"War and Peace" by L. N. Tolstoy is a historical novel. Why do certain historical events occur? Who drives history? In his historical and philosophical views, Tolstoy is a fatalist. He believes that the course of historical events is predetermined from above and does not depend on the arbitrariness of people. "Man consciously lives for himself, but serves as an unconscious tool for achieving historical, universal goals."

From this postulate follows a conclusion proved by the entire logic of the novel. The decisive influence on the course of events is exerted not by an individual (even if exceptional) personality, but by the people. To reveal the character of a whole people - this is the most important artistic task of "War and Peace". “The unresolved, hanging question of life or death, not only over Bolkonsky, but also over all of Russia, overshadowed all other assumptions,” writes Tolstoy, emphasizing the inextricable connection between the fate of his favorite heroes with the life of the people, with the outcome of the struggle that he is waging.

Pierre, having visited the Borodin field, having become a witness true heroism ordinary people, saw that "hidden warmth of patriotism", "which kindles patriotic feelings in every soldier." “To be a soldier, just a soldier,” Pierre thinks. Tolstoy portrayed the Russian people in crucial moment stories.

Throughout the novel, the author emphasizes that it was thanks to the people that Russia emerged victorious from the war. Russian soldiers fought and died not in the name of crosses, ranks and glory. In moments of feat, they least of all thought about glory. “There is no true greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth,” writes Tolstoy. However, while affirming the idea that history is created by people, the masses, the people, and not by a person who has risen above the people, Tolstoy does not deny the role of man in history in general.

Individuals have the freedom to choose their own actions. He who enjoys every moment of such freedom, intuition penetrates into common sense events, deserves the name of a great man.

This is how Kutuzov is depicted in the novel. Outwardly, he is passive, giving orders only when circumstances require it. He considers his main task to be the leadership of the "spirit of the army" - this is the key to victory. Being a wise commander close to the people, he feels this "spirit", "that people's feeling that he carries in himself in all its purity and strength." Kutuzov knew that the fate of the battle was decided not by the orders of the commander in chief, not by the place on which the troops stood, not by the number of guns and killed people, but by that elusive force called the spirit of the troops, and he followed this force and directed it, as far as it was in his authorities. The antipode of Kutuzov in the novel is Napoleon. According to his historical concept, the writer draws this famous commander and prominent figure as " little man with an "unpleasantly feigned smile on his face".

He is narcissistic, arrogant, blinded by fame, considers himself driving force historical process. His insane pride makes him take acting poses, utter pompous phrases. For him, "only what happened in his soul" is of interest. And "everything that was outside of him did not matter to him, because everything in the world, as it seemed to him, depended only on his will." In the novel "War and Peace" Tolstoy decided difficult task, corresponding to his historical views: he created the image of an entire people at a turning point for the fate of Russia in a historical moment.

There is a war going on in Austria. General Mack is defeated at Ulm.

The Austrian army surrendered. The threat of defeat hung over the Russian army.

And then Kutuzov decided to send Bagration with four thousand soldiers through the rugged Bohemian mountains towards the French. Bagration had to quickly make a difficult transition and delay the 40,000-strong French army until Kutuzov arrived.

His detachment had to accomplish a great feat in order to save the Russian army. So the author brings the reader to the image of the first great battle. In this battle, as always, Dolokhov is bold and fearless. Dolokhov's courage is manifested in battle, where "he killed one Frenchman at point-blank range and was the first to take a surrendered officer by the collar." But after that, he goes to the regimental commander and reports on his “trophies”: “Please remember, Your Excellency! Then he untied the handkerchief, pulled it and showed the gore: “Wound with a bayonet, I stayed at the front.

Remember, Your Excellency." Everywhere, always, he remembers first of all about himself, only about himself, everything he does, he does for himself. We are not surprised by Zherkov's behavior either. When, at the height of the battle, Bagration sent him with an important order to the general of the left flank, he did not go forward, where the shooting was heard, but began to look for the general away from the battle. Due to an untransmitted order, the French cut off the Russian hussars, many died and were wounded.

There are many such officers. They are not cowardly, but they do not know how to forget themselves, their careers and personal interests for the sake of a common cause.

However, the Russian army consisted not only of such officers. In the chapters depicting the Battle of Shengraben, we meet true heroes. Here he sits, the hero of this battle, the hero of this "case", small, thin and dirty, sitting barefoot, taking off his boots. This is artillery officer Tushin. “With big, intelligent and kind eyes, he looks at the commanders who have entered and tries to joke: “The soldiers say that they are more dexterous when they take off their shoes,” and he is embarrassed, feeling that the joke has failed.

Tolstoy is doing everything so that Captain Tushin appears before us in the most unheroic form, even ridiculous. But this one funny man was the hero of the day.

Prince Andrey will rightly say about him: "We owe the success of the day most of all to the action of this battery and the heroic stamina of Captain Tushin with the company." The second hero of the Shengraben battle is Timokhin. He appears at the very moment when the soldiers succumbed to panic and ran. Everything seemed lost. But at that moment the French, advancing on ours, suddenly ran back ... and Russian arrows appeared in the forest. It was Timokhin's company.

