Evgeny Sheinman

"... mysterious forces that move
humanity (mysterious because
that the laws that govern them
movement unknown to us), continued
your action"
L.N. Tolstoy, "War and Peace"

These lines are among the first in the epilogue to War and Peace. Lev Nikolayevich's brilliant novel was one of the most beloved among several books in my youth, which I constantly reread. In one of the most popular Russian talk shows, which were led by Pyotr Tolstoy (I heard that he is a descendant of the great writer), it was about education, one girl got up, saying that we don’t want to read War and Peace, we are bored! None of those present were horrified, indignant, even sympathetic remarks were heard ...
I don't know if everyone who read the novel once paid attention to the epilogue. In fact, thoughts about what drives the story are scattered throughout the novel, but in the epilogue they are concentrated and, in fact, the epilogue is, as it were, a separate philosophical work, quite significant in volume (more than 100 pages), consisting of two parts. And if in the first part a rather weighty part is still devoted to the main characters of the novel, then the second part is a purely philosophical treatise. I have long dreamed of “dealing with” this epilogue separately from the novel, I didn’t dare, but now I’m going to ...
Before I take the novel into my hands, let me, I think, look on the Internet for what is on the issue stated in the title of the article. Imagine my amazement when it turned out that a significant part of the sites referred to L.N. Tolstoy!
The main thoughts of these sites are approximately the following: a person can do little. History, according to the writer, acts in the world as a natural force. Its laws, like physical or chemical laws, exist independently of the desires, will and consciousness of thousands and millions of people. That is why, according to Tolstoy, it is impossible to explain anything in history based on these desires and wills. He argues that it is impossible to explain the development historical events will, desires, deeds of individual great people - " historical figures". History, according to Tolstoy, is the result of the coincidence of interests and actions of many people who make up the mass of the people.
In a very “fresh” article by Igor Smirnov “History and Its Other” (“Star”, 2016, No. 6), the author makes a small reference to “War and Peace”: “According to Leo Tolstoy’s conviction, substantiated by him in a philosophical supplement to War and the world”, history constantly results in its content the freedom of human will, which the mind tries in vain to formalize retrospectively, imposing the property of necessity on changes in life circumstances. Equalizing historical energy with freedom from predestination (from Providence), Tolstoy, it would seem, clearly sees how homo historicus and homo ritualis differ from each other. However, in its implicative depth, the historiosophical epilogue of "War and Peace" gives emancipatory acts the same character of "eternal return" that ritual actions have. All clear?
Here is another stylistic example from the same work: “History has already said everything about itself at its starting point. Paradoxically, it is total from the very beginning, before it has had time to go through all its vicissitudes. This position was formulated more clearly than others in 1923. Lev Karsavin, according to whose idea history is generated from itself by the same “contracted universal subject”, which proves its constant presence in empirically dissimilar time by self-improvement. History, subjected to cyclization, is evaluated not only optimistically, but also as a regressus ad infinitum, as if never conquering its slide along downlink". Much of this work is read as if it were written in foreign language. like this modern language philosophy (the article is under the heading "Philosophical Commentary")
My favorite philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Epshtein, in his article “Pause and Explosion” (Zvezda, 2016, No. 1), says this about history: “History is less and less subject to the laws of determinism that limit the pace social evolution, and more and more corresponds to the controlled-explosive type of thinking, when paradigm shifts occur not once in centuries, in the form of revolutions, but constantly, in the form of accelerating evolution. History is becoming more and more intellectualized, becoming a series of mental events that take place not so much in temporal succession as simultaneously, like an explosive expansion of civilization, an expansion of thought in all directions. There is a synchronous emergence of many new concepts, ideas, methods, disciplines that lead beyond the boundaries of history itself as a plot, narrative type of civilizational dynamics (one follows the other). .. now history becomes a dance of black swans - unpredictable events, anomalies, suddenly becoming sprouts of new systems. We are entering a turbulent field consisting of bifurcation points. ...". As they say, does not add clarity ...
I recently came across an article by Alla Latynina about Alexei Varlamov's novel " thought wolf". The article is called “Who controls history?” (N.Mir, 2014, No. 9). I was delighted - now, I think, I found it - after all, the title is almost the same as mine, only instead of "who" I have "what" ... Alas, this promising title turned out to be only a figure of speech.
How do you like modern sayings by history? No, I will look for the answer to my question from Lev Nikolaevich. So...
The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind. It seems impossible to directly catch and embrace in a word - to describe the life of not only mankind, but one people.
To questions about how individual people forced peoples to act according to their will and how the very will of these people was controlled, historians resolved these questions by believing in the direct participation of the deity in the affairs of mankind. New story rejects this position in theory, but follows them in practice. Instead of people endowed with divine power, guided by the divine will of a deity, the new history has either heroes gifted with extraordinary, inhuman abilities, or simply people of a wide variety of qualities, from monarchs to journalists. Modern history has come to recognize that peoples are led by individuals, and that there are known target towards which nations and mankind are moving. If instead of divine power another force has become, then it is necessary to explain what this power consists of. new strength, for in this force lies the whole interest in history.
What is the power that drives the nations? This question is as urgent as possible even now, when millions of people from distressed countries are fleeing to prosperous countries. Tolstoy meant the movement of the armed masses of the Napoleonic troops from west to east, and their reverse movement, pursued by Russian troops from east to west. We return to the Tolstoyan question. Some historians understand this power as the power inherent in heroes and lords. However, these historians often describe the same events in the opposite way. Other historians recognize this force as the result of a variety of directed many forces. They for the most part use the concept of power as a force that in itself produces events. According to them, a historical person is a product of his time, and his power is a product of his time, and his power is a product of various forces, and his power is a force that produces an event. The third historians - historians of culture, see this force in the so-called culture, in mental activity. It can be assumed that there is something in common between mental strength and the movement of peoples, but in no case should it be allowed, according to Tolstoy, that mental activity directed the actions of the people. The inevitability of the concept of power for explanation historical phenomena historians themselves prove.
