The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Leo Tolstoy · a novel in fifteen books and two epilogues · three hundred and sixty-five chapters · 1865–69 · scored on Tolstoy’s Russian, with his French, and Louise and Aylmer Maude’s translation (1922–23), the only one in hand, for sense and for every English quotation
Mode
Historical novel as family chronicle and argument with the historians; society novel, battle-piece and treatise in one work
Mythos
The fallen idol and the conqueror’s arm struck powerless; two deaths and two awakenings; the innocent sufferer; the globe of drops
Phase
Fifteen years, from a soirée in July 1805 to the eve of St Nicholas, 1820, with five books given to 1812; then a treatise outside time
Presentation
Fiction and essay; fifteen books and two epilogues, 365 chapters, the essay entering at the middle and taking the whole of the last part
Register
From the salon’s French and the hussars’ slang to a peasant’s proverbs and the calculus of history; talk falling from a third of the first book to a twentieth of the last
Scale
Four households across three generations; two emperors, two wars and the nations under them
Governing Proposition
A few families of the Russian gentry live through Napoleon’s wars and the peace between them, from a Petersburg soirée in 1805 to a nursery in 1820, and the novel stops at its joints to argue that no one, emperor or private, made what happened. The wager of the book is that every life is free as it is lived and necessary as history sums it, and that only a form which tells both, the scene from within and the argument from without, can show the two as one.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.” It is July 1805, a soirée in Petersburg, and in Tolstoy’s Russian the first words are French, the language of the guest who answers in “that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought” (I.I). The Maudes put most of the French into English and keep a few fragments, but the code it carries survives in the scenes. Prince Hippolyte must tell his Moscow story in Russian “or the point will be lost” (I.V). A forfeit is paid at Julie’s for a Gallicism in the summer of 1812. And Helene, arranging a second marriage while her husband lives, answers her mother: “Vous ne comprenez rien. Dans ma position j’ai des devoirs”
“You don’t understand anything. In my position I have obligations.” She changes from Russian, the narrator says, “into French which suited it better” (XI.VII).
Around the salon the novel builds fifteen books and two epilogues, 365 chapters, which the Russian groups in four volumes and a two-part epilogue. The books carry their years: three of 1805, then 1806, 1806–07, 1808–10, 1810–11 and 1811–12, then six books of 1812 and one running into 1813, and a first epilogue to 1820. Talk recedes as history advances. In the English, speech is a third of the first book, a tenth of the thirteenth and less than a twentieth of the last. The argument does not begin until the middle. No chapter before it is an essay; the first opens Book IX on the year 1812 and on a theory of it: “A king is history’s slave” (IX.I). From there the essay takes a share of every book, and at the end all of one.
The middle of the whole, by the English count, falls in the third chapter of Book IX on a single line: “Next day the following letter was sent to Napoleon:” (IX.III). What follows is Alexander’s last offer of peace after the French have crossed the Niemen, and even in the English it opens in French. The arithmetical centre of War and Peace is the hinge between its two titles, given as a document. On either side of it the vocabulary changes. In the Maude, “history” and its stems occur eight times in the first eight books and 394 times after them; the words of smiling fall from five hundred to two hundred and then to none, in a Second Epilogue that never names Kutuzov, the man the fifteenth book calls the one who understood.
Movement II
Before Austerlitz the novel explains why war stories lie, and does it inside a war story. Rostov, after his first action, tells it to friends in camp. “He began his story meaning to tell everything just as it happened, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably he lapsed into falsehood.” His hearers expect a charge, and he cannot tell them that he “fell off his horse and sprained his arm and then ran as hard as he could from a Frenchman into the wood.” The narrator draws the conclusion plainly: “It is very difficult to tell the truth, and young people are rarely capable of it” (III.VII). The rest of the book is written against the story Rostov told.
At Austerlitz no one sees the battle. Rostov on a hillock “could not understand or make out anything” (III.XVII). Andrew, who has caught up a falling standard and run with it, is struck down and sees above him nothing but the sky: “How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran,” and then, “All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky” (III.XVI). On the Augesd dam, where “the old miller had been accustomed to sit in his tasseled cap peacefully angling”, men crush one another under the guns (III.XVIII). When Napoleon stands over Andrew and says, “That’s a fine death!”, Andrew hears his hero’s words “as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly” (III.XIX). Before the battle the narrator has said what the day will come to: the passions of 160,000 men, and “a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history” (III.XI).
