The Overcoming of History in 'War and Peace' (Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, 42)

THE OVERCOMING OF HISTORY IN WAR AND PEACE

STUDIES IN SLAVIC LITERATURE AND POETICS VOLUME XLII Edited by J.J. van Baak R. Grübel A.G.F. van Holk W.G. Weststeijn

THE OVERCOMING OF HISTORY IN WAR AND PEACE

Jeff Love

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1632-9 Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION 1. NARRATIVE AND STRIVING 2. PURPOSE AND OUTLINE OF THIS BOOK 3. THE CRITICAL TRADITION CHAPTER ONE: SKEPTICISM 1. SKEPTICISM IN THE FICTIONAL TEXT 1.1. Schön Grabern 1.2. Counterpoint: Pierre and Helen 1.3. Austerlitz 1.4. Drissa 1.5. Dogmatic skepticism? The problem of mimesis or creation ex nihilo 2. SKEPTICISM IN THE HISTORICAL ESSAYS 2.1. The infinity of causes 2.2. An objection 2.3. Reply CHAPTER TWO: THE CALCULUS OF HISTORY 1. BORODINO 2. THE CALCULUS OF HISTORY 2.1. The calculus proposal 2.2. Two arguments against the calculus proposal 2.2.1. Berlin 2.2.2. Morson Excursus: Organic and mechanistic interpretations of the world The finite mind 2.3. A final objection to calculus 3. CALCULUS IN THE NOVEL

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CHAPTER THREE: A TEMPORALITY OF CONTRADICTION 1. TEMPORALITY IN THE NOVEL 1.1. Diegesis and mimesis 1.2. Linkages 1.3. Patterns 1.4. Tensions 2. EPIC AND NOVELISTIC TEMPORALITY 3. THE END OF TIME CHAPTER FOUR: THE FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURE 1. THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY 2. FREEDOM 2.1. Freedom as lack of connection 2.2. Origin of freedom 2.3. Consciousness 2.4. The mystery of consciousness 3. THE RELATION OF REASON AND CONSCIOUSNESS 3.1. The three grounds of representation 3.1.1. Space 3.1.2. Time 3.1.3. Causality 3.1.4. Determination and construction 3.1.5. The fundamental ground 3.1.6. Nothingness and plenitude 4. THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY REVISITED CHAPTER FIVE: MASTERY AND RETICENCE 1. NAPOLEON AND MASTERY 2. THE TRAGIC PATH 3. THE COMIC PATH

96 97 98 101 102 105 106 117 123 124 133 134 135 138 142 143 145 146 146 148 150 151 152 154 157 158 162 171

CONCLUSION: FREEDOM AND SILENCE

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NOTES

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WORKS CITED

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INDEX

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

While this book owes an obvious and general debt to the many fine critics Tolstoy has always managed to attract, I have incurred a number of specific debts which it is a pleasure to acknowledge. My advisory committee, Vladimir Alexandrov, Robert Louis Jackson and Michael Holquist, provided valuable comments on the core of this book in its earliest form as a doctoral dissertation. Subsequently, I benefited from the careful scrutiny several readers gave the book at various stages of completion, in particular, Caryl Emerson, Richard Gustafson, and William Mills Todd III. Donna Orwin has encouraged me both to take risks in my writing and to learn how to formulate my thoughts in a manner better suited to a broader audience of Tolstoyans (and non-Tolstoyans). I should like to thank her for granting permission on behalf of The Tolstoy Studies Journal to reprint material here which was published in somewhat different form in volumes XIII and XV of the Journal as, respectively, “Tolstoy’s Calculus of History” and “The End of Knowing in War and Peace.” Thanks are also due Frank Day and Sean McCambridge who kindly gave of their time to assist me in preparing the book for publication. I am grateful to my colleagues, Margit Sinka and Johannes Schmidt, for their generous support and encouragement on all fronts.

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INTRODUCTION …none of us has any sense of himself except in conflicts, contradictions.1

1. NARRATIVE AND STRIVING War and Peace is a great experiment. At once doubting and dogmatic, gliding between the minute cadences of everyday experience and the overwhelming tonalities of historical becoming, the novel stretches the boundaries of narrative to achieve the impossible, to reproduce the immediate in the inescapably mediate, to capture the infinite in the finite forms of narrative discourse, to portray in word and image what is beyond both. The fundamental pattern linking these protean and dynamic oppositions is one of striving, an almost traditionally romantic or Faustian striving to take up the infinite whole within the nets of reason and thereby subject it to human mastery. The inevitable failure of this striving, revealing the irreducible conflict between infinite desire and finite capacity, is at once the source of new beginnings and the repetition of old ones, a wellspring of perpetually renewed promises to obtain a synoptic vision of the whole that cannot be fulfilled. Hence, this striving is essentially ambivalent, the origin of heroic aggression and tragic disillusionment, of Napoleonic narcissism as well as the quietism of Kutuzov and Karataev: the great wheel of historical becoming continually offers a glimpse of freedom that turns out to be nothing more than illusion, a tempting mask of necessity. This repetitive struggle between expansive hope and tragic despair constitutes the productive structuring principle of the novel, its dynamic center and principal trope. But it is also the source of the restlessness everywhere evident within it, a restlessness critics have too long ignored or mistaken for a rather dogmatic skepticism. This restlessness is in fact profoundly erotic in a Platonic sense; it is at bottom an expression of the ebb and flow of ineradicable desire. In the words

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of one careful student of Plato, “[e]ros is continuously discontinuous or neither mortal or immortal, it waxes and wanes, lives and dies, and can be defined only as the desire for what it lacks.” And, as Aristophanes says in the Symposium, “eros is the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole” (1997: 476).2 But this is a most unusual pursuit, for the “whole” is no more clearly defined by Plato than it is by Tolstoy, while the fundamental presupposition, that knowledge of the whole requires an intuitive grasp of all that is, of the boundless totality that inheres in the openness of immediate (and largely visual) apprehension, is common to both. It is thus not surprising that the whole is elusive and malleable in the novel, a commandingly inarticulate plenitude and presence, which, as the retreating object of desire, is inflected in ever new ways by the means employed to capture and tame it, to turn the bad infinity of groundlessness into the good infinity of an intricately interwoven unity, a cosmos whose architecture is recognizably human. Regardless of the particular inflection the whole manifests, the underlying structure of striving remains the same, and at this point it might be useful to provide a brief preliminary sketch of this structure following Tolstoy’s account in the culminating arguments of the historical essays. There Tolstoy suggests that this structure consists of the dynamic interplay between two radically different kinds of cognition, one rational and mediate, the other non-rational and immediate. The historical essays initially examine rational cognition in connection with historical events described in the novel. The narrator asserts that human reason cannot know a historical event completely because the latter is an infinite totality arising from either an infinite causal series or infinitely divisible motion. In the Second Part of the Epilogue, the narrator broadens the scope of this assertion to apply to all forms of rational cognition by maintaining that reason is dependent on consciousness, an immediate source of “knowing” or “intuiting” the infinite whole, as form on content. He further claims that all genuine cognition results from a structuring process whereby reason gives finite form to the infinite content of consciousness. A useful clarification of this process may be achieved by comparing it to the diastolic and systolic functioning of the heart.3 The very

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act of giving form to the infinite content of consciousness is both an expansion towards the infinite and a contraction towards the finite, for in giving form to the infinite, reason makes it finite. Just like a heartbeat or, indeed, the act of breathing (to employ another organic metaphor suggested by Goethe), this continual interplay between reason and consciousness is the primal rhythm of life in the novel, the deepest expression of its striving for a durable form of unity; it is a fertile dynamism, a richly various negotiation between extremes that celebrates conflict and contradiction as the essence of unity. To cite but one example, the polarities of characterization in the fictional text reflect this interplay in several interesting ways. On the one hand, there are characters that resemble Napoleon because they show a supreme confidence in their ability to master events through the will directed by reason alone. Count Rostopchin and Speransky are notable examples of this polarity which is typically associated with Western European influence and, in a frequently ironic way, with the punctilious rationalism of the Austrian and German generals. On the other hand, there are characters who renounce the possibility of mastery. The most striking representative of this group is Platon Karataev, whose simple, peasant ways silently advocate a deep-seated reticence about rational cognition and seem to embody an intuitive attunement to the plenitude of being that is akin to consciousness. Kutuzov and Bagration display a similar reticence in marked opposition to their European counterparts. This opposition is no accident, for such reticence proves to be a distinctively Russian trait in the novel. These extremes appear within leading characters as well. Prince Andrei wavers between mastery and reticence and then rejects them both. At the beginning of the novel, he is much closer to the Napoleonic “pole”—he both harbors an unreserved admiration for Napoleon and seeks to model his career on that of the great man. At Austerlitz, however, as he lies wounded on the field of battle, Prince Andrei looks up at the sky and has a revelatory experience of the infinite. The most significant element of this experience is the comparison between the infinite sky and the petty figure of Napoleon whose voice Prince Andrei likens to the “buzzing of a fly.”4

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This comparison impresses upon Prince Andrei the sublime majesty of an infinity which overwhelms any one individual no matter how powerful. After Austerlitz, Prince Andrei seems to change. At first, he renounces his Napoleonic hopes in the bitter realization that they are vain and futile. He retreats from active life to his estate at Bogucharovo and seems to embrace a reticence about the possibility of mastery. I use the word “seems” because Prince Andrei will ultimately revive his previous admiration of Napoleon in a different guise when he comes into contact with Speransky. Yet, he will soon thereafter become disillusioned with Speransky and animated by love for the “unaffected” Natasha. When this love fails, he will return to the army having forgotten that “infinite, receding vault of the sky that had once stood above him” (III/1/VIII). Prince Andrei entirely rejects his previous striving and, in a figurative sense, he ceases to be alive. On this account, his fatal wounding at Borodino evinces a trenchant logic since it is the final fruit of this bitter rejection.

2. PURPOSE AND OUTLINE OF THIS BOOK These examples are intended to hint at the importance that this dynamic structure, this relentless striving, has on two different levels of the novel, that of the historical essays and the disposition of characters, arguably the most abstract and the most concrete. But this remains just a hint, and it is the primary task of this book to examine in detail how the central figure of striving, by shuttling between these two levels in the greater expanses of the narrative, both animates and determines the formal contours of the novel as a gathering point of different relations, of individual (part) and whole, concrete and abstract, subject and object. The overriding purpose for proceeding in this way is to reveal the main conceptual underpinnings of the novel and thereby provide a new explanation for the peculiar generic aberrations that have been the subject of considerable critical debate since War and Peace was first published in the mid 1860s with the ostentatious caution that it was indeed not a novel. Moreover, by moving beyond categorization of the novel as skeptical or dogmatic in its attitude towards the limitations of narrative, I hope to indicate just how profoundly dynamic and fluid the borders between these ostensibly

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opposed stances are, that the essence of their interrelation is in fact captured emblematically by the central figure of striving. And this assertion leads inexorably to the fundamental observation that the novel’s most powerful unifying action is to affirm that art and thought are intimately related, that the novel’s great art is no less a product of thought than the historical essays. Accordingly, I shall devote the balance of this study to analysis of one of the novel’s most famous and distinctive features, the multilayered reflexive relation between the historical essays and fictional text culminating in the Second Part of the Epilogue. By doing so, I intend to show that the novel proceeds in stages to an ever more complete reflexivity about, or awareness of, its own structure, this ascent itself being a “realization” of both the striving for cognitive mastery over the whole and a characteristic paradigm of historical development. The first stage is representational and mimetic; Tolstoy portrays the movement of history by describing “typical” historical events such as councils of war and military engagements together with the everyday lives of a group of characters. The second stage introduces a series of reflections on historical narrative into the fiction, while the third, represented only by the discussions in the Second Part of the Epilogue, serves as an overarching metaphysical reflection on the previous two stages that attempts to ground and thereby authorize their unity. This analysis is divided into two parts, each of which deals with one stage of reflexivity. In Part 1, I focus primarily on the fictional text while arguing that the essays’ discussions of historical narrative are distinctively reflexive, that they articulate major tendencies in the structure of the fictional text by skillfully exploiting a rich language of concepts with wide-ranging philosophical and scientific filiations. The thrust of this analysis is to show that the skeptical arguments advanced in the novel justify the deployment of more holistic narrative strategies for which the mathematical method of calculus introduced in Book III is one experiment, albeit a crucial one, in explanation. Indeed, calculus acts as a compelling master figure for the basic structural patterns that define the narrative form of the novel, one that moves beyond the limitations of Aristotelian poetics towards defining

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a new kind of narrative that hovers uneasily between the closure of epic and the openness inherent in the novel. In Part 2, I give a close reading of the abstract thinking Tolstoy sets out at length in the Second Part of the Epilogue so as to provide a basis for understanding the relation of the historical essays to the fictional text in terms of the interplay between reason and consciousness. Here I emphasize the close affiliation Tolstoy’s views have with central positions in German idealist thought, especially the strand of post-Kantian thinking reflected in the reading of Schopenhauer that emerges in the Second Part of the Epilogue. I then go on to examine the essential finitude or limitedness of human thought and action that the interplay between reason and consciousness expresses—a formidable distance between man and God—within the fictional text in the guise of the two polarities of characterization, mastery and reticence, the former essentially tragic, the latter essentially comic. In this respect, I ultimately show more clearly how the movement towards increasing reflexivity that shapes the novel as a whole, as a sort of absolute movement, also emerges on a highly subjective plane in the lives of two crucial characters, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov. This division of the analysis also highlights a closely related aspect of striving in the novel, the attempt to move beyond the particular limitations of subjectivity. Part 1 provides an overview of the ways in which the novel seeks to provide an objective account of the world in its historical becoming, to forge an objective identity not tainted by, but rather both preserving and subsuming, the errant partiality of subjective vision in a seamless whole such that neither part nor whole need be sacrificed to the other. Throughout this discussion, I emphasize the impetus to discover narrative forms that avoid the pitfalls inherent in the modern turn to the subject as the basic unit of world construction. But Part 2 examines why these forms cannot achieve their goal. In this Part, I take a closer look at the subjective side of the equation and, specifically, at how Tolstoy seeks to authorize a new synthesis of subject and object (through his conception of the relation between reason and consciousness) but also finally admits the impossibility of that synthesis, a point further articulated by some of the leading characters in the novel. This result is, however, shot through with ambiguity. While the ineluctable gap between subject and object

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affirms human limitation or finitude, the futility of seeking to know as a god might, it thereby also affirms freedom and continued life, an invitation to a new beginning that echoes Augustine’s “si fallor, sum” [If I err, I am]. Human finitude means that cognition is essentially impure, that any assertion implies its negation, the source of its own downfall and renewal. Thus my analysis has several fundamental points of focus, all of which refer to a specific aspect of the basic pattern of striving as well as to the whole appropriate for it. Indeed, if this analysis unfolds as an ascent, a movement towards a synoptic view, it also reveals the irony of such an ascent, that the desire to achieve pure vision of the whole cannot escape the bonds of subjective contingency, that no matter how closely subjective and objective views come to each other, they may never be brought together as a transparent unity, and, if they could, that unity would be nothing more than a tyranny, a profound loss of freedom.5 To forestall an important objection: I recognize that this layered way of dealing with the text has many affinities with Hegelian thought (and, more generally, the project of German idealism). One need only glance at the terminology to perceive a progression from “immediacy” to consciousness and, thence, to self-consciousness that recalls the basic progression of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. This similarity may invite reference to Tolstoy’s apparent antipathy to Hegel or a hasty ascription of influence. Two arguments militate against identifying the movement in the novel too closely with Hegel. First, within the philosophical (and Christian) tradition, an ascent towards increasing awareness of the true structure of the world of appearances, of the unchanging being that lies concealed in the evanescent muddle of becoming, is hardly a pattern unique to Hegelian philosophy. In its different manifestations such an ascent has ancient precedents (i.e., original theoria or visual contemplation of the Platonic ideas, a noetic communion with being, with “pure” unity), although as a movement of consciousness it is distinctively modern. Moreover, as a literary phenomenon, this latter movement—albeit towards an uncertain goal—was the principal trope of the Bildungsroman, a central form of the novel in the nineteenth century of which Goethe’s Wilhelm Mei-

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sters Lehrjahre is a prime example. In fact, there is a well-known line of interpretation according to which Hegel’s Phenomenology is but a philosophical adaptation of the Bildungsroman.6 Second, the supposedly dialectical logic of movement in Hegel has no echo in the Tolstoyan text. If arguments to the contrary exist, they usually conflate simple opposition with dialectic, as if Hegelian dialectic were merely a method of describing oppositions. In point of fact, my approach is an indirect response to Boris Eikhenbaum’s famous thesis that the emergence of the essays at the halfway point in the novel signals a change of plan. According to this view, Tolstoy originally conceived of the novel within the generic confines of the family chronicle. As work progressed, however, he slowly began to transform this family chronicle into a historical epic, a fact which comes fully to the fore with the appearance of the historical essays. Eikhenbaum uses the essays as evidence of epic intentions by likening them to Homeric digressions. However tenuous this latter claim may be—there is of course evidence both pro and contra—the main issue which Eikhenbaum addresses has to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that Eikhenbaum’s argument does not adequately account for the existence of important historical themes in the novel. One has only to recall that the first paragraph establishes a historical frame for the ensuing action. Now, one may of course argue that such historical details merely constitute an important backdrop for the family chronicle, but it is doubtful that such an argument can adequately explain or justify the complex ways in which historical events form an integral part of the text from the very beginning.7 Tolstoy himself seemed to conceive of the novel in these terms. In a rather acerbic draft for the Second Part of the Epilogue, he justifies his abstract meditations on history in the following terms (which, incidentally, tend to confirm the surmise that, for Tolstoy, art and thought have an underlying unity and are not intrinsically opposed to each other): I started to write a book about the past. While describing the past, I found that it not only was not known, but that it was known and described in a way completely opposite to what it was. And I began to feel the necessity to prove what I was saying and to articulate the views on whose basis I was writing. Perhaps, they will say, it would be better not to express them. Nonetheless, as a justification, I

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can add that, if I had not had these thoughts, there also would not have been any descriptions. (PSS 16: 241)

Finally, it may be worth noting that, although constantly tempered by concrete reference to the fictional text, long stretches of my analyses, especially those dealing with the Second Part of the Epilogue, are of necessity highly abstract. I recognize that such a level of abstraction may seem beyond the needs of typical literary analysis, but, in my view, there is simply no other adequate way to grasp the basic elements of the interplay of reason and consciousness in itself, and as it appears in the fictional text, than to strip away an occasionally obfuscating rhetoric to reach the philosophical and theological foundations of Tolstoy’s views. By taking this approach, however, I certainly do not seek to attribute specific positions to Tolstoy so as to establish a convenient “genetic” or causal tie between him and one or more of the luminaries in the great tradition of Western religious and philosophical thought. We have all heard sufficient professions of Tolstoy’s Platonism, Rousseauism, Existentialism and Nihilism to perceive that these labels typically obscure the particularity of Tolstoy. Indeed, if I refer to an array of scientific, philosophical and theological conceptions to develop important aspects of my arguments in the pages that follow, I do so in order to offer a series of prisms with which to illuminate the principal implications of the views Tolstoy espouses and not to indulge in facile ascription of influence or to impose thereby a precipitous and palliative categorization. This may seem to be a sort of scholarly dodge, a way of suggesting influence without having to indulge in the precarious task of proving what at best cannot be proved conclusively. Be that as it may, the fact remains that the conceptual tools Tolstoy himself uses have a history, and they are neatly defined by that history in a way that helps one to see more clearly the philosophical richness of Tolstoy’s views along with their connections to more general tendencies of thought.

3. THE CRITICAL TRADITION Certainly there is no shortage of distinguished critical treatments of Tolstoy’s great novels, and the sheer prominence of War and Peace as

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an object of critical attention can hardly be overestimated. It is therefore only reasonable to provide a preliminary account of how this study seeks to develop or add to previous discussions of the novel. While this study in fact addresses a fundamental issue in the critical reception of the novel, the vexed question of narrative form, of the novel’s unity, it does so in a manner that both departs from the critical tradition and tries to bring together significant divisions identifiable within it. To explain more specifically how this is so requires a succinct interpretation of the main positions in the critical reception of the novel dealing with the question of narrative form and unity. Indeed, since the first books of War and Peace were published in the late 1860s the question of unity has been at the very forefront of critical discussion. While the earliest Russian critics uniformly praised the brilliant and precise descriptions in the novel, they expressed at the same time a powerful sense of dismay about its apparent lack of order. They sought but were unable to find any central idea. Rather, the accumulation of detail, the apparently unmotivated sequence of action, and the sudden transitions between scenes of war and peace produced bewilderment. As one critic wrote in 1868: …we expect a novel in the mode of Walter Scott and, not finding that, we become perplexed. It seems to us that the plot of Count Tolstoy has no goal, that the form of his multi-volume work is disconnected and abrupt, that this is no historical portrait but simply a series of sketches pertaining to and related to each other merely because they belong to the same time period.8

The early Russian critics considered this lack of order a serious aesthetic flaw in the novel, one of whose most disturbing aspects was the unmistakable generic break between fictional description and the historical essays. Turgenev captures the early critical attitude to the essays when he writes that the “historical supplement about which readers are delighted is charlatanism and a puppet comedy.”9 Partially as a reaction to such criticism, in the 1873 edition of War and Peace Tolstoy deleted portions of the historical essays and relegated the remainder to a separate appendix at the end of the novel with the title “Essays on the Campaign of 1812.”10 Some notable Western European writers also

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shared this early contempt. Flaubert certainly did not appreciate the essays and complained that Tolstoy “repeats himself and philosophizes” in them.11 This early reaction was rather predictably followed by a reappraisal of the novel’s form that reflected a sweeping rejection of the values of nineteenth-century criticism. The vanguard here were prominent critics associated with Russian formalism who suggested that the apparent lack of order in the novel was not an aesthetic flaw but the result of a deliberate and carefully executed artistic plan. Viktor Shklovsky maintained that War and Peace attacked through the anomalies of its formal structure the traditional generic constraints of the novel. Boris Eikhenbaum wrote a series of important studies about Tolstoy’s fiction. He too considered the novel’s formal deviations from convention part of an overall artistic plan arising, as previously noted, from a rather pronounced change of generic design in favor of the epic genre.12 Eikhenbaum was also quick to discern that the philosophical content of the essays did not reflect a wholly eccentric position. He provides a rich description of both the various historical views which Tolstoy entertained at one time or another while he was writing the novel and Schopenhauer’s impact, which to this day has not been adequately assessed. In particular, Eikhenbaum shows that Schopenhauer had a fundamental influence on the terminology Tolstoy employs in the Second Part of the Epilogue.13 Sir Isaiah Berlin’s article, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” sets out the basic outlines of the still dominant modern view about the novel. Although Berlin praises Eikhenbaum as having written the “best critical work on Tolstoy in any language” (48), he seems to ignore Eikhenbaum’s broader claims concerning the essays and revives the earlier sense of dismay about them. Berlin does this in a rather complicated fashion. He stresses that the essays must be taken seriously, but in practice he dismisses them on the basis that they articulate only a “thin, ‘positive’ doctrine” (49) undermined by the fictional text. Berlin simply cannot accept the determinist arguments which Tolstoy constructs in the essays and enlists the fictional text to disprove them. Berlin’s generalizing characterization of this conflict is his primary contribution to the critical tradition. He claims Tolstoy was torn be-

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tween a powerful desire to reduce the diversity of phenomena to a single unifying theory in the essays and an acute appreciation of that diversity which informs the fictional text. Berlin is quick to decide this conflict in favor of diversity and suggests further that Tolstoy was instinctually skeptical of any unifying theory. Berlin’s description of Tolstoy’s skepticism is worth reproducing since it continues to influence attitudes about the novel: Tolstoy was by nature not a visionary; he saw the manifold objects and situations on earth in their full multiplicity; he grasped their individual essences, and what divided them from what they were not, with a clarity to which there is no parallel. Any comforting theory which attempted to collect, relate, ‘synthesize’, reveal hidden substrata and concealed inner connections, which, though not apparent to the naked eye, nevertheless guaranteed the unity of all things—the fact that they were ‘ultimately’ parts one of another with no loose ends—the ideal of the seamless whole—all such doctrines he exploded contemptuously and without difficulty. (48)

George Steiner’s famous book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky appears to accept Berlin’s thesis without further ado. Yet this acceptance is only apparent; in the final account, Steiner gives much greater credence to the quest for unity in Tolstoy’s work, “…for the revelation of total meaning underlies Tolstoy’s art even where his sensuous perception is most enthralled by the boundless diversity of life” (243). Steiner’s insistence on the essential movement towards unity and completeness in Tolstoy’s works represents in fact a pronounced counterpoint to Berlin. Berlin’s characterization of Tolstoy as a skeptic has, however, gained wide acceptance. One of the most influential recent monographs on the novel, Gary Saul Morson’s Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace’ argues very much in the spirit of Berlin that Tolstoy was fundamentally skeptical. Morson refers to Tolstoy as an “epistemic anarchist,” an “epistemic nihilist” and an opponent of “semiotic totalitarianism” (90, 109, 84). Unfortunately, Morson does not clearly define these terms, none of which is by any means self-evident or anchored in a well-established philosophical tradition. One must therefore judge from the arguments which Morson advances in the book itself. Morson extrapolates these arguments from a reading of the essays in conjunction with the fic-

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tional text. Following the earliest critics, he maintains that the novel has no orderly narrative structure, while at the same time attributing this fact to a skepticism presented in the essays and illustrated in the fictional text. On this basis, Morson evaluates the novel as a form of “negative narration” or deliberate “parody” that intends to reveal the weaknesses of narrative by showing that any narrative “necessarily falsifies” (130, 132, 130). With this thesis, Morson reprises the work of the Russian formalists by attributing the novel’s formal anomalies to an underlying order, while he differs from them in identifying this order as a philosophical position described in the essays. In doing so, however, Morson ironically puts himself in the awkward position of suggesting that Tolstoy asserts skepticism from a vantage point that presupposes superior knowledge thereby involving Tolstoy in an elementary contradiction between the form of expression and its content.14 Traces of Berlin’s ideas surface in modern Soviet criticism as well. Sergei Bocharov stands out among recent Soviet scholars for his attention to the importance of the historical essays. In his remarkable little book on War and Peace, Bocharov suggests that the historical essays try to articulate the motivating principles of the fictional text (34-44). But Bocharov also maintains that the historical essays, by attempting to translate these principles into the language of rational exposition, transform them. According to Bocharov, this transformation takes place because the historical essays impose a logical structure which cannot by definition account for the essential contradictions that are the source of the fictional text’s vitality. While these contradictions are variations of Berlin’s assertion that the novel pulls in two directions at once, Bocharov, unlike Berlin, finds that they create a tense unity in the novel. Not all modern critics agree that Tolstoy displays a radical skepticism in the novel. R. F. Christian in fact represents a potent opposing view based on a careful examination of the novel’s genesis and structure (1-59). He tries to show that Tolstoy gives a new kind of structure to his novel constructed from a complex series of antitheses, juxtapositions and repetitions, which he calls “situation rhymes.” Christian thinks that this array of devices and, especially, the repetitions, illus-

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trate the elaborate and cunningly designed artistic unity of the novel as well as its formal innovativeness.15 Christian does not make a case for the unity of the historical essays and the fictional text. He simply contends that the novel exhibits a thoroughgoing determinism which Tolstoy’s countervailing assertion of individual freedom does not contradict, since, for Christian, the latter is only a psychological perception, an illusion of sorts. Edward Wasiolek pays close attention to the interrelation of the historical essays and the fictional text. Moreover, outside of Eikhenbaum’s studies of Tolstoy, Wasiolek is almost alone in examining the linchpin of the essays, the relation of reason and consciousness, in detail. He states his basic contention simply: The totally free choice assumes that the individual can step out of the nexus of space and time and initiate an act abstractly; the totally rational view of the world assumes that men can step out of space and time and conceive of the whole series of events. In both, man plays at being God. In both the world is turned into an object, for the abstract ‘free will’ treats the world outside itself as an object just as surely as does the absolute reason. Total freedom and total necessity meet. The real act, however, cannot be either, for man does not live outside of history, but in history. Since he lives for history, he cannot step out of history to initiate events (unreal freedom), nor can he step out of history to judge history (unreal necessity). (122-123)

Wasiolek goes on to assert that, to the extent characters try to be totally free or totally knowing, they live in “unreality,” since the true sense of reality emerges only in the limited, concrete, individual experience of life. This distinction seems to blur the boundaries between reason and consciousness as different kinds of cognition. In fact, Wasiolek does not adequately take that difference into account. Rather, he simply emphasizes that the essence of the relation is its hostility to “unreal” absolutes. Two other works of American criticism are notable for their commitment to uncovering the religious dimension of thought in War and Peace. Richard Gustafson, in his book Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger, notes that the “central philosophical issue of War and Peace is the problem of knowledge” and places this issue within the context of the struggle of Tolstoy’s religious “world-view” with modernity

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(218). In doing so, Gustafson brings to the table the long-neglected connection of Tolstoy’s historical views with an essentially Christian metaphysics that pits the finite creature, man, against the infinite and uncreated divine nature. Rather than skepticism, Gustafson maintains that Tolstoy is “working out a new theory of knowledge” whose “hidden agenda was theological” and which was to be the forerunner of Tolstoy’s later doctrine of God and creation (224). Donna Orwin finds the existence of “circular” or “harmonic” reason in War and Peace (107).16 This kind of reason is opposed to the linearity of logical thought and affirms the harmonious interconnection of apparently diverse phenomena ordained by God. Traditional metaphysical opposites such as being and nothingness are seen as moments in a seamless whole and not as mutually exclusive opposites—one has only to recall unifying juxtapositions of this kind such as the early contrast of Count Rostov’s lively, agile dancing of the “Daniel Cooper” with the turgid atmosphere surrounding the dying moments of old Count Bezukhov. While this brief review of the critical reception of War and Peace shows the importance of the debate about unity, it also shows a deeper preoccupation with, if not unease about, the relation between narrative form and knowledge, between artistic representation and ostensibly rational exposition, that is fostered by the problematic status and content of the historical essays. On the one hand, there are critics, like R. F. Christian, who see in the novel’s intricate organization and, indeed, in its very comprehensiveness an affirmation of the power inherent in narrative form to grasp the structure concealed within the flux of experience. And, since the novel is ostensibly realistic, one that is supposed to imitate reality, to be a “wonder” of mimetic art, the obvious if tacit assumption must be that the flux of experience is not so elusive as poets and thinkers have often claimed both before and after the heyday of the realistic novel. On the other hand, the novel has also been seen by an important group of critics, of whom Sir Isaiah Berlin is one of the most influential, as an affirmation of the chaotic or infinite “character” of experience, its ineffability and uniqueness. For these critics, the novel shows how experience resists formal reduction of any kind and especially the pernicious artifice of narrative.

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Hence, one may with justification divide the critical reception of the novel into two broad tendencies that are strongly opposed to each other. One claims the novel is the artistic expression of a positive view of narrative as a means of transmitting knowledge, while the other claims that the novel shows how narrative is either a poor vehicle of knowledge or, more radically, that the novel shows how all narratives are ultimately deceptions, that in imposing form these narratives exclude all too much—they fail to portray the whole and, in this failure, can only misrepresent it. For these latter critics the cost of the terrible labor of form is the loss or corruption of truth—form does not bring the hidden to light, rather it merely conceals in attempting to do so. As Aristotle notes in Book I of the Metaphysics, the poets tell many lies—but what wondrous and beguiling lies they tell! This polarity is extremely problematic. While both attitudes strike at a crucial aspect of the novel, they also completely fail to escape one fundamental assumption they hold in common—the inevitability of the law of excluded middle. By this I mean that critics have tended to entertain either/or kinds of positions in regard to the novel’s guiding attitude towards knowledge, if indeed there is one, without taking into account a third possibility; namely, that the novel consists of a complex series of negotiations between these two broad alternatives, that is, between faith in, and distrust of, narrative as a vehicle of truth, as a means of accurately representing the whole. In other words, critics have tended to overlook the open-ended dynamism of the novel, the constant struggle that I have characterized as a striving whose goals condemn it to failure but which arises strangely renewed by failure to further activity. The intrinsically unstable synthesis of dogmatic and skeptical attitudes in this striving offers a “third way” that undermines and overcomes accounts of the novel tied to more traditional ranges of interpretation. This “third way” has been overlooked because the philosophical foundations of the novel, expressed with admirable clarity in the relation between reason and consciousness, have either been ignored or misread. Hence, while this study has as a principal task the exploration of this rather new way towards the heart of the novel, it acquits this task by providing a necessary and much more wide-ranging ex-

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amination of the thought contained in the historical essays as well as the fictional text. Tolstoy’s considerable talent for thinking has not been given its due, and one of the subsidiary aims of this study is to show how astute and sophisticated a thinker Tolstoy was, that many of the positions he presents in the novel, far from being the eccentric creations of a great writer and bad thinker, have important antecedents in the most advanced and daring thinkers of the 19th century and successors in some important movements of the 20th, of which structuralism and structuralist historical analysis are only two outstanding examples. Indeed, the ultimate goal that informs this entire study is the elimination of ingrained distinctions between thinker and artist that re-emerged in the wake of Romanticism and have retained some of their power into our own time. War and Peace is, if nothing else, one of the most remarkable and radical assertions of the essential unity of thought and art as two complementary aspects of human cognition, a unity that is nonetheless mysterious and difficult if not impossible to grasp in itself.

PART ONE: THE INFINITE QUEST

CHAPTER ONE: SKEPTICISM The object of philosophy—to discover general laws, for which one must renounce the individual. (PSS 7:132)

War and Peace seeks to move beyond the weaknesses of a purely subjective presentation of events, one based on the notion that the individual subject can shape events either directly by action or indirectly through the way those events are described. The narrative continually expands to construct a more comprehensive, objective narrative edifice that overcomes and preserves subjective points of view by linking them together in a multi-layered mesh of distinctively recurrent patterns according to certain characteristic similarities; part and whole are thus brought together in a unifying narrative, a collective identity, that does not efface but rather safeguards the individual by locating it perspicuously within the whole. This movement appears with particular clarity in the ambiguous rejection of skepticism that is in fact one of the dominant patterns in the novel. This movement is notably reflexive, and it permits the rather self-conscious articulation of the principles which determine the novel’s own structure, its narrative identity. Both the content and form of this articulation can best be understood by proceeding through the various steps in the novel’s long argument about historical narrative which originates in the early fictional descriptions and reaches its greatest intensity in the series of historical essays set forth in Book III; hence, I have thought it prudent to devote the first two chapters of this study to this argument.

1. SKEPTICISM IN THE FICTIONAL TEXT Before the emergence of the historical essays, Tolstoy’s panoramic descriptions of historical events supply numerous anticipations of the

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principal positions which his abstract arguments about historical narrative will formulate and refine. Of these descriptions the most famous, if not the loci classici, involve battles, complete with the political and military calculations, preparations and manipulations subsidiary thereto, that formed the core of the traditional subject matter for the histories of the Napoleonic Wars. At first glance these descriptions seem to reveal an essentially skeptical view about the kind of knowledge historians may obtain concerning historical events. They tend to show that the chaos of battle cannot be reduced to any tidy account whatsoever. For Tolstoy, such an account characterizes historical events as directed “solely by the will of a Napoleon, an Alexander, or in general the persons they [the historians] describe” (2E/II). Prior to the appearance of the historical essays, Tolstoy makes these points most clearly and elaborately in his complex narrative accounts of the battles of Schön Grabern and Austerlitz, the first detailed battle sequences in the novel. Accordingly, in the following I shall begin by providing an analysis of each of these battles that shows how they collectively develop the case for skepticism and thereby clarify what skepticism means in the context of the novel. I shall then proceed to examine the narrator’s description of the planning which takes place under the direction of General von Pfuel at Drissa. Both of these analyses deal with well-known, perhaps well-worn, aspects of the novel, and my intention here is not to engage in a strikingly different interpretation of these scenes, if that means to focus on neglected details or combinations of details. Rather, I intend to develop, through an analysis of the basic tendencies that these scenes reveal, a more precise account of skepticism in the novel than has been the case thus far. This is a crucial preliminary task because skepticism as a way of thinking, as an attitude to the world, is all too often reduced to an unclear notion of doubt or suspicion of dogmatism.1 But skepticism has had many forms in its long history, from apparently ironic Socratic claims about the inevitability of ignorance to the Derridean infinite play of the signifier, the indefinitely deferred advent of final meaning, that has so deeply marked recent thought in literature and philosophy. As a result, it is of the utmost importance for any

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analysis of the novel’s skepticism to start from the beginning, to grasp the phenomenon of skepticism in its own terms within the novel.

1.1. Schön Grabern At Schön Grabern Prince Andrei is the focus of the narrative whose structure is in part determined by the contrast between his expectations (nurtured by traditional historical accounts) about what shape the impending battle will take and his subsequent experience of it. While Prince Andrei first believes that a battle is directed by a commander’s skill and intelligence, he discovers that chance and not the will of any man rules the battlefield. Although this conclusion is rather obvious, a repetition of the venerable pattern of illusions lost so characteristic of the modern novel, the structure of the contrast reveals the tacit implications of Prince Andrei’s discovery, and these, while intriguing in and of themselves, are also very important for an understanding of the novel’s skepticism. Prince Andrei introduces this contrast on the morning of the battle. As a way of “setting the scene,” I would like to give a brief overview of the circumstances leading to the battle in which chance seems to have a significant role. Due to a ruse on the part of the French generals at Vienna, a considerable French force had been allowed to cross the Danube and now threatens the Russian armies under Kutuzov with complete destruction. Hence, a chance victory of French cunning over Austrian credulity puts the entire Russian army, hitherto protected by the Danube, in a desperate position. Only Prince Bagration’s meager force of 4000 troops stands in the way of the French army which with 150,000 men is so many times larger that any engagement is more likely to end in disaster than victory for the Russians. Fortunately for the Russians, Murat, the French general who successfully fooled the Austrians at Vienna, believes that he is engaging the entire Russian army. He thus attempts to employ another ruse to win time so that his army may prepare for an engagement. This ruse however merely helps the Russians to rest; it grants them a chance advantage. When Napoleon learns of the situation, he suspects Russian treachery and immediately orders Murat into battle.

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We rejoin Prince Andrei who, having chosen to stay with Bagration’s forces, looks down at the battlefield from Captain Tushin’s battery. From this vantage point over the whole area, he starts to think about the upcoming engagement with the French: Prince Andrei took out his notebook, and leaning on the cannon, sketched a plan of the position. He made some notes on two points, intending to mention them to Bagration. His idea was, first to concentrate all the artillery in the center, and second, to withdraw the cavalry to the other side of the dip. Prince Andrei, being always near the commander-in-chief, closely following the mass movements and general orders, and constantly studying historical accounts of battles, involuntarily pictured to himself the course of events in the forthcoming action in broad outline. He imagined only important possibilities: ‘If the enemy attacks the right flank,’ he said to himself, ‘the Kiev grenadiers and the Podolsk chasseurs must hold their position till reserves from the center come up. In that case the dragoons could successfully make a flank counter-attack. If they attack our center we, having the center battery on this high ground, shall withdraw the left flank under its cover, and retreat to the dip by echelons.’ So he reasoned.… (I/2/XVI—my emphasis)

The passage shifts immediately to a discussion among several officers in which they speculate about what comes “after death.” This juxtaposition outlines an initial response to Prince Andrei’s reflections by inviting a somewhat ironic comparison between them and speculation about the afterlife. There are two levels to this response. First, the officers speak about an issue, life after death, of course a central and “weighty” preoccupation of many influential strains of religious and philosophical reflection, in a remarkably simple and unpretentious manner.2 Such simplicity stands in distinct contrast to the perfervid grandiosity of Prince Andrei’s reasoning about the forthcoming battle. Second, while Prince Andrei concentrates on planning and the “important possibilities” that might be realized in the course of the battle, the other officers think of the obvious and all-pervasive possibility of death, the stark and bitter reality with which the battle threatens them, for “‘[a]fraid or not, you can’t escape it anyhow’” (I/2/XVI). If Prince Andrei’s thoughts betray a striving for military glory—as he will say immediately after the battle has begun, a desire to have his own “Toulon”—they do so with unmistakable vanity. By contrast, the officers in their simplicity show a humility and respect for the terrible

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seriousness of the battle that awaits them. Instead of glory, they think of death. Moreover, and I think this point is most telling of what follows, the comparison ultimately insinuates that planning for a battle, that is, to try to envision it in advance, and attempting to determine the nature of the afterlife are equally futile and arid exercises in human speculation which turn one’s gaze away from what stands directly in one’s path. Prince Andrei’s reasoning obscures or conceals the simple truth of the matter, that the battle brings death first and foremost. The elements of this comparison have an ancient pedigree. Socrates in the Theaetetus interrupts the flow of the dialogue to tell a story about how the “first” Greek philosopher, Thales, while gazing at the stars fell into a well in the presence of a Thracian servant girl who made a jest at his expense. Socrates adds that “…in his eagerness to know the things in heaven, he [Thales] was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet” (1997: 193).3 Lermontov, in Hero of our Time, ironically reprises this topos when, in “The Fatalist,” Pechorin literally steps on a slaughtered pig while resolving no longer to be bewitched by metaphysical speculations and to look always under his feet. Of interest is how Tolstoy alters this traditional topos, for the officers are the ones who see better what lies before them by recognizing the simple fact of death and speculating about the afterlife—a traditionally metaphysical occupation—whereas Prince Andrei’s reasonings about the apparently practical planning of a battle seem to edge him closer to the metaphysical “star gazers.” This reversal hints at an important aspect of the novel, that reason is cunning, a tool of deception permitting us to hide from or evade direct engagement with inconvenient and disturbing realities of human existence, the most daunting of which is death.4 In the remaining descriptions of the battle we come to see with ever greater clarity and force the distance between Prince Andrei’s preconceptions, based on his experience as a staff officer as well as on his reading of historical accounts of battles, and the actual course of battle. The basic problem is that Prince Andrei believes in what he has read about battles; he is conditioned to believe in the authority of the commander and his plans. But, at Schön Grabern, Prince Andrei cannot ignore the inadequacy, indeed, the almost fantastical nature of his

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beliefs which, in consequence, he soon begins to question. Prince Andrei’s description of Bagration is a case in point. Prince Andrei catches up to Bagration after the battle has begun and he expresses both curiosity and astonishment at Bagration’s remarkably passive demeanor; Bagration does not take charge in the way Prince Andrei seems to expect he would as a commanding general, namely, by issuing commands and thereby determining the overall direction of the battle. Instead, Bagration presents a diffident and rather impassive figure with his “half-closed, dull sleepy eyes” and readiness to greet all news of the battle with the terse response, “very good.” To Prince Andrei, Bagration’s impassivity at first gives the impression “that everything that took place and was reported to him was exactly what he had foreseen” (I/2/XXVII). This impression betrays Prince Andrei’s belief in the power of one man to direct events based on his having superior foresight. Hence, Prince Andrei clings to the assumption that Bagration is impassive because everything is unfolding as he has foreseen, i.e., according to plan. Like a Homeric god, Bagration calmly surveys from above what he knows is foreordained. Several important details support a vastly different and ambiguously ironic view of Bagration. In this respect, Bagration’s attitude towards Tushin is particularly instructive. The narrator notes that Tushin’s guns, which had been intended to fire on the valley beneath the battery, were in fact firing directly at the village of Schön Grabern and continues: “No one had given Tushin orders where and at what to fire, but after consulting with his sergeant-major Zakharchenko for whom he had great respect, he had decided that it would be a good thing to set fire to the village. ‘Very good!’ said Bagration…” (I/2/XVII). There is no evidence whatsoever that Bagration had foreseen Captain Tushin’s decision to act in contravention of the plan set for his battery and, hence, Bagration’s response, the ubiquitous approval “very good,” makes an almost comic case for drawing the opposite conclusion, that Bagration rather than directing the battle simply accedes to the direction it takes, whatever it

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might be. Bagration, far from being a Homeric god, is most certainly limited like any other man. As an additional and striking proof of this contention, I refer to how Bagration reacts to a subordinate’s dubious report. During the height of the battle, a regimental commander rides up to Bagration while the latter tours the field and reports that his regiment had been attacked and that this attack had been repulsed. The narrator’s comment here undermines and therefore complicates the regimental commander’s apparently straightforward description: He said the attack had been repulsed, employing this military term to describe what had occurred to his regiment, but in reality he did not himself know what had happened during that half-hour to the troops entrusted to him, and could not say with certainty whether the attack had been repulsed or his regiment had been broken up. All he knew was that at the commencement of the action balls and shells began flying all over his regiment and hitting men, and that afterwards, someone had shouted ‘Cavalry!’ and our men had begun firing. They were still firing, not at the cavalry which had disappeared, but at the French infantry who had come into the hollow and were firing at our men. Prince Bagration bowed his head as a sign that this was exactly what he desired and expected. (I/2/XVIII)

Bagration approves of a report which is fictitious or, at the very least, concocted in order to give a plausible account of what happened. The military language the regimental commander uses is meant to reinforce plausibility by making his description fit into the conventional expectations of what takes place in a battle; he says what he believes might have been expected to happen as a way of convincing Bagration. Yet, Bagration, who is in any event plainly unable to judge the veracity of the regimental commander’s report, reacts in a manner that is still surprising. Rather than making any inquiry whether that account has any truth to it, he merely nods his approval. This latter case only more aggressively makes the point that Bagration has no idea of what is going on during the battle. Foresight and planning have no relevance to him, and his approval, then, can only be a way of appearing to know. Prince Andrei is not slow to draw several trenchant conclusions with wide-ranging implications from this conduct. His comments are

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worth quoting in full, since they make the key point of the whole sequence with exemplary clarity: Prince Andrei listened attentively to Bagration’s colloquies with the commanding officers and the orders he gave them, and to his surprise found that no orders were really given but that Prince Bagration tried to make it appear that everything done by necessity, by accident, or by the will of subordinate commanders, was done, if not by his direct command at least in accord with his intentions. Prince Andrei noticed however that though what happened was due to chance and was independent of the commander’s will, owing to the tact Bagration showed, his presence was very valuable. Officers who approached him became calm; soldiers and officers greeted him gaily, grew more cheerful in his presence, and were evidently anxious to display their courage before him. (I/2/XVII—my emphasis)

