The Mixed Literature in War and Peace

I never wrote a final remark about War and Peace when I finished it, months ago. It's common ground to say that this is one of the best novels ever written, and I enjoyed it deeply. It has its boring moments of a hundred pages here and there, but what do we expect for a four thausand pages novel? Even the Brothers Karamazov has its boring moments. Gargantuan novels cannot escape this fact.

The novel itself can be read as an apology of Kutuzov, a prudent general completely the opposite of the military virtues Clausewitz praises in Napoleon Bonaparte, the virtues demanded in his days. He avoids confrontation, because he fears the size and proffesionalism of the Napoleonic army, not without good reasons. It even appears as if Tolstoy admires him for avoiding more casualties, for sparing human lives that the rest of the high command was so liberal to throw into battle, and we taste a touch of Tolstoy's developing pacifism. Kutuzov gives ground to the French invasion and he even abandons Muscow, probabbly the most dramatic decision of the entire campaign. Moscow's fire is probbably my favorite moment of the entire novel. It gives you a touch of the enormity of history.

Another aspect that might puzzle the reader is the insersion of certain essays about philosphy of history all through the novel, including all the second part of the epilogue, which does not contain a single sentence dedicated to the stroyline. This drives me to conclude that the novel actually finishes not in the second but in the first part of the epilogue.

To many people these inserted essays might look awkward or annoying. I liked many of them. Others I found less well accomplised. But the interesting thing is that Tolstoy tries to give a theoretical explanation of the world events that his main characters are living. In a strikingly Hegelian fashion, he tries to demonstrate that historical outcomes are not dictated by powerful individuals, but by long, autonomous and anonymous sociological movements. So far I share his view. But, of course, he tries to give it a positivistic approach that lacks all the methodological requierements to make these writings scientific essays, and you feel that he is trying to do this. This is not Tolstoy's to blame. He is part of a pre paradigmatic moment in the theory of history, and he cannot mothedologically organize all these numeruous facts to fit coherently into a single explanation. This is where Tolstoy's speculations fall short, and might even become boring, because he doesn't explain anything in the end, and the essays remain in the field of mere criticism of historians.

The combination between the main storyline, with its plots of romance, marriage, infidelity, with the world size events of the Napoleonic Wars, with its battles, politics, strategies, which belongs to the realm of epic, and these long reflections on theory of war and history, which belong to the realm of essays, make a combination of outstanding and impressive literature, to the point where it is doubful if we can catalogue War and Peace as a novel at all. It's something more.