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What Truth can we write under Stalin? Grossman’s Stalingrad

“It’s not enough to say, “I wrote the truth.” The author should ask himself two questions: “First, which truth? And second, why?” We know that there are two truths and that, in our world, it is the vile and dirty truth of the past that quantitatively preponderates. But this truth is being replaced by another truth that has been born and continues to grow” – Maxim Gorky, to Vasily Grossman.

This quote, which I find more harrowing than almost anything else I have read recently – and I have just finished Snyder’s Bloodlands – comes from the introduction to the new translation of the Jewish (ethnicity) – Ukrainian (birthplace & upbringing) – Russian (language & literary tradition) – Soviet (time) writer Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. The novel was first published as For a Just Cause (За Правое Дело), which I think is also a great (if ironic) title, but Grossman preferred Stalingrad, which is why the Chandlers chose this one.

Whether in the complexities of the author’s identity, or in Gorky’s twists and turns, or in the novel’s title and the many changes between editions to account for a shifting censorship environment, we can see one of the central problems of the work – truth itself. The great Russian critic, Vissarion Belinsky, once wrote that literature was the finest place for discussing the problems of the day because at that time it was less rigorously policed than philosophy or the papers. Belinsky, however, never met Stalin.

Stalingrad is an attempt to write a great novel under Stalin and it is about as good as is possible, given that constraint. The Chandlers’ translation pulls together scraps from the various drafts and editions of the novel to approximate what Grossman might have wanted for his work and reveal its real brilliance. Their notes at the novel’s end are in depth and fascinating, highlighting just how major and minor the censorship could be. Characters and whole chapters disappear or are added, bodies that touched in the manuscript remain chastely apart. The closer we get to publication, the fuzzier we get – we go from saying someone was in a camp, to a euphemism for the same, then at times to merely a blank space.

The story of Stalingrad concerns the lives of the Shaposhnikov family. There’s a matriarch, three sisters and a brother, and various grandchildren, husbands and ex-husbands. Through them, we have a kind of cross-section of Soviet society, ranging from kolkhoz volunteers to power plant operators, researchers and soldiers, doctors and teachers. The Soviets wanted a Soviet War and Peace. While in many ways this novel is worse than Tolstoy’s, one area where Grossman vastly outstripped Tolstoy was in actually showcasing an entire society. During the war, he worked as a war correspondent, so he really did see everyone and everything. (He was among the first to write about Treblinka).

As stories go, Stalingrad is fine – the problem lies in the characters. There are too many of them, and not enough plot, which makes it all hard to follow. The characters we have are also fairly flat. Both nuance and doubt are impossible here. A general can burst into tears while looking at an enflamed Stalingrad, but never can he feel scared or want to turn back. We read that Krymov, one of the sister’s ex-husbands, has had to execute several “traitors”, but Grossman can do nothing to suggest that there might be something wrong with this. (In Life and Fate, early on we have a meeting of powerful people where one of them makes a slip up about Stalin, and the sheer force of the menace that immediately arises is enough to send shivers down your spine – but here Grossman could not even get close to writing this).

The central topic of the book is the Battle of Stalingrad. It comes to consume everything, and everyone, whether they are fighting or fleeing. This sense of onrushing history keeps us reading by papering over the less interesting bits and the occasional limp characterisation. But war is, in some ways, a bad topic for literature. Such a war as the one against the Nazis refuses much by way of nuance.  

Here’s Sofya Osipovna, a Jewish friend of the Shaposhnikov’s: “You’re wrong. I can tell you as a surgeon that there is one truth, not two. When I cut someone’s leg off, I don’t know two truths. If we start pretending there are two truths, we’re in trouble. And in war too – above all, when things are as bad as they are today – there is only one truth.” This dialogue is on the same topic as Gorky earlier. Now, from a literary perspective, allowing for two truths at least presupposes a conflict, a need to clarify. But this novel is mainly about one truth instead – that the Germans are evil, and the Soviets – good. Nothing that makes the Soviets, or at least the Russians (the official line), look bad can be written. Looting and collaboration are carefully removed by the time of publication.