And only thanks to Timo-Khin did the Russians have the opportunity to return and gather battalions. Courage is varied. There are many people who are unrestrainedly brave in battle, but are lost in everyday life. With the images of Tushin and Timokhin, Tolstoy teaches the reader to see truly brave people, their low-key heroism, their great will, which helps to overcome fear and win battles. In the war of 1812, when every soldier fought for his home, for relatives and friends, for his homeland, the consciousness of danger increased tenfold strength. The deeper Napoleon advanced into the depths of Russia, the more the strength of the Russian army grew, the more the French army weakened, turning into a bunch of thieves and marauders.

Only the will of the people, only the people's will makes the army invincible. This conclusion follows from L.

N. Tolstoy "War and Peace".

A look at history (based on the novel by L. N. Tolstoy "War and Peace")

Essay on literature.

Topic: A Look at History: "Which Power Governs Everything?" based on the novel by L. N. Tolstoy "War and Peace".

The epic novel by L. N. Tolstoy "War and Peace", created by the writer in the sixties of the last century, became a great event in Russian and world literature. Back in 1860, the writer tried to turn to the genre historical novel. The attempt to write The Decembrists led Tolstoy to the idea of ​​War and Peace, in which the writer seeks to understand the course and meaning of history, the role of the individual in the historical process, and most importantly, the role of the people in its turning points.

The peculiarity of the novel lies in the fact that the story, imperceptibly for the reader, passes into the novel, and the novel into history. Historical persons that exist in reality (Kutuzov, Napoleon, Alexander, Bagration, Dokhturov) coexist and act together with fictional characters (Prince Andrei, Natasha and Petya Rostov, Pierre Bezukhov, Princess Marya). This feature of the novel was noticed by the participant of the Battle of Borodino, the poet and writer Vyazemsky, who in his article “Memoirs of 1812” noted that the author of the novel was not “a strict historical painter” in this work.

Indeed, Tolstoy's work is polemical in relation to official historiography, which glorifies the exploits of heroes and ignores the decisive role of the individual in the Patriotic War of 1812. Having studied many books, historical documents, memoirs before writing, talking with contemporaries and participants in the war, visiting the places of the most important battles, Tolstoy understood the events of more than half a century ago better than those who believed in fictitious feats that passed off as historical reality.

The subtle psychologist Tolstoy knew such important feature human soul as a tendency to exaggerate the significance of events and betray to others what they want to hear. So one of the most honest heroes of the novel, Nikolai Rostov, telling Berg about his first fight, began with a desire to tell everything as it was, but as the story progressed, “imperceptibly, involuntarily and inevitably for himself, he turned into a lie”: “They wanted a story about how he burned all over in flames, not remembering himself, how he flew into a square like a storm; how he cut into him, chopped right and left; how the saber tasted the meat, and how he fell exhausted, and the like. And he told them all this." Proceeding from this feature of the human soul, the writer put forward in the novel his own subjective view of the historical events of that time, sometimes radically different from the views of researchers.

Many historians reproached Tolstoy for the fact that historical figures novels are far from reality, largely changed and implausible. But in his characters, the writer was primarily interested in their moral character. Portraits of Bagration, Kutuzov, Napoleon are far from reality and are often rather conditional, far from what is known about them from historical documents, books and the words of contemporaries. So Napoleon in the work - artistic image and not a historical figure. Tolstoy does not want to see the courage, greatness and genius of the French commander praised by so many writers and poets, he ridicules his orders and dispositions. Even the appearance of Napoleon is deliberately distorted: when describing him, the main emphasis is on the “hairy chest” and “fat thighs”, with the help of which the Napoleonic myth is debunked. The negative aspects of the hero's personality (selfishness, rudeness, narcissism, cruelty) Tolstoy draws more vividly, while the value of the positive ones (military genius) is deliberately reduced. But despite this, the writer reproduced the behavior and moral side of the personality of the French emperor accurately. Tolstoy does not deny the outstanding abilities of Napoleon, even speaking of them ironically (“The trembling of my left calf is great sign”), but the writer denies him as a person who puts himself above the people. In the author's interpretation, the beauty of the human soul is impossible without "simplicity, goodness and truth", which are absent in an unprincipled conqueror who brought ruin and enslavement to the peoples.

The whole novel is imbued not only with the idea of ​​debunking the personal heroism of historical figures, real persons and characters, but also with a complete denial of the special role of the individual in history. It is no coincidence that the most important feats in the novel are not real. existing people, but fictional characters such as Tushin and Timokhin. Tolstoy says that one person is not able to radically influence the course of historical events, and only by uniting, as the Russian people did in the Patriotic War of 1812, it is possible to become the creator of history.