This power cannot be that direct force of physical dominance strong being over weak, dominance, based on application or application threat physical strength like the power of Hercules; nor can it be based on the overcoming of moral force. History shows us that neither the Louis nor the Meternichs, who ruled over millions of people, had any special properties of spiritual strength, but, on the contrary, were for the most part morally weaker than each of the millions of people they ruled. Obviously, the source of this power must be outside the person, in those relations to the masses in which the person in power is located. Power is the totality of the wills of the masses, transferred by a pronounced or tacit consent rulers elected by the masses. However, there is a lot of contradiction here. If the force that moves peoples lies not in historical figures, but in the peoples themselves, then what is the significance of these historical figures? Historical persons, historians say, express the will of the masses: the activity of historical persons serves as a representative of the activity of the masses. But, in this case, the question is whether all the activities of historical persons serve as an expression of the will of the masses, or only a certain side of it? Faced with this difficulty, historians come up with the most obscure, intangible, and general concept over which it is possible to sum up largest number events, and they say that this concept is the goal of the movement of mankind. The most common, accepted by almost all historians general concepts- this is freedom, equality, enlightenment, progress, culture.
However, the activity of millions of people moving, burning houses, burning each other, etc. is never expressed in the description of the activities of a dozen people who do not burn houses, do not exterminate each other. It will be the history of monarchs and writers, and not the history of the life of peoples.
The life of peoples does not fit into the lives of several people, because the connection between these several people and peoples has not been found. The theory that this connection is based on the transfer of a set of wills historical figures, there is a hypothesis that is not confirmed by the experience of history. The theory of transferring the will of the masses to historical figures is only a paraphrase - only an expression in other words of the question: what is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? - Power is a set of wills transferred to one person. Under what conditions are the wills of the masses transferred to one person? - Under the conditions of expressing the will of all people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word whose meaning we do not understand.
We cannot accept power as the cause of events. Power, from the point of view of experience, is only the dependence that exists between the expression of the will of a person and the fulfillment of this will by other people. An order cannot in any case be the cause of an event; there is a certain definite dependence between the one and the other. To understand this dependence, it is necessary to take into account that the person who orders himself participates in the event. This attitude of the one who orders to those whom he orders is precisely what is called power.
Of all those formations into which people form to perform collective actions, one of the sharpest and most definite is the army. Every army is made up of lower military ranks - privates, who are always the most a large number of, then corporals (meaning times Patriotic War 1812), non-commissioned officers, whose number less than the first, from still higher officers, the number of which is even less, etc. to the highest military power, which is concentrated in one person.
The soldier himself directly stabs, cuts, burns, robs, and always receives orders for these actions from superiors, but he himself never orders. A non-commissioned officer performs the action itself less often than a soldier, but already orders. The officer even more rarely performs the action itself and even more often orders. The general already only orders the troops to go, indicating the goal, and almost never uses weapons. The commander can never take part in the action itself and only makes general orders about the movement of the masses. The same relation of persons to each other is indicated in any combination of people for a common activity - in agriculture, trade, production, etc. It is this relation of persons who order to those whom they order, and constitutes the essence of the concept called power. By their very nature, those who order take the least part in the event itself, their activity is exclusively aimed at ordering. The one who ordered more, as a result of his activity with words, obviously, could act less with his hands. Without this, the simplest question that arises when considering each event could not be explained: how do millions of people commit cumulative crimes, wars of murder, etc.?
So what is power? “Power is such an attitude famous person to other persons, in which this person takes part in the action the less, the more it expresses opinions, assumptions and justifications for the ongoing cumulative action.
What force produces the movement of peoples? “The movement of peoples produces not power, not mental activity, not even a combination of both, as historians thought, but the activity of all people taking part in an event and always uniting in such a way that those who take the greatest direct participation in an event, assume the least responsibility, and vice versa.
It must be admitted that this Tolstoyan definition does not add optimism to the understanding of historical events. What kind of activity of all people leads to certain events? Tolstoy, describing the movement of peoples, had in mind the movement of the armed masses, to which the concept of power and other types of activity that Tolstoy wrote about is naturally applicable. But what about the current great migration of peoples to prosperous countries? One can, of course, explain this by the eternal desire of people to a better life. But why is this happening on such a scale right now? After all, no one ordered anyone, did not show power, everything happens as if spontaneously, but is it spontaneous? Looking for an answer...
History refers to man, “man, who is the subject of history, directly says: I am free and therefore not subject to laws. The presence of the albeit unspoken question of human free will is felt at every step of history. That's where this vague feeling came from, where this concept popped up in my memory, which was the reason for writing my previous article “Is there free will?”! Tolstoy believes that all the contradictions, the obscurities of history, the false path along which this science goes, are based only on the insolubility of this issue. If the will of each person were free, that is, if each could do as he pleased, then the whole history is a series of incoherent accidents. If there is at least one law governing the actions of people, then there can be no free will, because then the will of people is subject to this law. In this contradiction, he argues, lies the question of free will, which has occupied since ancient times the best minds humanity.
Looking at a person as an object of observation, says Tolstoy, we find common law a necessity to which it is subject as well as everything that exists. Looking at it from ourselves as something we are conscious of, we feel free. True, something painfully familiar? Remember, we taught according to Diamat: “Freedom is a conscious necessity”? It always seemed to me that this is a statement of Engels, well, at worst, Hegel. I rummaged through the Internet, in one place I came across that, it seems, this is a statement by Spinoza. In modern concepts of free will, I have not come across the term “necessity”, the equivalent of this concept is, obviously, “determinism”.