What kind of nuance is left to the author? Obviously, Grossman thought the idea of Gorky’s truth was hogwash. So how could he hint at something else?

The first way is by the act of hinting itself, by forcing the reader to connect the dots. One of the great lacunae of Stalingrad concerns the fate of the Jews. For Grossman, this was personal – his mother was murdered in his hometown of Berdichev (Berdychiv). Viktor Shturm, one of the key Jewish characters of the novel, receives a letter from his own mother, written before she was executed. But we never read it. Only in Life and Fate, a novel that could not be published in the Soviet Union, could Grossman say what the letter said. Yet we know the letter exists, and the reader would have to fill in this gap for themselves.

At another point, a German character flies over the terrain east of Warsaw:

“Forster had glimpsed a thread-like single-track railway, running between two walls of pine trees to a construction site where hundreds of men were swarming about amid boards, bricks and lime. Something of strategic importance was evidently being built here.”

Those last words are so heavy with irony they might bring the plane down. They bring us to the second way that Grossman criticises truth – using Germans. The Soviets had one truth, the Nazis another. While he could not criticise the Soviet truth, he could break down the Nazi truth in a way suspiciously easy to adapt to the Soviet one. The camp has no strategic utility – it just annihilates people, probably Jews. Forster deludes himself, but we sense the truth. Could characters on the other side, justifying their own camps, not be similarly deluded?

Another character, Schmidt, while under fire in Stalingrad, wonders how he might build bridges to his colleagues. He’s an old communist, and suspects he is not alone in not wanting to fight. But he cannot connect to his colleagues – to voice doubt in public or private would be to court immediate execution. It’s a similar scenario to the one the Soviets experienced in the Great Terror, of people unable to unite, even though they might manage to make change if they could, all because of the state’s power and surveillance. At another point, some soldiers declare their propaganda was always a lie: “To be honest with you – now that the war’s almost over – all this talk about the unity of the German nation is bullshit.” Here, too, could we not say something similar about the Soviets?

Yes, and no. A defensive war is generally one which unites people. To speak of Soviet unity is probably less of a lie than German unity. The Soviets, at least, knew why they were in the trenches. Grossman also does show some hints of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis, but the collaborators were only ever a small part of the Ukrainian people, a people who mostly wanted to protect their homes and families like everyone else. Those who did collaborate often soon realised that the Soviets were bad, but the Nazis were much worse. (It’s also worth noting that many of the heroes of Stalingrad are Ukrainians, and Ukrainian itself is spoken at a few points, so this is far from an anti-Ukrainian book. And by the time he could write freely in Life and Fate, Grossman was willing to dispel Russian unity as well – see Lyudmila’s visit to Saratov in that work, where a simple bus journey is enough to show us how selfish the Russian people really were.)

The final way that Grossman begins to challenge a kind of fixed, stultifying, “Gorkian” truth, is through his treatment of death in the novel. This was another weakness, for me, of War and Peace. While in theory Tolstoy could kill any character, in reality he keeps Andrey alive long after Borodino so he gets a proper goodbye. Only Petya gets the kind of death that suggests war is stupid, unglamorous, and cruel.

Grossman is an anti-Tolstoy – he wields his scythe with relish. “All deaths are stupid,” says one of the characters, deep into the fighting. “There’s no clever way to get killed.” Instead of stupid, we might say unromantic. As soon as the Germans arrive, Stalingrad becomes something of a slasher movie: people die all the time, without warning, without any kind of authorial protection seeming to act upon them.

“There was a whistle of iron over the Volga. A thick bubbly column of greenish water leapt up just in front of the dinghy’s bow, then crashed down on top of it. A moment later, in the middle of the river, amid foaming white water, the dinghy’s tarred black bottom was shining gently in the sun, clearly visible to everyone on the launch.”

This paragraph, as sudden as the bomb itself, ends the life of a major character. They get no goodbye, not even a revelation. But that’s life, or rather death. That’s war. Here’s the grand revelation we get for the first death of the book:

As he continued up the slope, he could hear the engine struggling.

