In his
epilogue to his masterpiece, Tolstoy presents what could be called a general
theory of the human condition. It is
full of analogies, repetitions, contradictions, and tautologies, but among what
readers usually find the most boring part of the novel Tolstoy manages to reach
interesting conclusions. A central
remark of the epilogue is “the subject matter of history is the life of peoples
and humanity.” From this follows that
the perfect historiography would scrutinize every human being, combining each
dream, each passion, each fear, and each desire in a true account of what is past.
Other
important contributions by Tolstoy are his hatred for war (“throughout this
twenty-year period vast number of fields go unploughed, houses are burnt down,
trade flows in different directions, millions of men grow poor, get rich or
migrate, and millions of good Christian folk who claim to love their neighbour
go about murdering each other.”) and his critic to the historiography of the
time, which focused its attention in some chosen individuals (the so-called
“great people”) & regions (“that little corner of the world known as Europe,”)
and which presupposed an ultimate goal to humanity. Although his critic to historiography is
correct in aim, Tolstoy employs untruthful analogies to prove his point (his
scientific analogies are especially prone to decay, as the advance of science
has rendered some of them illogical.) In
the analogy of the bee, Tolstoy states that every individual has a different
view about the ‘purpose’ of the bee, but that its ‘ultimate purpose’ is “beyond
comprehension,” just as “the purposes of historical characters and
nations.” The former statement doesn’t
follow from the other, however, except if taken as a dogma. From the analogy of the railway engine,
Tolstoy concludes – again illogically – that the “only concept capable of
explaining the movements of nations is the concept of a force that equates to
the entire movement of the nations.”
Again, Tolstoy may be right about the goal of his critic, but is wrong
in the way he develops it. Force is a
concept in physics, and he can’t employ it in history without defining it (“how
many Newtons has Louis XVI contributed to the outburst french revolution?”) Even if his opinion makes sense, we have no
way of measuring if the forces presented by historians as ‘causes’ are equal to
what Tolstoy calls “the movement of nations;” therefore, his statement is a
fallacy.
Tolstoy’s
contribution to the concept of power is a welcome one. His challenge of the historiography of the
time is based on the inadequacy of representing all the wealth of human actions
by telling the story of a few ‘great people’: “the activities of the millions
who uproot themselves, burn their houses down, abandon the fields and go off to
butcher each other never find expression in the descriptions of activities
limited to a dozen personalities who don’t happen to burn houses down, work the
soil or kill their fellow creatures.”
Tolstoy calls for a more adequate conception of power and the
manifestations of power (i.e. the orders), questioning the dependence of the
relationship between orders and events.
In her article, Greer summarizes the arguments
contained in the epilogue to War and
Peace in a somewhat positive view, trying to excuse Tolstoy of his
contradictions and digressions. There is
no basis to Tolstoy’s call for the renouncement of freedom, for as pointed out
by Greer herself, “the reasoning that carries us toward this conclusion is
anything but conclusive.” Greer’s call
for a Tolstoyan history of the Arab Spring, though, makes sense. History being guided by the composite will of
every individual, leaders have been necessary to the success of political
movements because of their roles as articulators (“Kings are the slaves of
history,” Greer quotes.) As Tolstoy
shows, leaders are not perfect manifestations of the will of the people. The advent of the internet, however, may be
eliminating the need for leaders in political movements, as people are now
capable of more easily expressing themselves to a greater number of other
people, and also of articulating themselves.
If the internet renders possible (not ‘causes’) leaderless movements, as
it seems to be doing in the Arab Spring (and in the Turkish and Brazilian
protests of last year,) the old historiography criticized by Tolstoy will lose
its remaining credibility.
Greer tries to justify the existence of the
epilogue to War and Peace, despite
several critics to it and demands that it should have been erased. Alex Castro,
a contemporary Brazilian author, has one sole rule for creative writing: “always
erase your favourite passage, chapter, or scene of your own work.” The reasoning behind this is that the
favourite passage of an author is inevitably the passage where he shows off his
wit instead of telling the story.
Castro, Flaubert, Turgenev, and Lubbock would all agree that the epilogue
and the passages narrated by what Greer calls “the essayistic voice” were certainly
among Tolstoy’s favourite passages.
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