The work, which, according to Tolstoy himself, was the result of “insane authorial effort,” was published in the pages of the Russian Messenger magazine in 1868-1869. The success of War and Peace, according to contemporaries, was extraordinary. Russian critic N. N. Strakhov wrote: “In such great works as War and Peace, the true essence and importance of art is most clearly revealed. Therefore, “War and Peace” is also an excellent touchstone of all critical and aesthetic understanding, and at the same time a cruel stumbling block for all stupidity and all impudence. It seems easy to understand that War and Peace will not be judged by your words and opinions, but you will be judged by what you say about War and Peace.
Soon Tolstoy's book was translated into European languages. Classic French literature G. Flaubert, having met her, wrote to Turgenev: “Thank you for making me read Tolstoy’s novel. It's first class. What a painter and what a psychologist!.. It seems to me that sometimes there is something Shakespearean in him.” Let us note that Russian and Western European masters and literature experts unanimously speak about the unusual nature of the “War and Peace” genre. They feel that Tolstoy’s work does not fit into the usual forms and boundaries of the classical European novel. Tolstoy himself understood this. In the afterword to War and Peace he wrote:
“What is “War and Peace”? This is not a novel, still less a poem, even less historical chronicle. “War and Peace” is what the author wanted and could express in the form in which it was expressed.”
What distinguishes "War and Peace" from classic novel? The French historian Albert Sorel, who gave a lecture on “War and Peace” in 1888, compared Tolstoy’s work with Stendhal’s novel “The Monastery of Parma.” He compared the behavior of Stendhal’s hero Fabrizio at the Battle of Waterloo with the well-being of Tolstoy’s Nikolai Rostov at the Battle of Austerlitz: “What a great moral difference between the two characters and the two concepts of war! Fabrizio has only a fascination with the external splendor of war, a simple curiosity for glory. After we went through a series of skillfully shown episodes with him, we involuntarily come to the conclusion: what, this is Waterloo, that’s all? This is Napoleon, that's all? When we follow Rostov near Austerlitz, together with him we experience a nagging feeling of enormous national disappointment, we share his excitement...”
The interest of Tolstoy the writer is concentrated not only on the depiction of individual human characters, but also on their connections with each other into moving and interconnected worlds.
Tolstoy himself, feeling a certain similarity between War and Peace and heroic epic past, at the same time insisted on a fundamental difference: “The ancients left us examples of heroic poems in which the heroes constitute the entire interest of history; we still cannot get used to the fact that for our human time a story of this kind does not make sense.”
Tolstoy decisively destroys the traditional division of life into “private” and “historical”. He has Nikolai Rostov, playing cards with Dolokhov, “praying to God, as he prayed on the battlefield on the Amstetten Bridge,” and in the battle near Ostrovnoy he gallops “across the frustrated ranks of the French dragoons” “with the feeling with which he rushed across the wolf.” . Thus, in everyday life, Rostov experiences feelings similar to those that overcame him in the first historical battle, and in the battle of Ostrovnoy, his military spirit feeds and supports the hunting instinct, born in the amusements of peaceful life. The mortally wounded Prince Andrei, in a heroic moment, “remembered Natasha as he saw her for the first time at the ball of 1810, with a thin neck and thin arms, with a face ready for delight, a frightened, happy face, and love and tenderness for her, even more vividly.” and awakened stronger than ever in his soul.”
The fullness of the impressions of peaceful life not only does not leave Tolstoy’s heroes in historical circumstances, but comes to life with even greater force and is resurrected in their souls. Reliance on these peaceful values of life spiritually strengthens Andrei Bolkonsky and Nikolai Rostov, and is the source of their courage and strength.
Not all of Tolstoy's contemporaries realized the depth of the discovery he made in War and Peace. The habit of clearly dividing life into “private” and “historical”, the habit of seeing in one of them a “low”, “prosaic” genre, and in the other a “high” and “poetic” genre, had an effect. P. A. Vyazemsky, who himself, like Pierre Bezukhov, was a civilian and participated in the Battle of Borodino, wrote about “War and Peace” in the article “Memories of 1812”: “Let’s start with the fact that in the mentioned book it is difficult to decide and even guess where the story ends and where the novel begins, and vice versa. This interweaving, or rather confusion, of history and the novel, without a doubt, harms the former and ultimately, before the court of sound and impartial criticism, does not elevate the true dignity of the latter, that is, the novel.”
