Forthcoming in Janet Tucker's Book

Satirical Subtlety in Lev Tolstoy’s
Sebastopol Sketches, War and Peace and Hadji Murad

Satire was certainly not a literary convention unfamiliar 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 (if not necessarily its ideology) rivals the work of Nikolai Gogol’ and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, a pair of authors roughly contemporary with Tolstoy who are more frequently associated with satire. However, Tolstoy was a master at incorporating satirical elements into his less-didactic novels as well. From his earliest writings through the short fictional 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 his 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 the author intends the reader to adopt in relation to that particular figure. Without writing the sorts of farcical or darkly comic works most often associated (and often incorrectly) with satire, Tolstoy guides the reader—sometimes gently, sometimes brusquely—into sharing his ethical perspective through the accretion of satirically charged narration.

At times, Tolstoy uses this technique to prevent the reader from judging too harshly a character who he wants to present as likable or, at least, deserving of sympathy. More often, though, Tolstoy will employ this method when making negative comments about characters who he wishes to disparage. Only occasionally does he step into the frame and offer an outright denunciation of a particular character. He generally prefers the satirist’s more indirect approach: presenting a character in such a way that his own words and actions, rather than the unconcealed protestations of an intrusive author/narrator, make him seem ridiculous and unworthy of the reader’s respect. Leon Guilhamet describes the way in which modal satire of this sort functions in his Satire and the Transformation of Genre (1987):

The basic difference between the satiric and the comic is that the satiric reinterprets the ridiculous in an ethical light. The satiric employs comic techniques of ridicule, but discovers harm and even evil in the ridiculous. The ridiculous that is proper to satire cannot be reconciled to the good at the conclusion of a comic plot. (8) 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". When Tolstoy wishes to spare a character from the full force of his indignation, he allows the satiric to evolve back into the comic, usually by showing how that character has learned from the mistakes that were scorned in him/her previously. Essentially, these characters are allowed catharsis despite their missteps. The unreconciled ridicule that Guilhamet contends is the identifying mark of satire is reserved for those characters whose actions and beliefs are consistently immoral in Tolstoy’s view.

Gary Saul Morson analyzes the role of parody at length in Boundaries of Genre and many of his ideas are useful in the identification of Tolstoy’s satirical technique. While parody and satire are by no means interchangeable terms, parody can be an indispensable element of satire whose goal is the exposure of meaninglessness beneath a seemingly significant surface. Morson writes the following of parody’s function:

Parody aims to discredit an act of speech by redirecting attention from its text to a compromising context. That is, while the parodist’s ironic quotation marks frame the linguistic form of the original utterance, they also direct attention to the occasion (more accurately, the parodist’s version of the occasion) of its uttering. The parodist thereby aims to reveal the otherwise covert aspects of that occasion, including the unstated motives and assumptions of both the speaker and the assumed and presumably sympathetic audience. Tolstoy’s narratives frequently include "act[s] of speech" (whether quoted conversations, interior monologues or narration that affects a particular attitude) by characters he wishes to satirize that are made ridiculous by the disparity that Tolstoy perceives between their meaning and their context. In this way, Tolstoy uses parody effectively to uncover "the divergence between professed and unacknowledged intentions—or the discovery of naiveté, the difference between belief and disconfirming evidence."

Morson’s study explicitly links this technique with Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, and examples in his work are plentiful from both his early liberal period and his later more conservative years. R. L. Busch extensively examines Dostoevsky’s parodic technique in Crime and Punishment, claiming that an elaborate system of character foils provides both a parody of Chernyshevskian rhetoric and a derisive satire of the ideas contained within it:

Closely relatable in function to irony are the parodic figures of Lebezyatnikov, Luzhin and Svidrigailov. Significant characterological parallels exist between them and Raskolnikov. These parallels allow them, at various levels of seriousness, to mimic Raskolnikov and thereby lower both him and what he represents. The ideas expressed by each of these characters are discredited not only by their respective reprehensible actions but also by the incongruity between their high-minded theoretical rhetoric and the decrepit situation of the Marmeladov family. Although both Raskolnikov and Lebezyatnikov represent ideas that Dostoevsky reviles, their satirical portrayal leaves room for redemption that is not afforded to Luzhin or Svidrigailov: "Like Raskolnikov, Lebezyatnikov stands for a sharp break with the past, but both are subverted in this by their own natures and by the weight of tradition." Lebezyatnikov’s ambivalence is largely contained to his exposure of Luzhin’s false accusation of theft against Sonya. Even in this instance, though, Dostoevsky parodies Lebezyatnikov’s language and logic, despite the positive function it happens to be serving. The scattered good deeds that Lebezyatnikov and Raskolnikov perform when their moral nature briefly overtakes their ideology actually serve to further Dostoevsky’s satirical agenda, since they point out the ways in which both men fail to take "disconfirming evidence" against their ideologies truly to heart. Raskolnikov’s spiritual renewal, achieved only after he abandons his old beliefs through Sonya’s example, reconciles the satirical viewpoint from which he has been consistently depicted into a cautiously hopeful, if not a happy, ending. Tolstoy’s fiction is filled with similar scenarios in which single-minded characters (at least those who are single-minded in the "wrong" way) are satirized into meaninglessness, while characters deemed capable of moral edification are chided for their mistakes but also allowed to repent.

Since the majority of the surprisingly sparse critical evaluation of Tolstoy’s satire has treated the moralizing and often rather severe works in the vein of The Kreutzer Sonata or Resurrection (neither of which is likely to be confused with comedy),I will limit myself in this article to discussing examples of Tolstoy’s more subtle 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 recurrent 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 rather dissimilar stories (in narrative form, if not in content), The Sebastopol Sketches (1855) is a work that allows Tolstoy to express 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 military service in the Crimean War. In an essay, "A Project for Reorganizing the Army," which was published roughly contemporaneously with The Sebastopol Sketches, Tolstoy enumerates the six "main vices" of the Russian military:

1) Meagre rations.
2) Lack of education.
3) Barriers to the promotion of capable men.
4) An air of oppression.
5) Seniority.
6) Extortion.

In this essay, 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 three tales in The Sebastopol Sketches that one finds the elaboration that brings the weight of these issues home. Personifications of each of these "vices" can be found in the characters of these stories (especially the latter two, "Sebastopol in December" and "Sebastopol in May") and their negative effects are demonstrated through the satirical reductio ad absurdum that Tolstoy undertakes with regard to the characters that embody them.

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-ranking officers, receives the brunt of Tolstoy’s animosity, with rank-and-file soldiers or junior officers often having any such taints excused as proceeding from the faults of their superior commanders. For example, in "Sebastopol in May," the relatively affable 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—and he receives a rather mild rebuke from the author because of them. 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 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.

To wit, after a lengthy scene in which Mikhailov and his manservant Nikita go through a somewhat melodramatic, yet affectingly genuine scene of parting and foreboding before the former’s departure for his "thirteenth time on 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. This episode (Chapter 5 of "Sebastopol in May"), in which Tolstoy recounts the narcissistic attitude of the officer class, comprises a mere six of the nearly one hundred and fifty pages of the Sebastopol Sketches. Setting a precedent that he would follow intermittently for the remainder of his career, Tolstoy uses a concise satirical depiction to cast aspersion on the group of people he believes to be responsible for the problems in the army and for the wasteful slaughter at Sebastopol.

Prior to the explicit depiction of the officers’ way of thinking, though, Tolstoy foregrounds his criticism by noting the falseness and vapid behavior surrounding perceptions of the word "aristocrat" among them ("even though," Tolstoy points out, "death hangs over the heads of aristocrats and non-aristocrats alike"). He sternly denounces the self-serving motivation behind their actions: "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!" The chatter in the officers’ quarters that Tolstoy subsequently relates reads like (and alludes to) that of the salons of Petersburg, a culture which Tolstoy repeatedly derides throughout his works for its senselessness. For example:

"I say, you never finished telling me about Vaska Mendel," said Kalugin, who had taken off his greatcoat and was sitting in a soft, comfortable armchair by the window, unbuttoning the collar of his clean, starched linen shirt. "How did he get married?"

"My dear fellow, you’d simply die laughing! Je vous dis, il y avait un temps où on ne parlait de ça à Peterbourg," said Prince Galtsin, laughing and jumping up from the piano at which he had been sitting. He resettled himself on the window seat, next to Kalugin. "You’d die laughing! I know the whole story." and he quickly launched, with much wit and humour, into an account of a love affair which we shall omit as it is of no interest to us.

