use of‘primary’ sources, and especially the evidence conveyed by eye-witnesseswho have actually been involved in the events under review. However, whensuch sources are investigated, they turn out on the whole to derive fromthose leaders and commanders whose evidence we have seen to be far fromreliable, for, as was made clear, each has his own motivation for thedescriptions and analyses he gives, and in fact ‘he who plays a part in anhistoric event never understands its significance’ (III. 164, italics mine). Inshort, those great men who leave their memoirs that confirm their owngreatness are themselves at the mercy of powers not understood – thosemovements through time which they may (like Napoleon) claim to control,but actually (as realised by Kutuzov) do not.
Commanders’ ability to control events is removed, first, by thatindefinable spirit by which people in the mass become affected – a spiritthat either saps or increases their morale, incapacitating them from doinganything, or enabling them to do what had seemed to be impossible. ‘Inmilitary affairs the strength of an army is the product of its mass and someunknown x . . . That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army’. When in1812 the French seemed to have the Russian army at their mercy, Napoleonfailed to give the order to attack, ‘not because he did not want to, butbecause it could not be done. All the generals, officers, and soldiers of theFrench army knew it could not be done, because the flagging spirit of thetroops would not permit it’; and so the war went on, as Tolstoy describes,‘never in the way people devised, but flowing always from the essential attitudeof the masses’ (III. 289; II. 545; III. 231, italics mine).
The second great constraint upon leaders is the role in human affairs of‘chance’ – that inexplicable, unaccountable occurrence that makes amockery of the most carefully prepared plans, as for example for theRussian Army when, hoping against all the odds to delay the advancingFrench, ‘a freak of fate made the impossible possible’. Similarly, as Tolstoyclaims of the whole campaign of 1812, ‘Everything came about fortuitously’(I. 221; II. 366, italics mine).
That, as he well knew, is only to say that we are unable to give a rationalexplanation of how and why things happened: ‘I do not know why a certainevent occurs; I think that I cannot know it; so I do not try to know it and Italk about chance.’ But the point is that some occurrences defy any attemptsby historians rationally to reduce everything to order; and that insistence onthe role of an inexplicable ‘chance’ impinges on historians’ attempts to giveto their narratives a coherent causal structure such as enables them (as isconventionally required) to give some explanation of what happened.Tolstoy is particularly critical of historians who oversimplify ‘with naiveassurance’ the complexity of causal explanation. ‘Man’s mind cannot graspthe causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causesis implanted in man’s soul’:
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In giving and accepting battle at Borodino, Kutuzov acted involuntarily andirrationally. But later on, to fit what had occurred, the historians providedcunningly devised evidence of the foresight and genius of the generals who of allthe blind tools of history were the most enslaved and involuntary.
Tolstoy describes the historians’ carefully structured account of the battle,and ironically comments: ‘So the histories say’, but they have overstretched‘the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination’; ‘and it is all quite wrong’.Any explanatory causal chain that may be adopted branches off into literallyinnumerable directions and leads back literally ad infinitum, so that ourchoices of when and where to begin, what retrospective route to follow andwhat closures to accept, is, if not arbitrary, at the very least inevitablypartial, the result of parti pris (III. 422–3, italics original; II. 255f.; III. 4–6;225; II. 459; III. 337; II. 460, italics mine).
These methodological problems are all subsumed within an essentiallysceptical philosophical framework, to which Tolstoy clearly subscribed, asfalling within what he saw as an essentially Russian tradition. In an amusingpassage describing the different ways in which various nationalities assumeself-confidence, he writes of the characteristic Russian who ‘is self-assuredjust because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since hedoes not believe that anything can be known.’ That contrasts favourably with
Germans [who] are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion – science,that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth . . . The German’s self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, becausehe imagines that he knows the truth – science – which he himself has inventedbut which is for him the absolute truth. (II. 302)
Similarly, Prince Andrew is represented as giving a highly critical assessmentof the character of the Russian statesman Speranski: he was particularlystruck by ‘his absolute and unshakable belief in the power and authority ofreason’, and he notes how ‘It was evident that the thought could never occurto him . . . that it is after all impossible to express all one thinks; and that hehad never felt the doubt, ‘‘Is not all I think and believe nonsense?’’’ Bycontrast, the admired Pierre ‘was struck . . . by the endless variety of men’sminds, which prevents a truth from ever presenting itself identically to twopersons . . . what he always wanted most was to convey his thought to othersjust as he himself understood it’, but he realised of course that that wasnever possible (II. 22, 27).
