I used to think that War and Peace was the best novel ever written, but then I read Anna Karenina and was no longer so sure.
Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina in the 1870s and he conceived the book as a literary riposte to John Stuart Mill’s advocacy of women’s equality. Tolstoy was a great believer in marriage and large families – his wife gave birth to thirteen children – and notwithstanding his numerous casual sexual liaisons prior to his own wedding, including fathering a child with one of his serfs, his views on women’s role in society were deeply conservative. His greatness as a novelist is in large part due to his ability to write sympathetically about characters whose behaviour he fundamentally disapproved of. Most modern readers will find Anna’s choices defensible, her treatment by her husband deplorable, her social ostracism hypocritical, and her suicide tragic. It is possible to admire the story without thereby partaking in Tolstoy’s moral disapprobation because his portrayal of Anna’s actions and their consequences present us with a credible and moving account of one of the great universal themes in human experience. Whatever his personal views, Tolstoy describes his own society with precision and sensitivity, but without direct judgement.
On reflection, however, I still consider War and Peace the better book not least because in this earlier story Tolstoy’s array of characters were situated within a moment of dramatic social and political upheaval, as the Napoleonic armies swept east from Paris to Moscow. In this case, we are treated not just to a series of descriptions of personal love and loss, of ambition and disappointment, of friendship and enmity, and of military heroism and incompetence, but also to a panoramic view of the Russian nation in turmoil. This lengthy book is then brought to a bizarre conclusion by a diatribe by the author on the meaning of history, the chaos of war, and the fundamental error of according a role to “great men” in the achievement of social change. War and Peace is a great novel – perhaps the greatest novel – precisely because Tolstoy does not just tell an interesting story with strong characters, good plot development, and a well-balanced narrative structure, but he also tells us many interesting and important things about life, by sprinkling liberally into the text many of his own eccentric opinions. (This is also the reason why Cervantes, Melville, Joyce, Proust, and Musil are great novelists too).
In later life, Tolstoy mostly abandoned fiction to concentrate on educational work and writing books about theology, social criticism, and the purpose of art. I find much of this work badly argued: for some reason he was unable to produce non-fiction of a similar quality to his novels, relying instead on exaggeration, didacticism, and caricature. His late novel, Resurrection – while not as good as War and Peace and Anna Karenina -shows that he was still able to write a compelling story at the age of seventy. It is a matter of regret, I think, that he might have produced one or two more epic novels had he chosen to devote his huge stores of energy to that end, but Tolstoy was a literary genius who wanted to be prophet, a man who disavowed his talent for art to pursue his commitment to social reform. He would have been delighted to know that his most illustrious twentieth century disciple was Mohandas Gandhi, the leader of a political rather than a literary movement.
Tolstoy, like Gandhi, was a champion of non-violence as a way of life. Yet much of his best writing – not only War and Peace but also the early stories that established his reputation, The Sevastopol Sketches – are concerned with the experience of war, based on his own service in the Imperial army during his mid-twenties. Tolstoy drew attention both to the incompetence of military leaders and generals, who had no real idea of the chaotic battlefields they were seeking to direct, and to the bravery and loyalty of ordinary soldiers, who risked their lives for their families, their land, their way of life. His writing served to memorialise the sacrifices of those who suffered and died, and the abject defeat of Napoleon’s army, captured so brilliantly in the pages of War and Peace, established Tolstoy’s reputation as the great chronicler of Russia’s national destiny. However much his later social activism alienated the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Tsar, and his autocratic government, at his death in 1910, Tolstoy was the most popular writer of his time, revered by many Russians.
Since his death the question has been asked, who will be the next Tolstoy? Who will write the great novel of the Soviet Union as Tolstoy wrote the great novel of Imperial Russia? One possibility was Boris Pasternak, the poet and translator, whose novel Dr Zhivago was published in the mid-1950s, and who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his achievement. In many ways Dr Zhivago resembles War and Peace, for itis a love story set during a time of war and social upheaval, and Pasternak’s poetic descriptions of the Russian countryside through the changing seasons would have reminded readers of Tolstoy’s love of nature. In addition, Pasternak was known as a critic of Stalin and his use of terror to supress the arts, but like Tolstoy he chose to remain in his native land, thereby running the risk of imprisonment or death, rather than move to Western Europe for a safer life. Dr Zhivago was first published in Italy, after the text was smuggled out of the Soviet Union whose leaders were not impressed by Pasternak’s description of the chaos of the early years of Soviet rule, the brutality and crimes of both sides during the Civil War (1917-23), and his focus on the lives and fates of individuals ahead of the steady progress of the collective under socialism. As a tragic love story, Dr Zhivago resembles Anna Karenina more than War and Peace, despite its wartime setting. I think it is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, but it does not quite match Tolstoy in providing the definitive description of a national experience of existential threat and – eventual – survival.