Schopenhauer put it well (I take this from my previous article “Is there free will?”): Suppose a person is able to choose between two “I want” at his own discretion, but is a person able to choose what he wants? How is it done given choice? Depending on your priorities, you choose based on your principles, on your logic, on your intuition, on the headache from yesterday's adventures - and you feel realization in this own freedom. But where did your principles come from? Why is logic important to you? Why do you trust your intuition? Where do your emotions come from? And why headache inclines you towards one choice over another? Did you choose your character or did it somehow form by itself? It turns out that even if we have freedom of choice, it does not change anything - each choice is predetermined by the complex background of our life and, in each specific situation, completely unpredictable. We can convince ourselves and others that we clearly know why we do this or that act, but a few questions will be enough to clearly reveal that we do not know the reasons for our own choice, but only adjust the fait accompli to explanations that are beneficial to us.
Tolstoy introduces the concepts of "consciousness" and "mind" into his reasoning. This consciousness is a completely separate and independent source of self-knowledge from the mind. Through the mind man observes himself; but he knows himself only through consciousness.
Surprisingly, these seemingly abstract arguments find experimental confirmation in modern science! In 1980, Benjamin Libet, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, conducted an experiment that disproved the traditional notion that we believe that the simplest movement, such as raising a hand, occurs in the following sequence: first, the mind makes a decision, the brain transmits it to neurons , responsible for controlling the body, then the neurons transmit the command to the muscles. Libet, on the other hand, believed that consciousness and the brain act simultaneously. Or the brain acts first, and only then the decision reaches consciousness (obviously, in this case, the brain can be interpreted as the mind, as in Tolstoy).
The experiments of the Haynes group are also known. They prove that many seconds before it seems to us that we have made a decision, it has already been made by our brain. In the presentation of most means mass media the work of the Hynes group is presented as a complete exclusion of the possibility of free will. Where do our desires come from? Reasoning on this issue is contained in Sam Harris' book "Free Will That Doesn't Exist": "Each second, our brain processes a huge amount of information, of which we are aware of only a small fraction. Although we are constantly noticing changes occurring in us - in thoughts, moods, perceptions, behaviors, etc., we know nothing about the neurophysiological mechanisms behind them. In fact, we are very mediocre observers as far as our own life. Often, people around us understand our state and motives of behavior better than we ourselves, by facial expression and tone of voice. I usually start the day with a cup of coffee or tea, sometimes two cups. This morning I drank coffee (two cups). Why not tea? I have no idea. I wanted coffee more than tea, and I was completely free to get what I wanted. Was this choice conscious? No. The choice was made for me by mechanisms in the brain, and in such a way that I, the subject, supposedly aware of my thoughts and actions, could neither control this choice nor influence it. Could I "change my mind" and make tea before the coffee drinker in me realizes which way the wind is blowing? Yes, but that would also be an unconscious impulse. Why didn't he show up this morning? Why might it occur in the future? I don't know". (I apologize to the reader, but I also took this piece from my previous work). But let's go back to Tolstoy...
All the strivings of people, all the impulses of people towards life, are the essence of the striving to increase freedom. Wealth-poverty, fame-unknown, power-subordination, strength - weakness, health-disease, education-ignorance, work-leisure, satiety-hunger, virtue-vice are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom. How should it be considered past life peoples and mankind - as a product of free will or non-free activity of people? Here is the question of history.
Whatever idea we consider of the activity of many people or one person, we understand it only as the product of partly the freedom of man, partly the laws of necessity. The ratio of freedom to necessity decreases and increases, according to the point of view from which the act is considered; but this ratio always remains inversely proportional.
The further back we look at events, the less they seem arbitrary to us. The further back in history we carry the object of observation, the more doubtful becomes the freedom of the people who produced the events, and the more obvious the law of necessity. Doesn't it seem to you, reader, that the theory of relativity operates here, according to which the result depends on the position of the observer?
If we consider such a position of a person in which his connection with the external world is most known, the period of time of judgment from the time of the commission of an act is the largest and the reasons for the act are the most accessible, then we get an idea of ​​the greatest necessity and the least freedom. If we consider a person in the least dependence on external conditions, if his action is performed at the next moment to the present, and the reasons for his action are inaccessible to us, then we will get an idea of ​​the least necessity and greatest freedom. We can never imagine either complete freedom or complete necessity.
“Reason expresses the laws of necessity. Consciousness expresses the essence of freedom... Freedom is content, necessity is form... Only when they are combined, a clear idea of ​​human life is obtained.... Everything that we know about people's life is only a certain relation of freedom to necessity, that is, consciousness to the laws of reason. In my opinion, these chopped Tolstoyan definitions can only be understood on an intuitive level...
In history, what we know we call the laws of necessity; what is unknown is freedom. Freedom for history is only the expression of an unknown remnant of what we know about the laws of human life.
According to Tolstoy, for history, the recognition of the freedom of people as a force that can influence historical events, that is, not subject to laws, is the same as for astronomy the recognition of the free force of the movement of heavenly forces.
“For history, there are lines of movement of human wills, one end of which is hidden in the unknown, and at the other end of which the consciousness of freedom of people in the present moves in space, in time, and depending on causes. The more this field of movement expands before our eyes, the more obvious are the laws of this movement. To catch and define these laws is the task of the people of history. So, I think, now Tolstoy will tell about these laws. True, it is embarrassing that there is very little left until the end of the epilogue - only a few pages, I'm worried - will I have time? Looking forward to the end of the story, where is it?
But hopes are melting with the approach of the last lines. We read further: “The search for these laws has long been begun, and those new methods of thinking that history must learn for itself are developed simultaneously with self-destruction, to which all the crushing and crushing of the causes of phenomena, goes old story". Followed by important conclusion Tolstoy about the unknowability of the primary causes of historical phenomena: “And if history has as its subject the study of the movement of peoples and mankind, and not a description of episodes from the life of people, then it must, having removed the concept of causes, look for laws ...”
For history, the difficulty of recognizing the subordination of personality to the laws of space, time, and causes is to renounce the immediate sense of independence of one's personality. “True, we do not feel our dependence, but, having allowed our freedom, we come to nonsense; having admitted our dependence on the external world, time and causes, we come to laws... It is necessary to renounce conscious freedom and recognize dependence that we do not feel.” This is the last line of the epilogue. Not wait. We have come to the first lines of the epilogue, which I have taken as an epigraph. Whether these laws are now open or not is already beyond the scope of my analysis of a philosophical treatise. brilliant writer so I won't go any further. I provide it to others.