P. V. Annenkov believed that the interweaving of private destinies and history in War and Peace does not allow the “wheel of the romantic machine” to move properly.
In essence, he decisively and abruptly changes the usual angle of view on history. If his contemporaries asserted the primacy of the historical over the private and looked at private life from top to bottom, then the author of War and Peace looks at history from the bottom up, believing that peaceful daily life people, firstly, is wider and richer than historical life, and secondly, it is the fundamental principle, the soil from which historical life grows and on which it feeds. A. A. Fet astutely noted that Tolstoy considers a historical event “from the shirt, that is, from the shirt, which is closer to the body.”
And under Borodin, at this decisive hour for Russia, at the Raevsky battery, where Pierre ends up, one can feel “a common revival for everyone, like a family revival.” When the feeling of “unfriendly bewilderment” towards Pierre passed among the soldiers, “these soldiers immediately mentally accepted Pierre into their family, appropriated them and gave him a nickname. “Our master” they nicknamed him and laughed affectionately about him among themselves.”
Tolstoy endlessly expands the very understanding of the historical, including in it the entirety of the “private” lives of people. He achieves, in the words of the French critic Melchior Vogüe, “the only combination of the great epic spirit with endless small analyzes.” History comes to life everywhere in Tolstoy, in any ordinary, “private”, “ordinary” person of his time, it manifests itself in the nature of the connection between people. The situation of national discord and disunity will affect, for example, in 1805 the defeat of Russian troops in the Battle of Austerlitz, and Pierre’s unsuccessful marriage to the predatory social beauty Helen, and the feeling of loss, loss of the meaning of life that the main characters of the novel experience during this period. And vice versa, the year 1812 in the history of Russia will give a living sense of national unity, the core of which will be folk life. The “peace” that emerges during the Patriotic War will bring Natasha and Prince Andrei together again. Through the seeming randomness of this meeting, necessity makes its way through. Russian life in 1812 gave Andrei and Natasha that new level of humanity at which this meeting turned out to be possible. If Natasha didn’t have a patriotic feeling, don’t spread it loving relationship to people from her family throughout the Russian world, if she had not committed a decisive act, she would not have convinced her parents to remove their household belongings from the carts and give them to the wounded.
Tolstoy's "War and Peace" as an epic novel
Tolstoy began work on the novel in 1863, immediately after the fiftieth anniversary of the victory over the French in the Patriotic War of 1812, and finished it in 1869.
Tolstoy spent quite a long time coming up with the idea of “War and Peace.” At first he conceived a work called “The Decembrists,” the main character of which was to be the Decembrist Volkhonsky-Lobazov, returning from Siberian exile. According to the author, this energetic man of advanced age should have stood out very much against the background of his compatriots who had lost their “high aspirations” and were incapable of decisive action. Considering that the center of the work would be a description of Russian social and everyday life of that time, and the basis of the novel was such a satirical opposition, “The Decembrists” could be called a socio-psychological novel.
But the events of 1825 led the author to 1812, because it was the social upsurge after the victory over Napoleon that gave birth to the Decembrist uprising. Thus, Tolstoy comes to the idea of a new work - the historical novel “Three Times”, in which the process of formation and development of the protagonist’s character took place against the backdrop of historical events early XIX century.
Tolstoy, while working on this work, became interested in depicting sketches of the Patriotic War, and the novel began to look more and more like a historical chronicle, where the facts were arranged in strict order. chronological sequence. So the author understands that history has already become an independent subject of narration, and the work is increasingly reminiscent of a heroic poem. This is how the idea for a work called “All’s well that ends well” appears. This novel already includes not only a description of the life of noble society, but also sketches of peasant life. Familiar heroes already meet there - the Rostovs, Bezukhov and Bolkonsky. This is the penultimate version of Tolstoy's novel, and after abandoning this version, the author begins work on War and Peace. Thus, the work preserves the signs of the genres of all previous plans: the novel, the heroic poem, as well as the historical chronicle, where the people - main character history, and the Patriotic War is not the background, but the ideological and compositional center of the work.
“The epic kind is becoming natural to me,” Tolstoy writes in his diary on January 3, 1863, shortly before he began writing the novel. Two and a half years later (September 30, 1865) Tolstoy wrote in his diary: “There is poetry of a novelist: 1) […] 2) in the picture of morals built on a historical event - the Odyssey, Iliad, 1805,” that is, he drew a parallel between the works of Homer and his novel.