Then he heard the howl of a falling bomb. He pressed his head to the steering wheel, sensed with all his body the end of life, thought with awful anguish, “Fuck that” – and ceased to exist.

So much for the author coming in to tell us about God and meaning. “Fuck that” – probably that’s far closer to the truth of war than any adoring contemplation of trees.  

If death is not romantic, and the Germans express doubts about their purpose which are just as applicable to the Soviets as they are to the Nazis, and the topic of the Jews is constantly there in the background, as a blank space, to suggest that perhaps the Soviet narrative of the war (primarily Russian suffering) might have its own limits – then, it’s fair to say, Grossman has done a lot to give readers something to think about. After all, Stalingrad came out under Stalin! Frankly, it’s impressive how good this work is, given that.

It’s far from great, however. The limitations that censorship placed upon Grossman’s characters are too powerful. It’s like they are aware we might be eavesdropping, and thus prefer to keep silent about those things that are most likely to make them human – their doubts, their unsanctioned passions. In Life and Fate, Grossman’s modestly titled sequel, all of these shackles come off. It’s extraordinary how much better that book is, from the very first page, than Stalingrad. At about a hundred and fifty pages in I can see already that this is brushing up against War and Peace. (After finishing it, I can say it’s just as good, and far more timely reading now).

Now, an interesting thought is how the two books might fit together when considering this truth problem. Stalingrad begins to dismantle certain Soviet truths, albeit carefully, subtly. Life and Fate, with its openness to discuss the importance of autonomous kindness against totalitarian control, seems to be proposing a truth of its own. Just as they share characters (and I think Stalingrad is worth reading just to help give depth to the people and destinies of Life and Fate), they also work together on the same themes. It’s a hard ask to say we should read nine hundred pages that are merely pretty good, just to enhance another nine hundred that are definitely really good. But hopefully not an impossible one. I certainly don’t regret it.

Alice Munro – Dear Life

I bought my copy of Dear Life, the last collection of short stories by the late Canadian writer Alice Munro, right about when she won the Nobel Prize in 2013 (one of the first times a writer of short stories had received that honour). I must have read a few of the stories then, not enjoyed or understood them, and set the book aside. On a whim I brought it back with me to Germany, hoping that being a bit older and wiser might help me understand things, and sure enough devoured it in a week.

It’s a hard thing to write about, though. Munro’s stories seem technically simple compared to other writers, where I’m always dotting the pages with marginal notes. Despite this simplicity, you read one page at a time with the ease of a bird gliding and then suddenly, probably at the end, she tries to leave you devastated and usually succeeds.

There are even few images to get excited about. The only one I remember, of “evergreens, rolled up like sleepy bears”, I did not like.

Instead, one of Munro’s key skills on a sentence-by-sentence level seems her ability to find a sharp way of phrasing those moments that change a life: “”Just leaving,” says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry but now is not going to marry me.“ Or “That was one of  the few times that I saw him act like a father.”

With such sentences, you get the impression that she has worked hard at her stories, unlike others who mask relative laziness with sheer talent or genius. It takes a lot of effort, hours of chiselling and sanding, to make such unobtrusive workaday prose. Or rather, prose that we cannot distinguish from other simple prose except when it is too late, and it has already delivered its broadside against the unprepared soul.

My favourite of the stories here is “Amundsen”, from which the bear image comes. Its story goes as follows. A young woman arrives to teach at a clinic for children with diseases like tuberculosis, out in rural Canada. She falls in love with Alister, the director, and they arrange to get married. Something happens, however, and they do not. The narrator is set on a train and leaves. Years later she sees Alister again, but barely has time to say hello.

Taken as a whole, “Amundsen” reminds me a little bit of Chekhov’s “House with the Mezzanine” with its sense of a relationship that does not go anywhere. Chekhov’s realist innovation (one of them) was that he translated his observation of unfulfilled promises within individuals’ lives into his fiction. Munro, often called the Canadian Chekhov, gains much of her own atmosphere of reality from this same thing. She is, like Chekhov, a great writer of the fudged life.

