catapult magazine

I’m really glad I took the time to plod through this classic by Tolstoy. The author really starts kicking it into high gear around page 837 or so.

I know it’s a long shot that anyone else is reading this right now too, but I’d love to talk about it here. I’ll just put the hook out there for anyone to bite. It’s an excellent book to read at this or any other time in our history.

harumph, i read the historical theories in the first half of the book, and didn’t say i skipped them, and then i skimmed after i got the point; there is a difference. :P

grant, if you don’t find historians boring why do you keep railing on about how disconnected you think they are from real life? also, i am not suggesting one should clean up history or attempt to stuff it into a theory, which i think should be obvious from what i have said all along. what i am saying is that there is a huge difference between attempting to handle the messiness of history, i.e. life, and what tolstoy does. i never said that the historian has to follow a preconcieved framework, but i have said that when the historian makes an argument and it must be supported in an accessible manner so someone cannot turn around and accuse one of dreaming it all up, i.e conjecture. tolstoy’s ‘historical’ work for all i know is a product of his imagination and it largly was, so to assert the veracity of a historical theory based on conversations, human beliefs which he dreamed up and real events that only in a very loose sense are reflected in the story seems to miss the purpose of writing about history.

as far as your point about the lack of bibliography, to compare tolstoy to paul given their widely varying cultures doesn’t work. paul rightly could expect the people that he wrote to, to recognize the sources because the OT was so prevalent in jewish culture. moreover, he says over and over he believed that x was coming again and soon, so he wasn’t writing these books with the idea in mind that generations of xns would read them. now it is necessary for commentators to go back and develop theories on what paul could possible have meant, what he was refering to, and what meaning we can draw from it today. which in turn resulted in a lot of confusion, schisms, and volumes of books that otherwise there would be no need for if the author to begin with clearly specifies meaning and source.

so when it comes to tolstoy, it is simply inexcusable for him to offer up a book in a culture where bibliographic notations are commonly expected of authors. him comes in and claims some kind of scholarly credibility and expects the rest of us poor schlumps that didn’t live in russia durring the 19thc to understand all of the details; that strikes me as sloppy.

I don’t care to hold onto the Paul-Tolstoy connection for this discussion, but my main point remains. Tolstoy expects his Russian audience (he even says “we” when he talks about the Russian army!) to know that they’re reading a work of fiction taken from actual events, letters and people.

And my beef, again, is not with history books or historians. I am mostly concerned that you do not seem to acknowledge the value of War and Peace’s contribution to understanding the events that took place during the War of 1812. I disagree with the idea that objective science has the only claim to truth when it comes to describing historical events. My basis for thinking history has been overtaken by science is by looking at the history of history, from Herodotus to the Roman use of history as a way of praising the current leader and erasing the memory of the defeated ones, to the invention of history as an objective science during Modernism. Now, of course, history is influenced by postmodern thinking, which is a whole other animal. But Tolstoy’s criticism of modernistic historical study is valid. And War and Peace should be seen as a foreshadowing of the recontextualization focus we see today in books, movies, television etc.

your, uh, ‘concern’ that i, uh, am not acknowledging the value of wandp’s contribution to understanding the War of 1812 and your later argument that tolstoy’s criticism of modern historcial methods are two very different things but you seem to think the two are the same. i have never taken aim at the idea that wandp is an excellent commentary on tolstoy’s own period, concerns, and culture. in fact, i would agree that tolstoy’s criticism of the historiography of his period is appropriate. my point all along, if not so simply stated before, has been that wandp has more to do with tolstoy than it does with the war of 1812.

given the degree of ideas and concerns that were paticular to tolstoy’s culture, namely the late 19th c. -early 20th c., in wandp, i don’t know that it is possible to discern what in wandp is particular to the culture of the early 19th c and what is particular to tolstoy’s period. the two cultures seem so interlaced, and in my opinion tolstoy overwhelms the earlier culture to make his argument, so how can i acknowledge what exactly wandp contributed to my understanding of the war of 1812. if anything i learned more about tolstoy’s despondency and disgust with objective science and the culture and expectations surrounding the discipline from wandp then i did about the world of andre and natalie.

But why do you prefer a particular historian’s perspective of the 1812 events over Tolstoy’s version? (I know what you’ve said about conjecture, but then we’re back to my argument that conjecture is an integral part of history) I’ll take Tolstoy’s fictional account just as readily as I’ll read any other “non-fictional” historian. I just don’t see why fiction can’t be a valid source of knowledge about events. It seems to come down to your preference for a non-fictional objective academic method over a fictional subjective product of the imagination.