Tolstoy appreciated the epic because at its center are the destinies of not one or several heroes, but of the entire people and even nations. In 1868, Tolstoy wrote an article “A few words about the book “War and Peace”,” where he tried to answer the question of what exactly his novel was. Reflecting on the genre, he wrote: “This is not a novel, still less a poem, even less a historical chronicle. “War and Peace” is what the author wanted and could express in the form in which it was expressed.” And further Tolstoy writes that the problem with defining the genre that “War and Peace” faced is characteristic of many other works: “The history of Russian literature since the time of Pushkin not only presents many examples of such a departure from the European form, but does not even give a single example of the opposite. Starting from " Dead souls"Gogol and before" House of the Dead"Dostoevsky, in the new period of Russian literature there is not a single artistic prose work, a little out of mediocrity, which would fit well into the form of a novel, poem or story.” That is, according to Tolstoy, all the great works of Russian literature do not fit into traditional ideas about the European novel.
In the twentieth century, literary scholars still managed to agree on the issue of the genre definition of the novel: they called the work an epic novel, primarily because “War and Peace” is an integral work of art, but many features of many novels can be seen in it.
- Historical novel. The reader understands that this historical work when he sees a link to the past, and also meets real people in the novel historical figures, such as Kutuzov, Napoleon, Alexander I. Tolstoy used many historical sources while working on the novel. For example, the author turned to books about Freemasonry, to the works of war historians (both Russian and French) and to historical chronicles. But Tolstoy’s interaction with historians is more reminiscent of an argument than full-fledged cooperation, which is why the author often turns to the memoirs of his contemporaries - to the works of Russian and French memoirists.
- Psychological novel. Contemporaries thought the combination of historical and psychological works. A. S. Pushkin followed this path in the novel “ Captain's daughter"and in the drama "Boris Godunov". There are many fictional characters in Tolstoy's novel, but there were prototypes for them: Denisov - Denis Davydov; the prototype of the old Prince Bolkonsky is Tolstoy's maternal grandfather - Volkonsky, etc. Tolstoy built the heroes so that their actions and way of thinking did not conflict with the real heroes of the era, that is, there is no contradiction between the actions real heroes and fictional. N. G. Chernyshevsky very accurately defined the features of Tolstoy’s psychologism. According to him, the author of “War and Peace” is interested in “the mental process itself, its forms, its laws, the dialectics of the soul.” The critic called the “dialectics of the soul” the detailed reproduction in a work of art of feelings in motion: the process of the origin of feelings, then development, then transfer to another character. Readers will go through the stages of spiritual quest of the main characters, such as Pierre Bezukhov, Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova.
- The novel also has features of a battle novel. Tolstoy describes in great detail the Shengraben, Austerlitz and Borodino battles, the number of soldiers, the location of troops, losses in killed and prisoners, and so on.
- Traits of a lover or family romance are also present in "War and Peace" in large numbers. There are more than ten in the novel love lines, each of which is described in sufficient detail.
In “War and Peace” one can also see the features of many other novels, for example, an educational novel, a secular novel, a Moscow novel, a St. Petersburg novel, and so on. Variety of plot directions large number characters and storylines, covering a large period of time, appealing to historical sources and the presence of real historical figures in the work allow us to confidently call “War and Peace” an epic novel.
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What is "War and Peace"? This is not a novel, still less a poem, even less a historical chronicle. “War and Peace” is what the author wanted and could express in the form in which it was expressed.
L. N. Tolstoy
In the article “A few words about “War and Peace”,” Tolstoy, as you know, stated that his work was not like any other traditional genre- neither a novel, nor a heroic poem, nor a historical chronicle.
In modern literary criticism, “War and Peace” is usually called an epic novel, and this definition requires special explanation. It is convenient to connect discussions about the genre uniqueness of Tolstoy’s work with his creative history, that is, with the history from the birth of the idea to the writing of the final text.
In 1856, Tolstoy conceived a novel, the hero of which was to be a Decembrist returning from Siberian exile with his family to Russia. The writer was prompted to this idea real events, which once again reminded Russian society of the Decembrists. In 1855 after sudden death Nicholas I, Alexander II ascended the Russian throne. He, according to ancient custom Russian tsars, began his reign with merciful deeds. In the spring of 1856, during the coronation, he announced the forgiveness of the Decembrists and permission, if they wished, to return from Siberia to the European part of Russia. The appearance of the Decembrists in Moscow living rooms made a strong impression on educated society: the Decembrists, who had experienced criminal investigation, hard labor, exile and settlement in Siberia since December 14, 1825, did not look like broken, dejected, pitiful old men, as one might expect, but people who had preserved their humanity dignity, clear mind “and high aspiration” (A.S. Pushkin “To Siberia”).
