Satire was certainly not an unfamiliar literary convention to Lev Tolstoy. His late novel Resurrection, for example, is a critical account of late nineteenth-century Russian government, society and religion whose satirical power rivals that of Nikolai Gogol' and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, authors more frequently cited as practitioners of satire. However, Tolstoy was a master at incorporating satirical elements into his less-didactic works as well. From his earliest writings through the short works he produced near the end of his life, Tolstoy’s descriptions of individual characters are almost always tinged with some sort of subtle narrative bias, usually related to Tolstoy's personal opinion about the traits he ascribes to his creation. Such authorial manipulation lends itself not only to controlling the reader’s mental image of the character but also to conveying the moral perspective that Tolstoy wishes the reader to adopt in relation to that particular figure. Without writing the sorts of farcical or darkly comic works most often, if somewhat incorrectly, associated with the genre of satire, Tolstoy guides the reader—sometimes gently, sometimes brusquely—into sharing his ethical perspective through the accretion of satirically-charged narration.

At times, Tolstoy utilizes this technique to prevent the reader from judging too harshly a character whom he wants to present as likable or, at least, deserving of sympathy. More often, though, Tolstoy will employ this mode when making negative comments about characters whom he wishes to disparage. Only occasionally does he step into the narrative frame with an outright denunciation of a particular character, preferring instead the satirist’s more indirect approach of presenting a character in such a way that his own words and actions, rather than the protestations of an intrusive author/narrator, make him seem ridiculous and unworthy of the reader's respect. This sort of subtextual derision recurs throughout the body of Tolstoy’s work, ranging from a rather light-hearted, almost paternally scolding tone to the occasional near-Jeremiads of Resurrection or The Devil. I will limit myself to discussing examples of Tolstoy’s satirical mode in one of his early works (The Sebastopol Sketches), one of his last works (Hadji Murad), and perhaps his finest and most notable work (War and Peace). I will focus on the ways in which Tolstoy fuses his authorial opinions with his descriptions of recurring character types, such as the overly ambitious military officer, in an attempt to retain didactic control over his readers' interpretation of his works.

Consisting of three stylistically dissimilar tales, The Sebastopol Sketches show Tolstoy expressing a full range of emotions and opinions concerning the nature of war and, more notably, the nature of humans involved in war. A richly diverse assortment of characters populates Sebastopol throughout the three stories and nine months of the book. Tolstoy uses his satirical tone on numerous occasions to make commentaries on certain members of this cast, many of whom are representative of persons he encountered first-hand during his Crimean War military service.

In an essay entitled "A Project for Reorganizing the Army," Tolstoy enumerated what he saw as the six "main vices" of the Russian military: "Meagre rations. Lack of education. Barriers to the promotion of capable men. An air of oppression. Seniority. Extortion." He goes on to briefly explain how each of these factors is detrimental to the effectiveness of the military, but it is in the fictional work of The Sebastopol Sketches, especially in the latter two tales, that one can find the elaboration that brings the weight of these issues clearly into focus.

Few, if any, characters in these stories are spared from Tolstoy’s contempt, although not all are indicted as being personally responsible for the traits that he finds so distasteful. The officer class, especially the higher officers, receives the brunt of Tolstoy’s animosity, with rank soldiers or junior officers often having any such taints excused as proceeding directly from the faults of their superior commanders. For example, in "Sebastopol in May," the generally likable lieutenant-captain Mikhailov exhibits some characteristics that Tolstoy personally found objectionable—he is something of a defeatist, occasionally given to mild fits of cowardice, and a bit of a tippler. For these qualities, Mikhailov receives some rather mild chiding from the author. However, the real invective in this story is saved for characters like Prince Galtsin or Baron Pest, who "command" the battle largely from the relative safety of their lavish townhouses or from the heavily fortified and wine-filled lodgments on the bastions. When Tolstoy describes these characters and their motivations, it is usually using the derisive language of satire.

