In all literature there is no writer equal to Tolstoy in depicting the human body. He is accurate, simple and as short as possible, selecting only the few small unnoticed facial or personal features, and producing them gradually he distributes them over the whole course of the story.
The wife of Prince Andreï in Peace and War is for ever recurring to our memory owing to the fact that we are constantly reminded of her short downy upper lip. Prince Andreï's sister, too, is always fixed in our minds owing to her trick of flushing in patches and walking heavily. There are countless instances of this. There is the long thin neck of Verestchagin, the swollen neck of Prince Andreï, the rotundity of Platon Karataev, the little white hand of Napoleon. All these details are impressed upon us with unwearying insistence until we come to realise that this is Tolstoy's peculiar method of unfolding before us the psychology of his characters. He has the gift of insight into the body of his dramatis personæ. Think for a moment of Anna Karènina. Trait is added to trait, feature to feature ... she has red lips, flashing grey eyes, and most noticeable of all, her hands are made to express her more even than her face. In them lies the whole charm of her person, the union of strength with delicacy.
We learn that she always held herself exceptionally erect, that she has a quick, decisive gait, when she dances she has a distinguishing grace, sureness and lightness of movement. Tolstoy emphasises again and again the roundness of her arms, the unruliness of her curls; the traits are so harmonised that they naturally and involuntarily unite, in the fancy of the reader, into one living, personal whole. We feel how easy and pleasant it is to the author to describe living bodies and their movements, not only of people, but also of animals. Even the Tartar footmen who wait on Levine are said to be broad-hipped, an unnecessary touch which shows us how much this sort of bodily accentuation can be carried to excess.
For there is no doubt that Tolstoy relies on gestures where another writer would have had recourse to words. He uses this convertible connection between the external and the internal with inimitable art and exquisite effect. It is the silent smile of Natasha which decides the fate of Pierre far more effectively than any words.
So peculiar is this gift that it has been said that the nervous susceptibility of people becomes different after reading Tolstoy's works. He notices what has escaped everyone else, and uses his discovery with a subtlety of effect that is startling. Thus it is to him that we are indebted for the simple but none the less surprising fact that a man's smile is reflected not only in his face, but also in the sound of his voice.
Thus Platon Karataev says something to Pierre "in a voice changed by a smile." Tolstoy was the first to notice that horse-hoofs have the queer effect of giving, as it were, a "transparent sound." As we should expect from so "animal-loving" a man, Tolstoy sounds every note in sensation. He is equally able to fathom the sensation of her bared body to a young girl, before going to her first ball, and the feelings of an old woman worn out with child-bearing, and those of a nursing mother who has not yet severed the mysterious connection of her body with that of her child. Even the sensations of animals are familiar to him. Not the least of his gifts to us is that he gave us new bodily sensations. He is the greatest portrayer of the physico-spiritual region in the natural man: that side of the spirit which most nearly approximates to the flesh. He is a man of the senses, half-pagan, a fraction Christian: in the region of pure thought, where Dostoievsky walked at ease, superbly master, he is totally at a loss. But within the limits of the animal in man he is the supreme artist of the world.
In War and Peace Tolstoy meant to give us what is commonly known as an historical novel: on laying it down we feel, not that we have lived in an age long past side by side with Napoleon, or fought at Borodino, but that these characters have been transplanted to our own age, and that he is depicting men and women whom we already know very well. The poverty of his historical colouring is amazing: where he depicts reality, the "natural" man, his language is distinguished by unequalled simplicity, strength and accuracy, but directly he gets on to the subject of abstract psychology he is lost; his very language seems to become helpless. When he leaves the passions of the heart for the passions of the mind he becomes obscure, ungrammatical and false. Compare Irteniev, the hero of Childhood and Youth, with Nekhlindov in Resurrection. The former is distinct, unforgettable, alive ... the latter a lifeless abstraction, a dreary megaphone. He cannot create human souls with anything like the success he achieves with human bodies.
We see this best of all in the case of Natasha, in War and Peace. She seems at the end of the book to have lost her soul in her body, and become a mere prolific she-animal, living solely for her children and husband. She has become divinely fleshly. "'We may run risks ourselves, but not for our children,'" she remarks to Pierre when he wishes to give away his property, echoing what Tolstoy's own wife said to him on a similar occasion.
Austerlitz, Borodino, the burning of Moscow, Napoleon—all pass forgotten as if written on sand, but Natasha remains, Natasha, the eternal mother, triumphantly waving "swaddling clothes, with a yellow stain instead of a green," the divine animal. The swallowing up of the human individual in the universal is Tolstoy's unvarying theme. Natures swallows up Uncle Yeroshka ("I die and—the grass grows"), child-bearing absorbs Natasha, sinful, destroying love swallows up Anna Karènina. She is all compact of love. Her words are poor: Tolstoy is always poor in dialogue. His excellence lies, as may have been guessed, in descriptions. One might almost say that his characters only speak because the mechanical conformation of their mouths admits of it.
What do we know, for instance, of Anna? What does she think about Children, People, Duty, Nature, Art, Life, Death and God? We don't know. But, on the other hand, we do know exactly how her slender fingers taper at the end, what a round, polished neck she has, how her curls flutter on her neck and temples; every expression of her face, every movement of her body we do know.