War and Peace: Appendix: A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace Summary & Analysis

Tolstoy wants to state his view of War and Peace for those readers who may be interested. He asserts that War and Peace is not a novel. It is simply what Tolstoy wanted to express, in the form in which it was expressed. This actually conforms to the history of Russian literature from Pushkin’s time to the present. No Russian work from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoevsky’s Dead House fits neatly into the genre of novel, epic, or story.

Readers have objected that Tolstoy’s portrayal doesn’t reflect the brutality of the period. Based on his study of the documents of the time, Tolstoy doesn’t believe it was more brutal than any other age. It possessed the same “complex mental and moral life” we have today. There is, however, a character of that time which is captured in the gap between the upper classes and lower ones, expressed in such things as the use of French. Tolstoy has sought to capture this class discrepancy instead. He also defends the use of French in a Russian work, while acknowledging that he may have gotten carried away.

There is an inevitable divergence between Tolstoy’s accounts of historical events and a historian’s. That’s because a historian and an artist have different aims. Just as a historian wouldn’t try to portray a figure in all his complexity, so an artist doesn’t always present figures simply in their historical significance. A historian portrays heroes; an artist should not have heroes, but people. He tries to convey a human being, not a famous person.

When it comes to events, a historian is concerned with the results, an artist with the fact of the event. The artist studies the details of an event, but from these he derives his own image of the event and often draws a different conclusion about it than the historian.

For example, military history is based on the military discipline assumed in commander’s reports. In the immediate aftermath of a battle, a researcher would gain a complex, diverse, and vague impression of what happened. A few days later, all these details are flattened into a deceptively clear, flattering report. Within a few months, even veterans describe their experiences in ways that conform to official reports. Furthermore, Tolstoy assures the reader that his portrayal of historical figures’ speech and actions are not invented, but based on a whole library of research, and that he can always provide references.

Finally, Tolstoy’s most important consideration has been the insignificance of “great men.” Why did millions of men try to kill one another, while knowing such things are bad? There can’t be a single isolated cause. There seems to be no answer besides the “zoological law” of male creatures exterminating one another. But because human beings are convinced of their individual freedom, they search for proof of this answer.

When we commit an act, we’re convinced that we do it by our own free choice. But when we look at actions as part of humanity’s common life, we’re convinced that they’re predetermined. How does this mistake happen? The answer is that there are really two sorts of acts: those that depend on one’s will and those that do not. The mistake occurs when we transfer the awareness of freedom to those acts we commit jointly with others. Thus our more abstract actions are more free, and our more connected acts are more unfree.

Having become convinced of this, it makes sense that in his descriptions of the years 1805, 1807, and especially 1812, Tolstoy emphasizes the law of predetermination. He believes this law governs history, and he was interested in the characters’ activity insofar as it illustrates that law. He was also interested in the psychological law which enables people who commit unfree acts to convince themselves that they are in fact free.