War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [793]
M. D. Akhrosimov and Denisov are exceptional characters to whom I involuntarily and thoughtlessly gave names that closely resemble those of two particularly distinctive and dear real persons of the society of that time. That was my mistake, which came from the particular distinctiveness of these two persons; but my mistake in this regard was limited to the introducing of these two characters alone; and readers will probably agree that nothing resembling reality happens to these characters. All the rest of the characters are completely invented and for me do not even have any specific prototypes in tradition or reality.
(5) The divergence between my descriptions of historical events and the accounts of historians. It is not accidental, but inevitable. A historian and an artist, describing a historical epoch, have two completely different objects. As a historian would be wrong if he should try to present a historical figure in all his entirety, in all the complexity of his relations to all sides of life, so an artist would not fulfill his task by always presenting a figure in his historical significance. Kutuzov did not always ride a white horse, holding a field glass and pointing at enemies. Rastopchin did not always take torch in hand and set fire to his Voronovo house4 (in fact he never did it at all), and the empress Maria Feodorovna did not always stand in an ermine mantle, her hand resting on the code of law; but that is how they are pictured in the popular imagination.
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.
The historian is sometimes obliged, by bending the truth, to bring all the actions of a historical figure under the one idea he has put into that figure. The artist, on the contrary, sees the very singularity of that idea as incompatible with his task, and only tries to understand and show not the famous figure but the human being.
The distinction is still sharper and more substantial in the description of events themselves.
A historian has to do with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event. A historian, describing a battle, says: the left flank of such-and-such army was moved against such-and-such village, cut down the enemy, but was forced to retreat; then the cavalry, going into the attack, overthrew…and so on. The historian cannot speak otherwise. And yet these words have no meaning for an artist and do not even touch upon the event itself. The artist, using his own experience, or letters, memoirs, and accounts, derives for himself an image of the event that took place, and quite often (in a battle for example) the conclusion which the historian allows himself to draw about the activity of such-and-such army turns out to be the opposite of the artist’s conclusion. 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. To say nothing of the fact that with every battle the two enemies almost always describe it in a totally opposite way from each other, in every description of a battle there is a necessity for falsehood which comes from the need to describe in a few words the actions of thousands of men, scattered over several miles, who are in the most intense moral agitation under the influence of fear, shame, and death.
In descriptions of battles it is usually written that such-and-such army was sent to attack such-and-such point and was then ordered to retreat, and so on, as if supposing that the discipline that makes tens of thousands of men obey the will of one man on the drill ground will have