Character and Genre in War and Peace

Although generally conceded to be one of the most important works in all literature, War and Peace has proved to be one of the most critically troublesome as well.' This critical discomfiture is particularly apparent in the numerous attempts to define just what the verbal artifact called War and Peace is, to locate its generic identity. As critics have long recognized, War and Peace shares affinities with both the traditional realistic novel and the Homeric epic.2 But beyond this point of agreement, the issue of genre in War and Peace tends to be clouded by a welter of competing theories, many of which deal in abstractions that tell us less about War and Peace than they do about a particular critical or political ideology. A clearer understanding of this work's relationship to both the epic and novel traditions can emerge through a study of the character in whom epic and novelistic elements are most fully combined -Natasha Rostova. Indeed, the character of Natasha will show that Tolstoi not only combines the novelistic with the epic, but actually creates a work that resembles two different kinds of epic-the Homeric, with its totality of objects,3 to use a Hegelian-Luka'csian definition, and the Biblical, with its qualities of multilayeredness and symbolism, as described by Erich Auerbach in the famous first chapter of Mimesis.4 This study of Natasha's connections to the genre of War and Peace will help to deepen our understanding of her character

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