The complete denial of military art by the author is especially pronounced in the novel. Through the lips of Andrei Bolkonsky, the author’s point of view on the need for war is expressed in the novel: “War is an event that is contrary to human reason and all human nature.” In the description of the battles, the writer ridicules military symbols and traditions (banners are “sticks with pieces of cloth”) and highlights the moral factor of war. Using the example of several battles, Tolstoy shows that victory does not depend on the number of troops, not on the location of the army, and not on the plans of the commanders-in-chief, but on the morale of ordinary soldiers. So in Shengraben, the four thousandth Russian army defeated the forty thousandth French, while at Austerlitz it was defeated, having powerful allies and a numerical superiority. But the mood of the Russian troops in the two battles is different. In Shengraben, the feeling of unity of all participants in the battle (“invisible river”) prevails, as well as fortitude and confidence in the victory of each soldier (“It has begun! Here it is - scary and fun!”), While at Austerlitz, even though the situation of forces and changed towards the Russians, there is no enthusiasm in the ranks of the soldiers, apathy and indifference reign. The indifference of the troops is great, and Tolstoy emphasizes the mechanical nature of the movement of the masses with the words "as in the mechanism of a clock."

But the main thing that distinguishes the views of the writer and historians is a different understanding of what victory in the war depends on. If historians considered the well-chosen position of the troops, the strength and professionalism of the army, as well as the precisely calculated tactics and strategy of the commander in chief, to be the main components of victory, then Tolstoy saw the key to success in the moral and psychological state of the troops, the patriotism of the soldiers and their understanding of the meaning and goals of the war. The writer emphasizes that the campaign of 1805 was lost because the people did not understand its meaning and could not fight for what they did not understand. Tolstoy rebels against the war of predatory and predatory, cruel and unjust, but he considers it as a holy war, caused by the need to defend the Fatherland. The writer believes that the Patriotic War of 1812 was won thanks to the "hidden feeling of patriotism" of the Russian people, who massively stood up to defend the Motherland from invaders and robbers. External danger united all people, regardless of their social status: the elder Vasilisa and the deacon “destroyed the great army in parts”, Prince Andrei and Tushin shot together the village occupied by the French, Count Bezukhov ate from the same pot with ordinary soldiers. It is in this universal unity that Tolstoy sees main reason victory in the Patriotic War. The writer emphasizes that it is the participation of the people in them that gives a socially significant role to events, and depicts the entire war as a people's war, contrary to the opinion of historians, that it was won only thanks to the ingenious calculation of Kutuzov, who forced the weakened Napoleonic army to march along the Smolenskaya ravaged by them themselves. road.

Evgeny Sheinman

"... mysterious forces that move
humanity (mysterious because
that the laws that govern them
movement unknown to us), continued
your action"
L.N. Tolstoy, "War and Peace"