The war comes home through a door. Andrew, given up for dead, reaches Bald Hills on the night his wife is in labour. He hears a scream cease and an infant wail: “What have they taken a baby in there for?” Then: “Or is the baby born?” (IV.IX). Lise is dead, and her face says what she never said aloud: “I love you all, and have done no harm to anyone; and what have you done to me?” (IV.IX). Every thread the first book left open is paid in this way, at length and on time. The little icon his sister hung round his neck was taken by the soldiers who carried him, and at Austerlitz it “suddenly appeared upon his chest outside his uniform” (III.XIX).
Movement III
Between the wars the novel stops, in a chapter of a few sentences, to set its terms. While emperors meet and treaties are made, “real life, with its essential interests of health and sickness, toil and rest, and its intellectual interests in thought, science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, and passions” goes on “as usual, independently of and apart from political friendship or enmity with Napoleon Bonaparte” (V.XXII). Then the oak. In spring Andrew passes an old tree that will not leaf: “There is no spring, no sun, no happiness!” it seems to say (VI.I), and he agrees with it. Weeks later, after a night at the Rostovs’ when a girl at the window above him would not sleep for the moon, he looks for it and does not know it: “The old oak, quite transfigured, spreading out a canopy of sappy dark-green foliage, stood rapt and slightly trembling in the rays of the evening sun.” And: “No, life is not over at thirty-one!” (VI.III).
After the wolf hunt, at the cottage of a poor kinsman the Rostovs call Uncle, Natasha dances to his guitar, and the narrator asks where this young countess had “imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit” (VII.VII). Driving home in the dark she tells her brother: “I know that I shall never again be as happy and tranquil as I am now” (VII.VII). The peace is the cause of the catastrophe. The year of waiting that old Prince Bolkonsky has set on the engagement leaves her alone, and that sentence is the measure of her fall.
Then the opera, seen by a girl who has stopped believing in it. “The floor of the stage consisted of smooth boards, at the sides was some painted cardboard representing trees” (VIII.IX). A man with bare legs leaps, and the narrator adds, in brackets, that he “received sixty thousand rubles a year for this art.” Helene takes Natasha into her box; Anatole is presented. The point of view crosses in one sentence: “Natasha no longer thought this strange” (VIII.IX). In the fourth act a devil sings “till the boards were withdrawn from under him and he disappeared down below” (VIII.X), and as they leave, Anatole presses her arm above the elbow. The estrangement is not a device laid over the scene. It is the scene: the order of a world dissolving as she enters it.
Movement IV
From the middle of the book the argument and the scenes answer each other. “In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events” (IX.I). The essay on causes cites Rostov, who “charged the French because he could not restrain his wish for a gallop across a level field” (X.I). The position at Borodino, the narrator says, “was no more a position than any other spot one might find in the Russian Empire by sticking a pin into the map at hazard” (X.XIX), and a civilian in a white hat stands on the knoll looking for the position he cannot see. The theory says that the commander takes the least part in the action. The scenes show Kutuzov on a bench, listening.
The battle is dealt out among Pierre’s knoll, Napoleon’s redoubt, Kutuzov’s bench and Andrew’s regiment, held in reserve under fire. The men wait; some “built little houses of the tufts in the plowed ground” (X.XXXVI). Andrew is struck by a spinning shell, and in the dressing station sees a man shown “his amputated leg stained with clotted blood and with the boot still on”, and knows Anatole (X.XXXVII). Napoleon for a moment feels “in his own person the sufferings and death he had witnessed on the battlefield”, and in the same chapter, told that the Russians still stand: “They want more!” and “Let them have it!” (X.XXXVIII). Then rain falls “on the dead and wounded, on the frightened, exhausted, and hesitating men”, and seems to say: “Enough, men! Enough! Cease... bethink yourselves! What are you doing?” The French go on “like an infuriated animal that has in its onslaught received a mortal wound” (X.XXXIX).
