Tolstoy on war: narrative art and historical truth in War and peace

Abstract

Rick McPeak and Donna Tussing Orwin, eds. Tolstoy on War. Narrative Art and Historical Truth in War and Peace. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012. 246 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $24.95, paper.Editors Rick McPeak and Donna Orwin issued this volume to commemorate bicentennial of Battle of Borodino during Napoleon's fateful invasion in Russia. The recently taken photograph in colour on cover features a premonitory thickening of atmospheric pressure before a summer thunderstorm over deserted field at Borodino. In a matter of minutes, all of it will be drenched in torrential rain and lut by lightning-the chuich cupola with a gilded tip, lush meadows, and trees. Pushkin's line the thunderstonn of immediately comes to mind. If asked about defining feature of volume, I would have to say, keeping in mind subtlety of this first prompt, that from front matter to index it is essays' enduring sensitivity to relationship between historical past and present. The editors and authors should be congratulated and thanked for providing readers with what constitutes a beautiful collaborative effort of specialists in several fields in humanities and social sciences. With help of Lev Tolstoi, essays disambiguate dogmatic uses of fiction in order to prove narrower disciplinary concerns of a given social science or humanities industry. With help of their open-eyed disciplinary honesty and rigour, they explain complex origin and shared afterlife of a literary masteipiece that cannot be bounded to a single cohort of knowledge or specialty.The volume asks, through skilled interpolations by both editors, what books do to a liberal arts education in order to prosecute violence virtuously (p. 193). Attractively produced and meticulously edited, volume includes twelve illuminating essays with detailed annotations that add significantly to provide answer to question above at same time as they aid and enrich our understanding of Tolstoi's methods and approaches to artistic recreation of war. Drawn into action are Dmitrii Likhachev and Anthony Kwame Appiah, Ulysses Grant and Douglas MacArthur, Caesar and Carl von Clausewitz, Plutarch and Cassirer, Honore de Balzac and Herman Melville, Madame Blavatsky and Frantz Fanon. There is something new on eveiy page, perhaps unexpected, but always to point.Every essay is memorable. Dominic Lieven addresses Tolstoi's famous claim that morale is most powerful factor for victoiy and finds strong corroboration for this claim in Russian army's unusual record of tenacity in 1812. Against enduring misconception, Alexander Martin portrays Moscow of 1812 as a cosmopolitan, thriving city, which learns momentous lessons about invader and its future paths through catastrophe that it suffers and survives. Allan Forrest focuses on Tolstoi's representations of French, finding that French inform Tolstoi about importance of multiculturahsm within Empire, as well as about social democratic power activated in response to heroic pressure issuing from great Jeff Love and Gaiy Saul Morsonuse vehicles of language and representation in order to assess possibility of T olstoi's dismantling grand narratives and myth of men. The same democratizing tendency can be observed in Dan Ungurianu's and Donna Orwin's essays probing Tolstoi's text against historical and military sources and eyewitness responses. …