Steven Schneider's Blog: The Unreadable Book Blog - Posts Tagged "war-and-peace"
The Unreadable Book Club Introduction
THE UNREADABLE BOOK CLUB
By Steven Schneider
Introduction
Obviously tongue in cheek, the Unreadable Book Club began with the observation that there are a number of books that most people know by reputation but probably haven’t read unless forced to in some high school or college English or Literature class. These books, though unread, have the interesting quality of being familiar enough in some respects to be the butt of jokes understood by most of the population. We all know that War and Peace is really long and perhaps boring because of this, and so we understand that a joke by Woody Allen is funny even if we haven’t read the book: “I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace. It’s about Russia.” Badda Bing!
Even so, the people that have decided that these books have great value, other than to torture high school students, must be sort of like us, right? A so-called Great Book is merely a book that speaks to some of us over the centuries in a familiar language of human emotion and intellect that we may have thought was ours alone. At a certain time in our lives this connection can become an unparalleled siren call out of our family of origin into the depth and breadth of humanity.
You alone will know if a book touches you deeply, but you might need a guide to even recognize the possibility that this can be true. These lessons then are not meant to comprehensive or authoritative, but merely to share my own experience of this phenomenon, assuming again that my audience may share my appreciation.
In my own experience, before Les Miz was even imagined on Broadway (in the 70’s) I was required to read Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, another massive book about France, Napoleon, War, Revolution and Love. I liked it so much that I read it three times before I was 20. Mostly it impressed me in the way people so far removed from me in time, circumstance and geography had feelings and passions that I could understand. After all, what is more familiar to a teenager than unrequited love, obsession, unreasoning idealism and despair?
If you follow along here, you may not be touched, but will at least understand more jokes about War and Peace without having read it.
By Steven Schneider
Introduction
Obviously tongue in cheek, the Unreadable Book Club began with the observation that there are a number of books that most people know by reputation but probably haven’t read unless forced to in some high school or college English or Literature class. These books, though unread, have the interesting quality of being familiar enough in some respects to be the butt of jokes understood by most of the population. We all know that War and Peace is really long and perhaps boring because of this, and so we understand that a joke by Woody Allen is funny even if we haven’t read the book: “I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace. It’s about Russia.” Badda Bing!
Even so, the people that have decided that these books have great value, other than to torture high school students, must be sort of like us, right? A so-called Great Book is merely a book that speaks to some of us over the centuries in a familiar language of human emotion and intellect that we may have thought was ours alone. At a certain time in our lives this connection can become an unparalleled siren call out of our family of origin into the depth and breadth of humanity.
You alone will know if a book touches you deeply, but you might need a guide to even recognize the possibility that this can be true. These lessons then are not meant to comprehensive or authoritative, but merely to share my own experience of this phenomenon, assuming again that my audience may share my appreciation.
In my own experience, before Les Miz was even imagined on Broadway (in the 70’s) I was required to read Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, another massive book about France, Napoleon, War, Revolution and Love. I liked it so much that I read it three times before I was 20. Mostly it impressed me in the way people so far removed from me in time, circumstance and geography had feelings and passions that I could understand. After all, what is more familiar to a teenager than unrequited love, obsession, unreasoning idealism and despair?
If you follow along here, you may not be touched, but will at least understand more jokes about War and Peace without having read it.
The Unreadable War and Peace, Part 1
War and Peace
By Leo Tolstoy
Disclosure: I am not the first one to make fun of War and Peace and some people are funnier than me, for example:
"As to War and Peace I haven’t, well, read it myself. But I have listened to all 44 or so tapes of an audio version produced for Books on Tape Inc. and I have seen a 12 or so episode BBC TV version from the early 1970s and just tonight I copied out from various Web sites some of the novel’s key passages. Equipped, therefore, as I am with a good grasp of what War and Peace is all about I am in as nearly as good a position as someone who has read the novel to authoritatively and unanswerably urge you to read it and in that capacity I hereby do so and herewith are some of the reasons you should.
First of all, there are many references in popular culture to War and Peace. As in, “It’s nearly as long as War and Peace.” Or, “Now that I am retired, I’ll have time to read War and Peace.” War and Peace is common parlance for excessive length and you won’t really appreciate all these jokes until you have plowed through all roughly 1400 pages of the novel.
I myself, as I say, haven’t read the novel. But I have listened to all those audiotapes and watched all those videotapes and both of those activities took plenty of time, I can tell you. Thus, I giggle far more than others might at jokes about the length of War and Peace and once you have read it, you too can laugh heartily at such wisecracks."
hopeyj blog at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21065/Why-Y...
Well hopeyj, I really did read War and Peace, so there.
Why I Read War and Peace
I read War and Peace because I had read a review in Newsweek that concentrated on the translators of a new edition, Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear. The point of the article, which is repeated in the translators’ Introduction to the 2007 Alfred A. Knopf edition, is that Tolstoy was an idiosyncratic writer and that he used repetition, rhythm, and sentence structure in a way that was distinctive for his time.
Other translators had been disturbed by this, varying his words and sentences to “fix” these peculiarities. These two however, proposed that their work had for the first time recreated the pace, rhythm and structure of the Russian language in the English translation. Their method was unique. A married couple, Volokhonsky, a native Russian speaker, first makes a translation from Russian into English preserving some of the literal translation of Russian meaning. Pevear, who is British, then translates that into more standard English. Finally they confer to make sure the author’s intent is reflected in the final edit.
As an example of the idiosyncratic language used by Tolstoy, the translators give this passage, introducing a quiet night scene: “Drops dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored;” and, describing a young girl coming out of an isolating depression: “Love awoke and life awoke.”
I found that his prose at times read like Hemingway, at times like Gertrude Stein. (confirmed in the next post.) Beyond that, I found that Tolstoy was such a unique writer and human being that he became my favorite author.
It is rewarding then to pay attention to the care and efficiency behind these phrasings. You will be surprised at the joy of discovering these small gems in the larger narratives of the book.
That having been said, War and Peace is a difficult read not only because it involves a history that the modern reader is not familiar with, requiring frequent reference to footnotes, but because its structure does not fit neatly into any familiar category of literature. Tolstoy himself agrees, but states that no Russian work worth reading does fit into our expectations.
The book has three different stories for three different audiences but with an overlap of characters and ideas such that it would be hard to separate them out.
1. First, it is a story of the trials and tribulations of families, a love story right out of Pride and Prejudice. Will the aristocrats find true love and avoid temptation at the balls, salons and soirees of the rich? Will the young men and women, all called “Prince” and “Princess”, marry to their advantage or chase rakes and fallen women? (Usually they do both.) It is the story of upper class Russians trying to deal with the events of the Napoleonic Wars which, by 1812, brought the French Emperor all the way to Moscow before he gave up and was chased back to France. It is also the story of these same Russians dealing with their own cultural changes, dealing with contemporary and timeless ideas of how life and society could be better. Is it better to look forward to modern ideas, or to look back to a simpler past? These are questions that we still deal with, to look forward to the cyber age or back to a simpler local economy?