The pivotal moment in “Amundsen” is the scene when, having left the clinic to get married in a far off town, the mood suddenly shifts between the couple and they head back, acknowledging that everything is over. Here is that shift in mood. The couple have just eaten, and now the narrator has plucked up the courage to put on a nice dress she had saved especially:

When I come out Alister stands up to greet me and smiles and squeezes my hand and says I look pretty.

We walk stiffly back to the car, holding hands. He opens the car door for me, goes around and gets in, settles himself and turns the key in the ignition, then turns it off.

The car is parked in front of a hardware store. Shovels for snow removal are on sale at half price. There is still a sign in the window that says skates can be sharpened inside.

Across the street there is a wooden house painted an oily yellow. Its front steps have become unsafe and two boards forming an X have been nailed across them.

The truck parked in front of Alister’s car is a prewar model, with a runningboard and a fringe of rust on its fenders. A man in overalls comes out of the hardware store and gets into it. After some engine complaint, then some rattling and bouncing in place, it is driven away. Now a delivery truck with the store’s name on it tries to park in the space left vacant. There is not quite enough room. The driver gets out and comes and raps on Alister’s window. Alister is surprised—if he had not been talking so earnestly he would have noticed the problem. He rolls down the window and the man asks if we are parked there because we intend to buy something in the store. If not, could we please move along?

“Just leaving,” says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry me but now is not going to marry me. “We were just leaving.”

We. He has said we. For a moment I cling to that word. Then I think it’s the last time. The last time I’ll be included in his we.

It’s not the “we” that matters, that is not what tells me the truth. It’s his male-to-male tone to the driver, his calm and reasonable apology. I could wish now to go back to what he was saying before, when he did not even notice the van trying to park. What he was saying then had been terrible but his tight grip on the wheel, his grip and his abstraction and his voice had pain in them. No matter what he said and meant, he spoke out of the same deep place then, that he spoke from when he was in bed with me. But it is not so now, after he has spoken to another man. He rolls up the window and gives his attention to the car, to backing it out of its tight spot and moving it so as not to come in contact with the van.

And a moment later I would be glad even to go back to that time, when he craned his head to see behind him. Better that than driving—as he is driving now—down the main street of Huntsville, as if there is no more to be said or managed.

I can’t do it, he has said.

He has said that he can’t go through with this.

He can’t explain it.

Only that it’s a mistake.

The first time I read it, I was shocked by the news that everything was over. (Shocked by the suddenness, but also because I wanted the marriage to happen.) Yet when we look back over the extract, there are no clues that things are going wrong of the sort that another clever short-story writer might feel compelled to leave. Even going back further, the occasional unkindnesses of the story, such as when the narrator and Alister skip the play of a school-aged friend, Mary, are not “gotcha” moments that we can use to explain what comes later. Adults preferring to spend time together over a meal to watching a performance that will probably be no good is hardly a cardinal sin we cannot ever imagine ourselves committing.

Instead, though we do have words like “stiffly” and the perhaps insufficiently thoughtful “pretty”, the passage before the revelation strikes us by having nothing to do with the marriage at all. We have a “wooden house” and the “hardware store.” It takes us until the man tapping on the window, and the knowledge that Alister is “talking so earnestly”, for us to realise that the reason we are focusing on everything else but what is taking place within the car is that the narrator herself wants to focus on anything else but that. Rather than the text reflecting the narrator’s internal voice, a la free indirect discourse, instead, we have the text reflecting the narrator’s very thoughts. It’s pretty cool, but also the kind of unflashy trick typical of Munro which it took me a second pass to notice. 

We never learn the reason that things collapse between them. Ultimately, it does not matter. Perhaps this is another thing Munro has the right to allow herself – a lack of an explanation. As in relationships, often the only explanation for a break-up is the one that we come up with, alone at night.

