Tolstoy, Opera and the Problem of Aesthetic Seduction Stephen Halliwell (University of St Andrews) In an important scene from Book II of War and Peace, Natasha Rostova, together with her father and her cousin Sonya, goes to the opera in Moscow. The evening becomes the setting for a fateful encounter between Natasha and Anatole Kuragin, an encounter which turns into an act of proleptic seduction on Kuragin’s part and stands as a key juncture in the complex narrative structure of the novel. The episode is remarkable, among other things, for a striking feature of its literary and aesthetic construction: the use of an operatic performance as the backdrop (glimpsed in a somewhat oblique and flickering manner) to the social and psychological drama taking place in Natasha’s own life. 1 It is crucial to Natasha’s experience in the theatre that she is unable to give the opera sustained concentration in its own right, despite her intermittent, partially subliminal awareness of a series of dramatic images – of erotic attraction, seduction, danger, but ultimate escape from evil – which the reader can recognise as ironically relevant to Natasha’s own unfolding story. The fascination which the opera’s imagined world appears to hold for most of the audience singularly fails to take hold of Natasha, though she does exhibit an involuntary physical reaction to the music of the overture which is underway as the family arrives in its box (“her hand opening and closing, obviously unconsciously, in time with the overture”). 2 She is too nervously excited about her immediate environment – the social drama playing itself out in the auditorium itself and the psychological drama of her own confused responses to the heady stimulus of the whole occasion – to be able, or even to want, to become absorbed in the work being sung and acted before her. The potential seductiveness of art is displaced by the threat of seduction in the whole environment and atmosphere in which Natasha finds herself. In fact, Natasha’s consciousness of the opera seems to diminish in proportion to her growing fixation with Anatole Kuragin, so that during the opera’s final act, in a piquantly symbolic contrast, she registers only one thing on stage (the singing of a devil who then falls through a trapdoor) while her eyes are constantly drawn to Kuragin himself. There are several angles from which Tolstoy’s handling of this intriguing and memorable section of War and Peace might be fruitfully approached. In line with the nature of the present volume of essays, my main aim here is to take this part of the novel as a test case of one of Tolstoy’s supreme “problems,” indeed one of his obsessions: the (supposed) differences between true and false art and his corresponding conception of the workings of aesthetic experience. This will involve analysing the opera scene in relation to some of Tolstoy’s independently attested views on opera in particular and on the aesthetics of art more generally. But in adopting this approach, which is not unfamiliar, I believe it is imperative to avoid the pitfall of assuming that the operatic backdrop of the scene is little more than a transcription of Tolstoy’s own attitudes to 1 Tolstoy was neither the first nor the last to use opera this way within the novel. See Newark for a variety of other examples: Cormac Newark, Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 2 Book II, Part V, Chapters 8-10. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 2007), 560; all quotations are from the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky hereafter abbreviated to Book and Part in Roman letters, chapters in Arabic letters, followed by page.