Views of L. N. Tolstoy
On the story in the novel "War and Peace"

“I tried to write the history of the people,” said L. N. Tolstoy about his novel “ War and Peace". And this is not just a phrase: the great Russian writer really depicted in the work not so much individual heroes how much the whole nation as a whole. "People's thought" defines in the novel and philosophical Tolstoy's views, and the image of historical events, specific historical figures, and the moral assessment of the actions of the heroes.

What is the power that drives the nations? Who is the creator of history - the individual or the people? The writer asks such questions at the beginning of the novel and tries to answer them with the whole course of the story.

According to Tolstoy, the historical path of the country is determined not by the will of a historical figure, not by his decisions and actions, but by the totality of the aspirations and desires of all the people who make up the people. “A person consciously lives for himself, but serves as an unconscious tool” to achieve historical goals, writes Tolstoy. He convincingly proves that one person, even the most brilliant, cannot control millions, this is only the appearance of power, but it is these millions that govern the country and determine historical process, that is, it is the people who make history. And a brilliant personality is able to guess, feel the desire of the people and ascend to the people's "wave". Tolstoy says: "Will historical hero not only does not direct the actions of the masses, but she herself is constantly led. Therefore, the attention of the writer is attracted primarily by the life of the people: peasants, soldiers, officers - those who form the basis of it.

