Tolstoy's Phoenix: From Method to Meaning in War and Peace

2. Tolstoy's Perpetual Present

Chapter Two Tolstoy's Perpetual Present IN SUCH ENDING-ORIENTED NOVELS as Pride and Prejudice and Madame Bovary, time is predominantly psychological . Chronological time may still exist in the outside world where everyone grows older at a uniform rate, but the tragic or comic hero is on a roller coaster and the only time that counts is the time that is running out. Her or his destiny determines the rate at which time passes because all scenes postulate an end that will resolve some problem posed at the beginning and which, at the climax, will reveal the protagonists' comic or tragic fate. What happens, happens because of what the hero and heroine were always capahIe of becoming, and they hecome what they were capable of because of what happens. \Vhen the two are fused, so that what finally happens reveals the way they really are, then "the matter is all used up in the form," as Percy Lubbock put it, and "the fcmIl expresses all the matter."] There may be more to say-in Pride and Prejudice, for example, about Elizaheth and Darcy after their marriage-but there is no longer any urgency about hearing it, any sense of impending concerns that are larger than life. Enlargement was due to the complex consistency of the hero and heroine's personalities, and the way in which all events contributed to their predicament. Without the predicament, they are as uninteresting as the predicament would have been without them. Thus "all smiles stop together"Z as time runs out-meaning internal time, the time we experience when we have "become" a particular character or been so swept along by what is happening to her or him that time seems "organic with the action, now rapid, now almost stationary, coinciding with the movement of the passions and feelings.'" As Edwin Muir has shown, in \Var and Peace the speed of time is only momentarily determined by the intensity of the action.4 For Prince Andrew wounded on Pratzen Heights, Nicholas disillusioned at Tilsit, Natasha nearly seduced by Anatole, Princess Mary devastated by her father's death, Pierre waiting in line to he executed-for these and others, on scores of occasions, time seems excruciatingly internal. But sooner than they would have thought possible the crisis passes; we are reminded that life goes indifferently onrecording growth, marking decay-and in spite of themselves Tolstoy'S char20 Tolstoy's Perpetual Present acters respond to its demands. Prince Andrew leaves Bogucharovo for Petersburg , telling himself that "life is not over at thirty-one" (6:1). Natasha, after many weeks in despair, one day takes up singing again, and flirting. Nicholas, after Tilsit and Voronezh, learns not only to accept compromise but to value it. After burying her father, Princess Mary responds to the French danger by taking charge of her household and giving orders to leave the estate. In prison, Pierre's spirit is mended by Karataev. There will be other crises, seemingly just as insurmountable, and these too will eventually disappear in the backwash, for Tolstoyan time (like nature's) does not run out, it runs on. It is not tied to a particular hero or heroine's destiny-Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage, Emma Bovary's death-but to the "cycle of generations": "of birth and growth, death and birth again."·5 Had he wanted it otherwise, Tolstoy could have kept time more consistently internal, emphasized courtship, then ended his novel with the French retreat and two protagonist marriages-as indeed he had planned to end it when (in 1866) his working title was All~s Well That Ends Well. But clearly he decided instead to keep his narrative open-ended and to portray a representative generation, flanked by the parents they are replacing and the children who will replace them. Within this cycle, Tolstoy shows us everything that we are "likely to do, think, suffer,"" from youth through old age: from Petya, at age nine, boasting that he would have killed so many Frenchmen at Schon Grabern that "there'd have been a heap ofthem," to old Prince Nicholas, in his dotage, having his bed moved to a different spot every night. Moreover, not only are we shown characters responding in ways both particular to their circumstances and typical of their age and sex, but when they pass from one stage to another , time might be alternated so that they themselves become aware of the change-as Natasha does on the day she becomes...