I've been thinking a lot about capital-T tragedy lately. specifically the kind of jean anouilh idea that the inevitability of the ending is what defines the genre and makes it work. and war and peace is not properly a tragedy, but there is this tragic note to its ending that derives really entirely from the fact of its historical perspective. the epilogue is supposed to be a resolution, but there's this sword of Damocles hanging over it in the form of the Decembrist revolt. the characters don't know, when we leave them, that it's going to happen, but the story knows, because it is being told from the future. it is writing about 1820 from the perspective of 1869. and that is something that tolstoy can't un-know, he can't take that knowledge out of it. that's part of why the epilogue feels so tense and weird, why the parts of it that aim to be reassuring so often fail to reassure
but then there's this other looming thing haunting the narrative, this thing that's impossible to ignore. and that's the russian revolution. and what's crazy is that tolstoy didn't know about that, but you do. you know, when you read war and peace, that you are reading about a system that failed catastrophically. that the particular social order the book so meticulously describes is going to be violently overthrown in just about a hundred years. every time you read about the estates, the peasants, the emperor, the army, you're thinking about that just a little bit. these people are not real, but if they were, none of them would have lived to see it, probably not even the baby pierre and natasha have right at the end—he would have to live to 96. tolstoy didn't live to see it, he died in 1910. but you are reading about 1820 from the perspective of the twenty-first century, so you can't escape knowing it. was it inevitable? no, nothing is. is it inevitable? yes. it already happened.
and is that not what we mean, when we say that history is tragedy? you can't change it. you can look back and trace the pattern and see what could have been done differently, but it will never, ever be any different. and is there not something strangely reassuring about that? the present is deeply uncertain and always is. there's opportunity in that, sure, but there's also discomfort. anything could happen, but something will. you just don't know what it is yet. it is st. nicholas's eve by the old calendar, december 5, 1820 and you are in your sister-in-law's house with everyone you love who is not already dead. you are not dead yet, which means that something is waiting for you. you won't know what it is until it's too late. and then, when you can't do anything about it, you won't be able to stop knowing
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