The Overcoming of History in War and Peace

The Overcoming of History in “War and Peace” marks a radical departure from the critical tradition dominated by Sir Isaiah Berlin’s view that the novel is deeply divided against itself, a majestically flawed contest of brilliant art and clumsy thought. To the contrary, Jeff Love argues that the apparently divided nature of the text, its multi-leveled negotiation between different kinds of representation, expresses the rich variety of the novel’s very deliberate striving to capture the fluidity of change and becoming in the fixed forms of language. The inevitable failure of this striving, revealing the irreducible conflict between infinite desire and finite capacity, is at once the source of new beginnings and the repetition of old ones, a wellspring of continually renewed promises to achieve a synoptic vision of the whole that the novel cannot fulfill. This repetitive struggle between essentially comic and tragic conceptions of human action, far from being a pervasive flaw in the texture of the novel, in fact constitutes its dynamic center and principal trope as well as the productive origin of the unusual features that distinguish it as an uncommonly bold narrative experiment.

"Jeff Love has done a serious service to Tolstoy studies, is book will go on the highest shelf…" - in: Modern Language Review, Vol. 102, No. 1 (2007)
"…a highly needed and brilliant book." - in: Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 49.3 (Fall 2005)
"[Love] is to be congratulated for having given us a signal contribution to Tolstoy studies." - in: The Russian Review, Vol. 64, No. 2 (April 2005)
"…a detailed and insightful analysis of the historical-philosophical themes of Lev Tolstoi’s War and Peace" - in: Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 4 (2005)
"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
"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, Slavic Department, Yale 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, Emeritus B.E. Bensinger Professor Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University