Essentially, the question Tolstoy is most interested in, "why did millions of people begin to kill one another?" is basically unanswerable. This is fatalism, which is "The belief that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable", or more important for us, "A submissive attitude to events, resulting from a fatalistic attitude" (Oxford English Dictionary, bold/italic/underline by me). Those ideas need to be contextualized and explained more, but I wanted to write a few words on the overall intellectual surrender that Tolstoy, mainly in War and Peace, but also in Anna Karenina and his later life, displays in his writings.
To get there, we first need to show Tolstoy's stress on "simplicity" and the serf life because this is deeply connected to his fatalistic ideas. There is a clear connection to class/wealth and happiness/unhappiness in Tolstoy's work. As Pierre (and to a lesser extent Andrei, with his hero worship of Napoleon, then his anti-empathetic Libertarianism, his following of Speransky, falling in love with Natasha, and then finally putting his life into the military and the war, which results in his death) looks for happiness through Napoleon worship, carousing and partying, Freemasonry, and finally at the end of the novel, the Decembrist movement, he only found it, temporarily, at the moment of his greatest suffering, at his most powerless, and because of a peasant.
As John Bayley writes in The Portable Tolstoy, “Tolstoy himself may have come to reject the ballroom utterly and to emphasize with a certain relish of morbidity the frivolous emptiness of ordinary life...At the end of War and Peace he celebrates the simple Russian country gentleman that Nikolai Rostov has become and dares us--as it were--to notice that fact that not only is he now the main hero, but that Pierre, the seeker and would-be reformer, led on throughout the story by idealism and lofty hopes, has been tamed and reduced to the same condition. Only Andrew’s son is left to restart the cycle of quest and unrest, to assume the human bondage to divine discontent: his elders are--from a spiritual point of view--finished. And yet Tolstoy does not portray this state of affairs as a defeat; on the contrary, the ending that from one point of view is total anticlimax...is also a majestic epic conclusion, fitting the work’s whole huge scope of man and nature. Tolstoy makes no attempt to explain this curious state of affairs...He declines to explain...we find ourselves trusting the tale, nor its teller.”
I'm not entirely sure that as Bayley writes, Tolstoy sides with Nikolai's blind obedience to Tsar and country that colors the character's "intellectual" life, so much so that he declares he will fight against Pierre and the rebels, killing them if necessary, but focusing on Nikolai, at the very least one of the novel's heroes, for a moment will help us bridge the ideas of fatalism and "simplicity" with intellectual surrender. In a key early episode of the novel, Nikolai yells at the soldiers questioning the Tsar and their leaders and instead gets drunk. As Dmitri Pisarev writes, "Rather than look at those facts that oppose his youthful dreams, he shuts his eyes to them, blinded by cowardice, stubbornness, and petty fits of anger...He not only closes his own eyes but with fanatical eagerness tries to shut the eyes of other people...He who is lucky enough to come upon the formula “our business is not to think” at the first experience of inner turmoil and who is able to calm himself, even if only for a minute, with this formula and with the help of two bottles; such a man will probably always seek this formula’s protection as soon as uncomfortable doubts assail him and the threat of independent thinking worries him".
Nikolai completely surrenders intellectually. His character is not tormented by the questions that haunt Pierre throughout the novel and thus he is able to adapt to routine and the military life. For Pierre, the formalism and emptiness of Freemasonry rings hollow, especially men using it to jockey for position. All men do in the military (in the novel) is jockey for position and this doesn't bother Nikolai (in fact he seems to revel in it himself and continues to get promoted). He has a code, stands up for what he believes, but does not consider the code in itself while Andrei and Pierre continually throughout the novel question their codes. Late in the novel, he stands up against the peasants to rescue Marya, just as he attacked Mitenka in the middle of the novel, taking complex and morally ambiguous situations (Tolstoy makes it clear that Mitenka is incompetent but not necessarily corrupt or a thief and the peasants certainly have a point near the end of the novel) and making them simple by relying on traditional class lines.
While not on class lines, Tolstoy himself completely surrendered to fatalism later in life, especially with an eventual religious surrender, like Marya has before the novel even begins. Marya and Nikolai in fact, seem to get the least amount of character development out of the five of the main characters. They are certainly the most stationary, while Natasha ebbs and flows more than any of them. She is the youngest and that may account for the way her character changes and zig zags throughout the entirety of the novel (though this is a separate issue relating to the fatalism and personality aspect of Tolstoy's apparent thought, almost every character in the book is defined by their personality at the beginning, with what happens to them and by them coming out of their set personality with Vasili acting completely out of habit, Anatole's actions being defined as just "who he is" and Berg and Boris' search for power being defined as almost subconscious, something they can't really help). Eventually, and controversially, Natasha herself surrenders to being a wife, throwing away all of her previous interests and ideas and devoting herself completely to "womanly duties."
