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Wrestling with Lev Tolstoi: War, Peace, and Revolution in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's New Avgust Chetyrnadtsatogo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Extract
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund BurkeSince its first appearance in 1971, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Avgust Chetyrnadtsatogo (henceforth to be referred to as August 1914) has been compared to, and measured by the standards of, Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace. One might say that both the subject of the novel and the scope of the historical events described in it, as well as its numerous references to Tolstoi, made such comparisons inevitable. Even though virtually all critics were unanimous that Tolstoi was a predominant presence in Solzhenitsyn's mind when he was writing the first “knot” of the multivolume novel cycle, they disagreed about the precise nature of Solzhenitsyn's relationship to Tolstoi. While some critics have been more inclined to see Solzhenitsyn's novel as an emulation of Tolstoi's masterpiece, others have emphasized the antagonistic and polemic quality of Solzhenitsyn's attitudes toward his predecessor—whether Tolstoi the “historiosoph” of War and Peace (1865— 1869) or Tolstoi the moralist and aesthetician of the later period.
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References
1. See, for example, the articles by Ehre, Milton, Feuer, Kathryn, McCarthy, Mary, Rahv, Philip, and Erlich, Victor in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, ed., Dunlop, John et al. (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1973)Google Scholar; Feuer's, Kathryn introduction to her Solzhenitsyn: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976)Google Scholar; Sidney Monas, “FourteenYears of Aleksandr Isaevich,” Slavic Review 35 (September 1976); Vladislav, Krasnov, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky: A Study in the Polyphonic Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980 Google Scholar; James M., Curtis, Solzhenitsyn's Traditional Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984 Google Scholar.
2. Aleksandr, Solzhenitsyn, Krasnoe koleso, Uzel I: Avgust Chetyrnadtsatogo, vols. I and II (Paris: YMCA Press, 1983 Google Scholar. All references will be to this Russian edition. For translation, I have consultedMichael Glenny's translation of the first edition of the novel, August 1914 (New York: Bantam Books, 1972).
3. Most notably Solzhenitsyn deleted Tolstoi's uncomplimentary utterance about modern poetryduring his conversation with Sania Lazhenitsyn in chapter 2 (the same in both editions).
4. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., vol. 17, p. 210. For other articles by Leninabout Tolstoi see V.I. Lenin/L.N. Tolstom, 2nd ed. (Moscow, 1972).
5. Lev, Tolstoi, War and Peace, tr. Maude, Louise and Maude, Aylmer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), p. 1, 336 Google Scholar.
6. Isaiah, Berlin, Russian Thinkers, eds. Hardy, Henry and Kelly, Aileen (New York: Viking, 1978), pp. 41 and 32Google Scholar.
7. Although the adjective fatalistic had been used by a number of critics, both Russian andforeign, to describe Tolstoi's philosophy of history, I am persuaded by Edward Wasiolek's argumentthat Tolstoi himself denounced “Oriental fatalism” and that his views were more complex (see Wasiolek's, Tolstoi's Major Fiction [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], p. 116)Google Scholar. Therefore, I preferto use the term passivism, as awkward as it may sound.
8. See, for instance, N. I. Kareev, “Istoricheskaia filosofiia v Voine i mire,” Vestnik Evropy, July1887, pp. 227–269; V. B., Shklovskii, Mater'ial i stil’ v romane L'va Tolstogo‘Voina i mir’ (Moscow, 1928)Google Scholar, esp. chapter 7; more recently, John Bayley contrasted Tolstoi's subjectivism with Pushkin's respect for history in Tolstoy and the Novel (New York: Viking, 1967), p. 70.
9. Tolstoi, War and Peace, p. 864.
10. Ibid., p. 1, 208.
11. Ibid., p. 941.
12. See, for instance, Gallie, W. B., Philosophers of Peace and War: Kant, Clausewitz, Marx, Engels and Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 100 Google Scholar.
13. According to Boris Eikhenbaum, Tolstoi's novel was “based more on‘historical legend’ than historical documents … a‘fairy tale arousing national feeling’ and consciously opposed to scientific historical descriptions.” Eikhenbaum, in his book, meticulously traced how Tolstoi elevated his “crudely negative anti-historicism … to the status of a‘philosophy of history, '” Tolstoi in the Sixties (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982), pp. 144 and 195. For other critics see note 8.
14. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, p. 26.
15. Wasiolek strongly defended the credibility of Tolstoi's theory of history against both Berlin's suggestion that it is deterministic and Kareev's suggestion that it is fatalistic (Major Fiction, pp. 116, 126, and passim). I, however, remain unconvinced. Wasiolek may be right in pointing out “the profoundpassion for truth that runs through [Tolstoi's] efforts and beliefs” (p. 14), but the passion fortruth is no proof of truth.
16. In addition to Gallie, Philosophers of Peace and War, see R. V., Sampson, The Discovery of Peace (New York: Random, 1973 Google Scholar, and Martin, Green, Tolstoy and Gandhi, Men of Peace: A Biography (New York: Basic Books, 1983 Google Scholar.