2. Second, the book is an extraordinarily detailed description of the battles that bookend the story. From the Battle of Austerlitz between Austria, Russia and Napoleon, to the Battle of Borodino between Russia and the French, to the occupation and retreat from Moscow, the characters walk us into the fray so that we can visualize what it was like to be right there among the sounds and sights of battle. From emperors to foot soldiers, we share their delusions and fears. To Tolstoy, this was never heroic in the usual sense, but confusing, absurd and insane. At the same time, it was the height of life and excitement, the most sought after experience of brotherhood and camaraderie.
3. Third and more to the point of Tolstoy’s purpose, War and Peace presents Tolstoy’s own theory of history, specifically, the uselessness of the “great man” and the non-existence of individual free will. Now, history was a great philosophical subject in the 18th and 19th centuries. Karl Marx had a big theory you may recall that had something to do with history. He got the idea from Hegel who thought the “World Spirit” became conscious of itself through the eyes, hands and feet of “great men.” (He especially thought this when he saw Napoleon marching with his troops past his apartment.)
Tolstoy’s view however, was that there is no such thing as history controlled or guided by great men, and that there was no such thing as the free will of individuals affecting history. The most that generals can do in battle is put thousands of men in a spot where they can be killed by guns and cannons. Whatever else happens is outside of their control. Later, historians find the one or two orders that actually correspond with what happened and forget the rest, thus the great man made history with his prescient orders.
Free will is also an illusion because individuals can never act outside of the larger context of society within which decisions are made. So, if there are neither great men guiding history, nor free will of individuals to decide whether or not to follow such men, if all history is fabricated after the fact according to the conceit of historians, then on what basis can you and I judge how to act in the present?
TOLSTOY’S THEORY OF HISTORY
The mistake everybody makes with War and Peace is to start reading it at the beginning. I figured this out when I got to the Epilogue and suddenly was told what was going on all along.
So, let’s get right to the point, History Makes No Sense. That’s about it. Here’s Tolstoy’s Tonight Show monologue on the French Revolution and Napoleon from the Epilogue.
"At the end of the eighteenth century, some two dozen men got together in Paris and started talking about all men being equal and free. That led people all over France to begin slaughtering and drowning each other. These people killed the king and many others. At the same time there was a man of genius – Napoleon. He defeated everybody everywhere – that is he killed a lot of people. . .and he killed them so well, and was so cunning and clever, that on coming back to France, he ordered everybody to obey him. And everybody obeyed him. Having become emperor, he again went to kill people in Italy, Austria, and Prussia. . In Russia there was an emperor Alexander who decided to restore order to Europe and therefore made war with Napoleon but in year seven, he suddenly made friends with him, then in year eleven, quarreled again, and again they started killing a lot of people. And Napoleon brought six hundred thousand men to Russia and captured Moscow; then he suddenly ran away from Moscow. . . All Napoleon’s allies suddenly became his enemies, and this armed force marched against Napoleon. . . defeated Napoleon, entered Paris, made Napoleon abdicate, and exiled him to the island of Elba, not depriving him of the dignity of emperor and showing him every respect, though five years earlier and one year later everybody considered him a bandit and an outlaw. . . "
This is pretty funny. He is being about as sarcastic and witty as a Russian aristocrat can manage without speaking French. There is a rather famous essay about this historical view called The Hedgehog and the Fox, by Isaiah Berlin. The Greek poet Archilocus wrote “the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The hedgehog knows how to repel the fox with its spines even though the fox might be smarter, like then Tortoise and the Hare or Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. Berlin’s theory is that Tolstoy is a fox, seeing many things but desperately wanting to fit all of these things into one big truth, like the hedgehog.
Berlin observes:
"And so Tolstoy arrives at one of his celebrated paradoxes; the higher soldiers or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect of the words and acts of remote personages, despite all their theoretical authority, upon that history.
. . .the harshest judgment is accordingly reserved for the master theorist himself, the great Napoleon, who acts upon, and has everyone hypnotized into believing, the assumption that he understands and controls events by his superior intellect, or by flashes of intuition,. . .The greater the claim, the greater the lie."
This then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control events. Side by side with these public faces. . .side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness, lies the real world, the stream of life that men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily existence.
Tolstoy’s overarching hedgehogian purpose then, is to place his characters into situations where they discover this truth. Some of the most moving and affecting writing in War and Peace therefore, has to do with descriptions of the experience of being in a battle, the target of cannonballs, bullets and bayonets, interspersed with descriptions of the absurdity of the “great men” sending soldiers into the fray.
Here, Tolstoy describes the disconnect between Napoleon and the battle itself:
"From the battlefield the adjutants he had sent and his marshals’ orderlies constantly came galloping to Napoleon with reports on the course of events, but all these reports were false; both because in the heat of the battle it is impossible to tell what is going on in a given moment, and because many of the adjutants did not reach the actual place of battle, but told what they had heard from others; and also because, while an adjutant was riding a mile or more that separated him from Napoleon, the circumstances changed, and the news that he was bringing became incorrect. . . .
An adjutant came galloping from the fleches with a pale frightened face to inform Napoleon that the attack had been repulsed and that Compans had been wounded and Davout killed, but meanwhile the fleches had been taken by another section of troops, just as the adjutant was being told that the French had been repulsed, and Davout was alive and only slightly bruised. On the weight of such unavoidably false reports, Napoleon gave his instructions, which either had been carried out before he even gave them or were not and could not be carried out. . . .
For the most part what came out was the opposite of what (was) ordered. Soldiers who were told to advance would come under canister shot and run back; soldiers who were told to stay where they were, suddenly seeing the Russians appear unexpectedly before them, sometimes ran back and sometimes rushed forward, and the cavalry galloped without orders in pursuit of the fleeing Russians. . . .
They were not afraid of being punished for non-fulfillment of orders or for unauthorized instructions, because in a battle it is a matter of what is dearest to a man – his own life – and it sometimes seems that salvation lies in running back, sometimes in running forward, and these people, finding themselves in the very heat of battle, acted in conformity with the mood of the moment. In reality, all of these movements forward and backward did nothing to alleviate or alter the situation of the troops. All their assaults and attacks on each other caused almost no harm; the harm, death, and mutilation were caused by the cannonballs and bullets that flew everywhere through the space in which these men were rushing about. As soon as these men left that space through which the cannonballs and bullets flew, their commanders, who stood in the rear, formed them up, established discipline, and, under the effect of that discipline, again led them into the zone of fire, in which (under the effect and fear of death) they again lost discipline and rushed about according to the chance mood of the moment."
