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his power of evocation and expression, converge on that one single goal. Outside any other religious or moral considerations, Tolstoy when he writes obeys one imperative, which is the foundation of what one might call his literary ethic. That imperative is not imposed on the artist by the moralist, it is the voice of the artist himself.” As early as the sketch “Sevastopol in May” of 1855, Tolstoy had asserted, “My hero is truth.” In War and Peace he wanted to speak the truth about a certain period of Russian life—the period of the Napoleonic wars of 1805 to 1812. He wanted to say, not how that period could be made to appear in a beautiful lie, an entertaining or instructive story, a historical narrative, but how it was. He wanted to capture in words what happened the way it happened. But how does happening happen? How can words express it without falsifying it? How can one capture the past once it is past? These were questions that Tolstoy constantly brooded on. He had already posed them for himself in 1851, in his very first literary work, the fragment “A History of Yesterday.” The composition of War and Peace was his fullest response to them.

Poète et non honnête homme, wrote Pascal, meaning that a poet cannot be an honest man. Tolstoy fully agreed with Pascal; he tried all his life to be honnête homme et non poète. Nabokov, in his lecture notes on Anna Karenina, speaks of “Tolstoy’s style with its readiness to admit any robust awkwardness if that is the shortest way to sense.” Yet Tolstoy found that the truth could not be approached directly, that every attempt at direct expression became a simplification and therefore a lie, and that the “shortest way to sense” was rather long and indirect. He was acutely aware of the inadequacy of all human means of speaking the truth, but his artistic intuition told him that those means might be composed in such a way as to allow the truth to appear. Against his will, he found that to be an honest man he had to be a poet.

In the fifth section of “A Few Words,” Tolstoy freely embraces that role, discussing the differences between the historian and the artist. “A historian and an artist, describing a historical epoch, have two completely different objects…For a historian, considering the contribution rendered by some person towards a certain goal, there are heroes; for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people.” And further on: “A historian has to do with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event.” And again: “The difference between the results obtained is explained by the sources from which the two draw their information. For the historian (we continue the example of a battle), the main source is the reports of individual commanders and the commander in chief. The artist can draw nothing from such sources, they tell him nothing, explain nothing. Moreover, the artist turns away from them, finding in them a necessary falsehood.” Neither here nor elsewhere, however, does Tolstoy say what sources the artist does draw from. To compound the problem, he says at the end of the same section: “But the artist should not forget that the notion of historical figures and events formed among people is based not on fantasy, but on historical documents, insofar as historians have been able to amass them; and therefore, while understanding and presenting these figures and events differently, the artist ought to be guided, like the historian, by historical materials.” The difference lies not in the figures and events that are seen, but in the way of seeing them: the artist sees not heroes but people, not results but facts, and considers a person not in terms of a goal, but “in correspondence to all sides of life”—with what Pasternak calls “the passion of creative contemplation,” which Tolstoy wisely avoids defining.

This leads to a crucial if paradoxical reversal: the most real and even, in Tolstoy’s sense, historical figures in War and Peace turn out to be the fictional