Biography
such a stupendous work, a whole library in itself, should have been composed within such a comparatively short time is sufficiently surprising, but our surprise becomes amazement when we learn that the author actually transcribed its thousands of pages with his own hand seven times before he was satisfied with it. With the possible exception of Turgenev's "Otsui i Dyeti" ("Fathers and Sons") five years earlier, no other Russian book ever created such a sensation. Despite its obvious defects (defects far less discernible, however, in the original than the translations be they never so good), prolixity, an almost total absence of humour and a disposition to philosophize à la Schopenhauer, under whose fascination Tolstoi lay at that particular time,[1] "Voina i Mir" must ever rank amongst the few supremely great masterpieces of the world's literature. It is a prose epic of vast dimensions, the history of the life and death struggle of the whole Russian nation with its most terrible adversary the first Napoleon, for the Russian nation is the real hero of the romance, even the leading characters, Kutuzov and Platon Karataev, being mere idealized exponents or representatives of the nation at large. Yet when Tolstoi forgets the philosopher in the artist, and condescends to probe the personal characters of the protagonists in the terrible struggle,
- ↑ On August 30th, 1869, Tolstoi wrote to a friend: "I have an indescribable enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, who has given me a sequence of intellectual delights, the like of which I have never experienced before. I know not, of course, whether my opinions may not change, but I am confident at present that Schopenhauer is the greatest of geniuses . . . and I can only attribute his being so little known to the fact that the world at large is made up of mere idiots."
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