The reader might expect Tolstoy to be writing about patriotism, heroism, bravery, the genius of commanders and the unswerving loyalty of the troops. Instead, here is the withering critique described by Berlin; of chaos and the fallacy of the writing of orderly and logical histories after the fact. This is a key reason why War and Peace continues to speak to us today. The absurdity of war is a continual and repeated revelation as each new generation confronts violence in its own world.
As Berlin tells us, the real stuff of history consists of:
". . .that alone which is genuine, the individual experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the colours, smells, tastes, sounds and movements, the jealousies, loves, hatreds, passions, the rare flashes of insight, the transforming moments, the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute all there is, which are reality."
Here then is the key to the structure and beauty of the writing. The everyday, mundane and petty details of life, love, death and social interaction, are hung on the meaningless but grand framework `of war, precisely to contrast the two histories that result. Characters disillusioned with ordinary life, wander into the field of battle and recognize nothing that looks like what they expect from accounts of past wars.
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."
Part 2 - Tolstoy and Robert Burns, Tolstoy and Hemingway.
By Leo Tolstoy
Disclosure: I am not the first one to make fun of War and Peace and some people are funnier than me, for example:
"As to War and Peace I haven’t, well, read it myself. But I have listened to all 44 or so tapes of an audio version produced for Books on Tape Inc. and I have seen a 12 or so episode BBC TV version from the early 1970s and just tonight I copied out from various Web sites some of the novel’s key passages. Equipped, therefore, as I am with a good grasp of what War and Peace is all about I am in as nearly as good a position as someone who has read the novel to authoritatively and unanswerably urge you to read it and in that capacity I hereby do so and herewith are some of the reasons you should.
First of all, there are many references in popular culture to War and Peace. As in, “It’s nearly as long as War and Peace.” Or, “Now that I am retired, I’ll have time to read War and Peace.” War and Peace is common parlance for excessive length and you won’t really appreciate all these jokes until you have plowed through all roughly 1400 pages of the novel.
I myself, as I say, haven’t read the novel. But I have listened to all those audiotapes and watched all those videotapes and both of those activities took plenty of time, I can tell you. Thus, I giggle far more than others might at jokes about the length of War and Peace and once you have read it, you too can laugh heartily at such wisecracks."
hopeyj blog at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21065/Why-Y...
Well hopeyj, I really did read War and Peace, so there.
Why I Read War and Peace
I read War and Peace because I had read a review in Newsweek that concentrated on the translators of a new edition, Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear. The point of the article, which is repeated in the translators’ Introduction to the 2007 Alfred A. Knopf edition, is that Tolstoy was an idiosyncratic writer and that he used repetition, rhythm, and sentence structure in a way that was distinctive for his time.
Other translators had been disturbed by this, varying his words and sentences to “fix” these peculiarities. These two however, proposed that their work had for the first time recreated the pace, rhythm and structure of the Russian language in the English translation. Their method was unique. A married couple, Volokhonsky, a native Russian speaker, first makes a translation from Russian into English preserving some of the literal translation of Russian meaning. Pevear, who is British, then translates that into more standard English. Finally they confer to make sure the author’s intent is reflected in the final edit.
As an example of the idiosyncratic language used by Tolstoy, the translators give this passage, introducing a quiet night scene: “Drops dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored;” and, describing a young girl coming out of an isolating depression: “Love awoke and life awoke.”
I found that his prose at times read like Hemingway, at times like Gertrude Stein. (confirmed in the next post.) Beyond that, I found that Tolstoy was such a unique writer and human being that he became my favorite author.
It is rewarding then to pay attention to the care and efficiency behind these phrasings. You will be surprised at the joy of discovering these small gems in the larger narratives of the book.
That having been said, War and Peace is a difficult read not only because it involves a history that the modern reader is not familiar with, requiring frequent reference to footnotes, but because its structure does not fit neatly into any familiar category of literature. Tolstoy himself agrees, but states that no Russian work worth reading does fit into our expectations.
The book has three different stories for three different audiences but with an overlap of characters and ideas such that it would be hard to separate them out.
1. First, it is a story of the trials and tribulations of families, a love story right out of Pride and Prejudice. Will the aristocrats find true love and avoid temptation at the balls, salons and soirees of the rich? Will the young men and women, all called “Prince” and “Princess”, marry to their advantage or chase rakes and fallen women? (Usually they do both.) It is the story of upper class Russians trying to deal with the events of the Napoleonic Wars which, by 1812, brought the French Emperor all the way to Moscow before he gave up and was chased back to France. It is also the story of these same Russians dealing with their own cultural changes, dealing with contemporary and timeless ideas of how life and society could be better. Is it better to look forward to modern ideas, or to look back to a simpler past? These are questions that we still deal with, to look forward to the cyber age or back to a simpler local economy?
2. Second, the book is an extraordinarily detailed description of the battles that bookend the story. From the Battle of Austerlitz between Austria, Russia and Napoleon, to the Battle of Borodino between Russia and the French, to the occupation and retreat from Moscow, the characters walk us into the fray so that we can visualize what it was like to be right there among the sounds and sights of battle. From emperors to foot soldiers, we share their delusions and fears. To Tolstoy, this was never heroic in the usual sense, but confusing, absurd and insane. At the same time, it was the height of life and excitement, the most sought after experience of brotherhood and camaraderie.
3. Third and more to the point of Tolstoy’s purpose, War and Peace presents Tolstoy’s own theory of history, specifically, the uselessness of the “great man” and the non-existence of individual free will. Now, history was a great philosophical subject in the 18th and 19th centuries. Karl Marx had a big theory you may recall that had something to do with history. He got the idea from Hegel who thought the “World Spirit” became conscious of itself through the eyes, hands and feet of “great men.” (He especially thought this when he saw Napoleon marching with his troops past his apartment.)
Tolstoy’s view however, was that there is no such thing as history controlled or guided by great men, and that there was no such thing as the free will of individuals affecting history. The most that generals can do in battle is put thousands of men in a spot where they can be killed by guns and cannons. Whatever else happens is outside of their control. Later, historians find the one or two orders that actually correspond with what happened and forget the rest, thus the great man made history with his prescient orders.
Free will is also an illusion because individuals can never act outside of the larger context of society within which decisions are made. So, if there are neither great men guiding history, nor free will of individuals to decide whether or not to follow such men, if all history is fabricated after the fact according to the conceit of historians, then on what basis can you and I judge how to act in the present?
TOLSTOY’S THEORY OF HISTORY
The mistake everybody makes with War and Peace is to start reading it at the beginning. I figured this out when I got to the Epilogue and suddenly was told what was going on all along.
