“Imperial Mythology”: Edyta Bojanowska on Nationalism and Empire in Tolstoy

On Wednesday, October 16, the Division of Literature and Languages and the Russian Department welcomed Professor Edyta M. Bojanowska to give her lecture “The Imperial Mythology of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.” Bojanowska is no stranger to campus, with her unique connection to Reed as the wife of an alumnus and as the mother of a current student. Bojanowska also participated in Professor Zhenya Bershtein’s class “Tolstoy and War” on Thursday, October 17, as a guest instructor. In her talk,  Bojanowska, who chairs the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, discussed her ongoing examination of the colonial dimensions in 19th-century Russian literature, specifically looking at the work of Leo Tolstoy. 

Tolstoy “asks us to take his narratives as true and free of mythologizing,” even as he was motivated by the rhetorical demands of his own historical moment. Tolstoy wrote his epic novel War and Peace coming off of the Crimean War (1853-1856), where Russia was defeated by an alliance including France and the Ottoman Empire, and lost some imperial territories in Crimea. This context partially inspired him to compensate for these losses by glorifying Russia’s historical victory over France in 1812.

A central idea was Tolstoy’s depiction of the French invasion of Russia in 1812 as a national, patriotic defense effort for Russia. In the vision of War and Peace, the Russian people were united against a foreign invader whose imperialist ambitions are specifically highlighted as a cause for concern. 

Bojanowska discussed War and Peace as being simultaneously imperialist and anti-imperialist in its depiction of the contrast between the French and Russian empires. Specifically, Tolstoy showed the Orientalist stereotypes held by the French about Russia that were used to justify the invasion. The French army’s Orientalist thinking “drove Napoleon to the folly of invading Russia.” In the French view, Bojanowska stated, “Only a superficial veneer of civilization covered Russia’s rough-hewn barbarity.”

However, Tolstoy’s negative depiction of French imperialism served to advance anticolonialism only in a Eurocentric light. He highlighted the absurdity of French Orientalism toward Russia to show the wrongness of comparing a Westernized, European Russia with racially othered colonies elsewhere in Asia or Africa.

Tolstoy acknowledges the Russian empire, but depicts it as an “empire of a particular kind” different from the French empire. The encroachments of the French empire leading up to 1812 are heavily emphasized, while similar discussion of Russia’s imperial gains in the same period is omitted, despite the evidence of Russia’s acquisition of Finland, Georgia, and territories in the Caucasus and California. This double standard continues to dominate Russian depictions of the Napoleonic war of 1812, including by official institutions. 

Bojanowska dwelled on a scene in the novel where one of the central characters, Pierre Bezukhov, defends an Armenian woman from implied sexual violence during the burning of Moscow in 1812. In her view, this scene exemplified how Tolstoy showed the relationship between Russia as a civilized European protector of its vulnerable Oriental subjects. Most critically, Bojanowska emphasized how this imperial myth was “nested within the national myth” of a unified Russia for Tolstoy. The novel was driven by the “overriding imperative to project Russia’s innocence and greatness,” showing the dual role of Russia as an imperial power for its legitimacy as a nation while also a victim of imperialism for its justification against France in the war.

After opening the floor to questions, Bojanowska remarked on the continued relevance of the types of national myth-making deployed by Tolstoy in light of the ongoing Russian war with Ukraine, where Russia’s imperial ambitions have been defended in similar language. Bojanowska ultimately expressed doubt about the ability to have a nation without these myths, but hoped to see a future where those myths are improved.