Those familiar with War and Peace will know Tolstoy’s central philosophical argument: that ‘great men’ and ‘great events’ don’t really make any difference, because things will play out in more or less the same way regardless.
Take the Battle of Borodino. Tolstoy casts the veteran Russian commander Kutuzov as one of the novel’s voices of wisdom. He doesn’t want to fight a battle, he wants to retreat into the interior and wait for the inevitable disintegration of Napoleon’s army. But he is forced to fight one by the Tsar and his coterie of boneheaded hawks. There are 75,000 casualties. This has no impact whatsoever on the outcome of the war: the Russian army withdraws, Moscow burns, the French retreat, and ‘General Winter’ and the Cossacks do the rest.
Shakespeare, incidentally, gives expression to much the same idea when he has Macbeth say, ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Both the tragedies and the history plays are suffused with this sense of human futility in the grip of a hopeless inevitability.
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