War and Peace and Tolstoys View of History Essay -- Tolstoy War and P

War and Peace and Tolstoys View of History take Lev Tolstoy wrote abundantly on the philosophical issues that he felt were universally important. maven of the most prolific examples of this is his view of history. This is set out most intelligibly and most famously in his largest work, War and Peace. As Tolstoy claimed himself in a public statement on the work, War and Peace is what the author wanted and was adequate to(p) to express in that form in which it was expressed. Not only do the themes and incidents in the novel reflect his theory of history, Tolstoy iterates this in less muniment terms in the twelve chapters of the Second Epilogue, described as, A general word of honor on the historians study of human deportment, and on the difficulty of defining the forces that scat nations. The problem of freewill and necessity. The view of history explored by Tolstoy has had few sympathisers and twisty critics. Tolstoy predicts this disagreement earlier in War and Peace in h is definition of the life of a bee A bee settling on a heyday has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower, and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper...The high the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes that the crowning(prenominal) purpose is beyond our comprehension. All that is accessible to man is the relation of life to the bee to other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historical characters and nations. This presupposition of the impossibility of a total, last view of history helps to explain why Tolstoy, in his view of human actio... ...rriere, Tolstoys Pierre Bezukhov - A Psychoanalytical Study, Melksham Bristol Classical Press, 1993. Helen Edna Davis, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, refreshed York Haskell House Publishers Ltd., 1929. I Cannot be Silent - Writings on Polit ics, Art and Religion by Leo Tolstoy, Chippenham The Bristol Press, 1989. E. H. Carr, What is History?, St Ives Penguin Books, 1987. Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post- in advance(p)ism and the Social Sciences, Princeton Princeton University Press, 1992. Notes 1 F.F. Seeley, Tolstoys Philosophy of History, From, Ed. Malcolm Jones, New Essays on Tolstoy, Bristol Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 176. 2 Ibid., pp. 178 - 183. 3 Edward Wasiolek, War and Peace The Theoretical Chapters, From, Ed. Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Interpretations - War and Peace, New York, Chelsea House Publishers, 1988, pp. 92 - 97.