Where to begin? Tolstoy’s weaving together of the stories of the principal characters—Pierre, Prince Andrei, Count Nikolai, Natasha, Princess Marya, et al.—with the narrative of the war (mainly 1805 and 1812) is masterful. More questionable is the relationship between those two strands of the novel (?) and his musings on history and free will vs necessity. He touches on these topics here and there throughout the work, then devotes the entirety of Part Two of the Epilogue (some 35 pages) to a fuller exposition. Tolstoy criticizes—even parodies very effectively in one place—the Great Man theory of history according to which geniuses like Napoleon, through their wills, are the prime movers in the “movement of peoples”; this theory, he says, has replaced the equally false theory of the ancient historians that the deities, acting through heroic individuals, shape history according to their own—that is, the deities’ own—goals. In fact, Tolstoy maintains, kings and other Great Men are the most enslaved, least free, of all humans, their actions constrained by the divergent wills of the masses of men whom they allegedly control. Tolstoy appears to exemplify his viewpoint in his portraits of Napoleon and Field Marshal Kutuzov. He repeatedly points out how none of Napoleon’s orders are actually carried out at the battle of Borodino or in the retreat from Moscow, whereas Kutuzov’s strategy, of avoiding engaging the French in battle, is successful because it allows the French army to go on destroying itself—looting, rushing forward in the freezing Russian winter without adequate provisions, dispersing—while somewhat minimizing the devastating losses of the equally ill-shod, ill-provisioned, freezing Russian army. Where Napoleon’s effort to impose his single will on the movement of his army is an utter failure, Kutusov’s submission to the myriad wills and conditions affecting the movement of both armies succeeds.

How does Tolstoy’s discussion of free will vs necessity relate to his view of history and to the stories of the principal characters? He writes: “The presence of the question of man’s free will, though unspoken, is felt at every step of history” (Epilogue, Part Two, VIII). His argument goes like this: When proceeding empirically, applying reason, man realizes that he is subject to necessity—“his every action depends on his constitution, his character, and the motives that influence him.” Nevertheless his consciousness tells him he is free. “. . . having learned . . . that his will is subject to laws, he does not and cannot believe it.” This notion of freedom is not only essential to his feeling of being alive, it underpins morality and jurisprudence (For if man’s actions are the product of immutable laws, how can he be held responsible for those actions?).

The study of history, Tolstoy believes, is in a unique position to examine the question of free will vs necessity because “the combining of these two opposites has already taken place”; history therefore stands to other disciplines—theology, ethics, and philosophy—as an experimental science to speculative sciences. In any action (presumably Tolstoy means a historical event under study) the ratio of freedom to necessity will be influenced by the vantage point from which it is studied; for example, simultaneous with an event—say, the Napoleonic wars—the event may appear to proceed from the wills of heroes; later, causes will become apparent rendering the action of those heroes less free. The ratio is affected by the action’s distance in time, its relation to the external world, and its dependence on causes. (Note that in Tolstoy’s account free will and necessity always remain “inversely proportional,” an example of his predilection for the language of science and mathematics; see what follows.) A reductio ad absurdum argument follows, driving home the point that man cannot be completely free or completely governed by necessity. Returning to his critique of contemporary historians, Tolstoy asserts that only by studying the “union [of freedom and necessity] do we get a clear picture of the life of man.” Were we to assume that man’s freedom were capable of [alone] influencing historical events, it would be the same as astronomy recognizing a free force moving the planets, independent of the laws of Kepler and Newton: Both are impossibilities. The task of history is to discover the laws (more general than causes, which can be infinite) that govern historical events, a task that involves renouncing the consciousness of freedom, just as astronomers had to renounce the consciousness of an immobile earth for the Copernican revolution in astronomy to take hold.

It seems to me that it is wrong to call Tolstoy’s view deterministic or fatalistic. True, he rejects the notion that the Napoleonic wars occurred largely because one man, Napoleon, willed them. The reason is that the personal interests and wills of innumerable people, not to mention a myriad of economic factors and the weather, were simultaneously were having unpredictable impacts on events (an interplay of will and causes portrayed in the 1200+ pages of War and Peace). Having argued that the apparent free will of any individual is understood to be constrained by necessity when examined by reason, Tolstoy makes the same case for history.

