SUBHAN ASLAM
There is a logic to history - the logic of cause and effect - and there is an ontology, namely that reality is human bodies in continuous movement. Tolstoy’s idea of history is based upon the connection between time and movement whereby if one considers them to be intrinsically linked there is a motion to history. A motion that must have a driving force, a source of power that moves history, the nature of which being a problem to define.
In Tolstoy’s writings, he presents history in several dimensions, the most important being the “vertical”, the total chain of circumstance extending from the present to the past and on the basis of speculation into the future. It is the sum of human action since the beginning of time. In War and Peace, it comes down to a great mass movement of men painting over continental landscapes with their tracks and washing over it with the blood of their counterparts. War becomes the perfect analogy for history, a raw concentration of human action, the destruction unwavering, an army the mightiest historical force. What propels this monolith is thus comparable to that which drives history. Theories that attempt to define this engine include the “great man” theory, progressive theory, the Hegelian idea and various ideological theories. The binding characteristic of them is that they all seek to place immense significance upon the mental being of a human: ideas expressed by ideologues, the will of a great man taking hold over his people, the will of the people placed within the head of state, what J.H Raleigh refers to as “History in the head”.
Battle of Borodino 7 September [O.S. 26 August] 1812. This was single bloodiest day of the Napoleonic wars fought during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, just west of Moscow. The Great Man theory objectively pins the blood on Napoleon and General Mikhail Kutuzov as male military commanders. Yet Tolstoy in War and Peace says “And it was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle (...) the killing went on independently resulting from the will of all the participants in their hundred of thousands” [X, XXVIII]. Ostensibly seeming to absolve Napoleon of the blame, the passage does more than just that: it denounces the idea that one commander is what drives the historical force of an army. It goes on to place power on an external source only “resulting from the will” of the armies in question. Similar sentiments were expressed regarding the battle of Austerlitz: “Every general and every soldier was aware of his own insignificance (...) yet as a part of that vast whole they sensed a huge collective strength” [III, VIII]. Undermining the influence of strategy, chains of command, tactical manoeuvres, and the supposed intelligent apparatuses of war, Tolstoy, in doing so, demonstrates the true nature of history to be the labours and exertions of humans. The fundamental driving force is human bodies constantly being on the move, never remaining still.
If man chose to sit still and refused to act, the vertical, and thus history, would come to a halt. For Tolstoy there are two main forces that rule mankind: routine and reason. The former represents maintenance of the same path and the latter strives for something more. If man were to denounce progress and stay passive in his own pocket there would no longer be unhappiness. The power of the state fundamentally lies within the physical hands and feet of its subordinates. This physical view of history presents a paradox: despite the fact that everything now depends on the human body, and the simple doctrine of passivity that would guarantee eternal happiness, man can simply not cease what he is doing. From birth there is instilled “an elemental force against which man is powerless” [VIII, I]. Taking this paradigm to its full conclusion would mean the individual fails to be more than an ant from a historical perspective. What Tolstoy, Freud and Darwin have achieved is locating an external centre of power, outside of the conscious wills of man, demonstrating his sameness and lack of freedom. Raleigh concludes: “As sermons in the illusions of human pride, the work of these men constitutes a kind of supreme assertion of the human intelligence, no matter what the cost to human pride.”.
The “vertical” dimension is not the sole historical perspective taken within the novel. Tolstoy makes use of what he calls the “law of retrospectiveness” whereby events of the past are seen as preparation for the present. The way in which these events are examined comes down to one of three vantage points: 1, how an event would look from the vertical chain; 2, how an event would look to an informed observer; 3, how an event looks to a novelist with the intent of describing the feelings of a participant. Raleigh states that “it should be added that the first vantage point is impossible of complete attainment; the second, while possible, is grievously limited; and the third is purely fictitious”.
There is the judgement made here that not only are the three perspectives entirely separate from each other but there is little merit in striving to achieve the first and no merit in pursuing the third. The novelist perspective seeks to make a point of observing the individual experiences of man in history. It is obsessive, perhaps overly, with Freud's Ego. For Tolstoy this was a feeling of self-realisation: “I remember very vividly that I am conscious of myself in exactly the same way now, at eighty-one, as I was conscious of myself, my 'I' at five or six years of age.” This places an observational focus upon the world, a grounded perspective interested by each instance of activity, of the human consciousness.
An Archimedean perspective focused on the vertical chain of events capitalises on the totality of events with a higher-historical vantage point. Rather than observing the world there is an observation of the observers; the ideas of form are explored as opposed to content: composition rather than consciousness. With a limited overlap between the lenses, the conclusion that both cannot be explored simultaneously is made. However, Tolstoy’s fusion of a description of history with a vast array of fictional characters helps to harmonise these vantage points. It is clear that War and Peace engages with higher, more abstract, historical ideas whilst also having a focus on individuals.
With history for Tolstoy being defined more by movement than time, it is not logic but an affair of rhythm. The horizontal sea metaphor explains this motion by likening history to a pulsation found within water: the sequence of wave and counter-wave, tidal movements that cast man from shore to shore with a rhythm akin to breathing. The position of an individual is analogous to history itself: at once the macrocosm and the microcosm. Raleigh takes quarrel with this habit Tolstoy has of analogising single lives and the rhythm of history, a notable example being the aforementioned Battle of Borodino, which serves as a moral turning point for Pierre and Prince Andrew, yet in the real world it posed a major disturbance and shift in history. While this could be seen as a novelist taking advantage of a more humanist perspective, it seeks to form a relationship between two vantage points of retrospective thinking. Despite having found a way to assimilate the abstract and the concrete, Tolstoy believes the contextualisation of history in its complete form can never be achieved. Inherent to us is the inability to fully comprehend and appreciate the infinite; we can never interpret the boundless nature of time and the limitless number of facts. We can never escape the wheel of necessity; we can never step away from the forces of routine and reason and if we try to live outside of it and observe it, it will forever remain a mystery.
While this may be true it seems to make the most sense not to discredit the usefulness found within taking advantage of multiple retrospective frameworks when seeking something that Tolstoy sought to achieve and something that joint novelist-historians still aim for: the complete understanding.
Bibliography:
Raleigh, John Henry. “Tolstoy and the Ways of History.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 2, no. 1 (1968): 55–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/1344797.
Tolstoy, L., Briggs, A. and Figes, O., 2007. War and peace. London: Penguin Books.