At Schön Grabern the validity of Prince Andrei’s comments is demonstrated by the operation of apparently chance events in a variety of different forms (all of which are characteristic of subsequent descriptions of battles in the novel as well). To round out my analysis, I shall take a closer look at this variety. If Prince Andrei’s observation of Bagration teaches that no one is “in command” in the accepted sense, then these other examples of the operation of chance (which is nothing else than independence from the will of the commander) provide illustrations of what kinds of factors obstruct or interfere with command. These factors teach us that the commander cannot possibly impose his will for there is no certain means of doing so. Reliance on means is in fact a sure sign of the commander’s dependence. When I speak of “means” in this context, I look first to the problem of the giving and execution of orders that the narrator highlights in the account of Schön Grabern. At issue are both the faithful transmission of the commander’s will to his subordinates who actually carry out the allotted tasks and the relation of the orders to the battle situation as it develops. The fragility of this transmission is a major proof that no one man can shape a battle as his will may direct. In this respect, the narrator shows again and again that orders do not reach their destination or reach it too late, in this sense becoming “stale.” When Bagration entrusts Zherkov with the task of transmitting orders to retreat to a general commanding the left flank, Zherkov, who “could not go where it was dangerous,” fails to deliver the order because he deliberately seeks out the general and his staff “where they could not possi-

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bly be” (I/2/XIX). Here Zherkov’s cowardice disrupts the chain of command. Such disruptions need happen only some of the time to undermine the notion that complete command is possible. The narrator also shows how narrowly selfish interests can intervene to confuse or delay the transmission of orders. As the battle gets underway, the bickering between a German colonel of the hussars and a Russian general, who both place protection of their reputations above concern for the effective execution of their orders, results in delay and prevarication. This irresolution communicates itself to the troops who respond to the vacuum in command by charging into the fray quite unexpectedly and regardless of any orders they may have had. In another instance of a vacuum in command, we have seen that Tushin aims his guns at the town of Schön Grabern even though this action goes against a preceding intention to have those guns cannonade the valley. Since this intention was not properly communicated to Tushin, he has to decide for himself. Ineffective transmission of orders compels soldiers to make autonomous decisions. Tushin decides quite independently of Bagration; in fact, he confers with a “lowly” sergeant, and they together in effect usurp command authority by taking it into their own hands. Later, as the roar of the battle overwhelms him, Tushin ignores orders because he is absorbed in his task. If Tushin’s conduct is not restricted to his own case but applies more broadly, then one can also not escape the conclusion that a number of different and ostensibly autonomous wills are inevitably at work in a battle. This is an implication which one would be hard pressed to ignore, especially in light of the rather comic confusions of the first chapter in Part 2, the review near Braunau, where the troops, having changed into their dress uniforms after a long march, must change back into their dirty gear due to a vaguely worded order. But Tushin’s case also shows that these wills may have a more decisive impact on the battle than that of the commander. In this respect, one should recall that, after the battle is over, it is Prince Andrei himself who claims that the Russians carried the day due to the efforts of Tushin. I am of course referring to the famous scene in Bagration’s tent where Tushin timidly appears before Bagration to explain the loss of two cannon. While the other officers look down on Tushin, who

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hardly cuts the figure of the daring artillery officer (and one should not forget here that Tushin’s efforts invite ironic comparison with Napoleon who first made a reputation for himself as an innovative artillery officer), Prince Andrei justifies Tushin’s conduct, remarking that “…’we owe today’s success chiefly to the action of that battery and the heroic endurance of Captain Tushin and his company’…” (I/2/XXI). Although Prince Andrei cannot help but attribute victory to the actions of Tushin, thus perpetuating his original thinking that one man can make all the difference in a battle, the more subtle message is still clear: Tushin’s prominence in the battle is the result of chance and not planning, that he decided to attack the village and not the valley, that he was able to hold out so long in a sort of feverish and intoxicated state and not follow orders. Prince Andrei’s comments about Tushin and surprise at Bagration’s passivity underscore the lesson typically gleaned from the battle: such events are manifestly not the product of the determining will of one man or group of men. Hence, Prince Andrei’s original position proves to be quite mistaken. He sees that events result from a number of different factors which seem to come together according to chance agglomerations on which no one, not even a formidable general commanding a large army, can possibly impose his will. Yet, as a corollary to this point of view, the description of Schön Grabern supports an even more radical thesis about the function of command according to which the latter consists solely in reacting on an appropriately flexible and confident basis to the chaotic and unforeseeable events of the battle. Tolstoy implies that a commander’s skill is measured by how effectively he gives the impression of seeming to be in command, indeed, of providing the illusion of being in command as a crucial source of comfort to the army. In brief, the effective commander assumes the mantle of an authority he does not have—he pretends (sdelat’ vid) to be in command. These extremely unconventional views have wide-ranging implications. If events happen thanks to a number of factors which coalesce by chance and not in accordance with the will of an individual or group of individuals, the conclusion that we in fact are all subject to a fate which we cannot know is unavoidable. In other words, the ulti-

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mate authority which determines the course of events is inscrutable and, as such, for us it is arbitrary, the pure operation of chance. It follows that attempts to assume the authority to guide events must constitute an illusion or a pia fraus [a pious fraud or noble lie] designed to protect us from the dangerous or unbearable truth that we are powerless. The full “sting” and acerbity of the comparison between Prince Andrei’s reflections about the upcoming battle and the officers’ (among whom we find Captain Tushin) speculations about the nature of the afterlife are now more readily apparent; for, in either case, there is no way of attaining to the truth which would permit us to know and, therefore, to act in accordance with such knowledge, consequently, with at least a modicum of authority. The result is that a “wise passivity” or acceptance of irremediable ignorance seems to be in order, if not beneficial. Hence, those critics who have noted the almost “oriental” fatalism of the novel seem amply justified in their opinion, one that is only underscored by the fact that the outstanding representative of this view in the Schön Grabern sequence is Bagration with his pronounced oriental accent and manners.5

1.2. Counterpoint: Pierre and Helen The quotidian fictional chronicle of the novel offers a certain counterpoint to the notion of “wise passivity.” Throughout the early chapters of Part 3 of Book I which begin at the end of the Schön Grabern sequence and relate the events leading up to the marriage of Pierre to Helen, Pierre, like Bagration at Schön Grabern, is notably passive. In what amounts to a comic echo of Bagration, he seems to adapt his behavior to the flow of events around him as completely as possible. Pierre has displayed this kind of passivity before. At the time of his father’s death, he submitted unquestioningly to the guidance of Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskaia (and was likened to an “Egyptian Statue,” again suggesting an association of passivity with essentially Eastern modes of thought and feeling). Then, however, Pierre was without a

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secure position in society, being the illegitimate son of the old Count. Consequently, one could easily surmise that his passivity was but the outward manifestation of insecurity and inexperience (although there are signs to the contrary). Having inherited his father’s great fortune, Pierre is now extremely rich, well esteemed and, hence, an exemplary if awkward social general—in short, he is an important personage. Yet, the text suggests that as a result of the dignity and power of his new position, Pierre submits to the society around him and, chiefly, to the conniving solicitations of Prince Vasilii: He felt as though he were the center of some important and general movement; that something was constantly expected of him, that if he did not do it he would grieve and disappoint many people, but if he did this and that, all would be well; and he did what was demanded of him, but still that happy result always remained in the future. (I/3/I)

It is perhaps even more surprising that Pierre is unable to resist the gravitational pull of society despite his own misgivings of which he is perfectly aware: Pierre knew that everyone was waiting for him to say a word and cross a certain line, and he knew that sooner or later he would step across it, but an incomprehensible terror seized him at the thought of that dreadful step. A thousand times during that month and a half while he felt himself drawn farther and farther into that dreadful abyss, Pierre said to himself: ‘What is it? I need resolution. Can it be that I have none?’ (I/3/II)

These are, of course, hardly the words of a happy suitor. Pierre’s sense of dread proves to be prescient, since his marriage to Helen will become a source of pain and anguish. Still, he ridiculously accepts “his proposal” to Helen which consists in Prince Vasilii’s declaring him to have done so. Nowhere are the extent and maleficence of Pierre’s passivity more glaring than in this rather pathetic acquiescence. Yet, is this acquiescence any different from Bagration’s in regard to authority for acts over which the latter is shown to have had no control? Bagration takes on the mantle of command because it is placed upon him by the soldiers who believe or would like to believe in his authority. Pierre takes on the obligation of marriage because it is placed upon him by the society in which he moves; to Pierre this soci-

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ety appears to demand that he marry Helen, the sheer inevitability of his love for her being a foregone conclusion. In both cases the supposedly central actor plays a role which is imposed upon him by others: the difference is in outcome. There is another difference which, it seems to me, is of utmost importance to a proper evaluation of the juxtaposition of Bagration’s passivity with that of Pierre. Bagration’s acquiescence to the needs of his troops results from a greater submission to the flow of events which lies outside the will of any one man or group of men; his acceptance of the authority conferred on him is a subsidiary consequence of that submission and not its origin. Bagration is wise since he submits to the flow of events while recognizing and maintaining an illusion of authority for the troops’ benefit. Pierre, to the contrary, submits to the will of a small group of people while failing to perceive the petty and selfish nature of their interests if not the foolishness and vanity of his own dependence on them. His passivity lacks the tincture of wisdom because it elevates the will of a few less than admirable people to the level of an inevitable force. In this sense, Pierre confuses the merely human and venal with that which is well beyond the human. Hence, the counterpoint which Pierre’s unwise passivity provides to that wise passivity of Prince Bagration is most instructive; whereas the former succumbs to the merely human, the latter recognizes what is beyond it. But this is a peculiar conclusion that reveals the polemical undercurrent in the argument for wise passivity. If fatalism is the correct attitude towards human action, then all such action is always already predetermined; no deliberation of any kind could have any significance or impact on the outcome of events. The plain fact is that fatalism simply obviates the assumptions that give rise to the notion of wise or unwise types of action, for the latter are themselves predicated on the utility of deliberation and thus on there being possibilities that may or may not be actualized depending on human choice. Fatalism entails, however, that possibility understood as such can only be illusory, and this brings out the crucial underlying assumption of fatalism, that we can somehow know that all our actions will be determined in advance. Whence this knowledge, the possession of which seems to

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contradict that elementary requirement of fatalism as expressed in the text so far, that we cannot know? A response to this question begins to unfold in the succeeding battle sequences of the novel that point to a more nuanced interpretation of fatalism associated primarily with Kutuzov himself. If Bagration introduces a sort of “oriental fatalism,” a stock topos, Kutuzov will introduce a peculiarly western form of fatalism, a “learned ignorance.” I might add that this quality of the text, its evaluation of slightly different shades of a philosophical position, is absolutely essential to grasp if one is to come to terms with the novel’s careful and disciplined differential technique of presenting its various philosophical positions—there is not one argument for fatalism, there is likewise not one underlying skeptical argument. Rather, as we have seen and shall see, there are a number of different sketches or drafts of the main arguments advanced in the text, a trying out of different thought-chains in these arguments, an analysis of the various possibilities they allow, that make any claim about determinism or skepticism in the novel quite superfluous unless it delves into the remarkably multi-faceted presentation of such positions.

1.3. Austerlitz If the description of the battle of Schön Grabern offers one view, a fatalism born of human inability, the terrible ironies which announce themselves in the narrator’s description of the battle of Austerlitz only confirm that the lack of authority to guide events is a case of there being no possible theoretical basis for action. Tolstoy maintains both that authority stems from knowledge and that the kind of knowledge which we would need to obtain in order to ensure that our authority is secured—that our actions achieve their intended results—is simply not available to us. One would have to foresee every aspect of a battle including the various cases in which plans become skewered by unexpected twists and turns of events. Authority is lacking, i.e., the will cannot impose itself on events, because the knowledge required to do so is lacking. Moreover, will is

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subordinate to knowledge; practice or action is subordinate to theory, and, thus, the operation of chance is in essence an expression of human incapacity or ignorance. Characteristically this view entails that the illusion which Bagration creates is not wholly pernicious, since he seems to be in some way aware of it. By contrast, the Austrian generals at Austerlitz show through their unshakable faith in reason that the failure to understand this illusion is truly pernicious, leading to disastrous defeat. On the eve of the battle of Austerlitz there is a great council of war attended by the highest ranking military personnel. The scene represents a fundamental intensification of the negative attitude toward the utility of planning for a military engagement which we have already seen in the account of the battle at Schön Grabern. Kutuzov’s sleep during the council of war recalls Bagration’s “sleepy eyes” at Schön Grabern and suggests obviously enough that the careful preparation of the Austrian generals is of no consequence whatsoever, that, indeed, Kutuzov’s need for sleep is of far greater significance: “‘But before a battle there is nothing more important…’ he paused, ‘than to have a good sleep’” (1/3/XII). It might be tempting to dismiss these comments as jocular irony, but if they are unmistakably ironic, this irony is not to be taken lightly. To the contrary, Kutuzov’s irony points to his very serious doubts about the coming battle and his uncomplimentary judgment of the Austrians who, immersed in the minutiae of their preparations, pay not even the slightest attention to such unmistakably basic and important matters as the status of the troops and the need to rest before a battle. (Here we find also an echo of the contrast between Prince Andrei’s attempt to imagine the battle of Schön Grabern and the unaffected speculations of the officers about the afterlife.) This immersion becomes quite palpable during the council of war when Langeron asks questions of Weyrother with a view to rattling the seemingly imperturbable Austrian: Langeron, trying as violently as possible to sting Weyrother’s vanity as author of the military plan, argued that Bonaparte might easily attack instead of being attacked, and so render the whole of his plan perfectly worthless. Weyrother met

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Langeron’s way of attacking the plan characterizes its most terrible weakness: it is based on a set of assumptions whose contingency seems to be ignored. Moreover, Weyrother’s response to Langeron brings out an additional weakness—its author is willfully blind to such contingency. The passage suggests that this latter weakness is, however, an unavoidable one, since any plan, like the battle plan for Austerlitz, must be made on the basis of a series of assumptions which themselves must obtain for that plan to be effective. The problem is that, as Langeron points out, if these assumptions are merely contingent, and if the plan is dependent on their not being so, the success of the entire plan hinges on that contingency. Hence, Weyrother’s complete refusal to accept contingency renders the whole plan suspect or, as Langeron says, worthless. Langeron of course turns out to be sharper than the dogmatic Austrian general; the subsequent description of the battle supplies a most eloquent refutation of Weyrother’s attitude. From the very beginning the battle does not go according to plan. As if in confirmation of the acuity of Langeron’s question to Weyrother, the French initiate the battle and thus explode one of Weyrother’s main assumptions. This assumption, however, is not the only one which proves to have been mistaken and which shows its naked contingency to disastrous effect during the battle. After Weyrother’s extensive and careful delineation of the dispositions, it is doubly ironic that the French are not at all where the Austrians believed they were but much more dangerously close. Indeed, the Austrians have been fooled by the French yet again (one has only to think of the disaster at the bridge in Vienna), and Napoleon commences his attack in a wholly unexpected way leading to the rout of the Austrian and Russian forces. This rout brings to light another extremely important reason why even the best of plans cannot hope to determine a battle. The Russian and Austrian forces panic, they are ruled by primordial emotion, fear, and not by the objectives of a rational battle plan. Tolstoy emphasizes the emotional coloration of the battle through the narrative’s almost

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nightmarish quality. In this fashion, the narrative reveals the battle as a confusing, reeling mess which has nothing to do with reason. After initial excitement, both the Austrian and Russian armies stumble into the battle in a somnolent state. The Austrians’ apparent faith in the battle plan and the “dispositions” which seem to be etched in stone lulls them into a dangerous unawareness of the possibility that the plan may not succeed. Nikolai Rostov awakens to the battle out of a peculiar and dream-like state of drowsiness which seems to be also an ironic reflection of the effect that his infatuation with the tsar has on him (and the balance of the army). This lack of awakeness is most strikingly expressed by the intense fog which sets in as the battle begins and surrounds the Russian army whose columns “moved forward without knowing where, and unable from the masses around them, the smoke, and the increasing fog, to see either the place they were leaving or that to which they were going.” The fog is a telling metaphor that emphasizes the perilous confusion of both the Austrians and Russians. Their whole joint enterprise is marked by a fundamental blindness which becomes demoralizing unease during the battle, an “unpleasant consciousness of some dislocation and blunder” that communicates itself through the ranks (I/3/XIV). By contrast, Napoleon first appears in person during the battle description from a position of superiority. Unlike the Austrians and Russians below, Napoleon has a clear view of the whole battlefield from the village of Schlappanitz where it had already become quite light: “Above him was a clear blue sky, and the sun’s vast orb quivered like a huge, hollow, crimson float on the surface of that milky sea of mist.” Nothing could portray with greater concision the difference between the two camps than this contrast between the Austrians and Russians, on the one hand, who find themselves in a foggy darkness, and Napoleon’s vigorous army, on the other hand, whose leader stands, as it were, level with the sun above the fray. Curiously, in this scene Napoleon’s demeanor challenges the notion that chance, not the will of one man, controls the battle, for he indeed resembles a Homeric god whose “assumptions (predpolozheniia) were being justified” (1/3/XIV). From this literally and meta-

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phorically exalted position, Napoleon gives the order for the action to begin. The portrayal of Napoleon here seems to provide an intriguing contrast to the otherwise rather dim view the narrative takes of command authority. Yet, this contrast is probably more apparent than real, since it is quite likely that the narrator seeks to describe the selfsatisfaction, the gloating confidence, that is characteristic of Napoleon without as yet showing him to be a fool. If one cannot dismiss the ambiguity of the narrator’s account, I think it is useful to note that the narrator is highly mobile; he does not stand above the fray, he is not always god-like and imperturbable. To the contrary, the narrator at times shares the views of individual characters, merging with them and then asserting his own independent view. In this instance, the ambiguity arises from this issue of perspective. While the narrator seems to praise Napoleon, it is not clear whether he is doing so from his narrator’s perch above the action or, so to speak, he is reflecting Napoleon’s own attitude without comment accentuating the contrast between Napoleonic assurance and allied weakness—a contrast that will give added depth to the description of Napoleon at Borodino. The remainder of the narrator’s account of the battle is a tale of chaos and rout marked by panic and culminating in Rostov’s finally catching sight of a shaken Alexander whose timidity and weakness present a sharp contrast to Rostov’s earlier “idol.” One would be hard pressed to find a more eloquent “argument” exposing the inability of the Austrian generals’ battle plan to deal with its own contingency. Their insistence that the plan had eliminated contingency by having foreseen all specific contingencies, and its unmistakable failure to have done so, provide a stark confirmation of the limits of theoretical knowledge and the dangers of succumbing to the illusion that such limits do not exist.

1.4. Drissa To focus my argument more sharply, I would like to examine the most egregious case of this obstinacy, one both comic and pathetic, which is provided by General von Pfuel’s extensive planning for the fortified camp of Drissa. Once again, it is largely through the eyes of

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Prince Andrei that the narrator describes the situation. But Prince Andrei has undergone a significant change; his epochal experience at Austerlitz has taught him to be cautious about the effectiveness of military science and cynical about the dedication of the military leadership to the task at hand. In this respect, Prince Andrei classifies with heavy irony the competing groups swirling around the emperor at Drissa. Of these he identifies no less than nine: 1) Pfuel and his adherents, the “military theorists” whom Prince Andrei defines as believing in “a science of war with immutable laws—laws of oblique movements, outflankings and so forth”; 2) those opposed directly to Pfuel, among whom one may count Bagration, who claim that “what one has to do was not to reason, or stick pins into maps, but to fight”; 3) courtiers who try to arrange compromises between the first two groups and in whom, we are told, the emperor has most confidence; 4) those who fear Napoleon and seek to conclude peace as soon as possible; 5) those who demand that Barclay de Tolly take command; 6) those who demand that Bennigsen take command; 7) those who demand that the emperor take command; 8) those, outnumbering the others “ninety-nine to one,” who seek private advantage and pleasure; and 9) the party of the “elders” (III/1/IX). In an ironic analogy to a “real” battle, Prince Andrei’s classification gives the impression of considerable divergence and confusion—the reality of the camp is disorder and fraction. In particular, Prince Andrei emphasizes the broad spectrum of perspectives on what must be done, and this provides also an appropriately ironic contrast to his description of Pfuel as the very embodiment of faith in theoretical order. Pfuel is an extreme epigone of his unsuccessful predecessors as the narrator does not fail to tell us: “There was about him something of Weyrother, Mack, and Schmidt, and many other German theoristgenerals whom Prince Andrei had seen in 1805, but he was more typical than any of them.” To drive the point home, the narrator further notes that, “Prince Andrei had never yet seen a German theorist in whom all the characteristics of those others were united to such an extent” (III/1/X).

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Pfuel is the very caricature of the military theorist and, by extension, of the theorist tout court. The narrator remarks that Pfuel “had a science—the theory of oblique movement deduced by him from the history of Frederick the Great’s wars…” The principal target of the narrator’s irony, however, is not merely that Pfuel has a theory, but that Pfuel’s adherence to that theory makes him discount experience. For Pfuel, “…all he came across in the history of more recent warfare seemed to him absurd and barbarous—monstrous collisions in which so many blunders were committed by both sides that these wars could not be called wars.” Here the narrator is acidly ironic about what is the major presupposition of Pfuel’s “science” of war, that there are two kinds of wars, scientific and non-scientific of which the latter do not deserve the name of war; i.e., they may safely be discounted, because “they did not accord with the theory and could not serve as material for science.” In other words, Pfuel’s theoretical presuppositions about what war should be “blind” him to experience precisely to the extent that the latter does not agree with them. Such dogmatism is indeed just another, more extreme variant of Weyrother’s attitude at the council of war on the eve of Austerlitz. And this is no accident, for the narrator, in a most interesting and revealing outburst, attributes theoretical blindness specifically to Germans (among whom he appears to include Austrians as well): “The German’s self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth—science—which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.” Just a few lines before this remark appears in the text, Prince Andrei had characterized Pfuel as “one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are selfconfident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth” (III/1/X). These tremendously reductive and vituperative generalizations attack the “repulsive” reduction of experience to an a aprioristic kind of “science” that can only claim to be absolute by exclusion, a contradiction the practical results of which are continuous defeats at the hands of Napoleon. What is more, the narrator claims that German

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“science,” far from providing access to the absolute truth, is an invention. In my view, this is the most radical claim that Tolstoy makes on the nature of scientific theorizing about the course of events and, as a consequence, I want to examine it in greater detail in the light of the preceding analyses.

1.5. Dogmatic skepticism? The problem of mimesis or creation ex nihilo In these analyses, I have taken pains to identify the main features of the apparently skeptical attitude regarding knowledge of historical events that emerges in the early battle scenes. This skeptical attitude is defined by one primary contention, that any attempt to know or, more precisely, to foresee what will happen is bound to fail because its presuppositions, in particular, that the will of one man or group of men can direct the course of events, end up excluding essential information and, thus, leave room for the operation of chance. Theory, as the most refined expression of this attempt to know, is, then, a rather inadequate guide to practice because theory does not account for the richness of experience; rather, it suppresses experience—it is too reductive—and thereby precipitates its own failure. This skeptical argument stands on the assumption that there is an inevitable incommensurability of thought and experience. The specific form it takes, that any theoretical account reduces experience by tracing it to a single grounding principle or concept like that of the will, has associations with basic themes of Romantic thought, an affinity which in turn points out the fundamentally theological bias of the argument, its opening up of space for faith. Why is that so? The argument conceals an essential contradiction, the same contradiction that undermines fatalistic views; namely, how is it possible to know with certainty that experience is not adequately characterized by reason? In other words, how can one know experience in a manner not reducible to knowledge? This way of formulating the problem begs the question—the answer must depend on how one defines knowledge. If knowledge can only be rational, then any other kind of knowledge is quite impossible. Therefore, to hold that thought and experience are

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incommensurable must be to assert tacitly the existence of a kind of knowledge not definable as rational or as the result of ratiocination. This is an essentially pre-theoretical form of knowledge, one based on immediate intuition or revelation, modes of knowing more properly associated with faith. But what kind of knowledge is this? Is it knowledge that can be communicated through language? Even if this latter knowledge can be communicated through language—a highly questionable assumption—it remains mantic, enigmatic and most assuredly not subject to rational argument. Indeed, by cheating the bonds of reason, knowledge based on revelation or faith is formidably dogmatic; it is god-like, it is because it is, and no further justification remains possible or necessary. Hence, to maintain that theory is inadequate to experience is to make a skeptical argument from a dogmatic basis that must somehow know the true nature of experience. But to argue for the inadequacy of theory is not the same as to suggest that it is a form of invention. By claiming that the German’s “science” (i.e. theory) is an invention, Tolstoy hints at a different and perhaps more sharply dismissive viewpoint on theory, according to which theory is simply fantastic, an imaginative creation of experience, a puppet theater of concepts with no possible relation to a pre-existing “reality.” The central assumption of this argument is that theory can only be an invention because experience does not and cannot have any intrinsic structure, for it is the purest play of chance or chaos. There really is no pre-theoretical experience to which theory may respond. Therefore, theory is but an attempt to impose an ever arbitrary order on primordial chaos; we know only what we make, since we do not passively experience the world as given to us, but rather produce our experience of it. In this case, the will becomes paramount; knowledge does not direct the will, does not provide a reliable guide for action, rather the will produces knowledge as the pawn of conscious or unconscious desires—in other words, reason is subordinate to desire, it does not command but obeys. Now, the implications of the two skeptical positions I have outlined seem to be radically different. The first position holds out the promise that theory can achieve knowledge of experience if it is properly inclusive or responsive to it, the assumption being that there is an

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inherent coherence to experience which can only be revealed by a responsive attitude to it as a totality. In this case, skepticism is a tool of discovery that might “drive inquiring reason on to the attainment of its lofty goal.”6 The second position appears to undermine the first and provides that theory cannot achieve knowledge of experience other than by producing it—in this sense, theory manufactures experience which is otherwise “empty.” The essential distinction at work in these two positions is between theoretical knowledge as mimesis of an ultimate order or as creation of order, a distinction that goes beyond notions of skepticism to a much more fundamental question about the nature of reality—whether it is subject to laws or an elemental chaos—and human access to it. But this distinction cannot conceal the fact that both claims are essentially dogmatic, that they both rely on an assertion not subject to rational or theoretical analysis. For the claim that experience is chaos has the same form and can be no more knowable than its opposite: this claim also presumes a superior kind of knowing, an absolute one, that points to revelation or faith, if in this case the faith is that no order exists—a God of plenitude has merely been replaced by nothingness, a god of emptiness, of the vacuum. The great irony, then, is that both these apparently skeptical arguments are in the service of an underlying dogmatic thesis which remains hidden, unquestioned and unquestionable. Far from being a skeptic, Tolstoy appears to be an extreme dogmatist, asserting via a skeptical method either that experience has a shape which reason cannot adequately describe or that experience has no shape at all, a consequence reason shields from us through the invention of ever new fictions that dazzle and decay, that come to be and pass away, for no apparent reason other than the play of chance. The question is: Which of these two dogmatic views is behind the skeptical approach in the early battle scenes? If the narrator attacks the calculative rationality of the Austrian generals, that they claim to know what they cannot know, he does not hesitate to extol the superiority of an awareness of the inability to know, of a kind of “learned ignorance” whose justification is rather unclear. The narrator describes this attitude in the very same paragraph which contains his immoderate comments about German confi-

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dence in theory, as a characteristically Russian trait: “A Russian is self-assured because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be fully known.” The adverb “fully,” however, provides a crucial qualification of the narrator’s statement; the narrator can only be taken to assert that Russians know that there are limits to knowledge but not that they believe no knowledge to be possible. And, of course, their knowledge of the limits of knowledge is itself a qualitatively higher form of knowledge, for they can steer away from the blinding dogmatism of the “German.” Kutuzov is the exemplary figure here, for he possesses this superior kind of knowing which, in realizing the limits of knowledge, goes beyond them. Unlike Bagration who seems resigned before fate, Kutuzov is actively passive, his passivity is aggressive and comes from discernment of the grand patterns at work in battles, if not in history itself. As Prince Andrei notes later about Kutuzov: ….but he will hear everything, remember everything, and put everything in its place. He will not hinder anything useful nor allow anything harmful. He understands that there is something stronger and more important than his own will—the inevitable course of events, and he can see them and grasp their significance, and seeing that significance can refrain from meddling and renounce his personal wish directed to something else. (XVI/2/III)

Kutuzov owes this discernment not to an ostensive belief in the futility of human action, but in the futility of the ability of one man or group of men to direct an action. For Kutuzov, human action is a most complex phenomenon, one that can only be read passively, thereby giving due respect to the complex kinds of interrelations that direct an event. Any notion of planning or control of an event that ignores both the event’s placement in a series, as part of a greater “flow” of human action, and the multiplicity inherent in that event, the mutually determining actions of its many participants, is bound to fail.7 Whence Kutuzov’s knowledge? How has he learned to be actively passive? Indeed, is Kutuzov’s knowledge “rational” or beyond reason? These questions are central because Kutuzov’s knowing seems to arise more from an intuitive grasp of patterns than from rational cal-

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culation. While Kutuzov’s knowing is no doubt not rational in the narrow sense, it is nonetheless a kind of thinking, albeit one that is more inclusive—more holistic—more interpretive and less analytic. Kutuzov reads the direction that events are about to take rather than indulging in calculations about that direction and, in this sense, he is more philologist than natural scientist. What then of the narrative itself? The skeptical views that have been frequently attributed to Tolstoy suggest that he was a rather unusual skeptic, either naively unaware of, or tacitly concealing, the dogmatism behind his skeptical views. To assert skepticism dogmatically is an elementary inconcinnity that explodes the whole edifice of Tolstoy’s novel if the force of his descriptions is to embody a skepticism arising from the notion that experience either cannot be reduced to rational knowledge or cannot be known at all but only invented, thus collapsing the traditional notions of truth and falsity of a narrative as well. Here Tolstoy may very well reveal a dogmatic tendency based on a revelatory assurance of knowledge or, less benignly, on a peculiar self-assurance concerning his own ability to know what others did not and cannot know—this is Tolstoy in the role of inspired and vatic poet who somehow manages to portray truths not accessible to the uninspired. The skeptical view may represent yet another possibility of thought about history that can neither be fully affirmed nor excluded, neither proved nor refuted, but that remains open to question. And, indeed, the intimate relation of the two possibilities I have outlined, theological or subjective assurance and essential insecurity, constituting an acceptance that knowledge and doubt are inextricably related, that the one implies the other, that all human affairs are in fact stricken by ambiguity, may itself be a more adequate interpretation.

2. SKEPTICISM IN THE HISTORICAL ESSAYS To assign this complex and ambiguous skeptical position its proper purpose within the text, I turn to the first of the so-called embedded historical essays with which Book III of War and Peace begins. Before proceeding to an analysis of this chapter, however, I would like to comment on both the nature of the term “historical essay,” as I have

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rather loosely used it to this point and, also, on the signal fact that the historical essays begin with Book III and no sooner or later. The term “historical essay” is a mere convenience, a descriptive label which attempts to classify a more elusive entity. I say this because the historical essays are a complex of different kinds of reflection on the text which both derive from, and contribute to, their surrounding context; they most certainly are not stand-alone disquisitions on assorted problems of historical narrative. In this respect, I think that the term “essay” is partially misleading because it brings to mind a more independent and complete form of exposition than the historical essays achieve. The question is how to find an appropriate term for the essays. Are they commentaries? Or aphorisms? Or digressive intrusions by the narrator (à la Sterne) into the weave of the fictional text? The essays in fact display elements of a number of different genres yet in an integral sense they belong to none. I raise the issue of generic identity at this point in my discussion to highlight both the artificiality and utility of my terminology. If the term “historical essay” is not, strictly speaking, a very precise one, it is nonetheless heuristically useful, since it permits me at least to identify the entity whose true character will only emerge in the course of my analysis; namely, as an embodiment of a deeper structure within the text. For too long, I think, the term essay (or others such as digression, commentary and so on) has imposed a crude generic separation, i.e., exposition versus description, which holds but fails to mine any deeper in the text. The sudden emergence of the essays in Book III has also been the source of perplexity. I have already alluded to both Boris Eikhenbaum’s resolution of this issue and my own response, but I think that additional comment is necessary. Henry James’ celebrated declaration of perplexity, the phrase “loose and baggy monsters” which he applied to Tolstoy’s novels, has haunted and hindered discussion of the intricate structure of War and Peace. But the novel in fact shows a remarkable architectonic gracefulness of thematic division into Books, Parts and Chapters.8 The three

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parts of Book I form a progression of three kinds of narrative dominated, respectively, by social and family matters, by military exploits and by a synthesis of both in Part 3. This order is matched on a different scale by the progression from Books II to IV. Generally speaking, Book II is governed by social and Book III by military narrative; Book IV features an ingenious synthesis of both. Hence, the triadic structure of Book I is reflected in the relation of Books II, III and IV, while this second triad differs from the first in that it introduces the historical essays thereby adding a new reflexivity to the narrative. The First and Second Epilogues follow this division between representation (First Epilogue) and reflection (Second Epilogue). Diagrammatically one can render the novel’s architectonic thus:

Book I

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Book II

Book III Book IV

First Part of Epilogue Second Part of Epilogue

This diagram is intended to suggest a movement upward, in short, an ascent to an ever more refined and abstract presentation of the same triadic pattern until the two epilogues. These in fact rehearse the

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same movement from narrative immediacy in the First Part of the Epilogue to the reflective thinking of the Second Part that marks the transition from the first two books of the novel to the last two books in which the historical essays play a significant role. Hence, there are two main patterns that characterize the ascent to self-awareness of its own structure which marks the Second Part of the Epilogue. On the one hand, there is a triadic structure alternating between descriptions of war and peace. On the other hand, there is a dyadic structure moving between relatively direct narrative presentation and reflections on that narration—indeed, I think that one might also argue that in this latter instance there is a further triad, since the reflections on the text ultimately turn into a self-reflection in the final chapters of the Second Part of the Epilogue. I must also caution, however, that the first four chapters of the First Part of the Epilogue point out the limitations in my schematic of the text by dealing exclusively with reflections on history, that is, there really are no simple divisions; I am doubtful that any attempt to impose a simplistic architectonic on a novel as complicated and subtly constructed as War and Peace can justify itself in the final account. Yet, in my view, these reservations do not diminish the value of my approach which permits one to see a defining structure in the novel that is too often ignored. Within this structure, the first chapter of Book III is a pivotal juncture. As such a juncture, I think that it is not in the least accidental that this chapter, with its abrupt shift to a complex and abstract mode of presentation, should introduce the central event of the novel, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. The preceding narrative has given us detailed descriptions of great and terrible battles, none of which takes place within Russia. With the invasion of Russia, however, a new selfconsciousness emerges in the novel, focused on a much more explicit analysis of the ways in which historical narratives are typically fashioned. I would venture the conjecture that the emergence of this new self-consciousness reflects the movement from the West to Russia; self-consciousness in this very Russian book being an indirect consequence of the turning of the historical narrative from Western Europe to Russia, from without to within. And it is abundantly evident that

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the narrator does not feign a god-like impartiality but is on the Russian side.9 Moreover, in chapter 1 of Book III, the narrator takes over arguments which Prince Andrei had previously aired, this being a prime example of what I might call (following George Steiner) a “fugue-like” structure in the text where one view is taken up almost contrapuntally by another voice, this time that of the narrator. In doing so, not only does the narrator advance arguments previously aired by Prince Andrei, he expresses other tendencies in the preceding fictional description (some of which I have discussed in detail) through the medium of more direct rational argument. In other words, he casts Prince Andrei’s thoughts in new form and confers his own authority on them. In the analysis of Chapter 1 of Book III that follows I would like to show how this chapter concentrates the tendencies of the preceding narrative both by providing a summation of what I have called the skeptical view together with the foundations of an opposing view whose main outlines seem to illuminate the narrative ambitions of War and Peace itself. In the words of George Steiner, Tolstoy’s “negations were axe-strokes to carve a clearing for the light” (229).

2.1. The infinity of causes The chapter starts with an astounding rhetorical flourish: From the close of the year 1811 an intensified arming and concentrating of the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces—millions of men reckoning those transporting and feeding the army—moved from the west eastwards to the Russian frontier, towards which since 1811 Russian forces had been similarly drawn. On the 12th of June 1812 the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders, as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes. What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? The historians tell us with naïve assurance that its causes were the wrongs inflicted on

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Chapter One the Duke of Oldenburg, the non-observance of the Continental System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the mistakes of the diplomatists, and so on.

These two paragraphs announce a comprehensive challenge to historical narrative. War turns the orderliness of civil society upside down and, in doing so, is “opposed to human reason and to human nature.” Why, then, do wars continually interrupt the peaceful conduct of human affairs? This obvious question is nothing more than an attempt to find reasons (and, for Tolstoy, that means causes) for the occurrence of an event opposed to reason. As such, the question seems to involve contradiction or impossibility. War is a metaphor of chaos, the outbreak of the terrible and irrational. In short, war is the very incarnation of an affront to, and defiance of, reason that can be neither explained nor ignored. Tolstoy appears to dismiss any narrative which purports to explain why a war occurred. He derides historians who seek to find causes for war in those historical phenomena which have at their core the directing will of one man or a group of men. There is, of course, nothing in this claim not already apparent or latent in the narrator’s preceding battle descriptions—indeed, it pronounces the collective wisdom of those descriptions. The essential underlying issue is the same: Can one understand a historical event as the product of the rational activity of individuals? What has changed is that, whereas in the battle descriptions the narrator primarily casts doubt on the possibility of rational planning as a basis for directing what will happen, he suggests here that one cannot even provide a rational account of what has happened. What is a rational account? The conception of rationality on which the narrator relies is finally explicit. Rationality ultimately consists of the determination of causes. Therefore, a rational account is about what causes that event. If one cannot find these causes, one cannot provide a rational account: nihil est sine ratione (nothing is without a cause/reason). This problem of causation is the heart and lifeblood of the skeptical position. The narrator comments:

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We understand that the matter seemed like that to contemporaries. We understand that it seemed to Napoleon that the war was caused by England’s intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). We understand that it seemed to members of the English parliament that the cause of war was Napoleon’s love of power; to the Duke of Oldenburg that the cause of the war was the violence done to him; to merchants that the cause of the war was the Continental System which was ruining Europe; to the generals and old soldiers that the chief reason for the war was the necessity of giving them employment; to the legitimists of that day that it was the need of re-establishing les bons principes, and to the diplomatists of that time that it all resulted from the fact that the alliance between Russia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed from Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. We understand that these and a countless and infinite number of other causes, the number of which depends on the countless diversity of points of view, presented themselves to the men of that day; but to us, their descendants who view the completed event in all its magnitude and perceive its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient. To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was power-hungry or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was cunning or the Duke of Oldenburg was offended. We are unable to grasp what connection these circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was offended, did thousands of men from the other side of Europe kill and ruin the people of the Smolensk and Moscow districts and were killed by them. To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of investigation and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, the causes suggest themselves in an innumerable quantity. The deeper we delve in the investigation of these causes the more of them are revealed to us, and each particular selected cause or whole series of causes appears to us equally legitimate, in itself, and equally illegitimate by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event and by its impotence (unless participating with all the other causes falling in together) to produce the completed event. To us the willingness or unwillingness of this or that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of Oldenburg, for had the corporal refused to serve, and had a second, a third, a thousand corporals and privates, also refused, Napoleon’s army would have been so greatly reduced that the war could not have taken place.

This passage introduces two fundamental theses about causation. First, any particular cause or series of causes is incommensurable with the event. Second, there are an infinite number of causes for any event. These theses seem to contradict what I have just said about a rational account of war. In fact they simply refine what Tolstoy has asserted. A rational account of war is in principle possible, if only we

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could take into account all the causes. Because the causes are infinite, however, we can never take them all into account and, therefore, we return to Tolstoy’s original denial with a subtle difference: history may very well be rational, but to grasp this rationality is beyond our ability. Tolstoy affirms this apparently subtle difference (in which lies all the difference) by asserting that events are necessitated: The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose word the event seemed to hang, were as little arbitrary as the actions of each soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (those on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was required, without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands the real power lay—the soldiers who fired the guns, transported provisions and cannons—should consent to carry out the will of those weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes. (III/1/I)

Tolstoy claims that an event can be necessary while having an infinite series of causes. But infinity entails that a gap or residue of possibility cannot be eliminated, that new causes can be found supporting a view of the event ultimately different from what it presently seems to be. If this is so, the narrator’s claim that events are necessary seems to contradict his claim that they result from an infinity of causes. The juxtaposition of two remarks by the narrator provides further evidence of this apparent contradiction; that events are at once irrational, that is, not accessible to finite human reason, and necessary. The narrator says that: “Fatalism in history is unavoidable as an explanation of irrational events (that is, events the rationality of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history rationally, the more irrational and incomprehensible they become for us.” By contrast, the narrator ends the chapter with an equally forceful affirmation of necessity, for he writes that “[e]very act of theirs, appearing to them to be an act within their own choice, is in a historical sense not within their own choice; rather, it is connected to the whole course of history and determined eternally.”

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These contradictory tendencies are highly instructive. While the narrator seems to deny rational knowledge of history, he also affirms that there is a rationality and necessity in history. It is easy to object that this affirmation is puzzling, since the narrator clearly states that this rationality is one which we do not understand. But it is crucial to note that both the notion of another rationality and necessity constitute claims that there is an ultimate order or ground for knowledge. The narrator’s paradoxical belief in such an order is usually associated with an infinite being or intelligence. In this light, one may interpret it as a typically Christian gesture, since the introduction of necessity also reflects traditionally Christian reference to the divine mind which foresees and, thus, necessitates all. This presence is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the narrator’s citation of Proverbs 21:1, that the “King’s heart is in the hand of God.” This curious presence of God in the narrator’s argument points to a different conception of history than the preceding arguments have led us to expect. The narrator makes a claim for the inherent order of history which is as sweeping as any skeptical claim. In doing so, the narrator recasts the supposed skepticism of his analysis of causation as well. He in fact maintains that history is not the mere play of chance, but rather the expression of an ultimate order to which we do not have access through the causes. This is hardly a paradoxical view, but the expression of a firm theocentric position that assumes a difference between the understanding of God and that granted to man, between the infinite and the finite mind.10 At last we have a preliminary answer to the question whether the novel dismisses the possibility of order: Mimesis triumphs over creation. Hence, the novel dogmatically (thus paradoxically) assumes that there is an ultimate order to which reason has scant access, but which is not to be doubted.

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2.2. An objection Surely, it is appropriate to object, as Morson does, that incapacity is incapacity—to say that there exists an ultimate order which we cannot know is hardly a means of avoiding skepticism, rather it merely reinforces it. A more probing explanation of both incommensurability and the notion of an infinity of causes lends support to this objection. Let me digress for a moment to explain why this is so. Incommensurability is a gloss on the opening paragraph of the first chapter of Book III. No matter how far one searches, the causes of any given event in the war cannot account for its breadth and complexity. What is more, the causes given seem to have a narrowly subjective origin which does not undermine but rather limits their validity. Pierre’s moment of discovery after having delivered his speech to the Masonic lodge captures this stream of thought in the novel well: “At that meeting he was struck for the first time by that infinite variety of men’s minds which prevents a truth from ever presenting itself identically to two persons” (II/3/VII). It seems impossible to give a sufficiently (i.e. absolutely) inclusive account of the causes coinciding in the formation of any historical event so that the whole truth may be revealed. There is always an ineluctable gap between cause and effect. This ineluctable gap is a more precise means of characterizing what is not rational about war. But this precision is surely most peculiar. Referring to a gap seems to evoke a sort of impenetrable darkness which will not yield its secrets to the light of reason. Returning to the Leibnizian formula, nihil est sine ratione, we can see that the notion of gap neatly overlaps with that of nihil. Incommensurability points to a nothingness, a negation of understanding, which threatens to undermine our faith in the solidity of the world in which we live by showing that solidity to be limited and fragile. This sense of limitation and fragility has everything to do with the infinite; it is the correlate of Prince Andrei’s experience of the “infinite sky,” of the sublime terror of mystics and mathematicians before, in Pascal’s words, “the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me.”11 With the infinite the skep-

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tical argument reaches the medium of its most destructive intensity. To see why this is so, I would like to set out the tacit assumptions of the narrator’s reference to the infinite.12 These assumptions are firmly rooted in a dominantly Greek tradition of rejecting the infinite as an object of knowledge, and it is therefore of heuristic value to examine them starting from the original formulations of Aristotle. In his Posterior Analytics, Aristotle sets out the kernel of the argument on which the narrator relies (1984: 117).13 This argument, a favorite of the ancient Skeptics and now commonly called an infinite regress, denies knowledge of any particular thing because knowledge must be complete, and no knowledge can be complete if it must encompass an infinity of items. Two primary conditions about what constitutes knowledge form the basis of the infinite regress argument. First, knowledge must be of causes; it does not arise from bare assertion of the existence of a thing (to hoti,“the that”) but must also provide an account of the causes or reasons why (to dihoti, “the because”) that thing is or came to be as such. “We think that we have knowledge of a thing as it is, but not in the sophistical manner, as an accident, whenever we think that we have come to know the cause through which the thing is, that it is the cause of this thing, and that it is not possible for it to be otherwise” (1984: 115).14 Second, knowledge must be complete or of a whole; it must include all the causes of a thing, and it must not be possible to add any causes.15 This interpretation of knowledge has its origins in the Greek distinction between knowledge (episteme) and opinion (doxa). Any kind of knowledge not compliant with the two conditions I have described is mere opinion. Mere opinion is partial and incomplete. Yet, is it not an affront to common sense to argue that one cannot “know” a simple event, say, “that the man stands,” because the causal explanation can be both multiplicitous and incomplete?16 Tolstoy’s narrator holds that partial

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knowledge of an infinite series involves contradiction, since partial knowledge of the infinite is equivalent to almost no knowledge of it. This most unusual nature of the infinite comes into sharp focus when one thinks of counting the infinite as the same as counting out some partial quantity of a greater whole. There can be no partial counting of an infinite whole because the whole is lacking, for, if the infinite can never be counted to an end, it certainly cannot constitute a whole. If the infinite cannot constitute a whole, then it cannot have parts. It is therefore impossible to determine a part of an infinite whole.17 If, then, partial knowledge is subject to insuperable difficulties, knowledge of the infinite appears to be impossible in any manner other than as a recognition of limitation or negation. Yet, of what is it a limit or negation? If one can only ever begin to know the infinite, how can one limit what has been begun? In other words, how is it even possible to define any part of the infinite to which limits can be ascribed? The difficulties which these various arguments involve arise from the fundamentally contradictory activity of trying to give limits or measure to that which cannot be limited or measured and as such tends to dissolve the notion of limit itself. Such difficulties do indeed support a drastic skepticism in so far as any partial view of the whole is always mere opinion subject to revision or alteration at any time. Any more probing attempt to know must end in tautology. Tolstoy writes: “In consequence, all these causes—billions of causes—coincided in order to produce what occurred. And it follows that nothing was the exclusive cause of the event, and the event had to happen simply because it had to happen” (III/1/I).