These lines are among the first in the epilogue to War and Peace. Lev Nikolayevich's brilliant novel was one of the most beloved among several books in my youth, which I constantly reread. In one of the most popular Russian talk shows, which were led by Pyotr Tolstoy (I heard that he is a descendant of the great writer), it was about education, one girl got up, saying that we don’t want to read War and Peace, we are bored! None of those present were horrified, indignant, even sympathetic remarks were heard ...
I don't know if everyone who read the novel once paid attention to the epilogue. In fact, thoughts about what drives the story are scattered throughout the novel, but they are concentrated in the epilogue and, in fact, the epilogue is like a separate philosophical work, quite significant in volume (more than 100 pages), consisting of two parts. And if in the first part a rather weighty part is still devoted to the main characters of the novel, then the second part is a purely philosophical treatise. I have long dreamed of “dealing with” this epilogue separately from the novel, I didn’t dare, but now I’m going to ...
Before I take the novel into my hands, let me, I think, look on the Internet for what is on the issue stated in the title of the article. Imagine my amazement when it turned out that a significant part of the sites referred to L.N. Tolstoy!
The main thoughts of these sites are approximately the following: a person can do little. History, according to the writer, acts in the world as a natural force. Its laws, like physical or chemical laws, exist independently of the desires, will and consciousness of thousands and millions of people. That is why, according to Tolstoy, it is impossible to explain anything in history based on these desires and wills. He argues that it is impossible to explain the development of historical events by the will, desires, deeds of individual great people - “ historical figures". History, according to Tolstoy, is the result of the coincidence of interests and actions of many people who make up the mass of the people.
In a very “fresh” article by Igor Smirnov “History and Its Other” (“Star”, 2016, No. 6), the author makes a small reference to “War and Peace”: “According to Leo Tolstoy’s conviction, substantiated by him in a philosophical supplement to War and the world”, history constantly results in its content the freedom of human will, which reason tries in vain to formalize retroactively, imposing changes life circumstances necessity property. Equalizing historical energy with freedom from predestination (from Providence), Tolstoy, it would seem, clearly sees how homo historicus and homo ritualis differ from each other. However, in its implicative depth, the historiosophical epilogue of "War and Peace" gives emancipatory acts the same character of "eternal return" that ritual actions have. All clear?
Here is another stylistic example from the same work: “History has already said everything about itself at its starting point. Paradoxically, it is total from the very beginning, before it has had time to go through all its vicissitudes. This position was formulated more clearly than others in 1923. Lev Karsavin, according to whose idea history is generated from itself by the same “contracted universal subject”, which proves its constant presence in empirically dissimilar time by self-improvement. History, subjected to cyclization, is evaluated not only optimistically, but also as regressus ad infinitum, as if never conquering its downward slide. Much of this work is read as if it were written in foreign language. like this modern language philosophy (the article is under the heading "Philosophical Commentary")
My favorite philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Epshtein, in his article “Pause and Explosion” (Zvezda, 2016, No. 1), says this about history: “History is less and less subject to the laws of determinism that limit the pace social evolution, and more and more corresponds to the controlled-explosive type of thinking, when paradigm shifts occur not once in centuries, in the form of revolutions, but constantly, in the form of accelerating evolution. History is becoming more and more intellectualized, becoming a series of mental events that take place not so much in temporal succession as simultaneously, like an explosive expansion of civilization, an expansion of thought in all directions. There is a synchronous emergence of many new concepts, ideas, methods, disciplines that lead beyond the boundaries of history itself as a plot, narrative type of civilizational dynamics (one follows the other). .. now history becomes a dance of black swans - unpredictable events, anomalies, suddenly becoming sprouts of new systems. We are entering a turbulent field consisting of bifurcation points. ...". As they say, does not add clarity ...
I recently came across an article by Alla Latynina about Alexei Varlamov's novel The Mental Wolf. The article is called “Who controls history?” (N.Mir, 2014, No. 9). I was delighted - now, I think, I found it - after all, the title is almost the same as mine, only instead of "who" I have "what" ... Alas, this promising title turned out to be only a figure of speech.
How do you like modern statements on history? No, I will look for the answer to my question from Lev Nikolaevich. So...
The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind. It seems impossible to directly catch and embrace in a word - to describe the life of not only mankind, but one people.
To questions about how individual people forced peoples to act according to their will and how the very will of these people was controlled, historians resolved these questions by believing in the direct participation of the deity in the affairs of mankind. New story rejects this position in theory, but follows them in practice. Instead of people endowed with divine power, guided by the divine will of a deity, the new history has either heroes gifted with extraordinary, inhuman abilities, or simply people of a wide variety of qualities, from monarchs to journalists. Modern history has come to recognize that peoples are led by individuals, and that there is a certain goal towards which peoples and humanity are moving. If instead of divine power another force has become, then it is necessary to explain what this power consists of. new power, for in this force lies the whole interest in history.
What is the power that drives the nations? This question is as urgent as possible even now, when millions of people from distressed countries are fleeing to prosperous countries. Tolstoy meant the movement of the armed masses of the Napoleonic troops from west to east, and their reverse movement, pursued by Russian troops from east to west. We return to the Tolstoyan question. Some historians understand this power as the power inherent in heroes and lords. However, these historians often describe the same events in the opposite way. Other historians recognize this force as the result of a variety of directed many forces. They are for the most part use the concept of power as a force that in itself produces events. According to them, a historical person is a product of his time, and his power is a product of his time, and his power is a product of various forces, and his power is a force that produces an event. The third historians - historians of culture, see this force in the so-called culture, in mental activity. It can be assumed that there is something in common between mental strength and the movement of peoples, but in no case should it be allowed, according to Tolstoy, that mental activity directed the actions of the people. The inevitability of the concept of power to explain historical phenomena is proved by historians themselves.
