Give War and Peace a Chance by Andrew D. Kaufman

Author:Andrew D. Kaufman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The Tolstoys in 1887. Standing from left: Marya, Andrei, Tatyana. Sitting from left: Sergei, Lev, Tolstoy with his daughter Sasha, Sonya, Ilya, Mikhail.

Tolstoy saw the family as society’s primary social unit. When families break down, he observed, societies break down, and life itself falls apart. The very breakdown in family structures that Tolstoy wrote about so passionately in Anna Karenina was already taking place ten years earlier, in the 1860s, as he was working on War and Peace. Even then, the shift from agrarian to industrial economy, with the latter’s emphasis on individualism, competition, and consumerist gratification, was having its effect. Not only were peasants abandoning their communes in the countryside in favor of the economic opportunities in the cities, but Tolstoy observed a shift in attitude even among those in his own aristocratic circles, and watched with disappointment as his friends and relatives began getting divorced.

What’s more, the so-called woman question was heating up: nineteenth-century Russia’s equivalent of what today we would call feminism. The most progressive thinkers at the time (most of them young, unmarried, or both) encouraged women to pursue more important work beyond the chauvinistic confines of married life. One of the most famous examples of this argument was found in the radical Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel, What Is to Be Done?, written over four months from December 1862 through March 1863, during the author’s imprisonment in Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress. That book, which would inspire the Russian “free love” movement in the 1860s, not to mention future revolutionaries, tells the tale of Vera Pavlova, a poor girl living with her brother and a mother who wants to marry her off to the owner of the tenement house in which they live. Vera is saved from this loveless marriage as well as her poverty by a young medical student who marries her and helps her to set up a successful sewing business.

Tolstoy remained uninspired by Chernyshevsky and his model of the self-determined “new woman,” not least because he believed that, while running a sewing business with a doctor in training might well improve the quality of both one’s wardrobe and medical care, it hardly guaranteed one’s chances for long-term happiness. In the end, Tolstoy responded to the female emancipation movement with a character of his own, named Anna Karenina—a character who he felt offered a rather more realistic account of a “modern” woman’s prospects. Here was a passionate lady who managed to escape a loveless marriage and find her own freedom, only in the end to stick her head on the tracks before an oncoming train.

In War and Peace, too, Tolstoy offers something of a response to the progressive thinkers of his day, this time through the story lines of Natasha Rostova and Princess Marya. Freedom, alas, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, as the nineteen-year-old Natasha realizes while suffering from a severe case of “option-itis,” unable to choose between the juicily romantic Anatole and the jaded but morally superior Prince Andrei. Thankfully, she avoids

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