2.3. Reply Despite its cogency, this objection still fails to appreciate the very considerable difference between a view which posits an order, albeit one which we do not understand, and a view which posits that no such

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order exists on any level. Classical physics (Newton, Maxwell), once the very paradigm of scientific knowledge, entails a determinism very much like that introduced by Tolstoy’s narrator. In classical physics, the question is never one of the actual knowledge of all possible causes, but of the potential knowability of all the patterns which they initiate; that there is a fundamental order, that all phenomena have a cause and, thus, are subject to a law of causality is assumed. Of equal significance, classical physics supposes that the finite mind can obtain knowledge qualitatively similar but quantitatively inferior to that of the infinite mind.18 This claim contains the germ of a response to the objection I have raised, since it is the quality of the knowledge and not its quantity which becomes important as a standard. If knowledge is of the same quality as that of an infinite mind, then, no matter how minuscule or inestimable its quantity, that knowledge is as certain as if it were infinite. The crux of this response, however, is a turn away from knowledge of individual causes as such. This is exactly what Tolstoy begins to propose as a solution to the problem of causation which he has so forcefully articulated. As one of the first hints of this solution, Tolstoy concludes chapter 1 of Book III with an analogy suggesting that a kind of rational account of historical events is indeed possible if the object of inquiry is changed: When an apple has ripened and falls—why does it fall? Is it because of the force of gravity, because its stem withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which every vital, organic elemental event occurs. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decomposes, and so forth, is just as right and as wrong as the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall. In the same way the historian who says that Napoleon went to Moscow and was destroyed because Alexander desired his destruction is just as right and as wrong as the man who says that an undermined hill weighing thousands of tons fell because of the last blow of a workman’s pickaxe. In historic events the so-called great men are but the labels giving names to events, and like labels they have only the slightest connection with the event itself.

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The narrator typically emphasizes multiple causal explanations for an event, none of which alone may explain it. Each cause reflects merely the subjective presuppositions of the interpreter of the event. Hence, any causal explanation is as correct and as incorrect as any other. Due to this absence of a single standard of correctness, attempts to understand events by the causes must lead to contradictions that cannot be resolved. In other words, as the narrator has already noted, any cause is as sufficient and insufficient as any other to explain the event, and others can always be found. An alternative to this impasse is to describe a historical event without regard to description of all the causes. The notion of “coincidence,” as the narrator interprets it in this passage seems to constitute a rejection of the search for all the causes of an event. The Russian word translated here by “coincidence” is, of course, “sovpadenie,” literally “a falling in together.” Of what? Of the “conditions in which all vital and organic and elemental events occur.” Such a qualification opposes interpretation of coincidence as a random concatenation of causes by providing that they may only coincide according to conditions determined by nature. This is a particularly intriguing suggestion in the text because, like the narrator’s preceding references to a rationality which we do not understand and to necessity, it counters the narrator’s apparent skepticism. For, if causes are infinite, they nonetheless combine in characteristic ways so as to provide a basis for determining laws of combination. The narrator confirms this somewhat tenuous conjecture at another point in the chapter by using the expression “by the law of coincidence of causes” (po zakonu sovpadenii prichin). If laws of combination are possible in principle, then, there may also be a response to the infinite regress argument. One might well ask how this response squares with the narrator’s assertion of subjectivity. If the perspectives the narrator mentions do not tend to coalesce in one unifying or defining perspective of an event (i.e., one that must exclude as a condition of obtaining unity), they can cohere together in principle according to laws of combination which themselves provide the ground for such coherence.

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Hence, the possibility of overcoming the infinite regress is based on an elementary notion of legality, a “logic” of combination or integration, that bypasses the infinite regress altogether in a way remarkably akin to classical physics.

CHAPTER TWO: THE CALCULUS OF HISTORY

The imposing central tableau of the novel, the narrative sequence describing the battle of Borodino, reinforces the progression away from the kind of skepticism I identified in the preceding chapter. Just as the first historical essay deepens the skeptical argument in order to clear the way for a possible resolution of the problems the argument poses, so the battle of Borodino provides the most extensive description of the kinds of disorder depicted in the preceding battles at Schön Grabern and Austerlitz as a prelude to the birth of a new attitude and yearning in the novel, one of integration. In the aftermath of the battle, Pierre has a dream in which he affirms this new attitude with the famously ambiguous words, “one must join together” (nado sopriagat’). The narrator also affirms this new attitude when, in a curious echo of his previous adoption of arguments first presented by Prince Andrei, he anticipates Pierre’s discovery through advancing a proposal for the radical restructuring of historical narrative based on a method utilizing concepts borrowed from calculus. This bold proposal, predating major trends in historical writing in the twentieth century, is among the most intriguing and undervalued aspects of the novel—it seems to provide one outstanding “master figure” for the idiosyncratic structural characteristics of the novel. The main purpose of this chapter, then, is to examine the calculus proposal in detail within the context of the novel both as a response to the terrible experience at Borodino and an attempt to describe tendencies in the structure of the novel as a whole.

1. BORODINO In a manner strikingly similar to chapter 1 of Book III, the description of the battle of Borodino begins with a polemical outburst about the irrationality of war and the consequent mendacity of historians

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who offer an ostensibly rational account of it. Tolstoy argues that historians shape their narratives teleologically as a way of showing that the event is the achievement of a coherent intention guided by reason. In short, historians interpret events in light of their outcomes, providing “cunningly devised evidence of the foresight and genius of the generals who of all the blind tools of history were the most enslaved and involuntary” (III/2/XIX).1 The narrator seeks to prove how fallacious such readings of the battle of Borodino can be: Why and how were the battles at Shevardino and Borodino given and accepted? Why was the battle of Borodino fought? There was not the least sense in it for either the French or the Russians. Its immediate result for the Russians was, and was bound to be, that we were brought nearer to the destruction of Moscow—which we feared more than anything in the world; and for the French its immediate result was that they were brought nearer to the destruction of their whole army—which they also feared more than anything in the world. What the result must be was quite obvious, and yet Napoleon offered and Kutuzov accepted that battle. If the commanders had been guided by reason it would seem that it must have been obvious to Napoleon that by advancing thirteen hundred miles and giving battle with a probability of losing a quarter of his army, he was advancing to certain destruction, and it must have been equally clear to Kutuzov that by accepting battle and risking the loss of a quarter of his army he would certainly lose Moscow. (III/2/XIX)

The challenge to the putative rationality of war is by now familiar, perhaps overly so (one can see why Flaubert accused Tolstoy of repetitiveness).2 But the emphasis on how historians read events as the production of a governing and rational will is nowhere more clearly stated. This initial polemic sets the tone for the narrative’s descent into the chaos of war which we experience through the eyes of Pierre Bezukhov. “Descent” is more than just a fanciful expression here; it is a governing metaphor of Pierre’s involvement at Borodino. Pierre quite literally descends into the fury of battle while observing and, then, participating in the action at “Raevsky’s Redoubt.” Before I discuss this crucial episode in the Borodino narrative sequence, I would like

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to go through the significant stages which precede it. They constitute an initial summation of the views expressed in the narratives of both Schön Grabern and Austerlitz. The sequence begins with Pierre’s leaving Mozhaisk for Borodino, since he is eager to witness a major engagement. But, while descending the road to Borodino on foot, what Pierre first sees are wounded men; an acquaintance whom he meets on the way says with laconic understatement, “[t]here will be something to see.” Pierre descends ever closer to the simplest realities of the battle, injury and death. Pierre is almost painfully innocent of military matters and, hence, he cannot seem to grasp the simplest aspects of preparation for the battle, let alone the vaunted subtleties of the generals. (And this is of course another example of that ironic means of description likely stemming from eighteenth-century French satire, in particular, Voltaire’s Candide, for which Shklovsky coined the term, “estrangement.”)3 In fact, as soon as he arrives at Borodino, Pierre takes it upon himself to ascertain the dispositions of the two armies. Although he finds an advantageous location from which to view the field panoramically, he is quite unable to discern where the armies are and has no choice but to trust the opinions of those who are “supposed to know,” i.e., the officers. Yet, in response to his inquiries he receives a variety of answers indicating that knowledge of the whereabouts of both armies is not clear to anyone. Even an officer who claims to be able to give an accurate description of the Russian positions, since he “constructed almost all our fortifications,” is not entirely correct. He, like almost everyone else whom Pierre encounters, presupposes that the French army will focus its attack in a way which turns out to be mistaken and organizes his account of the dispositions in accord with this presupposition. One can readily see why it is Pierre and not Prince Andrei who narrates this sequence. Pierre’s lack of expertise or prejudice in regard to military matters allows Tolstoy to pit common sense against the complicated science of the military men, in this case, against Count Bennigsen. In doing so Tolstoy gives fictional demonstration to a claim made in the first historical essay; namely, common sense grants

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one a view less clouded than those of the supposed experts who, carried away by their own involvement in the matter, are unable to look dispassionately upon it.4 The virtues of Pierre’s common sense show themselves to good effect when he tours the battlefield with Boris Drubetskoi and Count Bennigsen the evening before the battle. Pierre is soon perplexed: Bennigsen turned to a general who approached him and commenced explaining the entire position of our troops. Pierre listened, straining all his faculties to grasp the essential points of the impending battle, but to his chagrin felt that his mental powers were not equal to the task. He could make nothing of it. Bennigsen stopped speaking and, noticing that Pierre was listening, said to him: ‘I don’t imagine this is very interesting for you.’ ‘Oh, on the contrary, it’s very interesting,’ said Pierre not quite truthfully. (III/2/XXIII)

The irony, that Pierre could make “nothing” of what the generals discuss, is by now a familiar touch implying, as had Kutuzov’s sleep at the council of war on the eve of the battle of Austerlitz, that these discussions are of no consequence. This point is made with caustic irony at the end of the passage when Pierre becomes “more than ever doubtful of his capacity to comprehend military matters” (III/2/XXIII). The reason for Pierre’s doubt is that Bennigsen criticizes the poor positioning of troops because an elevation has been left unoccupied. Bennigsen orders this “obvious” mistake to be corrected, and Pierre concludes that only his own limited understanding of military matters impedes his grasping why anyone could make such a mistake. The narrator then tells us that the elevation had been left unoccupied as an ambush and that Bennigsen “unaware of this, moved the troops forward according to his own ideas and said nothing to the Commander in chief.” Pierre’s inability to understand is quite justified, since the supposed experts talk nonsense and blunder like the fools they are. This atmosphere of foolishness in fact pervades Pierre’s encounter with Boris. The contrast between the seriousness which Pierre observes on the faces of the common soldiers around him and the self-serving fa-

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tuity of Boris could hardly be more pronounced and Juvenalian in its satiric intensity; it is the best indication of the moral poverty of certain commanding elements in the army as opposed to Kutuzov and the peasant soldiers whom the former calls “…a wonderful, a matchless people.” If elementary perplexity is the beginning of Pierre’s journey to an understanding of the true nature of war, his meeting with Prince Andrei is a watershed. This meeting is remarkable in that both Pierre’s good-natured credulity and Prince Andrei’s bitter, battle-hardened severity are a distant reflection of the attitudes the two friends struck when they talked on the raft near Bogucharovo almost seven years earlier. As before, Pierre expresses a faith in the directing power of man, in this case that of the military commanders who foresee “all contingencies” and the “adversary’s intentions.” Not surprisingly, Prince Andrei dismisses Pierre’s “naïve” faith in favor of a much more resigned and passive view, the fruit of his first-hand experience of war. Still, at both meetings, Prince Andrei’s arguments seem to be the bilious dispensations of a bitter and disillusioned man; the difference resides, however, in the greater truth that the narrative seems to grant to Prince Andrei’s views in this second meeting in contrast to the first where Prince Andrei was in fact quietly convinced by Pierre that his own views did not represent the truth. The similarity of the two scenes—a classic situation rhyme in R. F. Christian’s words—leaves the matter ambiguous. And this ambiguity is of importance, since Prince Andrei unceremoniously refutes Pierre’s presupposition that military preparation and planning are decisive instruments of war, that battles are like games of chess, maintaining that a battle is won “by those who firmly resolve to win it!” He continues: “‘Why did we lose the battle at Austerlitz? The French losses were almost equal to ours, but very early we said to ourselves that we were losing the battle, and we did lose it’” (III/3/XXV). Prince Andrei goes on to predict that the Russians will win the battle, and that victory is the best warrant for the truth of his statements. Ambiguity is not eliminated, however, since both the Russians and the French claim Borodino as a victory. Moreover, Prince Andrei’s views retain his longstanding belief in the will of individuals to determine the outcome of a battle despite the fatalism of Bagration, Kutuzov and the narrator

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who at the end of the Borodino sequence holds that battles are directed by the “will of Him who governs men and worlds” (III/2/XXXIX). Having left Prince Andrei, Pierre finds himself in a disturbed state with the uncomfortable feeling that he will not meet his friend again. This rather elegiac coda to their friendship provides a sharp contrast to the following chapters in which the narrator describes Napoleon on the eve of the battle. Napoleon is an almost comic character, a dangerous fool in the guise of a king. Indeed, Napoleon is the incarnation of almost everything that Prince Andrei criticized in his meeting with Pierre; he relishes his power, obviously believes in it, and looks at the armies arrayed on the battlefield as at a collection of chessmen. In brief, the narrator shows the French emperor deeply ensnared in his position as a “great man.” In this respect, Tolstoy again takes pains to illustrate that any attempt to dominate the battle, to fore-ordain its conclusion is quite impossible. This time, the narrative focuses on Napoleon’s own order for the battle of Borodino which the narrator takes apart paragraph by paragraph in order to show how it was not and could not have been the “blueprint” for the battle. For my purposes, what is most interesting about this characteristic attack on planning lies in the narrator’s comment that the order was no better or worse than before, that it merely was not crowned by success and, thus, became suspect. In other words, historians look for faults in it (or Napoleon, whose cold is said to have negatively affected his judgment) because of the questionable outcome of the battle. The sequence has come full circle returning to its initial point, that historians read events in the light of their outcomes. Having come full circle, the narrative proceeds to a direct account of the battle through Pierre. Pierre’s real descent into the dark precincts of battle begins only after his meeting with Prince Andrei and the description of Napoleon; the debate over war ends with the actual experiencing of it. Pierre awakes the next morning to a cannonade and quickly heads for Raevsky’s Redoubt, the eventual center of the great battle. Having walked up to the battery at the top of the Redoubt, Pierre creates a

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most peculiar and disconcerting impression among the soldiers as he seems to observe the battle absent-mindedly from one of its most dangerous points. Pierre maintains this pose, observing the soldiers in an almost detached manner, and the soldiers come to accept him as if he were a mascot. But, as the action’s intensity increases, he is drawn into the battle directly as a participant. This increase is marked by the somewhat hackneyed metaphor of a thunder cloud slowly approaching. Suddenly, “[t]he thunder cloud had come upon them, and the fire that Pierre had seen kindling now flamed in every face.” Pierre then witnesses a literal incarnation of that thunder cloud in a most horrible explosion of grapeshot: Suddenly something happened; the young officer gave a gasp, and bending double sat down on the ground like a bird shot on the wing. Everything became strange, confused, and misty in Pierre’s eyes. One after another cannonballs whistled by and struck the earthwork, a soldier or a gun. Pierre, who had not noticed these sounds before, now heard nothing else. On the right of the battery soldiers shouting ‘Hurrah!’ were running not forwards but backwards it seemed to Pierre.

Soon thereafter Pierre descends further into a hellish inferno in order to fetch ammunition boxes for the battery which has almost run out: Pierre ran down the slope. ‘Where am I going?’ he suddenly asked himself when he was already near the green ammunition wagons. He halted irresolutely, not knowing whether to return or to go on. Suddenly a terrible concussion threw him backwards to the ground. At the same instant he was dazzled by a great flash of flame, and immediately a deafening roar, crackling and whistling, made his ears tingle. (III/2/XXXI)

Pierre experiences the total chaos of destruction. In this scene as perhaps in no other, we witness through Pierre that the energies released by war are the utter negation of planning, that there is no time for rational thought to tame the animal instincts that take over control of one’s actions. This latter point becomes abundantly clear when Pierre, after having recovered from the blast, sees a French soldier

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coming right at him and holds him off with the brute force of undiluted terror. It is perhaps only more sharply ironic, then, that after this description of Pierre’s descent into the netherworld of the battle, the narrator shifts back to the eerie calm surrounding Napoleon. But even in this calm there are intimations of chaos and defeat. If the sun shines brightly in the sky just like at Austerlitz, this time “its slanting rays struck straight into Napoleon’s face.” Napoleon must shade his eyes in order to see, but his vision remains impaired as he gazes intently at the battlefield: But not only was it impossible to make out what was happening from where he was standing down below, or from the knoll above on which some of his generals had taken their stand, but even from the flèches themselves—in which by this time there were now Russian and now French soldiers, alternatively or together, dead, wounded, alive, frightened, or maddened—even at those flèches themselves it was impossible to make out what was taking place. (III/2/XXXIII)

Napoleon too experiences chaos, but he chooses to ignore it. His instinct tells him that the battle is lost and he seems to freeze for a few moments in contemplation of the ruinous nature of the destruction he has brought upon Europe. But, in the end, there is no salvation for Napoleon; he is the tool of his destiny—he is, in the narrator’s words, “predestined by Providence for the gloomy, ineluctable role of executioner of peoples” (III/2/XXXVIII). For Pierre, to the contrary, chaos is not destructive but productive of a new apprehension of the world; the horror of war and human impotence does not lead him to acknowledge a bitter cynicism or to grow tired of life as it does Prince Andrei. Indeed, here we see with ever greater clarity that Pierre and Prince Andrei represent fundamentally differing trajectories in the novel. If the skeptical views of the first part of the novel are often provided through the consciousness of Prince Andrei, the new, emerging views, primarily integrative in nature, are equally often provided by Pierre. The difference between Pierre and Prince Andrei in fact underscores the central division in the text, the movement from skepticism to integration, from a tragic to a more comic character (in the broader sense of the word comedia), Pierre, who strives above all for reconciliation as Prince Andrei simply

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cannot. In this context, Pierre’s dream after Borodino is of the utmost importance. We catch up with Pierre only after the battle of Borodino is over, the narrator having assured us that a mortal wound had been inflicted on the French: The French invaders, like an infuriated animal that has in its onslaught received a mortal wound, felt that they were perishing, but could not stop, any more than the Russian army, weaker by one-half, could help swerving. By the impetus gained, the French army was still able to roll forward to Moscow, but there, without further effort on the part of the Russians, it had to perish, bleeding from the mortal wound it had received at Borodino. The direct consequence of the battle of Borodino was Napoleon’s senseless flight from Moscow, his retreat along Smolensk road, the destruction of the invading army of five hundred thousand men, and the downfall of Napoleonic France, on which at Borodino for the first time the hand of an opponent of stronger spirit had been laid. (III/2/XXXIX)

The complete destruction of the French invasion forces leads to a rebirth of Russian power and an affirmation of Russian identity. This is an absolutely crucial pattern that informs all of Book III and, in a more abstract sense, the novel itself, for Borodino is arguably its central event. In what, then, does the affirmation of Russian identity consist? Identity is fundamentally an expression of integration—if chaos is the most extreme negation of form, order and harmony, affirmation of identity is a bringing together into a kind of order. And this is why Pierre’s dream after the battle of Borodino becomes a signal event in the movement of the novel. The dream comes as a momentous clearing of insight, a sort of epiphany offering a defining metaphor with which to grasp the remainder of the novel. After the battle, Pierre simply wishes to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the wounded and dying, of the remains of the great battle, still everywhere around him: The one thing he now desired with his whole soul was to get away quickly from the terrible sensations amid which he had lived that day, and return to ordinary conditions of life and sleep quietly in a room in his own bed. He felt that only in the ordinary conditions of life would he be able to understand himself and all he had seen and felt. But such ordinary conditions of life were nowhere to be found. (III/3/VIII)

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Pierre makes his way from Borodino the day after the battle in the company of some peasant soldiers. On returning to Mozhaisk, he does not even remember that he has taken a room there, only a chance encounter with his groom reminds him of it. He soon settles into a sleep disturbed by recollections of the terrible fear he felt at Borodino and feelings of shame about his cowardice in comparison with the bravery of the troops who fought beside him. Pierre then imagines himself at a table with a group of men whom he considers brave (Anatole Kuragin, Dolokhov, Nesvitsky and Denisov). They are shouting and singing while, at the same time, Pierre tries to hear the voice of his Masonic benefactor Bazdeev (the table is in the Masonic Lodge). Here we have the conflict between two voices, one collective, the other solitary, one representing what appears to be the martial values of war, the other an altogether quieter, more serene sphere—I can only speculate that this latter voice is an interruption of a higher realm into the boisterous chaos of earthly existence, the voice of divine order in opposition to the empty garrulity of human discourse. This speculation seems to be supported by the following facts of the dream, for Pierre finds himself alone. It is only in this isolation and quiet that Pierre is able to achieve a different, higher level of understanding. He perceives that “[t]here were only thoughts clearly expressed in words, thoughts that someone was uttering, or that he himself was formulating.” Perhaps more strikingly, Pierre is also “convinced that someone outside him had spoken them.” Of these thoughts Pierre singles out one of particular significance: The hardest thing (Pierre went on thinking, or hearing, in his dream) is to be able in your soul to unite the meaning of all. ‘To unite all?’ he asked himself. No, not to unite. Thoughts cannot be united, but to join all these thoughts together is what we need! Yes, one must join them, must join them. He repeated to himself with inward rapture, feeling that these words and they alone expressed what he wanted to say and solved the question that tormented him. (III/3/IX)

The dream breaks off at this moment, and Pierre hears his groom trying to wake him with the words, “Time to harness, your excellency!..’ We must harness, it is time to harness…’” Pierre is hardly eager to wake up and he fears that, once awake, he will be unable to continue the dream and unravel the rest of its meaning. Pierre says:

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“One second more and I would have understood it all.” He is already awake, however, and realizes that the meaning of what he had seen and thought in the dream is no longer attainable (at least for the moment). The coincidence of Pierre’s thought with the groom’s trying to wake him, the punning pair sopriagat’/zapriagat’ can mislead; one might surmise that the punning has parodic overtones and seeks to undermine the possibility that Pierre has heard a voice from “on high.” While I have no wish to quibble with this argument, I do think that there is another, important dimension to this episode that has been largely neglected and which tends to put this argument in question or, at least, reveals its inadequacy. In my view, there is a Platonic explanation for this coincidence having to do with the Platonic conception of recollection, anamnesis. One of the distinctive aspects of Platonic thought in this regard is that recollection of the eternal and immutable truth can be triggered by humble means, by some reflection of that truth in mundane reality.5 This way of thinking also corresponds with the Christian notion that the divine shines through and in the mundane. Hence, one might argue that this kind of thinking also applies to Pierre’s dream, that, if indeed the groom’s words have an influence on Pierre’s dream, this may be merely an instance of recollection, in this case, of a divine truth. Pierre’s descent into chaos and destruction and subsequent attainment of enlightenment evinces a basic mytheme which is enacted in many forms throughout Tolstoy’s works and War and Peace in particular; that is, characters come to grasp a truth only through a sort of suffering that seems to ready them for the acceptance of that truth. What, then, is the lesson of Pierre’s suffering? The brief dream sequence is very complex, and I only wish to point to the general movement from chaos and destruction to an immediate sense of wholeness, of the ever latent absolute, the tools for the realization of which seem to be lacking. This new sense of the whole is, of course, a response to Borodino; Pierre’s dream seems to enact in one person what will gather force after the burning of Moscow, i.e., the bringing together of the diversity of Russia against the common en-

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emy. Of particular interest are the terms that Pierre uses. Pierre speaks of thoughts—one cannot unite diverse thoughts, but only bring them together by “harnessing” them. Yet, this notion seems to have wider application. If we recall the apple analogy I briefly discussed in the previous chapter, there is surely similarity between the elementary notion of legality which the analogy contains and that of “harnessing” diverse thoughts together. The apple analogy describes a series of diverse thoughts about a single occurrence as a way of showing the inadequacy of causal accounts. The analogy implies that these diverse thoughts, each of which is as correct and incorrect as any other, cannot be unified precisely for that reason; to create a unity would require, as I have noted, exclusion of some causes to the extent they contradict others. But this is certainly not the case if one were to bring this diversity together under laws of some kind. Both Pierre’s dream and the apple analogy present the bare elements of a position that overcomes the skeptical view the narrator has so effectively represented. In fact, as I have argued, the narrator’s apparent skepticism has clarified difficult problems of historical narrative so as to prepare the way for a new approach. This new approach changes the object of historical narrative from the causes to the ways in which they come together in an event, i.e., to the relations among them. Its fundamental assumption, the very basis of its possibility, is that an overall order or rationality operates in the world. If I may return to previous terminology, thus bringing together several strands of argument, according to this approach, knowledge is not creation but an attempt to master this deeper rationality mimetically. Moreover, Tolstoy suggests that this rationality is legalistic; it is an order governed by certain laws to which phenomena are subject. Hence, if we are to grasp its secrets, we must discover these laws.

2. THE CALCULUS OF HISTORY At the end of Book III, between the account of Borodino and Pierre’s dream, Tolstoy recommends applying the conceptual apparatus of calculus to historical narrative as a solution to the problems which he has raised. Tolstoy introduces this solution in an abstract discussion

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of history contained in the first chapter of Part 3 of Book III. Specifically, the narrator, having dismissed causes as a fruitful object of historical inquiry, proclaims that the aim of history is the apprehension of the laws of continuous motion, for the “movement of humanity, arising as it does from an infinite number of human wills is continuous.” Consequently, if one seeks to write history, one must face the problem of knowing continuous motion, yet another form of the infinite. This problem has its origins in antiquity as the narrator is quick to note in the opening lines of the chapter: To the human mind absolute continuity of motion is incomprehensible. Laws of motion of any kind only become comprehensible to man when he examines arbitrarily selected units of that motion. But, at the same time, a large part of human error flows from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous units. We all know the so-called sophism of the ancients that Achilles will never catch up with a tortoise, even though he travels ten times as fast as the tortoise. By the time Achilles will cover the distance separating him from the tortoise, the tortoise will cover one tenth of that distance ahead of him: when Achilles will cover that tenth, the tortoise will cover another one-hundredth, and so on to infinity. This problem seemed to the ancients insoluble. The absurd answer (that Achilles will never overtake the tortoise) resulted from this: that discontinuous units (of motion) were arbitrarily selected, whereas the motion both of Achilles and the tortoise was continuous. (III/3/I)

Put simply, for the human mind, absolutely continuous motion does not appear to move. The narrator asserts that the human mind can know only the discrete or finite, reaffirming his earlier denial that knowledge of the infinite is possible. The human mind requires finite differentiae, specifically, of time and place, in order to comprehend motion. For example, if an object is said to move between two places, A and B, time must elapse and its place must change. The only way in which one may become aware of this change is through these differences. In this respect, not continuity but difference is the condition of knowledge. But it is crucial to keep in mind that this difference is not at all “pure” (if that were possible) but dependent on a basic similarity, namely, that the object in motion not change in any other respect.

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Such unavoidable finitude, however, is the source of human error and, in support of this claim, the narrator gives an account of what he calls an ancient “sophism.” This “sophism” is in fact one of Zeno’s celebrated paradoxes (logoi) intended to prove that motion is not real. The paradox has come down to us in one primary source, Book VI of Aristotle’s Physics where Aristotle deals with the problem of motion and the infinite continuum (1984: 404-405).6 Aristotle spends much of Book VI attempting to refute Zeno and initially purports to solve the Achilles paradox by reference to time. Zeno provides that Achilles must complete an infinite distance in a finite time which is quite obviously impossible. But, according to Aristotle, time is also infinitely divisible and, therefore, the problem simply cannot arise. This solution, such as it is, does not ultimately satisfy Aristotle who provides another, more effective set of arguments to solve the problem later on in the Physics (1984: 439-440).7 Aristotle argues that Achilles cannot complete an actually infinite series of divisions in the distance; that is, he can only proceed by articulating his motion in a finite number of actual steps. The point is that, even if there may be a potentially infinite number of divisions in the distance, once the divisions are actually made, they must be finite. Actually making divisions in the continuum changes its character, because divisions render the continuum finite and, thus, accessible to the human mind. To suggest that motion is potentially continuous or infinite and actually finite is very problematic; Aristotle in effect says that motion both is infinite in one respect and is not infinite in another respect. In Aristotle’s own terms this means that motion at once both is and is not, a fundamentally ambiguous conclusion that completely negates the virtues of his solution. Hence, Tolstoy’s narrator is correct in suggesting that the ancients were unable to solve the problem revealed by the Achilles paradox. Aristotle’s solutions, which exercised a decisive influence on physics and mathematics until the advent of Newton and Leibniz, admit that knowledge of the continuous itself is impossible because knowledge of the infinite is impossible. Now, it might seem confusing or ironic that the narrator has come to the same conclusions

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about the infinite which motivated his exhortation to leave narrative based on causes behind. There is no futility in this move, however; the narrator has changed the object of history in order to advance a possible solution to the problems of the infinite, the modern mathematical method of calculus. It may be worth noting that there is external evidence indicating that Tolstoy certainly saw calculus in this way. Zaidenschnur reports: “Tolstoy considered such a view about history to be very fruitful for ‘historical discoveries’ and he ‘succeeded,’ as he claimed, ‘only with the help of this view of history to grasp from a new and, as it seems, correct point of view several historical events” (SS 7:419). Be that as it may, I do not mean to suggest in the following that Tolstoy seeks to develop an exact narrative “science” based on calculus; rather, my intention is to tease out the salient features of Tolstoy’s use of calculus, however imprecise, distorted or tentative, as a compelling “master” figure for some of the dominant structural characteristics of the novel, of the way the narrative shapes the world it creates.

2.1. The calculus proposal The narrator explains that the moderns have overcome the perplexity of the ancients in regard to continuous motion via calculus: A new branch of mathematics, having achieved the art of dealing with the infinitely small, can now yield solutions in other more complex problems of motion, which used to appear insoluble. This new branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when dealing with problems of motion, admits the conception of the infinitely small, and so conforms to the chief condition of motion (absolute continuity) and thereby corrects the inevitable error which the human mind cannot avoid when dealing with separate units of motion instead of examining continuous motion.

The narrator then advocates the application of this modern mathematical method to history in the crucial culminating paragraph of these comments: “Only having assumed an infinitesimal unit for observation (the differential of history, that is, the uniform tendencies of

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men) and having attained the art of integration (taking the sums of these infinitesimals), can we hope to grasp the laws of history.” The narrator concedes that the infinite cannot be eliminated; rather it can be mastered as motion, as a process. Yet, just how is one to apply an infinitesimal calculus to history? This is an absolutely crucial question, and, in my view, there can be no doubt that the narrator intends calculus to be applied analogically as a sort of ideal model of qualitative analysis permitting new kinds of narrative organization. For example, in Chapter XI of the Second Part of the Epilogue the narrator clearly indicates that calculus is to be applied analogically in accordance with the specific exigencies of the relevant discipline. He first states that “mathematics seeks out law, that is those characteristics which are common to all unknown, infinitesimally small elements” and, then, concludes that “[a]lthough in another form, the other sciences have also proceeded along the same path of thought.” Still, the notion of analogical application is by no means clear. If the narrator advances a straightforward thesis, that a modern method like the infinitesimal calculus should be applied to historical narrative and should in fact constitute a basic approach to historical events, he is much less forthcoming about the details. And it is in this context of specific application that one must be careful to establish exactly what level of specificity is appropriate or warranted based on the narrator’s comments. Hence, the key preliminary question is: To what degree can calculus apply to historical narrative, a linguistic form of representation whose nature is so different? As a starting point for this investigation, I shall provide a thumbnail sketch of calculus, its central function and concepts. The revolutionary significance of calculus is that it allows the coordination of relationships of change such that a continuous dynamic process like motion can be measured or described with unprecedented precision. Calculus achieves this precision by coordinating infinitesimally small differences or “increments” of change8 to define a continuous process in its essential dynamism either at every notional “point” as an instantaneous rate of change or as a whole ostensibly

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arising from these “points.” The definition of a continuous process at every point is called differentiation while the definition of the process as a whole is called integration, the latter being the reverse of the former. This reciprocity is a fundamental aspect of calculus and helps to explain its enormous versatility as a tool to describe all aspects of continuous processes, shuttling from the smallest particular to the most general, subsuming whole. Moreover, calculus can be used to develop general descriptions of continuous processes via differential equations that identify similarities in the patterns of change that govern different kinds of continuous process; indeed, the relevant equations may serve as “laws,” as ways of assigning the specifically different to general patterns of behavior. Both of these aspects of calculus reveal its tremendous underlying strength, its ability to describe and link with maximum precision the particular and the general, the part and the whole, of a process in every changing “instant” of its overall becoming. The narrator is clearly attempting to take advantage of this versatility in urging the application of calculus to history; he is looking for a means of describing the whole of a historical event or process by grasping the interrelation of its parts in their continuous, and continuously changing, motion. The three central concepts the narrator initially mentions, the infinitesimal, the differential and integration, reveal both the limits of this approach and the outlines of its more significant implications for narrative form. The infinitesimal is obviously a fundamental concept, and for the narrator it seems to be a limit of the continuous motion of history, that is, as he remarks, of the continuous motion arising from an infinite number of human wills (beschislennoe kolichestvo liudskikh proizvolov). It is thus tempting to assume that the narrator means to use the individual human will as such as the liminal unit for historical investigation. To understand the narrator’s approach, we need to examine what he means by will. The word, “will,” is in fact a rather inadequate translation of the Russian word “proizvol” which is very broad in meaning encompassing free-will, dominion (to do as one wishes), capacity and choice. It

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is similar to the Latin arbitrium or German Willkür, while it does not have the more restricted acceptation of the Latin term as a choice between alternatives.9 “Proizvol” fundamentally conveys freedom from restraint and the capacity to take advantage of that freedom to do as one pleases. It is a capacity-to-act, a pure potentiality, and therefore futural; this capacity-to-act is directed to possibilities which may be actualized under appropriate circumstances. The distinction is important for our purposes because, more precisely defined, the motion of history is a continuous “actualization” (sovershenie) “flowing from” (vytekaia) this capacity-to-act into the past. When the narrator says in another passage that the continuous motion of history is the sum of these capacities-to-act, (summa vsekh proizvolov liudei), he refers to a sum of actualizations of individual capacities-to-act, that is, to a sum of acts having taken place, having crystallized from future potentiality into past actuality. What, then, is the infinitesimal? Is it a “unit” of actualized potentiality, of this capacity-to-act of individuals? Not exactly—Tolstoy’s narrator in fact conceives of the infinitesimal more as a limit of this actualized potentiality, a sort of infinitesimal and irreducible potentiality or freedom unknowable in itself. Since freedom as such belongs only to human beings, it would be mistaken to argue that the infinitesimal holds of anything other than the actualization, the combined movement, of individual capacities-to-act (proizvoly). It is, then, important to keep in mind as well that the infinitesimal so defined, namely, as a limit of actualized motion, is not a static identity “in itself,” not an individual “will” or “cause,” but rather the limit of a differential ratio of the central constituents of that motion, distance and time—this ratio is in fact most like an “instantaneous rate of change” describing a smallest pattern of change, indeed, a smallest dynamic point of force in the continuous motion that makes history.10 Yet, when the narrator mentions the “differential of history,” he immediately qualifies the term by adding that it is the “uniform tendencies of men,” and this raises questions about what precise sense the term carries other than to constitute an arguably more exact way of describing the differential as a point relation in a continuous process. Conversely, the narrator also seems to advocate the taking of a sum of

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“infinitesimals,” and this raises yet further questions, for, just as it is unclear how the “uniform tendencies of men” are the product of differentiation, it is also unclear how they may be integrated. What sorts of mathematical tools could help the analogy to survive in these contexts? I doubt that any could because it is in these very contexts that the analogy reaches its limits of exactitude and can only begin to mystify; indeed, these brief discussions show just how difficult it is to construct an exact analogical relation between the central concepts of calculus and historical processes based on the narrator’s tantalizing suggestions. But this apparent limitation should not vitiate the general conceptual utility of the proposal—at worst a sort of creative misprision—within the context of the novel. Rather, it seems only more obvious that the narrator applies the conceptual apparatus of calculus to the continuous motion of history with much less precision and far greater conceptual generality. A simple imaginative model may serve as a starting point: if history is a continuous process resulting from the actualization of human capacities-to-act, the latter are motion and can thus be understood as constituting something like linear trajectories that reflect the uniform tendencies of men. These trajectories can be differentiated as well as integrated and, in turn, may also be assimilated into greater combinations that present a more complete description of the dynamic forms relating to a group of processes through the appropriate linking of these constituent processes or “parts.” In more general narrative terms, this model suggests that the narrator is advocating a combinatory procedure that may both overcome and preserve the partiality of narratives based on the causal hypotheses he dismisses; by spurning the wholly subjective narrative, one assuming that a central character can determine the contour of a story, the narrator promotes in its stead a narrative emerging from combinations of smallest narrative configurations into greater wholes that mimics the central flexibility of calculus, its capacity to negotiate between the part and the whole so that, as a consequence of their inner reciprocity, neither is sacrificed to the other. Moreover, the narrator speaks always of laws as the principal goal of the new approach, and it is quite reasonable to assume that he does so on the conviction that attention to human action on the smallest level will yield similarities and linkages

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in dynamic, i.e., narrative, structure that in turn reveal the existence of general laws and permit the classification of particular human activities under greater patterns. In this sense, laws are akin to Platonic ideas or to paradigms; they are a formal distillation of truth capturing the essence of the whole, and one can potentially—“in theory”—know the whole through them. To search for these laws, to describe them, is, then, to describe the general forms or paradigmata of human action and their interrelation, for that is what history is—the expression in time and space of such paradigmata. These views seem to echo Schopenhauer’s platonizing conception of history that was to have great importance for Tolstoy during the completion of the Second Part of the Epilogue: Therefore, a real philosophy of history should not consider, as do all these [Hegelians—author’s note], that which is always becoming and never is (to use Plato’s language), and regard this as the real nature of things. On the contrary, it should keep in view that which always is, and never becomes or passes away. Thus it does not consist in our raising the temporal aims of men to eternal and absolute aims, and then constructing with ingenuity and imagination their progress to these through every intricacy and perplexity. It consists in the insight that history is untruthful not only in its arrangement, but also in its very nature, since, speaking of mere individuals and particular events, it always pretends to relate something different, whereas from beginning to end it constantly repeats only the same thing under a different name and in a different cloak. The true philosophy of history thus consists in the insight that, in spite of all these endless changes and their chaos and confusion, we yet always have before us only the same, identical, unchangeable essence, acting in the same way today as it did yesterday and always. The true philosophy of history should therefore recognize the identical in all events, of ancient as of modern times, of the East as of the West, and should see everywhere the same humanity, in spite of all difference in the special circumstances, in costume and customs. This identical element, persisting under every change, consists in the fundamental qualities of the human heart and head, many bad, few good. The motto of history in general should run: Eadem, sed aliter [the same things, but in a different form]. (1966: 2/444)

Schopenhauer reveals what lies under a conception of history as the expression of immutable paradigmata; namely, that history is a continual return of the same in different guise, it is a continuous repetition. If this were not true, history would be a chaos.

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The narrator’s concern to define laws of history, to determine those greater paradigmatic patterns historical events characteristically express by linking the part to the whole in a more precise and perspicuous way is the fundamental thrust of the calculus proposal and the core of the analogy. Indeed, in this sense the calculus proposal becomes a governing figuration or metaphor in the novel evincing the desire to create a grand meta-narrative of general patterns that combines all the smallest constituent parts together into something approaching but not necessarily achieving a seamless whole—in Jakobsonian terms, the narrator expresses the search for a narrative capable of bringing about the completely harmonious integration of its paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. Accordingly, the combinatorial art allowing for construction of such a narrative has a crucial role. Yet, the narrator’s reticence about details is especially problematic here: he provides no guidance concerning how one may attain to the art of integrating the smallest constituent parts of the narrative. Attaining to this art, a purely formal one, becomes paramount and reveals itself as a central striving behind some of the most interesting narrative characteristics of War and Peace. But, as we shall see, there can be little doubt that this striving cannot overcome the distance between the ideality of the mathematical concepts and the essential errancy of timebound narrative, that ineluctable gap in precision the analogy neither conceals nor rectifies other than by recourse to figuration or metaphor. Before moving on to discuss possible reflections of the calculus proposal in the novel, I think it would be prudent to deal with two important criticisms of the proposal together with the weaknesses they seek to reveal in Tolstoy’s thinking.

2.2. Two arguments against the calculus proposal Negative judgments of the narrator’s proposal have appeared several times in the reception of the novel.11 I would like to respond to two important negative views, each of which holds that the analogy is a half-hearted and false one.

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2.2.1. Berlin Tolstoy simply could not have been serious about applying calculus to history. Sir Isaiah Berlin is the outstanding representative of this tendency and he suggests that Tolstoy’s proposal is but another variant of a central paradox. This “paradox” lies in the conflict between theorist/thinker and artist in Tolstoy that, for Berlin, manifests itself in Tolstoy’s desire to unify or integrate (theoretical) and in his countervailing desire to differentiate (artistic). Although the conflict which Berlin identifies seems to be yet another expression of the durable distinction between thinker and artist, it also has roots in the philosophical distinction between knowledge of the universal due to the intellect and “knowledge” of the particular due to the senses. Berlin writes specifically about the application of calculus to history that “[h]ere the paradox appears once more; for the ‘infinitesimals,’ whose integration is the task of the ideal historian, must be reasonably uniform to make this operation possible; yet the sense of ‘reality’ consists in the sense of their unique differences” (48-49). Berlin in fact uses the example of calculus to point out the flaws that undermine Tolstoy’s thought as opposed to the surpassing quality of his art. He maintains that the theoretical aspect is weak because the infinitesimals must be “reasonably uniform.” It is not clear what Berlin means by this criticism. He seems to imply that infinitesimals are representative of uniform quantities—perhaps even the “uniform tendencies of men.” But this is surely misguided. An infinitesimal is not representative of any uniform quantity because uniformity is the result of a mathematical operation and not of empirical inquiry. Although Tolstoy does seem to hold that infinitesimals are representational, he stipulates that they represent motion, an essentially dynamic relation, and not individuals as such. Even if one accepts Berlin’s tendency to view infinitesimals as representational (or his suggestion that this is what Tolstoy does), the notion of unique differences he advances is by no means clear; indeed, Berlin seems to go farther than Tolstoy, making infinitesimals into objects of some kind. If this means that infinitesimals derive their “reality” from their difference from each other, it is necessary to deter-

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mine what this difference is. Obviously, if they are completely different from each other, they cannot be referred to by the same term “infinitesimal.” This should be a highly unlikely interpretation, but Berlin does seem to oppose uniformity to difference while failing to consider the consequences of advocating difference without a prior uniformity. This leads to the ironic conclusion that the “reality” of the infinitesimals consists in their not having the uniformity on which their difference must depend. Berlin offers up these ambiguous arguments so as to assert that Tolstoyan reality lies in particulars and not in generalizing categories. This assertion ultimately serves Berlin’s thesis that Tolstoy is not a “sincere” thinker but an artist, that the narrator’s proposal to apply calculus to history is a feeble attempt to impose uniformity on what is different. But Berlin seems to ignore the intimate dialectical relationship that first permits identification of universal and particular, a peculiar avoidance his own recondite opposition between hedgehog and fox tends to foster. For works of art are very much works of thought—in this regard, it bears repetition that the particular is mute without the universal and, likewise, the fox is also mute without some unifying principle that permits multiplicity and prevents multiplicity from exploding into chaos.12 Behind these criticisms, I think, lurks Berlin’s distaste for Tolstoy’s holism which has a strongly platonic tendency and, thus, continuously wavers between the all-too-neat extremes of hedgehog and fox. And this distaste is perhaps only natural for an empiricist and positivist like Berlin. He senses that Tolstoy’s novel conceals a sweeping metaphysics of which he, not Tolstoy, is instinctually mistrustful. In my view, this is the heart of Berlin’s attack on Tolstoy and not a terrible conflict or failing in the latter.13

2.2.2. Morson If Berlin casts doubt on the seriousness of Tolstoy’s proposed solution, there is another rather tempting negative view represented by Gary Saul Morson who finds complementarity rather than antagonism

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in the relation of causes to calculus. This view arises from the apparent ease with which the analysis of continuous motion might seem to apply to the problem of causation precisely as a sort of description of the causes. According to Tolstoy, the only principle that might lead to a real understanding of history is the obviously impossible one of describing everybody and everything—“histories of all, absolutely all those taking part in an event” (p.1421). At one point in War and Peace, Tolstoy raises the possibility that a generalizing principle might be discovered someday that would enable the historian to take everything into account. Perhaps a “calculus” could be invented that would “integrate” history’s infinitely numerous and infinitesimally small causes. Even then, however, historiography would be doomed to failure for other reasons. (107)

The problem is to suppose that the narrator means calculus to apply to causes, “infinitesimally small causes,” as a response to the demand that every single individual be described in some fashion. If that were the case, then one would have little choice but to infer that the narrator’s alleged solution to the problems of correct, i.e. holistic, historical narrative is empty and, perhaps, even deliberately so. Alternatively, one could simply hold that the narrator entertains contradictory points of view in regard to the possibility of knowledge of historical events. While the narrator clearly advocates the impossibility of obtaining knowledge by means of the causes of a historical event, he just as clearly does not leave the matter at that. Instead, he maintains that the proper object of history is the discovery of the laws that govern history. The unadorned nerve of the issue is that calculus applies to motion without regard to an enumeration of the relevant causes—the emphasis is on “how” not “why.” Chapter XI of the Second Part of the Epilogue (from which I have already quoted) provides direct evidence of the narrator’s position: From that standpoint from which the science of history now regards its subject, on that path, on which it proceeds, seeking out the causes of phenomena in man’s will, a formulation of these laws appropriate for science is impossible; for, however we may limit man’s freedom, as soon as we recognize it as a force not subject to laws, the existence of all law becomes impossible. Only by limiting this freedom to infinity, that is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince ourselves of the utter inaccessibility of

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In this passage, the narrator develops even more clearly the opposition between two kinds of knowledge that is implicit in his advocating calculus as a superior narrative model. The first kind of knowledge is derived from traditional Aristotelian science; it demands to know the internal nature of the object, the occult forces which move and shape it. This is the standard of knowledge the narrator seems to impose in regard to causes, for causal chains are not knowable precisely because they cannot be completely known—we cannot describe every cause in itself because to do so we would have to describe every cause; we would have to end time or, in other words, be like God. The second kind of knowledge represents a liberation from these restrictions, being very much a product of the modern mathematical revolution inspired by Descartes, and its object is the laws that govern change.15 Here the full import of laws may become somewhat more explicit, because it is the formality of laws that allows them to apply to diverse situations regardless of specific content. If the laws arising from formal relations provide the basic objects of knowledge that permit knowledge, as it were, then these laws are in turn the basic formal conditions of objects. This is the beginning of a great epochal shift from knowing “the object itself,” as substance, to knowing the object as a multiplicity, a characteristic nexus of formal relations that permit it to be known and of which the causal relation is merely one. In terms of narrative, this shift is of fundamental importance. The narrator not only rejects the cherished principles of narrative construction derived in one way or another from Aristotle’s Poetics, but

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also proposes what is in essence a new narrative poetics based on a mathematical model whose main building blocks are formal multiplicities.