So, let’s get right to the point, History Makes No Sense. That’s about it. Here’s Tolstoy’s Tonight Show monologue on the French Revolution and Napoleon from the Epilogue.
"At the end of the eighteenth century, some two dozen men got together in Paris and started talking about all men being equal and free. That led people all over France to begin slaughtering and drowning each other. These people killed the king and many others. At the same time there was a man of genius – Napoleon. He defeated everybody everywhere – that is he killed a lot of people. . .and he killed them so well, and was so cunning and clever, that on coming back to France, he ordered everybody to obey him. And everybody obeyed him. Having become emperor, he again went to kill people in Italy, Austria, and Prussia. . In Russia there was an emperor Alexander who decided to restore order to Europe and therefore made war with Napoleon but in year seven, he suddenly made friends with him, then in year eleven, quarreled again, and again they started killing a lot of people. And Napoleon brought six hundred thousand men to Russia and captured Moscow; then he suddenly ran away from Moscow. . . All Napoleon’s allies suddenly became his enemies, and this armed force marched against Napoleon. . . defeated Napoleon, entered Paris, made Napoleon abdicate, and exiled him to the island of Elba, not depriving him of the dignity of emperor and showing him every respect, though five years earlier and one year later everybody considered him a bandit and an outlaw. . . "
This is pretty funny. He is being about as sarcastic and witty as a Russian aristocrat can manage without speaking French. There is a rather famous essay about this historical view called The Hedgehog and the Fox, by Isaiah Berlin. The Greek poet Archilocus wrote “the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The hedgehog knows how to repel the fox with its spines even though the fox might be smarter, like then Tortoise and the Hare or Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. Berlin’s theory is that Tolstoy is a fox, seeing many things but desperately wanting to fit all of these things into one big truth, like the hedgehog.
Berlin observes:
"And so Tolstoy arrives at one of his celebrated paradoxes; the higher soldiers or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect of the words and acts of remote personages, despite all their theoretical authority, upon that history.
. . .the harshest judgment is accordingly reserved for the master theorist himself, the great Napoleon, who acts upon, and has everyone hypnotized into believing, the assumption that he understands and controls events by his superior intellect, or by flashes of intuition,. . .The greater the claim, the greater the lie."
This then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control events. Side by side with these public faces. . .side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness, lies the real world, the stream of life that men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily existence.
Tolstoy’s overarching hedgehogian purpose then, is to place his characters into situations where they discover this truth. Some of the most moving and affecting writing in War and Peace therefore, has to do with descriptions of the experience of being in a battle, the target of cannonballs, bullets and bayonets, interspersed with descriptions of the absurdity of the “great men” sending soldiers into the fray.
Here, Tolstoy describes the disconnect between Napoleon and the battle itself:
"From the battlefield the adjutants he had sent and his marshals’ orderlies constantly came galloping to Napoleon with reports on the course of events, but all these reports were false; both because in the heat of the battle it is impossible to tell what is going on in a given moment, and because many of the adjutants did not reach the actual place of battle, but told what they had heard from others; and also because, while an adjutant was riding a mile or more that separated him from Napoleon, the circumstances changed, and the news that he was bringing became incorrect. . . .
An adjutant came galloping from the fleches with a pale frightened face to inform Napoleon that the attack had been repulsed and that Compans had been wounded and Davout killed, but meanwhile the fleches had been taken by another section of troops, just as the adjutant was being told that the French had been repulsed, and Davout was alive and only slightly bruised. On the weight of such unavoidably false reports, Napoleon gave his instructions, which either had been carried out before he even gave them or were not and could not be carried out. . . .
For the most part what came out was the opposite of what (was) ordered. Soldiers who were told to advance would come under canister shot and run back; soldiers who were told to stay where they were, suddenly seeing the Russians appear unexpectedly before them, sometimes ran back and sometimes rushed forward, and the cavalry galloped without orders in pursuit of the fleeing Russians. . . .
They were not afraid of being punished for non-fulfillment of orders or for unauthorized instructions, because in a battle it is a matter of what is dearest to a man – his own life – and it sometimes seems that salvation lies in running back, sometimes in running forward, and these people, finding themselves in the very heat of battle, acted in conformity with the mood of the moment. In reality, all of these movements forward and backward did nothing to alleviate or alter the situation of the troops. All their assaults and attacks on each other caused almost no harm; the harm, death, and mutilation were caused by the cannonballs and bullets that flew everywhere through the space in which these men were rushing about. As soon as these men left that space through which the cannonballs and bullets flew, their commanders, who stood in the rear, formed them up, established discipline, and, under the effect of that discipline, again led them into the zone of fire, in which (under the effect and fear of death) they again lost discipline and rushed about according to the chance mood of the moment."
The reader might expect Tolstoy to be writing about patriotism, heroism, bravery, the genius of commanders and the unswerving loyalty of the troops. Instead, here is the withering critique described by Berlin; of chaos and the fallacy of the writing of orderly and logical histories after the fact. This is a key reason why War and Peace continues to speak to us today. The absurdity of war is a continual and repeated revelation as each new generation confronts violence in its own world.
As Berlin tells us, the real stuff of history consists of:
". . .that alone which is genuine, the individual experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the colours, smells, tastes, sounds and movements, the jealousies, loves, hatreds, passions, the rare flashes of insight, the transforming moments, the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute all there is, which are reality."
Here then is the key to the structure and beauty of the writing. The everyday, mundane and petty details of life, love, death and social interaction, are hung on the meaningless but grand framework `of war, precisely to contrast the two histories that result. Characters disillusioned with ordinary life, wander into the field of battle and recognize nothing that looks like what they expect from accounts of past wars.
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."
Part 2 - Tolstoy and Robert Burns, Tolstoy and Hemingway.
The Unreadable War and Peace, Part 2
TOLSTOY AND ROBERT BURNS
It is of interest that Tolstoy was a great fan of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, enjoying his poetry set to music in Russian. Tolstoy’s son Sergei, in his memoir Tolstoy Remembered, tells of his father’s love for Burns’ “Scottish songs” Sergei also won a prize for composing music to Burns poetry and published arrangements for piano and voice.
As “The Poet of the Common Man”, Burns has had a large following in Russia that continues to this day. The Scottish connection goes at least back to Peter the Great in the 18th Century, who brought Scots in to build a modern army.
Robert Burns was inspired by the American and French Revolutions, which occurred in his lifetime. His sentiments of a brotherhood of man, and the Rights of Man, seemed to ring true down the years, in turn inspiring more hopes and dreams. It is striking to think of Tolstoy reading the words of Burns, himself inspired by the idea of natural law found in the American Declaration of Independence; “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . .”
And so we pray that come it may,
As come it will for all that,
That Sense and Worth, o’er all the Earth
Shall bear the gree*, and all that.
