Tolstoy and Homer

Abstract

EVEN Tolstoy's fiercest critics allow that War and Peace is Russia's great book. Other nations have waited in vain for Great War to issue in the national epic. Milton searched all the way back to Arthur before abandoning the project for the War in Heaven, and as recently as 1941 the young Norman Mailer was debating whether to stalk the Great American Novel in the Pacific theater or the European.' For much of the nation, of course, the Civil War and Gone with the Wind had already ended the quest.2 Things are good deal simpler for the Russians, since the victory of 1812 and the seven years preceding are the great moment in their military history and Tolstoy their great storyteller. So much was evident to them within generation of the book's appearance, as when Strakhov hailed War and Peace as a truly unheard-of phenomenon, an epic in contemporary form of art.3 Early in this century Tolstoy himself relieved Gorky of any doubts about the matter: Without false modesty, War and Peace is like the Iliad.''4 But is it just one book? While Homer had perfected unity of plot (Aristotle, Poetics 8), the Tolstoyan Iliad is notoriously several books at once and for some readers none of them convincingly: historical saga, romance, philosophical tract. Henry James included it among Tolstoy's loose baggy monsters ;5 Percy Lubbock diagnosed therein