What could a nearly 140-year-old, 1,400 page novel have to tell us about our own time and its people? Follow me, literary pilgrim, as Count Leo Tolstoy describes a well-know tyrant of history. My question is, couldn't he have been writing yesterday in Salon?
Along comes a man with no convictions, no customs, no traditions...and he works his way — seemingly by a series of curious chances — through the ferment of party conflict...and ends up in a prominent position...
He finds himself in charge of the army, thanks to the incompetence of his colleagues, the spinelessness of his piffling opponents and his own bare-faced duplicity, bravura, and narrow-minded over-confidence...Everywhere he is assisted by what you might call chance contingencies.
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Once again he is favored by chance events..; his most reckless schemes are now being crowned with success...; the men perpetrating these atrocities, and especially their leader, persuade themselves that this is wonderful, this is glory...a good thing all round.
This ideal of glory and greatness — stemming from a belief that one’s every action is beyond reproach, and every crime a proud achievement invested with a supernatural significance beyond all understanding — this ideal, which would prove to be the guiding principle of this man and those around him, is deployed on a massive scale...Whatever he does comes off. The plague doesn’t touch him. The callous slaughtering of his prisoners is not held against him...Dizzy with the success of his crimes and ready for his new role, he arrives...without any plan in mind just as the disintegration of the Republican government, which might have brought him down...completes its course...
He has no sort of plan, he is scared of his own shadow, but all parties grab at him and solicit his support.
He alone — with his ideal of glory and greatness...with his maniacal self-adulation, outrageous criminality and bare-faced duplicity — he alone can justify what has to be done.
He is needed to fill the place that awaits him, and so it is that, almost independently of his own will, and in spite of his dithering, his failure to plan ahead and his proneness to error, he finds himself drawn into a conspiracy aimed at the seizure of power, and the conspiracy comes off.
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There is no action, no atrocity, no little bit of trickery he could indulge without it being immediately represented on the lips of those about him as a great deed...Everything conspires to deprive him of the last scintilla of reason, and prepare him for his terrible role.
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But all of a sudden, instead of the chance contingencies and genius that had ensured such a consistent, uninterrupted run of successes leading him toward his destined goal he is faced with a vast number of chance contingencies working in reverse...and instead of genius we see in him unparalleled stupidity and wickedness.
The version I’ve chosen is Penguin’s 2005 edition of the excellent translation by Anthony Briggs. The excerpt above is from the Epilogue, Part I, Chapter 3.