In Moscow the violent find their reasons. Rostopchin gives the crowd a prisoner, Vereshchagin, and they kill him; driving away, the governor is calmed by the idea no killer has done without: “This idea is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of other people” (XI.XXV). Pierre, taken as an incendiary, is made to watch an execution and looks for the man who is killing him: “And Pierre felt that it was no one.” The next line stands as a paragraph of its own: “It was a system”, “a concurrence of circumstances” (XII.X). The fifth man, a factory lad, “himself adjusted the knot which hurt the back of his head” (XII.XI). Pierre’s world collapses into “a heap of meaningless rubbish”. That night in a shed a soldier, Platon Karataev, gives him baked potatoes and shows him how to eat them with salt, and the world stirs in him again “with a new beauty and on new and unshakable foundations” (XII.XII).
Movement V
Andrew dies twice in one chapter. He dreams that something is pushing at a door and he cannot hold it: “It entered, and it was death, and Prince Andrew died.” Then at the instant of death he remembers that he is asleep, and “having made an effort, he awoke.” “Yes, death is an awakening!” (XII.XVI). The book leaves open whether the love that follows, a love of everything and everyone, is victory or withdrawal. In the fourteenth book Petya Rostov rides with the partisans, hears the camp at night as an orchestra, and at dawn gallops into a French yard: “A bullet had pierced his skull” (XIV.XI).
On the march west Karataev, sick, cannot keep up. Pierre does not look back. He hears a shot, and goes on counting the stages to Smolensk. “Behind him, where Karataev had been sitting, the dog began to howl.” Pierre thinks only: “What a stupid beast! Why is it howling?” (XIV.XIV). That night he dreams of a globe made of drops, each trying to spread and pressed by the others, and of his old teacher’s words: “There now, Karataev has spread out and disappeared” (XIV.XV). It is the figure the Second Epilogue will give as the sum of numberless small wills, dreamed before it is argued. The book keeps its judgment of Karataev open. He “would not have grieved for a moment at parting” from Pierre (XII.XIII), and in the epilogue Pierre decides that he “would not have approved” of his politics, only of “our family life” (Ep. I.XVI).
The fiction ends on a boy. Andrew’s son has heard Pierre argue for a society against the drift of the government, and Nicholas answer that if “Arakcheev ordered me to lead a squadron against you and cut you down, I should not hesitate an instant”. He asks Pierre: “If Papa were alive... would he agree with you?” “Yes, I think so,” Pierre answers (Ep. I.XIV). That night the boy dreams of leading an army with Pierre in Plutarch’s helmets, and of his uncle stopping them with “orders from Arakcheev”, and wakes promising, “I will do something with which even he would be satisfied” (Ep. I.XVI). Then twelve chapters without a character: “History is the life of nations and of humanity” (Ep. II.I). It names its own form: “Freedom is the content. Inevitability is the form” (Ep. II.X). It ends on Copernicus and on its starkest wording, without the qualification it has just given: “it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious” (Ep. II.XII). The book stops there.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the work, and on the Russian in part. Length is not a cost, and the spine is compelled. Every thread the first book leaves open is paid: the icon returns on Andrew’s chest at Austerlitz, the son is born as the wife dies, the Anatole match comes back as Natasha’s ruin. The scenes and the essays need each other: the essay on causes cites Rostov, who “charged the French because he could not restrain his wish for a gallop across a level field” (X.I). What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the argument told again: the case against the historians, restated through Book XV and in both Epilogues, with the Masonic ritual and the Berg evenings, five or six per cent of the whole.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosures can be stated, and they hold. Testimony falsifies: Rostov “imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably” lapses into the story his hearers expect (III.VII). Benevolence from above extracts: Pierre “did not know that where the steward had shown him in the accounts that the serfs’ payments had been diminished by a third, their obligatory manorial work had been increased by a half” (V.X). The state kills with no author: “And Pierre felt that it was no one” (XII.X). Love and the wish for release live together: “I want his death!” (X.VIII). Held below the summit by what the narrator asserts rather than finds: “Natasha needed a husband. A husband was given her and he gave her a family” (Ep. I.X), and serfdom seen from the master’s porch.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Height reaches the top, and it comes in every register. The transcendent: “All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky” (III.XVI), and “It entered, and it was death, and Prince Andrew died” (XII.XVI). The dreadful: the factory lad at the execution who “himself adjusted the knot which hurt the back of his head” (XII.XI). The lyric: the oak “rapt and slightly trembling in the rays of the evening sun” (VI.III). The domestic: Lise’s dead face, Natasha’s dance. The battle’s own: the rain at Borodino, “Enough, men! Enough! Cease... bethink yourselves! What are you doing?” (X.XXXIX). The flat stretches are long, and they are meant: the salons, the Bergs, the middle of the Second Epilogue. Frequency, not height, holds it a step from the top.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Myth built, and built against the inherited one: “The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish the whole interest of the story” (X.XIX). The idol falls: Andrew hears Napoleon’s praise “as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly” (III.XIX). The conqueror’s arm is struck powerless, and his army goes on “like an infuriated animal that has in its onslaught received a mortal wound” (X.XXXIX). Pierre is broken and remade in a shed; Andrew dies and wakes. The globe of drops is the Second Epilogue’s sum of wills, dreamed first. Held a step down, the narrowest of the five gate margins, because the counter-myth of Russian spirit is sometimes asserted: Karataev is “the personification of everything Russian, kindly, and round” (XII.XIII).