All that I’m saying is give War and Peace a chance.
(Everybody now!)

oh, i have given wandp a chance, in fact it is on my list of favorite novels. i happen to believe that novel should remain novels and not become something they are not, namely academic work.

as far as your earlier question about why i prefer a historian’s edition over tolstoy’s, even given your assertions about conjecture which is problematic. nevertheless, for arguments sake say that the historian’s version is repleat with conjecture like i asserted tolstoy’s is, i still favor the historian’s version if i am looking for a resource on the war of 1812. the reason is very simple and very complex; there are degrees of conjecture and given my experience with historical work the degree of conjecture tends to be less than say in a novel. even if i were to conceed that wanp has historical validity i can not in turn look up the characters that tolstoy uses. there may very well have been an andretype figure that tolstoy had in mind but i don’t know who that is which prevents me from researching andre’s life on my own.

i guess it largely comes down to verifiability, while i do very much enjoy tolstoy’s literary style and have learned from his perspective, i can not check it on my own when it comes to research time. like i said before wandp taught me more about tolstoy’s world and his concerns than those of the people living during the war of 1812. therefor, i might consider it an admirable source if i write on the growing despondency with science in europe, along with strindberg, munch, and nietzsche.

I don’t disagree that academic historians try to remove as much conjecture as possible, and that this is an important aspect of their method. This tendency in academia, however, is what I find (along with Tolstoy) to be somewhat false and deceptive, a distortion of the richness of human existence and the way people really think, especially when people are in the historic moment itself.

When we read a history of the Sept. 11 tragedy ten years from now, the historian will tell us a story detached from the immediate feelings we had when the second plane hit the Trade Tower on national television. But a novel like Tolstoy’s, on the other hand, will open up a window onto the human feelings that should be considered just as much as the socio-economic conditions which led to this or that event.

Again, I’m not saying we should get rid of historiography. But why can’t we include the novel as a truthful document of the spirit of an age. Why must Tolstoy’s historical novel be limited merely to its own day and age? I trust the power of the imagination because there are so many examples of its accuracy. The Red Badge of Courage is a great example. The author—Robert Louis Stevenson?—captures the feel of battle so accurately eventhough he never fought a day in his life. I understand that he based all his conceptions of being in the heat of battle on his own experiences playing football. And yet, actual participants in battle have said that Stevenson captures the feeling perfectly!

Interesting discussion, but for me there is no dispute here. Historical writing runs the gammut from historical novels, to academic military and political history (all the rage until women started showing up in history departments) to social history, to psychoanalysis of historical personalities. All of them have value. If I want to be an expert on the war of 1812 I wouldn’t restrict myself to military histories—I would want to read concurrent newspaper articles, novels written at the time and since, I’d want to watch films about it, I’d want to visit the sites of the battles, I’d want to know social historians’ perspective and I’d want to read a feminist historian’s point of view.

What’s this debate about? Sure, some articles and films are stupid and not worth seeing, but something as time-tested as Tolstoy in my mind passes most criteria for academic worth-whileness whether it be for history or for sociology, or for literature.

good question dan, but their is a very real dispute going on here. the issues that grant and i are batting back and forth are divisive issues amongst historians and non, alike. these are questions and problems that depending on one’s answer demonstrates whether one believes that history is art, science, or both. so far what i have gotten from grant is that historiography should be art.

my point is, as it has been all along, that history is neither art nor science strictly speaking; it is both. my assertion is that inorder for history to be credible or at least attempt versimiltude it must be factual but for it to be real it must also be art. if it were strictly art it history would simply be a more factual type of fiction. on the other hand if it was strictly science it would be dry, boring, deterministic, and not accounting for the irrationality of the activity and thoughts of humans. both approaches negate the purposeful study of what people actually said, felt, and did based on the limited scope of what they knew and did, which is a method that the contemporary historian uses. the purposeful approach attempts to address peoples feelings, human limitations, social limitations, i.e. being fair to the subject.

again grant i don’t know what historical books you are reading; late 20th c work tends to be holistic, at least survey works. try alan brinkley’s survey of american history (colonial-present), or virtually any survey written in the last 20 years. literally every survey that i’ve read attempts to discuss all of the various aspects of a particular culture; art, theater, literature, movies, society- marriage, divorce, birth rates, standards of living, how people felt about their society, politics, etc. historians are hardly distant bean counters, their craft is to get into the details of what made a culture at a particular time what it was and convey that as a story that has proof; qualitative and quantitative evidence.

Why is it so important for historians to be scientific? Accurate and academically responsible yes, but scientific? Seems sooooo pre-postmodern.