“War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy: The Internal and External Planes of the Narrative (On the Russian-German Understanding of the “Internal Form”)

The correlation of external and internal plane of narrative is an attractive, but unsolved task for the theory of text. The interaction between the described events of the real world and the elements of the novel architectonics occurs at the level of the text’s artistic creation, and, at the same time, the reader’s perception, created by the writer. The “internal form” — an idea put forward by J.W. Goethe — is a framework of the whole, but also a function, born by the elements of this whole, perceived in their unity. This artistic structure can be disclosed only with analytical methods, which are postulated by the concept of internal form. Tolstoy, without reference to Goethe, comes to the same conclusion, asserting that the work of every veritable artist aims to convey the feeling experienced by him or her to the perceiving person. His another statement is also synonymous to the idea of internal form by Goethe: the definition of the structure giving itself to know in the hidden constructions of the text — in the “labyrinth of coupling” according to Tolstoy — the only place where the artistic idea of the veritable, by his definition, work of art can be outspoken. Moreover, it appears that even obvious, but unnoticed until now authorial errors, are not perceived as errors exactly because they, firstly, show artistic functionality, i.e. continue the creative work in the text, and, secondly, are strictly organized themselves, as the elements included in the general integrity of the work’s structure. Such methods give the opportunity of accurate modeling of the text that conveys additional senses.

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