Coping with a Disenchanted World: The Portrayal of Enlightenment in Tolstoy’s War and Peace

While traditional interpretations of War and Peace have snubbed its philosophical elements, and only a handful of scholars have taken seriously Tolstoy’s philosophical ideas, this paper claims that a sophisticated critique of the Enlightenment is the leitmotiv of his book. By means of a close reading of Tolstoy’s descriptions of some of the most controversial effects associated to the Enlightenment (i.e., the disenchantment of the world, concept fetishism, the decline of the individual, bureaucratization, the erosion of traditional solidarity, and the reduction of reason to its instrumental dimension), and by comparing Tolstoy’s ideas with some of the most accomplished analysis of the Enlightenment and its effects, this paper offers a novel reading of War and Peace: Tolstoy’s book should not be read exclusively as a chauvinist and aristocratic depiction of the nineteenth-century Russian society. Above all, War and Peace is an insightful assessment of one of the most momentous transformations of human societies.