What is Leo Tolstoy’s attitude towards fatalism? Artistic and philosophical understanding of the essence of war in L.N. Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace” What is fatalism according to Tolstoy

HISTORICAL VIEWS OF TOLSTOY

In the novel “War and Peace” L.N. Tolstoy appears to the reader not only as an original, brilliant writer, stylist and artist. His original historical views and ideas occupy an important place in the plot. The writer, who in Russia is always more than a writer, creates his own philosophy of history: an integral system of views on the paths, causes and goals of social development. Hundreds of pages of the book are devoted to their presentation. Moreover, the second part of the epilogue, which concludes the novel, is a historical and philosophical treatise, the ideological result of the author’s many years of research and reflection on given topic.

“War and Peace” is not just a historical novel, but also a novel about History. She acts, and her actions have a direct impact on the fate of all heroes without exception. She is not a background or an attribute of the plot. History is the main thing that determines the smoothness or swiftness of its movement.

Let us remember the final phrase of the novel: “...at the present time... it is necessary to abandon the perceived freedom and recognize the dependence that we do not feel,” and here Tolstoy puts an end to it.

The image of a wide, full-flowing, mighty river is what appears in silence and emptiness. This river begins where humanity begins and flows to where it dies. Tolstoy denies freedom to every individual. Every existence is an existence of necessity. Every historical event is the result of an unconscious, “swarm” action of natural historical forces. A person is denied the role of a subject of a social movement. “The subject of history is the life of peoples and humanity,” writes Tolstoy, giving it, history, the place of an active subject and character. Its laws are objective and independent of the will and actions of people. Tolstoy believes: “If there is one free action man, then there is not a single historical law and no idea about historical events.”

A person can do little. The wisdom of Kutuzov, like the wisdom of Platon Karataev, consists in unconscious submission to the element of life that attracts them. History, according to the writer, acts in the world as natural natural strength. Its laws, like physical or chemical laws, exist independently of the desires, wills and consciousness of thousands and millions of people. That is why, Tolstoy believes, it is impossible to explain anything to history based on these desires and wills. Every social cataclysm, every historical event is the result of the action of an impersonal, non-spiritual character, somewhat reminiscent of Shchedrin’s “It” from “The History of a City.”

This is how Tolstoy assesses the role of personality in history: “A historical personality is the essence of the label that history hangs on this or that event.” And the logic of these arguments is such that ultimately, not only the concept of free will disappears from history, but also God as its moral principle. On the pages of the novel she appears as an absolute, impersonal, indifferent force, grinding into powder human lives. Any personal activity is unproductive and dramatic. As if in the ancient proverb about fate, which attracts the obedient and drags the rebellious, she orders human world. This is what happens to a person, according to the writer: “A person consciously lives for himself, but serves as an unconscious tool for achieving historical universal goals.” Therefore, fatalism is inevitable in history when explaining “illogical”, “unreasonable” phenomena. The more we, according to Tolstoy, try to rationally explain these phenomena in history, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible they become for us.

A person must know the laws historical development, but due to the weakness of the mind and the incorrect, or rather, according to the writer’s thoughts, unscientific approach to history, the awareness of these laws has not yet come, but must definitely come. This is the unique philosophical and historical optimism of the writer. To do this, it is necessary to change the point of view, “to abandon the consciousness of immobility in space and recognize the movement that we cannot feel,” to abandon the concept of a person freely acting in history, without recognizing the absolute and strict necessity of historical laws.

From the novel “War and Peace” (volume III, chapter 1)

For us, descendants - not historians, not carried away by the process of research and therefore contemplating the event with unobscured common sense, its causes appear in innumerable quantities. The more we delve into the search for reasons, the more of them are revealed to us, and every single reason or a whole series reasons seem to us equally fair in themselves, and equally false in their insignificance in comparison with the enormity of the event, and equally false in their invalidity (without the participation of all other coinciding causes) to produce the event that took place...

