Less a Wheel than a Wave

Dan Jacobson

• Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith
  Chatto, 403 pp, £16.99, March 2006, ISBN 0 7011 7896 5

In one of the ruminative, generalising passages interspersed among the domestic and public scenes in War and Peace (battles, a formal ball, the burning of Moscow and so forth), Tolstoy grapples with the question of what degree of free will a human being of any social class might be supposed to have. The paradoxical conclusion he comes to is that the higher the position an individual occupies in his society, the less free he is to act as he wishes. ‘A king,’ Tolstoy writes bluntly, ‘is the slave of history.’ How can this be? Because, he argues, kings, generals and others like them are so closely bound to what he calls ‘the elemental life of the swarm, in which a man has to follow the laws laid down for him . . . The more connections he has with others and the more power he has over them, the more conspicuous is the predestination and inevitability of every act he commits.’