Another trick worth borrowing is the use of dialogue without quotes, as at the end of the extract. By placing it in the text in this way the finality, the unchangeability of the fact is emphasised, as against the dialogue within quotation marks which still has this element of hope. I think this is important to note because it can be easy to get sucked into quite a conservative way of thinking, particularly on “realistic” things, which considers that every innovation has already taken place. I know I’m guilty of it. But dialogue is more than just words in quotes. (Just as, for the Sally Rooneys and James Joyces of this world, it can be more than words without quotes!) Dialogue can be silences, like “…”, or shock “!?”, and so on. This may seem rather dreadful to some of my readers, but I think that such a way of writing “dialogue” could be more effective now than the more traditional “She went silent”. Show, not tell, we are told, after all.

Reading the stories in Dear Life is at once a joy and a sadness and a consolation for this blogger. A joy, because they are damn good. A sadness, because I know how vastly far ahead of anything I could ever notice, let alone write down, Munro’s knowledge of human nature is. And a consolation, because that previous statement is at least a little silly. More and more, whether as a psychological defence (you will still be a good writer, don’t give up!) or as a rational position, I’m coming to see how challenging it is to write good stories when you are young. I felt this many years ago, when I literally could not write any kind of time gap in my stories – not even, really, a week – because it felt like I hadn’t lived long enough to perceive time in that way. But still now, when I have lived long enough to allow for a changing of the seasons, I see that I have not seen enough of life’s stages to really write the kind of modern story that rolls itself out slowly, in fits and starts, like modern lives do.

Of course, there remain plenty of stories for the young, but not ones about whole lives. And it is precisely this kind of story that Munro chooses for her own in most of Dear Life. At around eighty when these stories came out, she was certainly entitled to it. But it’s still a surprise, and a powerful one, when we read in a story that began in the time of the Second World War, the news that characters are reaching out to one another over “email”.

I think I might have to live a lot longer to write something like that.

The Language of War and Peace

At last, my strength has failed me. For two years, almost exactly, I have been trying not to return to War and Peace. This book has everything, even now, especially now, when Russia is at war again. The good and the bad, the power and the glory, the vanity of all that, and the despair and darkness of senseless destruction. Pretty much every book I have read since the full-scale invasion began has been chosen with the war on my mind, whether to avoid thinking about it or to engage obliquely with it. Yet it is also the one subject that I try to avoid talking about directly on this blog, even though I feel like I can write seriously about it, and perhaps have a moral responsibility to do so. With War and Peace, though, I actually was not trying to understand my war. I was trying to understand how Tolstoy wrote his war.

Today’s post comes from only the first of the four volumes. I have already been through the whole epic once, but that was a few years ago. Back then, I was so overwhelmed I could not write about it. Yet it is part of Tolstoy’s magic, which I will try to describe here, that I still remember vividly certain moments, certain fates, when entire books fade from the memory as if they were never there at all.

Here I want to describe some of the technical features of War and Peace that struck me, because I or we might learn something from them. The translation is Anthony Briggs’ – I have the Russian at home, but alas I do not quite have the time for it at the moment. I propose to take a few sentences and describe briefly how they seem to work.

A practical post, perhaps, but one I hope will hold interest for people beyond my fellow Tolstoy fanatics.

“Eh bien, mon prince”

Where Anna Karenina is memorable for its opening lines, War and Peace just throws us in there with this. Isaac Babel apocryphally said that if the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy. Unfortunately, Tolstoy only had time to do a small fraction of the world from 1805 to 1813, but such a beginning makes us think he had already been writing his story for years and with some arbitrariness chosen now to let us in. The opening is memorable by taking us immediately into history more than into the dynamics of characters. The first paragraph, reminding us of Napoleon’s conquests in Italy, gives us a sense that world politics is as much the book’s theme as the ‘little people’ novels normally only bother with. Part of the tensions in the novel, we sense at once, will come from men before maps, just as much as the plain passions of the human spirit.

It’s also notable, though Briggs chooses to translate it here, that the novel begins in French. That too – being so inconsiderate to one’s readers – takes a certain bravery as a writer. (My girlfriend still complains at every foreign word that creeps into my posts). But the novel dramatizes, amongst so much else, the partial rejection of French as the primary medium of communication for the Russian upper classes. As the novel goes on, French is used less and less. We find something similar today, in the millions of Ukrainians whose primary language was once Russian, but who now refuse to speak it at all. I will have to steal Tolstoy’s idea on that one.

