War and Peace.
This class session will be devoted to the first half of Tolstoi’s novel.
The three presenters are:
1) Henry – Biography related to the novel. Test/assignment to evaluate reading.
2) Kelly – The work, its themes, characters, etc. Lead discussion.
3). Nate – How is War and Peace viewed by 20th and 21st century critics? What did our discussion omit?
Screening War and Peace – Soviet Film version, First half.
A few thoughts on preparation to teach. For the bio the course reserves has books by Troyat, Bartlett and Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia and daughter, Alexandra, as well as collected letters. For critical views check the reserve books by Bloom, Christian, McClean, Simmons and Wasiolek.
When teaching/discussing the novel consider what you hope to achieve, why and how will you accomplish that. Perhaps a short video on your vision of what literature and a literature class should be could be helpful.
Here are the notes from my presentation on Tolstoy’s life during the writing of W&P. They are a bit rough to read, but hopefully they’ll be of some use:
In 1851 Tolstoy volunteered, with his brother, to serve in the Russian army after struggling with his studies and incurring gambling debts; he eventually went on to serve in the Crimean war.
Throughout his time in the army, he was publishing, and beginning to make a name for himself throughout Russia as a thinker.
Yet he does not remember these years fondly: Reflecting on his youth:
From Confessions (1882): “I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing, and heart-rending pain. I killed people in war, challenged men to duels with the purpose of killing them, and lost at cards; I squandered the fruits of the peasants’ toil and then had them executed; I was a fornicator and a cheat. Lying, stealing, promiscuity of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder — there was not a crime I did not commit… Thus I lived for ten years. ”
He left the army after his brother Dmitry died in 1856, and traveled to Western Europe the following year. This trip contributed to his fascination with education and his disillusionment with the idea of nobility, and in 1859 he opened a school for peasants at Yasnaya Polyana, his childhood home in the Tula Province.
He returned to Western Europe in 1860 to study pedagogy; there he met Victor Hugo, the master French novelist, who influenced Tolstoy’s political thinking and, later, his literary style. That same year, his brother Nikolay—the same brother with whom he had enrolled in the army—died in his arms.
Following both the Emancipation of the Serfs and Tolstoy’s return to St. Petersburg in the spring of 1861, (at which time he challenged the legendary writer Turgenev to a duel, which was never fought) he was appointed Justice of the Peace in his district. This came as somewhat of an unwelcome surprise to Tolstoy, who, by granting his own peasants freedom ahead of the manifesto, had greatly enraged his conservative neighbors and the nobility at large.
Tolstoy used his position as Justice of the Peace to set up and run 21 schools by the fall of 1861, schools at which he advocated a method of instruction that focused on the children’s autonomy, rather than the rote, “autocratic” methods that had been in favor.
The next year, however, Tolstoy resigned his post amidst government audits and harassment of the schools. Later that same year, Yasnaya Polyana was raided by the secret police, and he decided to close down the schools.
He found something else to concentrate on, however:
1862 married the daughter of a court physician, Sofia Andreyevna Behrs. He was 34, she 18; she became pregnant shortly after their marriage. After his travels and travails, in the army, school, and elsewhere, Tolstoy finally came to find some semblance of stability, perhaps for the first time in his life, out of which he was able to become a more prolific and engaged writer.
The marriage was often tumultuous and had its many difficulties, many of which seemed to stem from the difference in the ages of husband and wife. Tolstoy viewed his wife as a child, someone to be educated and molded by the husband, but also by the father-figure: Sonya described his advice in one letter as “parental,” and described herself more than once as his eldest daughter. Yet that they enjoyed periods of great happiness—particularly at first—was well-documented, both in letters between them and in primary and secondary accounts. The summer of 1863 was full of merriment and cause for celebration: Tolstoy’s eldest son was born in June that summer, and the estate on which they lived was a frequent spot for visitors, among them both friends and family. Tolstoy enjoyed working on the estate, tending to bees, goats, and a garden, among other things.
That Autumn, Tolstoy wrote a letter to his cousin, the Countess Alexandra:
“I am a husband and a father well satisfied with his state, and so much accustomed to it that, in order to realize my happiness, I have to reflect and to recall what I was before. I search neither into my state nor my feelings, and feel only, without thinking, of my family relations. This state of mind affords me a huge mental span. Never before have I known my intellectual and moral faculties so free and ready for work. And I have work, in the form of a novel of the period of 1810-1820, which has completely absorbed me since the beginning of the autumn. Now I am an author with all the passion of my soul. I write and reflect as I have never done before.”
