Open ending

As Andrei Zorin argues in a TLS piece this week, Tolstoy intended to defy novelistic convention in writing War and Peace. His book was not a novel, and Tolstoy refused the easy resolutions of the novel genre.

Zorin agrees that there is something to this: “In one of the best studies of War and Peace, Gary Saul Morson’s Hidden in Plain View (1987), this perception is seen as the main clue to the mystery of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Tolstoy’s efforts, Morson argues, were directed towards conveying a sense of the openness and unpredictability of the future, of the existence of multiple unnarrated alternatives to any single possible narrative, such that ‘it is this conception of characters and incidents that led . . . to the instinctive and unexplained feeling that War and Peace is more like the world in which we live than any other novel, a ‘piece of life’ rather than a piece of art.’”

And yet, Tolstoy didn’t really detach himself from the devices he claimed to despise: “Tolstoy introduces his male hero in the first extended episode of the novel. The female protagonist appears in the second, and in the final episode they find each other and reunite after the enormous calamities they have had to endure, including Pierre’s unhappy marriage, Natasha’s unhappy engagement with Prince Andrei and even more unhappy infatuation with Anatole Kuragin, wars, battles, duels, political intrigues and assassination attempts. As in ancient Greek romance, the ordeals of the characters include the sudden captivity of one of the lovers. This lasts only several months, much less than in, say, Daphnis and Chloe, but still long enough to disentangle all the knots that separate them, to leave them free and yet to change their personalities completely.”

And yet, yet again: Tolstoy overshadowed his epilogue with coming gloom. The characters don’t know, but Tolstoy and the readers do: Pierre is moving toward the Decembrist Revolt, to exile in Siberia, and Natasha will soon be appealing to the Russian authorities to join him there as one of the Decembrist wives: “Their incredible ordeals and suffering seem in the epilogue to be over – but the reader knows that Pierre’s captivity in the retreating French army, the Great Fire of Moscow, and Count Rostov’s carriages full of wounded officers will be as nothing compared to what awaits this happy family in the near future. History has entered a lull, but it will return with a vengeance immediately after the last page. This expectation makes the whole description of family bliss in the epilogue deeply ironic.”

Even at his most novelistic, Tolstoy works against the smoothness of novelistic endings, leaving us a happy ending shrouded in approaching tragedy, a happy ending that cannot be fully happy because not fully closed.