This power cannot be that direct force of the physical predominance of a strong being over a weak one, a predominance based on application or the threat of an application. physical strength like the power of Hercules; nor can it be based on the overcoming of moral force. History shows us that neither the Louis nor the Meternichs, who ruled millions of people, had any special properties of spiritual strength, but, on the contrary, were for the most part morally weaker than each of the millions of people whom they ruled. Obviously, the source of this power must be outside the person, in those relations to the masses in which the person in power is located. Power is the totality of the wills of the masses, transferred by express or tacit consent to the rulers elected by the masses. However, there is a lot of contradiction here. If the force that moves peoples lies not in historical figures, but in the peoples themselves, then what is the significance of these historical figures? Historical persons, historians say, express the will of the masses: the activity of historical persons serves as a representative of the activity of the masses. But, in this case, the question is whether all the activities of historical persons serve as an expression of the will of the masses, or only a certain side of it? Faced with this difficulty, historians come up with the most obscure, intangible, and general concept over which it is possible to sum up largest number events, and they say that this concept is the goal of the movement of mankind. The most common, accepted by almost all historians general concepts- this is freedom, equality, enlightenment, progress, culture.
However, the activity of millions of people moving, burning houses, burning each other, etc. is never expressed in the description of the activities of a dozen people who do not burn houses, do not exterminate each other. It will be the history of monarchs and writers, and not the history of the life of peoples.
The life of peoples does not fit into the lives of several people, because the connection between these several people and peoples has not been found. The theory that this connection is based on the transfer of the totality of wills to historical persons is a hypothesis not supported by the experience of history. The theory of transferring the will of the masses to historical figures is only a paraphrase - only an expression in other words of the question: what is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? - Power is a set of wills transferred to one person. Under what conditions are the wills of the masses transferred to one person? - Under the conditions of expressing the will of all people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word whose meaning we do not understand.
We cannot accept power as the cause of events. Power, from the point of view of experience, is only the dependence that exists between the expression of the will of a person and the fulfillment of this will by other people. An order cannot in any case be the cause of an event; there is a certain definite dependence between the one and the other. To understand this dependence, it is necessary to take into account that the person who orders himself participates in the event. This attitude of the one who orders to those whom he orders is precisely what is called power.
Of all those formations in which people form to perform collective actions, one of the sharpest and most definite is the army. Every army is made up of lower military ranks - privates, who are always the most a large number of, then corporals (meaning times Patriotic War 1812), non-commissioned officers, whose number less than the first, from still higher officers, the number of which is even less, etc. to the highest military power, which is concentrated in one person.
The soldier himself directly stabs, cuts, burns, robs, and always receives orders for these actions from superiors, but he himself never orders. A non-commissioned officer performs the action itself less often than a soldier, but already orders. The officer even more rarely performs the action itself and even more often orders. The general already only orders the troops to go, indicating the goal, and almost never uses weapons. The commander can never take part in the action itself and only makes general orders about the movement of the masses. The same relation of persons to each other is indicated in any connection of people for a common activity - in agriculture, trade, production, etc. It is this relation of persons who order to those whom they order, and constitutes the essence of the concept called power. By their very nature, those who order take the least part in the event itself, their activity is exclusively aimed at ordering. The one who ordered more, as a result of his activity with words, obviously could act less with his hands. Without this, the simplest question that arises when considering each event could not be explained: how do millions of people commit cumulative crimes, wars of murder, etc.?
So what is power? “Power is such an attitude famous person to other persons, in which this person takes part in the action the less, the more it expresses opinions, assumptions and justifications for the ongoing cumulative action.
What force produces the movement of peoples? “The movement of peoples produces not power, not mental activity, not even a combination of both, as historians thought, but the activity of all people who take part in an event and always unite in such a way that those who take the greatest direct part in the event take on the least responsibility, and vice versa.
It must be admitted that this Tolstoyan definition does not add optimism to the understanding of historical events. What kind of activity of all people leads to certain events? Tolstoy, describing the movement of peoples, had in mind the movement of the armed masses, to which the concept of power and other types of activity that Tolstoy wrote about is naturally applicable. But what about the current great migration of peoples to prosperous countries? One can, of course, explain this by the eternal desire of people to a better life. But why is this happening on such a scale right now? After all, no one ordered anyone, did not show power, everything happens as if spontaneously, but is it spontaneous? Looking for an answer...
History refers to man, “man, who is the subject of history, directly says: I am free and therefore not subject to laws. The presence of the albeit unspoken question of human free will is felt at every step of history. That's where this vague feeling came from, where this concept popped up in my memory, which was the reason for writing my previous article “Is there free will?”! Tolstoy believes that all the contradictions, the obscurities of history, the false path along which this science goes, are based only on the insolubility of this issue. If the will of each person were free, that is, if each could do as he pleased, then the whole history is a series of incoherent accidents. If there is at least one law governing the actions of people, then there can be no free will, because then the will of people is subject to this law. In this contradiction, he argues, lies the question of free will, which has occupied since ancient times the best minds humanity.
Looking at man as an object of observation, says Tolstoy, we find a general law of necessity, to which he is subject as well as everything that exists. Looking at it from ourselves as something we are conscious of, we feel free. True, something painfully familiar? Remember, we taught according to Diamat: “Freedom is a conscious necessity”? It always seemed to me that this is a statement of Engels, well, at worst, Hegel. I rummaged through the Internet, in one place I came across that, it seems, this is a statement by Spinoza. In modern concepts of free will, I have not come across the term “necessity”, the equivalent of this concept is, obviously, “determinism”.