Excursus: Organic and mechanistic interpretations of the world Tolstoy’s interest in this epochal shift is reflective of the dominant trends in the modern era where mathematical science has became the paradigmatic standard of scientific knowledge to which all other branches of knowledge must aspire. In the words of Ernst Cassirer: The development of the scientific view of nature of the modern era is guided and determined by opposition to the Aristotelian system of ‘substantial forms.’ If Aristotle was concerned to reveal the inner source of all change, if he sought to lay bare the first beginnings, from which all becoming arises, modern science starts from the recognition that we are given nothing more than the appearances themselves in their various relationships, and that the task of theory is restricted to tracing them back to, and “understanding” them in the form of, generally applicable statements of law. Not the absolute, inner essence of things and changes, but only the immanent rules of their disposition in space and recurrence in time are regarded as worth understanding. The fundamental task of Aristotelian physics lay in the process of extracting from the particular phenomena the general teleological forces which condition and create them. All external reality was henceforth interpreted through the interplay of such forces: each physical change was only the expression of an inner transformation, by virtue of which the original “form” of a thing strove gradually to unfold and realize itself. All material change was conceived therefore as a result and a combination of defined organic drives, each of which is directed to the emergence of a specific individual form.16

The different notions of knowledge which Cassirer so elegantly summarizes can be usefully explained by reference to the related difference between organic and mechanistic interpretations of nature. An organic interpretation of nature is one which seeks to reveal the inner structure of things based on a fundamental division of those things. Aristotle sets out this fundamental division at the very beginning of Book II of the Physics where he distinguishes between those things which exist or come into existence by nature and those which do not. In the first group Aristotle includes animals, plants and the four elements or “simple bodies” of Greek science—earth, fire, water and air.

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In the second, he includes a bed, cloak and other objects wrought by human skill or craft (apo technes). The feature common to things which exist or come into existence by nature is that “each of them has within itself a principle or origin of motion and of rest, some with respect to place, some with respect to increase and decrease, some with respect to alteration” (1984: 329).17 By contrast things which do not exist or come into existence by nature are distinguished because they lack this internal principle or origin of motion and rest. In other words, to understand natural things, one must understand this inner principle or origin of motion (arche kinesos). This principle in turn is the form of the thing, that structure which it is the thing’s nature to become. The form is then the ultimate end of motion in the thing. It is also the nexus of those causes (efficient, material, formal and final) which one must know in order to know the thing, for form is the primary explanatory ground of natural things. One of the difficulties accompanying this interpretation of nature is that knowledge of a natural thing is not possible if knowledge of the ultimate end for which it strives is not possible. But this only hints at the more general difficulty of this interpretation which resides in the fact that any thing is the product of a principle or origin of movement which transcends it. Hence, the attempt to determine the essential nature of any thing means that one has to attribute to it an internal nature, force (a Leibnizian vis activa) or soul (anima/entelechy), beneath the appearances that only a god or God can truly know. The mechanistic interpretation of nature marks a reaction to Aristotelian physics. It in fact attempts to eliminate the difficulties of Aristotelian physics by interpreting nature in terms of quantitative relations among the appearances. This can be achieved by the complementary reduction of physical objects to the Cartesian notion of “res extensa” or extension. By reducing natural objects to “extended things” Descartes was able to apply mathematical techniques to nature while eliminating the need for the sort of explanations of occult forces and teleology associated with Aristotelian physics. The basis of this position is set out in the Second Rule of the Regulae ad directionem ingenii. Descartes writes that “from the foregoing it is not to be concluded that only arithmetic and geometry should be learned, but that those who seek the correct path of truth must occupy themselves with

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no object of which it is not possible to have a level of certainty equivalent to proofs in arithmetic and geometry” (X: 366).18 As a result, there is no longer any need to determine what natural things are in terms of metaphysical speculation about their internal nature, whether they have souls or spirits. All this kind of speculation becomes perfectly irrelevant. Moreover, the mechanical interpretation of nature assumes that this kind of speculation is irrelevant; it may be associated with other forms of superstition or mere belief. This change in the focus of the investigation of nature goes hand in hand with a change in the focus of knowledge, if not in the kind of knowledge sought, since, for Descartes, knowledge must still be complete or perfect: “And thus by this proposition we reject all forms of cognition in so far as they are probable, and only if they are complete (perfecte cognitis), and cannot be doubted, do we maintain that they should be believed” (X: 362).19

The finite mind In War and Peace the narrator’s argument in favor of a shift from knowledge of causes to calculus reflects these two interpretations of nature. And it is the limitations of human knowledge, its finitude, which recommend the mechanical approach to nature. This may not be immediately evident from the preceding discussions of the calculus analogy. One might agree that the Cartesian rejection of the array of metaphysical forces with which the Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages augmented and transformed the fundamental distinctions of Aristotelian physics is a means of progress to truly certain knowledge. In this sense, Descartes seeks to reveal the power of human reason to unlock the secrets of nature on its own terms. But there is another side to this issue. Descartes’ gambit is also fundamentally an admission of the limitations of human reason vis-à-vis the divine intellect. The human mind is finite and, accordingly, cannot possibly ascend to the kind of knowledge which its creator, the infinite deity possesses. It is, then, the finitude of human reason that leads to a reevaluation of knowledge as a first step in the attempt to render the

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knowledge of nature possible, even if this knowledge can never match that of the divine intellect. Indeed, it can match the divine intellect neither in quantity nor, ultimately, in quality of knowledge, for the divine intellect is the intellectus intuitivus or intuitus originarius; as such it intuitively knows all things as they are in themselves, their internal natures and ultimate purposes, completely without restriction. Human knowledge as finite is indirect or discursive knowledge that depends on appearances and the relations among them. This problem is discussed in the First Part of the Epilogue in the form of a characteristic Tolstoyan analogy:

As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and yet at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to comprehend, so each individual bears within himself his own aims and yet bears them to serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man. A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of the flower, and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely, says that the bee gathers pollen-dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee’s existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or third purpose that the human mind is able to discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to other manifestations of life. And so it is with historic characters and nations. (1E/IV)

For Tolstoy, there is a fundamental distinction between human understanding and that other form of understanding, that rationality which we do not know. The distinction points to an extremely important aspect of the novel to which I have already alluded; namely, the subtle role of God in it. For how else can one explain the ultimate thrust of the narrator’s critique of causation than to suggest that we

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should turn away from seeking to know as God does or on the assumption that we indeed can know as God does? The narrator is clear that this kind of knowing is not possible for the human mind because the human mind is finite; it is separated from the divine mind, the infinite, the “cause of all causes” by an unbridgeable gap. Yet, the narrator is careful not to conflate this assertion of finitude with skepticism. In recommending the application of concepts derived from calculus to human history, the narrator maintains that a kind of knowledge is possible for the human mind, even if it is asymptotic. While our finitude entails that we cannot possess the same breadth of knowledge as God, in principle we still can possess knowledge qualitatively similar. Moreover, the narrator also suggests that the existence of an order which is not completely accessible to the human mind is not a cause for skepticism, but rather encourages that we seek knowledge of that order. In doing so, we seek the “cause of all causes,” God. And the narrator ensures us that we will continue to do so; despite the fact that we can obtain a kind of knowledge which eschews the causes, we will always be tempted to pursue that knowledge which we cannot obtain, the answer to the question “why?,” for this “need to find causes is implanted in man’s soul” (IV/2/I). The narrator’s so-called skepticism emerges as something of a different order altogether—as an expression of a fundamental gap between God and man, the infinite and finite, which acts as an impetus to a striving that seems to hover between the two. “For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to nothing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding of the extremes...”20

2.3. A final objection to calculus There is arguably another, oblique critique of calculus in the text itself that relates to the preceding comments. I am referring to the curious antagonism between mechanical and organic kinds of being that plays a significant role in the fictional text of the novel from the very beginning. The narrator, in a justly famous simile, likens Anna Pav-

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lovna’s soirée to a machine shop where she is the foreman; Prince Vasilii speaks “like a wound-up clock,” and a machine-like predictability and monotony of operation not only dominate the atmosphere of the soirée, they are of its essence: Anna Pavlovna’s invitations are all the same, Helen smiles at everyone with the same unchanging smile, and even the little Princess addresses the guests “in general” and speaks in the same tone about clothing and her husband’s immanent departure for the war. Pierre’s appearance constitutes somewhat of an event. He does not belong in this benumbing atmosphere: Anna Pavlovna greeted him with the nod she accorded the lowest hierarchy in her drawing-room. But in spite of this lowest grade greeting, a look of anxiety and fear, as at the sight of something too large and unsuited to the place, came over her face when she saw Pierre enter. Though he was certainly rather bigger than the other men in the room her anxiety could only have reference to the clever, though shy, but observant and natural expression which distinguished him from everyone else in that drawing-room. (I/1/II)

The key adjectives in this description are “large” and “natural,” and they have interesting implications. They suggest the presence of an energy that cannot fit within the petty confines of Anna Pavolvna’s salon; a natural vitality, perhaps even a hint of the infinite that contrasts sharply with the listless and exaggerated limitedness of the main characters at the salon. Pierre’s brash behavior—he gaffes the ritual greeting of “ma tante”—causes even greater anxiety; namely, that he will disturb the hum of the machinery, that he will throw it out of whack. And Anna Pavlovna is quite right about this, as she soon finds Pierre in a lively argument with the Abbé Morio. This argument leads to a subsequent breakdown in the careful order of the soirée that is only repaired by Prince Hippolyte’s idiotic joke. Tolstoy’s point is not subtle. He contrasts Pierre’s spontaneity and naturalness with the stiff and unnatural choreography that Anna Pavlovna seeks to impose on the soirée. Why is this relevant to the calculus proposal? Within the context of the distinction between organic and mechanistic interpretations of the

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world, calculus clearly belongs to the latter; it is its very essence—the world functions like a machine whose operations are completely regular and calculable.21 In short, one of the fundamental aspects of calculus is its generality. This is the key to its utility as a method. In principle one could discover the differential equations defining every possible law of motion. If I examine this notion of calculus in light of the contrast between the mechanistic and organic that Tolstoy develops in the opening sequence at Anna Pavlovna’s, the result implies a criticism of calculus as a mechanistic interpretation of the world. The application of calculus to motion imposes the same kind of stifling uniformity that we witness at Anna Pavlovna’s soirée because calculus aims at describing the various kinds of motion and, to do so, assumes that the laws it finds apply without exception. Thus we have a conflict of sorts. Tolstoy seems both to advocate calculus as a solution to skepticism and to criticize its generalizing energies, once again displaying an unmistakable skepticism about generalizations. There is, however, a basic difference here because I think that we can see more clearly how Tolstoy at once supports both sides of the bargain. On the one hand, he sees that skepticism lies in partiality, the inability of the finite mind to grasp the whole as such, and tries to remedy that partiality as a problem and fault. On the other hand, he is suspicious of general solutions; while advocating calculus, he seems to realize that its application can only be imperfect. To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved. No one can say in how far it is possible for man to advance in this way towards an understanding of the laws of history; but it is evident that only along that path does the possibility of discovering the laws of history lie; and that as yet not a millionth part as much mental effort has been applied in this direction by historians as has been devoted to describing the actions of various kings, commanders, and ministers and propounding reflections of their own concerning these actions. (III/3/I)

With calculus, Tolstoy wishes to find a means of writing history capable of aspiring to the comprehension of the whole available to a divine intelligence. But striving remains just that—Tolstoy recognized that realization of this ideal would neither be easy nor desirable. In the First Part of the Epilogue, the narrator clearly expresses this latter

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point: “[i]f we concede that human life can be governed by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed.”

3. CALCULUS IN THE NOVEL How then does the calculus proposal apply to the narrative form of the novel? As an abstract preliminary answer I contend that the calculus proposal provides a very useful explanation for the way in which extremely varied and complex kinds of juxtaposition of smaller narrative configurations rather than an overarching causal progression dominate the linear formal organization of the novel. Such juxtapositions compel attention to the many ways in which relations—essentially ones of difference and similarity—integrate parts and wholes of tremendously varied specific content in the novel. These relations are themselves emphatically not causal, not mere connections of cause and effect (though the latter of course do make up an essential stratum of the novel), but form the bases for a dynamic network of content-based linkages that reveal patterns and intricate interrelations of patterns defining general types of human action in the novel. Putting this dogmatic presentation aside, in what follows I shall present on a much more tentative basis a few brief examples that draw on the rich critical tradition to suggest the relevance of the calculus proposal for exploration of such a typology of characters, actions and events; the goal is to sketch out some of the simplest ways in which Tolstoy strives to integrate dynamic particulars of character, action and event into grand tableaux—fundamental patterns of human activity—that attempt the impossible: a synoptic vision of the whole in ceaseless movement. The first question here again concerns what is to be integrated: What is equivalent to the infinitesimal? I have already indicated that, based on the evidence in the essays and the Second Part of the Epilogue, the concept of the infinitesimal is difficult to apply precisely. Did Tolstoy claim that he had performed a sort of calculus to arrive at his characters? Are they “differentials” or “trajectories” or, indeed, paradigmata denoting both how a group or class did and must act in characteristic situations? When we put the questions in this manner,

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Tolstoy’s proposal comes to resemble little more than an elaborate variation of the well-worn commonplace that an artist seeks to reveal the universal in the particular, that art itself is a revelation of a greater purity of being in its lesser manifestations. And I think there is no question that this is true as far as it goes. Even Berlin admitted that this was the “real” meaning of calculus in the novel, and Tolstoy’s notes suggest that he sought to endow his characters with typical traits of a certain group or class.22 Yet, when we concede that the novel features types that are supposed to embody different categories of people in typical or representative situations, we merely suggest that Tolstoy considered traditionally artistic means to be more effective in conveying historical truth than those of modern historiography—not a very remarkable conclusion that justifies Turgenev’s complaint about Tolstoy’s regrettable tendency to “discover” the commonplace.23 Consequently, from this standpoint, the calculus proposal at best seems to be a way of pointing to the underlying intentions of the novel—it is an exhortation to read the novel as a certain kind of narrative, and on the level of character and situation, this makes sense. But it is a meager result. Now, as I have suggested, the broader significance of the calculus proposal is realized in a different manner on another level of the text; namely, that of the structure of the novel itself. The battle scenes provide a useful example here, since it should be obvious from even a cursory examination of the famous battle sequences at Schön Grabern, Austerlitz and, especially, Borodino that Tolstoy makes a considerable effort to embed in the narrative an anti-heroic and anti-linear account of events. While I suggest that Tolstoy’s narration of these battles tends to undermine a narrowly causal account of them as the fulfillment of the governing will of one man or group of men, the crucial question remains as to what new ordering principle is implied. Obviously there is one, and I think it is far more substantial and complex than the purely negative desire to prove that causal accounts are false, a desire that is in any case essentially dogmatic. In this regard, I would like to refer to a very famous letter Tolstoy wrote to Nikolai Strakhov in 1876 while working on Anna Karenina. Although this letter was written six years after the completion of War

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and Peace, I think it admirably expresses the fundamental contours governing the practical application of the calculus proposal in the structure of the novel: In everything, in almost everything that I have written, I was guided by the need to bring together thoughts linked among themselves, in order to express myself. But every thought expressed by itself in words loses its meaning, becomes terribly debased when it is taken alone, out of the linking in which it is found. This linking is based not on thought (I think) but on something else, and to express the essence of that linking in any way directly by words is impossible, but it is possible indirectly, with words describing images, actions, situations. (PSS 62: 269)

With these words Tolstoy describes an ideal: to avoid a narrative based on one isolated thought in favor of one linking thoughts together in a grand mesh. This ideal is clearly similar to what the narrator outlines in the calculus proposal. Moreover, the “essence of the linking” is that purposive inner rationality to which we have no access; we may only describe the relations or linkages of the phenomena among themselves and, in doing so, we in fact reveal the phenomena as reflections of that deeper rationality, of its essential forms. If I return to the original question of what is to be integrated, it now seems that two answers incorporating a rather flexible notion of smallest narrative configuration are possible depending on the level of the text. On the one hand, it is a likely, if trivial, truth that the characters to some extent “result from” a process of integration of individual traits; in this sense they are paradigmata of a group or class, and they act in representative ways in a series of characteristic situations of life. On the other hand, the novel is structured to reveal them as such only through a wider process of integration involving specific images, actions and situations. White hands, for example, are associated with Napoleon and his gallery of lesser epigones in the novel, including Speransky and Rastopchin. In these cases, a repeated characteristic or image brings together a number of diverse characters and implies an underlying communality to their personalities and to their type of personality. There are many other examples, important situations include, of course, battles, but also balls, dinners and other social and familial events like the hunt; in each of these situations characteristic actions

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and attitudes emerge. This kind of grouping together seems to be a much more liberal procedure than the strict application of the concepts of calculus might admit. But, in this regard, it is important to note that Tolstoy is writing history as an artist, and this allows him to take liberties to portray the whole man and not merely a historic personage: An historian and an artist describing an historic epoch have two quite different tasks before them. As an historian would be wrong if he tried to present an historical person in his entirety, in all the complexity of his relations with all sides of life, so the artist would fail to perform his task were he to represent the person always in his historic significance.24

Even so, Tolstoy’s approach still follows the basic rhythm of the calculus—that is, to bring together a diversity of complexly imbricated parts within the ambit of a single law or set of laws that establishes more general patterns. It is, then, hardly surprising that, as the foregoing example of the “white hands” suggests, the central basis or principle of integration is repetition, the intricate and insistent play of relations of difference and similarity, that has been noticed by many students of the novel.25 This is where Schopenhauer’s claim that history is a repetition of “the same, but in a different form” has such resonance for an understanding of War and Peace. It reveals not only a central aspect of the novel’s structure, but an essential postulate: history, like nature, is the repetition of fixed patterns and human beings are but another part of this process whose lives unfold in certain characteristic ways. This is a view of human nature as essentially invariable. Tolstoy writes about Vera Rostova that she “as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing” imagines that she has “discovered and appraised the peculiarities of ‘our days’ and that human characteristics change with the times” (II/3/XXI).26 Repetition in the novel is extremely various. One of its familiar forms is manifested in the novel’s structural tendency to bring wholes together by juxtaposing diverse accounts of certain basic events. In this regard, the battle scenes are conspicuous. We see the same event through a number of different eyes. Hence, if we group the battle scenes together, we note that each contains numerous smaller narra-

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tives that provide different perspectives on the same battle. Prince Andrei’s view of Austerlitz differs from that of Nikolai Rostov or Kutuzov. The mere juxtaposition of these views establishes a synchronous unity of three different levels of seeing the battle and, in this sense, they create a more comprehensive account than any single, linear narrative could. Further, these ways of seeing a battle all differ from Pierre’s at Borodino. Yet, if we “attain to the art of integrating” this diversity, each element of which is arguably a summation of the perspective of a certain group, like concentric circles—Kutuzov at the center of command, Prince Andrei the adjutant near to command, Nikolai Rostov, the cavalry officer farther from command, Pierre the civilian farthest from command, or Tushin and his crew on the outer limits of command as a command unto themselves—we begin to see the greater panorama of both the particular battle and what a battle essentially is as a recurring historical reality. We are thus led to a greater objectivity that through a series of layers defines the common elements or characteristics of all battles. And this is the significance of calculus as an artistic structuring principle in the novel, since it both allows and directs one to integrate different perspectives within a greater whole that becomes a sort of paradigm of that situation and the characteristic ways of human thought and action within it.27 This example features a linkage based on an event, a very common one in the novel that R. F. Christian has referred to as a situation rhyme, but there are many others of different sorts. Both Christian and Sankovitch in their painstaking taxonomies examine several categories of repetitions; these include, among others, the constant repetition of a word, of a kind of relationship between two characters or groups of characters, and of certain kinds of experience, mundane or epiphanic. Viktor Shklovsky, who in typical fashion discerned this aspect of Tolstoy’s narrative well before anyone else, maintains that not only repetition but other devices, namely parallelism, gradation (by which he means the way in which different characters evince a “graded” quantity of a certain quality) and antithesis, are crucial semantic elements of the narrative.28 While I completely agree with Shklovsky’s observations, I prefer to consider these devices as species of repetition since they all depend on linkage through a similar element from which distinctions and differences, like an antithesis, flow.

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In other words, it is obvious that parallels are predicated on the repetition or possession by each instance of a similar element such that the parallel may be established. There is, for example, a famous parallel between Nikolai Rostov’s behavior in battle and at the hunt. The fruitful comparisons that emerge through this parallel are based on the repetition of similar elements in both Nikolai’s behavior, the charge, and, of course, the violent nature of both activities no matter how different that violence may be. All these kinds of linkage work to establish paradigms—either of a kind of character or event or theme—which arise out of the temporal flow of the novel. As I have said before, none of this may be particularly different from what happens in any novel, being an anticipation of modernist techniques (indebted to Tolstoy in any event) aptly described by the notion of “spatial form.”29 And yet this qualification is perhaps too cautious, thereby doing an injustice to the daring of Tolstoy’s narrative innovation. For in War and Peace we have a narrative that completely ignores some of the most influential aspects of Aristotelian poetics, the careful prescriptions as to the causal coordination of action, in favor of a mathematically governed narrative in which formal relations of similarity among smaller strings of action tie together the great variety of the novel, its cunningly un-Aristotelian discontinuity, to create a vast, multi-leveled network of interlocking wholes that are themselves parts as well. This network, supported by a remarkable series of linkages, functions to reveal the t i meless—indeed, almost mythic—patterns behind time-bound narrative progressions thereby evoking a continuous present, an epically unified reality far beyond, while entrenched within, the subjectivity of the novel, its peculiar celebration of polyphony. In brief, limited points of view are continually displaced in a more capacious narrative that surrounds and engulfs them all. And here we have paradox; a narrative against narrative that strives to overcome temporality in order to offer a synoptic view of the whole.

CHAPTER THREE: A TEMPORALITY OF CONTRADICTION

While War and Peace strives towards absolute vision, it also certainly fails to achieve such vision, what amounts to a hyperborean view belonging to the gods or God alone. In this very failure is the secret of its remarkable realism, or rather, the illusion of realism which has struck so many readers of the novel; indeed, the clash of both skeptical currents and the striving for an infinite knowledge, sustained and immediate presence, give the novel that unfinished quality which prompted George Steiner to remark that, for Tolstoy “narrative form must endeavor to rival infinity—literally the unfinishedness of actual experience” (112).1 This begs the question: When all is said and done is the novel a skeptical or anti-skeptical narrative? The answer is “both.” And in this answer Tolstoy reflects a broadness and openness to experience that is truly holistic and Goethean: “All empiricists strive towards the idea and cannot uncover it in the diversity of experience; all theorists seek the idea in diversity and cannot pick it out” and “[b]oth however are to be found together in life, in action, in art…” (12: 421).2 Indeed, the Faustian undercurrents in the novel are of considerable importance, especially the fact that skepticism acts as the engine of movement, the restless goad to new discovery and reformulation; skepticism in this sense is not only negation, it is also a form of affirmation. Yet, the novel is both skeptical and anti-skeptical in such a way that critics drawn to the skeptical aspects of the narrative, like Berlin and Morson, have been hesitant to accept the coexistence of these contradictory impulses in one novel. They become drawn up in its temporality, one which so skillfully represents the “sense” of the present, that they are prone to deny an overall structure. This is so because the narrative encompasses the conflict between two kinds of movement, being at once centripetal and centrifugal, and in this conflict it defines its temporal texture and vitality.

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Hence, the temporal structure of the narrative itself incorporates the tension between unity and diversity, order and chaos, that I have examined in the preceding chapters. To wrap up my analysis of this latter relation in the novel, then, I would like to make a few comments about this temporal structure and the curious problems of generic categorization, the perennial question as to the genre of War and Peace, whether novel or epic or epic-novel, that seem to be intimately bound up with it.

1. TEMPORALITY IN THE NOVEL The temporality of the narrative is in fact marked by the latter’s tendency to portray the present through a sort of montage, the contrasting of different perspectives or aspects of a more general synchronous or nearly synchronous totality. This technique of contrast gives the impression of disjointedness and freedom which we associate with the unstructured present. Yet, the cumulative impact of such juxtaposition is to construct or define a whole that emerges out of its specific temporal locality. In structuralist language, the breakdown of typical causal syntax or plot compels a greater reliance on the paradigmatic “axis of selection” to permit integration of the various syntactic units of the narrative. As I noted, kinds of repetition guarantee this paradigmatic stability. Nevertheless, no one overall “figure in the carpet” dominates the novel. Rather, there is in fact an immense variety of such figures, as the existing treatments of repetition attest, which are hidden from the immediate view of the reader. And Tolstoy tries everywhere to depict immediacy. In what follows, I shall examine these structures in Book I more closely by contrasting the temporality and spatiality of the narrative with its underlying patterns; that is, I shall look more carefully at the tension between its syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects. To borrow a striking image from Leo Spitzer, I would like to use this sequence in Book I as a “blood sample” that might permit a proper evaluation of the whole organism, for here the microcosm is a mirror of the macrocosm (88).

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1.1. Diegesis and mimesis The modern study of narrative structures tries to reduce any given narrative to three primary elements: story, plot or narrative, and the act of narrating. One is supposed to be able to adduce the temporality which governs a particular narrative from the interaction of the first two of these three elements. In the words of Genette: To study the temporal order of a narrative is to compare the order in which events or temporal sections are arranged in the narrative discourse with the order of succession these same events or temporal segments have in the story, to the extent that story order is explicitly indicated by the narrative itself or inferable from one or another indirect clue. (35)

This seems straightforward enough, but if we look carefully at this relation in War and Peace we immediately run into telling difficulties. The general outline of the story is readily available in the history books. War and Peace does not create its own story on this level but adapts one that is well-known and, in doing so, creates its own stories within this story. To understand the plot or narrative, i.e., the specific temporality of the novel, one has only to grasp how Tolstoy unfolds these stories. But here is the problem, one that many critics have noticed: How do the episodes of Book I unfold a story? In other words, where is the overall structure or plot that permits us to discern a narrative succession within it? These questions are not merely unusual or insouciant, they speak to the heart of the matter, for the novel does not construct a singular unifying plot, understood as a causal progression, either obvious or capable of reconstruction à la Genette, rather it characteristically abjures this very kind of causality, developing as an alternative a series of “lines of relation,” those of which Shklovsky first took note and others have since elaborated. This is merely to say in a different manner that the principle of selection in the novel, its episodic “syntax,” is often predicated on relations that are not causal. One of the principal reasons for this is that the novel foregrounds a continuous present and causal chains emerge not in the present but in the past; in other words, causation needs the passage of time, the very

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discontinuity that, according to Tolstoy, ensures an imperfect understanding of history. This temporality appears most sharply in the inherent tension of striving to portray the present while avoiding typical causal forms of narrative within a greater narrative. Perhaps this is why both Eikhenbaum and Orwin find that the novel is in fact profoundly anti-historical.3 The scenes which unfold in Book I provide a fine illustration of this tension. One of the most obvious examples of temporal “presencing” is the novel’s opening, a quite literally open one; to say, as some critics have, that the novel starts in medias res is misleading. While it is fair to claim that by means of the opening quote the narrative sets itself in a greater time line of general historical events, it does not then proceed to ground itself in a specific explanatory or grounding story as do traditional epics, and, in particular, the Iliad.4 One will recall that this epic begins with a general invocation, moves directly to set the scene and then to the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles. By avoiding this temporal “flashback,” War and Peace not only gives the unbounded present, the moment in itself, at Anna Pavlovna’s soirée and nothing more, it also resists the temptation to give an etiology of the events leading up to the soirée as if the latter were a product of those causes. This dismissal of purposive temporal coordination is highly characteristic. Each of the specific scenes which constitute Book I live in a present that is balanced only by the promise of historicity. But this promise, i.e., that the present exists within a greater context, seems abstract to the degree this latter context is not directly present. Book I provides ample evidence of this temporality beyond the allegation that it begins in medias res; having placed Anna Pavlovna’s salon within 1805 Russia, on the eve of war with Napoleon, the narrator steadfastly remains in the present, carefully minimizing his own role. In fact the novel opens with a presencing through dialogue balanced by brief narrative descriptions. The first chapter is a constant balance of these two different modes of representation, diegetic and mimetic. The terms trace their origins to Plato who attempted to distinguish between the enacting of dia-

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logue and the retelling of a narrative (1997: 1030-1033).5 The point is that enacting the dialogue is an attempt at conveying an unmediated present whereas retelling cannot help but draw attention to itself as a particular construction or deployment of the events narrated. Tolstoy tends to fuse these two modes (whose borders are none too distinct at any rate) into a single narrative movement: (1) Diegetic: ‘Eh bien mon prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now no more than family estates of the Bonapartes. No, I warn you, if you don’t say that this means war, if you still permit yourself to condone all the infamies, all the atrocities, of this Antichrist—and that’s what I really believe he is—I will have nothing more to do with you, you are no longer my friend, my faithful slave, as you say. But how do you do, how do you do? I see that I am frightening you. Sit down and tell me all about it.’

(2) Mimetic: So spoke in July 1805 the renowned Anna Pavlovna Scherer, lady-in-waiting and confidante to the empress Marya Fyodorovna, as she greeted Prince Vasilii, a man of high rank and office, who was the first to arrive at her evening party. For several days Anna Pavlovna had a cough, she had the grippe, as she said (grippe being then a new word used only by the elite)…

This pattern continues to hold not only throughout the first chapter but also throughout Book I. For Tolstoy both modes of narrative constitute a presencing of what is narrated. The narrator gives what amounts to a direct report of action taking place contemporaneously with the dialogue he supplies, and this style of narration is crucial to maintaining the very highest sense of presentness or synchrony between story and narrative, as if the reader were witness to the actions at the moment of their occurrence. Yet, the narrator also subtly reveals that he is narrating something which has occurred long ago. Here he notes that the word “grippe” was not commonly used then. In chapter III, the narrator remarks that Princess Helen’s shoulders, back and bosom were exposed “in the manner of the day” (“po togdashnei mode”) disclosing once again his own temporal distance from the action. But such references to temporal distance recur remarkably infrequently, affirming the essential character of the narration which is to

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portray everything as if it were happening in the same time frame as that of the reader. This particular narrative temporality permeates all of Book I. But it is still possible to discern three separate episodes judging primarily from their spatial coordination; simple changes of scene articulate the narrative sequence rather than temporal progression. Each of these scenes is distinguished as a unit by constituting both a spatial and temporal unity. At each of St. Petersburg, Moscow and “the country,” the locations for the salon, the nameday and death of Count Bezukhov, and the departure of Prince Andrei from Bald Hills, the action takes place in one stretch of time, either a single day as it runs into night or, in the case of Prince Andrei’s visit to Bald Hills, the seamless merging of one day into the night of another. The depiction of the day on which Prince Andrei arrives with the little princess merges into the night of his departure on the following day. This is achieved through a simple division of scenes. The first day ends and the next begins following dinner such that the passage of time is almost imperceptible. This kind of organization recalls that of a play, and it is rather surprising that critics have focused so much on the dramatic style of Dostoevsky while neglecting that of Tolstoy.6 I think that this omission merely gives testimony to the subtlety of Tolstoy’s manipulation of temporal conventions, that he tends to intertwine both novelistic and dramatic attitudes by mixing diegetic and mimetic narrative in a deceptively seamless present.

1.2. Linkages The three principal episodes of Book I are therefore not joined together in the more conventional or Aristotelian sense by focus on a unifying principal character or event, or one single time scheme as one might find in any number of other nineteenth-century novels from Balzac to Flaubert and Dickens to Trollope. Indeed, we only know that the last scene, Prince Andrei’s departure from Bald Hills, comes some time after the first scene at Anna Pavlovna’s. But this is not to

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say that the novel avoids conventional narrative linkages; they are in fact quite in evidence and of the simplest kind. We meet Anna Mikhailovna at Anna Pavlovna’s evening party; she is an epigone of Prince Vasilii. And, like him, she has come to the salon only to pursue a selfish end—the irony of course is that she importunes Prince Vasilii to do so. It is through her that the narrator “justifies” his introducing the Rostovs. This is an unusual move. It is not immediately motivated by any obvious causal progression and Anna Mikhailovna will fade into the woodwork after Book I. She is decidedly a secondary character whose major role is to secure the succession of Count Bezukhov’s wealth to Pierre. The transition to the next group of scenes which take place in Count Bezukhov’s palatial home in Moscow is achieved by a famous juxtaposition of Count Rostov’s dancing the sixth “Daniel Cooper” with the sixth stroke of Count Bezukhov. The final transition to Bald Hills is perhaps more conventional. The narrator has prepared us for Prince Andrei’s visit to the country. The link, however, is with the first scene at Anna Pavlovna’s and not with the immediately preceding scenes recounting the death of Count Bezukhov. None of these transitions is unusual or unprecedented in itself. What is, however, most unusual and most characteristic is the avoidance of a conventional cause and effect relation between the scenes. If Tolstoy in a sense effaces temporal difference by constantly presencing each part of the narrative, it is nonetheless possible to perceive a temporal progression, but this progression has a largely ancillary role in developing the narrative.

1.3. Patterns Book I works in a quite different manner. It provides three different views of the Russia of 1805. In a way that is very similar to the multi-perspectival description of battles, Book I as a whole provides a layered account that labors to convey the totality of that period. This construction of the narrative is only possible by integrating its units on the basis of their common underlying elements and not of a traditional

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plot structure—strictly speaking, in Book I, there is no plot. The sequence is, however, not static but sufficiently dynamic because of the narrative’s constant temporal presencing. If we integrate its units, the sequences that constitute Book I show several different sorts of patterns. On the surface one can see a transition in epochs from that of Catherine the Great to Alexander. This is emphasized both by the death of Old Count Bezukhov and the description of Old Prince Bolkonsky and his relation to his son. One could also point out that each description shows a different part of Russia. The story moves from St. Petersburg to Moscow and then to the country. We are thus provided with a view of the two main cities of Russia, representing modern and ancient Russia, along with the countryside which, one might also argue, is timeless. Likewise three kinds of families are depicted, the Kuragins, Rostovs and Bolkonskys. The first scenes give a multi-leveled portrait of Russia at a moment of transition from one era to another. There is, however, a more singular pattern of order dissolving into chaos which marks each of the three central episodes and foreshadows the first great movement of the novel into the chaos and disorder of war. The sequence that begins with the careful protocols of Anna Pavlovna’s salon descends into the utter nonsense of Prince Ippolit’s “joke” and, then, after a transition to Prince Andrei’s house, ends with Dolokhov’s daring and Pierre’s drunkenness, a raucous night of debauchery in St. Petersburg. The second sequence celebrates the nameday of a mother and daughter and ends with the death of Count Bezukhov, while the third describes the family reunion at Bald Hills and ends just as quickly with separation. Yet, here we find three kinds of order and three kinds of disorder. As always with Tolstoy, the pattern is not a monotonous repetition of the same, it is a repetition with subtle and telling differences. The order at Anna Pavlovna’s is not the same as that at the Rostovs’ or that at the Bolkonskys’. The order at the Rostovs’ reflects an internal, natural harmony and not one imposed to permit the covert pursuit of selfish ends as at Anna Pavlovna’s or to embody an intellectual ideal as at the Bolkonskys’ where the associations of the Old Prince with

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aristocratic Enlightenment rationalism are quite obvious. Likewise, the sense of dissolution is not the same. The nonsense of Prince Ippolit is a figuration of the emptiness of Anna Pavlovna’s salon countered by the revels with which the first episode ends; these represent an encomium to disorder as an expression of natural vitality in contrast to the deadened atmosphere of Anna Pavlovna’s salon. In this regard it is difficult to assign a sense of foreboding to this kind of disorder which, like Pierre’s presence at Anna Pavlovna’s salon, is a sign of life, the vitality without which life would be impossible. Count Bezukhov’s death is of course quite different, for it represents an end to that harmonious vitality that seems to permeate the Rostov household, but it also underlines a certain harmony (as Bocharov and Orwin note)7 between the two borders of life, birth and death. Likewise Prince Andrei’s poignant departure presents at the same time an end and a new beginning. In each of these cases both the surface and underlying patterns are similar and strikingly different. Each one comments on the other creating a complex matrix of mutually illuminating structures, and in this matrix, one that grows and mutates in an ever increasing geometric progression, one finds the essence of the structurally unifying forces of War and Peace. I am reminded of Mandel’shtam’s characterization of Dante: Dante’s thinking in images, as in the case of all genuine poetry, realizes itself with the help of a peculiarity of poetic material which I propose to call its convertibility or mutability. The development of an image may be called its development only in a qualified manner. And, in any case, imagine an airplane—leaving aside the technical impossibility—which in full flight constructs and launches another machine. In the same way this flying machine, while fully absorbed in its own flight, nonetheless manages to assemble and launch yet a third machine. For the sake of precision in the supporting comparison just introduced, I will add that the production and launching of these technically unthinkable new machines hurled out in mid-flight are not additional or unimportant functions of the plane in flight, but constitute an essential attribute and part of the flight; they condition its feasibility and safety to no less a degree than the correctly operating rudder or the regular functioning of its motor. (2: 229-230)

Mandel’shtam’s wonderful metaphor captures the productive quality of the patterns that criss-cross the novel as one proceeds through it. In

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Mandel’shtam’s terms, I might suggest that the tensions that exist between these patterns collectively constitute the engine of the airplane and the source of energy by which new machines are tossed off in flight through a vast inter-connected network that holds everything together even though it threatens to collapse, if it does not actually do so, at every moment in the text.

1.4. Tensions That the narrative maintains a focus on the present while compelling one to construct greater patterns that require time to perceive is a typical function of reading taken to a certain extreme in War and Peace. This tension between forces of present and past, experience and reflection, immediacy and mediacy strives to imitate a certain experience of time, of our being both “in” and “out” of it. This tension, then, is of course one which we experience in our ordinary perception of time that also constantly negotiates between an open present and an apparently closed past. As such, it is at once the most penetrating mimetic gesture of War and Peace and a most effective expression of the basic tension between order and chaos that permeates its structure and has to lead to a different conception of skepticism in the novel. In other words, the novel does not express a static structure, but one which challenges the so-called law of contradiction, displaying at the same time and in the same respect divergent qualities. Any given moment in the novel is both open and closed, both a movement of expansion and contraction; in this sense, one may liken reading the novel to proceeding through a constant and multi-leveled movement of opening and closing, a movement intended to parallel the actual perception of the present and grounded in the metaphysics of the relation to reason and consciousness described in the Second Part of the Epilogue. If we look closely we can see that this structure of expansion and contraction is mirrored in particular episodes of the novel, in the actual process of reading it and in the tension between principles of order and the disorder of immediacy which is everywhere evident within it. To say, then, that the novel is purely skeptical, that it shows how

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knowledge is impossible, is gravely to misunderstand this structure, the wellspring of its mimetic beauty—the novel decides neither for skepticism nor against it. As in Goethe’s great work Faust, Tolstoy seems to hold that a final decision is a termination or destruction of the vital network of tensions which make up finite being and which Tolstoy attempts to grasp by applying a mathematically inspired formalism to the novel. To eliminate these tensions, to ignore their pervasive influence is to search for a kind of peace that is illusory. But most characteristic of Tolstoy is that he recognizes the common desire which underlies any attempt to eliminate these tensions, however natural it might be, by seeking either the skeptical path or the path of absolute knowledge. Thus the text is marked by patterns of images, situations and thought just as Tolstoy had indicated in his letter to Strakhov. The crucial aspect of these linkages is that they do not resolve or cannot resolve into a singular grand “superstructure” in the novel; rather, these linkages are like lines of force that emerge and dissolve in a continual ebb and flow of self-definition. And this energy is a remarkable feature of the novel described succinctly in the image of the globe that one may thus regard as one of its governing tropes.

2. EPIC AND NOVELISTIC TEMPORALITY This basic conflict between expanding and contracting lines of force, both a striving towards resolving human experience into a complete mimetic tableau of its primary varieties and a persistent recognition of the disturbing consequences of such striving, that its goal is a sort of suicide, a death in life, constitutes the novel’s “third way” that weaves between dualistic extremes. The third way is an attempt at forging a new path for the narrative by eschewing both hegemonic closure, that the novel can purport to convey a final view, as it were, “from the mountain top,” and radical openness, that the mimetic world of the novel can express defiant indifference or difference made absolute.

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This conflict has considerable significance for the generic categorization of War and Peace and helps to explain why Tolstoy himself wanted to distinguish War and Peace as an independent artistic form that was indeed not a novel but “what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it was expressed.”8 While these words support those who would claim that the novel is the product of untutored genius, a view that has had surprising longevity given the numerous analyses of Tolstoy’s painstaking concern with form, they also point out an essential concern, that War and Peace not be seen as an example of any particular genre. Just what does Tolstoy mean? Why is the issue of genre important? The generic question is in fact a fundamental one that opens up another dimension of the dynamic structure of War and Peace, that it hovers between two primary generic categories, epic and novel, without belonging in any substantially final sense to either one. To see how this is possible, a very condensed discussion of modern theoretical attitudes to the relation of epic and novel is required. The primary figures involved are Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács. Bakhtin opposes epic and novel as continuously possible forms of world interpretation, whereas Lukács, following Hegel, maintains that the novel is the modern development of the epic.9 Fundamentally at stake here is the philosophical investment of thought in the notion of genre that identifies different genres as embodiments of consciousness, of an inherently reflexive attitude to the world. On this view, epic and novel are the generic representations or crystallizations of specific forms of consciousness. For the Hegelian line of thought that comes to its culmination in the work of Lukács, the emergence of particular genres is intimately related to a corresponding development of consciousness; they are in fact a sort of “witness” to the shapes that consciousness passes through on its voyage towards absolute self discovery, the novel being a modern incarnation of the epic. For Bakhtin, this teleological conception of development is anathema. He is concerned to show that the novel is not exclusively modern, not the culmination of a long historical process, but very much an ancient literary genre. In other words, Bakhtin maintains that novel and epic are not linked in a chain of linear devel-

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opment from an inferior to superior stage of self-consciousness, but rather that both possibilities exist side by side, that epic and novel are in fact related more profoundly by their difference, by the opposed notions of consciousness they embody, one monologic, the other dialogic. As Michael Holquist notes, “Bakhtin’s history conceives a constant struggle between two impulses that may be labeled epic and novel” (77). If these two most powerful modern theorists of the novel differ considerably about their conception of what the novel is as a genre, they are profoundly in agreement as to the significance of the notion of genre itself, that genre is a form of consciousness, and, further, that consciousness is the proper realm of philosophical investigation into the forms of human relation to the world whether theoretical, practical or aesthetic. This agreement betrays their dependence on, or common origin in, the central preoccupations and innovations of Kantian thought as well as the parameters that Kant’s thought set for the great debates of his successors. This concern with consciousness extends to Tolstoy; the Second Part of the Epilogue is in fact a remarkable essay about consciousness that tries to sketch out a model of consciousness applicable to War and Peace as a narrative. Hence, by canvassing briefly the views of Bakhtin and Lukács about the novel and its relation to epic, I think that the broader implications of the peculiar narrative structure of War and Peace will become a good deal clearer. Moreover, the fact that War and Peace ends with a lengthy discussion of the relation between reason and consciousness, in other words, with an examination of consciousness itself, may be placed in its proper context as capstone and justification for the narrative. Bakhtin’s conception of the novel is a peculiar formalism. Indeed, according to this conception, one might easily and ironically turn Tolstoy’s concern to distance his work from specific generic categorization around to say the opposite of what it apparently wants to say; namely, that Tolstoy only confirms the essential novelness of War and Peace by claiming that it departs from generic considerations, this being an essential trait of the novel, that it has no essential traits or, at least, that it subverts all essential traits. And here is the peculiarity of Bakhtin’s approach: the novel is the continuously self-transcending

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form, the expression of a negativity that does not wither away or annihilate itself in a final synthetic transparency, but one which is intrinsically open and undisciplined, that takes on form only temporarily—to repeat, its essence is to have no essence. This inescapable contradiction is tremendously productive and serves as the very life blood of the genre, the source of its protean flexibility—in a word, its inconclusiveness. Here Bakhtin is surely justified in claiming that the novel is in a certain sense unique among literary genres because, unlike the mass of inherited genres, the novel tends most powerfully towards radical openness, towards the continuous transformation of form, a sort of permanent revolutionary negativity (and certainly not evolution since there is no defined telos or justifying causa finalis). Bakhtin’s term for this negativity in its most basic form is the “excess of seeing,” a concept that relies on the visual characterization of knowing so central to the western tradition.10 This excess allows one to assert that no dialogical relationship can be closed, that to assume or assert closure is a mendacious and tendentious denial, since knowledge is always dependent, always a product of a knowing that cannot be completely one’s own. Like so many other thinkers of the twentieth century, Bakhtin sketches out, through the concept of an excess of seeing or dialogic negativity, a notion of radical finitude, that thought and being can never be united in an absolute harmony—this harmony being understood in the final instance as the control of subject over object or the reverse—and that it is precisely in this absence of completion, of access to the absolute, that the fundamental contours of human action come to the surface. The novel’s crucial philosophical importance for Bakhtin lies in its recognition and celebration of dialogic negativity, of the finite and, therefore, dependent nature of human activity. Consciousness is never singular or closed for Bakhtin, it is not purely subjective or private, but rather it is a dialogic and social creation that cannot be brought to completion, but is always in the process of becoming, whatever that process might be. The dialogic other sees more but not quite enough to eradicate the possibility of complete re-interpretation, of revolution. The dialogic relationship is creative and inconclusive.