This novel, War and Peace, had evolved from Tolstoy’s research into the Decembrists, the group of Russian army officers and soldiers who attempted an unsuccessful and bloody revolt against Nicholas I’s assumption of the throne. He had set out to write a book about a Decembrist hero who returns to Russia with his family (presumably after having been exiled after the trials and executions of many of the Decembrist leaders), but instead had found himself—unconsciously at first—turning his mind back to 1825, the year of the uprising, in order to understand how that fateful day would have affected the novel’s protagonists. He then put aside the work he had done on the novel up to that point, feeling compelled to go back even further in order to understand how the Decembrist uprising was occasioned and, more importantly, to understand his hero. In doing so, he found himself “obliged to realize the days of his early youth, which would have coincided with Russia’s year of glory—1812.” (from a posthumously published preface to War and Peace.) (Here again we see Tolstoy’s preoccupation with his youthful years, a theme that emerges constantly in his biographies, letters, and other writings. We also see his obsession with the chronology of history, tied into his idea of infinitesimal occurrences, mostly deriving from the psychological and “moral” conditions of a great number of people, piling up upon one another to create a chain of larger, or at least more emblematic, events.) After finding himself unsatisfied with his attempt at capturing the so-called “year of glory,” he again rejected everything he had done, and began again, this time from a decidedly different point of view. His description of how and why he came to settle on the scope of history and thought that would become War and Peace:
“For the third time, then, I went back still farther into the past, prompted by a feeling which to most of my readers may perhaps seem strange, but which I trust will be intelliglble to those whose judgment I value. This feeling can only be described in one word—shame; I felt ashamed to tell the story of our victories over Napoleon and his armies without mentioning also our own disasters, our own disgraces. Who can read the many patriotic accounts of the year 1812 without this feeling of secret shame? If the reason for our successes was not mere chance, but had its roots in the souls of the Russian people and the Russian Army, our failures and disasters must be traced to a similar source.”
Tolstoy spent the next five years attempting to do just that. He would experience outbursts of creativity and insight, tempered by frustration and a need to get back on the horse, which he did, going riding for ten or twelve hours at a time.
While Tolstoy was writing the book, he traveled frequently to Moscow in order to cull information from various sources, including historical documents, scholars, and even distant relatives who possessed esoteric information about or evidence of what it was like during the period covered by the novel—anything that could be of use or provide insight into the period. He did this work meticulously and exhaustively, intending to be as historically accurate as possible, and to leave no stone unturned in his research.
As for the writing of the text itself, Tolstoy labored even more over its numerous alterations and iterations, reading the work aloud to trusted friends and family members in order to gauge its reception, as well as its rhythm, flow and structure.
During this process, in the fall of 1864, Tolstoy fell off of his horse, dislocating and breaking his arm. He went to Moscow for an operation, where he reflected that anything he had published until then was no more than an exercise. During his convalescence, he dictated passages of the book to his sister-in-law Tania.
His wife’s letters at the time suggest a poignant sense of fear and love for her husband. After the accident, she described the threat of Tolstoy’s death as a constant and ever-clarifying presence in her mind, coupled with a feeling of inadequacy that came from her self-perceived lack of intelligence, talent, and education, and her fear that her husband derided the feminine world that was raising their family and tending to their home together.
Nevertheless, she was a strong and supportive presence in Tolstoy’s professional life, copying out manuscripts and coping with Tolstoy’s capricious moods while he was working.
In 1864 Tolstoy wrote to his sister that he was enjoying, for the third year, “a perfect happiness in which there is neither suffering nor deception.”
However, there was tumult between the two, as seen in the film.
Regardless of what was going on at home, Tolstoy was indeed working. The year after he described his “perfect happiness,” he was ready to share at least a part of his work with the world:
War and Peace was first published in part in The Russian Messenger in 1865, at which time it was titled The Year 1805.
Tolstoy was heavily involved in the editing process, continuing to make small as well as large changes in the next several years, and the novel was first made available in its entirety, as a six-volume work, in 1869.