Another option was Vasily Grossman, a scientist turned journalist, who wrote a huge two volume novel set during the Great Patriotic War (1941-45). The first volume – Stalingrad – was published in Russia in the early 1950s and draws extensively of Grossman’s experiences as a war reporter. It is written in the style of social realism, the only acceptable style for art, music, and literature during the later years of Stalin’s rule, and brings together a wide range of characters whose personal stories develop against the background of the German invasion and then the siege of Stalingrad. In this respect it is similar in form to War and Peace, although Grossman’s characters are mostly scientists, factory managers, technicians, nurses, and political workers, as opposed to aristocrats. The sequel – Life and Fate – written in the late 1950s and not published until 1980, is much more critical of the Soviet Union and the incompetence of Stalin’s political and military strategy: its focus is on the costs of the war for ordinary people of both sides, and the heavy burden of responsibility that lies with the two authoritarian regimes whose leaders were willing to sacrifice millions of lives to promote their own crazed ambitions. Grossman’s work is therefore both a memorialisation of the vast sacrifices of the Russian people, which saved the Soviet Union from military defeat, and a condemnation of the Soviet regime for its brutal disregard for the well-being of its own people. Like Tolstoy, Grossman is an author for the people, not for the rulers.
During the past couple of weeks, I have been reading the novel Stalingrad and, for historical background, Antony Beevor’s account of the great battle, also called Stalingrad, which was published in the late-1990s drawing upon newly accessible archival papers that provide a detailed account of the Soviet defence of the city, now renamed Volgograd. I had planned this reading a while ago, as this year is the eightieth anniversary of these events, and I have been meaning to read Grossman’s work for some time, having read many positive reviews. Just as with War and Peace, it helps to have a list of the various characters and their relationships at the end of the text, to help follow the numerous storylines, which periodically entwine with each other as the novel progresses. It has been a shock to have the bare facts of the war brought to life, by both Beevor’s history and Grossman’s novel: the scale of the war, the casualties, the destruction, the cruelty and the bravery, the devastation of land, towns, families, and friendships.
The balance of power changed once Germany attacked the Soviet Union (in June 1941) and Japan attacked the US (in December 1941), because the initial damage inflicted in both instances was insufficient to compensate for the vast material resources – fighting men and women, and military and industrial equipment – that could be deployed by the Soviet Union and the US over time. The eventual outcome of the war was determined by inequality of scale in the forces of production. Tolstoy’s observations about the inability of “great men” to influence the course of history seem apt in this case. That said, the invaluable service that Tolstoy, Pasternak, and Grossman have provided us, is to document the personal costs of each day of fighting, what it means in human terms to consume the material resources of warfare in the struggle of one nation to wrest control from its neighbour of a few hundred square kilometres of land.
It is a deeply unhappy coincidence that as I read his account of the German army invading Ukraine from the west back in 1942, today Russian forces are crossing the border into Ukraine from the east. Grossman was himself Ukrainian, from a Jewish family and his mother was murdered by the Germans soon after the invasion. On of his characters describes his memories of this last day in Kiev – the cloudless blue sky, the gleaming windows, the streets carpeted with gold leaves – Krymov felt as if an axe were cleaving his heart. This human cost cannot be fully accounted for in a list of fatalities, of homes destroyed and livelihoods lost. Twenty-five million Russians died during the Great Patriotic War, but that number is so large that it is hard for us to make sense of. It is only in fiction – in storytelling – that the reality of war can be made plain, and that appropriate memorialisation of the dead can be achieved. For the characters in stories continue to live and the meaning of their lives and fates can be shared with others, both today and far into the future.
In a short chapter that supplies military and political context to the personal stories that constitute the main body of his novel, Grossman’s narrator tells us that the eastwards retreat of the Soviet army disguised the true nature of the progress of the war: What very few understood, however, was that the swiftness of the German advance disguised the true nature of what was now a people’s war. The German’s apparent strength disguised a deeper weakness, while the weakness shown by the retreating Red Army was gradually being transformed into strength. There is a profound truth in these sentences. Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 had precipitated a crisis for Imperial Russia, but the nation and its royal family survived for just over a hundred years, until the Great War proved to be the catalyst for fall of the Romanovs. Meanwhile, Napoleon met his Waterloo just three years later. In the summer of 1941, it was not clear that the Soviet Union would survive, but the course of the war was transformed when the German onslaught was halted and reversed at Stalingrad. It was the Nazi regime which collapsed in 1945, while the Soviet regime held onto power for another forty-four years.
I wish that Mr Putin had devoted less time to judo and more time to reading great Russian novels. Let us hope some of his advisors will soon be able to persuade him of the truths found in fiction.