Leo Tolstoy on the pages of the novel shows that the historical process does not depend on whim or bad mood one man. War 1812 was inevitable and did not depend on the will of Napoleon, but was determined by the whole course of history, so Napoleon, according to the writer, could not help but cross the Neman, and the defeat of the French army on the Borodino field was also inevitable, because there Napoleonic France was “the hand of the strongest enemy in spirit” was laid, that is, the Russian army. It can be said that the will of the commander does not affect the outcome of the battle, because not a single commander can lead tens and hundreds of thousands of people, but it is the soldiers themselves (that is, the people) who decide the fate of the battle. “The fate of the battle is not decided by the orders of the commander-in-chief, not by the place on which the troops stand, not by the number of guns and killed people, but by that elusive force called the spirit of the army,” writes Tolstoy. Therefore, Napoleon did not lose battle of Borodino or Kutuzov won it, but the Russian people won in this battle, because the "spirit" of the Russian army was immeasurably higher than that of the French.

This historical pattern Kutuzov felt ingeniously. Leo Tolstoy contrasts on the pages of the novel two commanders (Kutuzov and Napoleon) and two battles - Borodino and Auster-Litskoe.

Russian soldiers did not want to fight in Austria for no reason. Kutuzov understood this very well, and therefore he was not sure of the victory of the allied Russian-Austrian army over the French, despite the numerical superiority and more advantageous position. We see how Kutuzov delayed the start of the battle, trying to save the lives of Russian soldiers in this senseless massacre. Conversely, Kutuzov was notified in advance
Wren in the victory at Borodino, because he knew that every soldier, every Russian officer was literally burning with the desire to fight the French. Andrei Bolkonsky spoke about this desire to fight to his friend Pierre Bezukhov on the eve of the battle: “The French have ruined my house and are going to ruin Moscow, insulted and insult me ​​every second. They are my enemies, they are all criminals, according to my concepts. And Timokhin and the whole army think the same way. They must be executed." Therefore, Bolkonsky himself, and Kutuzov, and all Russian people were sure of victory. We see that during the battle Kutuzov is inactive, he almost does not lead the army. But the brilliant commander knows that the soldiers themselves determine the course of the battle, and Kutuzov is confident in them. Napoleon, on the contrary, is very active: he is constantly interested in the course of the battle, gives orders...But all his activity leads to nothing, because > because he does not determine the outcome of the battle, and this outcome is already historically predetermined.

Tolstoy writes that Kutuzov was able to "guess so correctly the meaning folk sense events”, that is, “guess” the whole pattern of historical events. And the source of this brilliant insight was the "popular feeling" that he carried in his soul great commander. It was the understanding of the popular nature of historical processes that allowed Kutuzov, according to Tolstoy, to win not only the Battle of Borodino, but the entire military campaign and fulfill his mission - to save Russia from the Napoleonic invasion. And how fussy, helpless, even comical Napoleon looks against his background! There is nothing great and ingenious in it, because "there is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth."

Thus we see that Leo Tolstoy had his own A look at history, and this view differs in many respects from modern understanding historical process, but this does not make it less interesting for us.

Throughout the novel we see Tolstoy's distaste for war. Tolstoy hated murders - it makes no difference in the name of what these murders are committed. There is no poeticization of the feat of a heroic personality in the novel. The only exception is the episode of the Battle of Shengraben and the feat of Tushin. Describing the war of 1812, Tolstoy poeticizes the collective feat of the people. Studying the materials of the war of 1812, Tolstoy came to the conclusion that no matter how disgusting the war with its blood, death of people, dirt, lies, sometimes the people are forced to wage this war, which may not touch a fly, but if a wolf attacks it, defending himself, he kills this wolf. But when he kills, he does not feel pleasure from this and does not consider that he has done something worthy of enthusiastic chanting. Tolstoy reveals the patriotism of the Russian people, who did not want to fight according to the rules with the beast - the French invasion.

Tolstoy speaks with contempt of the Germans, in whom the instinct for self-preservation of the individual turned out to be stronger than the instinct for the preservation of the nation, that is stronger than patriotism and proudly speaks of the Russian people, for whom the preservation of their "I" was less important than the salvation of the fatherland. Negative types in the novel are those heroes who are frankly indifferent to the fate of their homeland (visitors to the salon of Helen Kuragina), and those who cover up this indifference with a beautiful patriotic phrase (almost all the nobility, with the exception of a small part of it - people like, Pierre, Rostovs), as well as those for whom war is a pleasure (Dolokhov, Napoleon).