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If the novel is the triumph of this dialogic being, of the recognition of the inevitably social nature of consciousness, it also betrays much more radically destructive impulses, for the novel must then also be the genre of the decline of final (monologic) authority, the death of God and the rise of an ever inter-dependent subjectivity as unstable arbiter of what is; the novel becomes thus the embodiment of anarchic energies, of a relativistic universe that shuns the absolute but has not yet drawn the appropriate conclusions, that the relative must also die along with the absolute. Indeed, this is where Bakhtin’s conception of the novel reaches its limits and bares its hidden dogmatism, since Bakhtinian openness is derived from an essentially dogmatic ground, the dialogical principle, which is itself closed to the very kinds of revolutionary transformation he identifies elsewhere. Bakhtin shrinks before the final step his own his praise of freedom invites; namely, that to be rid of the contradiction, for openness to be full and complete, it must decline into the chaos of complete indifference as to any defining principle. While the novel as a generic category tends towards this radical and inherently inconsistent openness, Bakhtin argues that the epic tends in the opposite direction, towards closure. For Bakhtin, the epic is primarily distinguished from the novel by the distance it creates between the present and the events it narrates. The latter are “walled off” from the present. They constitute a discrete whole, a totality whose integrity is protected by virtue of distance: These events and heroes receive their value and grandeur precisely through this association with the past, the source of all authentic reality and value. They withdraw themselves, so to speak, from the present day with all its inconclusiveness, its indecision, its openness, its potential for re-thinking and re-evaluating. They are raised to the valorized plane of the past, and assume there a finished quality. (1981: 18)

Epic is a genre of denial, in this sense monologic, and, since it tries to form one final hierarchical order not capable of subsequent modification, epic reality projects a monumental, finished structure that can be felled only by revolution.

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This revolution comes about by way of a fundamental change in the temporal limits and assumptions of narrative. It is no exaggeration to claim that Bakhtin’s whole analysis of the difference between epic and novel is shaped in decisive ways by an underlying distinction between the kinds of temporality that govern the two genres. While epic time is a completed whole, a distinct creation of closed temporal form that seeks to avoid the distentio animi Ricoeur discusses so ably in his major work, Time and Narrative, the novel welcomes this distention, is in a sense nothing more than a celebration of the aporias of the present, its resistance to definition, the freedom of the free flowing “now” (nunc fluens), of actually experienced time.11 In other words, epic strives towards defining the nature of time and the course of becoming and, in doing so, it turns time and becoming into a thing and not that “in” which everything appears as a thing; this epic impulse is then quite similar to what Heidegger calls “Seinsvergessenheit,” the oblivion of being, of the vibrant source that remains hidden in beings. Bakhtin maintains that “[t]o portray an event on the same time-andvalue plane as oneself and one’s contemporaries (and an event that is therefore based on personal experience and thought) is to undertake a radical revolution, and to step out of the world of epic into the world of the novel” (1981: 14). The present becomes the basic temporal quality that distinguishes the novel: The present, in its so-called “wholeness” (although it is, of course, never whole) is in essence and in principle inconclusive; by its very nature it demands continuation, it moves into the future, and the more actively and consciously it moves into the future the more tangible and indispensable its inconclusiveness becomes. Therefore, when the present becomes the center of human orientation in time and in the world, time and world lose their completedness as a whole as well as in each of their parts. The temporal model of the world changes radically: it becomes a world where there is no first word (no ideal word), and the final word has not yet been spoken. For the first time in artistic-ideological consciousness, time and the world become historical: they unfold, albeit at first still unclearly and confusedly as becoming, as an uninterrupted movement into a real future, as a unified, all-embracing and unconcluded process. Every event, every phenomenon, every thing, every object of artistic representation loses its completedness, its hopelessly finished quality and its immutability that had been so essential to it in the world of the epic “absolute past,” walled off by an unapproachable boundary from the continuing and unfinished present. (1981: 30)

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The temporality of the novel, as Bakhtin understands it, represents a radical and permanent departure from the kind of temporal manipulation that has been the durable justification and refuge of epic narrative. It is thus no surprise that Bakhtin emphasizes the uniqueness of the novel because in a very direct way, the novel at its most extreme dispenses with the attempt to disguise the aporias of temporality through narrative structure, the attempt to tame the openness of the present by denying it. The upshot is that the novel becomes the genre of immediate freedom, of inevitable inconclusiveness. Bakhtin’s view of the novel is radical, but he characterizes the epic in ways that follow the tradition stemming from Hegel’s discussions of epic poetry in his Lectures on Aesthetics with the one key difference that for Bakhtin epic is of course not a stage in an inexorable progression towards a specific goal, but rather a permanent possibility of world interpretation. For Hegel, the epic is very much the national “story,” the unifying narrative that establishes a basis for a culture, an original whole that is the inexhaustible source from which a given people draw to define their form of life, including its temporality.12 Hegel continually emphasizes that epic is the genre of totality, one that portrays the entire life of a people, that grasps the essence of their life (1975: II/1044, 1077-1093). While Hegel goes further claiming that the novel is one of the genres that has invaded the original domain of the epic in the modern period, he says little else about the exact significance of the novel (1975: II/1110). Here it is Georg Lukács who extends and clarifies the Hegelian line of thought in his complex and puzzling book, Theory of the Novel. Lukács sets out the fundamental proposition of his own view when he writes that the novel is “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality” (56). The key concept here is again totality. Yet, just what is this totality? The answers to this question of course differ as the underlying philosophical concept of the primary desiderata of human life changes, as consciousness develops from immediacy to selfrecognition. But, for Lukács, totality in the context of the novel is inextricably tied to an essentially romantic notion of the absolute, of a

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lost immediacy and wholeness, of an all-embracing “oceanic feeling,” that emerges as shattered and irretrievable in the wake of the development of self-consciousness. The epic individual, the hero of the novel, is the product of estrangement from the outside world. When the world is internally homogenous, men do not differ qualitatively from one another; there are of course heroes and villains, pious men and criminals, but even the greatest hero is only a head taller than the mass of his fellows, and the wise man’s dignified words are heard even by the most foolish. The autonomous life of interiority is possible and necessary only when the distinctions between men have made an unbridgeable chasm; when the gods are silent and neither sacrifices nor the ecstatic gift of tongues can solve their riddle; when the world of deeds separates itself from men and, because of this independence, becomes hollow and incapable of absorbing the true meaning of deeds in itself, incapable of becoming a symbol through deeds and dissolving them in turn into symbols; when interiority and adventure are forever divorced from one another. (66)

Within this context, the novel is the genre that gives artistic expression to modern self-consciousness, its agonizing sense of isolation and estrangement from a more originary experience of life, one not yet aware of its mediate nature and therefore blessed with an immediate, if inchoate, sense of connection with objects and other individuals, with the world beyond which there is nothing yet to see. Thus the novel as a genre both identifies this sharp awareness of fallenness and attempts to redress its effects, to regain in some fashion a primordial unity. These differing conceptions of the relation of novel to epic provide strikingly opposed views of the philosophical significance of the novel. For the concern with generic categories that occupies Bakhtin and Lukács is admittedly merely a pretext for dealing with underlying philosophical problems. Both theorists assume that literature provides a reflection of thought and in this sense they are thorough converts of German Romanticism, a tradition with which some modern critics take exception.13 Be that as it may, the underlying concern is the great predicament of modern thought: How to deal with the loss of faith in authority that is the final result of the Kantian revolution, the rapid historicizing of reason brought about by Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger? If Bakhtin welcomes this loss of authority, the liberation from

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monologism, the so-called absolute word that needs no proof and brooks no opposition, Lukács brings out a despairing view, one that reveals a longing for an essentially harmonic whole, an authoritative closure, a god that is not God. Both views suffer from dangerous complications, Bakhtin seeks to impose freedom dogmatically, thus risking far more than a purely formal contradiction, while Lukács seeks wholeness without complete loss of freedom, a tyranny without tyranny. If Bakhtin’s views threaten to sink into the tyranny of anarchy, a groundlessness that amounts to chaos, Lukács invites wholeness at the expense of the parts. These views are in turn a variation on the momentous debate about the relative virtues of modernity. The epic is an essentially ancient genre, one based on the separation between gods and man. Epic wholeness and discreteness, its capacity to provide a fixed, synoptic view of the events and characters it portrays, both of which act as archetypes—the individual and particular being important only as an embodiment of the whole—are essential components of an ancient tradition to which we owe the notion of character and event as having typological “reality” in any case. And this is why the epic must have the sanction of the gods or god-like insight, for it attempts to convey in artistic form the kind of general truth vouchsafed to the gods. The corollary is that the epic portrays the frailty of human beings, their terrifying ignorance and irremediable subjection to the inscrutable whims of gods who have little or no understanding—how could they after all?—of mortal existence. Very much like tragedy, its peculiar Attic child, epic resolves, in the most powerful representation possible of the vicissitudes of human life, intolerable and unrelieved suffering, and the human response to such suffering, that is essentially futile and all the more heroic for being so. Epic thus carries the dark burden of the ancient view of the world, a conviction about the limits of human life and the disaster that threatens to accompany any attempt to transcend those limits, to trespass upon the prerogatives of the gods. While epic represents the ancient world, the novel represents the rise of the subject, the foremost invention of modernity and the repository of its greatest hopes; the novel is thus a genre of daring, it is quixotic to the core, the representation of a new kind of experience of

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the world that did not belong to the ancients. This new kind of experience brings out the depth and breadth of actual lived life and therefore the time consciousness which Bakhtin so shrewdly identifies, an awareness that is profoundly subjective—it is particular, it is the rhythm of the lived present. The world is then no longer a closed totality in which individuals play a part consigned to them by an inscrutable fate, a sort of master plan that is the barely concealed expression of hopelessness. Rather, the world is malleable; it is, in Schopenhauer’s phrase, “my representation.” The subject can profoundly influence the world; it can transform itself along with its own conditions of life, it can thus dare to ascend to the heights of worldcreation, rivaling the gods or God. But one must be rather cautious here because the novel does not unequivocally share in this grand and desperate vision—while the liberation of plurality, of openness and inconclusiveness which Bakhtin constantly evokes, is intimately tied to the rise of the subject and the freeing of the subject from tradition, it also reflects another side of modern daring, the loss of all foundations. The liberation of the subject becomes a truly quixotic seeing of illusions, the creation of a world that has no anchor in objectivity or, at the very least, in a transcendent reality, because that reality has ceased to exist. And this vertiginous feeling leads to the search for wholeness, for the return to a lost origin that is dogmatic nostalgia in Bakhtin and nausea about modernity in Lukács. The fundamental problematic with which Bakhtin and Lukács deal in terms of the relation of epic and novel also plays a central role within War and Peace; it provides an appropriate means of beginning to grasp the significance of the competing patterns I have identified in the novel. For the movement between ancient and modern that is implied by the generic categories that both apply and fail to isolate the essence of the novel is just as readily evident in the narrator’s choice of calculus as against ancient (basically Aristotelian) ways of characterizing the world. The view of temporality that lies under this distinction is equally indicative, since causal thinking is a major component of the creation of a linear temporality, whereas calculus creates a timeless temporality in the sense that the most powerful relations are conceptual and not purely temporal; they move the narrative out of the flow of time understood as a succession into a simultaneity that is

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nothing more than a continuous presentness. But, this simultaneity has two diametrically opposed consequences. On the one hand, the concealment of simple linear causality in War and Peace creates the same sort of open, novelistic temporality that Bakhtin describes so well. On the other hand, the ultimate fruit of that concealment, the creation of a new form of governing meta-narrative, a continuous presence, is not that of the evanescent moment, but of God-like intuition where all objects are present at once to the divine mind—in a word, an epic closedness, the formidable expression of the desire to impose being on becoming, to resolve the constantly shifting present of finite consciousness into the immutable presence of an infinite one. Indeed, the novel’s foremost structural characteristic, the movement between part and whole in its various forms, as a movement between subjective and objective modes of knowing, between the immediacy of the open moment and the global constructions that shape that moment and, ultimately, between relative and absolute, finite and infinite, is quite usefully analogous to the basic opposition between novelistic and epic forms of representation. One may argue that the essentially competing ways of fashioning the world that these two genres embody govern the structure of War and Peace and shed light on its deepest impulses. In this sense, Tolstoy’s admonition about generic classification of the novel points to the unsolved nature of the opposition, that rather than being one or the other, War and Peace is itself a continuous becoming, at once belonging and not belonging to a particular genre. And this is all the more remarkable since the novel seems to move inexorably towards a conclusion, the consciousness of its own principles, the reflective capture of the basic model of consciousness that the text reveals on several levels at once, but mainly as a shifting between the merging of subject and object in history and the re-assertion of ineradicable subjectivity. This movement suggests a deceptive teleology, that War and Peace moves towards definitive closure. Yet, as we shall see, this grand gesture ends up in an unequivocal denial of the possibility and desirability of closure. Rather, the movement in War and Peace is generated by failure, by the inability to reach the kind of final position that would exclude all other positions, that would complete history and render nugatory any continued movement. In this context, the most penetrating irony is

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that a goal must both exist and not be capable of attainment. Imbalance, disharmony, and unavoidable difference are the primary motors of life; war and struggle dominate over the stifling illusion of peace. If we revisit the differing views expressed by Bakhtin and Lukács about epic and novel, War and Peace seems to embrace both Bakhtinian openness and the longing for a lost harmony, one that is impossible to retrieve. In this sense, War and Peace displays both the unfinished and open qualities Bakhtin ascribes to the novel with the crucial difference that there remains an inherent teleology, a neversilenced desire to achieve or retrieve the epic absolute, despite the knowledge that it may be impossible and undesirable to do so. The novel thus implies another dogmatic barrier to chaos, a suggestion that restlessness, that irresolvable movement towards a goal, an “infinite nearing,” is a first principle of some kind, one whose assertion must be dogmatic. Thus the novel also engages in a contradiction of sorts, at least until the Second Part of the Epilogue where the dogmatic relation of reason and consciousness is fully revealed. By suggesting, however, that the striving for the whole is the basic if never satisfied movement of consciousness, Tolstoy avoids the deceptive rhetoric of Bakhtin and the all too romantic despair of Lukács.

3. THE END OF TIME The hunt scene, the importance of which Tolstoy stressed in his drafts for the Second Part of the Epilogue, offers the rudiments of an interesting countervailing position, an assertion of the possibility of essential harmony that does not end up in a debilitating form of peace. In this sense, the claim that the scene represents a sort of idyll (as do a series of other parallel scenes in Book II) seems entirely appropriate, at least at first blush. The scene in fact contains a somewhat comic mixture of generic elements from epic and novel, a curious juxtaposition of venerable cultural tradition with the influx of seemingly incongruous modernity. Here the clash between a closed tradition and contemporary life is sharp and telling, for the hunt scene is one of the most powerful evocations of pure Russian life in the novel with its own hero of the stamp of Kutuzov, “uncle.”

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The hunt sequence begins with a clear indication of synthesis, of the union of two different worlds. When Nikolai wakes up on the day of the hunt, he notes that “it was as if the sky were melting and sinking to earth without a breath of wind.” The suggestion is instructive—two erstwhile separate worlds are coming together, heaven and earth, a surmise that is only further supported by the fact that this chapter follows introduction of the enigmatically metaphorical sky above the wounded Prince Andrei at Austerlitz.14 This indication receives confirmation in several distinctive ways in the sequence. Danilo, who is otherwise completely under the control of his master, Nikolai, is permitted to act as if he were on an equal or superior level: At that moment there rang out a loud “O-hoy!” that inimitable huntsman’s halloo that unites the deepest bass with the highest tenor, and around the corner of the house came the huntsman and the whipper-in, Danilo, a gray, wrinkled man with his hair cut straight across his forehead, Ukrainian fashion, and a long bent whip in his hand. His face wore the expression of independence and scorn of everything in the world that is seen only in huntsmen. Doffing his Circassian cap to his master he looked disdainfully at him. This disdain was not offensive to his master: Nikolai knew that scornful and superior as Danilo appeared to be, he was still his man and his huntsman. (II/4/3)

Several important details emerge in this paragraph. The huntsman’s “halloo” unifies high and low registers; in this sense it is very much a formal reflection of the merging of sky and earth. Moreover, Danilo is able to reach a level superior to that of his master, an independence that seems to brook no opposition, while at the same time, his master is not at all disconcerted about Danilo’s outburst but remains confident and calm. Important here is not just the fact that Danilo can assume to be on the same level if not superior to his master, but also that he can act to the fullness of his own strength, that he can express the basic traits of his nature without fear of reprisal. This is a fascinating harmony, where master and servant may maintain both roles at the same time, if in different respects. The strict hierarchy of life is reversed and retained, so that Danilo can be independent while not overtaking his master, while not being forced to destroy the latter as the price of independence. How is this so? The narrator suggests an answer somewhat obliquely when he states that, at the beginning of the hunt, “[e]very dog knew its master and its call. Every man in the hunt knew his business, his place, and what he had to do.” The salient

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fact is that all the participants in the hunt know their place. There simply are no radical dislocations, no basic deficiencies that cannot be remedied, that beckon to action, to the desire to eliminate or control others—the participants remain content. But this contentedness is due neither to vegetative resignation nor to a belief in the futility of all action. It results from an apparently immediate or instinctual appreciation of one’s place and function, an appreciation not available to reason. The dominating physicality of the hunt, the quick changes, the unmistakable similarity of the hunters and the hunted, all point to the diminishment of rational activity and the enhancement of pure action, of the pure exercise of our physical selves. Yet, in this regard, the hunt sequence has a remarkably Dionysian texture, as if the characters with their wild ululations were engaged in a Dionysian frenzy, the submergence of rationality in pure ecstatic physicality, in the supposedly deeper, primordial processes of nature. While evidence that Tolstoy had such an echo in mind is lacking, there is nevertheless little question that the hunt sequence bears an intriguing family resemblance to the kind of Dionysian freedom from restraint that Euripides depicts in The Bacchae. This strange echo raises more questions. If the sequence does reveal a sort of harmony or, in any event, seems to stress unity as the harmonious interaction of the various participants in the hunt, the latter’s wildness along with its bloody end points to another aspect of it that suggests harmony is obtained only at the cost of a violent sacrifice, only through the death of another creature. The hunt sequence is thus thoroughly ambiguous. It offers a vision of harmony that, if initially idyllic, turns frenzied and bloody. The implications of this conclusion for the narrative are intriguing. Far from suggesting that a harmony between the different impulses in War and Peace can be achieved, the ambiguous nature of the hunt sequence reveals the brutality of this apparently “idyllic” reality, its purchasing initial harmony at the cost of a greater loss of order with consequent submergence in ecstatic and chaotic physicality, a world of brutal instinct. Here the underlying pattern departs from epic and novel, to embrace the more basic opposition between human rule (nomos) and chaotic nature (phusis) that plays such a central role in

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Euripides’ dark play (while also hinting at the very Dionysian undercurrents in Bakhtin’s thought). At stake is a much more complex conception of the relation between human beings and nature that points to the inherent lack of harmony between them. The underlying argument here is a very ancient one; the stoics after all were among the first to praise harmony with nature as the highest achievement of the good life. The problem is of course suggested by the very need to encourage harmony, a need that reveals the fact that such a harmony must be striven for, that it is not natural but acquired. This leads to the obvious opposing view, that human beings are intrinsically “out of joint,” that we are at once part of, and radically other than, nature. The hunt scene is thus a recognition of the vitality of the subject, that subjectivity cannot be eliminated, cannot be subsumed into the whole without dire consequences—either a mechanical objectivity, an overwhelming sameness, or a plunge into the silence of pure feeling. And this is merely another way of characterizing the central conflict in War and Peace as one between subjective autonomy, the privilege of the moment, of undivided experience, and objective determinacy, the basic factors that limit and thus tie together individuals in a world. If we look at the most significant structural traits of the novel I have discussed, they indeed all reveal a variant of this central conflict between subject and object understood as an underlying conflict between immediate undivided experience which is somehow “mine” and constructed, hence, mediate, experience that belongs to all and none. If the former slides towards chaos, as a kind of inchoate and necessarily silent apprehension—indeed, an apprehension so unusual that it does not deserve or justify the term—the latter tends towards tyranny, a “semiotic totalitarianism” in Morson’s words. Either extreme fails because it denies the delicate balance, the necessary relation to its other that permits the extreme to exist as a conceptual possibility in the first place. Indeed, the extremes are a melting away of the tissue of reality into an amorphous abyss of chaos or unity (understood as pure identity). The extremes depend on underlying conflict.

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This conflict that spreads out concentrically in the novel like ripples of water from the impact of a stone finally comes to its fundamental form in the Second Part of the Epilogue, where the root of conflict is located in the basic contradiction between freedom and necessity, understood as one between reason and consciousness. This contradiction is an absolutely central one. No less a philosopher than Schelling writes that the contradiction is the impetus to striving for knowledge without which the latter would be empty and trivial: …it seems that the connection between the concept of freedom and a total world view will always remain the subject of an inevitable problem which, if it is not solved, will leave the concept of freedom ambiguous and philosophy, indeed, totally without value. For this great problem alone constitutes the unconscious and invisible mainspring of all striving for knowledge from the lowest to the highest. Without the contradiction of necessity and freedom not only philosophy but every nobler ambition of the spirit would sink to that death which is peculiar to those sciences in which the contradiction serves no function.15

Schelling expands on these comments in another work and, in so doing, provides a useful formulation applicable both to the principal pattern of struggle in the novel described thus far and to the arguments of the Epilogue: All life must pass through the fire of contradiction. Contradiction is the engine of life and its innermost essence. From this it follows that, as an old book says, all deeds under the sun are full of trouble and everything languishes in toil, yet does not become tired, and all forces incessantly struggle against each other. Were there only unity and everything were in peace, then, truly nothing would want to stir itself and everything would sink into listlessness. Now everything ardently strives to get out of unrest to attain rest.16

PART TWO: THE FINITE PATH The reason by which one may reason is not eternal reason; a being which one may name is not the highest being.1 For life is sweetest when we are free from the care of thought.2

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The movement from early and apparently corrosive skepticism to a more holistic approach to the narrative capture of historical events culminates in the Second Part of the Epilogue. Here the central relation—indeed, the struggle—between the two most powerful competing forces in the novel, the individual subject and the overwhelming whole, the objective reality that impinges on the subject and that the latter seeks to shape to its own ends, comes to pregnant expression. Behind this relation lurks a deeper argument about freedom and necessity in literary art that turns on the difficult question whether a literary work can depict freedom, that is, whether a literary work can provide an account of freedom. This question is so difficult because the giving of an ordered account of freedom—what must be beyond any order or structure to be—seems entirely contradictory, opposing two basically contradictory notions, that of freedom and system, immediacy and mediation. Yet, there is no narrative that can dispense with this question if one grasps narrative as the conferring of form on the immediate apprehension of occurrence, as the translation of the immediate into the language of concepts, indeed, into language itself. For narrative from this perspective is the shape of consciousness; it is the means by which consciousness comes to understand itself. The Second Part of the Epilogue has a generic form radically different from the rest of the novel; it is written as a sustained treatise. Hence, in examining it, I shall proceed in a manner appropriate to that form, while also being cautious not to forget that this treatise is the final part of a long novel and the culmination of the remarks that the narrator has scattered throughout its latter half in the historical essays. Tolstoy’s argument has two distinctive movements. In the first seven chapters, the narrator is concerned both to state in what consist the object and purpose of historical narratives and to point out once more how modern historians have fallen wide of the mark by preferring to “answer questions no one asks” (2E/I). In the final five chapters, the narrator reveals why historians have failed. He identifies the central

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problem as one of freedom and turns subsequent discussion directly to metaphysics. Specifically, having already argued that the explanations upon which historians of various kinds have based their writing of history are unsatisfactory, Tolstoy proceeds to trace this result to their belief in the reality of human freedom. In doing so, he develops his own treatment of the problem, the relation of reason to consciousness, that proves to be the summit of rational argument in the novel, its fullest exploration of its own foundations.

1. THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY The first lines of the Second Part of the Epilogue restate both the object and great difficulty of historical writing with breathtaking simplicity: “The object of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To capture directly and put into words—to describe—the life of humanity or even of a single people appears to be impossible.” This is the kind of opening apothegm that sets up a trenchant and unavoidable irony, that conceives of the writing of history as a Sisyphean task, an exercise in the retention of ever frustrated hopes. And, of course, this irony seems to hang over the novel itself which, after all, shows every evidence of seeking to write history as historians have not. But it is worth questioning whether an ironical stance is entirely appropriate. The narrator continues: The ancient historians all employed one and the same method to describe and seize the apparently elusive—the life of a people. They described the activity of individuals who ruled a people, and this activity expressed for them the activity of the whole people. To the questions: In what manner did individuals compel peoples to act as they wished and by what was the will of these individuals themselves guided? The ancients answered the first by acknowledging the will of a deity that subjected peoples to the will of a chosen man, and the second by acknowledging that the same deity guided the will of the chosen man to predestined ends. For the ancients these questions were solved by belief in the direct participation of a deity in the affairs of mankind.

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These comments are an admission of limitation based on the difference between God and man; to attribute a sense of irony to them is equivalent to suggesting that human finitude is simply ironic. But this is surely a trivialization of their metaphysical significance. While the desire to overcome limitation may be ironic, it is also heroic; ultimately it is the desire to know as a god, to throw off the “mortal coil” and possess the unmediated vision of the whole that our tradition grants to the gods or God alone. Moreover, as such, this latter desire is the basis for a people’s knowledge of itself. Tolstoy says that the goal of history is the “description of the movement of peoples and humanity,” and he also appears to conclude that this description constitutes the “self-awareness of peoples and humanity.” Yet, human knowing is ineluctably mediate, and the narrator refers to the means the ancients chose in order to describe the ever elusive life of a people. The finite mind cannot grasp the whole of this life as it is in itself, but only as it appears to us in terms of a given relation to that whole. This relation, then, is of utmost importance, the act of understanding depends on it, and that is why the narrator so quickly moves to discuss means. According to him, the ancients write history through the prism of the chosen man who represents and guides his people to a divinely ordained goal. This prism is the relation, a form of mediation that seeks to reflect the whole and whose accuracy or truthfulness is underwritten by the assumption that the deity participates in human affairs. It is not clear on what basis Tolstoy makes these generalizations about ancient historiography; they in fact seem to apply better to Homeric epic than they do either to Herodotus and Thucydides or Sallust and Tacitus. It is also an open question whether they apply to narratives in the Bible. It seems most likely that Tolstoy is trying to combine Pagan and Christian forms of historiography in one set of generalizations, a rather problematic endeavor to say the very least. Perhaps the best one can do is to reduce Tolstoy’s analysis to two primary contentions. First, he claims that human history can be written only via mediations of some kind; the ancients looked to the chosen man both as an expression of his people and the will of the deity.

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Second, the suitability of this mediation to fulfill its purpose is guaranteed by a belief in an active deity. In other words, the mediation is grounded in a particular metaphysical belief. It is noteworthy that Tolstoy never criticizes the view that the deity participates in the affairs of men—he tacitly admits that there can be no argument among different metaphysical beliefs. Instead, Tolstoy simply goes on to indicate that this view is no longer satisfactory because the belief on which it is based has been rejected by modern historians. Here he echoes a line from Book III: “The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom ourselves to the fact that for our humanistic (anthropocentric) epoch a history of that kind is meaningless” (III/2/XIX). While modern historians may have rejected the ancients’ belief in the direct participation of a deity in history, they have not succeeded in articulating a justification for their own approach to historical narrative. They in fact merely follow the ancients: It would seem that having rejected the belief of the ancients in man’s subjection to the deity and in a predetermined end towards which nations are led, modern history should study not the manifestations of power but the causes that give order to it. But modern history has not done this. Having in theory rejected the view held by the ancients, it still follows them in practice. (2E/I)

This is the crux of the arguments which absorb the narrator’s attention until the end of chapter VII of the Epilogue. To employ traditional metaphors, in these chapters Tolstoy seeks to tear down the edifice of modern historiography because its foundations are not capable of supporting it. In particular, the argument purports to show that, while modern historians have rejected the direct participation of the deity in human affairs, they have in reality only transferred the role performed by the deity to new entities which, on closer inspection, are simply not capable of fulfilling that role. I would like to pause for a moment to address a peculiar aspect of this citation that will occupy us again further on in my analysis of the Second Part of the Epilogue. Tolstoy says that historians should turn their attention to the “causes that give order/shape” to historical

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events. But I have just shown in Part 1 that Tolstoy also said that historians need to divert their attention away from the search for causes if they seek knowledge of historical events. We are obviously in the presence of a contradiction; the question is whether that contradiction is real or only apparent. I think that no simple answer is ready to hand. Rather, I suspect that Tolstoy’s language is somewhat lax here and reveals his occasional tendency to look on laws as having a quasicausal function in describing historical events. In other words, he illicitly confers on laws the status of a cause in the limited (and misleading) sense that one might well answer the question why an event occurred as it did by referring to its compliance with certain laws. I mean that one might say that a ball drops because of the law of gravity, thereby giving the law the status of a cause. But it should be clear that this explanation is imprecise; the law of gravity does not cause the ball to fall, it does not initiate the motion, it merely describes it. There is a fine line here which is easily blurred and reveals a tension in the notion of law that cannot be dismissed. To show that historians have failed to provide a new basis for understanding historical events, Tolstoy revives the incommensurability thesis to suggest that any of the new entities historians use to explain historical events cannot adequately explain why the event has come to pass: “To find component forces equal to the composite or resultant force, the sum of the components must equal the resultant” (2E/II). Or, as the narrator says in chapter III: “The only conception that can explain the movement of peoples is that of some force commensurate with the whole movement of the peoples.” The problem, then, becomes one concerning force. The question of what constitutes the force that causes historical events, the “locomotive” of history, to borrow an image Tolstoy himself uses, is absolutely central, “for the whole interest of history lies directly in that force” (2E/I). It is therefore not surprising that the next and second chapter of the Epilogue begins with the question: “What force moves peoples?” The narrator first tries to answer this question by discussing the different attitudes to it current among historians. He divides them into three general groups: biographical (including historians of specific peoples), general and cultural. In these three he identifies a

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common attempt to explain why events occur in the way they do by searching for a force similar to that of the deity; each of these three kinds of historians seeks to find a single explanatory principle for events based either on the activity of one individual or group (biographical) or the interrelation of an individual and one or several groups (general and cultural). But in every case the narrator affirms that the explanatory principle fails to meet the threshold test of commensurability. As a result, historians resort to a murky concept of power to “fill in the gap,” one with which Tolstoy has in fact carried on a polemical debate throughout the novel. He asks: How is it that one man can be claimed to have power over others? So long as histories are written of separate individuals, whether Caesars, Alexanders, Luthers or Voltaires, and not a history of all, absolutely all, those who take part in an event, it is quite impossible to describe the movement of humanity without the conception of a force compelling men to direct their activity towards a certain end. And the only such conception known to historians is that of power. (2E/III)

The narrator devotes a long discussion to the subject of power. In the absence of the notion of a ruling deity, how is it that men can be endowed with an equivalent power? Of what does this power consist? Tolstoy rehearses a series of arguments all of which deal with this problem: he rejects both the notion that individuals can exert direct physical coercion over the masses and that they can exercise a kind of moral authority over them. He also rejects the supposedly jurisprudential argument that the people confer power upon their leaders to represent them. He finally comes to the conclusion that explanations of power are tautological; that is, they explain nothing, they end up stating that power is power. This leads Tolstoy to question whether power is anything more than a sort of phantasm, a wind-egg of the intellect. In response he concludes that power has a phenomenal reality quite apart from the conceptual parlor games of historians: If the realm of human knowledge were confined to abstract reasoning, then having subjected to criticism the explanation of power that science gives us, humanity would conclude that power is merely a word and has no real existence. But man has, besides abstract reasoning, experience in regard to knowledge of phe-

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nomena by which he verifies his reflections. And experience tells us that power is not merely a word but an actually existing phenomenon. Not to speak of the fact that no description of the collective activity of men can do without the concept of power, the existence of power is proved both by history and by observing contemporary events. (2E/V)

Tolstoy claims, using a baldly verificationist argument, that power is a really existing phenomenon the explanation of which is insufficient, and this is the continuing refrain of his subsequent analyses. Of particular interest in this regard is his quasi-Humean critique of a certain kind of causation, the giving of commands, which deepens the preceding criticisms set out at length in both the fictional text and the historical essays. I call this critique “Humean” because it essentially destroys the notion of a necessary connection between cause and effect, i.e., a really existing or “metaphysical” necessity, just as Hume had in his famous treatment of causation.1 According to Tolstoy there is and can be no necessary connection between the giving and execution of a particular command. Indeed, there can be no relation other than an apparently coincidental one; strictly speaking, from this point of view commands cannot be causes in the traditional sense: Our false conception that an event is caused by a command which precedes it is due to the fact that when the event has taken place, and out of thousands of others those few commands which were consistent with the event [i.e. as it turned out] have been executed, we forget about the others that were not executed because they could not be. (2E/VI)

This thinking is completely consistent with the account of Prince Bagration’s manner of command at Schön Grabern. It asserts that the power of a commander is illusory, that we cannot understand this kind of power as the exercise of direct coercion on the troops. Tolstoy introduces another thesis in this connection which is familiar from the novel. He claims that the leaders, those who are supposed to exercise power, are in fact dependent on the troops ostensibly under their command. The leaders have the least connection with the actual conduct of the battle; they stand away from it and issue commands, whereas the troops are in the thick of things and they engage in the physical act of killing that is the essence of war.

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Tolstoy employs the figure of a cone to explain this structure. At the top of the cone is the leader, the individual supposedly in command. At the bottom of the cone are the troops who actually engage in the basic activities. Between these two extremes, there are a series of different levels. Tolstoy asserts that all these levels are connected and that the crucial explanatory merit of this figuration is that it explains not causes but the connections between those who ostensibly are vested with power or command and those who are not. But Tolstoy is careful to point out that these connections are dynamic in so far as power is a fatally divided phenomenon. He suggests that the commanders exercise moral whereas the troops exercise physical power. One kind of power moves “downwards,” so to speak, while the other moves “upwards.” There is thus a constant dynamism between the two extremes of the cone and, hence, when one seeks to account for why a certain action is taken, both explanations recommend themselves; one is the reason for the other, and neither can stand alone. The hope to explain power as a cause of what occurs is in this sense circular, and Tolstoy admits as much: Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event; physically it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity is inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event is neither in the one nor the other, but in the union of the two. Or, in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable to the phenomena we are examining. In the last analysis we reach the circle of infinity—that final limit to which in every domain of thought man’s reason arrives if it is not playing with its object. Electricity produces heat, heat produces electricity. Atoms attract each other and atoms repel one another. (2E/VII)

This circle is not necessarily a vicious one; it merely indicates that the search for a causal explanation of historical events is not the best way to grasp them or fails to grasp their essence, one which lies in dynamic interconnection. And this is of course a wholly expected result. We have already seen that a very distinctive element of Tolstoy’s attitude to the problems of historical inquiry is to eliminate the tradi-

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tional notion of cause. We are no longer to ask “Why?” or “What for?” If the narrator initially claimed that the question of force was the crucial question of history, it is now obvious that looking for answers based on a causal analysis is fruitless. This is so because it is impossible to identify an ultimate cause for an event. The deity is of course such a cause. But, having rejected the deity, historians should not expect to find a final cause as if the deity still played a role in historical analysis. What is this role? As I have noted before, the deity is the ground, the guarantor of the meaningfulness and truthfulness of explanation. In the narrator’s words, “[w]ithout admitting divine intervention in the affairs of humanity we cannot regard ‘power’ as the cause of events” (2E/5). With this discussion, the first seven chapters of the Second Part of the Epilogue end inconclusively; they thus reveal a grave metaphysical problem but do not explicitly provide an answer. On the one hand, it is clear that to provide a historical narrative which explains why an event took place in the way it did is impossible without a grounding in a divine power, one not subject to time and space. On the other hand, it is equally clear that this divine power is no longer accepted and that no successful substitute has emerged to take its place. Heidegger expresses the problem succinctly: “If God, the Christian God, has lost his place in the transcendent world, then this place itself still remains, although as one that has become empty.” Moreover, the “empty place even demands to be occupied anew and to have God replaced by something else now that He has disappeared” (1950: 225).2 This problematic is quintessentially modern in that it reveals the difficulties inherent in any attempt at explanation which avoids the issue of a ground or basis that transcends the terms of the explanation. If no basis or final point for such terms exists, one cannot help but come to that very “circle of infinity” that the narrator describes; ultimately, all explanations become tautologies; they assert that a thing is because it is. This is another way of saying that the human mind is finite, that it must posit either a ground of explanation for an event that exceeds its

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limited, empirical grasp or cease exploring why. “Why?” is the metaphysical question par excellence; it is the question which forces us behind the appearances since its essence is not to accept but to look to the roots under the tree. Tolstoy in this first argument of the Second Part of the Epilogue seems to be arguing in another way the major point made in the historical essays, that the search for causes is fruitless, that a rational approach to history cannot seek to know why events occur because to do so it will have to step beyond its own limits. Again, it is not hard to see that these views could be considered skeptical. Yet, as before, they can only be considered skeptical in the light of the very standards they seek to overcome. In other words, one would have to define skepticism as relating only to knowledge of causes; any account that is unable to explain why an event occurred would then be an invitation to skepticism. But Tolstoy’s attitude is hardly skeptical. He suggests that we should forget trying to know why, to move beyond the appearances, that we should in fact accept and trust them for what they are. History should attempt to know events as they are instead of organizing them on the basis of principles which move beyond them. We can know the world of appearances, but we cannot know what lies beyond them, that is the prerogative of God. There are several important implications in this view which the subsequent arguments of the Second Part of the Epilogue bring out with greater clarity. In this sense, the first seven chapters act as a prolegomenon to Tolstoy’s attempt to provide an account of the dynamic structure that explains the problem of grounding and the need for reliance not on identification of causes but on general laws that describe phenomena without reference to their origins or ultimate ends. Tolstoy introduces this structure by questioning the nature of freedom, while moving forward to the heart of his discussion in a typically layered manner; he first establishes that freedom and system are in contradiction and then locates the origin of this contradiction in the peculiarities of the relation between subject and object; finally, he generalizes this relation as one between two different kinds of knowing, consciousness and reason, thereby disclosing the central structure of the novel.

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I intend to examine each of these layers in detail in the course of the discussions that follow. By doing so I hope to reveal that Tolstoy’s thinking is rooted in an essentially Christian-Platonic metaphysics couched in the philosophical language Tolstoy seems to have adopted largely from Schopenhauer. For Tolstoy, man is an inescapably divided creature, at once free and unfree, with one foot in the infinite and the other firmly in the finite. Tolstoy addresses this circumstance through his own original conception of the productive relation between consciousness and reason in which freedom and consciousness, the openness of the present, are associated with man’s inner life, while reason is associated with closure and necessity, man’s external or “hive” life (roievaia zhizn’).3 But the core of Tolstoy’s position is not in either of the polarities of infinite and finite; it lies in the dynamic relation between the two, in the very fact that man combines these apparently divided spheres in a sort of “inbetween,” a liminal being that is neither god nor animal, but rather a sort of erotic daimonion,4 a continuous dynamism that creates and destroys, that emerges and disappears just like the drops in the globe Pierre dreams: man is all struggle, and this struggle is history.5 I should also point out that my analysis moves in two directions at the same time. It both refers back, and adds a new dimension, to my preceding discussions of the novel, where I have shown that a dynamic struggle to know the infinite is a fundamental structural aspect of the text itself, and anticipates the final section of this Part in which I try to show how a similar struggle plays out in the lives of two major characters in the novel, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov.

2. FREEDOM Freedom brings to light the most intractable problems of historical inquiry, but its presence remains unspoken. Near the beginning of chapter VIII of the Second Part of the Epilogue, Tolstoy’s narrator says:

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To clarify the parameters of the question, I shall examine the way in which freedom leads to the “contradictions and obscurities of history,” the ineradicable incommensurability that undermines the writing of history.

2.1. Freedom as lack of connection Tolstoy stresses that freedom of the will leads to “contradictions and obscurities” because it is a negative concept, defined as “freedom from” or a lack of connection. If history is characterized by lack of connection, then history is “accidental,” a collection of chance, isolated happenings which defy unification, having no intrinsic identity; it is an unsoundable chaos stripped of meaning. Freedom denies to history the very orderliness by virtue of which historians could integrate diverse “happenings” into meaningful narratives. Tolstoy comments: If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected accidents. If even one man in a million once in a thousand years had the power to act freely, that is, as he chose, it is evident that this man’s single free act in violation of the laws governing human action would destroy the possibility of the existence of any laws for the whole of humanity. But if there is so much as a single law governing the actions of men, free will cannot exist, for man’s will would be subject to that law. In this contradiction lies the problem of freedom of the will… (2E/VII)

Tolstoy’s conception of history expresses a form of “superessentialism,” the proposition that absolutely all properties that can be spoken of a given entity are necessary to its identity and, hence, entails

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that history can be knowable only as the seamless connection of all the “accidents” (which, of course, can no longer be referred to as such if they come together as of necessity). Every action finds itself implicated in a complex web of relations reflecting the narrator’s contention that there “…undoubtedly exists a connection among all contemporaneously living beings…” (2E/II). For Tolstoy, knowledge of history is impossible without this level of connection, and laws are the only means by which the latter may be expressed in historical narrative. He does not accept the probable; laws must be absolute. For Tolstoy no action can ever be free in the sense of being free from, or outside the purview of such laws. Freedom of the will acts in opposition to this absolute coherence. Tolstoy maintains that freedom challenges system, in this case a system of laws, and, ultimately, unity as well, for system is a unifying structure subsuming a multiplicity under one principle or hierarchy of principles. Freedom impedes this kind of cognition and, as such, freedom is a problem.

2.2. Origin of freedom The narrator then proceeds to explain that this problem arises because of the peculiar fact that human beings can observe themselves observing and that, in doing so, human beings have an impression that they are beyond determination as an object, that they are free. The origin of the ability to observe oneself remains mysterious, for this origin cannot go beyond itself to that which is greater and, hence, more original, because it is itself that which is forever greater and more original, perpetually retreating from determination. The narrator distinctively articulates this interpretation of the origin of freedom only a few paragraphs into chapter VIII: The question is that, looking at a person as an object of observation from whatever point of view—theological, historical, ethical or philosophical—we find a general law of necessity to which he, like all that exists, is subject. But looking at him from within ourselves, as at that of which we are conscious, we feel ourselves to be free. (2E/VIII)

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When we observe one of ourselves as an object, we must assume that this object conforms to the rules which have been fashioned to give definition to that object as object, what Tolstoy means by the “law of necessity.” Yet, this cannot hold when we observe one of ourselves as a subject. In this case, we consider the other as a subject like ourselves and can think of the other as being free only through this kind of “translation.” This is why the narrator uses the verb soznavat’, “to recognize” or “to be aware of,” instead of nabliudat’, “to observe,” to describe the kind of recognition of the other as a subject which allows one to observe the other as a subject. That is, the other is not observed as another subject, since the narrator seems to limit the notion of observation to “external phenomena” (vneshnie iavleniia) or objects. The tortured locution “iz sebia kak na to chto my soznaem” emphasizes that the recognition of the other as a subject must be an identification from within. How is this possible? To answer this question we need to examine in greater detail the conception of subject and object on which Tolstoy relies. By definition, an object is other, that which is thrown opposite.6 Hence, it cannot stand alone. The crucial question here concerns that to which an object is thrown opposite. This is certainly not another object, but obviously a subject. Here is the grounding interpretation of the relation of human beings to the world which the modern age has fashioned. It is the crucial distinction between us and “them” or all things which achieve their “thinghood” by being thrown opposite us, by being in this sense, not us. Now, if the subject is to know or define the object, the subject must be able to “encompass” the object; it must be greater than the object or not totally exhausted by it. To use a simple analogy of perspective as a heuristic tool, I suggest that the subject can encompass the object only if the latter is “lesser than” or within the “view” of the subject.7 If the object were not “lesser than” the subject, the subject would be unable to “take it in,” it would be unable fully to define the object. It follows that anything “greater than” the subject cannot be fully defined. For it is one thing to define an object as what it is, and quite another to de-

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fine what it is as what it is not. The first kind of definition applies only to objects which are in some sense “lesser than,” while the second applies to that class of “objects” that are only objects in so far as they are not objects, being always “greater than,” like the infinite. In the language of our metaphors of perspective, objecthood is achieved when the object is “lesser than” and can be completely seen or defined (“fenced in”). Therefore, when we observe a person as from within ourselves, we encounter a contradiction. This contradiction consists in the fact that observing a person as from within ourselves requires that we consider him at once both as lesser and greater than the observing subject, both as definable and undefinable. On the one hand, as an object, the person is always lesser than the observer. On the other hand, as a subject like the observer, we must consider him greater than any one self in so far as he must exceed any specific objectification as a self to be like us capable of recognizing a self. This is but another way of saying that, as a subject, the other “conceals” the inner dimension from observation. And this applies just as surely to reflection on one’s own self, where there is a separation between object self and subject self which remains fundamentally undefinable. In both cases it is precisely this inner dimension that is always hidden or “greater than” since it cannot be reduced to any one objectification. Tolstoy draws an essential distinction between two aspects of grasping or perceiving a person, from without as an object and from within as a subject. In the first case, a person observed strictly as an object of a specific science is governed by the “law of necessity,” while in the second case, that same person cannot be looked at otherwise than as free. The inner dimension of the subject therefore transcends objectification and is in this sense free. As such, it is the origin or ground of freedom called consciousness (soznanie).

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2.3. Consciousness Consciousness is an awareness of mysterious immediacy. In the following analysis, I try to shed light on this mysterious immediacy by examining Tolstoy’s initial attempt to provide a sort of “definition” of it (again in chapter VIII of the Second Part of the Epilogue). The narrator says that “…consciousness is a source of self-cognition completely separate from and independent of reason. Through reason a person observes himself; but he only knows himself through consciousness.” The definition accords with the claim that consciousness is a means of describing an internal dimension of the subject. This can be gathered from the distinction between “to observe” and “to know.” “To observe” (nabliudat’) suggests an externalization or objectification of the subject in so far as the subject must give itself as an object to allow any observation. “To know” (znat’), on the contrary, suggests another kind of knowing which cannot be easily described as a knowing of any object. In a revealing draft for this chapter, Tolstoy writes that “[b]eing conscious of myself, I am free, representing myself (to myself), I am subject to laws” (PSS 16: 255). Here Tolstoy returns to the verb soznavat’ to describe the internal, subjective aspect and to the verb predstavliat’ to describe the external or “objective” dimension of knowing. This antithesis harkens to the distinction between an inner or intelligible self which is free and an empirical self subject to laws that has its roots in Kantian philosophy. Tolstoy seems to have encountered the distinction in these terms through his reading of Schopenhauer. It is well-known that Tolstoy started reading Schopenhauer in 1869 as he was working on the Second Part of the Epilogue to War and Peace. In a letter to Fet, dated May 10, 1869, Tolstoy writes: What is the main reason why I am not afraid? Because that which I wrote, especially in the epilogue, is not invented by me, but wrested with effort from within. Another comfort is that Schopenhauer, approaching from another point of view, in his Wille says exactly the same thing as I do. (PSS 61: 217)

Boris Eikhenbaum points out that the drafts for the Second Part of the Epilogue provide ample evidence of the extensive influence of Schopenhauer and, in particular, of his famous prize essay, On Free-

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dom of the Will. Reference to Schopenhauer in fact establishes a context in Kantian philosophy that clarifies the antithesis between “being conscious of” and “representing” as a tendentious variant of Kant’s teaching about the divided nature of selfhood, that there is both an intelligible and phenomenal self.8 This distinction follows Kant’s essential division of the sources which together constitute human knowledge, sensory intuition (Anschauung) and concepts (Begriffe), the latter constituted first and foremost by the table of categories or pure concepts. For Kant, knowledge can only result from a combination (Synthesis) of such intuitions and concepts derived in judgments of the understanding (Verstand). This kind of knowledge (Erkenntnis), the only kind which Kant recognizes as such, is dependent on, and, hence, limited by sensory information received by a subject (die Rezeptivität des Gemüts); it is phenomenal in so far as it is based on how things appear to us. Kant maintains that knowledge of a thing as it is “in itself” (Ding an sich) and not as it appears is noumenal and remains impossible for us. Schopenhauer extends and rethinks this distinction in a very significant way by expressing it as one between the will and representation (Vorstellung). The inner or noumenal nature of an object is will and as such is not knowable. But its external or phenomenal nature is knowable in the form of a representation in which a certain objectification of the will (Objektivation des Willens) emerges in conformity with the conditions for understanding of the subject; namely, time, space and causality. By ascending to ever more complex and refined objectifications of the will through the activity of representing the world and itself to itself, the will comes to “know” itself. In the essay on free will, Schopenhauer uses a different terminological configuration, distinguishing between self-consciousness (Selbstbewußtsein) and the consciousness of other things (Bewußtsein anderer Dinge), the former applying to the inner nature, the latter applying to the world outside (1999: 49). Schopenhauer indicates that self-consciousness is immediate (unmittelbar) whereas the consciousness of other things is the mediate knowledge of the outside world provided by representations (Vorstellungen). Self-consciousness is

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nothing more than the consciousness of the will of its own self, and, since the will as it is in itself cannot be a representation, selfconsciousness can only be unmediated. Schopenhauer’s adaptation of Kant and his particular terminology illuminates Tolstoy’s use of the noun soznanie and the equivalent verb soznavat’ as well as the verb predstavliat’. Each of these terms corresponds to a German equivalent used by Schopenhauer in distinguishing between the internal and external. Soznanie corresponds to the German word for self-consciousness, Selbstbewußtsein (or bewußt sein which Schopenhauer also uses to translate the Latin equivalent to soznanie, conscientia, in the prize essay). Predstavlenie is equivalent to the German word for representation, Vorstellung. This equivalence allows one to surmise that Tolstoy’s narrator indeed does create a distinction between two kinds of knowledge of the self that incorporates or reflects Schopenhauer’s own interpretation. Tolstoy seems to be closer to Schopenhauer because selfconsciousness in the sense of an immediate apperception of “oneself,” although originally a Kantian term (1965: 136, 142, 153).9 is appropriated in a distinctive way by Schopenhauer. In the essay on free will, Schopenhauer writes: “…for self-consciousness is immediate. How ever that should be is our next question: What does selfconsciousness contain? Or: how does a person become aware of his own self? Answer: completely as a willing being” (1999: 50-51).10 The narrator uses remarkably similar language in the Second Part of the Epilogue: “As a living being a person knows himself in no other way than as willing, that is, he is conscious of his own will.” In an important draft version of Chapter VIII, Tolstoy is rather more candid and refers directly to Schopenhauer in support of his own position (in the following translation I have retained the very uneven style of the original): Schopenhauer, in my opinion, is the greatest thinker of the present century and the only direct heir of the great thinkers of modern philosophy, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, having proved just as successfully as they, using the new tool of our century—the natural sciences (Der Wille in der Natur) in his essay on free will crowned by the Academy, the law of necessity, to which man is subject,

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in deciding the question (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and Grundprobleme der Ethik). By a complicated path of reasoning he comes to recognition of the source of unmediated knowledge—the very same Ding an sich, which x for Kant remained or was understood as pure reason, and the source of this knowledge he sees [that] in the unmediated consciousness of the will—Der Wille zum Leben which in essence is the very same as Kant’s reason and Ding an sich: it is nothing else than unmediated consciousness, the very unmediated consciousness which these two great thinkers, through enormous and majestic labor, arrived at by way of thought but which in all its force and clarity lies in the soul of everyone, even the most crude person, the very same consciousness against which Schopenhauer in his Preis[s]chrift über die Freiheit des Willen[s] not infrequently takes up arms and to which he constantly returns. (PSS 16: 246)11

The significance of Tolstoy’s closeness to Schopenhauer lies in the fact that consciousness as self-consciousness is not a transcendental or a priori unity as it might be in Kant (1965: 153)12 or thought in the process of thinking itself as it might be in Hegel (1977: 46-57). Rather, consciousness is not at all a realm of reason or thought. It is instead a mysterious “sense” of immediacy whose exact character can only be rather difficult if not impossible to describe. This difficulty, of course, is not surprising since consciousness seems to relate to a “something,” the will, which cannot be known as an object; to do so would indicate that it is “available” to mediation by reason as any other object. But as the narrator indicates, consciousness is a source of self-knowing not accessible to reason as it is in itself, in its immediacy. Consciousness “of the” will is then a highly problematic expression which can only be inaccurate. Consciousness is not “consciousness of” anything; in this sense, it is consciousness of nothing and is itself somehow a “nothing,” an awareness that we cannot explain. This is its link with freedom of the will which is also a “nothing” to the extent it takes no specific phenomenal form, i.e., as it is in itself. Hence, consciousness “of” can only be a misleading phrase whose essential negation works against its own assertion. Consciousness is both “of” freedom and itself free.

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2.4. The mystery of consciousness Consciousness “of” freedom is therefore a “locus” of unusual equivalencies which ever retreats from determination. When the narrator uses the verb “znat’” to distinguish knowledge of the self as alive from knowledge of the self as an observed or object-self, he is asserting the possibility of a kind of knowledge to which reason has no access. What is more, the narrator asserts that this kind of knowledge is more fundamental than rational knowledge, which would be impossible without it. The narrator says that “[w]ithout consciousness of oneself no observation and no application of reason is conceivable.” This assertion forms part of a crucial paragraph in Chapter VIII. Although I have already examined portions of this paragraph, it is worth citing in its entirety: To understand, observe, and draw conclusions, a person must first be conscious of himself as a living being. As a living being a person knows himself in no other way than as willing, that is, he is conscious of his own will. His will, which constitutes the essence of his life, a person is conscious of, and cannot be conscious of, other than as free.

Since one cannot be conscious of oneself other than as free, it follows that freedom is unavoidable. Surely this is a peculiar conclusion. Yet, it is only a further affirmation of the difference between observing an object from without as object and from within as subject. The latter, of course, is not observation in the sense of a representation of the self as an object at all, but as the problematic consciousness of oneself. The narrator proceeds to claim that, no matter how convincing the proof is that the will directs itself according to one and the same law, a person cannot otherwise (ne mozhet inache) understand this same direction of his will than as a limitation (ogranichenie). Since only what is free may be limited, the narrator concludes that a person imagines his will to be limited only because he is conscious of it as free. The remaining examples culminate in a rhetorically charged paragraph:

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But having learned with certainty that his will is subject to laws, he does not and cannot believe it. However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under the same conditions and with the same character he will do the same thing as before, yet when, under the same conditions and with the same character, he approaches for the thousandth time an action that always ends in the same way, he feels as certainly convinced as before the experiment that he can act as he pleases. Every man, savage or sage, however incontestably reason and experiment may prove to him that it is impossible to imagine two different courses of action in precisely the same conditions, feels that without this irrational conception (which constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannot imagine life. He feels that, however impossible it may be, it is so, for without the conception of freedom not only would he be unable to understand life, but he would be unable to live for a single moment. … A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.

In all of the examples, evidence that the will is not free proves to carry no weight whatsoever. The dual character of any particular action stands out. If one looks at an action as a nexus of causes or as subject to laws, i.e., as rational, it seems determinate and necessary. If one looks at the same action as produced from within oneself, then one cannot help but look at this action as the product of free will, since one cannot consider oneself other than as free. This duality seems to reside ultimately in the inability of the subject completely to determine itself, for this kind of determination can only mean one thing: death. And how can a subject possibly know of its own death?

3. THE RELATION OF REASON AND CONSCIOUSNESS In dealing with history, Tolstoy claims that no resolution of this relation of contradictories, between freedom and reason, is required, since history “concerns not the very essence of the will of man, but representation of the appearance of this will in the past and under known conditions.” The narrator restates this view a few lines further in the text: “[h]istory has as its object not the will of man itself, but our representation of it.” His repeated use of the word “representation” (predstavlenie) is clear confirmation of the Kantian nature of the relation, since it is not the will in itself or as free which can be the

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object of history, but rather only a representation of it governed by the laws of reason. This still leaves matters open as to what a representation can be in the present context. Tolstoy explains what he understands by this notion of representation in Chapter X of the Second Part of the Epilogue. In doing so, he begins to sketch the outlines of a relation between freedom and reason which is much less dependent on Kantian thought as interpreted by Schopenhauer. To begin this discussion, the narrator makes an important point: And so the insoluble mystery concerning the unity of the two contradictories, free will and necessity does not exist for history, as it does for theology, ethics, and philosophy. History examines a representation of man’s life in which the unity of these two contradictories has already been achieved.

The narrator justifies a refusal to answer the question about the origin of the relation of freedom and necessity. This justification leaves a most important question unanswered, the very question which the preceding interpretation of freedom seems to raise; namely, why is there any relation between freedom and reason at all? This question will remain unanswered, although an answer has been lurking within the novel all along; we cannot know why there is such a relation because that knowledge is vouchsafed to God—the relation is the mark of finitude, the lack that compels us to reason as a way to compensate for the deficiencies in our intuitive knowledge of the world. For the moment, however, it will suffice to examine how the narrator describes the unity of freedom and reason in history. The narrator begins this description by asserting that every action is a “product” (proizvedenie) of freedom and reason. This is so because knowledge is inescapably mediate. One learns about an event only by learning about the conditions in which it took place, not as a thing in itself or through immediate intuition of some kind but through certain mediations.

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3.1. The three grounds of representation The narrator calls these mediations “foundations” or “grounds” (osnovaniia) which underlie and make possible any representation about freedom and reason. They are three: (i) the relation of someone who has completed an action to the external world; (ii) the relation to time; and (iii) the relation to the causes which produced the event (2E/X). Each of the grounds is a structure allowing for a variation in which greater definition of the basic category tends to necessity, i.e., the laws of reason, while the opposite tends to freedom. These grounds recall the three basic determinations Schopenhauer adapts from Kant: space, time and causality. As a result, it is once again tempting to gloss over the narrator’s detailed discussion of them by suggesting that Tolstoy has merely borrowed these determinations from Schopenhauer. Aside from the fact that this reveals nothing about Tolstoy’s argument other than to shrug it off as a borrowing from a famous thinker, it also is a questionable judgment; Tolstoy’s arguments in fact diverge from Schopenhauer’s whose touchstone is always Kant. And, in this context, Boris Eikhenbaum’s judgment on Tolstoy’s reading of Schopenhauer, that the former “assimilated” (“assimiliroval sebe”) the latter to his own purposes, is both prudent and accurate.13 Each of the three grounds establishes a network of connections. Their guiding function is twofold: to join together diverse elements into a whole and to provide a means of constructing unities. Without them no notion of calculus would be possible—they constitute the basic building blocks of physical knowledge; that Tolstoy takes this approach to historical narrative, that his sense of a more accurate and comprehensive form of mediation flows from careful attention to the basic relations which determine physical behavior, confirms his essentially modern attitude, the leaning towards a mathematically modeled solution to the problems of historical narrative that I have examined at length in Part 1. Moreover, it is of the utmost importance to grasp the notion of a dynamic relation that Tolstoy brings to the fore with his analysis of these three grounding structures. This relation is a variant of the dynamic movement that culminates in the relation of

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consciousness to reason; it is in fact Tolstoy’s way of introducing the limitations that reason cannot overcome thereby ensuring that the latter relation will be forever dynamic and open. Hence, I shall look at each of these structures in some detail.

3.1.1. Space Space is defined as relative. It denotes the relation of a person to the “outside world.” The narrator states that this first grounding is the “…more or less visible relation of a person with the outside world, the more or less clear understanding of the determined position which each person occupies in relation to all which simultaneously co-exists with him” (2E/IX). This does not resemble a Kantian definition of space, for Kant holds that an a priori “pure intuition” of space must precede any relative determination of it; it is a condition of the possibility of appearances [“Bedingung der Möglichkeit der Erscheinung”] (1965:68).14 But, for Tolstoy, space in this sense is either already assumed or not in question, since the primary focus of his approach to space is that it connects. Space is a determinant which measures the degree of freedom a person may enjoy in proportion to the degree of connection of that person to the outside world.

3.1.2. Time Time as a grounding is the “…more or less visible temporal relation of a person to the world; the more or less clear understanding of that position which the action of a person occupies in time” (2E/IX). This also does not resemble a Kantian definition of time. As in the case of space, Kant maintains that an a priori “pure intuition” of time must precede any relative determination. For Kant time is an even more fundamental a priori condition of the possibility of experience than space, since time is a condition of “inner experience” and, hence, any experience at all [“aller Erscheinungen überhaupt”] (1965: 77).15 This distinction, which Schopenhauer upholds, is not clear at all in the narrator’s discussion of time and likely plays no role in it.

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The emphasis is once again on connection. Tolstoy advances a fairly unorthodox argument in this regard: “The degree of representation of greater or lesser freedom or necessity in this relation depends on the greater or lesser period of time from the time the action was completed to the time of judgment about it” (2E/IX). Tolstoy means by this argument that the more separated in time the judgment from the action, the less free the action appears. In support of this argument, the narrator produces some examples: If I examine an act, performed a moment ago in circumstances approximately the same as those in which I find myself now, my action appears to me undoubtedly free. But If I consider an act performed a month ago, then, finding myself in different circumstances, I cannot help recognizing that if that act had not been performed, much that resulted from it that was useful, pleasant and even necessary would not have taken place. If I recall to memory an action more remote, ten years ago or more, then the consequences of my action appear still more obvious to me, and I find it hard to imagine what would have happened had that action not been performed. The farther I go back in memory, or, what is the same thing, the farther I go forward in my judgment, the more doubtful becomes my belief in the freedom of my action. Exactly the same progression of conviction concerning the part played by free will in the general affairs of mankind we find in history as well. A contemporary event appears to us to be undoubtedly the product of all the known participants; but in the case of a more remote event we see only its unavoidable consequences, which prevent our considering anything else possible. And the farther we go back in examining events the less arbitrary do they seem to us. (2E/IX)

The argument contained in this passage is not particularly clear at first glance. It seems to claim that the necessity of an action becomes evident only when one looks back from a distance sufficient enough to render other possibilities doubtful. The problem is that it remains quite unclear why distance in time should render doubtful possibilities which must have been available closer to the time of the action. Why should distance in time have any effect on such possibilities either to affirm or eliminate them? One should not deny, however, that there is psychological plausibility in this notion; as we have seen in the novel, characters frequently read the outcomes of events as “fated,” as having come to pass as part of a grand design. Hence, Tolstoy starts from a psycho-

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logical insight but then tries to convert it into an ontological one, skipping from a subjective point of view to one that makes claims about the nature of reality. This latter transition is the problem. For in this case there is a tension between the two views. Perhaps the most appropriate response to this problem is one that does cross over into metaphysics, maintaining that such possibilities as seemed to be available were illusory, that they were upon reflection the product of deceitful appearance rather than reality. This is a means of asserting the ineluctable primacy of subjective perspective in judgment about actions at the time of their occurrence. One’s initial relation to an action determines one’s view of the possibilities inherent in it at that time. This relation is, however, limited by the fact that it is only relative and has not sufficient time to take into account other perspectives. For an action’s “true nature” first unfolds in time as one examines more perspectives when they become available after the fact. What may have seemed fortuitous or accidental at a particular time seems necessary or unavoidable at a later time with the benefit of a broader (more total) view of the action. This is a summary of what I have shown to be the case in the fictional text where the emphasis on perspective is unmistakable; Pierre is astonished at the variety of opinions about his speech to the Masonic brethren and the battle scenes constantly stress perspective both by showing the limitedness of one point of view whether it be that of Pierre, Prince Andrei, Nikolai or Petya, and by bringing those views together to present a fuller and more accurate picture of that battle.

3.1.3. Causality The last grounding structure, causality, is the “greater or lesser accessibility for us of that infinite nexus of causes.” This nexus of causes “constitutes the inevitable demand of reason and in which each comprehensible phenomenon, and thus every act of man must have its own defined place as the consequence of the foregoing or as the cause of what follows” (2E/IX).

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Nowhere is the emphasis on connection more evident than in regard to causation. Here the narrator’s statement that “each comprehensible phenomenon…must have its own defined place” either as an effect or a cause is very close to the principle of reason. The principle of reason was first formulated by Leibniz and is the basic modern principle which holds out the possibility of connecting all things together in a greater and encompassing rational unity or system; according to it literally no thing can exist as such unless that thing can be traced to a cause or ratio which explains its origin. Hence, this principle provides for the connection of all things by means of their causal dependency on each other and is a basic way of giving form to diversity or identity to a multiplicity. The narrator specifies that an event “becomes” more necessary with an increase in the knowledge of its causes. Another way of making this point is that an increasing knowledge of the causes of an event convinces one of the density of the causal nexus, a density which can only reduce and thereby restrict the possibility of freedom. As we have seen in earlier discussions, the primary thrust of causation in this context is its cognitive utility or its utility as a means of giving form to a diverse range of phenomena by recognizing the complexity of their inter-connection. Once again, Tolstoy seems to conflate laws and causes or, at the very least, that there is a tie of some kind between the two, since both perform the crucial task of connection or integration. This tie can in fact be considerably closer, since causality, as an expression of a lawful regularity in causal relationships, is essential to connecting phenomena. Indeed, the basic assumption of the narrator that there is an order in the world seems to assume a causal order above all on which application of calculus relies. If there were no patterns, no “homogeneous tendencies” of mankind, then calculus would be of no consequence. These patterns are primarily causal—and what else could they be? If they are patterns of movement, their very regularity or repetition suggests causality. And this causality might have great diversity, for a number of different kinds of causality might govern the world and the “tendencies of men.”

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From this standpoint, one could turn the tables and argue that causality has an important role to play in grounding the possibility of applying basic concepts of calculus to history and that to learn about causes as a means of formulating laws is consistent with the narrator’s advocacy of calculus. This would be in accord with classical physics where causality is a structuring principle whose efficacy in the natural world is simply assumed.16

3.1.4. Determination and construction An important question remains: to what degree are these three grounding structures in fact determinative? In other words, is it possible for an action to be either entirely free or entirely necessary? The narrator makes an extended comment on this: So that if we examine the case of a man whose connection with the external world is very well known, where the period of time between the action and our judgment of it is very great, and the causes of the action are quite accessible to us, we arrive at a concept of a maximum of necessity and a minimum of free will. But if we examine the case of a man little dependent on external circumstances, whose action was performed very recently, and the causes of whose action are inaccessible to us, we arrive at a concept of a minimum of necessity and a maximum of free will. But in neither case—however we may shift our point of view, however clear we may make to ourselves the connection between the man and the external world or however inaccessible it may be to us, however long or short the period of time, however understandable or incomprehensible the causes of the action may be—can we ever conceive of either complete freedom or complete necessity.

The narrator proceeds to outline this notion of limitation within the terms of the finite and infinite. He affirms: 1) that we can neither conceive of a person outside of space nor of all the spatial conditions which determine a person’s actions, since “the number of these conditions is as infinitely great as the infinity of space”; 2) that we can neither conceive of a person outside of time, nor can we increase the distance of time from the occurrence of a given action to infinity, since “this period is finite, but time is infinite”; and 3) that we can

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neither conceive of an action without a cause nor of all the causes which constitute the chain of causation relevant to the action (2E/X). Hence, the grounding structures which permit rational knowledge ensure that it can only be finite. Finitude in this sense is a means of defining the limits of rational understanding of the whole, but it also defines the possibility of “life.” For, as the narrator is quick to note, a complete lack of freedom would eliminate the notion of man: But besides this, even if, admitting a least remainder of freedom equal to zero, we were to assume in some given case—as for instance in that of a dying man, an unborn child, or an idiot—complete absence of freedom, by so doing we should destroy the very concept of man in the case we are examining, for as soon as there is no freedom, there is no man. (2E/X)

3.1.5. The fundamental ground The three foregoing grounds of representation are mediating functions which serve both to permit and to limit knowledge; such limitation is in fact the basic condition of freedom’s possibility. In this paradox we see the bare outlines of the dynamic relation between consciousness and reason which Tolstoy fully describes at the end of Chapter X of the Second Part of the Epilogue. In this pivotal chapter, Tolstoy brings together diverse strands of argument about freedom and necessitating reason within a basic relation between consciousness and reason: Reason expresses the laws of necessity. Consciousness expresses the essence of freedom. Freedom not limited by anything is the essence of life in human consciousness. Necessity without content is reason in its three forms. Freedom is the thing examined. Necessity is what examines. Freedom is the content. Necessity is the form. Only by separating the two forms of cognition, related to one another as form to content, do we get the mutually exclusive and separately incomprehensible concepts of freedom and necessity.

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These are the crucial culminating determinations of the Second Part of the Epilogue and, indeed, the entire progression of comments on history by the narrator. They reveal a fundamental structure which grounds the preceding structures by bringing them together in a unity. This unity, of course, is the relation of consciousness to reason that the narrator describes in a striking way as a relation of content to form. This fundamental qualification of the relation of consciousness to reason is difficult to grasp. For, how is it that consciousness of freedom or consciousness of freedom of the will, what we have previously understood as a sort of immediacy, can serve as “content” to reason? If one interprets this relation within the framework of Kant, it is all too easy to assimilate it to that of sensory intuition and the concepts of the understanding. If one interprets this relation within the framework of Schopenhauer, it is equally easy to assimilate it to the relation of the will to reason. Neither of these interpretations provides an entirely accurate account of what the narrator means to say or not to say.

3.1.6. Nothingness and plenitude Consciousness is consciousness “of” freedom and as such pure immediacy; this means in turn that it can be literally nothing for reason except a border concept, something defined by what it is not. Freedom is therefore not only a border concept, but a root of negation, since freedom can only be defined as a not-x. This is what the narrator seeks to bring out in the relation of freedom to reason; that freedom is for reason a not, a “thing” only in so far as this “thing” is defined by its not being any “thing,” by its not lending itself to determination. The narrator further maintains that freedom is an ineluctable not, that no matter how one tries to determine something that determination

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can never be complete. As a result, the issue of what freedom is cannot arise other than as what freedom is not. Freedom as it is in itself, namely, freedom defined in a positive manner, must be impossible, since to define freedom is to eliminate it. Thus, freedom is always only understood as a relative not—as a defined not. Without definition, one cannot begin even to speak of freedom. This course of reasoning reveals the basic problem of consciousness of freedom. If consciousness, like freedom, only exists (“is”) in so far as it is a defined not, whence this defined not? For definition is a limitation of something greater. Hence, for example, if freedom is a defined not it must presuppose a “greater freedom,” as it were, which exceeds any definition and, therefore, must be absolute. But an absolute freedom cannot be known at all. It can only be a sort of nihil absolutum which is absolute negation or “pure nothingness.” If consciousness were also this “pure nothingness,” there would be no way to connect it to reason at all. But the fact that it can be conceived as “pure nothingness” already presupposes such a connection and, in doing so, must pose the most fundamental question of the possibility of this connection in the first place. While this question sheds light on the mystery of the connection of consciousness to reason, it does not clarify the characterization of this connection as one between content and form. How can reason recognize consciousness as content at all, if consciousness is a kind of nothingness? Here the structure of the narrator’s argument starts to collapse on its own. There must be a hidden assumption or some means by which the connection of consciousness to reason can be explained. If consciousness is a “pure nothingness” it can never submit to reason. Yet, how is it that one can speak of a “pure nothingness” as such? Consciousness cannot be “pure nothingness” but must be plenitude. It is “nothingness” only in the sense that it can be no particular thing, but it cannot be a “pure nothingness,” for it is not nothing at all. On the one hand, “nothingness” describes a plenitude which can only ever exceed definition; it is like the infinite in that it must always be greater than any particular representation of it. On the other hand, a

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“nothingness” which may be considered “pure” literally cannot be and, as such, can neither be thought nor be open to any kind of relation. Consciousness, then, is an infinite “plenitude”—it is the immediate intuition of life. Yet, we cannot be satisfied with the immediate intuition of life. We require reason to permit knowledge of life—we are finite. That we are finite begs the question of the possibility of the infinite. Whence the notion of the infinite? Whence the lack which we seek to eliminate? It is in this very structure, where reason co-exists with the immediate intuition of a plenitude to which reason can have access only by transforming the plenitude into something finite—a thing which is incomparably less than the plenitude to which it owes the very possibility of its existence. Hence, at one moment, we are aware of both that plenitude and our inability to grasp it. The term “grasp” is useful in this regard. It clarifies the essence of the difficulty which lies in the fact that the attempt to grasp the infinite by reason is an endless labor, for reason can grasp any thing only by making it finite—in attempting to grasp the infinite reason can only lose it and find itself again. This is the iron truth of finitude; the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite and only returns to itself in attempting to do so; the opposition between reason and consciousness, finite and infinite, cannot be overcome, it is in the broadest sense always already there.

4. THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY REVISITED Tolstoy’s placement of an elementary opposition at the heart of human knowing suggests that no final cause or ultimate harmony will ever be available to historians. While this view may seem disquieting, it also points to a way of grasping the force that makes history, that is history. In this respect, the real root of Tolstoy’s exploration of history in War and Peace comes to light as an overriding concern to understand why history emerges at all—what is the motive force of history or, indeed, why is there history? And, for Tolstoy, desire is this motive force; namely, the desire to overcome the contradiction that Tolstoy identifies in his relating of reason to consciousness, a relation that is perpetually dynamic, that is homologous to the relations between

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mediacy and immediacy, thought and being, word and perception. Hence, history in the broadest sense is a narrative of desire that results from this contradiction, from not being able to find a resolution to the contradiction, a stable or final ground for human action. History is the record of this struggle, and War and Peace is a grand attempt to narrate the varieties of struggle that yields neither to Greek conceptions of temporal circularity, nor to providential eschatology, nor to Hegelian and Marxist narratives of alienation, whereby struggle comes to an end in a necessary progression of steps towards the absolute, whether that be absolute knowing or disappearance of the state in a new economy of satisfaction. While Tolstoy’s conception of history surely adopts a great deal from Schopenhauer, it has equally significant affinities with many currents in both late Enlightenment and early Romantic thought.17 In the final account, however, Tolstoy’s conception of history seems closest to Rousseau in its tragic dimension (and, in particular, to the latter’s discussion of the beginnings of history in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality), while coming strikingly close to Schelling in stressing the inherently creative nature of the fundamental contradiction in the relation of freedom and necessity; that this contradiction can be resolved only through an ever-varying synthesis that is the essence of narrative representation. Here contradiction gives rise to action, an attempt to resolve contradiction, that is the origin of narrative.18 What ultimately seems most innovative about Tolstoy’s approach is not only that he conceives of the nature of this contradiction in an unusually open way, being quite unwilling to define his main terms, reason or consciousness, with any great precision, but also that he combines both tragic and creative or comic attitudes to the contradiction in the narrative possibilities that emerge from it. Indeed, Tolstoyan holism is marked by the acceptance of both these differing attitudes to contradiction, to what amounts to the impossibility of satisfying desire, as necessary counterparts: despair and excitement over the impossibility of fulfillment of desire move hand in hand. This is why Tolstoy appears to affirm the importance of discovering the laws of history while also adding that to do so would eliminate any possibility of life. The identification of life with desire and struggle is unmistakable, and one might be inclined to place Tolstoy in a more

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modern context of striving within a vacuum. But Tolstoy’s position remains perplexing and ambivalent; he at once tends to affirm the existence of an overarching order, suggesting that freedom is illusory, while asserting the precariousness of this illusion, its tendency to dissipate in the lived moment due to the difficulty of grasping that order.19 Tolstoy derives at least two general attitudes from these assumptions, one of frustration and one of elation at limitation, one tragic, one comic Tolstoy’s conception of the centrality of contradiction is remarkable in that narrative becomes the expression of a resolution to the contradiction, a point of view reflected in the immense network of narrative possibilities offered in War and Peace. Narrative triumphs over exclusively rational discourse because narrative combines the warring elements of contradiction in a new, synthetic whole, even if that whole’s integrity must in fact be precarious. Here, in Tolstoy, one finds an extremely audacious assertion of the sovereign power of the artist as cosmotheurgos or world-creator, since every narrative, as an opening up of time and space, is in the broadest sense the creation of a world.20 This assertion of world-creation is inherently erotic, a response to elemental discontinuity, the divided nature of human being represented by the central contradiction of reason and consciousness, and it raises radical questions about the authority of reason, whether reason is sovereign or not, whether the artist writes in accordance with a defined notion of rationality or, in effect, defines rationality through the medium of narrative. To examine these arguments in a new way I would like to return to the fictional text. There, a cyclical, repetitive struggle between the finite and infinite is vividly reflected in the polarities of mastery and reticence that determine the novel’s primary forms of characterization, reflecting the sinuous interplay of comic and tragic conceptions of desire.

CHAPTER FIVE: MASTERY AND RETICENCE

Tragic and comic attitudes are sounded in a variety of narrative trajectories in the text and, in a striking way, in those trajectories that connect and distinguish the lives of the novel’s two main heroes, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov. Both of these characters display a desire to know, to master their destinies; they attempt to give definitive form to immediacy, that being the essence of action, of the will to act. But their responses to the inevitability of failure are very different. Prince Andrei cannot accept failure, he cannot reconcile his striving with failure, and at Borodino he ultimately turns his back on the dynamic of attempt and failure that characterizes the desire to resolve contradiction. Pierre Bezukhov seems to find peace as Prince Andrei cannot, but revolts against that peace; at the very end of the novel, Pierre tacitly rejects the passivity he learned from Platon Karataev to take an active role in what will become the Decembrist uprising. In either case, however, the narrative is nothing else than the record of struggle, of a continuous expansion towards the infinite and contraction towards the finite; an essential rhythm that cannot be overcome—every end is at once an end and a beginning, itself and its other.1 These polarities of mastery and reticence embody two broadly opposed attitudes towards finitude. One represents a refusal to accept limits while the other submits to them; one denies while the other embraces human frailty and impotence; for one, war is the governing trope, for the other, peace. In this chapter I shall explore the key varieties of this kind of experience in the novel by looking at the principal representatives of the opposing tendencies, embodied on the most general level by Napoleon and Platon Karataev, and, more graphically and particularly, by the complex patterns of striving and submission which mark the peripatetic lives and differing fates of Prince Andrei and Pierre. In this latter regard, I suggest that struggle is a consequence of their dawning selfawareness, the so-called burden of consciousness that virtually con-

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demns Prince Andrei and Pierre to strive without end; indeed, their lives manifest the liminal status characteristic of human being in a most explicit way primarily because of their reflective distance from life, a distance that is at the heart of their inability to be satisfied either with a resigned acquiescence to the flow of events or the aggressive drive to master one’s destiny. And I use the word destiny here intentionally. To this point in my analysis I have talked about destiny only in the guise of that distant rationality of which the narrator spoke in Book III, one that exists but is inaccessible to man, in the words of the narrator, the so-called “fate of the ancients” (III/1/I). Yet, Pierre and Prince Andrei give impetus to the problem of destiny or fate, for in both cases the turbulence of their lives, their suffering, seems to stem from an attempt to come to terms with that most singular destiny of the finite creature, death.2

1. NAPOLEON AND MASTERY Napoleon is a figuration of the striving for mastery; he is that north star of “power” and “genius” from which other characters, like Prince Andrei, initially take their bearings. As we have seen, the novel introduces Napoleon in its opening dialogue. Anna Pavlovna Scherer refers to him as “Antichrist.” And in this, she echoes aristocratic sentiment about the Corsican usurper throughout Europe. Yet, if “Antichrist” is rather too powerful a term, it is nonetheless true that, from the standpoint of the old aristocracy, Napoleon was a representative of evil surpassing the merely human. From another standpoint, however, he was a decidedly romantic figure adorned with a mantel of invincibility and mysterious genius as he rolled his armies across Africa and Europe, at once presiding over terrible devastation and the building of a “new” society—he was the man, after all, of the bloody Egyptian expedition and the Code Napoléon. In either of these roles, Napoleon shows the indefatigable ambition to create a new world, to tower God-like over vanquished and effu-

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sively “appreciative” peoples in contemplation of his creation, of the mirror of his own countenance. In this sense, Anna Pavlovna is surprisingly clairvoyant (as she will be again when talking of Austria and the future of the war in the same opening scene). She points to the defining trait of Napoleon’s career, the reason why the aristocrats hated him and he appealed to the Romantic age; he seeks to perform the greatest, most terrible and most daring feat of human endeavor—to take the place of God, to be a self-designated king, both an absolute beginning and a creator of worlds. For this role he naturally also arrogates to himself the power and dubious right of a destroyer of worlds. Napoleon is in this respect like Antichrist; in endeavoring to usurp powers associated with the divine to himself, he seeks to be a law unto himself. None of these attitudes is particularly unusual; in fact, this compound image of Napoleon, his existence more as myth than man, was current and important in Russia as one can glean from another Russian novel which came out in the 1860s. In Crime and Punishment Napoleon also represents the essentially criminal desire to cross all boundaries by setting them oneself. And Dostoevsky too, as is well-known, presents his own theory about “great men” in that novel. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are addressing a heroic and Romantic interpretation of Napoleon that emerged within the Russian context in part through the poetry of Lermontov. Despite his brilliant iconoclasm and predilection for the ironical and satiric, Lermontov propagated a view of Napoleon as heroic and demonic, a man “higher than praise, and glory, and humanity!…”3 Napoleon retains this dark mystique even in Lermontov’s later poetry where the theme of Napoleon’s exile takes on particular significance. Lermontov in fact combines these two aspects of Napoleon’s life, and the latter starts to look like a vivid historical incarnation of the swirling energies that Lermontov celebrates in his great poem “Demon.” In a sense, Napoleon very much is that great exiled spirit who can only rule and soar above the mediocrity of the herd. These may sound rather like romantic clichés nowadays, and there is no question that Lermontov’s interpretation of Napoleon is immersed in that shadowy world of sad and dark spirits which both he and Byron before him had celebrated. But Lermontov

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thus also puts the question in all seriousness, quid sit deus? [What is God?] And it is to this question, I think, that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky respond in their differing ways. In other words, Napoleon’s striving for mastery is a striving to be as a god. Anna Pavlovna’s use of the term “Antichrist,” although partial, allows one access to this crucial aspect of Napoleon in the novel, appropriately introduced at its very beginning. As her salon progresses, a debate ensues which emphasizes the centrality of the Napoleonic theme, the question becomes who will be God? The Viscount de Montmorency, whom Anna Pavlovna has “served” to her guests, describes the assassination of the Duc d’Enghien in which Napoleon is shown to have been sinister and without honor. Simply put, Montmorency is a royalist, and he is displaying the same distaste for the social upstart that we have already witnessed in Anna Pavlovna herself. Here we have the aristocratic view in clear outline. But there is a sharp reaction to the Viscount’s view in the offing. After the Viscount has finished his story, Anna Pavlovna returns to the subject of Napoleon to bemoan the “comedy” of the coronation at Milan, and Prince Andrei gently mocks her by quoting Napoleon’s famous words in both French and Italian upon accepting the crown, “God gives this to me, beware he who touches it!”4 Prince Andrei argues against Montmorency and Anna Pavlovna that the old régime is gone for good and makes no efforts to conceal his admiration for Naploeon by quoting him. Pierre joins in: ‘The execution of the Duc d’Enghien,’ declared Pierre, ‘was a political necessity, and it seems to me that Napoleon showed greatness of soul by not fearing to take on himself the whole responsibility of that deed.’ ‘Dieu! Mon Dieu!’ muttered Anna Pavlovna in a terrified whisper.

Pierre continues: “‘Napoleon is great because he rose above the revolution, suppressed its abuses, preserved all that was good in it—equality of citizenship and freedom of speech and of the press—and only for that reason did he obtain power’.” These ideas of course shock the aristocratic crowd. Pierre appears to them as a Jacobin, and, in a curious example of the narrator’s reinforcing the opinion

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of the aristocrats, Pierre is referred to several times during this exchange with Montmorency as “monsieur” as if to underscore the Frenchness of his Jacobin views. This is a comic touch which tends to undermine the seriousness of the debate as a whole, adding an ironic color to issues of apparently great moment. Aside from the fact that this irony likely expresses a disdain for political discussion typical of the novel, it also exposes an important distinction between Prince Andrei and Pierre. If Prince Andrei’s admiration for Napoleon as an ideal is an expression of a serious commitment on his part, one has the impression that Pierre’s adherence to such abstractions must not be accepted at face value and might even be difficult or unnatural for him. In this respect, the scene’s dénouement is telling—Pierre’s vitality and “natural” goodness undermine the harshness of the positions he defends: “…everybody saw his smile, which said nothing, unless perhaps, ‘Opinions are opinions, but you see what a fine, good-hearted fellow I am.’ And everyone, including Anna Pavlovna instinctively felt this was true” (I/1/V). The striking aspect of this scene, however, is that both Prince Andrei and Pierre show an almost unqualified admiration for Napoleon that is in sharp contrast to the society around them. Although this seems to depict a generational attitude of the time, with the younger generation showing sympathy for the ideals of the Revolution and admiration for the dominating figure of Napoleon, it also has the very basic and simple effect of allying two crucial characters with the “enemy of civilization,” the “Antichrist.” In this respect, as the quotes show, there is a curious preponderance of language dealing with the issue of God, whether it be Napoleon’s impudent statement, attributing his rule to God (as in fact hereditary monarchs had been doing already for quite some time, at least in France) or Anna Pavlovna’s innocent exclamation at Pierre’s approbation of Napoleon’s actions. Although I think it would be a mistake to attribute too much significance to the use of such language, it is certainly helpful in showing that a theme of the utmost importance, the challenge or usurpation of the position of God by man, in this case a man, is evident throughout these early scenes in the novel.

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While Prince Andrei and Pierre side initially with Napoleon, they will change their views considerably in the course of the novel. They represent two very particular trajectories in the life of the novel, each of which manifests a dynamic “wavering” between a belief in the possibility of human mastery, evidenced by their original admiration for Napoleon, and an apparently final rejection of all such attempts at mastery. For Prince Andrei, this rejection is connected with the failure of his engagement to Natasha, while for Pierre it emerges from his encounter with Platon Karataev. Here, we have another example of a structure which repeats itself with telling differences. I propose now to examine both these trajectories in detail to show how they differently incorporate the “wavering” movement between mastery and reticence. In Prince Andrei’s case, such wavering occurs because he is fundamentally unable to accept the limitations that finitude imposes on man, that man is but a small part of a whole too great to understand, while Pierre wavers because he searches for, but cannot find a way of integrating the grandiose and everyday, the boundless infinite and the immediate concerns of finite existence.

