Nobility versus Bureaucracy in War and Peace
Anne
Hruska
War and Peace was read by most of Tolstoj's
contemporaries as an apologia for the aristocracy; they complained of
the absence of portraits of razno&chachek;incy, peasant poverty, and the
abuses of serfdom. And yet, as both Viktor &Shachek;klovskij and
Kathryn Feuer have argued, Tolstoj was in fact responding, albeit in
veiled form, to the burning issues of his day. &Shachek;klovskij
argues that both Napoleon and Speranskij are meant to be read as
razno&chachek;incy; Feuer claims that one of the novel's concerns is
in describing a battle between a service-oriented, bureaucratic
aristocracy and the morally superior landed gentry.
This split between the false,
bureaucratic nobility
and the true,
landed gentry had particular
significance during the 1860s, when Tolstoj was writing War and
Peace. Both during and after the emancipation of the serfs,
thinkers of various political stripes voiced concern that, having lost
its most important privilege, the gentry would come to be swallowed by
a faceless bureaucracy. Such ideas hailed back to old resentments
arising from Peter the Great's Table of Ranks, which allowed commoners
to acheive noble status through civil service—an innovation
which old-fashioned noblemen felt was causing their ranks to be
infiltrated by servile parvenus.
In his thinking on the gentry in War and Peace,
Tolstoj shows the influence of Montesquieu, who inspired many Russian
conservative social thinkers, including, for example, Nikolaj
Karamzin, who also figures obliquely in Tolstoj's novel. Tolstoj's
hero Prince Andrej is a particular admirer of the French thinker, and,
in a discussion with Speranskij, quotes Montesquieu's assertion that
the monarchy is upheld by the honor of the nobility. If the principle
of honor, as personified by the nobleman, is degraded, then the system
is a despotic one, under which, Montesquieu says, every man is
a slave.
This concern with honor as one of the cornerstones of
nobility is fundamental to Tolstoj's thinking on class in War
and Peace. Noblemen who betray their background by being
servile are marked as false noblemen, and connected through images and
linkings with the parvenus Napoleon and Speranskij. Prince Andrej
tries to admire both Montesquieu and Speranskij simultaneously—a
contradiction which takes its toll. Throughout the novel, Prince
Andrej suffers from the conflict between his noble need for true
honor, and his Napoleonesque obsession with outward appearances.
The false nobleman is always recognizable by his manners. Those who
behave with excessive social aplomb, or comme il faut, as Tolstoj
often called it, mark themselves as servile and inferior. Speranskij
and Napoleon both are models of social propriety, seeming incapable of
committing a faux pas. The Kuragin family, especially
Hélène, is connected to Napoleon through images and
words—Hélène, for example, cites Napoleon as a
precedent when she seeks to divorce her husband in order to marry
another. Boris, likewise, is connected to Speranskij through the
screened gaze
that is mentioned repeatedly in
connection with both men. While Tolstoj relies in some measure on the
literary stereotype of the razno&chachek;inec as awkward and unlovable
outsider in his descriptions of Napoleon and Speranskij, he has made
one very significant change. While still exiles from human closeness,
the parvenus of War and Peace are the opposite of
socially awkward. Instead, social awkwardness belongs to the genuine
aristocrats. In contrast to Hélène and Anatole, Pierre
and Princess Marija reveal their moral superiority through their
clumsy manners. The Rostov family is continually transgressing social
rules; Nata&shachek;a in particular, by violating what Alexander
&Zhachek;olkovsky has called the laws of the ball,
comes to embody a sense of rightness that is higher than social
propriety.