The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2022

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2022 61 Tolstoy, the gifted author, betrays a slight admiration for the diplomatic wordsmith. One-eyed but all seeing, poorly informed of the latest military maneuvers but profoundly in sync with the currents of history, Kutuzov doesn’t bother to read dispatches or absorb briefings, the very stuff of diplomacy. He speaks with a “homely coarse- ness.” He operates on a higher, or deeper level. He moves on a Tolstoyan plane. Another diplomatic episode, call it “the dog that didn’t bark,” illustrates the author’s outlook. Having clashed with Kutuzov at Borodino before advancing to occupy Moscow, Napoleon assumes the tsar would be ready for a peace settle- ment. To initiate talks, he sends him a note in St. Petersburg and awaits a reply. None is forthcoming, so another note is transmitted. Again, no answer from the imperial capital. In the event, there would be no reply to Napoleon and no negotiations. Tolstoy portrays this diplomatic silence as a mas- terstroke, the very absence of diplomacy as a Russian triumph. Facing a burnt-down Moscow and an icily silent St. Petersburg, the French invader realizes the snare has sprung. After five weeks in Moscow, Napoleon orders the winter retreat of his Grande Armée out of Russia, back across the Nieman. It is one of the most harrowing retreats in history and most gripping in literature. The Statesman’s Chair Early in the novel, Tolstoy dispenses with the contribution of diplomats by ironically postulating that the Bilibins of the world use clever words to exert “influence on so-called great events.” There is a lot of poison in that phrase “so-called.” And a lot of distillation of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. The diplomats in the novel stand out. Their diplomacy, however, is small-bore. In his dense essay at the end, rather demanding after a thousand pages and utterly lacking the rousing climax of Tchai- kovsky’s “1812 Overture,” Tolstoy ridicules the concept of “Tal- leyrand’s chair.” We may know the theory better as “Cleopatra’s nose”—that is, the fanciful notion that little things, such as the style of a chair at a negotiating session or the pulchritude of an Egyptian queen, could jolt History. Such trivialities might rattle teacups, or tweak “so-called great events,” but they do not cause upheaval among tectonic plates, not in Tolstoy’s view. To grasp his philosophy of history, we might turn to the latest Nobel Prize in physics, awarded to three scientists for their pathbreaking work in modeling complexity in geophysical phenomena and theorizing on chaotic and apparently random processes. For Tolstoy, history is made partly in such a way, by and in the “swarm” of people and their individual actions. Tolstoy tries in the novel to model his conception of history’s complex interaction, what he sees as a massive collision of countless variables. Sadly, by the time of his death in 1910, Tolstoy had not won the Nobel, not for physics, a pardonable oversight, and not for literature, a gross miscarriage. The Nobel Committee selected the Russian writer Boris Pasternak in 1958 and noted—ruefully, one senses—that he could be compared to Tolstoy. (Not the only Nobel misstep: Surely Richard Holbrooke deserved the Peace Prize for ending the savage war in Bosnia.) Reading War and Peace is a long but rewarding trek. Its memorable characters—Pierre, Natasha, Andrey—endure great suffering and, at the same time, achieve wisdom, a peace after war. This is an echo of Aeschylus that wisdom comes because of suffering, not in spite of it. (It is the Aeschylus quote on Robert Kennedy’s grave.) Our dear Bilibin, the consummate diplomat, the paladin of high society, the spinner of gossamer witticisms, never suffers … that is, until he is forced to leave Vienna for a charmless village. Tolstoy ultimately abandons him, leaves him behind at a St. Petersburg soirée and bars him from the epilogue, where much of the grand denouement takes place. The Practitioner’s Handbook Then what can modern-day practitioners of diplomacy take from the diplomats of War and Peace ? We should resist the temptation, out of wounded pride, to wave away the novel’s diplomats as shallow stereotypes. This is, after all, Tolstoy, creator of archetypes. Like Michelangelo and Beethoven, he soared above stereotypes. Further, we can take solace in the fact that Tolstoy lam- pooned other professions, as well. He portrays, for example, an officer who measures his life not in years but promotions; an official who chooses his opinions like his clothes accord- ing to the latest fashion; and an author—here a Tolstoyan confession—who might not be immune to flattery. Touché, we recognize these types.