For example, after a somewhat melodramatic, yet affectingly genuine scene prior to Mikhailov’s departure for his numerically significant thirteenth trip to the bastion, Tolstoy immediately switches scenes to the quarters of Adjutant Kalugin, where Galtsin, Pest, and two other staff officers have gathered for tea and conversation in the midst of the fighting. The chatter of the officers' quarters within the besieged city reads like that of the salons of Petersburg, a culture that Tolstoy repeatedly derides throughout his works. The banal society intrigues being discussed by Prince Galtsin serve not only as a counterpoint to Mikhailov’s brooding on the very real possibility of his own imminent demise but also mark Galtsin’s speech as incongruous with the serious setting. No one in Sebastopol is dying of laughter, as Galtsin implies the hearers of his trivial story will do, but plenty are dying. Furthermore, his use of French, while standard among the Russian aristocracy, is especially out of place in this situation, given that the French are the very ones shelling the city and killing Galtsin’s countrymen. There is a degree of Gogolian poshlost’ in both the artificiality of the salon atmosphere within a besieged city and the emptiness of the conversation among the officers, a fact that is not overlooked by the narrator in stating that he will forego retelling Galtsin's tale "as it is of no interest to us" (since "we" are presumably more interested in the surrounding events).

The entire scene is reminiscent of Tolstoy’s later critical descriptions of Petersburg high society, especially the chapters of War and Peace that center on Anna Scherer's circle. His description of the officers’ mood is tinged with irony: "They seemed to have lost all the absurd haughtiness and snobbery with which they addressed the infantry officers; here they were among their own kind, and they revealed themselves as charming, high-spirited and good-hearted young men." Sebastopol in May, 1854, was most certainly not a salon. Rather it was a place where, as Tolstoy wrote "the angel of death...hovered ceaselessly" for six months, and Tolstoy exhibits his extreme resentment at the introduction of this superficial subculture into the terrible environment of war.

The conversation among these officers is unconscionable to Tolstoy, as it points out both their lack of understanding of the grave military situation and their inability to sympathize with the troops they command. Furthermore, Tolstoy abhors the duplicity with which they treat their subalterns throughout the tale. When the officers discuss the troops, their conversation alludes to almost all of Tolstoy’s six vices of the military in the course of a few lines of dialogue. The "bravoure de gentilhomme" that Praskukhin and Galtsin extol so ardently is ultimately useless and false, as both Praskukhin’s inglorious death on the ramparts and Pest’s ineffectual, foolishly courageous and self-aggrandizingly misremembered charge serve to illustrate.

Whereas "Sebastopol in December" had won Tsar Alexander’s admiration with its grim, yet generally positive description of the city’s defense, Tolstoy’s tone changes significantly in the latter two stories. Even at the end of "Sebastopol in December", though, Tolstoy already contrasts the poshlost'-filled motivation behind the actions of the officers with the higher morality of the regular troops in his famous lament "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity—even on the brink of the grave, and among men who are ready to die for the sake of a lofty conviction!" None among gloomy Mikhailov, vainglorious Pest (who thinks of the battle "with a sinking heart" even as he "don[s] his cap at a rakish angle and march[es] out of the room with loud, firm steps"), doomed Praskukhin or imperceptive Galtsin give any evidence through their words or actions to disprove this contention.

On the other hand, "Sebastopol in August" takes an even harsher stance towards the wastefulness and corruption among the army as it documents the experiences of the Kozeltsov brothers in and around Sebastopol as the city succumbs to the French. Tolstoy's criticism of both the conduct of the officer class and of war in general reaches a such peak in this story that the censor cut from the text numerous insinuations that the Russian officers were pampered cowards, greedy for personal glory. Even so, the published versions of the sketches reflect Tolstoy's sad conviction that even the bravest men were dying in vain and served as an apprenticeship for Tolstoy's satirical voice, one which he would put to good use in the creation of his monumental novel War and Peace.

In the course of its story, War and Peace introduces a cast of characters which numbers almost as many as the thousand-plus pages of the book. The book includes characters created from whole cloth by Tolstoy, as well as an assortment of stock types, historical personages and characters like Denisov who are thinly-veiled simulacra of historical figures. Tolstoy exerts a considerable authorial/editorial control over all of these and none are exempt from Tolstoy's satire.

Again, though, Tolstoy's satire does not take on the quality of simple parody or burlesque, both because this novel is, at heart, realistic (if not entirely believable at all times) and because his satire is intended as a part of his didacticism and must therefore serve a greater purpose than to simply make Napoleon seem like a clown. Tolstoy's characterization of Napoleon as a crass, somewhat ignorant and wholly egomaniacal figure is not intended for mere comic effect, but to point out the fallacy in the established historical writing, which asserts that Napoleon was a military genius and a statesman of the first order. Furthermore, his depiction of Kutuzov as a wise old man surrounded by a military hierarchy composed largely of incapable and self-absorbed sycophantic foreigners assists him in promulgating his opinion that the "natural" wisdom of Russians like Kutuzov or Platon Karataev is superior to that which is generally considered estimable by historical opinion. Tolstoy's satire is aimed at correcting the mistakes that he believes have been made by history and historians in valuing men like Napoleon, Murat, Ermolov or Miloradovich over those like Kutuzov or Bagration, who go about the admittedly grim business of war in a way that does not seek self-aggrandizement (or even shuns it) while still accomplishing the goal of victory.