The Epilogue, Part One Unlike many 19^th century novels that end with the marriage of one or more courting couples, War and Peace provides a peek at the lives of the principal characters seven years on. Tolstoy first sets the stage, briefly relating the changed historical conditions in Europe and Russia—the reaction, the Holy Alliance, Alexander I’s retreat from politics into mysticism. He then anticipates the fuller discussion of history in Part Two of the Epilogue with an ironic account of the rise and fall of Napoleon, noting how contemporary historians’ Great Men theory of history is dependent on the notions of chance and genius. Those matters dealt with, we return to the lives of the characters. We are told in a rather off-hand manner that Natasha and Pierre and Nikolai and Marya have married; although we don’t directly hear about the birth of children, we later learn, incidentally, that both couples have large families. It’s almost as if Tolstoy is saying, I know what conventions other writers of my era have followed, and I’m going to do things differently, more realistically. Thus, we learn about the financial hardships of the Rostovs after the death of Count Ilya and how proud Nikolai nearly doesn’t propose to Marya because he is poor and she is rich. What saves them is her unromantic but terribly moving reaction to his new coldness toward her: ’There has been so little happiness in my life that every loss is hard for me . . . Forgive me, good-bye.’ Natasha has “let herself go” and no longer goes into society; she is herself nursing her fourth child (unheard of for a woman of her class at the time), doesn’t care about her appearance, and (sadly) has given up singing. Both she and Marya have moments in which they are jealous of other younger, prettier women. Both couples have disagreements. Nikolai, who has devoted himself entirely to agriculture and estate management, and Pierre, who hopes to establish a society to counter the reaction and promote liberal policies, disagree about political involvement. Tolstoy, in other words, shows us real life. And despite the minor marital disagreements, there is no question that Natasha and Pierre and Nikolai and Marya love one another and that, as Natasha puts it, these years, not the early romantic days, are the best part of marriage. Still some readers have been as dissatisfied with this ending as with Tolstoy’s dissertation on free will and history and wish the novel ended in the romantic early days of betrothals and weddings. In deference to perceived public taste, the most recent BBC mini-series indeed lopped off the Epilogue, both Tolstoy’s philosophizing (understandably) but also the “ever after” part of the marriages of the Rostovs and Bezukhovs (much to the detriment of Tolstoy’s obvious intent).

Isaiah Berlin on Tolstoy’s View of History in The Hedgehog and the Fox

General reaction: Berlin knows War and Peace down to the minutest details, is thoroughly acquainted with the scholarship on Tolstoy, and takes the historical and philosophical passages very seriously—unlike those scholars and readers (led by Turgenev) who look upon them as “so much perverse interruption of the narrative.” Some highlights:

*Tolstoy’s interest in historical truth was passionate before and after the writing of the novel

*It went along with his love of the concrete, the empirical, and his distrust of abstraction, metaphysics

*Influenced by the historicism of his time but described Hegel’s writings as unintelligible gibberish; saw historical study as the way to answer the great ethical questions—What is the purpose of life? How should we live?

*If history is a science, it must be possible to formulate laws of history based on empirical data

*Criticized contemporary historians for their arbitrary selection of material

*Obsessed throughout the 1850s by desire to write a historical novel, one that would contrast the real texture of life with the unreal picture presented by the historians

*The novel continually contrasts what really happened on the battlefield with what the likely official accounts will be, exaggerating the role of Bagration, Speransky, Alexander, et al. when their plans had less to do with the outcome than the actions of the humble soldiers

*Paradoxically, the higher up in the chain of authority are soldiers and statesmen, the smaller effect they have on history

*Self-delusion of those who believe individuals can understand and influence the course of history

*Tolstoy was particularly irritated by references to the dominant influence of great men or ideas as a way of explaining the historical movements of the times

*However, he was not content to record the subjective experiences of individuals, which he excelled at and which Turgenev encouraged him to return to; [he wanted to be a hedgehog, arriving at a single dominant belief, as well as a fox.]

*He believed there is a natural law determining the lives of individuals as much as nature; just because the infinite number of causes can’t be fathomed doesn’t mean that free will is more than an illusion

*Portrait of Kutuzov as a symbol of the intuitive wisdom of the Russian people is ahistorical but completely necessary to Tolstoy’s artistic intent

*An ideal historical science would proceed by a kind of calculus, an integrating of infinitesimals—the infinitely small human and non-human events and actions

*Tolstoy in effect did this in his novel

*Nevertheless he was haunted by his lack of positive convictions and longed for a universal explanatory principle [wanted to be a hedgehog rather than a fox]

*Source of his ideas: Rousseau, Schopenhauer (contrast between the illusion of free will and iron laws of necessity), Stendhal (scene in The Charterhouse of Parma in which Fabrice wanders around the battlefield of Waterloo “understanding nothing” anticipates W&P and was confirmed by Tolstoy’s own Crimean War experience), and—according to Berlin—especially Joseph de Maistre, an ultramontane Catholic.

*Despite their political and other differences, Tolstoy borrowed heavily from Maistre, using his exact words in places—e.g., in the view of the uncontrollability and chaos of battles and the discussion of army morale (rather than the plans of generals) as decisive in the outcome of battles.

*Maistre regarded the battlefield as typical of life in all its aspects

*The attribution of the Russian army’s victory over Napoleon to the desire of the army to survive echoes Maistre, not Stendhal, according to Berlin

*Maistre and Tolstoy were skeptical of both scientism and romanticism, of liberal optimism about the goodness of people; shared a faith in the intuitive knowledge of common people (viz., Pierre’s outlook is changed by his encounter with the Russian peasant Karataev, not the Freemasons)