2. THE TRAGIC PATH Until the battle of Austerlitz, Prince Andrei retains the same undiluted admiration for Napoleon that was so much in evidence at Anna Pavlovna’s soirée. Napoleon is an ideal, a model, which Prince Andrei strives to emulate. Hence, Prince Andrei’s interest in strategy and planning, the science of war. There is no need to review Prince Andrei’s growing disillusionment about this “science,” since I have already discussed it in sufficient detail. It is well enough to note that the particular logic of Prince Andrei’s admiration of Napoleon, his desire to have his own Toulon, ends up in disaster; the tremendous and acerbic irony of this act in Prince Andrei’s career is that he finally gets to meet his hero while lying wounded on the battlefield at Austerlitz, that is, at the very moment when his preceding path in imitation of Napoleon has shown its danger and bankruptcy to the fullest extent. The lesson to take from this obvious irony is that Prince Andrei’s aspiration to be great like Napoleon leads him inexorably closer to his own

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death, that, for him, the desire for mastery and death are intimately related. This relation is in fact at the very core of Prince Andrei’s tragic journey in the novel; the extremity of his striving brings him closer not to mastery but to the basic limit of life, death, in Hegel’s words, the “absolute master” (1977: 117). At Austerlitz, Prince Andrei undergoes a remarkable transformation. Its essence is captured in one passage from the text describing his encounter with Napoleon: ‘That’s a fine death!’ said Napoleon as he gazed at Bolkonsky. Prince Andrei understood that this was said of him, and that it was Napoleon who said it. He heard the speaker addressed as Sire. But he heard the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly. Not only did they not interest him, but he took no notice of them and at once forgot them. His head was burning, he felt himself bleeding to death, and he saw above him the remote, lofty, and everlasting sky. He knew it was Napoleon—his hero—but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between himself and that lofty infinite sky with the clouds flying over it. At that moment it meant nothing to him who might be standing over him, or what was said of him; he was only glad that people were standing near him, and only wished that they would help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had today learned to understand it so differently. He collected all his strength, to stir and utter a sound. He feebly moved his leg, and uttered a weak sickly groan which aroused his own pity. ‘Ah! He is alive,’ said Napoleon. ‘Lift this young man up and carry him to the dressing-station.’ (I/3/XIX)

Prince Andrei’s discovery, his awakening to a dimension of reality that he had not known before, is beautifully conveyed in the passage by Napoleon’s framing comments which allow one to perceive a movement from death to life, a symbolic rebirth. And Prince Andrei’s contrast of the sky with Napoleon, his erstwhile hero, makes it clear that a profound change has occurred, that Prince Andrei has realized the utter vanity of his imitation of Napoleon and come to a new level of consciousness of the limitations of his previous attitudes, for all human attitudes are limited by the infinite. The specter of the infinite hangs over the remainder of Prince Andrei’s life in the novel; he is both attracted to it and seeks to evade the devalorization of the merely

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human that it announces, and in this conflict one can discern the characteristic form and motivation of his pursuit of mastery. Yet, his retreat to Bogucharovo after his return from the war is evidence of a bitter sort of resignation from life, almost a petulant expression of dismay about the fragility of human endeavors. There is acid commentary in Prince Andrei’s choosing to lead what amounts to a quasi-monastic life at his estate shut off from the imperfect world. When Pierre visits, he is astonished by the simplicity and cleanliness, the Spartan order of Prince Andrei’s modest house. But these excessively clean closed spaces bespeak a lack of energy, a certain claustrophobic immobility; they are like a coffin, and, as such, they clearly mirror the oppressive feeling of mortality that Prince Andrei is unable to escape; he ruminates about the futility of human action and harbors guilt because of the death of his wife. Prince Andrei transforms himself after his meeting with Pierre, but this renewal is only another turn of the wheel for him. While it is accompanied by powerful, organic feelings of rebirth as emphasized by the blooming of the famous oak tree, Prince Andrei typically begins to think and plan as a “whole series of sensible and logical considerations showing it to be essential for him to go to Petersburg” crowd his mind (II/3/III). With his vigor returned, he does go to St. Petersburg and almost immediately falls prey to Speransky’s influence. As his thought of plans and projects of reform show, his renewal is in fact a return to hopes of mastery formerly dashed by his experience at Austerlitz and his wife’s death. Perhaps the only difference this time around is that Prince Andrei cannot sustain his admiration for Speransky. Of course it is likely that his own personal contact with Speransky, his growing awareness that the supposedly great man is petty and smug, turns him away in disappointment. But it is remarkable how closely his brief association with Speransky recalls his earlier admiration for Napoleon. Speransky is a ‘social general,’ and Prince Andrei “followed Speransky’s every word and movement with particular attention…” expecting to “discover in him the perfection of human qualities” (II/3/V). There is no subtlety in the message here—Prince Andrei is again looking for an ideal measured on the human scale, and this is only peculiar if one recalls that his experience of the sky de-

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molished all mortal idols for him, that he came to see the shortsightedness of his admiration for a mere man, Napoleon. Although Prince Andrei refuses to accept the infinite sky, it still haunts him. He thus also refuses to accept finitude, the limits which bind all human beings. In this refusal is the crux of Prince Andrei’s continuing predicament. Because he can accept neither the infinite nor the finite, he is condemned to a peculiar liminal existence, an alternation between the two extremes that is in fact the very essence of human finitude as expressed in the relation between consciousness and reason. This relation is reflected in Prince Andrei’s alternating faith in reason and rejection of it, the former associated with Napoleon and Speransky, the latter with the infinite sky. Yet, Prince Andrei never discovers a way to integrate the two extremes; either one or the other rules his life with increasing intensity after Austerlitz. He cannot grasp their relation and, hence, in a very real way fails to see the pattern that determines his life; in this sense he is driven by a necessity of which he has only the faintest inkling. He moves in a bewitched and bewitching circle. He comes closest to breaking out of this circle when he falls in love with Natasha. But even this love cannot change him; indeed, it is suspect in so far as Prince Andrei’s attitude to Natasha and the different kind of life that she represents, “a strange world completely alien to him and brimful of joys unknown to him,” is never free of a curious tension that emerges strikingly in this same passage. The narrator remarks how Prince Andrei’s love for Natasha invokes in him a “vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable within him, and that limited and material something that he, and even she, was. This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while she sang” (II/3/XIX). Natasha’s “song” never satisfies Prince Andrei. As stark evidence of this, I refer to Prince Andrei’s unsettling and highly ambiguous reaction to Natasha’s acceptance of his proposal, hardly that of a happy suitor: “Prince Andrei held her hands, looked in her eyes, and did not find in his heart his former love for her.” And the narrator tells us that “[s]omething in him had suddenly changed...there was no longer the

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former poetic and mystic charm of desire, but there was pity for her feminine and childish weakness” (II/3/XXIII). Moreover, one has the impression that, after Prince Andrei has been rebuffed by Natasha, it is his pride that suffers most and, by falling into his own vanity, he succumbs to his basic discomfort with the unadorned and everyday, the limitations that tie human beings to the earth. The failure of this love seems to confirm that Prince Andrei cannot escape the destiny his peculiarly liminal existence sets for him. This destiny begins to crystallize after Pierre’s final visit to Prince Andrei on the eve of the battle at Borodino. Prince Andrei’s aggressive bitterness represents almost a complete rejection of the conflict that has governed his life; he seeks to strive no more. Although he still thinks about Natasha and Anatole, and thereupon “[j]umped up as if someone had burnt him, and again began pacing up and down in front of the shed,” his mind is elsewhere. Another passage from this same sequence furnishes penetrating insight into that state of mind: He had received and given orders for next day’s battle, and had nothing to do. But his thoughts—the simplest, clearest, and therefore most terrible thoughts—would give him no peace. He knew that tomorrow’s battle would be the most terrible of all he had taken part in, and for the first time in his life the possibility of death presented itself to him—not in relation to any worldly matter or with reference to its effect on others, but simply in relation to himself, to his own soul—vividly, plainly, terribly, and almost as a certainty. And from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented and preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light without shadows, without perspective, and without distinction of outline. All life appeared to him like magiclantern pictures at which he had long been gazing by artificial light through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those badly daubed pictures in broad daylight and without a glass. ‘Yes, yes! There they are, those false images that agitated, enraptured and tormented me,’ said he to himself, passing in review the principal pictures of the magic lantern of life and regarding them now in the cold white daylight of his clear perception of death. ‘There they are, those rudely painted figures that once seemed splendid and mysterious. Glory, the good of society, love of a woman, the Fatherland itself—how important these pictures appeared to me, with what profound meaning they seemed to be filled! And it is all so simple, pale, and crude in the cold white light of this morning which I feel is dawning on me.’ (III/2/XXIV)

This ‘morning’ of course signals the beginning of the slow end of Prince Andrei’s terrestrial life. The rejection of earthly striving is a

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removal to a different perspective, one that is tied no longer to life but to death. The passage is saturated in imagery that recalls Plato’s famous cave and that places Prince Andrei in a God-like “position” (which can be no position at all) outside of that cave, the habitation of all limited, finite creatures as well as the realm of vibrant human life. Here, as in no other single passage in the novel, the finitude of human being is expressed in the language of Platonic dualism, language that declares a drastic separation between two unlike orders of reality. This passage marks a crucial turning point that matches or surpasses in intensity the two other cruces in Prince Andrei’s life, one being his experience at Austerlitz and the other his love for Natasha. In both these cases, Prince Andrei seems to accept that the pursuit of mastery, the omnivorous desire to rise above others and impose one’s own particular views on the world, a variant of that “intellectual pride” of which Marya accused him before he left for the 1805 campaign, is a mistaken, ruinous and illusory one. Here Prince Andrei seems to approach the end of his struggle; he neither rejects mastery nor passively acquiesces to the “flow” of events, but moves beyond both to a shadowy transitional state that perfectly anticipates his fatal wounding. As he told Pierre: “…it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it does not do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil…” (III/2/XXV). And I might add that his wounding seems almost an inevitable consequence of this changed state; when the shell lands in front of Prince Andrei, he is quiescent, ready for the final blow that will come. In this light, I think it is easier to see that the governing contrast between the infinite sky and the figure of Napoleon, of finite life, remains one of ineluctable opposition. Napoleon sets a sad figure next to the sublime and infinite sky, an infinite that increasingly in the course of Prince Andrei’s life, as disappointments linger, will lose its mystery and grandeur while turning into a mockery of the finite, an ugly reminder of the essential dependence and insignificance of each human being in comparison with that great whole, “too immense to grasp,” that prevents him from ever being satisfied with the merely human. After the break with Natasha, the narrator remarks that Prince

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Andrei felt as if “that lofty infinite canopy of heaven that had once towered above him had suddenly turned into a low solid vault that weighed him down…” (III/1/VIII). The infinite reminds Prince Andrei only of his finitude, and it lowers down on him like the lid of a coffin. As I have said, this is the tragic aspect of Prince Andrei’s life. He cannot integrate the infinite into his life, cannot avoid the destiny of mortality imposed upon him, and thus also cannot escape its crushing weight; where once there was possibility and mystery, only disillusionment is left over. His considerable intelligence, his leaning to ratiocination, his faith in reason blind and frustrate him, they are the source of his disquiet; in Goethe’s words: The little god of the earth remains always the same And is as wondrous strange as on the first day. He would live a little better Had you not given him the glimmer of heaven’s light.5

Prince Andrei cannot finally be satisfied by giving up his belief in the power of human reason to determine and grasp the true nature of things, despite all the countervailing evidence of the battles he has participated in, both military and social, a belief that his experience of the infinite can only undermine. Prince Andrei’s refusal to accept finitude has a fatal and necessary logic; it tempts him inexorably to his own death and freedom from the limitations of earthly existence. This kind of freedom is, however, fraught with ambiguities that complicate his slow death; his final encounter with the infinite comes into sharp conflict with his desire to stay attached to life, as represented by his growing affection for Natasha. In these justly celebrated scenes, among the most powerful in the whole novel, the conflict between the infinite and the finite in Prince Andrei comes into its starkest and final definition. Tolstoy employs an ingenious metaphor to describe Prince Andrei’s condition several days after having been wounded at Borodino. While he lies in a state that appears to be mildly delirious, he hears a “soft whispering voice incessantly and rhythmically repeating ‘pitipiti-piti’” and feels that “above his face, above the very middle of it, some strange airy structure was being erected out of slender needles or

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splinters, to the sound of this whispered music—‘it stretches, stretches, spreading out and stretching…’” (III/3/XXXII).6 These needles recall the needle-like structure of a Gothic cathedral, and one might conjecture that they have a similar significance in as much as they represent Prince Andrei’s awakened spiritual aspiration. Here for the first time in the novel Prince Andrei begins to think about a love that is not merely human, one that extends beyond a love “which loves for something, some quality, for some purpose.” Prince Andrei distinguishes between human love and divine love. The former is narrow and limited, it can change to hatred, it can be destroyed by death—in short, it is subject to the same limitations and weaknesses as any other manifestation of human finitude. The latter, to the contrary, cannot change, cannot be limited and cannot turn to hatred, for it cannot be limited, and hatred is limitation. Prince Andrei then thinks of Natasha and how he had judged her based on the limitations of human love. In doing so, he is able to understand her in a way that had been barred to him before, and this allows him to accept and appreciate her care. Prince Andrei seems to waver between these two kinds of loving until the very end of his life. Then, he senses the approach of “[t]hat inexorable, eternal, distant and unknown—the presence of which he had felt continually all his life—was now near to him…” (IV/1/XVI). In other words, the infinite that had shadowed and pursued Prince Andrei throughout the novel after his experience at Austerlitz (and evidently before—what is the desire for glory other than a striving to overcome finitude?) finally comes closer to him, within reach, and only as he is on the verge of dying. Indeed, the “more deeply he penetrated into the new principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously detached himself from earthly life.” Love for Natasha, however, holds him back: But after the night at Mystichshy when, half delirious, he had seen her for whom he had longed appear before him, and had shed quiet tears of joy and pressed her hand to his lips, love for a particular woman crept imperceptibly into his heart, binding him again to life.

On this last evening of his life, Prince Andrei wavers violently. He both professes his love to Natasha and changes the terms of his previous thoughts:

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The image of a particle of love returning to its source clearly reflects Pierre’s dream-image of the globe, of those drops that expand and contract. Yet, as the narrator laconically notes, these thoughts were “only thoughts.” They were “too one sidedly personal and intellectual.” Prince Andrei then falls asleep and has a horrifying dream in which death breaks through the door. This dream triggers in Prince Andrei an “awakening from life” (probuzhdenie ot zhizni) and he dies. Prince Andrei’s death represents the darkly ironic terminal point of his struggle to overcome the inevitable limitations of finitude; mastery resides in contempt for the human, in a state equivalent to death. And this is the greater, ironic significance of his experience of the infinite, the shock that it brings to his desire to emulate Napoleon and to be great and “immortal” himself; his vision of the infinite reveals for him the emptiness of human striving, of finite life, as he says, “[a]ll is vanity, all is falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist” (I/3/XVI). Prince Andrei is in fact the great model for those who would insist that the novel is skeptical. He cannot accept that finitude can have any worth or meaning in the all-encompassing light of the infinite, since everything that comes into being must pass away. In this sense, he seems to be very much like his friend Pierre at the beginning of his journey of discovery. This journey first takes shape in a moment of supreme despair. At the end of Book II, we find Pierre at the very nadir of his reflections on life: Sometimes he remembered how he had heard that soldiers in war when entrenched under the enemy’s fire, if they have nothing to do, try hard to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. To Pierre all men seemed like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in toys, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in governmental affairs. ‘Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it’s all the same—only to save oneself from it as best one can,’ thought Pierre. ‘Only not to see it, that dreadful it!’

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While Prince Andrei’s rejection of finitude is a form of skepticism and an expression of despair to possess the absolute, Pierre succumbs to an equal despair, only to overcome it; his fate is different because he is more capable of accepting limitation; his need to believe in a greater meaning or presence in life is not accompanied by the essential inability to do so that stymies Prince Andrei. And here we clearly see a fundamental difference in the attitude to limitation expressed by Prince Andrei and Pierre that can be associated with the distinction between the tragic and comic. Tragedy is a recognition of failure, of an inability to be content with the limitations of human life that is both heroic and disastrous. But the comic in its true sense is quite the opposite, being neither heroic nor disastrous; rather, the comic is a recognition of failure as the most powerful affirmation of life in its inherent errancy and lack of finality—comedy is the willingness to entertain the never terminal conflict of opposites that tragedy must overcome—comedy is an impulse to openness, whereas tragedy seeks closure. Moreover, if tragedy is thus monistic, comedy is pluralistic; if tragedy is despairing, a letting go of hope, then comedy is forever hopeful, even ridiculously so. Tragedy claims that no reconciliation with life is possible, whereas comedy is reconciliation itself, the spirit of deft movement, elastic and free. Prince Andrei seems to embody a tragic path, but Pierre seems essentially comic in his continued hopefulness. While Pierre begins his journey by looking at the same meaninglessness of human activity, of its essential emptiness and vanity, that strikes Prince Andrei at Austerlitz, he cannot believe this to be true. If Prince Andrei evades the infinite, if he cannot integrate it into his life, Pierre seeks to do little else; he continually asks, What is it?

3. THE COMIC PATH After his duel with Dolokhov and interview with his wife in which he had to restrain himself so as not to hurt her, Pierre leaves Petersburg. But he is obliged to wait at the Torzhok post-station, and it is

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during this wait that Pierre experiences a sort of revelation of the abyss, a moment where the meanings that had previously given order and direction to his life dissolve. A result of this dissolution is that long dormant questions seize Pierre: No matter what he thought about, he always returned to these same questions which he could not solve and yet could not cease to ask himself. It was as if the thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in the same place. (II/2/I)

This simile is a most effective means of describing Pierre’s essential predicament, that he cannot find a basis capable of guiding his life and giving it a particular meaning or shape. The incessant turning of the screw that nonetheless fails to gain a secure foothold that would allow Pierre to hold his life together depicts an experience of groundlessness aptly described by Heidegger as a state of affairs where “…every essential statement refers back to a ground that cannot be pushed aside, that demands instead only to be grounded more thoroughly.”7 Here Pierre suffers the agony of finite limitation—that complete knowledge, a sure ground, is simply not available to the finite mind. Yet the finite mind cannot cease to ask the questions for which it knows there is no answer; these questions are in fact the most pressing and important—indeed, they are the very essence of finitude, for how could any infinite mind need to ask a question? Kant wrote in his Preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: “Human reason has the peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer” (1965: 7).8 Kant sets out with precision the very problem that confronts Pierre and that is basically—to its core—of a metaphysical nature because the desire to find the ground, the ultimate arbiter of truth, is nothing else than a desire to transcend finitude, to “grasp” that infinite sky that so oppresses Prince Andrei. But Pierre, unlike Prince Andrei, desires more than anything else to be assured that there is an infinite deity, that there is an infinite measure without which one is condemned to the nothingness of fini-

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tude. In other words, Pierre’s attitude to the infinite shows none of the terrible ambiguities that trouble Prince Andrei; Pierre’s fear stems from doubt that the infinite can be grasped by the finite—his entire striving is not to overcome the infinite, but to begin to see it in the finite, and this is the essence of the question of knowledge for Pierre. In other words, to bring finite and infinite together—to integrate them—is the dominant motif of Pierre’s striving and oscillation between mastery and reticence in the novel. It is, then, characteristic that Pierre does not seek military glory, to defeat and conquer, but rather he is constantly tempted into the vanity of human strivings by utopian plans of a final kingdom, heaven on earth, and the false prophets of this kind of salvation. Indeed, at the very beginning of the novel, we find him in a spirited discussion with the Abbé Morio about the latter’s plan for “permanent peace.” The Masons also seem to entice Pierre into these peculiar realms. He first encounters Freemasonry in the person of Alexei Bazdeev at the Torzhok station. Bazdeev is another guide for Pierre, both better than Anna Mikhailovna, and worse than Platon Karataev—he guides Pierre through the second major transitional passage in his life. At Torzhok, as we have seen, Pierre has come to a point of extreme perplexity and despair, and, as a consequence he is innerly willing to listen to Bazdeev who talks of purifying oneself in order to accept the “highest wisdom”: ‘The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole—the science explaining the whole creation and man’s place in it. To receive that science it is necessary to believe and to perfect oneself. And to attain this end we have the light called conscience, that God has implanted in our souls.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ assented Pierre. (II/2/II)

Pierre leaves this supposedly chance meeting with a new sense of purpose; he is filled with the desire to do good, to be a benefactor of mankind. After his initiation into the Masons, where Pierre in a typically passive way proceeds through all the phases of the initiation rituals that appear by turns either bizarre or ridiculous, his faith in his

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new venture is somewhat shaken, but he ignores these doubts as if he were trying to avoid that terrible it. The upshot is that Pierre is taken with a genuine desire to help humanity and tries to institute a series of radical changes on his estates in order to relieve the burdens of the peasantry. He becomes a veritable general of philanthropy, but, unfortunately, his measures are undermined by his estate manager and numerous other minor functionaries who stand to lose by Pierre’s innovations. In a manner strikingly reminiscent of Tolstoy’s pointed criticisms of the transmission of orders from a commander to his soldiers, Pierre’s desired ends are thwarted or modified at every turn and he, like a commander, is saddled with the illusion that his beneficent intentions are actually being carried out, that they in fact can be carried out as he wishes. Pierre is naïve and foolhardy about his grand plans, and we are told that Prince Andrei, who makes no great fanfare about it, was able to achieve much more than his friend because of his greater tenacity and his head for detail. But, nonetheless, during their second meeting at Bogucharovo, Pierre’s utopian thoughts make a tremendous impression on Prince Andrei; they set in motion a sequence of growth and renewal in Prince Andrei himself. While on the raft, a key figure of transition, Pierre reveals as never before that his striving to integrate the finite and infinite is a desire to know God: ‘…Don’t I feel in my soul that I am part of this vast harmonious whole? Don’t I feel that I form one link, one step, between the lower and higher beings, in this vast harmonious multitude of beings in whom the Deity— the Supreme Power if you prefer the term—is manifest? If I see, clearly see, that ladder leading from plant to man, why should I suppose it breaks off at me and does not go farther and farther? I feel that I cannot vanish, since nothing vanishes in this world, but that beyond me and above me are spirits, and that in this world there is truth.’ (II/2/XII)

Pierre soon thereafter makes a crucial statement: ‘If there is a God and future life there is truth and good, and man’s highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth but have lived and shall live for ever, there in the Whole,’ said Pierre and he pointed to the sky.

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Prince Andrei stood leaning on the railing of the raft listening to Pierre, and he gazed with his eyes fixed on the red reflection of the sun gleaming on the blue waters. There was perfect stillness. Pierre became silent. The raft had long since stopped, and only the waves of the current beat softly against it below. Prince Andrei felt as if the sound of the waves kept up a refrain to Pierre’s words, whispering: ‘It is true, believe it.’

Both these passages make a highly equivocal point; they suggest that if there is no afterlife, no eternal life, then there is no God, there is only finitude that can neither be overcome nor overlooked. Pierre seems to come very close to the position we have already ascribed to Prince Andrei; namely, a refusal to accept finitude, an equation of finitude with weakness, smallness and the negation of meaning. In other words, Pierre affirms the necessity of transcendence without which human life is a paltry and ridiculous satire. Hence, when Prince Andrei perceives a voice urging him to believe what Pierre has said, I can only infer that this voice is urging him to believe that without a deity, without a guarantor of eternal life, human life is unlivable. This is a powerful view, one that Dostoevsky advances as well, but it is a view of despair—for it suggests that we believe in God because the alternative would be too unpleasant to countenance. It is not surprising that Prince Andrei finds this view attractive. As we have seen, he is a sort of Platonist; the essence of his inability to accept finitude lies in his distress before the imperfection of the world and of human beings, an imperfection that becomes obvious to him under the influence of his epiphanic vision of the lofty sky. But Prince Andrei’s desire to overcome the limitations of finitude eventually emerges as a nihilistic inclination, a complete abnegation of the rhythm of mortal life, for he is ultimately never able to bear its transience. Pierre is of another cast. The views he represents here do not last long with him. No matter how hard he tries to penetrate the obfuscating mysticism of the Masons, to rise above everyday life, he is ultimately unsuited to such speculation, he is much better suited to life. Yet, as his utopian plans for his estates show, he also cannot accept this fact, a conflict revealed with satiric brio when Pierre attempts to

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discern his fate as the one destined to limit the power of Napoleon and thus become the savior of Russia in its hour of need. Pierre tries to determine his fate by manipulating an arcane numerology that seems to be a parodic allusion to the true nature of the sacred “mysteries” so dear to the Masons. In view of his disillusionment with the Masons, his experience of their ever-present and corrosive hypocrisy, the great distance between word and action, Pierre’s “playing with” numbers seems to be an appropriate symbolic condensation of their influence on him. Clearly Pierre’s attempt to prove that he is fated to kill Napoleon is thoroughly ridiculous; he finds a suitable Biblical passage, in the Apocalypse, of course—Napoleon once again appears as the Antichrist, the beast—and “cooks” the numbers to fit an end desired by his heart and not his head, that he has some connection to the career of Napoleon. As it turns out, this connection hardens into an attempt to assassinate Napoleon, which ends with Pierre’s saving a young girl and his capture by the French. This contrast between grandiosity of intention—to kill Napoleon and save all of Russia—and an ostensibly humble result, the saving of a little girl, is characteristic of Pierre. It shows as no other aspect of Pierre’s journey in the novel does, that he is drawn to the immediate and finite, actual human life, and not the remote infinite horizons that attract and terrify Prince Andrei. Hence, Pierre’s encounter with Platon Karataev seems to be a fitting culmination of this path. Through Platon Karataev Pierre learns to accept and to value the immediate and everyday, to see the infinite in the present, in that which is humble and simple. In another one of those repeating situations that represent the signature pattern of the novel, Pierre meets Platon Karataev at a moment when his world has “fallen in” once again but in a way that is much more severe, destructive and comprehensive than ever before. This time it is not the death of a distant parent, not a duel, not a failed marriage, but the horror of witnessing an execution and the ambiguous elation of having his own life spared that compels Pierre to abandon those questions to which there is no answer and which make a tidy mockery of utopian ideas:

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From the moment Pierre had witnessed those terrible murders committed by men who did not wish to commit them, it was as if the mainspring of his life, on which everything had depended and which made everything appear alive, had suddenly been wrenched out and everything had collapsed into a heap of meaningless rubbish. Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, his faith in the right ordering of the universe, in humanity, in his own soul and in God, had been destroyed. He had experienced this before, but never so strongly as now. (IV/1/XII)

Platon Karataev is a new sort of figure in Pierre’s life. He does not lead Pierre around for selfish gain, like Anna Mikhailovna, nor does he seek to instruct Pierre with edifying speeches like Bazdeev. Platon Karataev does not seek to teach at all. But, for Pierre, he becomes a living example of a way out of the labyrinth of unanswerable questions and fearful suspicions that have directed his life since the duel with Dolokhov and meeting with Bazdeev at Torzhok. As I have already noted, Platon Karataev is characterized by the metaphor of roundness, of the circle. He is a living image of the whole or, as Tolstoy writes, he is an “unfathomable, rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth” (IV/1/XIII). At least one critic has complained that Tolstoy is writing poorly here, giving up fuller characterization in favor of what turns out to be somewhat of a caricature, a mouthpiece for Tolstoy’s heavy-handed views.9 But I think that the very point of this less than detailed characterization is to suggest the ideality that exists in Pierre’s relation to Platon, that Karataev is in fact an ideal figure for Pierre. This is an extremely important point because it shows that, if Pierre discovers through Platon a new way to see life by experiencing the simple, everyday and nonintellectual, he does so by making Platon into an ideal, and, in so doing, cannot help but go against the very teaching that he seems to imbibe from Platon. In this way, the curious mixture of the name Platon or Plato with the unobtrusive surname is highly indicative of the hybrid nature of Platon who is an inherently unstable ideal for Pierre; namely, one whose content contradicts its form. And, in this sense, the simplicity and immediacy that Platon seems to represent is at odds with Pierre’s assessment of these qualities as ideals of a sort, i.e., as generalities by means of which he can direct his life towards the correct path. I do not deny, however, that Pierre is transformed and liberated from his doubts, that in Platon’s simplicity he finds shelter from

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the emptiness that had initially pervaded his view of life after the executions. But I question whether Pierre has not merely found another means of hiding from the terrible it, the abyssal experience of the world or, rather, of its destruction that first assailed him after the duel with Dolokhov. The First Part of the Epilogue ends on a note that shows how Pierre has left behind the lessons he learned from Platon Karataev by embracing the utopian plans that will lead to the Decembrist plot. Once again, Pierre seems to slip into the belief that he can be a necessary agent in the realization of heaven on earth, that he can act as a ‘social general’ not wholly unlike Speransky. And it is perfectly fair to argue that the tension inherent in his idealization of Platon leads to its own collapse and Pierre’s adherence to this new utopian ideal, one that is far more capable of being idealized. I would like to clarify the broader implications here: What does the phrase “capable of being idealized” mean? Strictly speaking the notion of an ideal returns us to Plato and always carries the banner of its history as an image (eidos) that transcends experience but also somehow manifests itself in it. An ideal must be transcendental; anyone who proclaims an ideal is implicitly relying on its transcendental credentials, its authority as not merely a human construct. The ideal is eternal. This kind of thinking, however, seems to belong to a different world than Platon Karataev. And, indeed, it does. Platon Karataev belongs very much to this world, the continuous present, and not to the world of transcendent contemplation. Platon Karataev lives in immediacy, he displays an organic harmony with his environment that betrays no reflection, no ratiocination, no decision making about where to go and why. He is like the rose of Angelus Silesius that blooms we know not why.10 He is an example of the simplicity and immediacy of nature, and in this sense his humanity is a very peculiar one. Yet, to create an ideal out of living in immediacy is already to betray it most harshly and to lose it forever; it reminds us once again of the bargain that we, as finite creatures, must make with the world in order to participate in it, that the very condition of our access to the world is that it is conditioned, limited, mediated, and that all attempts to deny or escape that fact are bound to fail.

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Hence, even though Pierre’s journey ends in a less extreme manner than that of Prince Andrei, he is no more capable of escaping the pattern of mastery and reticence than was Prince Andrei. To escape by his terms he would need to transcend the only reality he can know, thus ending up in the unenviable position of denying life in order truly to know it. One can surmise from Prince Andrei’s experience that this course has one direction and end. The circle of finitude cannot be broken; we are destined to repetition, if not a Nietzschean eternal return of the same. While Prince Andrei and Pierre are central characters in the novel, establishing the relevance of the great patterns of struggle that course through the text on so many levels within the context of lived life, there are many other characters who have important roles but to which I have given scant attention. One of the primary reasons for this is that Tolstoy rarely grants sustained access to their inner worlds, their subjectivity, an honor in fact accorded most frequently to Prince Andrei and Pierre of all the characters in the novel. Indeed, Prince Andrei and Pierre carry much of the burden of subjectivity; their inner lives are the most carefully and elaborately articulated subjective points of view that emerge in the course of the narrative. Here the mode of inner monologue reaches its early height in Tolstoy’s prose in stark contrast to the ways that other characters are described, either from the outside by the narrator or through the filter of other characters. This directness of access to Prince Andrei and Pierre also issues from the fact that they are more reflective and ratiocinative than most of the others. The only character who approaches them in this regard is Princess Marya. Natasha, for example, while undoubtedly a major character, is not endowed with an overly reflective nature, this being in fact the essence of her extraordinary vivacity; her more direct connection with life, and her mental states are seldom described with the same intensity as those of Prince Andrei and Pierre. These other characters, then, tend to appear as representations of one of the polarities which are internal to Prince Andrei and Pierre. As such, they are frequently subtle epigones of the tendencies concentrated in Napoleon and Karataev and complexly ramified in the trajectories of Prince Andrei and Pierre. Dolokhov, for example, shares a

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concern for his poor mother (sa pauvre mère) with Napoleon, while showing Napoleonic daring and cruelty in another light, one that adds considerable ambiguity to the Napoleonic image the novel otherwise seeks to create. Natasha shares the immediacy and instinctual vitality that Platon Karataev demonstrates in a more abstract way—it is no surprise from this point of view that she is eventually paired with Pierre, the irony being that she is also partially responsible for his not living up to the curious ideal that Karataev had hitherto set for Pierre. The upshot of these observations is that the predicament of Prince Andrei and Pierre is one that confronts reflective consciousness in the novel: it is in fact the very essence of the so-called burden of consciousness. Given the overuse of this expression, it might seem to be a mere commonplace that characters endowed with greater awareness or consciousness are brought to despair by it. But that is only one aspect of the issue in War and Peace. While it is fair to say that both Prince Andrei and Pierre find themselves in a sort of perpetuum mobile of finitude of which they are in some manner aware and which they seek to transcend, this pattern is also the essential rhythm of life that they experience all the more acutely because of their reflective distance from it. If consciousness is a burden, it is also a heightened sense of life. Such distance is the result of their having that glimmer of heavenly light that other characters lack. And their own paths in the novel show a movement from reflective immediacy, by which I mean a more or less conventional perception of order, to a reflective attitude that puts that order in question. In this respect, they pass through the same layers of consciousness as the novel itself. On the one hand, the oscillations that they experience are shifts of emphasis. They are attempts to overcome finitude either by eschewing thought for immediacy or by eschewing immediacy for thought. The former attitude is more closely aligned with Platon Karataev, the latter with Napoleon. The former is a kind of reticence or resignation before the attempt to accede to God-like understanding, the latter the most direct expression of that attempt. Yet, in either case, Prince Andrei and Pierre cannot be satisfied by a way of living based on resigned immediacy or aggressive reason, and the pattern repeats itself in different ways for Pierre, while for Prince Andrei it finally comes to an awareness of itself, its

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limitedness, with his ascent to a new viewpoint (really a paradoxical one since it is beyond all viewpoints) at Borodino. Prince Andrei represents the tyrannical and tragic aspect of the desire to master that can only originate in the assumption that the world is in a very strong sense a primordial chaos that must be tamed, that must be made human as a condition of its acceptability. Pierre represents the comical aspect of mastery, the desire to grasp the essential nature of the world in order to find one’s proper place within it, a desire that arises from an assumption totally foreign to Prince Andrei, that there is a structure to the world, that mastery is learning to place oneself in harmony with the whole, rather than to conquer it. This difference is one of the reasons that Prince Andrei seems so worldly in comparison to the “perpetual” innocent Pierre whose ability to cultivate immaturity, to revive illusion, fuels his dynamism. This distinction shows to a greater extent the remarkable way in which both Prince Andrei and Pierre reveal different qualities of a basically erotic striving that is ever restless, presenting two broad alternatives, one tragic, the other comic. These alternatives are interwoven both in the contrapuntal relation of the two great erotic heroes of the novel and the temporalities that are associated with them, epic and closed in the case of Prince Andrei, circular and novelstic in the case of Pierre. On these several levels, an underlying irony of finitude describes the movement of history, both individual and collective, as the ascent to a self-consciousness that seeks to renew itself by a return to immediacy, its origins, that is not possible. Man seeks an ever elusive transcendence: Give me your right hand, Father, and do not withdraw from my embrace. Thus he spoke, his face flooding with tears. Three times he tried to throw his arms around Anchises’ neck Three times the image fled from his hands’ vain grasp Like light winds or most like a winged dream.11

CONCLUSION: FREEDOM AND SILENCE Many are the wonders, Terrible and brutal, But none is more wondrous, Terrible and brutal Than man— 1

The distance of man from God is measured by freedom, an illusion of possibility and independence that deludes the finite mind to presume well beyond its capacity and so dooms it to learn by suffering, by recognizing its own limitation, a tragic shortness of breath. This path of learning, the great rhythm of War and Peace, vibrantly echoes the central conflict of Greek epic and tragedy between man and gods within the thoroughly Christian context of Tolstoy’s field of vision—the distance between man and God, different orders of being, is the space of Tolstoyan evil. For Tolstoy freedom and evil are intimately linked. Man’s illusion of freedom compels him to transgress, to ignore and profane that divine rationality to which he has scant access; it is the source and primary tool of his disobedience and the endless struggle that accompanies it. This struggle leads to pain—enlightenment is always a questionable gift—because through it man learns of his weakness and dependence, that he is but one “link,” to quote Pierre, in a great chain of being that he neither originates nor can hope to master. For Tolstoy, learning is precisely this education in human limitation, the realization that we are an integral part of a greater whole that functions according to the laws of a deity that always lies beyond the reach of rational explanation. The path from evil to good, from ignorance to knowledge, from falsehood into truth is marked by an increasing acknowledgment of the mysterious linkage, the astonishing interconnection, of all living things. Tolstoyan evil, then, is delusion, the state of understanding in which the subject, my I, claims that it determines the world, that it writes the law. Hence, the fundamental striving of the novel, that desire to bridge the gap between finite and infinite is highly ambiguous.

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As a Napoleonic striving for mastery, it is an expression of evil. But as a striving to grasp the myriad interconnections of things, like calculus, it seems much more benign, for it sets one on the road to truth by imitation not creation. This difference is a crucial one; the desire to know is not evil if it seeks to discover the laws that determine us and not set them down as if they were our creation. For Tolstoy, the path of good is a path of acquiescence and acceptance of finitude; we learn to be content with the necessity that shapes us, that decries that we must die. Hence, to learn more about this necessity cannot be evil. There is yet a stronger ambiguity in the novel. If freedom is the source of evil, it is also, as Tolstoy never tires of repeating, the source of life, the continuously enticing vitality that is the wellspring of hope. Does Tolstoy then maintain that this wellspring itself is tainted? Prince Andrei’s path in the novel seems to represent this view and illustrate its consequences. But what of Pierre? Does he not uncover another side of this argument? Does Pierre not speak for discovering the essential goodness in life no matter what the hardships? I think that one has to split hairs here by arguing that for Prince Andrei and Pierre freedom has radically different meanings. For Prince Andrei freedom is power; for Pierre it is recognition of powerlessness, acquiescence to necessity, that allows one to be freed from the cycle of struggle that characterizes finite existence. Yet, even in Pierre’s case there is additional ambiguity because he is still tempted into grandiose projects at the end of the novel. In other words, there is a deep-seated tension, a shadow of doubt about any resolution of human struggle, about the possibility of reconciliation with God—Prince Andrei’s specter cannot be eliminated or explained away. Schelling wrote that “[t]he character of finitude is that nothing can be posited without at once positing its opposite” (1927: 1/104). And this claim applies equally well to describe the essential restlessness that these ambiguities reveal. The novel simply does not and cannot arrive at a final dogmatic view, at perpetual peace or satisfaction, although on the surface this may seem to be the case; rather, it weaves in increasingly complex ways between extremes, between skepticism and affirmation concerning knowledge, between openness and clo-

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sure, tragic and comic, epic and novel, freedom and necessity—in none of these cases is the matter settled. But there is a serious flaw in this claim that the novel comes to no final view because its own recognition of why this is so, the description of consciousness as a relation between reason and consciousness, seems unmistakably dogmatic, exempt from the very prescriptions it otherwise imposes on knowing and action. What is this higher knowledge that permits the unification of oppositions even in their constant instability and dynamism? This is indeed an important question, one that cannot simply be dismissed out of hand, for it points to a distinctively vatic element in the novel, however impure its manifestations may be. This dogmatic assertion of the impossibility of dogmatism is ultimately rather unnerving—it points to its own fragility and reveals a far more profound restlessness, a contradiction that simply cannot be smoothed out or eliminated in any way. Far from merely suggesting that consciousness arises out of the struggle between intrinsically opposed impulses, this contradiction stands to undermine the very model that permits the contradiction to emerge in the first place. What is one to do? The entire edifice must collapse as a result of its own unstable grounding, proving in the most direct manner possible that the need to ground ends up in futility, in re-asserting the doubts, the sense of vertiginous instability, that it was intended to quiet; patterns of thought, their rise and fall, mirror the patterns of life, the cycle of birth and death, that constitute the underlying rhythm of life. The novel’s broad keel, its basic movement towards a final characterization of consciousness, towards grounding itself, proves to be just as fragile and illusory in its finality as the great epiphanic or revelatory moments experienced by Pierre and Prince Andrei. This raises the crucial question of the relation between the essays and the fictional text again in quite a different light. By attempting to ground basic patterns of the fictional text in an abstract speculation about the nature of consciousness that reveals itself to be radically ungrounded in any higher authority, does Tolstoy not undermine his attempt to unify the two aspects of the novel? Does he not show that

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art and thought are in fact incommensurable, thereby reversing the primary tendency of the novel towards their union and asserting instead that art is in some fundamental way silent, that even literature, the most garrulous of the arts in this sense, conceals a profound silence? Or can he seek yet another middle way between the extremes of silence and discursivity? This question is intimately linked with fundamental philosophical questions arising from the definition of man as the animal rationale, as the “rational animal,” as a peculiar combination of mind and body, intellect and the senses. Philosophy in its many guises has typically occupied the realm of the intellect, while the senses occupy the realm of art, what became aesthetics in the eighteenth century, the study of the sensory things, of art as sensual form, as perceptum.2 The basic question concerns their interrelation. Are the intellect and the senses two completely different sources of cognition? If so, the intellect creates a world independent of the senses, and the senses give us a world independent of the intellect. The intellect talks constantly about things that cannot be said to exist in the world perceived by the senses—the intellect talks about its own creations—and the senses do not talk at all, they are quite silent. Yet, if intellect and the senses are not wholly independent, roughly three possibilities of combination arise; either the intellect is dependent on the senses, whereby it learns to speak the language of the senses (realist empiricism), or the senses on the intellect, whereby the latter teaches the senses to speak (idealist rationalism), or both are dependent on the other, whereby they learn that they speak the same language (German idealism). These ways of grasping the relation between intellect and the senses are all relations of mind and nature, the inside and outside, the invisible and the visible. Yet, it is one thing to speak of mind and nature, while it is quite another to speak of the significance of a work of art that may be mimetic or representational or non-mimetic, abstract and fantastic. Mimetic art is based on re-presentation of an original while non-mimetic is ostensibly free, creating art that has no direct representational relation to an original. No matter whether mimetic or non-mimetic, art is a making, an artwork comes into being through the form-giving activity of the artist and not through itself as a natural

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object, although the view of the artist as an inspired medium for the truth from on high is still a powerful one. The giving of form implies the imposition of order, one that is objectively or inter-subjectively accessible, that is, one that can be perceived and appreciated by others. In this sense, form must have a public face, must be reducible to a common language whether verbal or symbolic or broadly semiotic. The point is that the language of art, whatever its particular form, must in some fashion be accessible to discursive treatment. If this were not the case, one could not discuss or share any feeling about a work of art; indeed, art would be quite simply subjective in the most extreme sense. And the notion of a largely private artistic language would be subject to the same kinds of objections that have been leveled against the notion of a private language itself.3 Art must in some sense be discursively accessible; it must lend itself to treatment in a language. If art must be discursively accessible, must that discursivity be grounded? What does it mean to ground a work of art, in effect, to justify why it is as it is? These two questions both recognize the problem of silence, the threat that silence can authorize any view or none at all. Tolstoy’s emphasis at the very end of the novel on an abstract discursive treatment of major aspects of the novel’s fictional representations underscores the surmise that grounding is necessary to overcome silence, that the silence of art, pure mimesis, is problematic. And yet the fatal inconsistency between the mode of presentation of the model of consciousness and that model itself reveals the vulnerability of Tolstoy’s justification, which turns against itself. This remarkable restlessness, the inner animation that can neither be fully expressed by, nor fully contained in, form, is wayward, a madness, and, in this sense, a kind of ceaseless and cautioning evil—an implacable contradiction that gives rise to freedom, is indeed the essence of freedom, while also restricting it as a product of contradiction. That there is no way out, that the whole cannot be known but also not discarded as a goal of knowledge—here is the animate force of the novel. The contradiction that ends the novel, that brings an ironic closurenon-closure to it, exists also on the most humble level of the text and is in a sense the most basic variant of the novel’s dilemma. For what is

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language, if not the attempt to end silence, to allow that to speak which has no voice? Here too language both allows and limits, gives form to and conceals what is in its immediacy. The episodes in the novel are legion where vision communicates what language cannot, what language can only leave out or obscure. This is especially evident with Pierre who realizes the limits of words in a very conventional way when he first perceives the gravity of his father’s situation, of the decline into death, when his father looks at him. In a similar fashion the famous moment of mutual recognition between Pierre and Davout saves Pierre’s life. The great irony here has traditional romantic elements; it is the irony of trying to convey through language what can only be corrupted by language, of trying to achieve a sort of “infection” (as the later Tolstoy would have it) through means that are illstarred to infect in any way. Thus both the highest planes of the novel, its grand and complex architectonics, and the most humble plane, that of the language it uses, are imbued with a contradictory essence, one that consists of an ever renewed striving to overcome that has both tragic and comic elements, that recognizes limits and tries to overcome them, that finds its central creative energy in this irrepressible movement, this constant strife described so succinctly in the saying of Heraclitus that “war is the father of all things” (polemos ton panton pater). War and Peace like few other novels before or since weaves a brilliantly structured narrative from these fundamental conflicts that only intensifies them without ultimately breaking into dogmatic affirmations of plenitude or absence. In this sense, it is indeed much more than a conventional novel, much more than simply an attempt to convey a historical truth, but rather an exploration of the basic forms and possibilities of human thought and action that praises the life of simplicity on the surface while denying its viability underneath—resolution to the novel’s conflicts is at once proffered and undermined. The underlying implication of this bit of cunning is that peace is impossible, that life is movement and that it is the ever troubled task of narrative to capture that movement, to impose being on becoming. We encounter at the very foundations of the novel not a choice in favor of Napoleon or Platon Karataev, but an affirmation of

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the impossibility of finally making such a choice, a restlessness of desire that cannot be eluded but that only takes on different masks at different times. Desire seeks to comprehend the infinite, to encompass the world, and, in seeking to do so by finite means, it ends up creating by destroying or eliminating its ostensible object. Repetition is thus inevitable: if it is impossible to be a god, it is intolerable to remain a man.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Tolstoy as quoted by Gorky. See Fortunatov 463. Translation by Clarence Brown. See Brown 34. 2. Rosen 17; Symposium 192e10-193a1 [“…tou holou oun tei epithumiai kai dioksei eros onoma”]. The translation is mine. Unless otherwise noted, all translations that follow are my own. Citations from Plato and Aristotle in the parenthetical notation in the body of the text will refer to the appropriate English translation listed in the Works Cited, while the page numbers indicated in the accompanying endnotes refer to the Stephanus edition for Plato and the Bekker edition for Aristotle since the page numbers in these latter editions are the standard for reference to the original Greek text in philosophical literature. The Greek editions used are also listed in the works cited. 3. Goethe employed the metaphor to describe a rhythm of taking apart (analysis) and putting together (synthesis) which for him characterized an inherent quality of rational activity. In comparing Kant’s use of these terms with his own, Goethe notes: “…for I had proceeded throughout my life, in writing and observing, synthetically, and then again analytically, the systole and diastole of the human mind was for me like a second draught of breath, never separate, always pulsing.” See Goethe 13: 27. Schelling also uses this metaphor more broadly in the 1815 draft of his Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) to describe the movement of expansion and contraction underlying the essentially contrapuntal structure, the web of oppositions, that makes up the whole. See Schelling 1927: 4/607. 4. Tolstoy SS 4: 394. All Russian quotations from War and Peace are based on this edition which prints the text of the novel established by E. E. Zaidenshnur after having conducted an exhaustive examination of published editions and manuscript variants in an effort to eliminate the many problems in the text. (For more information on the editorial principles involved, see Zaidenshnur’s article, “Istoriia pisaniia i pechataniia” (SS 7: 395-437)). All translations are based on two important English translations, one by Alymer and Louise Maude, the other by Ann Dunnigan, both of which I have not hesitated to modify where necessary for the sake of greater accuracy and literalness. The locations of quotations are henceforth given by the relevant Book, Part and Chapter to facilitate reference for those using other editions of the novel. Books and Chapters are designated by Roman numerals, Parts by Arabic numerals. 5. This is one facet of Hölderlin’s famous statement in Hyperion that “[i]t has always made the state a hell that man has wanted to make it a heaven.” See Hölderlin 3: 31. 6. See Abrams 229. Also see Jay 55. The comparison remains highly and obviously problematic, since the difference between the notion of education appropriate to the novel and the pursuit of absolute knowledge that runs through Hegel’s Phenomenology is perhaps so considerable as to undermine completely the utility of such a comparison. Yet, Hegel himself invites such comparison when he writes in the “Intro-

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duction” to the Phenomenology: “The series of shapes which consciousness passes through on this way is rather the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself towards scientific knowledge.” See Hegel 1980: 56. 7. See Eikhenbaum 1928. Also see Zaidenshnur (SS 7: 396), where she shows that history was at the center of the projected novel from the beginning. 8. N. D. Akhsharumov, “Voina i mir” in Sukhikh 86. 9. The citation is taken from a letter, dated February 26 (NS) 1868, to Pavel Annenkov who shared Turgenev’s dislike of the essays. See Turgenev VII: 64. Also see P. Annenkov, “Istoricheskie i esteticheskie voprosy v romane gr. L. N. Tolstogo ‘Voina i mir’” in Sukhikh 38-58. 10. For a discussion of the 1873 edition, see Zaidenshnur (SS 7: 420-421). This was the third edition of the text which has never attained canonical status because scholars consider this edition to be a concession to the novel’s critics; it both departs from Tolstoy’s original conception and also shows evidence of Nikolai Strakhov’s invasive editing (which included the re-writing of sentences for “stylistic reasons”). In fact, the most commonly printed edition is based either on the first or second editions of the novel (1868-69) but discards their division into six books in favor of the four book format introduced (by Tolstoy himself) with the third edition. 11. Flaubert’s comment comes from a letter to Turgenev who then sent on excerpts (including this comment) to Tolstoy in a letter dated January 24, 1880. See Turgenev XII/2. Also see Berlin 25. 12. See Shklovsky 1928 and Eikhenbaum 1928: 2/2/317-319. Kathryn Feuer suggests in a manner reminiscent of Eikhenbaum that the novel evidences different stages of composition which have different generic orientations. For Feuer there are three stages: what began as a “political novel” became a “novel of manners” and then a “philosophical novel.” See Feuer 3-4. For a remarkably similar division of the novel, see Pierre Pascal as quoted in Steiner 105-106. 13. See Eikhenbaum 1974: 98-99. 14. This kind of contradiction is a staple of the deconstructionist approach and has its origins in Heidegger’s curious dismissal of self-referential contradiction as a merely formal rule of thought. See, for example, Heidegger 1961: 1/501-502. 15. For a recent examination of repetition in Tolstoy, see Sankovitch. 16. Orwin traces this notion to Sergei Bocharov. See Bocharov 34-44.

Part One Chapter One 1. Berlin claims that the novel’s skepticism is a form of anti-reductionist empiricism or positivism, while Morson is apparently more radical, moving from skepticism to nihilism. What does nihilism mean here? It most likely means the raising of an essentially negative doctrine, that narratives cannot be true, to the status of a dogma. Yet, Morson is well supported by a tradition of Russian criticism that finds Tolstoy a nihilist for the same reasons, that he seems to deny the possibility of truth with the assurance of one who already possesses it.