In 1860, Tolstoy called his intended novel “The Decembrists.” The beginning of the work has been preserved: the Decembrist Pyotr Ivanovich Volkhonsky-Labazov, a fresh and strong old man who remained faithful to the noble convictions of his youth, returns from Siberian exile. The personality of the courageous Decembrist, his views and character interested the author above all. The old-fashioned and naive Labazov compares favorably with the young liberal talkers whom he meets in Moscow and whom the author satirically contrasts with the main character. Thus, the signs of a socio-psychological novel in “The Decembrists” are obvious: the description of the character of one or more main characters (as in “Eugene Onegin”, “Hero of Our Time”, “Oblomov”) takes place against the backdrop of Russian social and everyday life.
Having written the first three chapters, Tolstoy abandoned work on the novel “The Decembrists,” but did not abandon the idea of a work about the Decembrist. Naturally, having started the story about his hero in 1856, the writer had to turn to 1825 - to the uprising itself on Senate Square and to its preparation. In the novel, this period in the life of Volkhonsky-Labazov is called a time of “delusions and misfortunes.” Starting from 1825, the author inevitably came to 1812, since the Decembrist movement was born from the social upsurge associated with the victory in the Patriotic War of 1812. So the socio-psychological novel about the Decembrists turned into a new, now historical novel“Three Times”, where the events of the first quarter of the XIX centuries created a historical background (in addition to the social background) against which the main character was depicted.
Turning to the events of 1812, Tolstoy became interested in depicting the Patriotic War, and the background story became an independent subject of description. The novel now reminded historical essay, or a historical chronicle in which individual (private) facts (military skirmishes, local battles, general battles, military councils, diplomatic correspondence and negotiations) are arranged in a strict chronological sequence, connected into large (epoch-making) events (the Patriotic War) and illustrate the move national history. At the same time, Tolstoy did not forget his hero, the future Decembrist, and continued to develop novel narrative: a young man, like the best representatives of the Russian nation, participates in the Patriotic War and tries to comprehend its course and character.
The more the author reflected on the Patriotic War and painted its individual episodes, the more the historical chronicle novel acquired the features of a heroic poem, which glorifies the exploits of heroes in the name of the freedom of the homeland and high ideals (the French “Song of Roland” and the Russian “Zadonshchina” are considered examples of heroic poems ", "Rossiyada" by M.M. Kheraskov). Now Tolstoy began new option of his work - the novel "All's Well That Ends Well." In this version, characters familiar from War and Peace already appear (for example, the Rostov family), from the image of the future Decembrist Volkhonsky-Labazov, two heroes emerged - Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky, and most importantly, the novel includes folk heroes and scenes from folk life. Tolstoy depicts the patriotic enthusiasm of Russians during the Patriotic War, that is, the war for the freedom and independence of their homeland.
The last version - the epic novel "War and Peace" - absorbed the ideas of the previous versions: the personal life of a person, his search for worthy ideals; noble society in the first quarter of the 19th century; the people as the main character of the story. That is, in “War and Peace” the genre characteristics of both the novel, the heroic poem, and the historical chronicle have been preserved. On the one hand, the heroes, main and secondary, received detailed characteristics in numerous episodes historical narrative, one can even talk about the dialectic of the soul of the main characters (Pierre, Prince Andrei, Natasha and Nikolai Rostov). On the other hand, Tolstoy once again expanded the historical framework of his work: from 1812 he turned to 1805, from the victorious Patriotic War to the unsuccessful war with Napoleon for Russia. Thus. The Patriotic War became not the beginning, but the center, compositional and ideological, of the entire work.