The banal subject matter being discussed by Prince Galtsin not only serves as a counterpoint to Mikhailov’s brooding one chapter earlier on the very real possibility of his own imminent demise, but also marks Galtsin’s speech as incongruous with the serious setting. No one in Sebastopol is dying of laughter, 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. The speech of the officers is made plainly incongruous with the setting, thus becoming a perfect example of parody as Morson defines it. There is a degree of poshlost’ in both the artificiality of the salon atmosphere within the besieged city and the meaninglessness of the conversation among the officers, a fact that is not overlooked by the narrator in stating that he will omit 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 salon society, especially the chapters of War and Peace that revolve around Anna Scherer’s coterie of acquaintances. As such, his comment that "all these gentlemen who had made themselves comfortable in various parts of the room" were in their element in this isolated apartment in wartime Sebastopol is highly ironic: "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 of 1854, was most certainly not a salon. Rather, it was a place where "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 wartime through his satirically tinged portrayal of these characters.

Given the innumerable privations and hardships (both mental and physical) that Tolstoy presents to the reader in these stories, the conversation among these "charming, high-spirited and good-hearted" men is not only inappropriate (it points out their lack of understanding of the military situation, as well as their lack of sympathy with the troops they command) but also duplicitous, given their demonstrated behavior towards their subalterns throughout the tale. When the officers actually discuss the troops, their conversation alludes to almost all of Tolstoy’s six vices within the course of a few lines:

"It’s a strange thought," said Galtsin, when he had taken his glass and was on his way back to the window-seat again. "Here we are in a town that’s under siege, tickling the ivories and having tea and cream in the sort of flat I for one would be proud to own in St. Petersburg."

"Well, all I can say is it’s just as well," said the old lieutenant-colonel, who was never satisfied with anything. "Otherwise this constant waiting about for something to happen would be intolerable...Just think what it would be like if we had to live surrounded by this never-ending slaughter day after day up to our necks in mud, without any creature comforts."

"But what about our infantry officers?" said Kalugin. "They have to live in the bastions with the rest of the men and have to eat the same borshch they’re given in the casements. What about them?"

"There’s something I don’t understand," said Prince Galtsin. "I have to confess, I don’t really see how men in dirty underwear, suffering from lice and not even able to wash their hands, can possibly be capable of bravery. You know what I mean, cette belle bravoure de gentilhomme—it’s simply not on."

"Well, they don’t understand that kind of bravery," said Praskukhin.

Kalugin does manage a somewhat positive rejoinder to the toadying Praskukhin’s jibe, but his assertion that the infantry officers are "heroes, wonderful people" excuses only him (and not entirely at that) among the officers from Tolstoy’s satirical glare. The "bravery of the gentleman" that Praskukhin and Galtsin refer to is ultimately useless and false, as both Praskukhin’s inglorious death on the ramparts and Pest’s ineffectual, foolishly courageous and almost totally misremembered charge serve to illustrate.

In case it has still eluded the reader, Tolstoy makes the difference between Praskukhin and Mikhailov evident by comparing the way in which each reacts to the stimulus of having a shell fall in his vicinity while on the ramparts. Donna Tussing Orwin does not specifically identify Tolstoy’s technique in this regard as satirical, although the effect she describes clearly imparts satirical ridicule to Praskukhin and his kind:

Like the others, Mikhailov has feelings of fear and ambition; he may have felt all the emotions that visit Praskukhin in the seconds before his death; but he overcomes his fear and other feelings to force himself to check up on Praskukhin back where the battle rages, because "it’s my duty."

Praskukhin, like the other officers at headquarters, is a creature of amour propre. He thinks only of himself, and yet his self-esteem depends entirely on what others think of him. His gaze remains directed outside himself and toward the world of men…. Praskukhin’s amour propre diminishes his reality, both for himself and for Tolstoy’s readers. He is more a shadow than a man.

Mikhailov looks inside himself to God…. His self-esteem, also important to him, depends on what God, not men, thinks of him. Asking for forgiveness of sins, he conceives of himself as an independent individual capable of moral responsibility…. One can say of Mikhailov, then, as one cannot of Praskukhin, that he has fixed inner principles, or ideas, as well as an active inner life.

