War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [792]
(2) The character of the time, as some readers expressed to me when the first part appeared in print, is insufficiently defined in my work. To this reproach I have the following rejoinder. I know what this character of the time is that people do not find in my novel—the horrors of serfdom, the immuring of wives, the whipping of adult sons, Saltychikha,3 and so on; and this character of that time, which lives in our imagination, I do not consider correct and did not wish to express. Studying letters, diaries, legends, I did not find all the horrors of that brutality in a greater degree than I find them now or at any other time. In those times, too, people loved, envied, sought truth, virtue, were carried away by passions; there was the same complex mental and moral life, sometimes even more refined than now, among the upper classes. If in our minds we have formed an opinion of the arbitrariness and crude force characteristic of that time, it is only because the legends, memoirs, stories, and novels that have come down to us record only the most outstanding cases of violence and brutality. To conclude that the prevailing character of that time was brutality is as incorrect as it would be for a man who sees only treetops beyond a hill to conclude that there is nothing but trees in that region. There is a character of that time (as there is of every epoch), which comes from the greater alienation of the upper circles from the other estates, from the reigning philosophy, from peculiarities of upbringing, from the habit of using the French language, and so on. And this character I have tried as far as I could to express.
(3) The use of French in a Russian work. Why is it that in my work not only the Russians but also the French speak partly in Russian, partly in French? The reproach that people speak and write in French in a Russian book is similar to the reproach made by a man who, looking at a painting, notices black spots in it (shadows) that are not found in reality. The painter is not to blame if the shadow he has made on the face in the painting looks to some like a black spot that does not exist in reality, but is to blame only if those shadows are laid on incorrectly and crudely. Studying the period of the beginning of the present century, portraying Russian figures of a certain society, and Napoleon, and the French, who took such a direct part in the life of that time, I was involuntarily carried away more than necessary by the form of expression of that French way of thinking. And therefore, without denying that the shadows I laid on are probably incorrect and crude, I wish only that those to whom it seems very funny that Napoleon speaks now in Russian, now in French, should know that it seems so to them because, like the man looking at the portrait, they see not a face with light and shadow, but only a black spot under its nose.
(4) The names of characters—Bolkonsky, Drubetskoy, Bilibin, Kuragin, and others—resemble well-known Russian names. In juxtaposing nonhistorical characters with other characters who are historical, it felt awkward to my ear to make Count Rastopchin talk with Prince Pronsky, Strelsky, or some other princes or counts with invented double or single last names. Bolkonsky and Drubetskoy, though they are neither Volkonsky nor Trubetskoy, have the ring of something familiar and natural in a Russian aristocratic circle. I was unable to invent names for all my characters, such as Bezukhov and Rostov, that did not seem false to my ear, and could not get around this difficulty otherwise than by taking the last names most familiar to a Russian ear and changing some letters in them. I would be very sorry if the similarity of the invented names to real ones should give anyone the idea that I meant to describe this or that real person; especially because the literary activity that consists in describing persons who really exist or existed has nothing in common with that which I was engaged in.