One of the most telling episodes of Tolstoy's fatalism occurs in the Andrei part of the story when he becomes a part of the cult of Speransky. Very quickly, he decides that none of these actions (to be clear, this is attempting to reform Russia in one of the most progressive intragovernment movements in the Romanov era) will make him happy and finds Speransky unpleasant (even later, when he defends him, he still says he doesn't like him). The hedonism he displays in his conversation with Pierre is also somewhat of a give up, a throwing up of the hands, an intellectual surrender where he tries to believe that if he just worries about himself and things stay the same, he can be happy. At that point of the narrative, Andrei argues against freeing the serfs (he later puts Pierre's plans into action and is much more successful at doing so): “you want to lead him out of his animal condition...and give him moral needs. But it seems to me that the only possible happiness is animal happiness, and you want to deprive him of it...I don’t fall asleep until morning, because I’m thinking and cannot not think…”
Assuming Andrei's thoughts are sincere at this point, they mirror the thoughts Tolstoy would offer in A Confession (David Patterson translation): "Many times I have envied the peasants for their illiteracy and their lack of education. They could see nothing false in those tenets of faith which to me seemed to have arisen from patent nonsense; they could accept them and believe in the truth, the same truth I believed in. But unhappily for me, it was clear that the truth was tied to a lie with the finest of threads and that I could not accept it in such a form.". Knowledge and education (though Tolstoy himself would spend a lot of time working on education for peasants) leads to unhappiness because it reveals the emptiness and superstition of religious and political tradition. The Enlightenment breaks down faith in institutions, not that the institutions are good (marking a difference between Tolstoy and the traditional conservative who defends the institutions as being "right") but are necessary for routine (like Nikolai's time in the army) instead of damaging self-reflection (like Pierre and Andrei suffer, Andrei being the closest to happiness when he is closest to death). Once these institutions are broken down, whether on a personal level or a political level, peasant-like intellectual surrender becomes impossible and this breeds unhappiness.
Points of view that intentionally jettison rationality or critical thinking become impossible to argue with in a logical way by definition, just as Tolstoy's historical fatalism is tough to disprove. However, there are a couple objections that should at least be mentioned before moving on. First is the relation between class/wealth and available time. Tolstoy, being a "count" and in the clear upper echelon of Russian society would have substantially more idle time than the serfs he owned (until the emancipation, though their idle time did not necessarily improve after being freed). So not only would Tolstoy have the education and the availability of post-Enlightenment philosophy, but he would also have time to read the post-Enlightenment philosophy. This is something the "simple, poor" men would just not have time to do, just as the women would not be spending their time at balls and in "society" as the women of War and Peace do. And it isn't just the reading, it's the reflection and opportunity of conversation. This is why the men are able to spend their time at parties discussing war and politics in War and Peace and of course, it is one of the reasons Tolstoy spends the novel focusing on characters of nobility despite his fetishizing over peasants at the end of this novel and Anna Karenina. As Tolstoy himself wrote: "The life of clerks, merchants, seminarists, and peasants is uninteresting and half unintelligible to me; the life of the aristocrats of that time, thanks to documents of that period and for other reasons, is intelligible, interesting, and dear to me." People that must work to survive spend most of their time working. People who do not work have the time and ability to discuss and really reflect on their lives, religions, and philosophies. Plato's Republic as a work would not exist if Plato was placed in the "producer" category of his theoretical republic. The simple peasant is unable to reflect on the absurdity of the empty religious ritual that attaches meaning to their lives because they are not educated and free, but they also do not have the time to make these questions because the available time they do have will be dedicated to simple enjoyments to ease the burden of their work or to their families.
Secondly, the personality determinism that Tolstoy himself subscribes to, at least in how he defines his characters, may be more helpful than looking at philosophical or sociological reasons for combating Tolstoy's desire for a de-evolution or peasant-like happiness. Maybe happiness/unhappiness has nothing to do with class or education. Maybe Tolstoy was just what we might today call Clinical Depression. Without doing the dirty business of diagnosing authors from their writing without holding any kind of medical degree or expertise, it is hard not to read the following and conclude that Tolstoy's unhappiness had a stronger psychological basis than class, education, and belief system: "I struggled to get away from life. The thought of suicide came to me as naturally then as the thought of improving life had come to me before. This thought was such a temptation that I had to use cunning against myself in order not to go through with it too hastily. I did not want to be in a hurry only because I wanted to use all my strength to untangle my thoughts. If I could not get them untangled, I told myself, I could always go ahead with it. And there I was, a fortunate man, carrying a rope from my room, where I was alone every night as I undressed, so that I would not hang myself from the beam between the closets. And I quit going hunting with a gun, so that I would not be too easily tempted to rid myself of life. I myself did not know what I wanted. I was afraid of life, I struggled to get rid of it, and yet I hoped for something from it."