For all that, and all that,
It’s coming yet for all that
That man to man, the world o’er
Shall brothers be, For all that.
*win the prize
From: A Man’s a Man For All That, Robert Burns
Soap Opera
War and Peace starts in a very confusing manner and this is probably the reason many people get frustrated with it. You’ve got a bunch of Russian aristocrats discussing politics and romance in French. Even in the original, the dialog was in French because that’s what Russian aristocrats spoke amongst themselves and used as an international language of diplomacy and high society. Tolstoy, being a Russian aristocrat himself, decided that this habit was important and the translators thought so too.
This feature is however, more significant than you might think. Tolstoy was describing events that occurred a generation before his book published. His readers, like us, may not have had the same command of French, or grasp of the history and politics of the earlier time. It is a way of immersing the reader, then and now, into unfamiliar territory, in order to present his characters against a high contrast backdrop from the beginning
In the first chapter, Tolstoy describes a visitor to the salon of Anna Pavlovna Sherer, Prince Vassily:
"He was wearing an embroidered court uniform, stockings, shoes, and stars, and had a bright expression on his flat face.
He spoke that refined French in which our grandparents not only spoke but thought, and with those quiet, patronizing intonations which are proper to a significant man who has grown old in society and at court"
This introduces a theme that runs deep in Russian History. On one hand, the country is huge and extends through Asia from the Western and Central Steppes to Siberia, a stone’s throw from Alaska. The vast majority of the people were engaged in simple farming and other occupations close to the land. The minority of aristocrats however, perched on the edge of Western Europe were obsessed with western styles, music, politics and intellectual pursuits.
Even the Czars were cousins to other royal families in Western Europe. It is with some disturbance therefore, that these Francophiles engage in a deadly war with the French. Likewise, the slavophiles look toward the east and to the agricultural peasant life of the countryside and steppes for their roots and validation. All characters fall somewhere in this dichotomy but you can bet, like Tolstoy himself, the truly fortunate find themselves close to the land and peasant life.
Another confusion in the beginning comes from names. Russians are well known for having three or four names, a given name, then a surname, than a patronymic, and then a few diminutives and nicknames, all totally different and used interchangeably so it seems like there are four times as many characters than there actually are.
For example: Princess Maria Bolkónsky a/k/a Márya Nikoláevna a/k/a Másha, Máshenka, Marie.
Count Nikolai Rostov a/k/a Nikolai Ilyích Rostov a/k/a Nikólushka, Nikólenka, Kólya, Nicolas, Coco. You get the idea. On top of this name problem, all the aristocrats are generically called “Prince” and “Princess” even though they aren’t princes and princesses.
Tolstoy is a bit clumsy and melodramatic about love, like his male characters, for which we can forgive him I think. It’s really no different than all the pained and socially straightjacketed lives of the familiar English aristocrats in Victorian novels.
Putting all that together, waltzing through the first ball and soiree in War and Peace is a bit of a chore. But what of romance, you might ask? Well, the complex and interconnected melodrama of love, family, and duty was the Downton Abbey of its day, or Dallas, depending upon your generation. The characters are as well-known in Russia today as those in I Love Lucy or the Twilight series are in America.
Many jokes are still told where some stereotype, such as the boorish soldier Peruchik Rzhevsky, interacts with characters from the novel. For example: Young heartthrob Natasha is dancing with Rzhevsky at the ball. He excuses himself to check on his horse but he really has to pee. When he comes back in, he’s drenched from head to toe. Natasha asks. “Is it raining outside?” He says. “No, it’s windy.” Badda Bing!
Anyway, Pierre is in love with Natasha, a 15-year old girl when the novel opens. Natasha is being courted by the much older genteel Prince Andrei. Natasha instead falls for bad boy Fédya Dólokhov. (Justin Bieber on a horse) This is why your mother warned you about balls. Well, Dólokov isn’t serious about eloping of course, although Natasha spurns Prince Andrei before she realizes this. Andrei is stoic in his rejection and marries someone else who conveniently dies later. In the meantime, Natasha has to go traveling to drown her sorrow and becomes sort of a young Mother Theresa at the sanitarium resort where she and Mom are taking the waters. She comes out thinking less of herself and more of others and just grows up. She now finds Prince Andrei noble and kind, though he is still gun shy. Prince Andrei dies, and Pierre’s wife dies. Natasha and Pierre, both having matured, retire to his country estate to raise children and manage serfs.
Sorry, no spoiler alert.
TOLSTOY AND GANDHI
The connections between historical periods which we might study separately can be surprising. Tolstoy, who died in 1910, knew Mahatma Gandhi, the spiritual and political force behind the creation of independent India and Pakistan after World War II. Tolstoy, in the latter part of his life was dedicated to reform of the Russian political system and justice in the world. An advocate of spiritual and political simplicity and a return to the land in communes, he was also an advocate of nonviolent resistance to government oppression.
He had seen the oppression of a religious group called the Dukhobors who held prohibited Christian services outside of the state mandated Russian Orthodox Church. When Cossack troops were sent to punish them, they did not resist but protested in silence. Tolstoy helped to raise money so that the group could emigrate to Canada. Tolstoy was also aware of Thoreau, the American advocate of resistance to unjust laws.
Tolstoy wrote a “Letter to a Hindu” that was published in a newspaper in India. It advocated the throwing off of British rule as the logical path for the majority population in India. The young Gandhi was working as a lawyer in South Africa, read the letter, and wrote to Tolstoy asking if he could translate it into Hindi. They became correspondents, and Tolstoy referred to Gandhi as “Our man in Cape Town.”
In a 1909 introduction to the translation, Gandhi wrote:
"If we do not want the English in India we must pay the price. Tolstoy indicates it. 'Do not resist evil, but also do not yourselves participate in evil—in the violent deeds of the administration of the law courts, the collection of taxes and, what is more important, of the soldiers, and no one in the world will enslave you', passionately declares the sage of Yasnaya Polyana. Who can question the truth of what he says in the following: 'A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand people, not athletes, but rather weak and ordinary people, have enslaved two hundred millions of vigorous, clever, capable, freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that not the English, but the Indians, have enslaved themselves?'
One need not accept all that Tolstoy says—some of his facts are not accurately stated—to realize the central truth of his indictment of the present system, which is to understand and act upon the irresistible power of the soul over the body, of love, which is an attribute of the soul, over the brute or body force generated by the stirring in us of evil passions."
Gandhi would later pursue these two ideas of independence for India and non-violent resistance to achieve the end of British rule. Martin Luther King Jr. was a follower of Gandhi and also Thoreau. We can therefore, find some connection in our own recent history with the themes in Tolstoy’s work.
As Tolstoy states in the Letter: “The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late.”
Link to Letter to a Hindu with commentary by Gandhi: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7176/7...
