The Overcoming of History in "War and Peace"

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The most authoritative, detailed and nuanced study to date of the vexed question of the novel's holism, or the relation between its historical "essays" and the fictional text. Love analyzes the complex philosophical provenance of Tolstoy's ideas with utmost care and clarity and shows their simultaneous commitment to both skepticism and affirmation, the finite and the infinite. Love also demonstrates convincingly how Tolstoy's ideas inform the novel's narrative structure, major scenes and life trajectories of the main characters. Love's book is a brilliant corrective to the critical oversimplifications that have long surrounded War and Peace and is a major contribution to Tolstoy scholarship in general." Vladimir E. Alexandrov B. E. Bensinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University "Hedgehog versus Fox, Tolstoy the unifier versus Tolstoy the skeptic, intellect versus senses, thinker versus artist: as Tolstoy himself knew well, to dislodge canonized binaries on any topic often requires long, reasoned narrative argument. We have just such a fine-grained, sustained philosophical argument here. Jeffrey Love takes on those familiar binaries and demonstrates that Tolstoyan truth is dynamic, integrated, durative-and that the two great lessons about human consciousness presented in War and Peace, cognitive humility and finitude, are in fact exhilarating virtues, not human failures or unbridgeable contradictions. A tour-de-force." Caryl Emerson Princeton University "Intense, analytical, philosophical, G. Jeffrey Love's "The Overcoming of History in War and Peace, " like Isaiah Berlin's study "The Hedgehog and the Fox, " offers rewarding insights into the difficult but central historical-philosophical themes of War and Peace-issues organic to an understanding of Tolstoy's epic work. Here is an important book on Tolstoy." Robert Louis Jackson B.E. Bensinger Professor (Emeritus) Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University