Shakespeare and Tolstoy, liars

Who was the greatest writer ever? This is one of the silliest questions one can ask.

Unlike tennis players and pop hits, writers and other artists have no official rankings. Ask 100 well-read people and you’ll get 100 different answers, or more (well-read people like to hedge their bets with phrases like “or else perhaps…”).

However, it’s a safe bet that Shakespeare and Tolstoy would get their fair share of mentions in our hypothetical poll. And while many people would come up with their own candidates, few would say those two don’t belong in that company.

Neither writer, however, would – or rather should – make any sensible list of great historians. Nor would the two giants have any posthumous problems with such exclusion. Though both read a fair amount of history and used historical motifs in their work, neither devoted his life to painstaking scholarly enquiry.

Both wrote historical stories, and the noun is more important than the adjective. When the narrative demanded playing fast and loose with facts, they both did. Artistic truth mattered more to them than factual accuracy, and rightly so.

At times, however, the demand to distort history came not from their art but – and here we are getting to a real problem – from their ideology. When that happened, they betrayed not only scholarly integrity but also, much worse, artistic truth.

However, to the powers that be ideology tends to be almost everything, while artistry is next to nothing. Hence, they found the great writers’ ideology useful and canonised their take on history as unquestionably true to life.

Thus many generations of English schoolchildren read Shakespeare’s Richard III as reportage on the Wars of the Roses, while Russian pupils never doubted the historical veracity of War and Peace and its view of the 1812 war.

Should both Shakespeare and Richard III still be alive, the latter could sue the former for libel and win the case hands down. Just recently we got a reminder of that when the Richard III Society republished a lost history text The History of King Richard III by Sir George Buck, roughly Shakespeare’s contemporary.

The Society of Antiquaries certified the text’s authenticity and endorsed its portrayal of Richard as a “just” and “good” king – not the perfidious, murderous hunchback depicted by Shakespeare.

In 1485, Richard lost his battle and his life to the man who thus became Henry VII, the first Tudor king of England. Writing his Richard III drama during the reign of Henry’s granddaughter, Shakespeare was working to what the Soviets later called ‘social order’.

The order was twofold: first to besmirch Richard, then to glorify Henry, whose rights to succession were rather tenuous. The first objective was achieved by depicting Richard as an evil hunchback who murdered those little princes in the Tower. Both parts were mendacious.

Richard had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, that’s all. A real hunchback wouldn’t have been able to wield a heavy 15^th century sword with the athletic agility required to stay alive in many battles, which Richard did.

As to the two young sons of Edward IV murdered in the Tower of London, there isn’t a shred of evidence to connect Richard with that crime. Shakespeare based his play on Sir Thomas More’s account that solely relied on cui bono conjecture.

The Duke of Richmond, later to become King Henry VII, was a Welsh usurper who had a much better reason for killing the little princes. That doesn’t mean he did, but then it doesn’t point an accusing finger at Richard either.

Writing a century after the event, Shakespeare had the benefit of hindsight but ignored it. He knew that Henry’s subsequent reign was tyrannical and generally unsuccessful. And yet he put in his mouth a soliloquy that any Stalinist hack would have been proud of:

O, now, let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if thy will be so.
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!

This is ideological sycophancy at its most emetic. That, however, didn’t prevent Richard III from becoming historical orthodoxy. The artist of genius lent his gravitas to a falsehood.

Three centuries later Tolstoy (who, by the way, detested Shakespeare) did the same in his mendacious, ideologically inspired portrayal of the 1812 war against Napoleon.

Two of Tolstoy’s pet ideas, both false, came into play. The first is that personalities have no role to play in history. The only impetus comes from some mysterious historical forces Tolstoy left unidentified. Those forces move people around like pawns on the chessboard, and the people have no more say in the matter than do those wooden figurines.

Tolstoy borrowed that determinist concept from Joseph de Maistre (who appears in the novel as a minor character). In fact, Tolstoy copied whole pages from de Maistre’s essays without attribution. But he missed the point: de Maistre identified those forces as divine providence. Since the only God Tolstoy believed in was himself, he left that part out.

His other hobbyhorse was the saintly nature of Russian peasants and whichever other Russians came close to that ideal. That’s why he poopooed every foreign officer in the Russian army as an incompetent fool – this though some of them, such as Clausewitz, Stein and Bennigsen, have a different reputation in history. Then again, Tolstoy even managed to show Napoleon as a military nonentity, which took some doing.

At the same time he extolled the senile Field-Marshal Kutuzov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian forces. In the eyes of serious military historians, the latter fought a do-nothing campaign of staggering incompetence which could easily have ended in catastrophe.

As it was, Kutuzov lost the only major battle of the war and as a result surrendered Moscow. (Tolstoy lovingly describes how Kutuzov slept through the War Council meeting where the decision to abandon Moscow was taken. In some quarters, such somnolence could be seen as gross negligence, if not outright treason.) Later Kutuzov missed the easiest of chances to finish off the French army in full flight, capturing Napoleon and ending the war a couple of years earlier.

However, Tolstoy, ever the dialectician, argues that even the battle of Borodino was actually a Russian victory because the French lost the war in the end. That’s like saying that the French defeated the Nazis in 1940 because de Gaulle triumphantly entered Paris in 1944.

As to the saintly Russian peasants Tolstoy credits as the principal factor of victory, rather than fighting the French, they rose against their serf-owning masters. Peasant uprisings broke out throughout the country, and at the critical points of the war Kutuzov had to send whole divisions out to quell them.

Dumas’s accounts of France’s 17^th century history are another example of history distorted by fictional portrayal. The greatest French statesmen of that period, Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert, come across as, respectively, a sinister tyrant, a thieving nonentity and a bean-counting flunky. But Dumas neither pretended nor was considered to be a writer of genius.

He wrote light entertainment of very high quality, and though many children read his musketeer stories with delight (I still do, in my dotage), few take them as historical orthodoxy. Shakespeare and Tolstoy, geniuses as they are, have a much greater influence – and a much better chance to falsify history.

P.S. Speaking of history, we must set the record straight: Joe Biden doesn’t hate Britain. In fact, an unverified account reports him as saying: “Some of my ancestors and best friends are colonialist murderers”.