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War and Peace has to be put in a group not with Madame Bovary, Vanity Fair, or The Mill on the Floss, but with the Iliad, in the sense that when the novel is finished nothing is finished—the stream of life flows on, and with the appearance of Prince Andrew’s son the novel ends on the beginning of a new life. All the time there are openings out of the story into the world beyond. This is a thing that had never been attempted by historical novelists before Tolstóy. As for the open form, it has often been attempted, but never so successfully. In a very different way the open form was achieved by James Joyce in Ulysses. As Tolstóy is compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, so critics say that Joyce’s novel is of a mythological nature. John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga and Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale may also claim to belong to the category of “open” novels. No novel has received more enthusiastic praise both in Russia and England than War and Peace. John Galsworthy spoke of it as “the greatest novel ever written,” and those fine critics Percy Lubbock and E. M. Forster have been no less emphatic. In The Craft of Fiction Lubbock says that War and Peace is: “a picture of life that has never been surpassed for its grandeur and its beauty. . . . The business of the novelist is to create life, and here is life created indeed! In the whole of fiction no scene is so continually washed by the common air, free to us all, as the scene of Tolstóy, the supreme genius among novelists. “Pierre and Andrew and Natásha and the rest of them are the children of yesterday and today and tomorrow; there is nothing in any of them that is not of all time. To an English reader of today it is curious—and more, it is strangely moving—to note how faithfully the creations of Tolstóy, the nineteenth-century Russian, copy the young people of the twentieth century and of England: it is all one, life in Moscow then, life in London now, provided only that it is young enough.” E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel says: “No English novelist is as great
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