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2. Philosophy is, after all, a preparation for death as Socrates says in the Phaedo (55 [64a4-6]). Moreover, the intimate relation between Christianity and death, the curious fact that Christianity is born near the tomb, struck many writers of the Romantic period. Melville, in an uncharitable mood, writes that “faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.” See Melville 55. 3. Theaetetus 174a4-8. [“hosper kai Thalen astronomounta, o Theodore, kai ano bleponta, pesonta eis frear, Thraitta tis emmeles kai chariessa Therapainis aposkopsai legetai os ta men en ouranoi prothoumoito eidenai, ta d’emprosthen autou kai para podas lanthanoi auton.”] 4. There is in this reversal an intriguing echo of the highly ambiguous attitudes towards the notion of khitrost’, understood as a certain dexterity of thought and expression, that are evident throughout the medieval literary tradition in Moscovy and also play a significant role in the writings of major figures in orthodoxy such as Avvakum. 5. See (XVII/2/I). Konstantin Leontiev not only carried the fatalistic line forward, he also pointed out the obvious similarity between the closed universe of fatalism and that of tragedy. See Leontiev, “On Tolstoy’s Qualities” in Knowles 381. 6. This phrase is taken from Fichte’s review of Aenesidemus, an important skeptical attack published in 1792 on the Elementarphilosophie of Karl Leonhard Reinhold, one of the Kantian philosophy’s early defenders. Fichte praises skepticism’s usefulness, its essential role on the way to truth, noting that “it is undeniable that philosophizing reason owes all the human progress which it has made so far to the observations of skepticism concerning the insecurity of every resting place yet obtained by reason.” See Fichte 59. 7. It is, however, worth mentioning that this representation of Kutuzov is not innocent. Rather, the fact that it is Prince Andrei who provides the representation leads to the suspicion that this is just one more instance in which Prince Andrei accords god-like authority to an individual. The suspicion of bias may be confirmed by other portraits of Kutuzov in the novel that deny him any such authority. The final result is inescapable ambiguity. 8. Christian was the first to identify these structures in the novel. See Christian 125. See also the somewhat restrained comments in Silbajoris 92-107. 9. The narrator is not omniscient; to claim, as several critics have, that this is the case, fails to account for the variety and complexity of narrative postures in the novel (what is, perhaps, not surprising in so far as Western critics often assume a more stable adherence to narrative convention in Tolstoy than the evidence warrants). 10. That belief in chance is equivalent to ignorance is a position set out in the second chapter of the First Epilogue. As to modern philosophy, Spinoza is a notable representative of a similar position outside the overtly Christian context: “But a thing is called contingent only because of a defect of our knowledge…because the order of causes is hidden from us, it can never seem to us either necessary or impossible. So we call it contingent or possible.” [“At res aliqua nulla alia de causa contingens dicitur, nisi respectu defectus nostrae cognitionis…propterea quod ordo causarum nos latet, ea numquam, nec ut necessaria, nec ut impossibilis videri nobis potest, ideoque eandem vel contingentem, vel possibilem vocamus.”] See Spinoza 107. (Translation of Part I, Proposition XXXIII, Scholium I of the Ethics by Edwin Curley)

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11. Pascal 563. [“…l’infinie immensité des espaces que j’ignore et qui m’ignorent…”] 12. The narrator uses three Russian words to describe the infinite in this chapter without regard to different shades of meaning among them. Both “beschislennyi” and “neischislennyi” may be translated by “innumerable,” although a more exact equivalent for “neischislennyi” may be “uncountable.” The Russian word “beskonechnyi” is properly translated by the word “infinite” whose Latin precursor, “infinitum,” exactly resembles the Russian in word structure and meaning, for in is equivalent to the prefix “bez” while “finis,” border or end, is near in semantic range to “konets.” “Beskonechnyi” can be construed to apply to the broadest definitions of “without limits, ends or termini” and can be construed to include within its scope almost any kind of infinite. Both the definitions of “beschislennyi” or “neischislennyi” refer more explicitly to infinity as a numerically defined quantity and, specifically, as a non-denumerable quantity, that is, a quantity which can never be counted out in full. 13. See Posterior Analytics 72b7-16; 83b5-9; 86a4-10; Metaphysics 994b16-27. A 3 at 72b7-16 sets out the infinite regress argument: “Those who suppose that one cannot have complete knowledge (holos epistasthai), asserting that we are led back without end since we do not understand the later things through the prior things of which there are no grounds, speak correctly—for it is impossible to survey infinitely many things.” That this argument became a favorite skeptical argument can be gleaned from the primary source of the arguments of that “school,” the writings of Sextus Empiricus. See Sextus Empiricus 165-177. 14. Posterior Analytics 71b9-13. The translation is mine. 15. This dominant Greek understanding of knowledge assumes a particular ontological attitude to the infinite. There is only one kind of infinite (whether of the great or small), the potential infinite (to einai dunamei apeiron). The potential infinite’s peculiar ontological status consists in its not being, i.e., its being is confined to negation or limit. Hence, nothing which is can be infinite; to be is to be finite or complete. Moreover, knowledge of any thing that is must also be complete or finite. Therefore, knowledge of the infinite is a contradiction and, as such, impossible; it is knowledge of nothing. See Physics 206a14-25. 16. The point is that the narrator does not say that the event as a phenomenological “fact” cannot be known, but rather that the causes for the event without which, as I have noted, knowledge of the event is not possible, cannot be known. 17. Finite number can only provide an illusion of partial quantity, for what amount of infinity can any finite number be? One may illustrate the problem by performing the simple operation of adding 1 to the infinite. If 1 is added to the infinite the sum does not equal the infinite +1, for this would suggest that the infinite is a definite number, i.e. finite, but rather the infinite +1=the infinite. One must therefore relinquish the desire to obtain some knowledge of the whole, if the whole is infinite, because partial knowledge of the infinite is only ever a beginning of knowledge of it. See Benardete 116. Benardete relates a celebrated anecdote given by David Hilbert in his lectures on infinity, that of the Grand Hotel. The Grand Hotel contains an infinite number of rooms. One night a traveler is unable to find lodging and asks for a room at the Grand Hotel. The manager takes pity on the traveler and announces over a telephone system which provides him with access to all the rooms in the hotel that, due to

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unforeseen circumstances, each lodger must leave his present room and move to the one next door. The lodger in room 1 will move to room 2 and so on. The manager, having completed his announcement, turns to the traveler and tells him to take room number 1. The number of rooms does not change, but the number of lodgers does. 18. My interpretation of classical physics follows that of Ernst Cassirer and Alexandre Kojève. See Cassirer 3-25 and Kojève 25-46.

Chapter Two 1. Historians are not alone in this practice; it seems to be a psychological tendency and is shared by notable characters in the novel as well. Natasha cannot help but think that her love for Prince Andrei was fated from their first meeting at Otradnoe: “It seemed to Natasha that even at the time she first saw Prince Andrei at Otradnoe, she had fallen in love with him” (II/3/XXII). But we are led to suspect from Prince Andrei’s description of this first meeting that Natasha hardly noticed him. A difference is that Natasha sees her love for Prince Andrei as fated by a greater power, whereas historians look to the human will as the determining force in history. Like Pierre in the period preceding his marriage to Helen, historians fail to distinguish between heaven and earth, the divine and the merely human. 2. See Berlin 25. 3. For this observation, I am indebted to John Bayley. See Bayley 103. I should note that Shklovsky was of course well aware of the French sources of Tolstoy’s technique. See Shklovsky 63. 4. See Bayley 103. 5. The locus classicus for this thinking is Plato’s dialogue Meno in which Socrates shows that an ignorant slave boy can attain to mathematical knowledge through a kind of prompting that permits him to recollect the truth that his soul possesses but loses upon its return to a body. See also, Gutkina, “The Dichotomy between Flesh and Spirit: Plato’s Symposium in Anna Karenina” in McLean 84-99. 6. Physics 239b14-29. 7. Physics 263a4-263b9. 8. I use the term “infinitesimal” in this explanation because that is the term Tolstoy uses in the novel. The concept is troubling (how can one obtain a “sum” of infinitesimals?) and was in fact eliminated by the innovations of Cauchy and Weierstrass in the 19th century, although it has been revived in the 20th century by Abraham Robinson’s non-standard analysis. Generally speaking, modern calculus employs in place of an infinitesimal difference (equivalent to zero) the complex notion of a limit; there are no more mysterious infinitesimal quantities to ponder. Tolstoy seems to have been unaware of these developments or the problem itself—this may be the fault of his sources. See Eikhenbaum 1928: 2/2/351-388. 9. See Arendt II: 89. Arendt maintains that arbitrium is to will as a faculty whose choices are set (arbitrium) is to one which sets its choices (will). 10. This interpretation arguably does violence to the notion of infinitesimals as commonly understood and, of course, one could object that the term ‘differential” merely denotes one of the infinitesimal differences (differentiae as Leibniz originally called them) that forms an element of the differential relationship, the differential co-

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efficient or derivative in modern terminology. This is a plausible argument suggesting that Tolstoy conflates the differences, notionally infinitesimal measures of change, with motion, a “product” of the differential relation between these infinitesimals, specifically, between distance and time. The key distinction between the two possible interpretations is that one suggests Tolstoy understands that motion is essentially relational, while the other does not, assuming that the infinitesimal segments simply need to be added up to get to laws of motion. Among other difficulties, it seems to me that this latter thesis renders the notion both of a limit to activity (apparent exercise of freedom) and of attaining to an “art” of integration incoherent, since, in the latter case, one has only to add a series of “units.” Hence, I suspect that Tolstoy is loose with his terms and assumes a relation when the narrator mentions the differential and not an infinitesimal difference of some kind, e.g. distance or time. Having said that, I do not wish to glide over the difficulties a detailed interpretation of the narrator’s notion of the infinitesimal has to address. Perhaps the danger of incoherence here only reveals more clearly that a different approach, one that assumes much less precision is not only warranted but necessary. Indeed, the lack of precision on Tolstoy’s part may also be a nod in this direction. 11. See Eikhenbaum 1928: 2/2/ 341-385. 12. Hegel provides a most penetrating modern treatment of this relation in the chapter entitled “Sense Certainty” (“Die Sinnliche Gewißheit“) of the Phenomenology (1977: 58-66; 1988: 69-78). In that chapter Hegel reveals the weakness of the opposition of the particular and the universal by affirming their necessary prior grounding in the universal (“das Allgemeine”). Hegel also asserts that language expresses that generality without which indeed no expression of any kind would be possible. 13. Berlin’s view can also give rise to suspicion about the sincerity of the narrator’s claims. That Tolstoy may be exercising a form of esoteric writing seems particularly relevant in this regard if only to those who believe that the narrator cannot be serious about calculus. By esoteric writing, I mean the ostensibly ancient practice of concealing unacceptable meaning under an acceptable cover as brought to light in this century by Leo Strauss. In his book, Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss makes the case for the widespread practice of this writing of concealment whereby dangerous truths may be transmitted to those worthy of them. Strauss claims that one of the characteristic ways in which writers have diverted the attention of the “vulgar” is to commit “such blunders as would shame an intelligent high school boy.” In the present case, one might make the claim that the narrator’s proposal to use calculus conceals a dangerous skepticism. But if that were so, it is difficult to understand why the narrator would directly express skepticism in regard to causation and only later mute that expression. See Strauss 30. 14. The narrator affirms this view in similar terms earlier in the novel, in the Third Part of Book III: There is, and can be, no cause of an historical event except the one cause of all causes. But there are laws directing events, and some of these laws are known to us while we are conscious of others we cannot comprehend. The discovery of these laws is only possible when we have quite abandoned the attempt to find the cause in the will of some one man, just as the discovery of the laws of motion of

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the planets was possible only when men abandoned the conception of the fixity of the earth. (III/3/I) 15. Another argument Morson advances to combat Tolstoy’s determinist outlook suggests that a greater number of laws is somehow not supportive of determinism, since more laws means uncertainty. I can only assume that this argument means to say that an infinity of laws runs against determinism. But this is not clearly the case, since to deny our ability to know the deterministic structure of the world is not to deny the reality of that structure; such a position is in fact based on the assumption, a distinctly problematic one, to the effect that only what we can know at any given time is real. Further, as Alexandre Kojève notes: “The idea of an infinite system of equations [i.e. laws] is not at all contradictory in itself, and it is not the presence of the infinite which can stop the mathematician” [“L’idée d’un système infini d’équations n’a en soi rien de contradictoire, et ce n’est pas la présence d’un infini qui peut arrêter le mathématicien]. See Kojève 56. While this comment may seem overly glib, there is a useful point to it: simply because one cannot presently grasp the whole structure of reality, find that uniform field theory or theory of theories that scientists are quite actively seeking, does not mean that the basic premise of such a theory, that the universe is knowable because it obeys certain laws, is to be dismissed out of hand. The notion, for example, that the quantum universe has once and for all refuted determinism is certainly not without its detractors, principal among whom was Einstein himself. The persistence of the “hidden variable” notion shows the vitality of determinist views and a concern that the probabilistic nature of quantum physics is nothing more than an affirmation of finite limitation, of our inability to see the final patterns that govern the universe. It is also obvious (if still worth mentioning) that the curious coincidence of quantum thinking with the breakdown of old certainties in Europe and, especially Germany, is a highly suggestive one—here the pride of modern science has weakened and taken a form which some scientists refer to as a kind of “mysticism.” In any event, the fact is that theological determinism, that God knows what we only glimpse, is quite compatible with quantum thought. See Hemion 97. I am grateful to Arkady Kholodenko for this latter reference. 16. This citation comes from Cassirer’s introduction to a German translation of the principal writings of Leibniz. See Leibniz 1: xxxix-xl. The German reads: Die Ausbildung der wissentschaftlichen Naturansicht der neuren Zeit ist durch den Gegensatz gegen das Aristotelische System der “substantiellen Formen” bestimmt und geleitet. Wenn Aristoteles den inneren Urgrund alles Geschehens zu enthüllen gedachte, wenn er die ersten Anfänge bloßzulegen suchte, die alles Werden aus sich hervortreiben, so beginnt die moderne Wissenschaft mit der Selbstbescheidung, daß uns nichts anderes als die Erscheinungen selbst in ihren mannigfachen Verhältnissen gegeben sind, und daß die Aufgabe der Theorie sich darauf beschränkt, sie auf allgemeingültige, gesetzliche Ordnungen zurückzuführen und in ihnen zu “verstehen.” Nicht die absoluten, inneren Wesenheiten der Dinge und der Veränderungen, sondern nur die immanente Regel ihrer räumlichen Ordnung und ihrer zeitlichen Wiederkehr gilt es zu begreifen. Die wesentliche Aufgabe der Aristotelischen Physik lag darin, von den besonderen Phänomenen auf die allgemeinen zwecktätigen Kräfte zurückzuschließen, die sie bedingen und hervorbringen. Die gesamte äußere Wirk-

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lichkeit ward nunmehr in ein Spiel derartiger Kräfte umgedeutet: jede physikalische Veränderung war nur Ausdruck einer inneren Wandlung, kraft deren die ursprüngliche “Form” des Dinges sich allmählich zu entfalten und zu verwirklichen strebt. Alles materielle Geschehen war damit als ein Ergebnis und ein Zusammenwirken bestimmter organischer Triebe gedacht, deren jeder auf die Hervorbringung einer besonderen individuellen Gestaltung gerichtet ist. 17. Physics 192b13-15 [ta men gar phusei onta panta phainetai echonta en heautois archen kineseos kai staseos—ta men kata topon, ta de kat’auksesin kai phthisin, ta de kat’alloiosin—]. 18. The Latin reads: “Jam vero ex his omnibus est concludendum, non quidem solas Arithmeticam & Geometriam esse addiscendas, sed tantummodo rectum veritatis est iter quaerentes circa nullum objectum debere occupari, de quo non possint habere certitudinem Arithmeticis & Geometricis demonstrationibus aequalem” (X: 366). 19. The Latin reads: “Atque ita per hanc propositionem rejicimus illas omnes probabiles tantum cognitiones, nec nisi perfecte cognitis, & de quibus dubitari non potest, statuimus esse credendum.” 20. Pascal 610 [“Car enfin, qu’est-ce l’homme dans la nature? Un néant à l’égard de l’infini, un tout à l’égard du néant, un milieu entre rien et tout. Infiniment éloigné de comprendre les extrêmes…“]. 21. Leibniz writes in one of his German texts: Mathematics or the art of measuring can elucidate such things very nicely, for everything in nature is, as it were, set out in number, measure and weight or force. If, for example, one sphere meets another sphere in free space and if one knows their sizes and their paths and directions before collision, one can then foretell and calculate how they will rebound and what course they will take after the impact. Such splendid laws also apply, no matter how many spheres are taken or whether objects are taken other than spheres. From this one sees then that everything proceeds mathematically—that is, infallibly—in the whole wide world, so that if someone could have sufficient insight into the inner parts of things, and in addition had remembrance and intelligence enough to consider all the circumstances and to take them into account, he would be a prophet and would see the future in the present as in a mirror. This is quoted in Cassirer 11-12. Cassirer comments that the “same infallibility that discloses itself in mathematical thought and inference must obtain in nature, for if nature did not possess this infallibility it would be inaccessible to mathematical thought. In this mode of argument there is expressed the characteristic subjective fervor that inspired the first founders and champions of classical rationalism.” It is worthwhile to add that the essence of the modern striving to mathematize nature is an overcoming of the reticence of Greek and Christian culture in regard to the possibility of obtaining true knowledge, the prerogative of the gods or God. Hence, the narrator’s juxtaposition of the ancients and the moderns, as it were, in his discussion of continuous motion, seems entirely consonant with this interpretation of modernity. 22. Berlin 46. Zaidenschnur (SS 7: 404). Christian 1-59. 23. As noted in Eikhenbaum 1974: 69.

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24. Translation by George Gibian. Note the similarity between the statements made in the letter and the passage quoted above in note 2 from Pierre’s dream after Borodino. Goethe, whose closeness to Tolstoy is no secret, being one of those unusual artistic affinities that emerge in the course of our tradition, writes in a similar vein that the “truth, identical with the divine, never allows itself to be known directly, we see it only in its reflection (Abglanz), in example, in symbol, in individual and related appearances; we perceive it as incomprehensible life and yet cannot relinquish our wish to understand it.” See Goethe 13: 305. Elsewhere, in the great fragment, Pandora, Goethe writes that man is “fixed to see what is illuminated and not the light.” See Goethe 5: 362. 25. “Neskol’ko slov po povodu knigi ‘Voina i mir’” (SS 7: 385). 26. Christian 122-147. Also see Sankovitch for her comprehensive treatment of repetition. 27. This statement recalls Goethe’s well-known comment to Eckermann: “‘The world remains always the same,’ said Goethe, ‘conditions repeat themselves, one people lives, loves and feels like another…’” [“‘Die Welt bleibt immer diesselbe,’ sagte Goethe, ‘die Zustände wiederholen sich, das eine Volk lebt, liebt und empfindet wie das andere…’”] See Eckermann 128. 28. Nietzsche writes in a Goethean vein: “…the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be.” [“…je mehr Affekte wir über eine Sache zu Worte kommen lassen, je mehr Augen, verschiedene Augen wir uns für dieselbe Sache einzusetzen wissen, um so vollständiger wird unser ‘Begriff’ dieser Sache, unsere ‘Objektivität’ sein.”]. See Nietzsche 5: 365. 29. See Shklovsky 1991: 61-65; Todorov 22. 30. See Joseph Frank. Calculus is indeed the key to grasping the spatial form of War and Peace—eadem, sed aliter—and, in my view, the calculus proposal advocates reading the novel in a way that also reflects very closely in its basic outlines the principles of modern structuralism. It is, after all, fair to say that the techniques of structuralism represent a formalization of literary analysis inspired by mathematical formalism as so many other areas of modern inquiry. Moreover, with its emphasis on a system outside the subject, on discovering the laws of that system and on viewing individual literary works as manifestations of those laws, I think structuralism is remarkably close in intent and execution to the calculus analogy. Indeed, even the basic question of the infinitesimal or minimal unit is vital and vexing both in regard to structuralism and the calculus proposal.

Chapter Three 1. I am quite aware of the dangers that employing the term realism incurs. Realism as mimetic verisimilitude is a modern problem and concept. What we think is realistic may not apply to other periods. Hence, I think it is best to qualify my comments by suggesting that the novel captures a certain modern experience of the world, one which passed and still passes for realistic. Much of this has to do, as Nabokov noted, with Tolstoy’s depiction of time. See Nabokov 141. See also Jakobson, “On Realism in Art” in Jakobson 19-27.

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2. The German reads: “Alle Empiriker streben nach der Idee und können sie in der Mannigfaltigkeit nicht entdecken; alle theoretiker suchen sie im Mannigfaltigen und können sie darinne nicht auffinden. //Beide jedoch finden sich im Leben, in der Tat, in der Kunst zusammen…” 3. Orwin 101. 4. This structure is followed by Virgil and the tradition that takes the Aeneid as its model (in varying degrees this includes Camões, Ariosto, Tasso, and Milton). 5. Republic 392c-395. 6. This is a constant refrain in Steiner’s book and a reputed discovery of Nabokov who archly suggests that Dostoevsky might have “done better” as a dramatist. 7. See Bocharov 34-44 and Orwin, 107. 8. “Neskol’ko slov po povodu knigi ‘Voina i mir’” (SS 7: 382). 9. My intention here is to examine the problematic “novelness” of War and Peace from the perspective of the patterns I have thus far identified. The problem of generic classification has been a significant one in critical discussions of the novel since it was first published. While there are a number of studies relating to the novel’s generic identity, Eikhenbaum’s writings on Tolstoy in the 60s being one of the most notable in this regard, the philosophical motivations of the relation of between epic and novel in War and Peace present an arguably more tenuous topic. For a useful summary of the main issues involved in regard to the generic classification of War and Peace, see Morson 37-65 and Silbajoris 108-123. 10. See Bakhtin 1990: 22-27. The association of knowledge with vision is founded in Greek thought and, specifically, in its expression, the ancient Greek language. The ancient Greek verb “to know” (eidenai) is a perfect form of the verb “to see” and has the same root as the Greek eidos, idea or form. The Greek word Theoria derives from the root thea, a look or view. The Greek origins have left a permanent imprint, decisively influencing subsequent thought. The highest form of knowledge is still vision or an immediate intuition of what is. Such knowledge is to be distinguished from discursivity that remains dependent on it. This dependence becomes a fundamental issue in the modern era, the debate over priority, whether that of reason (rationalism) or of the senses (empiricism) or a synthesis of the two (Kant) where reason as understanding is dependent and as itself in its purity is independent, a radically selflegislating “faculty.” 11. See Ricoeur 1: 3-30. Ricoeur notes that “time becomes human to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience” (1: 3). Bakhtin is more radical. Temporal experience is the result of narrative or narrative is a specific configuration of temporal experience. For Bakhtin there is no time outside of narrative time, the chronotope, Bakhtin’s development of the Transcendental Aesthetic. 12. “Consequently the content and form of epic proper is the entire world-outlook and objective manifestation of a national spirit presented in its self-objectifying shape as an actual event.” Hegel 1975: II/1044. (Also see Hegel 1970: 15/325-415.) 13. Jean-Marie Schaeffer argues against the “speculative theory of art” that he associates with the great German idealist thinkers and, above all, with Hegel. Schaeffer rejects the notion that art requires a metaphysical justification, that it is somehow one route to grasping metaphysical truths. He believes that philosophy has invaded and distorted art leading to the circulation of fashionable ideas such as the “death of art,”

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which merely reflect the same kind of grounding crisis that many attribute to modern philosophy in the wake of Hegel and Heidegger. 14. I owe this observation to Vladimir Alexandrov. 15. Schelling 1936: 9. The German reads: Denn diese große Aufgabe allein ist die unbewußte und unsichtbare Triebfeder alles Strebens nach Erkenntnis von dem niedigsten bis zum höchsten; ohne den Widerspruch von Notwendigkeit und Freiheit würde nicht Philosophie allein, sondern jedes höhere Wollen des Geistes in den Tod versinken, der jenen Wissenschaften eigen ist, in welchen er keine Anwendung hat. 16. Schelling 2000: 90 (translation modified). The German reads: Alles Leben muß durchs Feuer des Widerspruchs gehen; Widerspruch ist des Lebens Triebwerk und Innerstes. Davon kommt’s, daß, wie ein altes Buch sagt, alles Thun unter der Sonne so voll Mühe ist und alles sich in Arbeit verzehrt und doch nicht müde wird, und alle Kräfte unaufhörlich gegeneinander ringen. Wäre nur Einheit und alles in Frieden, dann fürwahr würde sich nichts rühren wollen, und alles in Verdroßenheit versinken, da es jetzt eifrig hervor strebt, um aus der Unruhe in die Ruhe zu gelangen.

Part Two 1. Tolstoy’s adaptation of Lao-tsu in The Way of Life (Put’ zhizni) (PSS 62: 69). 2. Sophocles 24 [at line 554: “en toi phronein gar meden hedistos bios”].

Chapter Four 1. See Hume 1978: 72-83; 1975: 60-79. 2. The whole passage reads as follows in the original: Wenn nämlich Gott im Sinne des christlichen Gottes aus seiner Stelle in der übersinnlichen Welt verschwunden ist, dann bleibt immer noch die Stelle selbst erhalten, obzwar als die leer gewordene. Der leer gewordene Stellenbereich des Übersinnlichen und der idealen Welt kann noch festgehalten werden. Die leere Stelle fordert sogar dazu auf, sie neu zu besetzen und den daraus entschwundenen Gott durch anderes zu ersetzen. 3. Tolstoy uses the term “hive life” in the first chapter of Book III. 4. To daimonion (or daimon) is the Greek term that Socrates reports Diotima using to describe the half-state of human striving or eros in the Symposium (193 [202d13-14]). 5. Tolstoy wrote about Dostoevsky that the latter was “all struggle” and that “one cannot place on a pedestal for the instruction of posterity” such a man. There seems to be no discrepancy between this view and those Tolstoy advances in the Second Part of the Epilogue. The ideal characters in the novel like Platon Karataev are not all struggle; it is precisely his lack of struggle, his inner harmony that distinguishes Platon. See Jackson 112-113. 6. This translates the Latin, ob-iectum, from the preposition ob, meaning “before,” “in front of,” “over against,” and the verb iacio, “to throw before,” “offer,” “expose.” The Russian, predmet, would seem to have a quite similar structure; all evidence is that it is an eighteenth-century calque from Latin. The preposition pred also means “before” or “in front of,” while met comes from the verb metat; which means “to

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throw” or “to fling.” I might add that the Latin etymology is debated—there is question about the underlying verb, whether it is iacio (“to throw”) or iecio (‘to lie”)—and I have made my own choices based on both the Russian and German calques. 7. Metaphorical language is unavoidable here, for I am attempting to describe knowledge in terms of the language of perspective or vision. This approach is hardly new. In fact, as noted earlier, it can be traced back to the Greeks as a legion of scholars and philosophers have noted in this century. 8. See Eikhenbaum 1974: 93-101. Also see Orwin 150. Orwin suggests more aggressively that Tolstoy simply borrowed the “argument on the relationship of determinism and freedom of the will in the second epilogue.” While this latter position cannot be denied, evidence that Tolstoy adapted the argument in telling ways must be given due weight as well. 9. Kritik der reinen Vernunft A107, A117, B132. Citations from Kant in the parenthetical notation in the body of the text will refer to the English translation listed in the Works Cited, while the page numbers indicated in the accompanying endnotes refer to the standard form of reference (to the first (A) and second editions (B)) to the German text used in philosophical literature. 10. “…denn das Selbstbewußtsein ist unmittelbar. Wie dem auch sei, so ist unsere nächste Frage: was enthält nun das Selbstbewußtsein? oder: wie wird der Mensch sich seines eigenen Selbsts unmittelbar bewußt? Antwort: durchaus als eines Wollenden.” Schopenhauer’s language reflects the impact of Schelling’s essay on free will where Schelling asserts that “Willing is original being.” See Schelling 1936: 24 (translation modified). 11. This important passage is also quoted by Harry Walsh who recognized the barely digested presence of Schopenhauer in the Second Part of the Epilogue. See Walsh 573-574. Also see McLaughlin 15-45. 12. Kritik der reinen Vernunft B 132. 13. See Eikhenbaum 1974: 98. 14. Kritik der reinen Vernunft A24/B39. 15. Kritik der reinen Vernunft A34/B50. 16. See Cassirer 3-25 and Kojève, 25-46. 17. See Crocker 3-35. Here one can perceive the seminal influence of the great debates among the eighteenth-century philosophes concerning rival conceptions of man either as being merely another “part” of an indifferent, non-teleological nature or as having a special place in nature. Tolstoy’s place in this debate is rather more complex than it might appear at first glance and, hence, cannot be examined closely or adequately here; rather, the many as yet unexplored filiations of Tolstoy’s thought with his predecessors merit in their own right an independent study. 18. Rousseau 1992: 43-44; See Schelling 2000: 90. 19. This point of view is certainly not unique to Tolstoy and reflects some of the central tensions in Enlightenment thinking about freedom and determinism. Diderot, for one, expresses very similar views in Jacques the Fatalist. See Crocker 155. Also see Gustafson 264-27. But it is hardly surprising that, once again, Rousseau’s presence is probably the decisive one. See Rousseau 1997: 561 and Rousseau 1979: 272274. Also see Orwin 102. 20. Manfred Frank 155-174.

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Chapter Five 1. As I noted in my introductory comments, this terminology is derived from Schelling who uses the Goethian analogy of diastole and systole broadly in the 1815 draft of his Ages of the World to describe the movement of expansion and contraction underlying the essentially contrapuntal structure, the web of oppositions, that makes up the whole. See Schelling 2000: 21. Patricia Carden identifies a similar movement relating more specifically to the self or subject with what she calls (using terms from Isaiah Berlin), “expressivity.” 2. This is not to deny, however, that another sense of destiny is also alive in the novel. One has only to think of the series of apparent coincidences that “permit” Pierre to marry Natasha. Here the suggestion that there is a divine order and plan is unmistakable. But I think that this latter kind of destiny is another hint in the novel at the reality of the divine presence in human life useful but not determinative for the characters themselves. For them doubt about that presence is more immediate and persuasive; it in fact drives their desire to find the truth, to master an elusive and hostile reality. 3. M. Yu. Lermontov, “Napoleon.” See Lermontov 1: 28. 4. “Dieu me la donne, gare à qui la touche”/”Dio me la dona, guai a chi la tocca.” 5. Faust in Goethe 3: 17 at lines 281-285. The German reads: Der kleine Gott der Welt bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag Und ist so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag. Ein wenig besser würd er leben, Hättst du ihm nicht den Schein des Himmelslichts gegeben ... 6. See John Weeks, “Love, Death and Cricketsong: Prince Andrei at Mystishchi” in McLean 61-83. 7. Heidegger 1961: I/503. The German reads: “…jeder wesentliche Satz weist auf einen Grund zurück, der sich nicht beseitigen läßt, der vielmehr nur fordert, gründlicher ergründet zu werden.” 8. Kritik der reinen Vernunft AVII in Kemp Smith’s translation. The German reads: Die menschliche Vernunft hat das besondere Schicksal in einer Gattung ihrer Erkenntnisse: daß sie durch Fragen belästigt wird, die sie nicht abweisen kann; denn sie sind ihr durch die Natur der Vernunft selbst aufgegeben, die sie aber auch nicht beantworten kann; denn sie übersteigen alles Vermögen der menschlichen Vernunft. 9. Steiner 275. Quoting this very line, Steiner says that the “…weak writing here is revelatory. The figure of Platon and his effect on Pierre are motifs of a ‘Dostoevskian’ character. They lie on the limits of Tolstoy’s domain.” 10. “The rose is without a reason why; it blooms because it blooms, It pays no attention to itself, nor asks if one is looking at it.” [“Die Ros ist ohn warum; sie blühet, weil sie blühet, Sie acht nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet.”] This is quoted in Heidegger 1957: 77. 11. Virgil VI: 697-702. Hermann Broch uses these lines as an epigraph to his novel, The Death of Virgil, which questions the ability of language to deal with death,

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to describe what strips away all illusions of perdurance. The connection with Tolstoy seems obvious and pertinent.

Conclusion 1. Sophocles 196 [at lines 332-333 : “polla ta deina kouden an/ thropou deinoteron pelei”]. 2. See Manfred Frank’s interesting discussion of the turn to aesthetics in Manfred Frank 7-24. 3. This is of course Wittgenstein’s famous argument that winds through most of the Philosophical Investigations in a number of different contexts. Saul Kripke’s treatment of its implications is particularly suggestive if also rather controversial; yet, it has the virtue of revealing in an extremely lucid way the inherently public nature of rules and standards.

WORKS CITED

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INDEX

Abrams, M. H., 189n.6 Akhsharumov, N. D., 190n.8 Alexandrov, V. E., 199n.14 Annenkov, P., 190n.9 Architectonic, 44-46 Arendt, Hannah, 193n.9 Aristophanes, 2 Aristotle, 16, 53, 71, 82, 83, 192nn.13, 14 (Posterior Analytics) and 15 (Physics), 193nn.6 and 7 (Physics) Augustine, 7

Bakhtin, M. M., 107-113, 115, 117, 120, 198n.10 Bayley, John, 193nn.3 and 4 Benardete, J. A., 192n.17 Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 11-13, 15, 79, 80, 91, 96, 190n.11, 193n.2, 194n.13, 196n.22, 201n.1 Bildungsroman, 7 Bocharov, Sergei, 13, 104, 190n.16, 198n.7 Broch, Hermann, 202n.11 Brown, Clarence, 189n.1

Calculus, 5, 69, 72-74, 76, 78-82, 85, 87-94, 115, 145, 149-150, 183, 193nn.8 and 10, 197n.30 Carden, Patricia, 201n.2 Cassirer, Ernst, 83, 193n.18, 195n.16, 196n.21, 200n.16 Cauchy, Augustin-Louis, 193n.8 Causation, 48-49, 51, 55, 81, 86, 98, 129, 149, 151, 194n.14 Chance, 21, 26, 28, 33, 35, 39, 40, 41, 51, 67, 134, 173, 191 Chaos, 20, 36, 40-41, 48, 59, 64-68, 77, 80, 97, 103, 105, 110, 114, 117, 120, 134

Christian, R. F., 13, 15, 62, 94 Comic (the), 6, 65, 155-156, 157, 171, 184, 187. See also tragic (the) Consciousness, 138-145; and reason, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 14, 16, 105, 108, 117, 121, 123, 124, 132, 133, 137, 146, 151, 152, 153, 154, 165; and generic form, 107-117 passim; contradiction between freedom and, 121, 155-157; burden of, 157, 180; grounding of, 184, 186 Continuity, 70, 72 Continuous motion, 70-72, 74-76, 81, 196 Continuum, 71 Contradiction, 3, 13, 39, 48, 50, 54; law of, 105; openness and form, 109-110, 114, 117; between freedom and necessity/and system, 121, 132; subject and object, 137; overcoming of, 154-157; selfreferential, 184, 186, 190; and knowledge of the infinite, 192 Creation (ex nihilo), 39-43 Crocker, Lester, 200n.17

Dante, 104 Descartes, René, 82-85, 140 Desire: restlessness of, 1-2, 188; and reason, 40; and epic absolute, 117; motive force of history, 154-156; and mastery, 157, 167, 169, 175; and grounding, 172, 182 Determinism, 14, 32; in classical physics, 55, 195n.15, 200n.19 Dialectic, 8 Diderot, Denis, 200n.17 Diegesis, 98 Differentiae, 70, 194n.10

208 Differential: and presentation of philosophical ideas, 32; of history, 72, 75; equations, 74, 89; co-efficient (calculus), 193n.10 Digression, 44 Dostoevsky, F. M., 12, 101, 159, 175, 198n.6, 199n.5 Doxa, 53 Dunnigan, Ann, 189n.4

Eikhenbaum, Boris, 8, 11, 14, 44, 99, 138, 145, 190nn.7, 12 and 13, 193n.8, 194n.11, 197n.23, 198n.9, 200nn.8 and 13 Epic: and novel, 6, 107-117; generic change to, 8, 11; and temporality, 110-112; and beginnings, 99, 198n.4; and tragedy, 182, 184 Episteme, 53 Eros, 2, 189n.2, 199n.4. See also Desire Euripides, 119, 120 Evil: and freedom, 182, 183, 186

Failure: and striving, 1; and absolute vision, 96; and movement, 116; inevitability of, 157; tragic and comic interpretation of, 171 Fatalism, 31, 32; "oriental," 29; 191n.5 Fate, 28, 42, 115, 158, 171, 172, 176 Feuer, Kathryn, 190n.12 Fichte, J. G., 191n.6 Finitude, 6; and freedom, 7, 151; and the infinite mind, 85-87; radical, 109; irony of, 125, 181; and duality, 143; and Prince Andrei, 165, 168, 170; and tragedy, 171; and Pierre, 172 Flaubert, Gustave, 11, 59, 101, 190n.11 Force: dynamic points of, 75; and freedom, 81; as internal nature (vis activa) of things, 83-84; and linkages, 106; and incommensurability

Index thesis, 127-128, 131; and history, 154, 193n.1 Form: and the infinite, 3; and narrative, 5, 10-16, 96, 123; selfunfolding, 83-84; and calculus, 90; spatial, 95, 197n.30; of consciousness, 107-117; and immediacy, 157; pursuit of mastery, 164, 171; and order, 186, 187; or eidos, 198n.10 Fortunatov, N. D., 189n.1 Frank, Joseph, 95, 197n.30 Frank, Manfred, 201n.20, 202n.3 Freedom: and finitude, 7, 168; and proizvol ("will"), 81; and the present, 97; and novelistic temporality, 110-117 passim; and the hunt, 119121; as the "problem of history," 133-135; origin of, 135-138; and consciousness, 139-143; and reason/necessity, 144, 151-152; and silence, 182-184; and determinism, 200n.19 Fugue structure, 47

Genette, Gérard, 98 Genius, 59, 107, 158 Genre, 97; importance of, 107; epic and novel, 107-117 Gibian, George, 197n.24 God, 15, 41, 51; and finitude, 6, 82, 84, 86-87, 144, 182, 183; and absolute vision, 96; intuition, 86, 116; and historical writing, 125, 131, 132; quid sit deus? 160; and Napoleon, 160-161; and Pierre, 174 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 3, 7, 106, 168, 189n.3, 197n.24, 198n.2, 201n.1 Gustafson, Richard, 14, 200n.19 Gutkina, Irina, 193n.5

Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 107, 112, 113, 141, 163, 189n.6, 194n.12, 198n.12 Heidegger, Martin, 111, 113, 131, 172, 190n.14, 199n.13, 201n.7

Index

209

Hemion, Geoffrey, 195n.15 Heraclitus, 187 Hilbert, David, 192n.17 Historical essays, 2, 4, 19, 20, 123, 129, 132; relation to fictional text, 5, 6; generic role of, 8, 10-17 passim; skepticism in, 43-47; genre of, 44 Historiography, 81, 91, 125, 126 History: movement of, 5, 181; fatalism in, 50-51, 193n.1; calculus (laws) of, 70-78, 87, 89; differential of, 75; Berlin on, 79-80; Morson on, 8182; problem of, 124-133, 134, 154, 155 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 189n.5 Holism, 80, 155 Hume, David, 129, 199n.1

198n.10, 200nn.9, 12, 14, and 15, 201n.8 Kholodenko, Arkady, 195n.15 Knowledge: of the whole, 2; theory of, 15, 16; and narrative, 20, 29, 31, 106-117, 123-124; object of, 39-43, 51; Greek notion of, 53-54; modern notion of, 55; transition from Greek to modern notion of, 70-78, 82, 8385, 127, 130-131; infinite, 96; and contradiction, 121; sources of (Kant), 139; and self-consciousness (apperception), 140-141, 145-151 passim; and the infinite, 154, 167, 172; and evil, 183-186 Kojève, Alexandre, 193n.18, 195n.15, 200n.16 Kripke, Saul, 202n.11

Identity, 6, 19, 120, 149 Infinite regress, 53, 56, 57, 192n.13 Infinitesimal, 72-76, 193nn.8 and 10; and narrative structure, 90-91, 197n.30; critique of, 79, 80, 81 Infinity: and causation, 2, 47-54, 81; and continuous motion, 70-72; and knowledge, 96; circle of, 131; and laws, 195n.15 Integration, 57, 58, 65, 66, 73, 194n.10; and differentiation, 74; and narrative, 78, 79, 92, 93, 97; and laws, 82, 149; Intuition: immediacy of, 40, 86, 144, 154, 198n.10; and God, 86, 116; sensory (Kant), 139, 152; a priori (space and time), 146

Law: of excluded middle, 16; of contradiction, 105 Laws of history, 70-78, 87, 89; versus causal accounts, 70-78, 82, 83-85, 131. See also Calculus Leibniz, G. W., 71, 149, 194n.10, 196n.21 Leontiev, Konstantin, 191n.5 Lermontov, Mikhail, 23, 159, 201n.3 Locke, John, 140 Lukács, Georg, 107, 108, 112, 113, 115, 117

Jackson, Robert Louis, 199n.5 Jakobson, Roman, 198n.1 Jay, Martin, 189n.6

Kant, Immanuel, 108, 139, 140, 141, 145, 146, 152, 172, 189n.3,

Mandel’shtam, O. E., 104 Mastery, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 156, 157, 158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 167, 173, 179, 183 Maude, Aylmer and Louise, 189n.4 McLaughlin, Sigrid, 200n.11 Melville, Herman, 191n.2 Mimesis, 39, 41, 98, 186 Morson, Gary Saul, 12, 52, 80, 96, 120, 190n.1, 195n.15, 198n.9 Motion: continuity of, 70-72; laws of, 76-77

210 Nabokov, V. V., 197n.1, 198n.6 Narrative: striving and, 1-9; critical reception of, 10-19; principles of, 72-78, 90-95; mathematical vs. Aristotelian, 82-83; repetition in, 9395; temporality of, 97-106; genre of, 106-117; and freedom, 123-124, 135, 154-156 Necessity: and freedom, 1, 14, 50-51, 183, 184; (as central contradiction), 121, 123, 133, 135, 136, 137; and/as reason, 143-155 passim Nietzsche, F. W., 113, 197n.28 Nihilism, 9 Nothingness, 41, 52, 172; and plenitude, 152-154 Novelness, 108, 198

Index Reason: and consciousness, 2, 3, 6, 9, 14, 105, 108, 117, 121, 124, 132, 133, 138, 151-154, 184; historicizing of, 113; as mediation, 144, 148149; authority of, 156 Reinhold, Karl, 191n.6 Repetition: of struggle, 1; in history, 77; in the novel, 93-94, 97, 103 Representation, 15, 45, 73, 111, 144; diegetic and mimetic, 99; forms of, 116; and Kant, Schopenhauer, 139143; grounds of, 145-150 Reticence, 3, 4, 6, 78, 156, 157, 162, 173, 179, 180, 196 Ricoeur, Paul, 111, 198n.11 Robinson, Abraham, 193n.8 Rosen, Stanley, 189n.2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 155, 200nn.18 and 19

Orwin, Donna, 15, 99, 104, 190n.16, 198n.3, 200n.8

Pascal, Blaise, 52, 190n.12, 192n.11, 196n.20 Passivity, 28, 29, 30, 31, 42, 157 Plato, 2, 77, 99, 167, 177, 178, 189n.2 (Symposium), 191nn.2 (Phaedo) and 3 (Theaetetus), 193n.5 (Meno) Plenitude, 2, 3, 41, 187; and nothingness, 152-154 Plot, 10, 97, 98, 103, 178 Polarity: of characterization, 3-4; of critical reception, 16; mastery and reticence, 157 Predstavlenie, 140 Presentness, 100, 116 Proizvol, 74-75

Rationality: calculative, 41; conception of, 48; beyond the finite mind, 50, 69, 86, 92; and necessity, 50-51; submergence of, 119; and the artist, 156 Realism, 96, 197

Sankovitch, Natasha, 94, 190n.15, 197n.26 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 198n.13 Schelling, F. W. J., 121, 155, 183, 189n.3, 199nn.15 and 16, 200n.18, 201n.1 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 6, 11, 77, 93, 115, 133, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 145, 146, 152, 155, 200n.11 Selbstbewußtsein, 139, 140, 200n.10 Shklovsky, V., 11, 60, 94, 98, 190n.12, 193n.3, 197n.29 Silbajoris, R., 191n.8, 198n.9 Silesius, Angelus, 178 Skepticism: and the critics, 1, 12, 13, 15; and the fictional text, 20, 21, 32; dogmatic, 39-43; in the historical essays, 43-51; and incommensurability, 52; and concept of knowledge, 54, 56, 58; overcoming of, 69, 87, 89, 123, 132; skeptical or anti-skeptical, 96, 97; different conception of, 105; and the novel's "third way," 106; utility of, 191n.6 Sophocles, 199n.2, 202n.1 Soznanie, 137, 140

Index Spinoza, Benedict de, 140, 191n.10 Spitzer, Leo, 97 Steiner, George, 12, 47, 96, 190n.12, 198n.6, 201n.9 Strakhov, N. N., 91, 106, 190n.10 Strauss, Leo, 194n.13 Striving, 1, 4, 5, 7; structure of, 2; for unity, 3; and subjectivity, 6; and struggle, 16; and integration, 78, 173; and finitude, 87; as fortuitous failure, 89, 96, 106, 117; and contradiction, 121; and submission, 157; and mastery, 158, 160, 163, 166; emptiness of, 170; ambiguity of, 182, 187; and eros, 199 Structuralism, 17, 197n.30 Struggle, 1; and striving, 16; between epic and novel, 108, 117; and contradiction, 121; individual and the whole, 123; to know the infinite, 133; history as record of, 155-157; and Prince Andrei, 170, 179; and finitude, 182-184; "man is all," 133, 199n.5

Teleology, 84, 116, 117 Temporality, 96, 97, 106-117 Todorov, Tzvetan, 197n.29 Tolstoy, L. N.: and structure of striving, 2; and movement of history, 5; and new synthesis of subject and object, 6; and Hegel, 7; and genre of novel, 8; Flaubert on, 11; as skeptic, 12-14; as thinker, 17; and scientific theorizing, 39-43; and laws of combination, 55-56; and mytheme of suffering, 68; and calculus, 72; holism of, 80; ancients and moderns, 83-85; on linkages, 92; on history as art, 93; anticipates

211 structuralism, 95, 197n.30; on genre of War and Peace, 107; and Schopenhauer, 138, 140, 141; on motive force in history, 154-156; on significance of Napoleon, 159; and evil, 182-183; as vates, 184; mistrust of language, 186-187 Tragic (the), 1, 6, 65, 182; conception of history, 155; conception of desire, 156; and comic, 157, 171, 181, 183, 187. See also comic (the) Turgenev, I. S., 10, 91, 190n.11

Unity: as cosmos, 2; conflict as essence of, 3; of art and thought, 5, 17; and critical reception of War and Peace, 10-17; and perspective, 56; and laws, 69; synchronous, 94, 97, 101; and epic, 113; and the hunt, 119-121; and system, 135; and consciousness, 141; of freedom and reason, 144, 152

Virgil, 198n.4, 202n.11 Vorstellung, 139, 140, 141

Walsh, Harry, 200n.11 Wasiolek, Edward, 14 Weeks, John, 201n.6 Weierstrass, Karl, 193n.8 "Willing" (volition), 140, 142, 173 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 202n.4

Zaidenshnur, E. E., 72, 189n.4, 190n.10 Zeno, 71