『전쟁과 평화』에서의 집단의식에 관하여

Abstract

Tolstoy's ‘War and Peace’ is not simply a historical novel with a chronicle of the Napoleonic War in Russia. In this gigantic epic that deals with a great historical event, the author views the whole picture of the event in the sight of a telescope and at the same time dig into the inside of the individuals participating in it with the microscopic view. With regard to the interpretation of the cause of the war and its consequences, Tolstoy repeatedly emphasizes the uselessness of a particular historical perspective. It is the consistent claim of the author that the trivial events and the individual wills come together to produce a huge event of war. For this reason, the author can not but pay attention to the consciousness of the people and individual characters. The process by which individual consciousness is united into the mass in the collective action such as the battle or the military review is derived from the collective consciousness unique to human species. In this paper, we study Tolstoy’s perspective on collective consciousness through analyzing the text of ‘War and Peace’.