The closest to Tolstoy are those Russian people who, realizing that war is a dirty, cruel, but in some cases necessary, work without any pathos on the great work of saving the motherland and do not experience any pleasure in killing enemies. This is, Bolkonsky, Denisov and many others episodic heroes. With special love, Tolstoy paints scenes of a truce and scenes where the Russian people show pity for defeated enemy, caring for the captured French (Kutuzov's call to the army at the end of the war - to pity the frostbitten unfortunate people), or where the French show humanity towards the Russians (Pierre being interrogated by Davout). This circumstance is connected with the main idea of ​​the novel - the idea of ​​the unity of people. Peace (absence of war) unites people into a single world (one common family), war divides people. So in the novel the idea is patriotic with the idea of ​​peace, the idea of ​​the negation of war.

Even though the explosion spiritual development Tolstoy occurred after the 70s, in its infancy, many of his later views and moods can be found in works written before the turning point, in particular in "". This novel was published 10 years before the turning point, and all of it, especially as regards political views Tolstoy is a phenomenon of a moment of transition for a writer and thinker. It contains the remnants of Tolstoy's old views (for example, on the war), and the germs of new ones, which will later become decisive in this philosophical system which will be called "tolstoy". Tolstoy's views changed even during his work on the novel, which was expressed, in particular, in a sharp contradiction in the image of Karataev, which was absent in the first versions of the novel and introduced only on final stages work, patriotic ideas and moods of the novel. But at the same time, this image was caused not by the whim of Tolstoy, but by the entire development of the moral and ethical problems of the novel.

With his novel, Tolstoy wanted to say something very important to people. He dreamed of using the power of his genius to spread his views, in particular his views on history, "on the degree of freedom and dependence of man on history", he wanted his views to become universal.

How does Tolstoy characterize the war of 1812? War is a crime. Tolstoy does not divide combatants into attackers and defenders. “Millions of people have committed against each other such an innumerable number of atrocities ... that in whole centuries the annals of all the judgments of the world will not collect and which, during this period of time, the people who committed them did not look at as crimes.”

And what, according to Tolstoy, is the reason for this event? Tolstoy cites various considerations of historians. But he does not agree with any of these considerations. “Any single reason or a whole series of reasons seems to us ... equally false in its insignificance in comparison with the enormity of the event ...”. Huge terrible phenomenon- war, must be generated by the same "huge" cause. Tolstoy does not undertake to find this reason. He says that "the more we try to rationally explain these phenomena in nature, the more unreasonable, incomprehensible they become for us." But if a person cannot know the laws of history, then he cannot influence them. He is a powerless grain of sand in the historical stream. But within what limits is a person still free? “There are two aspects of life in every person: personal life, which is the freer, the more abstract its interests, and spontaneous, swarm life, where a person inevitably fulfills the laws prescribed for him.” This is a clear expression of those thoughts in the name of which the novel was created: a person is free in every this moment act as he pleases, but "a perfect deed is irrevocable, and its action, coinciding in time with millions of actions of other people, acquires historical significance."

A person is not able to change the course of swarm life. This life is spontaneous, and therefore not amenable to conscious influence. A person is free only in his personal life. The more he is connected with history, the less he is free. "The king is the slave of history." A slave cannot command a master, a king cannot influence history. “In historical events, so-called people are labels that give a name to an event, which, like labels, has the least connection with the event itself.” Such are the philosophical arguments of Tolstoy.

Napoleon himself sincerely did not want war, but he is a slave of history - he gave more and more new orders, accelerating the start of the war. The sincere liar Napoleon is confident in his right to plunder and is sure that the stolen valuables are his rightful property. Enthusiastic adoration surrounded Napoleon. He is accompanied by "enthusiastic cries", before him jump "fading with happiness, enthusiastic ... huntsmen", he puts a telescope on the back of the "happy page that has run up". One reigns here general mood. The French army is also some kind of closed "world"; the people of this world have their own common desires, common joys, but this is a “false common”, it is based on lies, pretense, predatory aspirations, on the misfortunes of something else in common. Participation in this common pushes to stupid actions, turns human society into the herd. Driven by a single thirst for enrichment, a thirst for robbery, having lost their inner freedom, the soldiers and officers of the French army sincerely believe that Napoleon is leading them to happiness. And he, to an even greater extent a slave of history than they, imagined himself to be God, because “for him, the conviction was not new that his presence at all ends of the world ... equally strikes and plunges people into the madness of self-forgetfulness.” People tend to create idols, and idols easily forget that they did not create history, but history created them.

Just as it is incomprehensible why Napoleon gave the order to attack Russia, so are Alexander's actions incomprehensible. Everyone was waiting for the war, "but nothing was ready" for it. “There was no common leader over all the armies. Tolstoy, as a former artilleryman, knows that without a "common leader" the army finds itself in a difficult situation. He forgets the skeptical attitude of the philosopher to the possibility of one person to influence the course of events. He condemns the inaction of Alexander and his courtiers. All their aspirations "were aimed only at ... having a good time, forgetting about the upcoming war."