Tolstoy doesn't pack his other great novel with philosophical or theological treatises as the narrator transcending the narrative, but the contentious Book Eight of Anna Karenina (in which the title character has already been dispensed with, similar to if Hamlet was extended by three scenes so Horatio and Fortinbras can discuss contemporary religion and politics) contains Levin's search for truth. At risk over over-relying on quotations, consider this passage from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky's translation of the novel:
"The theological works of Khomiakov (endnote: "A.S. Khomiakov (1804-60), religious philosopher and poet, an important representative of the Slavophile movement, wrote about the Byzantine origin of Russian history.")...He (Levin) was struck first by the thought that it is not given to man to comprehend divine truths, but it is given to an aggregate of men united by love - the Church. He rejoiced at the thought of how much easier it was to believe in the presently existing, living Church, which constitutes the entire faith of men, which has God at its head and is therefore holy and infallible, and from it to receive one's beliefs about God, creation, the fall, redemption, than to begin with God, the distant, mysterious God, creation, and so on. But later, having read a history of the Church by a Catholic writer and a history of the Church by an Orthodox writer, and seeing that the two Churches, infallible in their essence, rejected each other, he became disappointed in Khomiakov's teaching about the Church as well, and this edifice fell to dust just as the philosophical edifices had done."
This is just one example of the many belief systems that Levin goes through and ultimately rejects in Book Eight. Just as in Tolstoy's story "The Coffee-House of Surat" which I consider key to understanding his religious thought (pluralistic, skeptical, but wishing to be like the slave that worships their wooden idol), humankind has created an impossibly vast amount of belief systems that are impossible to wade through rationally and only lead to conflict. The answer in that story, as it is for Levin, is not to have a "battle" (of course, many times these battles are literal battles and I think the "pacifism" that Tolstoy advocates towards war is related to intellectual "pacifism". The two pacifisms certainly seem linked in Levin in Book Eight) of ideas, but for everyone to retreat back into their own traditional ideas. It is this interesting link to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his ideas on the "state of nature" that counteract many of the enlightenment political ideas that Rousseau supposedly helped spur (that is beyond the scope of the ideas presented here, as I've digressed too many times already).
While much of this may seem like I have a strictly negative personal opinion of Tolstoy's diagnosis and solution of and for the Enlightenment project, Tolstoy clearly understands our desire to identify with cults of personality and infallibility. Whether it is Napoleon, Alexander, Speransky, Freemasonry, the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, Protestantism, Zionism, Marxism, Western Liberalism, Constitutionalism, Sanderism, Trumpism, or Clintonism, humans tend to gravitate towards people or ideologies that can define themselves as people, as a label, and provide them with a method of interpreting the world that cannot be questioned. What late Enlightenment philosophy, and Tolstoy falls into this in his own quirky way, did was to question the validity of creating these systems at all, just as Enlightenment philosophy questioned the religious systems that entire nations had been built upon. War and Peace is in many ways, a reaction against Bonapartism as a cult, which was in full force at the time, which seems absurd now (but this is partly because of how Napoleon has been deconstructed in the last few generations in the West, which War and Peace may have had a role in).
In that way, Tolstoy's thoughts are admirable, critiquing cults and systems that cause violence by showing the absurdity of their plurality and their impossibility of being "right" (My Religion and A Confession provide some excellent arguments for religious pluralism), but it is the conclusion, the retraction, the surrender into family life (something Andrei famously rejects very early in War and Peace), work, and religious ritual, the heavily idealized "peasant life", (as in Anna Karenina: "Well, that's how it is - people are different. One man just lives for his own needs, take Mityukha even, just stuffs his belly, but Fokanych - he's an upright old man. He lives for the soul. He remembers God.'....A new, joyful feeling came over him. At the muzhik's words about Fokanych living for the soul, by the truth, by God's way, it was as if a host of vague but important thoughts burst from some locked-up place and, all rushing towards the same goal, whirled through his head, blinding him with their light."") that just doesn't quite sit right. I think what it most tastes like is political inaction (a personal "pacifism") and privilege. While it is unfair to say that Tolstoy failed to use his power as a wealthy writer to fight for the disenfranchised (Bethink Yourselves! is a powerful political treatise and Resurrection was written for the Doukhobors, a religious group oppressed by the government), his anti-political/anti-ideological views in the novels sound less like Mahatma Gandhi and more like a rigid conservative of the moneyed class who can afford to tell people not to fight for change because change wouldn't help him personally.
And this is the ultimate problem with the intellectual surrender of Andrei, Nikolai, Marya, or Levin. It ultimately leads to either collaborating and not questioning bad ideas (compare Andrei's early declaration: "If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars") or retreating from society and becoming so self or family obsessed that you do not empathize or work for the people who are hurt by bad ideas and bad politics. Levin regrets arguing against the coming war (though Tolstoy fought for this controversial section of the novel and went out of his way to have it published), Andrei decides working with Speransky has nothing to do with his happiness, and Natasha has no interest in the rights of women (neither did Tolstoy). Tolstoy's belief that happiness and meaning comes only from inner realizations rather than anything in the outer world, this surrender of political aims, can certainly be construed as failing to address the physical and societal barriers that many classes of people around the world have to possessing a fulfilling life. And, unfortunately, this may be the end result of historical fatalism: humans have no control over history and politics, so people should concentrate not on trying to transform society but on perfecting their inner self.
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