17. The Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia praised Tolstoi for challenging the “bourgeois historiography” with his “progressive viewpoint that the decisive role in world history belongs to thepeople” (2nd ed., vol. 42, p. 581). More recently, the Soviet critic V. Lakshin, praising Tolstoi for “showing [in the historiosophy of War and Peace] awareness of dialectical contradictions betweenfreedom and necessity,” concluded that Tolstoi stood “a head taller than the majority of contemporaryphilosophers and historians” (Tolstoii Chekhov [Moscow, 1975] p. 239).
18. On the Slavophile sources for much of the historiosophy of War and Peace see Eikhenbaum, Tolstoi in the Sixties, esp. part 4, chaps. 3 and 4; and Berlin, Russian Thinkers, pp. 54–55. It should bepointed out, however, that Tolstoi's notion of patriotism, as evinced in War and Peace, differed fromthat of his Slavophile friends because it largely excluded the tsarist establishment, a fact that suitsthe Soviet establishment even better.
19. Henri Troyat is not too wide of the mark when he says that in Tolstoi's “patriotic distortion” of historical reality “Chauvinism gives him a heavy hand” (Tolstoy, tr. Nancy Amphoux [GardenCity, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967], p. 326).
20. Avgust I: 383.
21. Ibid. II: 38. The quoted part is given as cursive in the Russian edition.
22. The historical Kutuzov was probably very different from the Tolstoyan portrait. He wascertainly more professional in his conduct than Tolstoy's portrayal of him. Nonetheless, Solzhenitsynmakes it clear that it was the fictional Kutuzov that exerted greater influence on the strategy andattitudes of Russian generals.
23. Avgust 11: 39.
24. Victor Erlich was quite right when he observed that “in taking issue with Tolstoy's fatalisticphilosophy of history, Solzhenitsyn might be aiming at a more proximate target, notably the Marxist-Leninist brand of historical determinism” (in Dunlop et al., eds., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, p. 353).
25. A former professor of the academy, who later took part in military operations and rose to the rank of general and to directorship of the academy, Nikolai N. Golovin is the author of Nachalo voiny 1914 g. i operatsii v Vostochnoi Prussii (Prague, 1926), which served Solzhenitsyn as one of his principal sources.
26. Avgust 1: 123.
27. Ibid. I: 120, 122, and 123.
28. Recent research in the west seems to confirm Solzhenitsyn's high appraisal of Stolypin's reforms and statesmanship. See, for instance, George, Tokmakoff, P.A. Stolypin and the Third Duma: An Appraisal of the Three Major Issues (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981)Google Scholar; Yaney, George L., The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Judith, Pallot, “ Khutora and Otruba in Stolypin's Program of Farm Individualization,” Slavic Review 42 (Summer 1984): 242–256 Google Scholar. In his review of Solzhenitsyn's book, the British historian Geoffrey A. Hosking says: “Historically speaking, Solzhenitsyn's admiration for Stolypin iswell-founded. There is no doubt, in my view, that Stolypin was the outstanding Russian statesman of the early twentieth century, and for precisely the reasons Solzhenitsyn puts forward” (Times Literary Supplement, February 2, 1983).
29. Avgust II: 179.
30. Ibid. II: 224.
31. Ibid. II: 222.
32. Both Vorotyntsev and Obodovskii approvingly quote Dostoevskii who, they allege, advocatedan “eternal peace” with Germany and “toward the end of his life … gave up his ideas about Constantinople” in favor of the development of the Russian northeast (ibid. I: 124 and II: 487). In thenew version, Vorotyntsev also praises Stolypin for wishing to avoid the war (ibid. II: 514).
33. Ibid. I: 117.
34. Ibid. I: 163.
35. Ibid. I: 36.
36. Ibid. I: 21.
37. Ibid. I: 403.
38. Chapter 22 had been published, however, as part of Lenin v Tsiurikhe (Paris: YMCA Press, 1975). It is available in English in Willett's, H. T. translation as Lenin in Zurich (New York: Bantam, 1976 Google Scholar. The book includes chapters from subsequent “knots” as well.
39. Ibid. I: 227.
40. Ibid. I: 228.
41. Ibid. I: 229.
42. Ibid. I: 150.
43. Ibid. I: 340.
44. von Clausewitz, Carl, On War, ed. and trans. Howard, Michael and Paret, Peter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.
45. Lenin, Sobranie 36: 292, and 32: 79.
46. See Lenin in Zurich.
47. In a parenthetical remark, Solzhenitsyn explained that he was aware that by including theStolypin story he risked a “violation of the novelistic genre.” He justified his decision, however, bythe need to restore “violated” Russian history (Avgust II: 169).
48. Quoted in Green, Tolstoy and Gandhi, p. 104.
49. See, for instance, Mark, Popovskii, Russkie muzhiki rasskazyvaiut: Posledovateli L.N. Tolstogo v Sovetskom Soiuze 1918–1977 (London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1984 Google Scholar.