Critique of Cartographic Reason: Tolstoj on the Media of War

The military efforts during the Napoleonic Wars gave rise to a large-scale cartographic enterprise across the European continent. As a medium of war, military maps served the purpose of orchestrating the “grand operations” of several distinct army corps in space. After the wars, however, the maps migrate into a different medium: the literary text. This article examines how Tolstoi's War and Peace grapples with a central problem for the 19th century novel, viz. the role of different media, literary and cartographic, in the representation and management of large-scale war. Tolstoi, the author argues, transposes the military conflict to the representational level and stages a struggle between the two media and the different military theories of the time that accompany them. Operating at this meta-level, War and Peace serves as a highly complex and self-conscious examination of the media of war.