Truth of Fact, Truth of Power: History and Politics in War and Peace
Abstract
The paper analyses War and Peace as a work in which the formal characteristics of the historical novel are chosen to convey a strong political message and to make an explicit accusation against the old Russian ruling class as well as against the populist attitudes shown by the intelligencija of his time.
In order to highlight this political dimension of his work, the study will focus on how Tolstoj uses his fictional remake of historical sources to prove wrong the “official” version of Napoleonic wars and to regularly replace it with a representation of events aiming – especially through the portrait of some symbolic characters (Alexander I, Napoleon, Kutuzov) – to show that individuals are ultimately not in charge of History, and so to expose the falsity of historiographical artifices.
For that reason War and Peace expresses in its very formal structure the philosophy of history developed by Tolstoj while preparing his work: a philosophy which not only concerns the evaluation of the past, but also quests the social and political project with which his contemporaries intended to face the need for democracy in Nineteenth-century Russia.Downloads
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