Schopenhauer put it well (I take this from my previous article “Is there free will?”): Suppose a person is able to choose between two “I want” at his own discretion, but is a person able to choose what he wants? How is it done given choice? Depending on your priorities, you choose based on your principles, on your logic, on your intuition, on the headache from yesterday's adventures - and you feel in this the realization of your own freedom. But where did your principles come from? Why is logic important to you? Why do you trust your intuition? Where do your emotions come from? And why does a headache incline you to one and not another choice? Did you choose your character or did it somehow form by itself? It turns out that even if we have freedom of choice, it does not change anything - each choice is predetermined by the complex background of our life and, in each specific situation, is completely unpredictable. We can convince ourselves and others that we clearly know why we do this or that act, but a few questions will be enough to clearly reveal that we do not know the reasons for our own choice, but only adjust the fait accompli to explanations that are beneficial to us.
Tolstoy introduces the concepts of "consciousness" and "mind" into his reasoning. This consciousness is a completely separate and independent source of self-knowledge from the mind. Through the mind man observes himself; but he knows himself only through consciousness.
Surprisingly, these seemingly abstract arguments find experimental confirmation in modern science! In 1980, Benjamin Libet, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, conducted an experiment that disproved the traditional notion that we believe that the simplest movement, such as raising a hand, occurs in the following sequence: first, the mind makes a decision, the brain transmits it to the neurons , responsible for controlling the body, then the neurons transmit the command to the muscles. Libet, on the other hand, believed that consciousness and the brain act simultaneously. Or the brain acts first, and only then the decision reaches consciousness (obviously, in this case, the brain can be interpreted as the mind, as in Tolstoy).
The experiments of the Haynes group are also known. They prove that many seconds before it seems to us that we have made a decision, it has already been made by our brain. In the presentation of most of the media, the work of the Hynes group is presented as a complete exclusion of the possibility of free will. Where do our desires come from? Reasoning on this issue is contained in the book by Sam Harris "Free Will, which does not exist": "Every second our brain processes great amount information of which we are aware of only a small fraction. Although we are constantly noticing changes occurring in us - in thoughts, moods, perceptions, behaviors, etc., we know nothing about the neurophysiological mechanisms behind them. In fact, we are very mediocre observers as far as our own life. Often the people around us understand our state and motives of behavior better than we ourselves, by facial expression and tone of voice. I usually start the day with a cup of coffee or tea, sometimes two cups. This morning I drank coffee (two cups). Why not tea? I have no idea. I wanted coffee more than tea, and I was completely free to get what I wanted. Was this choice conscious? No. The choice was made for me by mechanisms in the brain, and in such a way that I, the subject, supposedly aware of my thoughts and actions, could neither control this choice nor influence it. Could I "change my mind" and make tea before the coffee drinker in me realizes which way the wind is blowing? Yes, but that would also be an unconscious impulse. Why didn't he show up this morning? Why might it occur in the future? I dont know". (I apologize to the reader, but I also took this piece from my previous work). But let's go back to Tolstoy...
All the strivings of people, all the impulses of people towards life, are the essence of the striving to increase freedom. Wealth-poverty, fame-unknown, power-subordination, strength - weakness, health-disease, education-ignorance, work-leisure, satiety-hunger, virtue-vice are only great or lesser degrees freedom. How should it be considered past life peoples and mankind - as a product of free will or non-free activity of people? Here is the question of history.
No matter how we consider the idea of ​​the activity of many people or one person, we understand it only as the product of partly the freedom of man, partly the laws of necessity. The ratio of freedom to necessity decreases and increases, according to the point of view from which the act is considered; but this ratio always remains inversely proportional.
The further back we look at events, the less they seem arbitrary to us. The further back in history we carry the object of observation, the more doubtful becomes the freedom of the people who produced the events, and the more obvious the law of necessity. Doesn't it seem to you, reader, that the theory of relativity operates here, according to which the result depends on the position of the observer?
If we consider such a position of a person in which his connection with the external world is most known, the period of time of judgment from the time of the commission of an act is the largest and the reasons for the act are the most accessible, then we get an idea of ​​the greatest necessity and the least freedom. If we consider a person in the least dependence on external conditions, if his action is performed at the nearest moment to the present, and the reasons for his action are inaccessible to us, then we will get an idea of ​​the least necessity and greatest freedom. We can never imagine either complete freedom or complete necessity.
“Reason expresses the laws of necessity. Consciousness expresses the essence of freedom... Freedom is content, necessity is form... Only when they are combined, a clear idea of ​​human life is obtained.... Everything that we know about people's life is only a certain relation of freedom to necessity, that is, consciousness to the laws of reason. In my opinion, these chopped Tolstoyan definitions can only be understood on an intuitive level...
In history, what we know we call the laws of necessity; what is unknown is freedom. Freedom for history is only the expression of an unknown remnant of what we know about the laws of human life.
According to Tolstoy, for history, the recognition of the freedom of people as a force that can influence historical events, that is, not subject to laws, is the same as for astronomy the recognition of the free force of the movement of heavenly forces.
“For history, there are lines of movement of human wills, one end of which is hidden in the unknown, and at the other end of which the consciousness of freedom of people in the present moves in space, in time, and depending on causes. The more this field of movement expands before our eyes, the more obvious are the laws of this movement. To catch and define these laws is the task of the people of history. So, I think, now Tolstoy will tell about these laws. True, it is embarrassing that there is very little left until the end of the epilogue - only a few pages, I'm worried - will I have time? Looking forward to the end of the story, where is it?
But hopes are melting with the approach of the last lines. We read further: “The search for these laws has long been begun, and those new methods of thinking that history must learn for itself are developed simultaneously with self-destruction, to which all the crushing and crushing of the causes of phenomena, goes old story". This is followed by Tolstoy's important conclusion about the unknowability of the primary causes of historical phenomena: "And if history has as its subject the study of the movement of peoples and mankind, and not a description of episodes from people's lives, then it must, having removed the concept of causes, look for laws ..."
For history, the difficulty of recognizing the subordination of personality to the laws of space, time, and causes is to renounce the immediate sense of independence of one's personality. “True, we do not feel our dependence, but, having allowed our freedom, we come to nonsense; admitting our dependence on the external world, time and causes, we come to laws ... It is necessary to renounce conscious freedom and recognize dependence that we do not feel. This is the last line of the epilogue. Not wait. We have come to the first lines of the epilogue, which I have taken as an epigraph. Whether these laws are now open or not - this is already beyond the scope of my analysis of the philosophical treatise of a brilliant writer, so I do not continue further. I provide it to others.

