Consciousness, Memory, and History in Tolstoy'sWar and Peace

Contrary to the critics of Tolstoy's War and Peace who have interpreted the Second Epilogue as an aberration in the novel that distracts from the merits of the work, I argue that Tolstoy spells out the crucial principles that organize the entire novel in the Second Epilogue. In the Second Epilogue, Tolstoy presents his philosophy of consciousness and memory that, in turn, informs his philosophy of history that is similar to Augustine's conceptions of the city of God and the city of man. Tolstoy's comments, therefore, about God, freedom, and history in the Second Epilogue make War and Peace a philosophical work that has literary elements within it rather than a literary work with philosophical aspects. Keywords: Tolstoy War and Peace Godfreedomhistory Notes 1. An example of this type of criticism can be found in the following works: Edward Garnett, Tolstoy: His Life and Writings (London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1914); Hugh I'Anson Fausset, Tolstoy: The Inner Drama (New York: Russell and Russell, 1928); Edwin Muir, The Structure of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1929). Speir and Gunn have continued in this tradition: Logan Speir, Tolstoy and Chekhov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); and Elizabeth Gunn, A Daring Coiffeur: Reflections on Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1971). 2. For those critics who believed that War and Peace has an organizing principle, refer to the following works: Janko Lavrin, Tolstoy An Approach (New York: MacMillan Company, 1946); Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York: Peter Smith, 1947); Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1953); Albert Cook, “Unity of War and Peace,” Western Review 22 (Summer 1958): 243–55; George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959); R. F. Christian, Tolstoy's “War and Peace”: A Study (London: Oxford University Press at Clarendon Press, 1962); John Hagen, “On the Craftsmanship of War and Peace,” Essays in Criticism 13 (January 1963): 17–49; Jerome Thale, “War and Peace: The Art of Incoherence,” Essays in Criticism 16: 4 (October 1966): 398–415; Gordon William Spence, Tolstoy the Ascetic (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1967); Henri Troyat, Tolstoy (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967); B. M. Eichenbaum, Levi Tolstoi, vol. 1 (Munich: Nachdruck der Ausgabe, 1968); Richard Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Strange, a Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Helen E. Davis, Tolstoy and Nietzsche (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1971); Edward Crankshaw, Tolstoy: Making of a Novelist (New York: Viking Press, 1974); Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987); Rimvydas Silbajoris, Tolstoy's Aesthetics and His Art (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1990); Kathryn B. Feuer, Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Natasha Sankovitch, Creating and Recovering Experience: Repetition in Tolstoy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Andrei Wachtel, “History and Autobiography in Tolstoy,” in Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 176–90; Hugh McLean, “Could the Master Err? A Note on ‘God Sees the Truth but Waits,’” Tolstoy Studies Journal XVI (2004): 77–81 (3). 3. PSS 15: 238, L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochineii (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1928–1953). All subsequent citations to this work will be abbreviated as PSS. Translations are my own. 4. F. F. Seeley, “A Philosophy of History,” in New Essays on Tolstoy, ed. Malcolm Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978): 175–93. 5. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1953), 21–8. Subsequent critics would continue in Berlin's historical determinist interpretation of Tolstoy, such as Christian and Raleigh. R. F. Christian, Tolstoy's “War and Peace”: A Study (London: Oxford University Press at Clarendon Press, 1962); John H. Raleigh, “Tolstoy and the Ways of History,” in Towards a Poetics of Fiction, ed. Mark Spilka (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977), 211–44. 6. Nicola Chiaromonte, The Paradox of History: Stendhal, Tolstoy, Pasternak and Others (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.), 47; Scott Craig, “The Hunt for Truth in War and Peace,” Tolstoy Studies Journal III (1990): 120–3. 7. Elliott Mossman, “Metaphors of History in ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Doctor Zhivago,’” in Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 247–62. 8. Donna Tussing Orwin, Tolstoy's Art and Thought 1847–1880 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 171–202. 9. George R. Clay, Tolstoy's Phoenix: From Method to Meaning in “War and Peace” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 30–1. 10. Edward Wasiolek, Tolstoy's Major Fiction (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 121–5. 11. Jeff Love, “The End of Knowing in War and Peace,” Tolstoy Studies Journal XV (2002): 35–49. 12. Ibid., 41–5. 13. (X.viii), Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine (New York: Doubleday, 1960). The citations are book and chapter numbers. 14. The citations of War and Peace are the book and chapter numbers. 15. In August 1914, Solzhenistyn rebuts this vulgarized Tolstoyanism. Vladislav Krasnov, “Wrestling With Lev Tolstoi: War, Peace, and Revolution in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's new Avgust Chetyrnadtsatogo,” Slavic Review 45.4 (Winter 1986): 707–19. Also refer to Dominic, Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2010). I thank the referee for bringing this question to my attention

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