‘Great Chords’: Politics and Romance in Tolstoy's War and Peace

Abstract

A national epic and Bildungsroman, Tolstoy's realist masterpiece also incorporates a quest romance, which flirts with fantasy by allusions to volshebnoye tsarstvo (‘fairyland’). This romance projects a social ideal that reflects Tolstoy's thoroughgoing alienation from modernity. The article uses Northrop Frye's ideas to disclose the hidden romance and reveals its political significance by comparing Tolstoy's story to Walter Scott's Waverley and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Politics and romance are strange bedfellows, but each lends itself to spatial representation. The article shows how Tolstoy uses spatial imagery to infuse his quest romance with political meaning and discusses the neglect by English-speaking critics of romance and politics alike, which it relates to a disagreement between Percy Lubbock and E.M. Forster over the relative importance of time and space as dimensions of Tolstoy's narrative.