Slavonic and East European Review

Slavonic and East European Review, 94, 4, 2016 Reviews Faggionato, Raffaella. L’alambicco di Lev Tolstoj. ‘Guerra e Pace’ e la massoneria russa. Viella, Rome, 2015. 433 pp. Illustration. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. €30.00. Lev Tolstoi’s Alembic: ‘War and Peace’ and Russian Freemasonry is the new book by Raffaella Faggionato, author of A Rosicrucian Utopia in Eighteenth-Century Russia: The Masonic Circle of N. I. Novikov (Dordrecht, 2005). On the one hand it takes further her investigation of the history of Russian Freemasonry up to the first decades of the nineteenth century (Appendix: ‘A Short History of Freemasonry under Alexander I’, pp. 372–90), and on the other is likely to be recorded as a milestone in the study of Lev Tolstoi’s masterpiece. As the title implies, it sheds light on the many masonic sources consulted by the Russian writer, and on the very different roles they played in various stages of his work. Well known even to the common reader is the story of how Tolstoi’s wife ‘copied out War and Peace seven times from beginning to end’ (Mirsky), and in the last seventy years several ‘layers’ of the author’s manuscripts have been published and studied by different scholars. Here Faggionato combines the results of a thorough investigation of a mass of documents from the Iasnaia Poliana and Russian State libraries and from Tolstoi’s Museum in Moscow, including diary entries, books and manuscripts Tolstoi purchased or read, notes he took, drafts, rewritings, annotations on copies and even printed proofs. She achieves important results, providing a key to understanding the evolution of Tolstoi’s artistic method, from ‘realistic’ to ‘mystical-symbolic’, as defined by recent scholars. This rich book is masterly arranged, from the many apt epigraphs to the very large and detailed, almost exhaustive bibliography, leaving an impression of convincing unity. Following an informative introduction, it is divided into five parts, each formed by two chapters of short paragraphs, whose titles define each step of the investigation, leaving the reader to ask why the impact of Freemasonry on Tolstoi’s masterpiece has not been stressed strongly before. As a matter of fact, in the final version of War and Peace, the masonic affiliation of Pierre Bezukhov plays a comparatively small role, and a series of patent inconsistencies in the description of persons and rituals could lead readers to think that Tolstoi had only a very superficial knowledge of Freemasonry, or that he used his sources to give a parodic image of it (V. I. Shcherbakov). But the books and manuscripts perused by Faggionato (let it be noted that in the ninety-volume ‘Jubilee’ edition of Tolstoi’s oeuvre the drafts regarding this aspect have not been included, while the new 100-volume edition is still very far from complete) reveal a very different story. SEER, 94, 4, OctOber 2016 726 Faggionato begins with Tolstoi’s predecessor, Alexander Pushkin, as chronicler of the Russian nobility’s intellectual history, whose Queen of Spades is recalled in a crucial episode of War and Peace during Pierre’s visit to his dying father (1.1). A reconstruction of the considerable interest in the history of the late-eighteenth- to early-nineteenth-century Masonic movement by pedagogists, thinkers (A. Herzen) and historians (M. Pogodin) between 1856 and 1862 follows (1.2). Part two is devoted to Tolstoi’s earlier literary project on the Decembrist movement (1860–63) and his discovery of its deep Masonic roots (2.1), and anticipates the writer’s idiosyncratic use, in the final version of War and Peace, of ‘published and unpublished sources’ (on M. Speranskii, I. Lopukhin, M. Mudrov, F. Rostopchin, etc.), bought and collected at this stage. While real, historical figures were called to play an increasingly symbolic, often parodic, role, their ideas and words were eventually assigned to very different fictional characters (2.2). A pun repeated in the introduction to the Russian translation of one of the books bought in 1864, i.e. Miguel de Molinos’s Spiritual Guide, is seen as a possible source of Tolstoi’s decision to turn the final title from War and the Human Universe to War and Peace (in both cases ‘Voyna i mir...