An Evolutionary Study of Tolstoy's First Story, "The Raid"

[...]The Raid" provides an early example of the creative tension in Tolstoy's writing between the sketch genre's convention of inductive empirical analysis and the philosophical essay's tendency to engage in reductionistic abstract generalization. According to Eikhenbaum's Tolstoy in the Sixties,2 War and Peace begins as an "anti-historical historical novel" which creates an enhanced sense of unchanging family life, a diminished sense of historical change, and a sceptical, "nihilist" critique of the view that political leaders can both understand history and change it through their actions. [...]by looking at how "The Raid" evolved we can better evaluate the authenticity of Sofja Andreevna Tolstaja's 1911 edition which claims to have restored the story to the "original" form it was in before the censor made its cuts in the first published edition in The Contemporary in 1853.5 It is clear that in her 1911 edition Tolstaja did not simply publish a single extant manuscript which had previously been unpublished (she and subsequent editors have never had access to the copy which Tolstoy originally sent to The Contemporary). [...]without losing its psychological and philosophical focus as a sketch/essay on individual experience, the final version (written in December, 1852) became a story about the collective experience of warfare as well.