Orwin sees Tolstoy’s depiction of Praskukhin’s death as part of the author’s "unflinching realis[m]," but I contend that it is rather a distinctly satirical commentary on the way in which the lack of "moral responsibility" makes an individual "more a shadow than a man." Orwin’s distinction between Praskukhin’s diminished reality in comparison with Mikhailov does, however, reinforce the impression that the characters satirized by Tolstoy rarely rise above stock types. In contrast, the more fully developed (i.e., more "real") characters are either spared satirical treatment entirely or, like Mikhailov, behave in ways that demonstrate intrinsic virtue, thus mitigating prior satirical description. As Tolstoy repeatedly asserted about himself, no individual is perfect, but one should be able to learn from one’s mistakes and live a upright life if they so choose.

Tolstoy’s lament about the ultimate purpose of the fighting at Sebastopol opens this story and provides the mood that retroactively frames the three stories collectively:

Six months have now passed since the first cannonball came hurtling over from the bastions of Sebastopol...

During this time, thousands of individual personal vanities have been insulted, thousands have been gratified and thousands have gone to rest in the arms of death. How many military decorations have been pinned on, how many stripped off, how many St. Anne Ribbons and orders of St. Vladimir have been awarded, how many pink coffins and linen palls have gone to the grave...?

One of two things appears to be true: either war is madness, or, if men perpetrate this madness, they thereby demonstrate that they are far from being the rational creatures we for some reason commonly suppose them to be.

None among 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 gives any evidence to disprove this contention. Mikhailov’s initial characterization also supports this idea, but his small affirmation of the role of duty (a concept both religious and military) and individual responsibility near the end of the story provides the simple positive (for Tolstoy) alternative to the madness of war and the irrational culture of the officers. Tolstoy stops short of making Mikhailov into a heroic figure for his actions, though, and even shows him relapsing into the vanity (and language) in his last quoted speech: "Est-ce que le pavillion est baissé déjà?" enquired Prince Galtsin, who had resumed his customary haughty manner, surveying the lieutenant-captain’s cap and addressing no one in particular.

"Non pas encore." replied Mikhailov, anxious to show that he too could speak French."

Tolstoy even goes so far as to conclude the sketch with the assertion that "[a]ll the characters are equally blameless and equally wicked," leading him to assert that "the hero[,]…who has always been, is now and will always be supremely magnificent, is truth."

His approach in "Sebastopol in December" is somewhat less hostile to the military, although the second-person address of this reportage does still take an occasional swipe at "vain, petty and mindless emotions" as it extols the qualities of Sebastopol’s defenders, the enlisted soldiers. Having been written by Tolstoy before the fall of Sebastopol (unlike the other two sketches), this piece maintains something of a positive outlook on the war, even as it chronicles some of the horror.

On the other hand, "Sebastopol in August" takes the harshest stance among the three stories 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 attack. Tolstoy’s criticism of both the conduct of the officer class and of war in general reaches a peak in this story, as does the negative reaction of the censors and critics: "...[T]he censor cut from the text numerous insinuations that the Russian officers were pampered cowards, greedy for personal glory. Even so, the published versions of these stories reflect Tolstoy’s sad conviction that even the bravest men were dying in vain." In all, The Sebastopol Sketches served as an apprenticeship for Tolstoy’s satirical voice, one that he would put to good use in the creation of his monumental novel War and Peace.

III

In the course of its intricate story, War and Peace (1865-68) introduces a cast of characters almost as numerous as the thousand-plus pages of the book. This group includes those characters created from whole cloth by Tolstoy (such as the myriad Rostovs, Pierre Bezukhov or Prince Andrei Bolkonsky), those who are thinly-disguised stand-ins for historical personages (Denisov, for example, is largely modeled on folk-hero Denis Davydov) and "actual" historical figures (such as Napoleon or General Kutuzov), over all of whom Tolstoy exerts a considerable authorial/editorial control. None of these classes of characters is exempt from Tolstoy’s satirical tendencies, although the last group is especially susceptible, as are those characters in the other two groups who are more types than fully realized individual characters.

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 conventional historical record, 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 (neither part of which is more than partially accurate), 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 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." The last of these is most important for an analysis of his satirical technique, since satire often relies heavily on associations with archetypes to achieve its effects. Bayley discusses some of the satirical types that Tolstoy employs in describing the general staff: "It is natural that Miloradovitch, who is later compared to Murat, the epitome of stupid military panache, should represent the absurdity of mere pugnacity for its own sake." Bayley continues this line of reasoning in interpreting the difference in Tolstoy’s more fleshed-out description of Kutuzov’s real-life mentor Suvorov:

He belonged to no Tolstoyan category; neither to the cold, vain Don Juan-like war-lovers, like Napoleon, nor to the pathetic and dedicated purists, like Weyrother and Pfuel, nor to the boasters and strong men, like Murat and Miloradovitch. That Tolstoy can reduce a monolithic historical figure like Napoleon to such a type, yet maintain his viability as a character within a realistic novel, is a testament to his skill at understated satire.