It is worth noting that, although Tolstoy initially conceived of War and Peace—or at least the germ of War and Peace—as a novel, he came to think of it quite differently, famously saying:
“It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle.”
Later, while writing Anna Karenina, he said of the work that it was his first true novel.
(Henry James called it one of those “large loose baggy monsters.”)
I think it’s very appropriate that Sam mentions our ‘counterparts’ in 19th century Russia. Part of the fascination of Tolstoy’s highly realistic style for me is seeing how there is a certain timeless relationship between my own situation and those simultaneously exotic and familiar scenes that he describes. However, with regard to literary criticism, it seems to me that the practice of reading is a very different thing now, even for liberally educated people like ourselves, from what it was in 19th century Russia. I think environmental factors have as much as anything to do with this: we take in information at a breakneck pace through the Internet and social media, while a Russian aristocrat would regularly have had whole afternoons or evenings to devote to the reading and contemplation of a single work or subject.
That said, for those of us who have made like the 19th century Russians and read these novels, I suppose it’s worth considering the degree to which criticism helps with an understanding. While other, and some later, novels that I have read in other classes, such as Moby-Dick, Heart of Darkness, Paradise Lost, etc., in setting up archetypal characters and situations, lend themselves conveniently to hermeneutic criticism-I mean criticism that assumes a sort of underlying structure or plan to a work-Tolstoy’s sprawling style, which represents human subjects in all their mercurial realism, is harder to pin down. The only critic I can think of that really appreciates this very real aspect of human nature is our first essaist, Montaigne, who in writing reflective essays on himself for years eventually realized that there just was no discernible pattern in people. Montaigne has been called the first modern man for his intellectual views, and the affinity between his depiction of human nature and Tolstoy’s makes me feel that Tolstoy’s writing style was in a sense decades more modern than that of his more structurally motivated contemporaries.
Colleagues:
On Tuesday I will be discussing the nature and purpose of literary criticism as an introduction to criticism of Tolstoy’s work from various disciplines. Two related questions that I will be asking the class are “What is the purpose of literary criticism?” and “What do we gain from literary criticism?” As I’m sure the answer to these questions (particularly the latter) vary for each of us, I encourage you to give these two questions some thought before class. Your answer to these questions likely informs your reason for taking this class; therefore, you can expect me to ask that question as well. Until then!
Nate
John Ciardi who once taught at our own Bread Loaf School of English wrote an entire book on the topic of not “what” but “how” does a poem mean. http://www.csun.edu/~krowlands/Content/Academic_Resources/Poetry_Instruction/ciardi.pdf
You might glance at it as one answer to the questions. There is also the question of whether there is a difference between literary criticism and literary scholarship.
It seems to me that what we as a society gain from literary criticism today is quite different from what the Russians gained from literary criticism throughout the 1800s. In 21st century America, we generally see literary criticism as a purely academic pursuit, even an esoteric one. But in Tolstoy’s Russia I think there was a much smaller divide between the world of literature and the forces of history. In Isaiah Berlin’s “Russian Thinkers”, he writes on this particularly Russian inseparability between art and life. He describes the Russian intelligentsia as “a kind of self-conscious army, carrying a banner for all to see- of reason and science, of liberty, of a better life” and he makes explains that “every Russian writer was made conscious that he was on a public stage.” While we, intellectual students who have taken up at least to some degree the study of literature, would be hard pressed today to state our opinions about any one literary critic’s views or works, Russian literary critics such as Dmitry Pisarev and Vissarion Belinsky were incredibly important men whose ideas had profound effects on the development of Russian history and society– men who were quite well known to our counterparts (young intellectual students, that is) in 19th century Russia. Therefore, in studying 19th century Russian literary criticism on the works of a writer such as Tolsoty, for example, one can delve into a lot of important socio-historical-political questions related to Russia at the time (e.g. how land should be managed, the role of the nobility in society, etc.). Yet when one reads a purely literary critique of Tolstoy published in let’s say 2013, the merits of such a critique are sure to be in their analysis of Tolstoy’s art and are therefore somewhat more academic and perhaps even somewhat esoteric. For anyone interested in the Berlin chapter I have mentioned, which is a fascinating read, I have sent out an e-mail to the class with the PDF attached.