sciously depends on the novel as an idea; somewhat in the way in which
undergraduates in the old days unconsciously revealed by their wish to steal
policemen's helmets their acceptance of the status and sanctity of the Force.
In the novels of Jean Genet, for instance, do we not recognise the wholly
French fictional tradition on which they depend for their novelty and—in
Gide's phrase—their nouvelles chose à dire?

Although Tolstoy said that he had learnt from Stendhal how to describe
war, the mot about "the mirror in the roadway" would have meant nothing
to him, as neither would that other equally irritating status phrase—"une
tranche de vie." Such phrases offer a background to Tolstoy's comment
on the unfreedom of those who live under laws of their own making in a
western constitutional government. The novelists who invent these phrases,
like the M.P.s who pass the laws, are making sticks for their own backs,
blinkers for themselves and their fellows. But in Russia there is no obligation
to support the idea of the novel, and on at least four occasions Tolstoy
observes that this idea has never acquired any real status or meaning in
Russian literature. When he makes critical remarks about fiction—and in
the course of his life he made a good number—they are seldom about the
form of the novel, its constitution and mode of government so to speak,
but about the people in it and the man behind it.

"Anyone writing a novel," he says in his essay on Maupassant, "must
have a clear and firm idea as to what is good and bad in life." We can press
the political parallel further, and say that in the West novelists acquire their
individuality, their air of being different from other novelists, precisely
because they have submitted themselves to laws of their own making, just
as the citizens who submit themselves to the laws of a free country are
different in opinions, outlook, and so forth. For Tolstoy, difference begins
further back, in the heart and in the body.

When the first draft of War and Peace, entitled 1805, began to appear
in The Russian Messenger, Tolstoy would not allow the editor to call it a
novel, although, being almost entirely about family life in high society, it
was much more like a conventional novel than the final project turned out
to be; and incidentally much more like a first sketch of the ideal novel which
Percy Lubbock felt could be separated out of the great mass of War and
Peace. In the cancelled preface of a later draft, Tolstoy says that what he
wrote would not fit into any category "whether novel, short story, poem,
or history"; and in the foreword to the first serial version of 1805, which
also remained unused, he says that "in publishing the beginning of my
projected work, I do not promise a continuation or conclusion." (We re-
member that Dickens and Hardy, in their serials, had to invent further

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