Upon its publication in 1869, one of the most widely discussed scenes in Tolstoy’s War and Peace was the lynching of Vereshchagin. The son of a merchant, Vereshchagin stands accused of spreading defeatist literature in Moscow as Napoleon’s army marches eastward. Anticipating the city’s imminent fall, a crowd gathers outside the residence of the city’s governor, who, rattled by the people’s latent fury, declares Vereshchagin responsible for Moscow’s capitulation, and orders his dragoons to execute him. A soldier strikes Vereshchagin on the head with his sabre. It is at that point, Tolstoy writes, as Vereshchagin cries out in pain, that “the barrier of human feeling, strained to the utmost, that had held the crowd in check, suddenly broke”. The mob, contagious with fear and anger, sets upon Vereshchagin, beating and tearing at him in “feverish haste” until the wearied sound of his death-rattle stops the attack.
The scene is one of the more lyrical treatments of crowd psychology in the mid to late 19th century, capturing in stark resolution the tension that rent liberals between their love of democracy on one hand and their fears of “the people” on the other. In the wake of the 1848 revolutions, and again after the Paris Commune of 1871, when social orders were convulsed by industrial modernisation, mass politics and the spectre of working-class insurgency, intellectuals set out to decipher what was referred to as “the personality of the people”.
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