Expansion of the epic novel described historical era indicated that the author had developed a general philosophical concept that explained both the history of the people and the life individual person. Tolstoy argued for the need to merge (subordinate) personal will and interests with the general (popular, unconscious) will and interests. The heroic feat, the genius of the Russian people in the Patriotic War, according to the writer, was reflected in the fact that it is the common people who understand the essence of historical events, distinguish the nature of the Napoleonic Wars of 1805-1807 and the Patriotic War, and are able at a critical moment to subordinate personal interest to the national (general) interest. This is evidenced by the guerrilla war, the refusal of the men to sell fodder and food to the French, the burning of their own houses and property so that the enemy would not get anything. Selfish actions and selfish aspirations of the Moscow governor Rastopchin, colonel “with Vladimir and Anna on his neck” (3, 3, XVI) Berg, General Bennigsen, representatives of the St. Petersburg secular society, who imagined themselves to be heroes and took credit for the victory, drowned in the flow of popular unostentatious patriotism. In other words. Tolstoy emphasizes that the people make history - what is important is not the history among the people, but the people in history. Connecting historical events with images folk character(the latter was expressed in the actions of ordinary men, soldiers, officers and aristocrats Bolkonsky, Rostov, Bezukhov) made “War and Peace” a national heroic epic.
So, "War and Peace" is one of unique works Russian and world literature - has unique artistic features, including genre characteristics. Being a novel according to its main features (a description of the fates of the main characters runs through the entire work), “War and Peace” goes beyond the scope of a classic novel. Tolstoy’s work can be called an epic, since the subject of the writer’s depiction is the entire Russian life of the first quarter of the 19th century (state domestic and foreign policy, the main layers and numerous strata of Russian society, their relationships, their way of life, spiritual life). The images of heroes are not revealed from themselves, but are associated with the social environment (novel), but the multifaceted (epic) image of this environment, or rather, national life, pushes the images of specific heroes into the background, making them separate, albeit very bright, representatives of the nation .
War and Peace contains signs of a historical chronicle and a heroic poem. The author describes in detail the course of the Napoleonic Wars of 1805-1807; V general outline the reform activities of the Speransky Committee, the next Russian-Turkish war (1806-1812); in detail all stages of the Patriotic War - from the passage of the French army across the Neman to the expulsion of the French from Russia. Tolstoy shows the heroism of the troops ( Battle of Borodino, partisan war) and the moral beauty of the Russian people, when Russian soldiers, partisans, men sympathize and help the captured French. This unnoticeable, “inner” heroism testifies to the generosity of the nation and is therefore extremely highly valued by the writer.
Strictly speaking, the genres combined in Tolstoy’s epic novel had already been developed in the works of various European and Russian authors. French writer V. Hugo had already written a large socio-psychological novel, Les Misérables (1862), in which the fates of several main characters are shown against the backdrop of critical revolutionary events. The Scottish writer W. Scott in his novel “Rob Roy” (1818) depicted heroic events from the history of Scotland and the active role of the masses in them. Russian writers have already created historical novels (M.N. Zagoskin “Roslavlev, or Russians in 1812” 1830, F.V. Bulgarin “Peter Ivanovich Vyzhigin, a moralistic historical novel XIX century" 1831) and a story (A. Pogorelsky "Izidor and Anyuta" 1828) about the Patriotic War. The philosophical and historical concept presented in “War and Peace” was also not new; it was expressed, for example, in the philosophical works of G. Hegel and N.G. Chernyshevsky.
"War and Peace" is reminiscent of the great scientific discoveries. Before D.I. Mendeleev, humanity had accumulated great knowledge about each chemical element separately, but the Table of Chemical Elements created by the Russian scientist, combining and systematizing this knowledge, became the most important scientific achievement. Tolstoy's merit lies in the fact that he combined disparate ideas and genre techniques and created a huge artistic canvas, which is at the same time a historical, social, philosophical, family, and psychological epic novel.
“What is War and Peace,” Tolstoy wrote in an article about his book. - This is not a novel, still less a poem, even less a historical chronicle. War and peace is what the author wanted and could express in the form in which it was expressed.” Modern literary criticism notes that “War and Peace” is a work of large epic form. This is an epic novel, which is characterized by a wide-ranging depiction of historical reality and a deep disclosure of the continuous process of life. Its main character is the Russian people, and the main idea of the novel is the invincible power of the people. “War and Peace” reflects the life of the 20s of the 19th century not only in Russia, but also Western Europe. The action takes place in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Smolensk, in a Russian village; in Austria, Prussia, Poland, the Balkans, in a German village. Historically specific depiction of European wars, clashes of armies and poetic pictures of nature, scenes from the life of landowners' estates and high society salons, dissatisfaction of serfs with their position; the patriotism of the people in the fight against foreign invaders - all this forms the broad background of the era in the work.
