The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund BurkeSince its first appearance in 1971, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Avgust Chetyrnadtsatogo (henceforth to be referred to as August 1914) has been compared to, and measured by the standards of, Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace. One might say that both the subject of the novel and the scope of the historical events described in it, as well as its numerous references to Tolstoi, made such comparisons inevitable. Even though virtually all critics were unanimous that Tolstoi was a predominant presence in Solzhenitsyn's mind when he was writing the first “knot” of the multivolume novel cycle, they disagreed about the precise nature of Solzhenitsyn's relationship to Tolstoi. While some critics have been more inclined to see Solzhenitsyn's novel as an emulation of Tolstoi's masterpiece, others have emphasized the antagonistic and polemic quality of Solzhenitsyn's attitudes toward his predecessor—whether Tolstoi the “historiosoph” of War and Peace (1865— 1869) or Tolstoi the moralist and aesthetician of the later period.