George R. Clay
Tolstoy’s Phoenix: From Method to Meaning in “War and Peace “
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Pp. 142. $59.95 $17.95
Reviewed by Edward Wasiolek

The “grandeur” of War and Peace, both in size and quality, is such that critics have had a hard time finding the novel’s “center” or unity. Henry James called War and Peace a novel “which can only mislead and betray others”; and Percy Lubbock, his disciple, asserted that War and Peace was structurally flawed because it had no unity. Lubbock was coming from a constricted conception of structure. A novel was successful if it could maintain a single and consistent point of view. War and Peace has many centers and many points of view, and is still a magnificent novel. Clay’s discussion of this vexed question constitutes the main body of his work. According to him, all of the main characters are plagued by a set of opposites, and to the extent they develop, they come to see that such opposites as right and wrong, good and evil, joy and sorrow, and life and death are indivisible. By way of example he says: “Tolstoy’s theme throughout Natasha’s and Pierre’s development has been the indivisibility of opposites: for Natasha, of joy and sorrow; for Pierre, good and evil” (63). Or Nicholas has a “gradual growth toward wisdom (that is, toward realizing the indivisibility of right and wrong)” (63), Princess Mary “realizes that love coexists with hate” (73), Andrew dies without understanding “that life and death are symbiotic” (87) and that life is nourished and not opposed to death. They are reborn-except Andrew-when they come to realize that seeming contradictions are really connections. All of this is true, but we do not need Tolstoy’s immense talent and insight to lead us to the fact that life and death, right and wrong, and good and evil are interconnected. Such sets of opposites have plagued readings of Tolstoy (country and city, peasant and nobleman) and have told us little about the specifics of the novel.

Yet Clay is brilliant when he turns to such specificities, as he amply demonstrates in the first two chapters of the study. There he shows how masterfully Tolstoy uses the smallest details to move the reader to collaboration with the author. By single words or phrases Tolstoy lifts statements and situations from the concrete context in which they occur to universal contexts. Man, in some sense, is always everyone for Tolstoy, while remaining individual and specific. Here is an example of Clay’s analysis: “Natasha, who sat opposite, was looking at Boris as girls of thirteen look at the boy they are in love with and have just kissed for the first time” (8). Clay shows that Tolstoy inserts phrases that detach the specific act, saying, or gesture from the immediate context and give it a more general and sometimes universal context. He perceives, too, that objects-shoes, dresses, furniture-are never isolated in some historical moment; they are never just “background,” or information about the period. Objects for Tolstoy function always in a human context. They are not just shoes, but shoes that someone likes, envies, disapproves of. They are part of the individual’s personality and drama and may signify defiance, independence, or merely habit. I am reminded of an example that Clay does not cite in Natasha’s preparation for the Tsar’s ball. At the last moment before the Rostovs go off to the ball, Natasha’s skirt is discovered to be too long. Several maids flutter about the skirt, pins in their mouths, working to the accompaniment of exclamations about being late. The hem is not just a hem, but a hem that tells us something about Natasha, the Rostovs, and the moment.

Clay is at his best with such structural and semantic analyses, and one would wish for more. But more might be hazardous, because, apparently, Clay does not know Russian, and the kind of close analysis of language and structure that he does so well here depends on language. He can never be sure that the phrase or word he picks out is the same in Russian and in English. I note too that the critical tradition that he relies on-James, Lubbock, Berlin, Steiner, Christian-rich as it is, necessarily excludes the history of criticism in Russia, the richest tradition of all. In sum, George Clay has a keen critical eye and writes with clarity and grace, but he wastes his sensitive reading on the tired debate about unity and contradictions, and he is necessarily limited in his structural analyses by working with a translated text.