The man and the myth

Tolstoy’s legend is not what it was; but sometimes the world needs idealised versions of ordinary men, argues Philip Hensher

The truism that Tolstoy was the greatest of novelists hasn’t been seriously questioned in the last century. The nearest competition comes from Proust and Thomas Mann, I suppose. But when you compare two similar moments in the writings of Tolstoy and one of these other supreme novelists, a difference emerges. Both War and Peace and In Search of Lost Time culminate in a glimpse of the next generation. In Proust, the two irreconcilable worlds of the novel, the Guermantes ‘walk’ and the ‘walk by Swann’s place’ meet surprisingly, at the final party, the bal de têtes, as the daughter of Gilberte and Robert de Saint-Loup emerges from the crowd. She is exquisite, like a museum object — ‘le temps l’avait petrié comme un chef-d’oeuvre’, Proust says. Impossible to imagine her thinking or even saying anything memorable.

Proust has taken this from the marvellous conclusion of War and Peace, where Nicholas Bolkonsky’s son is introduced for the first time; it is clear that his hero-worship of his dead father is going to shape the actions of his future life. The boy Bolkonsky is clearly going to be a man of action. Tolstoy said, very truly, that he was barely a novelist by the standards of his day, since when a character died, he thought first of the reactions of all those around, and for him a marriage was the beginning of the story. At the end of the action of War and Peace we are left with a turmoil of dreams, plans and ambitions in Nicholas Bolkonsky’s bedroom:

‘But some day I shall have finished learning, and then I will do something . . . Everyone shall know me, love me, and be delighted with me.’