History Meets Fiction by Beverley Southgate

Author:Beverley Southgate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

That indicates the essence of Tolstoy’s own position – a position reached from personal experience in a war later characterised as ‘completely pointless and manifestly avoidable…a completely futile waste of life’.15 His own repudiation of military values, and of the inhumanity implied in them, is evident throughout the book and exemplified in sneering references to ‘a stick called a “marshal’s staff”’, and to ‘that sort of victory which is defined by the capture of pieces of material fastened to sticks, called standards’.16 He is clear that traditional justifications for war (as still used in the twenty-first century) are nothing better than cynical political rhetoric: ‘Since the world began and men have killed one another, no one has ever committed such a crime against his fellow-man without comforting himselfwith this same idea…the hypothetical welfare of other people’ (III.359; II.545, my emphases; III.98).

‘Hypothetical’ is the key word there, and points up the self-delusions with which, in the perpetration of inhumane acts, we continue to indulge ourselves. Ideals of glory and grandeur continue to be manipulated: it is not for nothing that national kings dress up formally in army uniforms, and that military commanders (with their ubiquitous statues) are held up as exemplary figures. But such values, Tolstoy insists, essentially ‘consist not merely in considering nothing wrong that one does, but in priding oneself on every crime one commits, ascribing to it an incomprehensible supernatural significance’ (III.425).

How on earth, then, we are bound to ask, does this all come about? Who is responsible for what has happened and what happens? Those too are questions to which historians have addressed themselves, and, Tolstoy believes, their answers all too often resort again to the concept of the ‘great man’ – the great man who personally determines the course of history, and so absolves the ordinary person from any responsibility for what happens. It is in opposition to that distorted emphasis, that Tolstoy advocates a rethought historiography.

In denying the supreme importance of the great, heroic figure as the motor of history, Tolstoy was bucking the trend of his time – especially in the case of Napoleon, who, together with a few others such as Alexander the Great (and later Adolf Hitler), has almost invariably been treated by historians as an archetypal ‘hero’ (or anti-hero) who, whether for good or ill, by force of character single-handedly changed the course of history. The ‘great man’ theory of history had been influentially promoted by Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837) and by Thomas Carlyle in his lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841); and it had then been deliberately reinforced in historical practice by Napoleon’s own nephew in his The History of Julius Caesar (1865). Furthermore, with its implicit Hegelian justification for trampling down ‘many an innocent flower’ that may stand in the way, it was adopted with approval in a fictional context by Dostoevsky: in Crime and Punishment, the ‘hero’ Raskolnikov argues that ‘great’ individuals are above the law, and are

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