Altogether, then, a sceptical stance – not least in relation to history – isdescribed by Tolstoy as a virtue. He goes so far as to list ‘philosophicinquiring doubt’ under the ‘highest and best human attributes’, and hemakes clear his belief that any historical understanding can be attained‘[o]nly by renouncing our claim to discern a purpose immediately intelligibleto us, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond our ken’ (II. 308; III.423, italics mine). Historians may believe that they have provided adequate
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explanations of what has happened in the past, but that is never actuallypossible; their so-called ‘science’ may permit them some knowledge,empirically gained, by the imposition of categories that apply to theempirically experienced world. But that ‘knowledge’ is inevitably and alwaysincomplete, barely masking the chaos that it purports to make some senseof. Ever beyond the reach of any but the most exceptional, and unattainableby the conventionally approved human faculties of reason and the senses, isthat aspect of the universe, of human life, that has to do with wisdom andwith the ultimate ethical question of how to live – such wisdom as isattributed to the peasant Karataev, to Pierre after his sufferings, and to thedying Prince Andrew.10
If Tolstoy’s approach to historiography and the nature of history (asrevealed in the first and second sections above) is essentially sceptical, to anextent that would command respect from both theorists and practitionerstoday, the third section may resonate in its implications yet more loudly,referring as it does to the use of history for ethical purposes; for it is clearthat Tolstoy approached his work with a definite moral agenda: his majorconcern, as we have seen, is with the retention and development of a‘humanity’ that is frequently endangered, especially through war.
This too relates to historical practice, for Tolstoy (not without somereason at the time) believes that historians have been more concerned withtheir ‘great men’ than in the sufferings of ordinary people: to them the plansand strategies and career of some general are of much more interest than‘the question of those fifty thousand men who were left in hospitals and ingraves’; for that last ‘does not come within the range of their investigation’(III. 342). That is no doubt far less true now in the twenty-first century; butthe moral purpose of history is still worth insisting on, with Tolstoy’s help.
From the rejection of the ‘great man’ thesis an implication arises that issometimes overlooked: namely, the responsibility for whatever happens of‘ordinary’ people. All too often, as Tolstoy might have observed, we hear ofevils attributed to Hitler, or Stalin, or Sadam Hussain; but the evils ascribedto them are largely perpetrated by others ‘in their name’. Reverting back to1812: ‘At the battle of Borodino, Napoleon shot at no one and killed no one.That was all done by the soldiers. Therefore it was not he who killed people.’Individual soldiers are, at least to some extent, responsible for their ownactions: ‘The French soldiers went to kill and be killed at the battle ofBorodino not because of Napoleon’s orders, but by their own volition.’ As wehave further seen, commanders-in-chief are not really in control of events atall: ‘it was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of hisorders were executed and during the battle he did not know what was goingon before him’ (II. 498–9). Moral responsibility reverts to the individual.
Each individual, then, does well to seek his or her own salvation: ratherthan following the crowd or some charismatic leader, humans need to findtheir own happiness – not through theorising but through practical
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experience. It is through his own suffering and deprivations in captivity thatPierre comes to conclude that ‘man’s highest happiness’ lies in freedom andthe ability to choose one’s own way of life, and comes also to the realisationthat ‘there is no condition in which he need be unhappy and not free’; his‘inner freedom . . . was independent of external conditions’ (III. 259, 324,385). He remained an autonomous individual at all times, enabled to resistthe pressure of others’ assumed power – which was a very practicallyorientated conclusion that would affect how he lived in the future.
Education, then, more generally might benefit from that practicalemphasis. The ‘plain farmer’ Nicholas, we are told, ‘laughed at theoreticaltreatises’, and was all the more successful for doing so. The Army GeneralPfuel is criticised for being ‘one of those theoreticians who so love theirtheory that they lose sight of the theory’s object – its practical application’.As with agricultural and military matters, so too with historical, we need toavoid becoming remote from everyday practical – and so moral – concerns:Tolstoy refers scathingly to ‘a present-day professor who from his youthupwards has been occupied with learning – that is with books and lecturesand with taking notes from them’ (III. 439–40; II. 303; III. 420–1), a picturethat remains familiar today, and may now need to be replaced.
