New Left Review 46, July-August 2007
Within the epic sweep of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Hayden White argues, three genres are braided together: historical, novelistic and philosophical. If the former two—and the battles, loves and deaths they recount—continue the line of European realism, in the third Tolstoy presents history as a force beyond human control, in a bid to dismantle ideologies of progress.
HAYDEN WHITE
AGAINST HISTORICAL REALISM
A Reading of ‘War and Peace’
We Russians in general do not know how to write novels in the sense in which this genre is understood in Europe. [1] Leo Tolstoy, ‘Drafts for an Introduction to War and Peace’, in Tolstoy, War and Peace: The Maude Translation, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, 2nd edition, New York 1996, p. 1087. All subsequent citations are from this edition, henceforth wp. This article originally appeared as ‘Contro il realismo storico’, in Franco Moretti, ed., Il romanzo, vol. V: Lezioni, Turin 2003, pp. 221–37.
Tolstoy
Subscribe for just £40 and get free access to the archive
Please login on the left to read more or buy the article for £3’My institution subscribes to NLR, why can't I access this article?’
Also available in: