Family and Freedom

In Part One of the Epilogue, Tolstoy gradually shifts his attention from the political and historical to the domestic. Andrei having died (after being reborn at least twice), the two remaining male seekers—Pierre and Nikolai—find fulfilling lives within the context of families that they create with their wives and children.

The general opinion was that Pierre was under his wife's heel, and in fact it was so. From the very first day of their marriage, Natasha had announced her demands. Pierre was very surprised by his wife's view, which was completely new to him, that every minute of his life belonged to her and the family; Pierre was surprised by his wife's demands, but was flattered by them and submitted to them. (1156)

Natasha reciprocates with her own submission: "At home Natasha put herself on the footing of her husband's slave" (1156).

These characters thus seem to exemplify the idea that I explored in that graduate school essay (mentioned in this earlier post), the idea that “freedom necessarily involves some submission or surrender, either to a human community or to a powerful God"; or, as D. H. Lawrence puts it, that “It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be.”

Given that Tolstoy eventually comes to reject as illusory the very notion of individual freedom, these characters' submission or surrender to their family lives seems to be part of a profound statement by Tolstoy about human life: Since one is never really free, true freedom consists in choosing that to which one will be bound.

Of all the lives that his characters have chosen to bind themselves to (lives of military or political service, lives of vice and dissipation, lives of societal gossip and scheming), Tolstoy strives to show us in the epilogue that family life can be the most fulfilling of all.

This familial devotion becomes a type of filial piety, exemplified in the adults' forbearance of Countess Rostov in her rather annoying dotage:

Everyone in the house understood the old woman's condition, though no one ever spoke of it, and everyone made every possible effort to satisfy her needs.... they said that she had already finished her business in life, that all of her was not in that which could be seen in her now, that we would all be the same, and that it was a joy to submit to her, to restrain oneself for the sake of this being, once so dear, once as full of life as we, and now so pathetic. Memento mori.... (1163)

The submission to family life, as Tolstoy depicts it here, creates relationships that lend meaning to life (Nikolai says he always feels as if he's "lost and can't do anything" (1152) whenever he's away from Marya or fighting with her), that provide structure for the rearing of children and the care of the old.

And thus, I think, it makes sense that the final sentence of the novel is this: "[I]n the present case, it is ... necessary to renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we do not feel" (1215). Though we may be tempted to believe that happiness is to be found in shaking off all duties and claims on us that seem to take away our autonomy, in fact we are never autonomous. The best we can do is find something deep and meaningful to bind ourselves to. In the intertwined stories of Natasha, Pierre, Nikolai, and Marya, Tolstoy suggests how family may be the best avenue for doing so.

Tolstoy, History, and Freedom

One of the major themes of Tolstoy's novel, one that he returns to vigorously throughout the final third of the novel (and especially in the second part of the Epilogue) is, essentially, an attack on the "great man" theory of history.

Tolstoy asserts that historians have gotten it all wrong by focusing on history from the top down:

To study the laws of history, we must change completely the object of observation, leave kings, ministers, and generals alone, and study the uniform, infinitesimal elements that govern the masses. No one can tell to what extent it is given to man to achieve in this way an understanding of the laws of history; but it is obvious that the possibility of grasping historical laws lies only on this path, and that on this path human reason has not yet made one millionth of those efforts the historians have made in describing the deeds of various kings, commanders, and ministers, and in setting forth their reflections on the occasion of those deeds. (823)

Why should we leave kings, ministers, and generals alone? Because, in Tolstoy's view, those people have the least to do with why history unfolds in the way it does. Though kings, ministers, and generals may feel that their efforts and orders are the driving forces of historical events and mass movements, Tolstoy sees those with "power" as merely pawns of much larger forces, figures whose prominence puts them in "the center of a most complex play of intrigues, cares, dependency, power, projects, advice, threats, deceptions"; meanwhile, "Imperceptibly, moment by moment, an event is carved into its meaning" (825).

The passive voice here is telling, for Tolstoy's vision is one that I am tempted to call historical fatalism. According to Tolstoy, although Napoleon may have given countless orders, the only ones that could make any difference were the ones that the larger historical forces and the masses of human beings involved allowed to be carried out, "just as in stencilling, some figure or other gets painted, not depending on the direction or manner in which the paint is applied, but because the figure cut out of the stencil is smeared in all directions with paint" (1196). In other words, it didn't really matter how Napoleon smeared his paint; the eventual design was preordained by the stencil of history. Why did the stencil have that preordained design? Tolstoy considers the answer to that question beyond human knowability.

Tolstoy goes further, investigating the very nature of the idea of freedom (and surely Jonathan Franzen must have been thinking of this part of the novel when he was writing and titling his 2010 novel Freedom) and, finally, rejecting the notion that we as individuals are free. Although in the moment we may feel that we are free to do as we please, Tolstoy notes that, as time passes and we look back at a particular action (especially ones that occur in concert with other human beings), we realize that there were countless circumstances that influenced our action.

In any case, I think that, especially in academia, the "great man" theory of history has largely been abandoned. Academic historians now are much more likely, it seems to me, to accept Tolstoy's vision and to look for larger forces to explain the movements of history, or to try to get a sense of the role that the masses of people played—instead of focusing on the kings and ministers and generals.

I was talking about this with the father of one of my daughter's friends the other day (he's a graduate student in American literature and bio-politics, and one might call him a New Historicist), and he pointed out a couple problems with this trend in academic history:

1) It seems to leave out the possibility of human agency and, with it, the possibility that individuals (whether leaders or not) can actually effect change. If we're not free and leaders are the least free of all, then why bother struggling to elect leaders we think will be good? Why bother with anything?

2) As Jill Lepore has apparently argued in one of her books, it leaves the story of history's "great men" to be told by popular historians—or even by demagogues like Glenn Beck and the pseudo-historians of the Tea Party. And since the mass audience has a great appetite for the story of history's great men (e.g., the Founding Fathers), whoever controls the narratives about these figures can potentially control an important political instrument.

Tolstoy's theories are also making me second-guess this piece I wrote in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden. In my essay, I credit President Obama for accomplishing something that President Bush did not. I argue that bin Laden was killed because Obama made it a priority and Bush did not. I believe the evidence bears out the latter part of that claim, but would Tolstoy reject the first part of it? In other words, would Tolstoy say that it didn't matter what Obama or Bush ordered because the pre-cut stencil of history is what it is regardless of the orders of leaders?

Climbing the Mountain

I finished the book on Monday. I do feel that I've climbed a mountain, especially when I look at the slope on this graph of my reading progress, generated by goodreads.

Here were the benchmark dates in my reading of the novel:

2/16 page 8

2/21 page 52

2/24 page 112

3/03 page 200

3/09 page 303

3/11 page 347

3/17 page 418

3/21 page 503

3/25 page 603

3/31 page 700

4/09 page 800

4/15 page 901

4/21 page 987

4/28 page 1075

5/01 page 1129

5/02 page 1215