After ReadingIn 1856, the old Tsar Nicholas I ended his life by poison, and Alexander II came to the throne. The reforms of the new reign stirred fresh public interest in the Decembrist Uprising—the failed revolt that had greeted Nicholas I’s accession. Tolstoy, always suspicious of authority and its symbols, disliked this renewed fascination with “digging up old relics.” Turgenev, ten years his senior, scolded him sharply in a letter. That exchange, ironically, awakened Tolstoy’s own curiosity about the period.
He began to imagine a novel about the Decembrists returning from exile. Yet he soon discovered that to reveal what those men believed, he would have to return to 1825 and write the uprising itself. And to write 1825, he would need to show how those beliefs first took root—back in their youth, during the wars of 1805, 1807, and 1812 against Napoleon. The plan underwent a fundamental transformation. The original Decembrist novel was never completed, but out of that expanding vision—and Tolstoy’s stubborn insistence on understanding everything to the bottom—Russian literature gained War and Peace.
War and Peace reaches only the eve of the Decembrist movement. It ends with Pierre Bezukhov—modeled on the future Decembrists—resolved to form a secret society. The story is woven through the inner changes of four central figures: Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov, Nikolai Rostov, and Boris Drubetskoy. Of these, Prince Andrei is closest to Tolstoy’s own ideal self: a man who tried, in his own way, to reform serfdom (and therefore, in the novel, is allowed to die). The other three each have their counterparts among the Decembrists, and so they survive into the future. Pierre’s attraction to Freemasonry, and through it to mysticism (Tolstoy, after corresponding with Herzen, was excited to confirm that some Decembrists truly leaned that way); Boris Drubetskoy’s tendency toward opportunistic wavering (his real-life prototype being Trubetskoy); and Nikolai Rostov’s hot temper paired with brave decisiveness—all of these, the record of the Decembrists suggests, are not inventions pulled from thin air.
Tolstoy is a master of writing war. Even in the three Sevastopol tales, he left many “war novelists” far behind. In War and Peace he goes further still. Much of the book is war, yet each campaign feels distinct—especially Austerlitz and Borodino. More than that, Tolstoy is determined to challenge the absurdities he finds in conventional war histories. If historians reduce war to a set of symbols, and biographers turn it into a stage play, then Tolstoy makes it a landscape—something as physical and impersonal as weather, mud, smoke, and the movement of crowds.
Because he fiercely rejects the historian’s worship of “military genius,” Tolstoy repeatedly ridicules Napoleon: the “fat little hands,” the cunning glove, the comic image of an emperor enjoying being brushed all over by his attendants as if he were an Arab horse. Yet a tension appears here. Tolstoy mocks Napoleon’s “genius,” and at the same time he seems to praise the genius of Bagration and Kutuzov. The contradiction is not hard to resolve. What Tolstoy admires in these Russian commanders is not clever strategy. It is their stance before war: a willingness to follow the natural flow of events without surrendering their courage, and a faith rooted in the people. Kutuzov retreats again and again, yet insists that the French will be driven so far they will end up eating horse meat. Bagration, in battle, nods at report after report without making speeches; when the moment demands it, he leads by example and charges. In this way, Tolstoy both explains his belief in “letting things take their course” and echoes Rousseau’s call to “return to nature.”
Tolstoy had been reading Rousseau from an early age; Rousseau’s mark is everywhere in his thinking. Rousseau—often called a spiritual father of the French Revolution—placed at the center of his thought a protest against “civilization” and a longing to return to nature. The more people chase refinement, admire genius, and polish their lives, Rousseau argues, the more hollow, performative, stifled, and fragile they become. Only by returning to a more natural condition can human beings form a true original contract and build a better society. Voltaire famously mocked this vision, joking that after reading Rousseau people ought to learn to walk on four legs again and lower their heads to graze.
One implication of Rousseau’s ideas is that ordinary people—those less shaped (or poisoned) by elite “civilized” education—deserve praise, and may even be the rightful builders of the future. Their way of life can look like a living outline of an ideal society. Rousseau did not always push his argument that far, but the seed is there: the early stirrings of democratic thought (and in his Social Contract, hints of republicanism). In Tolstoy, Rousseau’s influence becomes a lifelong project: through questioning civilization, he searches for “purification of the soul” and “self-perfection.”
In War and Peace, Pierre Bezukhov’s turning point is both the book’s essence and one of its most easily overlooked main threads. Pierre wounds Dolokhov—his old friend and his wife’s lover—in a duel. Afterward he is shaken, lost, and disgusted with himself. He tries to flee his marriage. He does not love his wife, yet he cannot make sense of what has happened or how he is supposed to live. He is miserable, and then—almost by chance—he meets the elderly Mason Bazdeev. Bazdeev seems to see through Pierre’s life at once, and to loosen the knot inside him.
Bazdeev tells him directly: the root problem is that Pierre has no faith, and without faith he cannot know what life is. Faith, he says, is what opens the way to the highest wisdom. Without that wisdom, a person lives in a fog—half understanding, half blindness—pushed around by fate, mocked by it, and still forced to persuade himself that he is happy. Even today, these words can strike like a wake-up call. They lead to an unsettling reflection:
A careless life is often just an empty form of living. If you do not recognize that emptiness, you are not living for yourself—you are being spent by life. You run, struggle, exhaust yourself; you agonize over goals you cannot reach; you shout for rights you do not truly need. You roll in the mud of daily existence until you are stained through. And when the future you imagined collapses, the pain becomes unbearable. You may defend the “material meaning” of life with confident arguments, but what you carry away in death is still a loneliness anyone can see at a glance. A life like that seems to deserve, after death, a second death.
Tolstoy paints the same tragedy in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan Ilyich finally understands, at the edge of death, that he and his whole family have been living inside this hollow form. Even his earlier cruelty toward his wife and children grows out of that same emptiness. When his son comes to see him, Ivan Ilyich wants to say, “Forgive me,” but cannot bring himself to speak the words. Instead he turns his head and says only, “Let me be.” It is a shocking and heartbreaking moment: a man can forgive everyone else, yet cannot forgive the void he has called a life.
Still, one question troubles Pierre most. People chase “civilization” with real devotion. They long for art, science, and knowledge; among them are brilliant minds. Why, then, can even the most intelligent fail to reach this “highest wisdom”? Bazdeev’s answer is startling. He tells Pierre, in effect:
Supreme wisdom and truth are like the purest nectar we long to drink. How can I scoop that nectar into a dirty cup and then judge whether it is pure? Only by cleansing what is inside me can I keep what I draw—even for a moment—free from stain.
This, surely, is one of Tolstoy’s guiding truths. Seek conscience. Cleanse the heart. Cultivate the self. Return to nature. Then the highest wisdom becomes possible—the wisdom that sees through life without despair. That is Tolstoy’s spiritual nectar.
