Edward Wasiolek

The point of the long theoretical discussion of history that dominates the
later portions of War and Peace is to prove that necessity and freedom are
resolved in the concrete historical act—the same point that Tolstoy has
dramatized in the best moments of the domestic portions of the novel.
Percy Lubbock was wrong when he said that Tolstoy was writing two
novels without knowing it, and the Soviet critic Bocharov is right when
he says that there is only one novel in War and Peace, and that the same
laws govern both the movement of individuals and the movement of nations
and historical events. Nowhere are the antinomies of freedom and necessity,
which Tolstoy discusses at such length in the later chapters of War and Peace,
and the resolution of these antinomies more eloquently communicated than
in the hunt scene. The laws that Tolstoy formulates abstractly about free-
dom and necessity are the same that are shown to move the drama of the
hunt.

Although we sense instinctively that the hunt scene is one of the high
points of War and Peace, it is difficult to know why the hunt of the old grey
wolf and its capture should be so moving. The scene has something of the
impenetrability of Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River, where one is ex-
asperatingly in the presence of what seems to be a very special experience
and vocabulary, and yet where one recognizes that something universal is
being communicated. Hemingway's vocabulary of leaders, lines, strains,
wet grasshoppers, and large trout is matched by the special vocabulary of