If Napoleon had not been offended by the demand to retreat beyond the Vistula and had not ordered the troops to advance, there would have been no war; but if all the sergeants had not wished to enter secondary service, there could not have been a war. There also could not have been a war if there had not been the intrigues of England, and there had not been the Prince of Oldenburg and the feeling of insult in Alexander, and there would have been no autocratic power in Russia, and there would have been no French Revolution and the subsequent dictatorship and empire, and all that what produced French revolution, and so on. Without one of these reasons nothing could happen. Therefore, all these reasons - billions of reasons - coincided in order to produce what was. And, therefore, nothing was the exclusive cause of the event, and the event had to happen only because it had to happen. Millions of people, having renounced their human feelings and their reason, had to go to the East from the West and kill their own kind, just as several centuries ago crowds of people went from East to West, killing their own kind...

Fatalism in history is inevitable to explain irrational phenomena (that is, those whose rationality we do not understand). The more we try to rationally explain these phenomena in history, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible they become for us.

Each person lives for himself, enjoys freedom to achieve his personal goals and feels with his whole being that he can now do or not do such and such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, performed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible and becomes the property of history, in which it has not a free, but a predetermined meaning.

There are two sides of life in every person: personal life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests are, and spontaneous, swarm life, where a person inevitably fulfills the laws prescribed to him.

Man consciously lives for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for achieving historical, universal goals. A committed act is irrevocable, and its action, coinciding in time with millions of actions of other people, acquires historical significance. The higher a person stands on the social ladder, than with big people he is bound, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predetermination and inevitability of his every action.

"The heart of a king is in the hand of God."

The king is a slave of history.

History, that is, unconscious, general, swarm life of humanity, uses every minute of the life of the kings as an instrument for his own purposes.

Napoleon, despite the fact that more than ever, now, in 1812, it seemed to him that the verser or not verser le sang de ses peuples depended on him (as Alexander wrote to him in his last letter), never more than now did he was subject to those inevitable laws that forced him (acting in relation to himself, as it seemed to him, at his own discretion) to do for the common cause, for history, what had to happen.

Westerners moved to the East to kill each other. And according to the law of coincidence of causes, thousands of small reasons for this movement and for the war coincided with this event: reproaches for non-compliance with the continental system, and the Duke of Oldenburg, and the movement of troops to Prussia, undertaken (as it seemed to Napoleon) only to to achieve armed peace, and the love and habit of the French emperor for war, which coincided with the disposition of his people, the fascination with the grandeur of the preparations, and the expenses of preparation, and the need to acquire such benefits that would repay these expenses, and the stupefying honors in Dresden, and diplomatic negotiations, which, in the opinion of contemporaries, were carried out with a sincere desire to achieve peace and which only hurt the pride of both sides, and millions of millions of other reasons that were counterfeited by the event that was about to take place and coincided with it.

When an apple is ripe and falls, why does it fall? Is it because it gravitates towards the ground, is it because the rod is drying up, is it because it is being dried by the sun, is it getting heavy, is it because the wind is shaking it, is it because the boy standing below wants to eat it?

Nothing is a reason. All this is just a coincidence of the conditions under which every vital, organic, spontaneous event takes place. And that botanist who finds that the apple falls because the fiber is decomposing and the like will be just as right and wrong as that child standing below who will say that the apple fell because he wanted to eat him and that he prayed about it. Just as right and wrong will be the one who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted it, and because he died because Alexander wanted him to die: just as right and wrong will be the one who says that the lost one million pounds the undermined mountain fell because the last worker hit under it last time with a pickaxe. IN historical events so-called great people are labels that give names to an event, which, like labels, have the least connection with the event itself.

Each of their actions, which seems to them arbitrary for themselves, is in the historical sense involuntary, but is in connection with the entire course of history and is determined from eternity.

