Tolstoy's War and Peace, A Study by R. F. ChristianReview by: R. HareThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 42, No. 98 (Dec., 1963), p. 211Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4205530 .

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REVIEWS 21 I

to Mr Kamen for the painstaking, self-effacing, competent, and at times brilliant way in which he has carried out his work of translation.

Oxford DIMITRI OBOLENSKY

Tolstoy's War and Peace, A Study. By R. F. Christian. Clarendon Press, Oxford, I962. I84 pages.

THIS compactly arranged and well-written book can act as a helpful guide in following up some of the many questions raised by a serious read- ing of Tolstoy's War and Peace. As the author, with correct modesty, points out, it cannot be of any help to people who have not first read the novel. But neither is the book superfluous, simply because War and Peace is unique both in scale, in blend of historical fact with imaginative vision, and in provocative many-sidedness, so that a well-informed commentary of this kind becomes here appropriate and welcome.

The author has divided his exposition into six chapters, each dealing with a separate aspect of War and Peace. These are the evolution of the novel, its use of sources, its idea and genre, its structure and composition, its language, and its characterisation. The first and second are the most important and give wider opportunities for an unfamiliar insight into Tolstoy's aims and methods. These chapters provide enlightening in- formation, hitherto available only in Russian sources, about Tolstoy's detailed plans and preliminary drafts for War and Peace, and about the historical works, biographies and memoirs, which he carefully studied, and then used, exactly as he wanted, for his narrative. As the author observes, to the extent that his own reading about the Napoleonic period widened, Tolstoy became more and more convinced of the enormity of the gulf separating the truth of history from the truth of the historian. In refuting the latter, he believed that he had found a new way of ex- pressing the former. Tolstoy's own chosen form of Dichtung und Wahrheit, of interwoven chronicle and fiction, becomes thus more intimately intelligible to his readers.

In the section devoted to structure and composition, the author draws attention to the singular lack of class-consciousness with which Tolstoy represents the bonds of sympathy uniting the aristocracy with the common people. Indeed the 'good' aristocrats, like Pierre and Prince Andrew, are far closer to their own inferiors in the social hierarchy than they are to corrupt aristocrats, like the Kuragins, about whom Tolstoy writes with a withering contempt and irony which he never uses for uneducated people. This solidarity of the Russian narod, when they drove out Napoleon in I812, is clearly intended to represent a victory of the whole nation, which included serfs and masters, and certainly not a triumph of the common people only.

The section about language contains a number of apposite comments on Tolstoy's syntax and vocabulary, and helps to explain his sometimes deliberate clumsiness and repetition of identical words and phrases.

London R. HARE

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