Steven Schneider's Blog: The Unreadable Book Blog - Posts Tagged "mini-series-tolstoy"

A new version of War and Peace has spectacular and heart felt moments. Uniforms stay a little too clean. But Pierre (Paul Dano) at Borodino is every bit as tragically absurd an account of the chaos of war as the original. See the first posts in this blog.

Pierre Bezúkov, a bear of an aristocrat of great size and greater sentiment, (like Hagrid from Harry Potter) being heartsick over one romance or another, and affected by the general Russian aristocratic angst, decides to wander into the thick of the battle of Borodino, where the French are trying to move forward to Moscow. Though a non-combatant, he finds himself drawn into the chaos:

"He had only just run into the earthworks, when a gaunt yellow man with a sweaty face, in a blue uniform, with a sword in his hand, came charging at him, shouting something. Pierre, instinctively defending himself against the shock, because they were running into each other without seeing it, put his hands out and seized the man (it was a French officer) by the shoulder with one hand and by the throat with the other. The officer, letting go of his sword, seized Pierre by the collar.

"For a few seconds the two men looked with frightened eyes into their mutually alien faces, and both were perplexed about what they had done and what they were to do. “Am I taken prisoner, or have I taken him prisoner?” each of them thought. But evidently the French officer was more inclined to the thought that he had been taken prisoner, because Pierre’s strong hand, moved by involuntary fear, squeezed his throat more and more tightly. The Frenchman wanted to say something, but suddenly a cannonball came whistling, low and terrible, just over their heads, and Pierre fancied that the French officer’s head had been torn off, he ducked so quickly.
Pierre also ducked his head and released his grip. No longer thinking who had captured whom, the Frenchman ran back to the battery, and Pierre ran down the hill, stumbling over the dead and wounded, who, it seemed to him, tried to catch him by the legs."

This is almost slapstick comedy although frighteningly beautiful in its brevity and concise imagery. Pierre now arrives at the spot where he had visited and joked with soldiers a few minutes before.

"Crowds of wounded, familiar and unfamiliar to Pierre, Russian and French, with faces disfigured by suffering, walked, crawled, and were carried on stretchers from the barrow where he had spent more than an hour, and of the family circle which had taken him to itself, he found not a single one. There were many dead who he did not know. But some he recognized. The young little officer sat in the same curled up way, by the edge of the rampart, in a pool of blood. The red-mugged soldier was still twitching, but they did not take him away.
Pierre ran down.
“No, now they’ll stop it, now they’ll be horrified at what they’ve done!”
. . . the roar of the gunfire, musketry, and cannonades not only did not abate, but intensified to the point of despair, like a straining man crying out with his last strength."