Views of L. N. Tolstoy

On the story in the novel "War and Peace" “I tried to write the history of the people,” said L. N. Tolstoy about his novel “ War and Peace". And this is not just a phrase: the great Russian writer really depicted in the work not so much individual heroes as the whole people as a whole. "People's thought" defines in the novel and philosophical Tolstoy's views, and the image of historical events, specific historical figures, and the moral assessment of the actions of the heroes. What is the power that drives the nations? Who is the creator of history - the individual or the people? The writer asks such questions at the beginning of the novel and tries to answer them with the whole course of the story. According to Tolstoy, the historical path of the country is determined not by the will of a historical figure, not by his decisions and actions, but by the totality of the aspirations and desires of all the people who make up the people. “A person consciously lives for himself, but serves as an unconscious tool” to achieve historical goals, writes Tolstoy. He convincingly proves that one person, even the most brilliant, cannot control millions, this is only an appearance of power, but it is these millions that govern the country and determine historical process, that is, it is the people who make history. And a brilliant personality is able to guess, feel the desire of the people and ascend to the people's "wave". Tolstoy says: "Will historical hero not only does not direct the actions of the masses, but she herself is constantly led. Therefore, the attention of the writer is attracted primarily by the life of the people: peasants, soldiers, officers - those who form the basis of it. Leo Tolstoy on the pages of the novel shows that the historical process does not depend on whim or bad mood one man. War 1812 was inevitable and did not depend on the will of Napoleon, but was determined by the whole course of history, so Napoleon, according to the writer, could not help crossing the Neman, and the defeat of the French army on the Borodino field was also inevitable, because there Napoleonic France the hand of the strongest enemy in spirit was laid, that is, the Russian army. We can say that the will of the commander does not affect the outcome of the battle, because not a single commander can lead tens and hundreds of thousands of people, but it is the soldiers themselves (that is, the people) who decide the fate of the battle. “The fate of the battle is decided not by the orders of the commander-in-chief, not by the place on which the troops stand, not by the number of guns and killed people, but by that elusive force called the spirit of the army,” writes Tolstoy. Therefore, Napoleon did not lose the Battle of Borodino or Kutuzov won it, but the Russian people won this battle, because the "spirit" of the Russian army was immeasurably higher than that of the French.

Throughout the novel we see Tolstoy's distaste for war. Tolstoy hated murders - it makes no difference in the name of what these murders are committed. There is no poeticization of the feat of a heroic personality in the novel. The only exception is the episode of the battle of Shengraben and Tushin. Describing the war of 1812, Tolstoy poeticizes the collective feat of the people. Studying the materials of the war of 1812, Tolstoy came to the conclusion that no matter how disgusting the war with its blood, death of people, dirt, lies, sometimes the people are forced to wage this war, which may not touch a fly, but if a wolf attacks it, defending himself, he kills this wolf. But when he kills, he does not feel pleasure from this and does not consider that he has done something worthy of enthusiastic chanting. Tolstoy reveals the patriotism of the Russian people, who did not want to fight according to the rules with the beast - the French invasion.

Tolstoy speaks with contempt of the Germans, in whom the instinct for self-preservation of the individual turned out to be stronger than the instinct for the preservation of the nation, that is stronger than patriotism and proudly speaks of the Russian people, for whom the preservation of their "I" was less important than the salvation of the fatherland. Negative types in the novel are those heroes who are frankly indifferent to the fate of their homeland (visitors to Kuragina's salon), and those who cover up this indifference with a beautiful patriotic phrase (almost all the nobility, with the exception of a small part of it - people like Kutuzov, Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre, Rostov), ​​as well as those for whom war is a pleasure (, Napoleon).

The closest to Tolstoy are those Russian people who, realizing that war is a dirty, cruel, but in some cases necessary, work without any pathos on the great work of saving the motherland and do not experience any pleasure in killing enemies. These are Kutuzov, Bolkonsky, Denisov and many others episodic heroes. With special love, Tolstoy paints scenes of a truce and scenes where Russian people show pity for the defeated enemy, care for the captured French (Kutuzov’s call to the army at the end of the war - to pity frostbitten unfortunate people), or where the French show humanity towards Russians (Pierre on interrogation with Davout). This circumstance is connected with the main idea of ​​the novel - the idea of ​​the unity of people. Peace (absence of war) unites people in one world(one common family), war divides people. So in the novel the idea is patriotic with the idea of ​​peace, the idea of ​​the negation of war.