As John Bayley points out in his Tolstoy and the Novel, Tolstoy accomplishes this correction of historical vision by utilizing "coincidence, oversimplification and even his early mania for types." Tolstoy constantly deflates Napoleon's attempts at self-mythology, thereby denying the validity of the claims made by those who bought into such myths. Tolstoy's description of Napoleon at Austerlitz is one example that Bayley cites as indicative of the author's attitude towards the "greatness" of the French leader: "His face wore that special look of confident, self-complacent happiness that one sees on the face of a boy happily in love." As Bayley notes, "the tone is overtly objective, satirical, [and] even disgusted."

Still, there are entire episodes which are written by Tolstoy with comic effect to satirize certain traits of social life, mostly that of the Petersburg courtiers. The marriage of the icy Vera Rostov and the climber Berg (one of the most status-obsessed characters in Tolstoy's oeuvre, rivaling even Alexei Karenin) is one example out of many. Others include Pierre's experiences with the Freemasons, Hippolyte Kuragin's near-idiotic attempts at social conversation and the morbid, comme il faut courtship of Julie Karagina and Boris Drubetskoy. While many of these scenes are only tangentially related to the central plot of the novel, they do serve once again to establish a way of life form which Tolstoy’s positive characters can and will depart by the end of the book.

The "heroes" of War and Peace most often make themselves identifiable as such through their righteous actions. However, they can also be separated by the manner in which Tolstoy spares them, for the most part, from his mockery when they go astray. None of the foursome who emerge by novel's end as Tolstoy's chosen exemplars for the future (Natasha, Pierre, Nicholas and Mary) progress through the novel without some behavior that is presented by the narrator as distasteful or even downright bad. A lack of faults would change them from being relatively complete characters into being simple specimens of a type: the saintly innocent. Not only could such a beatific type invite satire in return, but it also lacks the verisimilitude that this essentially realistic (if idealistic and heavily biased) novel demands. Minor characters like Tushin and Karataev are allowed to flirt with saintliness, but only as allegorical models for his incalculably more complex "central" characters and, by extension, his readers. Furthermore, these ancillary figures behave as they do without any conscious recognition on their part of the possibility that they might be saintly, since that would be unbecomingly hubristic in Tolstoy’s view. Tolstoy refrains from outright condemnation when his heroes stumble, usually presenting them either as youthfully ignorant or as the victims of connivance by those characters whom he does condemn. Tolstoy, as in The Sebastopol Sketches, reserves his real venom for those characters he believes are deserving of it.

Nearly four decades pass between the publication of the final installment of War and Peace and that of the elegantly crafted novella Hadji Murad. Vastly different from the moralistic and proselytizing tracts and stories that Tolstoy had produced for thirty years since the publication of Anna Karenina, this work returns Tolstoy to the Russian frontier (specifically Chechnya) and also marks a return to his examination of war and human behavior in relation to it. His adroit satirical commentary also returns, not in the form of obtrusive invective that it took in Resurrection, but in the more measured tones found in the works already discussed. Hadji Murad is a story about honor and bravery, both as the term is understood by Tolstoy's Russian contemporaries and as he himself comprehended it, and the satirical thrusts of the novel again are aimed towards those who do not share Tolstoy's revised version of the "truth." Through characters like Chernyshov, the elder Vorontsov and Poltoratsky (some of whom, again, are drawn from the history of the period), Tolstoy is able to use satire to turn such officially celebrated personages into foils, against whom the "true" dignity and goodness of a character like Hadji Murad is immediately recognizable.