“…this aunt, who was unknown, uninteresting and unneeded by anyone.”

One distinguishing feature of Tolstoy’s writing, I realise, is its harshness. He speaks clearly in his narration of the unpleasant realities that we might try to gloss over. An uninteresting aunt at a party is just that – and people do not want to talk to her. We neither hide her from view nor pretend she is anything but an obstacle to enjoying the evening. In general, a certain cynicism is an emotion he allows his characters. One of the officers, Zherkov, is all about taking advantage of the war for his own advancement. Boris, one of the younger characters, is determined to use all the networking skills he and his mother have to raise himself up out of relative poverty, but in his thoughts, we see quite unpleasant envy towards Nikolai Rostov, his richer friend.

The things a writer allows herself to say about the world and the people in it are the clearest path we have to her worldview. By including too much cynicism, we end up with a sense of the world’s misery. On the other hand, the easiest way to put forward an optimistic view of things is simply to give the characters the right only to positive emotions. Ultimately, both approaches can seem overwrought and fake. Writers are often scared of us disliking their characters, over whom they labour and love, so they do not allow them the nastiness that makes them real. But people really are cynical at times, not as monsters but merely as human beings, and by including both cynicism and heroism of spirit, unevenly distributed though it be, Tolstoy creates a world that seems more real for the fullness of human nature he puts in it.  

“His smile was not like theirs – theirs were not real smiles”

I mean this is just great. As with the cynicism problem above, what we have here is directness. Society’s falseness is typically revealed in novels gradually and tragically, as with the character of Innstetten in Effi Briest. In such cases, writers adhere faithfully to the principle of “show, not tell”. But just as showing is important, so too is telling as a supplement. Telling here functions to make even more impactful what is shown, because language offers opportunities both in showing and in telling, which are not shared between them. Specifically, showing sentences soften up the victim to create the opening through which the knock-out punch of a perfect telling sentence can come. Without that softening up, the telling sentence can be easily deflected or blocked. One of Tolstoy’s many gifts is knowing when to tell, and when to show, and not shying away from one or the other.

“Suddenly there was a great rattling sound on the bridge, like a scattering of nuts”

For the greatest writer in the entire universe, Tolstoy does not do much of that image-making we typically associate with great writers. He mainly describes how things are. He is good at the telling detail, such as what people wear or eat, but really this is just the fruit of the gigantic research he did before writing War and Peace. What happens in the novel is simply the onrush of history. Characters, places, everything changes, but because so much is dialogue or simple description, because there is so much movement, the entire text is extremely engaging. We feel close to people because nothing gets in the way. Writing like Tolstoy is simple, if only you pay enough attention to the world to write it down just as it comes.

Yet on rare occasions, he does do images, and this image of a cannon’s grapeshot is one that you simply have to underline. At another point, blood pours from Prince Andrei’s wound “like liquid from a bottle”. These images are so rare because they are hardly ever needed. It’s not as if any of us have experienced the lives of the Russian high aristocracy around 1805, it is just that we are humans and so are they, so that Tolstoy need only describe them properly and we will find ourselves standing there alongside them. With war, it seems to me, he does find himself using the occasional image, because our experience of the battlefield is less widespread. Here, the images make us see clearer. What writers might want to take away is that in realistic narratives most of the images we try to introduce just get in the way, like frosted glass.

“Then he suddenly felt there was something dangling on his numb left arm that shouldn’t be there.”

Here we have almost the opposite to the comment above. The art, which Tolstoy mastered, is knowing what to say, and what not to. Here we have something imprecise, but precisely because of its imprecision and the knowledge we have of the actual fact of the injury, Nikolai Rostov’s own confusion at his (ultimately minor) wound becomes heightened for us. Gaps in knowledge create tension – Tolstoy does not take us for fools.

“Next day the troops were on the march, and Boris had no opportunity of seeing Bolkonsky or Dolgorukov again before the battle of Austerlitz. For the time being he would stay with the Izmailov regiment.”