Despite the fact that the explosion in Tolstoy's spiritual development occurred after the 70s, many of his later views and moods can be found in their infancy in works written before the turning point, in particular in War and Peace. This novel was published 10 years before the turning point, and all of it, especially as regards political views Tolstoy is a phenomenon of a moment of transition for a writer and thinker. It contains the remnants of Tolstoy's old views (for example, on the war), and the germs of new ones, which will later become decisive in this philosophical system, which will be called "Tolstoyism". Tolstoy's views changed even during his work on the novel, which was expressed, in particular, in a sharp contradiction in the image of Karataev, which was absent in the first versions of the novel and introduced only on final stages work, patriotic ideas and moods of the novel. But at the same time, this image was caused not by the whim of Tolstoy, but by the entire development of the moral and ethical problems of the novel.

With his novel, Tolstoy wanted to say something very important to people. He dreamed of using the power of his genius to spread his views, in particular his views on history, "on the degree of freedom and dependence of man on history", he wanted his views to become universal.

How does Tolstoy characterize the war of 1812? War is a crime. Tolstoy does not divide combatants into attackers and defenders. “Millions of people have committed against each other such an innumerable number of atrocities ... that in whole centuries the annals of all the judgments of the world will not collect and which, during this period of time, the people who committed them did not look at as crimes.”

And what, according to Tolstoy, is the reason for this event? Tolstoy cites various considerations of historians. But he does not agree with any of these considerations. “Any single reason or a whole series of reasons seems to us ... equally false in its insignificance in comparison with the enormity of the event ...”. A huge, terrible phenomenon - war, must be generated by the same "huge" cause. Tolstoy does not undertake to find this reason. He says that "the more we try to rationally explain these phenomena in nature, the more unreasonable, incomprehensible they become for us." But if a person cannot know the laws of history, then he cannot influence them. He is a powerless grain of sand in the historical stream. But within what limits is a person still free? “There are two aspects of life in every person: personal life, which is the freer, the more abstract its interests, and spontaneous, swarm life, where a person inevitably fulfills the laws prescribed for him.” This is a clear expression of those thoughts in the name of which the novel was created: a person is free in every this moment act as he pleases, but "a perfect deed is irrevocable, and its action, coinciding in time with millions of actions of other people, acquires historical significance."

Man can't change the tide swarm life. This life is spontaneous, and therefore not amenable to conscious influence. A person is free only in his personal life. The more he is connected with history, the less he is free. "The king is the slave of history." A slave cannot command a master, a king cannot influence history. "AT historical events so-called people are labels that give a name to an event, which, like labels, have the least connection with the event itself. Such are the philosophical arguments of Tolstoy.

Napoleon himself sincerely did not want war, but he is a slave of history - he gave more and more new orders, accelerating the start of the war. The sincere liar Napoleon is sure of his right to plunder and is sure that the stolen valuables are his rightful property. Enthusiastic adoration surrounded Napoleon. He is accompanied by "enthusiastic cries", before him jump "fading with happiness, enthusiastic ... huntsmen", he puts a telescope on the back of the "happy page that has run up". There is one general mood here. The French army is also some kind of closed "world"; the people of this world have their own common desires, common joys, but this is a “false common”, it is based on lies, pretense, predatory aspirations, on the misfortunes of something else in common. Participation in this common pushes to stupid actions, turns human society into a herd. Driven by a single thirst for enrichment, a thirst for robbery, having lost their inner freedom, the soldiers and officers of the French army sincerely believe that Napoleon is leading them to happiness. And he, to an even greater extent a slave of history than they, imagined himself to be God, because "for him, the conviction was not new that his presence at all ends of the world ... equally strikes and plunges people into the madness of self-forgetfulness." People tend to create idols, and idols easily forget that they did not create history, but history created them.

Just as it is incomprehensible why Napoleon gave the order to attack Russia, so are Alexander's actions incomprehensible. Everyone was waiting for the war, "but nothing was ready" for it. “There was no common leader over all the armies. Tolstoy, as a former artilleryman, knows that without a "common leader" the army finds itself in a difficult situation. He forgets the skeptical attitude of the philosopher to the possibility of one person to influence the course of events. He condemns the inaction of Alexander and his courtiers. All their aspirations "were aimed only at ... having a good time, forgetting about the upcoming war."

Tolstoy puts Napoleon on a par with Anatole Kuragin. For Tolstoy, these are people of the same party - egoists, for whom the whole world is enclosed in their "I". The artist reveals the psychology of a person who believes in his sinlessness, in the infallibility of his judgments and actions. He shows how a cult of such a person is created and how this person himself begins to naively believe in the universal love of mankind for him. But in Tolstoy one-linear characters are very rare.

Each character is built on a certain dominant, but it is not exhausted. Lunacharsky wrote: “Everything positive in the novel “War and Peace” is a protest against human egoism, vanity ... the desire to raise a person to universal human interests, to expand one’s sympathies, to elevate one’s heart life.” Napoleon personifies this human egoism, the vanity against which Tolstoy opposes. Napoleon is alien to human interests. This is the dominant feature of his character. But Tolstoy also shows his other qualities - the qualities of an experienced politician and commander. Of course, Tolstoy believes that a tsar or commander cannot know the laws of development and, moreover, influence them, but the ability to understand the situation is developed. To fight with Russia, Napoleon needed to know at least the commanders of the enemy army, and he knew them.