Notes on contributor
Beverley Southgate is Visiting Fellow, University of Chichester. His publicationsinclude Postmodernism in history: Fear or freedom? (Routledge, 2003), and What ishistory for? (Routledge 2005). History meets fiction will be published by Pearson laterthis year.
Notes
1. The best-known account of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history is Berlin 1967; themost recent treatment, brought to my attention after completion of this essay inFebruary 2007, is that of Hayden White (2007).
2. Stendhal was an acknowledged literary predecessor with his description (againbased on personal military experience, serving as an officer under Napoleon) ofthe Battle of Waterloo in The charterhouse of Parma (1839).
3. Following Hegel (1953 [1837], 43), Dostoevsky’s ‘hero’ Raskolnikov argues that‘great’ individuals are above the law and are justified in committing ‘all sorts ofenormities and crimes’ in furtherance of their visionary objectives – ‘in thename of a better future’ (Dostoevsky 1951 [1866], 275, 277).
4. All references to War and Peace are to the 1941 edition, in which threeseparately paginated books are included in one volume.
5. Cf. Tolstoy’s long-time friend and fellow officer S.S. Urusov (himself the authorof a book on the 1812 campaign), who proposed that the bloody struggle for theFifth Bastion at Sebastopol be settled by a game of chess (Sampson 1973, 116).
6. Eric Hobsbawm has recently written in similar vein about the HungarianRevolution of 1956, noting that ‘in retrospect, given their historical context,there is an air of inevitability about the flow of events, as there is about thedirection of a great river’ (2006, 3, italics mine).
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7. Submission to the pattern of a design beyond our present vision is a recurringtheme in Tolstoy: on a more personal level, see the reiterated assurances inAnna Karenina that ‘things will shape themselves’ (Tolstoy 1995, xv, 5, 447).
8. Cf. Alexis de Tocqueville’s assessment of Napoleon as being ‘as great as a mancan be without virtue’ (Brogan 2006, 404).
9. War did of course continue to be seen as a form of sport (which form dependingon the social class of those involved) at least until the SecondWorldWar, duringwhich one Brigadier Beckwith-Smith of the Coldstream Guards advised his menat Dunkirk to ‘stand up . . . [and] shoot at [the German dive-bombers] with aBren gun from the shoulder. Take them like a high pheasant.’ (Quoted by NiallFerguson, New York Review of Books, 30 November 2006, 28 [italics mine]).
10. On de Maistre’s influence here, see Berlin 1967, 67f.
References
Berlin, I. 1967 [1953]. The hedgehog and the fox: An essay on Tolstoy’s view of history.London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Brogan, H. 2006. Alexis de Tocqueville: A biography. London: Profile Books.Dostoevsky, F. 1951 [1866]. Crime and punishment. Trans. D. Magarshack.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.Hegel, G.W.F. 1953 [1837]. Reason in history: A general introduction to the philosophy
of history. Indianapolis, New York: Bobbs-Merrill.Hobsbawm, E. 2006. Could it have been different? London Review of Books 16
November: 3.Sampson, R.V. 1973. Tolstoy: The discovery of peace. London: Heinemann.Southgate, B. 2008. ‘My racket is history’: Wyndham Lewis and historical theory.
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 12, no. 2: 263–71.Tolstoy, L. 1941 [1868, 1869]. War and peace. Trans. L. and A. Maude. London:
Oxford University Press.Tolstoy, L. 1982 [1852]. The raid and other stories. Trans. L. and A. Maude, intro.
P.N. Furbank. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Tolstoy, L. 1995 [1877]. Anna Karenina. Trans. L. and A. Maude, intro. W. Gareth
Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press.White, H. 2007.War and peace: Against historical realism. In The many faces of Clio:
Cross-cultural approaches to historiography, essays in honor of Georg G. Iggers,eds Q.E. Wang and F.L. Fillafer. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.
Wilson, A.N. 1989. Tolstoy. London: Penguin.
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