The same thing happens here, at the end of a chapter. We know, as the characters do not, what Austerlitz means – a crushing defeat. Multiple chapters end while mentioning it is coming, but the characters meanwhile get on with their lives as if they are on holiday. The contrast is unbearable but brilliant. The one mistake Tolstoy makes is that he does mention the battle will be a defeat before it begins. That makes the ominous shape of the coming battle coalesce into something more prosaic, weakening the tension. You have to have history be familiar to fully enjoy this tension, but Austerlitz is so famous as a battle that Tolstoy cannot be faulted for expecting us to remember it.

“She clomped in”

Ultimately, as with Dickens, we can read Tolstoy to try and work out how to make vivid characters. Whereas Dickens’ characters gain power from his mastery of caricature, Tolstoy’s come from the details that he uses for them, in particular repetitions. Prince Andrei is at several times referred to as “indolent”, so that the word is associated with him in our minds. Now, this is worth giving more attention to. Normally, in creating and introducing characters, we dump the information on the reader all at once. We learn perhaps their history, their personality, their appearance. But I tend to forget this all myself – it’s too much, especially when detached from the world.

Character is shown in Tolstoy’s fiction as in life – one element at a time. Yet we need something solid, more than just a name, to attach the character’s traits to. Telling us too much is like making a clay statue and forgetting to fire it, so that it melts when left out on the mantlepiece. Tolstoy gives us very little, repeated over and over, with the result that we have something solid that we cannot possibly forget about a character. And thus everything that the character does after that is memorable too, because we have something structural to pin it onto, rather than just a mush. Andrei’s wife, the little princess, (already her name is a memorable thing), has a “downy lip”; Andrei himself has his indolence; Pierre has his glasses, Sonya her inner kitty; Berg has his inability to talk about anything but himself, Vera her crap personality.

It’s utterly staggering that I can just reel these things off. With Dickens, the people are so flamboyant in their personalities that we have to remember them. But Tolstoy’s people, real as you or me, are just described effectively from a technical standpoint. He finds their essence, and never lets us forget it.

Which brings us to “clomped”. The way we walk, like all the things we do with our bodies, is memorable. They can form the foundation for the rest of the novel’s description of them. Andrei’s poor, poor sister, “clomps”. That tells us all we need to know about the success she has had in her life, her confidence, and the distance between her hopes and her realities. If she did not clomp, if we did not know she clomped, we would not feel the full pain and sadness of the line when meeting the handsome suitor Anatole Kuragin: “She tried to be nice to him and didn’t know how.”

It’s brutal, but also not nearly as ambiguous as it looks when taken out of context. Marya clomps. She is not failing to be nice because she’s an unkind person – in fact, she’s one of the novel’s moral centres. She’s failing to be nice because her life is simple, sad, and cramped, living with her insane father on their estate. In other words, she can’t be nice because she doesn’t know how. And, of course, she doesn’t know how – she’s the kind of person who clomps.

These walking words are surprisingly useful for a writer, so it’s a shame few of them take full advantage of them. Characters always have to move around, so if we can find a way of describing their movements while also describing the innermost nature of their soul – why not kill two birds with one stone?

“And the three voices, hers, Mademoiselle Bourienne’s and the giggling Katya’s, blended into a kind of happy babble like birds twittering.”

What’s interesting here is how we get to the image. Images, even striking ones, are as I noted above, not necessarily an unambiguous good in the writer’s arsenal. They can get in the way of the scene, being a barrier rather than a path. Here we have a rare non-war image, but now read it again. Here we don’t just have the image – we have its creation. The voices blend, and then they become this babble which is like birds twittering. Images are annoying because they slow things down – we need to stop and work out how they relate to the scene that we expect to see in our heads. But here, because we see the scene become the image, via that word “blended” and the “And” at the beginning, the sentence retains its vigour. We catch the image in its becoming, so that we take it in while still running to the next page.