Views of L. N. Tolstoy

On the story in the novel "War and Peace" “I tried to write the history of the people,” said L. N. Tolstoy about his novel “ War and Peace". And this is not just a phrase: the great Russian writer really depicted in the work not so much individual heroes as the whole people as a whole. "People's thought" defines in the novel and philosophical Tolstoy's views, and the image of historical events, specific historical figures, and the moral assessment of the actions of the heroes. What is the power that drives the nations? Who is the creator of history - the individual or the people? The writer asks such questions at the beginning of the novel and tries to answer them with the whole course of the story. According to Tolstoy, the historical path of the country is determined not by the will of a historical figure, not by his decisions and actions, but by the totality of the aspirations and desires of all the people who make up the people. “A person consciously lives for himself, but serves as an unconscious tool” to achieve historical goals, writes Tolstoy. He convincingly proves that one person, even the most brilliant, cannot control millions, this is only the appearance of power, but it is these millions that govern the country and determine the historical process, that is, it is the people who make history. And a brilliant personality is able to guess, feel the desire of the people and ascend to the people's "wave". Tolstoy claims: "The will of the historical hero not only does not guide the actions of the masses, but is itself constantly guided." Therefore The writer's attention is attracted primarily by the life of the people: peasants, soldiers, officers - those who form the basis of it. Leo Tolstoy on the pages of the novel shows that the historical process does not depend on the whim or bad mood of one person. War 1812 was inevitable and did not depend on the will of Napoleon, but was determined by the whole course of history, so Napoleon, according to the writer, could not help but cross the Neman, and the defeat of the French army on the Borodino field was also inevitable, because there Napoleonic France was “the hand of the strongest enemy in spirit” was laid, that is, the Russian army. It can be said that the will of the commander does not affect the outcome of the battle, because not a single commander can lead tens and hundreds of thousands of people, but it is the soldiers themselves (that is, the people) who decide the fate of the battle. “The fate of the battle is not decided by the orders of the commander-in-chief, not by the place on which the troops stand, not by the number of guns and killed people, but by that elusive force called the spirit of the army,” writes Tolstoy. Therefore, Napoleon did not lose the Battle of Borodino or Kutuzov won it, but the Russian people won this battle, because the "spirit" of the Russian army was immeasurably higher than that of the French.

A look at war and peace from a position popular interests(based on the novel by L.N. Tolstoy "War and Peace")

In 1869, L. N. Tolstoy wrote one of the brilliant works of world literature - the epic novel War and Peace. According to I. S. Turgenev, "nothing better has ever been written by anyone."

“For a work to be good, one must love the main, basic idea in it. In War and Peace, I loved the people’s thought, as a result of the war of 1812,” said Leo Tolstoy.

Main character novel - people. The people thrown into the unnecessary and incomprehensible war of 1805, the people who rose in 1812 to defend their homeland and defeated in the war of liberation a huge enemy army led by an invincible commander until then.

The novel contains more than a hundred crowd scenes, more than two hundred named people from the people act in it, although the meaning of the image of the people is determined not by the number of crowd scenes, but by the people's idea. Major events novels are evaluated by Tolstoy with folk point vision. The writer expresses the people's assessment of the war of 1805 in the words of Prince Andrei: "Why did we lose the battle near Austerlitz? .. There was no need for us to fight there: we wanted to leave the battlefield as soon as possible."

The War of 1812 was not like other wars. "Since the fire of Smolensk, a war has begun that does not fit any previous legends," wrote Tolstoy.

The Patriotic War of 1812 for Russia was a just war of national liberation. The Napoleonic hordes entered the borders of Russia and headed for its center - Moscow. All the people came out to fight the invaders. Ordinary Russian people - the peasants Karp and Vlas, the elder Vasilisa, the merchant Ferapontov, the deacon and many others - hostilely meet the Napoleonic army, put up resistance to it. The feeling of love for the Motherland embraced all segments of the population.

Tolstoy says that "for the Russian people there could be no question whether it would be good or bad under the control of the French." The Rostovs are leaving Moscow, having handed over carts to the wounded and leaving their house to the mercy of fate; Princess Marya Bolkonskaya leaves her native Bogucharovo nest. Disguised in a simple dress, Count Pierre Bezukhov is armed and stays in Moscow, intending to kill Napoleon.

But disgusting are individual representatives of the bureaucratic-aristocratic society, who, in the days of the national disaster, acted for selfish, selfish purposes. The enemy was already in Moscow, but Petersburg court life went on as before: "There were the same exits, balls, the same french theater, the same interests of service and intrigue". The patriotism of the Moscow aristocrats consisted in the fact that instead of French dishes they ate Russian cabbage soup, and a fine was imposed for French words.

Tolstoy angrily denounces the Moscow governor-general and commander-in-chief of the Moscow garrison, Count Rostopchin, who, due to his arrogance and cowardice, was unable to organize replacements for the heroically fighting army of Kutuzov.