The most striking example of this treatment occurs after Hadji Murad has surrendered himself and is taken to meet with the elder Vorontsov, a representative of the Tsar. Before Hadji Murad arrives in Tiflis, he is the topic of a heated dinner-table discussion among Vorontsov’s coterie. As a general speaks of his personal experience with Hadji Murad, he describes a rescue mission led by Vorontsov that had been ambushed by the Chechen leader. The narrator breaks into the dialogue to inform the reader that the so-called "rescue mission" was an abysmal failure due to the ineptitude of Vorontsov’s leadership, but is always referred to as a glorious victory in Vorontsov’s presence, since that is how he reported it to the Tsar. Vorontsov is essentially caught in a lie in the relation of this detail, but Tolstoy makes sure to point out that almost everyone else participates in this lie so that Vorontsov may retain his honor despite his failure. The author wishes to compare this false honor with the integrity of Hadji Murad and inserts the brief corrective comment in order to cast aspersion on those who distort reality.

This narrative "correction" of the official report of a military action echoes almost exactly the manner in which Tolstoy’s narrator sets straight the account that Baron Pest gives of his comportment under fire in "Sebastopol in May". Tolstoy repeatedly uses the dismissive phrase "and so forth" (i tak dalee) in relating Pest’s thoughts and words in these instances, pointedly demonstrates the insignificance and meaninglessness of his words—they do not even merit full reproduction, since they are only dissembling attempts at saving face rather than accurate descriptions. Overt narrative identification of instances in which characters willingly distort the truth in order to save face is among the most effective of Tolstoy’s satirical weapons. Its exposes vainglorious and self-important figures as little more than charlatans, and provides Tolstoy with negative models against which he can favorably compare those characters he believes to be more righteous, either in a moral/religious sense or in the ethical system of his own devising.

Once Hadji Murad actually arrives in Tiflis, Tolstoy becomes more lampooning and harsh in his satire, cutting a broad swath of semi-comic malediction across many segments of society. Hadji Murad is taken to the prince’s palace and then to the opera, to which he is described as being "obviously indifferent." This latter scene, and indeed Hadji Murad’s entire interaction with Russian haute couture, is similar to the episode in Book 8, chapters 8-10 of War and Peace in which young Natasha is seduced, both by the social pageantry of her first opera-going experience and by the devious, somewhat predatory Anatole Kuragin. Howver, Hadji Murad is not as impressionable as Natasha and his impassive reaction to the scene helps to accentuate his essential integrity (chestnost’). When contrasted with the rogues’ gallery surrounding him (reminiscent in many ways of the crowd gathered at the mayor’s party in Gogol’s Dead Souls) Hadji Murad becomes even more virtuous in the eyes of the reader, especially since it is only the characters whom Tolstoy satirizes that provide any criticism of Hadji Murad. Their comments function in the story as slanders rather than believable observations, especially once they are debunked by Tolstoy’s corrective narrator.

Understanding of and sympathy with Hadji Murad is the moral measure by which characters are judged in this story. The characters who are changed for the better (i.e.. those who believe what they experience in his presence, rather than believing what they hear through the grapevine about him) by their exposure to Hadji Murad are the ones Tolstoy wishes to extol. Not only are they pardoned by Tolstoy, but they ultimately serve as the carriers of the ideals that he wishes to celebrate.

Hadji Murad, in the end, is not a saint either. He is violent and warlike (albeit not in the same self-aggrandizing way that Napoleon is), somewhat inconstant in his allegiances, and even stubborn at times. However, his unswerving devotion to his family, his relative equanimity and his strong sense of ethics (perhaps different from Tolstoy's, but based on a much more solid philosophical foundation than the fluid and capricious allegiances of the Petersburg-style social circles) are all qualities that make him far superior in Tolstoy's value system to the array of dissembling and opportunistic characters that populate the remainder of the book.

Satire remains an integral part of Tolstoy's methodology over the course of the more than fifty years of his writing career, both because it allows him to deride particular historical figures and because it gives him a means (via antithetical comparison) through which he can exalt characters who embody the virtues he believes to be commendable. His satire is not allegorical or fabulist in the manner of Gogol'. Tolstoy usually fits satire into the form of realistic Russian prose, rather than transcending the form in the way that the more figurative Dead Souls does. However, his satirical voice can be every bit as damning as Gogol's, if not necessarily in its intensity, then in its consistency and its effectiveness. While he does not present the reader with as grotesque or pathos-inspiring a character as Gogol's Akaky Akakyevich or Chichikov, Tolstoy does create characters who receive as clearly stated a satirical commentary, albeit in measured doses over the course of an entire novel, novella or short story. Tolstoy then moves a step further (at least in his later works) to present an alternative to the objects of his satire, being unwilling simply to deride without suggesting his own improvements.