Score: 9.4 / 10
The inheritance is the historical romance, the family chronicle, the society novel and the battle-piece, with Stendhal’s Waterloo the nearest precedent. The turn: a battle told by a man who “could not understand or make out anything” (III.XVII) and by a civilian in a white hat; a novel that stops at its joints to argue with named historians, and ends in a treatise without a character: “History is the life of nations and of humanity” (Ep. II.I). The stake was paid in the reception: Flaubert complained in 1880 that the book repeats itself and philosophises, and Henry James in 1908 made it his type of the loose, baggy novel. Held from the top because the departure stands beside an inherited comic close: two marriages, the debts paid, an estate nearly bought back.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The work states its formal principle, and the form enacts it: “Freedom is the content. Inevitability is the form” (Ep. II.X). Change the form and the book stops knowing three things. That no one sees the whole: Austerlitz and Borodino are dealt out among the column, the emperors and the wounded, and the passions of 160,000 men come to “a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history” (III.XI). That the same act is free from within and necessary from without: soldiers hauling a wattle wall in the fiction return in the essay as men hauling a log, “command and power in their primary form” (Ep. II.VII). That time is a cause. Held off the top because the Second Epilogue can be lifted out, and never returns to the fiction.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: a century and a half of re-reading that has kept changing its question. Shklovsky made the opera a founding case of estrangement (1917); Lukács read its history in The Historical Novel (1937), Isaiah Berlin its Second Epilogue in The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), Gary Saul Morson its form against narrative in Hidden in Plain View (1987). The text leaves its questions open: whether Karataev is a saint or the man Pierre walks away from, who “would not have grieved for a moment at parting” (XII.XIII); whether Andrew’s death is victory or withdrawal; whether freedom is “the unknown remainder” (Ep. II.X) or a thing to renounce. The polemic gives less on each return, and the promised laws of history are never stated.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The book changes what a novel may hold. History becomes the subject of argument inside the fiction. The battle-piece is rebuilt from below, from soldiers under fire who “built little houses of the tufts in the plowed ground” (X.XXXVI). The great man is reduced: “In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events” (IX.I). The private life is held level with the public. Its essay-novel had fewer successors than its war. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the measure of the large novel; Woolf called its author the greatest of novelists (1925); Grossman took it for the model of Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn of The Red Wheel; Hemingway praised its battles and complained of its philosophy (1942); Prokofiev made an opera of it, Vidor (1956) and Bondarchuk (1966–67) films.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Survival is demonstrated: in print since 1868–69, translated into every major language, adapted by every generation since. It has outlived the empire, the serfdom, the Soviet state and the historiography it was written against. Its scenes need no knowledge of 1812: the oak, Natasha’s dance, Petya’s raisins, the old countess, for whom what was once an aim is “merely a pretext” (Ep. I.XII). The surface fixed to its moment is real, and it is the essays’ surface: Buckle, Gervinus and Schlosser, the quarrel over Shevardino, national types and claims about women, and a French whose social meaning a modern reader no longer hears. That surface holds the axis a step from the top; the fiction carries almost none of it.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Judged on the original as far as a close translation carries it; the Russian sentence, unheard here, is neither credited nor charged. The making that comes through is load-bearing. Point of view crosses in one sentence: at the opera, “Natasha no longer thought this strange” (VIII.IX). The perceiving body comes before the name: “What have they taken a baby in there for?” (IV.IX). A fact is withheld for a page: “This wounded man was Prince Andrew Bolkonski” (XI.XIV). An object carries the feeling: Anatole’s leg “with the boot still on” (X.XXXVII). Charged, for construction and care, because they lie in the structure in any language: two families keeping dates a year apart through Book VIII; tags kept past their use; explanation after showing; the Second Epilogue’s numbered lists; a last chapter that stops rather than closes.