“My, how you’ve changed”

One of the problems a writer has is that in the two to three hundred pages allotted them by the gods of publishing, there’s only so much space we have for the forking paths of destiny. A novel is not a novella, which is lightning-focused on a particular plot and character or small group of them; still, things are short and simple enough that we can “see where things are going”, ultimately taking the tension out of the work after a certain point. Then there’s the problem of worldviews. With only a few characters, it’s hard to avoid the writer’s views of how things are. There is no space to explore alternatives, so that the universe presented often ends up seeming quite simplistic.

Tolstoy does not have this problem in War and Peace. There are so many characters and so many pages that we simply do not know what is going to happen or when. We know the history, but not how it will be told or what role our little people have to play in it. The characters we expect to meet again, like Boris, from early on in the book, may turn out to have relatively minor roles. The general tension is greater not just because of the war, but because people can be replaced on a narrative level. In fact, one major character does die long before the novel’s end, and the epic just keeps going.

If characters were simple and only replaceable, there is a great danger – we might feel like we could choose not to care about them. The opposite is the case. Because there is space, we know that they have time to grow, so we care about even the ones we don’t like at first. This is doubled by the fact that so many of the characters – Nikolai and Natasha, Pierre and even Andrei – are young. With all respect due to my older readers, young people change much more over a given time period than older folks do. By focusing on young people growing up, we get a situation where we are truly invested in people’s fates, not just whether they live or die as in a normal story, but what kind of person they will become. At my own advanced age (26), I recognise this as a great pleasure from coming into regular contact with younger people – I want to see what they will make of their lives.

So, this is another part of the magic of the book – the wave of characters that, thanks to the characterisation skill described feebly by me above, are all distinctive and exciting to read about. They and the history itself form part of the drive of the work.

“The same night, after taking leave of the war minister, Bolkonsky was on his way to rejoin the army, not knowing where to find it and worried about being captured by the French on the way to Krems.”

We end the piece on a simple one: the beginning of volume I, part II, chapter 13. The conclusions we might draw from this blog post are as follows – detail is key, not quantity; showing and telling must work together; images are not as important as we might think; cynicism is a human emotion as much as any other; a sheer quantity of characters, provided they are made using the principles above, is only a gain for tension and engagement.

This final extract does not correspond to all of these lessons, but it shows how narrative works in War and Peace, and that’s important too. What we have is very simple – time, place, person, and purpose. It provides the minimum for us to keep going. With so many stories and personalities, Tolstoy needs to be on top of his transitions or else we will get lost. And he is. And what’s surprising is how simple this is. The sentence above is not technically complicated. We can write our own, taking it as a model, or have that time/place/person/purpose as a kind of checklist on the door of our fridge. But we must write it. If we do, we too can take readers running through our imagined worlds.

What I might be trying to say is that War and Peace is actually quite simple. It may be one of the greatest works in the entire world, but that’s because it is simple, not because it’s complicated. The challenge in writing it, aside from the deep knowledge of human nature that Tolstoy had, is just the research and the planning. If you know exactly who is going to be where, and when, and why, you too can gradually build up something similar from scratch. Tolstoy wrote this novel in his thirties – it’s not actually the work of a great and aged sage so much as of a rich young man who had the money and time he needed to devote himself fully to his research project. That might give us hope that we may yet imitate it, correct lottery numbers forthcoming.

Unfortunately, though, it’s not that simple. Great literature has no formula, neither in general nor even in its specific instances. There is something missing in my attempts so far to write in a Tolstoyan manner, whether it’s the impetus that the sense of history gives or the quality of my characterisations, I don’t know. Somehow, no matter how prosaic it is, I am swept up and along by War and Peace. I put the novel down after finishing the first volume and haven’t read it for a few weeks, but just going over it again for this blog post I am already raring to get back into it. There is some hidden force here, something almost mystical. Is it merely my interest in characters’ destinies? But I know them already – I remember it all. There is no tension of that sort, no illicit love affairs like in Anna Karenina.

But still, like a raging torrent, I cannot read this book and not be carried by it. What is the force? I must return and see if I can find it, or drown happily in the attempt.

If you are still interested in Tolstoy’s language after this piece you can try to track down Henry Gifford’s elusive essay “On Translating Tolstoy”, which delves further into the topic. If you find a copy, please consider sending one my way!