War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [3]
The formal structure of War and Peace and the texture of its prose are indeed strange. Those who did not simply declare the book a failure, dismissing the newness, the “passionate quality” and “fighting spirit” of what Tolstoy was doing as artistic helplessness and naïveté, often said that it succeeded in spite of its artistic flaws. But that is a false distinction. War and Peace is a work of art, and if it succeeds, it cannot be in spite of its formal deficiencies, but only because Tolstoy created a new form that was adequate to his vision.
It is equally mistaken to go to the other extreme and declare, as more recent critics have done, that, far from being a magnificent failure, War and Peace is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century realism, simple and artless, a direct transcription of life. Tolstoy was well aware of the perplexities his book caused and addressed them in an article (included here as an appendix) entitled “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace,” published in the magazine Russian Archive in 1868, before the final parts of the book had appeared in print. “What is War and Peace?” he asked.
It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed. Such a declaration of the author’s disregard of the conventional forms of artistic prose works might seem presumptuous, if it were premeditated and if it had no previous examples. The history of Russian literature since Pushkin’s time not only provides many examples of such departure from European forms, but does not offer even one example to the contrary. From Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoevsky’s Dead House, there is not a single work of artistic prose of the modern period of Russian literature, rising slightly above mediocrity, that would fit perfectly into the form of the novel, the epic, or the story.
Two things in this passage are especially characteristic of Tolstoy: first, the negative definition of the genre; and second, the assertion that his departure from artistic convention was not premeditated. Both might be taken as disingenuous, but I do not think they are. Tolstoy was trying to express something which, to his mind, had never been expressed before, and which therefore required a new form that could only define itself as he worked. By excluding the known forms of extended narrative, he leaves an empty place in which an as yet unknown form, indefinable and unnameable, may appear. (He uses the same negative method throughout War and Peace itself.) But this procedure was not premeditated—that is, as Pasternak rightly said, it was not a literary method, not a play with form for its own sake in the modernist sense. He found it necessary for the task he had set himself.
What was that task? What was it that Tolstoy “wanted to express” in his book, which he deliberately does not call a novel? Boris de Schloezer, a fine critic and philosopher, wrote in the preface to his French translation of War and Peace (1960) that Tolstoy’s one aim, from the beginning, was “to speak the truth” as perceived by his eye and his conscience. “All the forces of his imagination,