The historical basis of the novel is the events associated with the struggle of Russia against Napoleonic France. Volume 1 describes the events of 1805, when Russia fought in alliance with Austria and on its territory; in the 2nd - 1806-1807, when Russian troops were in Prussia; The 3rd and 4th volumes are devoted to a broad depiction of the Patriotic War of 1812, which Russia waged on native land. In the epilogue, the action takes place in 1820. The basis of the novel is historical military events. Truthfully and accurately described battles: Shengraben, Austerlitz, Borodino - appear in the work the most important moments, who decided both the fate of the Russian state as a whole and personal destinies the best people of that time, who saw the purpose of their life primarily to be useful to their fatherland. Tolstoy’s favorite heroes of the novel: the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, Pierre Bezukhov are patriots, they constantly feel a connection with their homeland and prove this not with words, but with direct participation in the most difficult military affairs.
The range of problems in the novel is very wide. It reveals the reasons for military failures in 1805-1807; using the example of Kutuzov and Napoleon, the role of individuals in military events and in history is shown; with extraordinary artistic expression pictures are drawn guerrilla warfare, the great significance of the Russian people, who decided the outcome of the Patriotic War of 1812, is revealed.
Simultaneously with historical problems era of the Patriotic War of 1812, the novel addressed pressing issues of the 60s of the 19th century. After the defeat in the Crimean War, it became clear to society in the 60s that the nobility serfdom has outlived its usefulness. In the new living conditions, the role of the nobility in the state was rethought. The question of the situation of the peasantry was acutely raised. Questions were raised about the reasons for the Decembrist movement, about the identity of a true citizen of the homeland. Despite the fact that in the novel “War and Peace” these issues were resolved historical material era of the wars between Russia and France, they responded to the moods and demands of the writer’s contemporaries who were experiencing the consequences of the Crimean War.
The artistic solution to the essence of the Patriotic War required Tolstoy to experiment in genre. Tolstoy’s work is not a novel in the usual sense (the main subject of rejection for the Russian prose writer was French novel), here the archaic poetics of the epic is revived. And indeed, in 1812, for a moment, archaic, tribal, pre-state forms of human existence were revived, when it is not the government that confers the right to speak on behalf of the nation and make history, but each person, as part of the people, has national-historical weight.
Epic is a genre of the widest possible coverage of reality, dedicated to a turning point in national history. The main feature of an epic is its scale; a necessary condition for the genre is an epic event. An epic cannot be written for any occasion: it must be as inclusive as possible, affecting everyone. But this condition is not enough: the reforms of the 1860s. were turning point national history, affected everyone, but were not epic. The latter is possible only in the case when a nationwide unification has occurred, when each person truly began to carry a piece of “people's thought.”
Why is this happening? How Patriotic War different from conventional war? A heroic upsurge, a general impulse, arises when the scale of the issue is as high as possible: not the fate of a dynasty, not the interests of some social group, not the life and death of an individual, but the survival of the nation itself, of the entire Russian world. And this affects absolutely everyone, it is impossible to lose in this war, in this case the national and personal coincide. So simple war becomes domestic, so a nationwide unification occurs - or it does not happen, the nation disappears, and there is no one to create an epic.
The scale of the threat - the life and death of the nation - is the primary, deepest basis of the scale of the epic event. Other signs of the epic world that implement the principle of inclusiveness characteristic of this genre: the scale of space and time, the hero, the volume of the work.
In "War and Peace" we see a panoramic space - as opposed to the pointy, scenic space of the tragic world, for example, in Dostoevsky. This is not the outlook of one person, but of a certain popular “we”. Here is a complete picture of the national space: both capitals (with their differences), a large provincial city (using the example of Smolensk), local Russia (also in different options: the estate of a retired nobleman, Bolkonsky Sr., or the leader of the nobility, the hospitable owner Ilya Rostov, or the rich eccentric trying to improve the lives of his peasants, Pierre Bezukhov), peasant Russia, uninhabited, wild corners of the country that the army or prisoners pass through.
The time of Tolstoy's epic novel covers 15 years of national history (from 1805 to 1819 in the epilogue - the time of the birth of the secret societies of the future Decembrists) - comparable to several days of the tragic world of Dostoevsky. The epic model of time is also presented in another, non-calendar respect. At the beginning of the novel, some characters (for example, Natasha Rostova) are children themselves; at the end of the novel we see their children. Before us is endless tribal time, which is not limited to the boundaries of individual fate.