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The range is as wide as any: a girl’s dance and a firing squad, a nameless dog and Copernicus. One law holds most of it: the infinitesimal will, real to itself, summed into a motion no one owns. The Rostovs give up their carts to the wounded, and “a quarter of an hour before it had not seemed strange to anyone that the wounded should be left behind” (XI.XVI); the execution has no author. The strains are real. Napoleon is judged by “the standard of good and evil given us by Christ” (XIV.XVIII), and the principle allows it, but he alone is denied the interior that would let the verdict be tested. Kutuzov’s insight is asserted as “national feeling which he possessed in full purity and strength” (XV.V). And a plot that argues against arranged causes runs on coincidence.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Every order the axis names is present, and one structure holds them. Consciousness: Andrew’s sky, Pierre’s dreams, Petya’s fugue, Nikolenka’s dream. The family: four households across fifteen years and three generations. Labour and money: Count Ilya’s mortgages, Pierre’s steward’s books, Dron, who never forgot “a single shock of the whole corn crop” (X.IX), Nicholas’s farming. The state and the court; war from the commander-in-chief to the drummer boy; history and its historians; the sacred from the icon to Karataev’s God; nature from the oak to the frost; death, birth and old age; and the question of freedom. They are integrated: Alexander’s vow to “eat potatoes with the meanest of my peasants” (XII.III) is answered by Karataev’s potato with salt. Held a step down because the peasant order is seen mostly from above, and the French mostly from outside.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Encompassed at 9.7, with The Unconcealment, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.6. Every order from a child’s dream to the calculus of history held in one structure and integrated; disclosures about testimony, benevolence and the state that hold without the book’s doctrine; a century and a half of re-reading that keeps changing its question; and a fiction whose surface has barely dated.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.5, held by the argument told again: the case against the historians, made at the middle of the book and restated through the fifteenth book and both Epilogues, with the Masonic ritual and the Berg evenings, five or six per cent of the whole. Next above it, The Inner Law at 9.3, for a law right in principle and partisan in application: Napoleon alone is denied an interior, and Kutuzov’s insight is asserted as national feeling. The rhythm of the Russian sentence is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.5, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.6, The Imperishable at 9.6, The Swerve at 9.5, Pressure on Tradition at 9.5 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.4 clear the bar of 8.5, The Archetypal Deep by nine tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.5, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.7. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · Lev Tolstoy’s Voina i mir, in the final text of 1869, scored as one work: fifteen books and two epilogues, 365 chapters, the Second Epilogue included. The opening parts ran in The Russian Messenger from 1865 under the title 1805, and the book came out in six volumes in 1868–69. The edition of 1873 put the French into Russian and moved the essays to an appendix; later editions restored the arrangement of 1869, which is the one scored. Every score is judged on the novel in Tolstoy’s Russian, with his French, which is not in hand. Translation · Louise and Aylmer Maude’s (1922–23), Project Gutenberg e-text #2600, for sense and for every quotation on this page. It was used because it is the only version in hand, and because it is close and sober, the work of translators Tolstoy knew and approved; its fifteen books follow the Russian volume-parts one to one. Its English is not charged to the novel: it puts most of Tolstoy’s French into English and keeps only fragments, glossed in footnotes; it gives Denisov’s burr as a lisped w, turns songs and verses into doggerel, carries Latinate abstraction into the Second Epilogue, and once makes a rhyme the Russian does not have. Constance Garnett’s (1904), Anthony Briggs’s (2005) and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s (2007) versions are not in hand, and none is quoted. The e-text names no source edition and drops the accents from the French; its two impossible dates, Pierre reaching Moscow “On the thirteenth of August” (XI.X) and a letter dated from Moscow on October 30, 1812, are not charged without the Russian. The divisions carry over from the Russian; the word counts do not, and the shares and the middle given on this page are measured in the English. The rhythm of Tolstoy’s sentence, its repetitions, its peasant speech and its play on words are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Citations are by book and chapter, the Epilogues as Ep. I and Ep. II.