Tolstoy constantly deflates Napoleon’s attempts at self-mythology, parodying the language of gallantry and bravura that Napoleon used to amplify his reputation. When taken together with Tolstoy’s explicit critique of historical recollection, this parody also attempts to invalidate 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’—the tone is overtly objective, satirical, [and] even disgusted."

Still, there are entire episodes that are written by Tolstoy with comic effect in order 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 attempts to decipher and utilize the numerology of Freemasonry, Hippolyte Kuragin’s near-idiotic attempts at social conversation and the morbid and comme il faut courtship of Julie Karagina and Boris Drubetskoy, which concludes with a statement illustrative of the superficial basis for their engagement:

There was no need to say more: Julie’s face shone with triumph and self-satisfaction; but she forced Boris to say all that is said on such occasions—that he loved her and had never loved any other woman more than her. She knew that for the Penza estates and Nizhegorod forests she could demand this, and she received what she demanded. Neither of these characters receive much positive description, with Julie conforming to the familiar type of the controlling Petersburg society women that Tolstoy disliked (and portrayed negatively often in his works) and Boris essentially mirroring the careerist officers who inhabited the drawing rooms of Sebastopol in the earlier stories.

In all, Tolstoy’s control over the reader’s perspective in this novel is masterfully executed, almost so lightly as to make its presence invisible to less-sophisticated readers. His narrator does not intrude so far as to make his voice distinct within the story as a character—except, of course, when the narrator is in fact Tolstoy himself, holding forth on history, morals, etc.—choosing instead to guide the opinion of the reader by filtering the presentation of various characters and their action through a smoky lens of satirical inferences, almost all of which spring from Tolstoy’s personal agenda concerning history and society. As Ernest Simmons notes, "The revelation of personality in real life comes about over a period of time by slow accretion, by the accumulation of much detailed information and understanding through innumerable small actions and intimacies...and a close approximation of it is pursued in Tolstoy’s novels." A close approximation, yes, although not one that is necessarily free of prejudice on the part of the provider of these "small actions and intimacies," namely Tolstoy.

The "heroes" of the 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 absolute disdain 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) progresses through the novel without some thoughts or 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. The happy (in a Tolstoyan moral sense) ending that comes to this group of four is representative of the comic resolution of ridicule that Guilhamet mentions. Had these characters remained static like Berg or Hippolyte Kuragin, the ridicule would have remained in the realm of the satiric, since they would have been incapable of realizing the error of their past ways.

Minor characters, especially those like Tushin and Karataev, are allowed to flirt with saintliness, but only as allegorical models for Tolstoy’s 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 and inexperienced or as the victims of connivance by those characters whom he does categorically condemn. Tolstoy, as in The Sebastopol Sketches, reserves his real venom for those characters who are deserving of it within his scheme of things, as dictated by his personal philosophy and by the ax he has to grind with historians. These characters repeatedly are subject to the inclusion of small details or brief scenes that cast aspersions on their behavior, adding up over the course of the novel to place them clearly on the side opposite that which Tolstoy wishes to extol.

Nearly four decades pass between the publication of the final installment of War and Peace and that of the elegantly crafted novella Hadji Murad, which was composed off-and-on between 1896 and 1904, but remained unpublished until after Tolstoy’s death. If War and Peace is the "large loose baggy monster..." that Henry James so questionably claims it to be, then this work, which picks up many of the same themes that had been covered in Tolstoy’s younger writing, is as tight a summation of his mature philosophy as is extant in the author’s oeuvre.

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 thinly-veiled 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."