One more touch to artistic model time, not directly related to the epic. Tolstoy offers a very characteristic emblem at the very beginning of the first volume: Pierre Bezukhov rides with children's day the birth of Natasha Rostova to her dying father; the birth of the nineteenth century appears next to the dying eighteenth century (Kirill Bezukhov, a nobleman of Catherine’s court, can be perceived as the personification of the passing century).
The biggest hero of the epic is the entire nation. It is no coincidence that Tolstoy’s work does not contain such a familiar component of the novel world as the main character. At the center of “War and Peace” are several leading characters, a fundamentally three-dimensional picture, and next to them is a huge, densely populated world. The classical epic assumes that the leading characters quite comprehensively recreate the picture of national life, but Tolstoy complements this with crowd scenes; national life truly appears as a huge human river.
The plot material of an epic is an event, something objective and universal. The material of tragedy is action, a field of personal choice and responsibility. We see this even in the titles of the novels: “War and Peace” - the level of events (war, victory in the war - not actions, but events), “Crime and Punishment” - the world of action. novel epic war tragic
Analyzing the plot and compositional features of the epic in a transhistorical context (in a direct comparison of “War and Peace” and “The Iliad”), G. Gachev talks about the specific “looseness” of this genre. The epic narrator is in no hurry, does not build a dynamic plot intrigue(and this is impossible in relation to the well-known historical event- we know its outcome), many side lines and scenes are introduced - in the theory of the epic this gave rise to the special concept of “retardation”, i.e. slowing down the action.
The “looseness” of the epic is also associated with the specific equality of big and small - the latter can also attract the narrator’s attention for a long time (like, for example, the shield of Achilles in Homer): Natasha Rostova’s first ball turns out to be no less weighty than the negotiations of the emperors; family, everyday life, “world” are just as interesting to the epic as the historical in the narrow sense of the word, like “war”. This equality of big and small is associated with the special feeling inherent in the epic of the fullness of being, the justification and meaningfulness of each of its elements. General meaning, the truth of life is present just as fully in small things. This special tone of perception of the world is inherent, perhaps, only in the epic (in the novel world there is a lot of meaningless, empty, vulgar), it is something like the pictures of the book of Genesis - God looked at the world he created and said: this is good. Therefore, you can select and combine image material completely arbitrarily - in any element of the world, all the completeness, in what was not included in the epic, is the same, truth and the same meaning. G. Gachev points to another sign epic plot- “double motivation” for the hero’s actions. In the Iliad, the hero acts according to his own understanding, and at the same time, in the same thoughts, words, decisions, actions, fulfills the will of the gods. In "War and Peace" human freedom also coexists with logic historical necessity, by the will of Providence.
Indeed, such a combination of the personal and the superpersonal is one of the central qualities of the epic. In tragedy, the personal enters into an insoluble conflict with the superpersonal; in epic, they coexist organically, without contradicting or excluding each other.
The epic is built on the basis of the heroic state of the world. Developing this category (in contrast to the prosaic state of the world), Hegel points to the archaic nature of heroics; it is realized in such genres as epic and tragedy, while prose is inherent in modernity and embodied in the novel and drama. In the heroic state of the world, superhuman, essential values are revealed only in the form of the actions of a specific person, only in the being of the individual, they have no other form of existence. In prose, they are alienated from man and exist in the form of faceless structures (for example, justice is realized not in the actions of the hero, but in the law and court, which lose their living human relevance). And a person in a prose writer ceases to be a hero in the strict sense of the word, a significant figure on which the existence of values, the fate of the world depends, he becomes private, in the limit - small.
1812 - the time of the revival of archaic tribal heroism, the Motherland here is specific people, only in them and in their actions does it exist, national interest completely coincides with personal interest; By defending the Motherland, heroes defend themselves, and vice versa. In the prosaic world, power acts on behalf of the nation. The essence of the prosaic can be illustrated by the example of the war of 1805-1807. In the name of what is this war being waged? Russia defends its national interest in Europe, but this is the interest of a faceless state, not a specific soldier. The latter does not participate in the war of his own free will, as a person who does not influence history, does not speak on behalf of the nation, and does not even control his own destiny (it is no coincidence, according to researchers, when depicting the war of 1805-1807, the army is shown as something mechanistic and impersonal). Basic character modern world- prosaic (and wars, as a rule, are exactly like this - like, say, the Crimean War). Once again we must talk about the specific historical miracle that the Patriotic War represents.