Powerful Writing
Now that you have the historic and philosophical setting and a few characters, some particularly striking passages may encourage you to read more by and about Leo Tolstoy. These are passages that formed lasting images in my mind that, to this day, are the essence of my enjoyment of the novel as literature.
Before the Battle of Austerlitz, where the French faced the allied Austrian and Russian armies, Tolstoy describes how the pent-up energy of the army unwinds like a clock spring.
"The concentrated movement which began that morning in the emperors’ headquarters and gave a push to all subsequent movement was like the first movement of the central wheel in a big tower clock. Slowly one wheel started, another turned, a third, and the wheels, pulleys and gears were set turning more and more quickly, chimes begin to ring, figures popped out and the clock hands started their measured advance, showing the result of that movement.
As in the mechanism of a clock, so also in the mechanism of military action, the movement once given is just as irrepressible until the final results, and just as indifferently motionless are the parts of the mechanism not yet involved in the action even a moment before movement is transmitted to them. Wheels whizz on their axles, cogs catch, fast spinning pulleys whirr, yet the neighboring wheel is as calm and immobile as though it was ready to stand for a hundred years in that immobility, but a moment comes – the lever catches, and, obedient to its movement, the wheel creaks, turning, and merges into one movement with the whole, the result and purpose of which are incomprehensible to it.
As in a clock the result of the complex movement of numberless wheels and pulleys is merely the slow and measured movement of the hands pointing to the time, so also the result of all the complex human movements of these hundred and sixty thousand Russian and French – all the passions, desires, regrets, humiliations, sufferings, bursts of pride, fear, rapture – was merely the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three emperors, that is, a slow movement of the world-historical hand on the clock face of human history".
The Human Experience of War
Tolstoy’s purpose is to answer the question posed by historians; what forces move people? Tolstoy observes that it is not the ideas of writers, the misdeeds of monarchs, or the grand vision of emperors. People can be put into a situation where they must move or die. Momentarily they are put where cannonballs may kill them, but they do not share the goal of the one who puts them there. People try, in each moment, to live and not die, to eat, to sleep, to protect something, to befriend someone, to feel what humans feel.
Describing, as would a visitor from Mars, the outward result of the French revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy removes all goals and glory:
"In 1789 a ferment arises in Paris; it grows, spreads, and expresses itself in a movement of peoples from west to east. Several times this movement directed to the east comes into collision with a countermovement from east to west, in year 12 it reaches its utmost limit – Moscow; and, with remarkable symmetry, the countermovement from east to west is accomplished, drawing with itself, as the first movement had done, the peoples of the center. The countermovement reaches the point of departure in the west – Paris – and subsides.
It is however, the effect of this unexplained movement on ordinary people that drives the need for explanations; the need for history to be written, even if a true explanation cannot be known.
During this twenty-year period of time an enormous number of fields go unplowed; houses are burned; trade changes direction; millions of people become poor, become rich, migrate; and millions of Christians, who profess the law of love of their neighbor, kill each other."
This symmetry is seen in the description of a deadly retreat of Russian soldiers over a narrow dam.
"On the narrow dam of Augesd, on which for so many years an old miller in a cap used to sit peacefully with his fishing rods, while his grandson, his shirtsleeves rolled up, fingered the silvery, trembling fish in the watering can; on this dam over which, for so many years, Moravians in shaggy hats and blue jackets had peacefully driven in their two-horse carts laden with wheat and had driven back over the same dam all dusty with flour, their carts white – now, on this narrow dam, between wagons and cannon, under horses and between wheels, crowded men disfigured by the fear of death, crushing each other, dying, and killing each other, only to go a few steps and be killed themselves just the same."
As French cannonballs smack into the terrified men on the dam, they are still trying to take their cannon and caissons, horses and artillery, with them across the dam. Illustrating Tolstoy’s theory, the officer in command is silenced while the momentary passions of the soldiers bring about their own destruction.
"very ten seconds, pushing through the air, a cannonball smacked or a shell exploded in the midst of this dense crowd, killing and spattering with blood those who stood near. Dolokhov, wounded in the arm, on foot, with a dozen soldiers of his company . . . and his regimental commander on horseback, represented the remainder of the entire regiment. Drawn by the crowd, they pressed into the entrance to the dam and, hemmed in on all sides, stopped, because ahead of them a horse had fallen under a cannon and the crowd was pulling it out. One cannonball killed someone behind them, another landed in front and spattered Dolokhov with blood. The crowd pushed on desperately, shrank back, went a few steps, and stopped again.
“Get through these hundred steps and I’m saved for sure, stand here another two minutes and I’m sure to be dead,” each man was thinking.
Dolokhov, who was standing in the middle of the crowd, tore his way to the edge of the dam, knocking two soldiers off their feet, and ran down onto the slippery ice that covered the pond.
“Turn off!” he cried, skipping over the ice, which cracked under him; “turn off!” he cried to the ordnance. “It holds! . . .”
The ice held him, but it sagged and cracked, and it was obvious that it would give way, not only under a cannon or a crowd, but under him alone. People looked at him and pressed to the bank, not yet daring to step onto the ice. The regimental commander, standing on horseback at the entrance, raised his arm and opened his mouth, addressing Dolokhov. Suddenly one of the cannonballs came whistling so low over the crowd that everybody ducked. There was a wet smack, and the general and his horse fell in a pool of blood. No one looked at the general, still less thought of picking him up."
A wet smack; the sound of death. Now, with no voice of reason alive, the soldiers rush onto the ice with their cannon and horses.
." . .The ice cracked under one of the foremost soldiers and one foot went into the water; he tried to right himself and fell through to the waist. The nearest soldiers hesitated, the cannon driver stopped his horse, but shouts were still heard from behind; “Go onto the ice, don’t stop, go! go!” And cries of terror were heard in the crowd. The soldiers around the gun waved at the horses and beat them to make them turn and move on. The horses set out from the bank. The ice that had held the foot soldiers gave way in one huge piece, and about forty of them rushed, some back, some forward, drowning each other."
This scene stuck with me for years since I first read it. It is the juxtaposition of the quaint peasant scene of the miller and his grandson with the death and destruction of the war that is haunting.
TOLSTOY AND HEMINGWAY
The scene on the dam at Augesd draws one into the terror with simple declarative sentences. The first thing that comes to mind is that the writing seems remarkably modern with no unnecessary ornamentation or baroque structure. Ernest Hemingway, the poster boy for modernist literature, comes immediately to mind. Here is a description of a retreating column from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms:
"When we were out past the tanneries onto the main road, the troops, the motor trucks, the horse drawn carts and the guns were in one wide slow-moving column. We moved slowly but steadily in the rain, the radiator cap of our car almost against the tailboard of a truck that was loaded high, the load covered with wet canvas. Then the truck stopped. The whole column stopped. It started again and we went a little further, then stopped. I got out and walked ahead going between the trucks and carts and under the necks of horses. . .
"Come on," I said. We would make for the side-road and work to the south of the town. We all started down the embankment. A shot was fired at us from the side-road. The bullet went into the mud of the embankment.
"Go on back," I shouted. I started up the embankment, slipping in the mud. The drivers were ahead of me. I went up the embankment as fast as I could go. Two more shots came from the thick brush and Aymo, as he was crossing the tracks, lurched, tripped and fell face down. We pulled him down on the other side and turned him over. "His head ought to be uphill” I said. Piani moved him around. He lay in the mud on the side of the embankment, his feet pointing downhill, breathing blood irregularly. The three of us squatted over him in the rain. He was hit low in the back of the neck and the bullet had ranged upward and come out under the right eye. He died while I was stopping up the two holes. Piani laid his head down, wiped at his face, with a piece of the emergency dressing, then let it alone."
***
It’s important to realize that the lives of Tolstoy and Hemingway overlapped, Hemingway born in 1899 and Tolstoy dead in 1910. Even though Hemingway is held out as something utterly new on the scene, even he was in awe of Tolstoy. Hemingway said:
"I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better. Ernest Hemingway"
With that endorsement, I think you should have a good grasp of why War and Peace and Tolstoy are worth learning more about.
CONCLUSION
By connecting the familiar with the lesser known, and the ponderous with the light hearted, we hope that some genuine admiration of Tolstoy has been created. Also, our emphasis on the translator team of Volokhonsky and Pevear will perhaps give a new method of approaching literature; as a fan of its translators. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and Dostoyevski’s Brothers Karamazov have also been translated by the team and are worthy of your attention.
Further Reading
Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox, Ivan R. Dee, 1978
Parini, Jay, The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Last Year, Anchor 2009
Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
Tolstoy, Sergei, Tolstoy Remembered, Atheneum, 1962
Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms, Scribner, 2012
It is of interest that Tolstoy was a great fan of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, enjoying his poetry set to music in Russian. Tolstoy’s son Sergei, in his memoir Tolstoy Remembered, tells of his father’s love for Burns’ “Scottish songs” Sergei also won a prize for composing music to Burns poetry and published arrangements for piano and voice.
As “The Poet of the Common Man”, Burns has had a large following in Russia that continues to this day. The Scottish connection goes at least back to Peter the Great in the 18th Century, who brought Scots in to build a modern army.
Robert Burns was inspired by the American and French Revolutions, which occurred in his lifetime. His sentiments of a brotherhood of man, and the Rights of Man, seemed to ring true down the years, in turn inspiring more hopes and dreams. It is striking to think of Tolstoy reading the words of Burns, himself inspired by the idea of natural law found in the American Declaration of Independence; “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . .”
And so we pray that come it may,
As come it will for all that,
That Sense and Worth, o’er all the Earth
Shall bear the gree*, and all that.
For all that, and all that,
It’s coming yet for all that
That man to man, the world o’er
Shall brothers be, For all that.
*win the prize
From: A Man’s a Man For All That, Robert Burns
Soap Opera
War and Peace starts in a very confusing manner and this is probably the reason many people get frustrated with it. You’ve got a bunch of Russian aristocrats discussing politics and romance in French. Even in the original, the dialog was in French because that’s what Russian aristocrats spoke amongst themselves and used as an international language of diplomacy and high society. Tolstoy, being a Russian aristocrat himself, decided that this habit was important and the translators thought so too.
This feature is however, more significant than you might think. Tolstoy was describing events that occurred a generation before his book published. His readers, like us, may not have had the same command of French, or grasp of the history and politics of the earlier time. It is a way of immersing the reader, then and now, into unfamiliar territory, in order to present his characters against a high contrast backdrop from the beginning
In the first chapter, Tolstoy describes a visitor to the salon of Anna Pavlovna Sherer, Prince Vassily:
"He was wearing an embroidered court uniform, stockings, shoes, and stars, and had a bright expression on his flat face.
He spoke that refined French in which our grandparents not only spoke but thought, and with those quiet, patronizing intonations which are proper to a significant man who has grown old in society and at court"
This introduces a theme that runs deep in Russian History. On one hand, the country is huge and extends through Asia from the Western and Central Steppes to Siberia, a stone’s throw from Alaska. The vast majority of the people were engaged in simple farming and other occupations close to the land. The minority of aristocrats however, perched on the edge of Western Europe were obsessed with western styles, music, politics and intellectual pursuits.
Even the Czars were cousins to other royal families in Western Europe. It is with some disturbance therefore, that these Francophiles engage in a deadly war with the French. Likewise, the slavophiles look toward the east and to the agricultural peasant life of the countryside and steppes for their roots and validation. All characters fall somewhere in this dichotomy but you can bet, like Tolstoy himself, the truly fortunate find themselves close to the land and peasant life.
Another confusion in the beginning comes from names. Russians are well known for having three or four names, a given name, then a surname, than a patronymic, and then a few diminutives and nicknames, all totally different and used interchangeably so it seems like there are four times as many characters than there actually are.
For example: Princess Maria Bolkónsky a/k/a Márya Nikoláevna a/k/a Másha, Máshenka, Marie.
Count Nikolai Rostov a/k/a Nikolai Ilyích Rostov a/k/a Nikólushka, Nikólenka, Kólya, Nicolas, Coco. You get the idea. On top of this name problem, all the aristocrats are generically called “Prince” and “Princess” even though they aren’t princes and princesses.
Tolstoy is a bit clumsy and melodramatic about love, like his male characters, for which we can forgive him I think. It’s really no different than all the pained and socially straightjacketed lives of the familiar English aristocrats in Victorian novels.
Putting all that together, waltzing through the first ball and soiree in War and Peace is a bit of a chore. But what of romance, you might ask? Well, the complex and interconnected melodrama of love, family, and duty was the Downton Abbey of its day, or Dallas, depending upon your generation. The characters are as well-known in Russia today as those in I Love Lucy or the Twilight series are in America.
Many jokes are still told where some stereotype, such as the boorish soldier Peruchik Rzhevsky, interacts with characters from the novel. For example: Young heartthrob Natasha is dancing with Rzhevsky at the ball. He excuses himself to check on his horse but he really has to pee. When he comes back in, he’s drenched from head to toe. Natasha asks. “Is it raining outside?” He says. “No, it’s windy.” Badda Bing!