The story of the real-life Hadji Murad is one that Tolstoy had known since his youth, referring to it both in an 1861 essay entitled "Schoolboys and Art" as well in the frame narration that opens this novella, in which he states that the story was "partly seen [by him]self, partly heard from eye-witnesses, and in part imagined." The third part of this statement is the one that allows him to transform this tale from a simple retelling of a war-story into a meditation and subsequent lecture about morality. Through the introduction of characters like Chernyshov, the elder Vorontsov and Poltoratsky (some of whom, again, are drawn from real figures), Tolstoy is able to use satire to turn such officially celebrated personages (they are, after all, representative of the Russian military commanders who eventually subdued the Chechen insurrection) into foils, against whom the "true" dignity and goodness of a character like the Hadji Murad he creates is immediately recognizable.

The most striking example of this treatment occurs after Hadji Murad has surrendered himself to the younger Vorontsov and is taken to meet with the elder Vorontsov, a representative of the Tsar. Tolstoy here satirizes the superficiality of Russian high society by reversing the technique he employed in "Sebastopol in May." Rather than bringing the mountain of Russian high society to the Mohammedans of Chechnya, Tolstoy chooses to place Hadji Murad, the embodiment of all the virtues that he sees in the Chechen mountaineers, directly into that society and to contrast the values of the two directly. Tolstoy utilizes his trademark technique of ostranenie to survey the scene from Hadji Murad’s unconditioned perspective. Before Hadji Murad arrives in Tiflis, he is the topic of a heated dinner-table discussion among Vorontsov’s coterie. Once he arrives, he becomes a first-hand participant (and commentator) on an evening in the company of this group, with both scenes providing opportunities for Tolstoy to comment deprecatingly on the Russian elites.

As Hadji Murad is discussed at a sumptuous dinner, a general speaks of his personal experience regarding the Chechen leader:

"Why it was he, if your excellency will please remember," said the general, "who arranged the ambush that attacked the rescue party in the ‘Biscuit’ expedition."¼

What the brave general spoke of as the "rescue" was the affair in the unfortunate Dargo campaign in which a whole detachment, including Prince Vorontsov who commanded it, would certainly have perished had it not been rescued by the arrival of fresh troops. Every one knew that the whole Dargo campaign under Vorontsov’s command¼ had been a shameful affair, and therefore, if anyone mentioned it in Vorontsov’s presence they did so only in the aspect in which Vorontsov had reported it to the Tsar—as a brilliant achievement of the Russian army.

Vorontsov is essentially caught in a lie in the relation of this seemingly small 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 actual integrity of Hadji Murad and inserts the brief corrective comment about the truth of the Dargo campaign 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":

[…]Pest proceeded to describe how he had ended up in command of his entire company, how his company commander had been killed, how he, Pest, had bayoneted a Frenchman and how, had it not been for him, the day would have been lost, and so on, and so forth.

The principal elements of this story¼ were factually true; in recounting its details, however, the cadet boasted and made things up.

And again, in a slightly later passage: Baron Pest had also come up to the Boulevard. He was telling a long story about how he had been present when the truce was signed, and had spoken with the French officers, one of whom had apparently said to him: "S’il n’avait pas fait clair encore pendant une demi-heure, les ambuscades auraient été reprises," and how he had replied: "Monsieur! Je ne dit pas non, pour ne pas vous donner un démenti," and what a good rejoinder it had been, and so forth.

While it is true that he had been present at the signing of the truce, he had not managed to say anything particularly clever¼ It had only been later, on his way to the boulevard, that he had thought up the French ripostes with which he was now entertaining everyone.

The dismissive use of the phrase "and so forth" (i tak dalee, in the original Russian) in both these passages pointedly demonstrates the insignificance and meaninglessness of Pest’s words—they do not even merit full reproduction, since they are only dissembling attempts at saving face rather than actual events.

Overt narrative identification of instances in which characters willingly distort the truth for their own self-aggrandizement remains a consistent feature throughout Tolstoy’s writing. In a largely unconcealed manner, Tolstoy is engaging in what Morson calls "the etiology of utterance": "[The parodist] does not…quote ‘out of context,’ as the [parodied] targets often respond, but rather in ‘too much’ context—in a context the targets would have rather overlooked." This technique is among the most effective of his satirical weapons, serving to expose vainglorious and self-important figures as little more than charlatans, and providing Tolstoy a negative model against which he can favorably compare those characters he believes to be more righteous, either in terms of a moral/religious sense or in the less clearly articulated 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:

When Hadji Murad arrived at the prince’s palace the next day, the waiting room was already full of people. Yesterday’s general with the bristly moustaches was there in full uniform with all his decorations, having come to take leave. There was the commander of a regiment who was in danger of being court-martialled for misappropriating commissariat money, and there was a rich Armenian¼ who wanted to obtain from the Government a renewal of his monopoly for the sale of vodka. There, dressed in black, was the widow of an officer who had been killed in action. She had come to ask for a pension, or for free education for her children. There was a ruined Georgian prince in magnificent Georgian costume who was trying to obtain for himself some confiscated church property. There was an official with a large roll if paper containing a new plan for subjugating the Caucasus. There was also a Khan who had come solely to be able to tell his people at home that he had called on the prince. Hadji Murad is then taken to the opera, to which he is described as "obviously indifferent," but sits through because of his "Oriental Mohammedan dignity." This scene, and indeed Hadji Murad’s entire interaction with the Russian haute monde, 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. Hadji Murad is not as impressionable as Natasha is, but his perspective is similarly estranged from that of the Russians (removed to a Georgian setting in Tiflis) who are watching as "an Italian opera was performed at the new theater, which was decorated in Oriental style." The incongruous mélange of cultures represented by this scene furthers the comparison between the essential integrity (chestnost’) of Hadji Murad and the superficial banality of those around him. Morson specifically cites Tolstoy’s depiction of opera (although without mentioning Hadji Murad) as part of a satirical gesture aimed toward not only characters but certain audiences as well: Parodies are usually described as being of (or "after") a particular author or work, but the parodist’ principal target may, in fact, be a particular audience or class of readers. The etiology of utterance includes the pathology of reception…. Tolstoy’s parodies of opera in War and Peace and What Is Art?, for instance, are primarily concerned with why "rich, idle people" should enjoy such immoral artifice. By making opera ridiculous in the eyes of his hero, Tolstoy satirizes not only the members of Tiflis’s vysshii svet but also anyone who sympathizes with them.

Tolstoy also combines his dislike of the foppishness of military officers and the strong criticism of sexuality that had so strongly marked the writings of his later career when he describes those who are present at "the usual evening party at the Vorontsov’s":

Young women and women not very young wearing dresses that displayed their bare necks, arms, and breasts, turned round and round in the embrace of men in bright uniforms. At the buffet, footmen in red swallow-tail coats and wearing shoes and knee-breeches, poured out champagne and served sweetmeats to the ladies. The "Sirdar’s" [Vorontsov] wife also, in spite of her age, went about half-dressed among the visitors smiling affably, and through the interpreter said a few amiable words to Hadji Murad who glanced at the visitors with the same indifference he had shown yesterday in the theater. After the hostess, other half-naked women came up to him and all of them stood shamelessly before him and smilingly asked him the same question: How he liked what he saw? Vorontsov himself, wearing gold epaulets and gold shoulder-knots with his white cross and ribbon at his neck, came up and asked him the same question, evidently feeling sure, like all the others, that Hadji Murad could not help being pleased at what he saw. When contrasted with this poshlost’-filled rogues’ gallery (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 the very characters whom Tolstoy satirizes that provide any criticism of Hadji Murad in Tiflis. These comments function in the story as slanders rather than believable observations, given the power of Tolstoy’s corrective narrator. Hadji Murad’s measured reaction (he responds to Vorontsov’s above question "as he had replied to them all, that among his people nothing of the kind was done, without expressing an opinion as to whether it was good or bad that it was so") to the shallow carnival that he witnesses in Tiflis is enough to make the reader sympathize with him in regard to the probity of such matters, a viewpoint that the moralistic older Tolstoy would almost certainly share.

The characters who sympathize with Hadji Murad, other than his henchmen, are those who are either excluded from or choose to depart from the usual behavior of elite Russian society. For example, the servant woman Marya Vasilievna is a positive Tolstoyan character type, reminiscent in many ways of Princess Mary or Anisya Fyodorovna from War and Peace. Similarly, Butler is first presented as a shallow young officer but gains greater insight through his direct interaction with Hadji Murad and his men. This process is similar to the growth that Pierre Bezukhov undergoes in War and Peace, especially his epiphany in the wake of meeting Platon Karataev. The younger Vorontsov also has some admiration for Hadji Murad, although his social/military rank, and the direct relation to the corrupted/corrupting society into which this rank places him, makes him largely unable and unwilling to accept Hadji Murad fully. 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, insomuch as they are mostly spared his satirical lacerations, but they 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 surrounds him.

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.