The writer speaks with indignation about careerists - foreign generals like Wolzogen. They gave all of Europe to Napoleon and "came to teach us - glorious teachers!" Among staff officers, Tolstoy singles out a group of people who want only one thing: "... the greatest benefits and pleasures for themselves ... The drone population of the army." These people include Nesvitsky, Drubetskoy, Berg, Zherkov and others.

Tolstoy had great sympathy for the people, who played the main and decisive role in the war against the French conquerors.

The patriotic feelings that gripped the Russians gave rise to the mass heroism of the defenders of the Motherland. Talking about the battles near Smolensk, Andrei Bolkonsky rightly noted that Russian soldiers "fought there for the first time for the Russian land", that the troops had such a spirit that he (Bolkonsky) had never seen, that Russian soldiers "repulsed the French for two days in a row and that this success has multiplied our strength."

Even more fully, the "folk thought" is felt in those chapters of the novel where characters are depicted who are close to the people or strive to understand them: Tushin and Timokhin, Natasha and Princess Marya, Pierre and Prince Andrei - all those who can be called "Russian soul".

Tolstoy portrays Kutuzov as a person who embodied the spirit of the people.

Kutuzov is a truly popular commander. Thus, expressing the needs, thoughts and feelings of the soldiers, he speaks during the review near Braunau and during the Battle of Austerlitz, and especially during the Patriotic War of 1812. “Kutuzov,” writes Tolstoy, “with his whole Russian being knew and felt what every Russian soldier felt.” Kutuzov for Russia - his own, native person. During the war of 1812, all his efforts were directed towards one goal - the cleansing of his native land from the invaders. "It is difficult to imagine a goal more worthy and more in line with the will of the whole people," says the writer. On behalf of the people, Kutuzov rejects Lauriston's proposal for a truce. He understands and repeatedly says that the Battle of Borodino is a victory; understanding like no one folk character war of 1812, he supports the plan proposed by Denisov for the deployment of partisan operations.

Kutuzov - carrier folk wisdom, an exponent of popular feelings. He is distinguished by "an extraordinary power of penetration into the meaning of occurring phenomena, and its source lies in the popular feeling, which he carried in himself in all its purity and strength." Only the recognition of this feeling in him made the people elect him, against the will of the tsar, as commander-in-chief of the Russian army. And only this feeling put him on that height from which he directed all his forces not to kill and exterminate people, but to save and pity them.

Both soldiers and officers - they all fight not for the St. George Crosses, but for the Fatherland. The defenders of the battery of General Raevsky shake with their moral stamina. Tolstoy shows the extraordinary stamina and courage of the soldiers and the better part of the officers. He writes that not only Napoleon and his generals, but all the soldiers of the French army experienced in the battle of Borodino "a feeling of horror before the enemy, who, having lost half of the army, stood just as menacingly at the end as at the beginning of the battle."

With great knowledge of the matter, Tolstoy describes the glorious actions of the Russian partisans and their commanders - Denisov and Dolokhov. In the center of the story about the guerrilla war are the images of Tikhon Shcherbaty, who embodies the best national traits Russian people, and Platon Karataev, personifying "everything Russian, folk, round, kind." Tolstoy writes: "... it is good for the people who, in a moment of trial ... with simplicity and ease, pick up the first club that comes across and nail it until the feelings of insult and revenge in their souls are replaced by contempt and pity."

The culminating moment of the Patriotic War was the Battle of Borodino. If, when describing the battles that took place on foreign territory (Austerlitz, Shengraben), the author focused on some heroes, then on the Borodino field he draws the mass heroism of the people and does not single out individual characters.

The courageous resistance of the Russian troops, their invincibility surprise and amaze Napoleon, who has not yet known defeat. The self-confident emperor at first could not understand what was happening on the battlefield, because instead of the expected news of the flight of the enemy, the previously slender columns French troops they were returning now in disorganized, frightened crowds. Napoleon stumbled upon a mass of dead and wounded soldiers and was horrified.

Discussing the results and significance of the Battle of Borodino, Tolstoy says that the Russians won a moral victory over Napoleon's troops. The moral strength of the French attacking army was exhausted. "Not that victory, which is determined by the picked up pieces of matter on sticks, called banners, and the space on which the troops stood and are standing, but a moral victory, one that convinces the enemy of the moral superiority of his enemy. And in his impotence, was won Russians near Borodino.

Moral qualities armies, or the spirit of the troops, certainly influence the outcome of hostilities, especially since on the part of the French the war was of an aggressive nature, on the part of the Russian people the war was national liberation.

The people achieved their goal: motherland was cleared of foreign invaders.

Reading the novel, we are convinced that the writer judges the great events of the past, war and peace from the standpoint of popular interests. And this is the “folk idea” that Tolstoy loved in his immortal epic, and which illuminated his brilliant creation with an unfading light.