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was for a long time captured by a literary idea, which was first called “One Thousand Eight Hundred and Five”, and then “Decembrists”. This plan was embodied in the great epic "War and Peace" during financial well-being and family happiness that reigned in the young Tolstoy family in Yasnaya Polyana in the early 60s of the nineteenth century. The inspired rise of creativity found a way out in calm, solitary work. The young wife Sofya Andreevna worked selflessly on numerous editions of the novel. Without her help, Tolstoy would hardly have been able to complete the unprecedented amount of work.
He read military memoirs, memoirs and correspondence of people who became famous for something during the reign of Emperor Alexander the First. At his disposal were family archives their relatives Tolstoy and Volkonsky. The writer worked in the state archives, studied Masonic manuscripts in a special repository of the Third Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, walked across the Borodino field and even measured the distances between the trenches with steps. At least six handwritten editions went through the pen of Sofia Andreevna before readers saw the novel.
But the first part of the epic was read avidly in Russia, and additional editions were published one after another. The novel left no one indifferent and evoked many responses in the press. Readers were struck by the combination of a wide epic canvas with a thin psychological analysis. Living pictures privacy organically fit into the history of the Fatherland, with which the history of Russian families was intertwined. Soon the second part of the epic was released. The writer transferred his fatalistic philosophy to the history of Russia. According to Tolstoy’s ideas, it turned out that it was driven by the people as an exponent of social forces, and not by individual bright individuals. By the way, we should understand the word people in Tolstoy’s words as the totality of the entire population, and not just as its uneducated part. Tolstoy's fatalism was primarily manifested in the battle scenes. The wound of Prince Bolkonsky at Austerlitz, the bottomless depth of the sky above and the shadow of the Emperor of France - everything comes together to show the insignificance of earthly thoughts and the greatness of higher aspirations. The Russian troops were defeated because they fought on foreign soil for the glory of foreign banners, as omniscient providence ordained.
The weaving workshop, as Madame Scherer’s secular salon seems to Tolstoy, is disgusting to him, like everything mechanical and soulless, but behind the comparison with the workshop there lies a secret machine of conspiracies that are being woven in the capital by the Freemasons, in whose ranks Pierre Bezukhov will later appear. There is here the fatal inevitability of evil, hidden in any form of supreme power: “evil must come into the world, but woe to him through whom it comes.”
“People’s thought” mystically moves the club “ people's war” and “nails” the enemy to the last, that is, he proves that in “the beginning there was a word.” The unity and inseparability of the destinies of people from different walks of life seems to be a monolith that Napoleon cannot split. And this unity comes at a critical hour from the fatal unity of people, whose name is “the people.” According to Tolstoy, neither Napoleon nor Kutuzov determined the outcome of the war by their orders and orders. The victory of the Russian troops was predetermined by the very justice of the people's anger, protesting against the suffering brought to the people by the invaders. There can be no arbitrariness in historical events, as Tolstoy teaches us. Fatal predetermination always reigns in everything. Old Field Marshal Kutuzov relied in everything on the people’s anger and their determination to defeat the enemy, and that’s why he won. He listened sensitively to the mood in the troops, looked closely, although he had only one eye, at the determination written on the faces of the soldiers, and only then made the only right decision. Because “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
If you ask my opinion about the philosophy of fatalism, I will show its inconsistency using examples from life. If you knew how many people in my class had read War and Peace, you would simply be surprised. Only a few people read all the volumes of the novel, and the majority “get to know each other” through summary. Tolstoy’s narrative intonation reminds us of the moral teachings and instructions of parents at home and teachers at school. And young people nowadays are not used to being lectured and pushed around. So Tolstoy’s fatal faith in the Russian people as the engine of historical development turned out to be untenable. The Russians, at the first opportunity, get rid of folk traditions and rush in pursuit of Western civilization in order to stop being Russian. Based on Tolstoy’s epic “War and Peace,” it is now possible to study Russian life, Russian character, which have become a museum rarity for us. If Tolstoy’s book is alive, then the world around is inanimate. For us, Tolstoy remained behind glass in a museum display case, and not as a contemporary.