The French Image of Russia and Russians as Aposiopesis in the Epic Novel War and Peace

The article aims to explain Leo Tolstoy’s approach to representing the French ideas about Russia in the epic novel War and Peace. Previously created works of Russian literature about the Patriotic War of 1812 are analyzed: M.N. Zagoskin’s Roslavlev, or the Russians in 1812 (1831) and F.V. Bulgarin’s Peter Ivanovich Vyzhigin (1831). A comparative analysis allows making a conclusion that both works are characterized by the belles-lettres modeling of negative and derogatory French stereotypes about Russia. Zagoskin, trying to convince the reader that the disregard of Russia is a typical feature of the French worldview, puts cliched negative comments about Russia and Russians into almost all French characters’ mouths. As a result, the reader perceives the presence of negative stereotypes as a circumstance no less significant than the real tragedy of hostilities, and which became the basis of Napoleon’s invasion. In a similar vein, the theme of the French’s biased attitude towards Russia is also developed in the novel by Bulgarin. Imitating French judgments about Russia, the author suggests that the basis of the war was the neglect of the French towards Russia, and the victory over Napoleon was the result of the Russians’ desire to debunk the foreigners’ unjust opinions about Russia. Since the regular aggravation of Russian-French relations constantly kept up to date the topic of negative French stereotypes, the reader had reason to believe that in the novel by Leo Tolstoy significant attention would be paid to the French reception of Russia. However, Tolstoy touched on this problem only with a glimpse, avoiding modeling negative French stereotypes about Russia. The French image of Russia has traditional exotic features, but this image cannot be perceived as a cause of military aggression. This can be explained by a combination of two reasons. Firstly, the experience of the writer’s participation in the Crimean War suggested that the explanation of the logic of military history should be sought in the bivouac truth, in the movement of combat everyday routine, and in a combination of many individual characters involved into the events, but not in the exceptional abilities of historical persons or stencils of national mutual perception. The absolute priority given to the role of national stereotypes contradicted Tolstoy’s historiosophical concept. In addition, by the time of the creation of War and Peace, the French reception of Russia had widely been comprehended in Russian scholarly, journalistic, and belles-lettres literature, which turned this topic into a “locus communis” not explaining the deep historical processes. Tolstoy’s use of stereotypes of the French perception of Russia would have referred the reader to already familiar texts about the French in Russia and bated the sharpness of the reader’s perception. Based on all this, the writer preferred to minimize the embodiment of the French reception of Russia to laconicism, allowing us to evaluate this reception as a real feature of national mutual representations, but not a key factor of historical upheavals.

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