War and Peace
War and Peace is a honking doorstopper. The explanation appears to involve a heartwarming tale of vertical integration. With the confidence provided by early career literary success, and spurred by the indifferent response to early serialized excerpts, Tolstoy decided to self-publish War and Peace, contracting a printer, and adopting the financial risks as his own. In so doing, he excised the role of “external editor”, and asserted independence from meddling oversight. In fully liberated auteurship, we get multiple epilogues, multi-chapter philosophical asides, and a ludicrously sprawling cosmos of characters. Like a Substacker unshackled from tyrannical newspaper restrictions on length and form, Tolstoy wallows delightedly in his prolix freedom.
War and Peace combines history, novel, and philosophical treatise. The philosophy, however, is wrong: Tolstoy attempts a misguided refutation of the heroic conception of history. Instead of, say, granting Napoleon’s European success as an interesting exception to a general tendency, Tolstoy unapologetically adopts a tendentious and implausibly maximalist position. “Napoleon’s influence on the course of these events is purely external and fictitious.”
It certainly seems possible that the importance of history’s heroes tends to be overstated relative to structural factors and the deliberate effects of single individuals, but “purely external and fictitious” is stretched beyond credibility. How exactly does one deterministically derive events which occurred under Lenin, Hitler, Atatürk, Mao from the broad tenor of the masses?
Tolstoy immodestly adopts the robes of Newton and even the infinitesimals of calculus as analogs for his case, but his position is of course the antithesis of anything the scientific revolution represents, and his “science of history” is de facto the opposite. Where Newton enabled specific prediction, and rendered supernatural explanations unnecessary, Tolstoy places us in the position of mystics: whatever ensues is structurally determined by unknowable forces far larger than us. His famous religious transformation was not announced for some years to come, but in War and Peace we already see his sympathies.
He was only 35 when he started to work on War and Peace, and he was supposedly irritated by hagiographic histories, such as that of Adolphe Thiers. Maybe he was just too young.
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Tyler agrees that the philosophy is wrong, but argues that War and Peace best reflects just how much detail can be in a single grain of history. (The novel arguably even contradicts the treatise.) Even though Tolstoy’s explicit argument is that humanity as a whole is a kind of teeming hive (“history, that is, the unconscious swarmlike life of mankind, uses every moment of a king’s life as an instrument for its purposes”), the novel demonstrates the infinite intricacy of society and relations, integrating both private and the public domains. When asked which major novel has the most named characters, ChatGPT ranks In Search of Lost Time ahead of War and Peace, but places it nonetheless in the top 5.
The obvious comparison for War and Peace is Grossman’s Life and Fate. Both span multiple families, military conflict, personal relationships, and major figures of the age, with Grossman’s work of course explicitly modeled on Tolstoy’s. As works of fiction, they’re somewhat comparable: sprawling and compelling tapestries. As evocations of the human condition, however, Grossman quite clearly gets the better of Tolstoy. Grossman understands the moral and spiritual significance of freedom, and he uses Tolstoy’s architecture to contest Tolstoy’s outlook.
Tolstoy purports to show that enlightenment comes from acceptance. Pierre’s valiant efforts (to free his serfs, to assassinate Napoleon) come to nought; his peace arrives when he encounters Karataev, who simply accepts the larger forces that determine our outcomes. Prince Andrei, similarly, seeks worldly achievement (military glory, reform), but instead achieves happiness on his deathbed by viewing death as an awakening and transcending the idea of specific love in favor of something more diffuse. (Again, we can already see Tolstoy the mystic.)
For Grossman, this acceptance is in error, for human agency is the flame. Ikonnikov, the prisoner, refuses to build the gas chamber. This is an act of self-assertion that costs his life, but for him there can be no meek submission, and even totalitarianism can’t extinguish the ability to choose. Grekov, commanding House 6/1, cuts the line connecting him to his superiors, so that he may execute his own autonomous strategy. Again, a rejection of the swarm. In signing the letter of denouncement, Shtrum does accede to larger forces of history. Where Pierre finds serenity in capitulation, it is catastrophic for Shtrum: an irreconcilable fracturing of the soul.
Grossman acknowledges this disparity. In the book, we encounter the comment: “Chekov brought Russia into our consciousness in all its vastness—with people of every estate, every class, ever age… More than that! It was as a democrat that he presented all these people—as a Russian democrat. He said—and no one had said this before, not even Tolstoy—that first and foremost we are all of us human beings.”
Tolstoy misses the importance of human agency in the macro and devalues it repeatedly in the micro.
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If we had to steelman the Tolstoy position in a contemporary context, maybe we could look at AI. It’s not a war, but it’s consuming a lot of society’s resources these days. Here, it’s not clear how much heroic individuals exercise meaningful control. Nick Land wrote (in 1993, no less) that “what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.” Despite the stated desire of many to avoid race dynamics, has there ever been a more vivid demonstration of the machinic determinism of “techno-capital” than 2025’s perfervid sprint?
Tolstoy venerates Kutuzov for his humility amidst the sweeping tides. Kutuzov nudges and adjusts, but lacks the hubris to attempt control. As Napoleon retreats from Russia, he simply follows, and in such restraint Tolstoy’s approbation is established. Early attempts to control AI’s development have not really worked, and those arguing that we must avoid the race, pause, or first solve safety have been mostly swept away by the tide. At least thus far, the AI Kutuzovs seem to have fared better.
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Unlike Karenina, War and Peace is definitively too long.