"The answer, John Bayley, New College, Oxford, writes in the Signet edition introduction, seems to lie in Tolstoy's evident absence of an intention, a point to make, a situation to explore. He describes married life as he describes a hunt or a battle: that is to say, with epic simplicity and with complete accuracy of detail. Most novelists lose creative intensity when they have no point to make--they slide over, and edge away. When Tolstoy has no point to make his description gathers wings. He sees a hunt as the huntsman sees it; war as the soldiers feel it; and marriage as the partners find it.
Like a life itself. There is no "point" to an individual life, the individual person just is. Like non-representational art. There is no "point", it just is. What is the point of a tree? Is War and Peace history? Is it a novel? "It is what I had to say in the manner I wished to say it," answered Tolstoy. Not more, not less.
War and Peace grew out of, and was sourced in, Tolstoy's diaries, begun when he was nineteen. Life is...based in life. You can't have a life without first existing. The products of human creation are based in life. Dead men don't write. But to say that a human creation grew out of an individual life, you can't say that. If Tolstoy had published his diaries they would not have made War and Peace. There is then something magical and ineffable in a human life that makes it capable of producing a War and Peace.
It is this ineffable, the trans-human, that is the mark of Tolstoy's genius. Tolstoy knew it. A diary is a diary, nothing more, nothing less. A novel is a different thing, as is a history, a painting, or a tree. The individual human does not experience life as Tolstoy describes it, in minute detail from every angle; that is, the individual is not omniscient, he is not God. The merely human has no capacity to know another's mind, yet Tolstoy does both, and he gives it to us in a format, the written word, that makes the unknowable knowable to all other individual humans. He is and makes us trans-human, godlike.
Pierre, Tolstoy's central character, knew it. Like his creator, Pierre is a "seeker." He is initiated into the brotherhood of the Freemason's in a mystical ceremony that seeks to transform members into trans-human beings. Tolstoy sought a new Christianity on his own interpretation of the Gospels. It is faith, a thing that does not "grow out of" human experience, a thing that transcends human life, that Tolstoy and Pierre seek. It is faith that War and Peace is about. I am not a seeker.