Anyway, Pierre is in love with Natasha, a 15-year old girl when the novel opens. Natasha is being courted by the much older genteel Prince Andrei. Natasha instead falls for bad boy Fédya Dólokhov. (Justin Bieber on a horse) This is why your mother warned you about balls. Well, Dólokov isn’t serious about eloping of course, although Natasha spurns Prince Andrei before she realizes this. Andrei is stoic in his rejection and marries someone else who conveniently dies later. In the meantime, Natasha has to go traveling to drown her sorrow and becomes sort of a young Mother Theresa at the sanitarium resort where she and Mom are taking the waters. She comes out thinking less of herself and more of others and just grows up. She now finds Prince Andrei noble and kind, though he is still gun shy. Prince Andrei dies, and Pierre’s wife dies. Natasha and Pierre, both having matured, retire to his country estate to raise children and manage serfs.
Sorry, no spoiler alert.
TOLSTOY AND GANDHI
The connections between historical periods which we might study separately can be surprising. Tolstoy, who died in 1910, knew Mahatma Gandhi, the spiritual and political force behind the creation of independent India and Pakistan after World War II. Tolstoy, in the latter part of his life was dedicated to reform of the Russian political system and justice in the world. An advocate of spiritual and political simplicity and a return to the land in communes, he was also an advocate of nonviolent resistance to government oppression.
He had seen the oppression of a religious group called the Dukhobors who held prohibited Christian services outside of the state mandated Russian Orthodox Church. When Cossack troops were sent to punish them, they did not resist but protested in silence. Tolstoy helped to raise money so that the group could emigrate to Canada. Tolstoy was also aware of Thoreau, the American advocate of resistance to unjust laws.
Tolstoy wrote a “Letter to a Hindu” that was published in a newspaper in India. It advocated the throwing off of British rule as the logical path for the majority population in India. The young Gandhi was working as a lawyer in South Africa, read the letter, and wrote to Tolstoy asking if he could translate it into Hindi. They became correspondents, and Tolstoy referred to Gandhi as “Our man in Cape Town.”
In a 1909 introduction to the translation, Gandhi wrote:
"If we do not want the English in India we must pay the price. Tolstoy indicates it. 'Do not resist evil, but also do not yourselves participate in evil—in the violent deeds of the administration of the law courts, the collection of taxes and, what is more important, of the soldiers, and no one in the world will enslave you', passionately declares the sage of Yasnaya Polyana. Who can question the truth of what he says in the following: 'A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand people, not athletes, but rather weak and ordinary people, have enslaved two hundred millions of vigorous, clever, capable, freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that not the English, but the Indians, have enslaved themselves?'
One need not accept all that Tolstoy says—some of his facts are not accurately stated—to realize the central truth of his indictment of the present system, which is to understand and act upon the irresistible power of the soul over the body, of love, which is an attribute of the soul, over the brute or body force generated by the stirring in us of evil passions."
Gandhi would later pursue these two ideas of independence for India and non-violent resistance to achieve the end of British rule. Martin Luther King Jr. was a follower of Gandhi and also Thoreau. We can therefore, find some connection in our own recent history with the themes in Tolstoy’s work.
As Tolstoy states in the Letter: “The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late.”
Link to Letter to a Hindu with commentary by Gandhi: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7176/7...
Powerful Writing
Now that you have the historic and philosophical setting and a few characters, some particularly striking passages may encourage you to read more by and about Leo Tolstoy. These are passages that formed lasting images in my mind that, to this day, are the essence of my enjoyment of the novel as literature.
Before the Battle of Austerlitz, where the French faced the allied Austrian and Russian armies, Tolstoy describes how the pent-up energy of the army unwinds like a clock spring.
"The concentrated movement which began that morning in the emperors’ headquarters and gave a push to all subsequent movement was like the first movement of the central wheel in a big tower clock. Slowly one wheel started, another turned, a third, and the wheels, pulleys and gears were set turning more and more quickly, chimes begin to ring, figures popped out and the clock hands started their measured advance, showing the result of that movement.
As in the mechanism of a clock, so also in the mechanism of military action, the movement once given is just as irrepressible until the final results, and just as indifferently motionless are the parts of the mechanism not yet involved in the action even a moment before movement is transmitted to them. Wheels whizz on their axles, cogs catch, fast spinning pulleys whirr, yet the neighboring wheel is as calm and immobile as though it was ready to stand for a hundred years in that immobility, but a moment comes – the lever catches, and, obedient to its movement, the wheel creaks, turning, and merges into one movement with the whole, the result and purpose of which are incomprehensible to it.
As in a clock the result of the complex movement of numberless wheels and pulleys is merely the slow and measured movement of the hands pointing to the time, so also the result of all the complex human movements of these hundred and sixty thousand Russian and French – all the passions, desires, regrets, humiliations, sufferings, bursts of pride, fear, rapture – was merely the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three emperors, that is, a slow movement of the world-historical hand on the clock face of human history".
The Human Experience of War
Tolstoy’s purpose is to answer the question posed by historians; what forces move people? Tolstoy observes that it is not the ideas of writers, the misdeeds of monarchs, or the grand vision of emperors. People can be put into a situation where they must move or die. Momentarily they are put where cannonballs may kill them, but they do not share the goal of the one who puts them there. People try, in each moment, to live and not die, to eat, to sleep, to protect something, to befriend someone, to feel what humans feel.
Describing, as would a visitor from Mars, the outward result of the French revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy removes all goals and glory:
"In 1789 a ferment arises in Paris; it grows, spreads, and expresses itself in a movement of peoples from west to east. Several times this movement directed to the east comes into collision with a countermovement from east to west, in year 12 it reaches its utmost limit – Moscow; and, with remarkable symmetry, the countermovement from east to west is accomplished, drawing with itself, as the first movement had done, the peoples of the center. The countermovement reaches the point of departure in the west – Paris – and subsides.
It is however, the effect of this unexplained movement on ordinary people that drives the need for explanations; the need for history to be written, even if a true explanation cannot be known.
During this twenty-year period of time an enormous number of fields go unplowed; houses are burned; trade changes direction; millions of people become poor, become rich, migrate; and millions of Christians, who profess the law of love of their neighbor, kill each other."
This symmetry is seen in the description of a deadly retreat of Russian soldiers over a narrow dam.
"On the narrow dam of Augesd, on which for so many years an old miller in a cap used to sit peacefully with his fishing rods, while his grandson, his shirtsleeves rolled up, fingered the silvery, trembling fish in the watering can; on this dam over which, for so many years, Moravians in shaggy hats and blue jackets had peacefully driven in their two-horse carts laden with wheat and had driven back over the same dam all dusty with flour, their carts white – now, on this narrow dam, between wagons and cannon, under horses and between wheels, crowded men disfigured by the fear of death, crushing each other, dying, and killing each other, only to go a few steps and be killed themselves just the same."
As French cannonballs smack into the terrified men on the dam, they are still trying to take their cannon and caissons, horses and artillery, with them across the dam. Illustrating Tolstoy’s theory, the officer in command is silenced while the momentary passions of the soldiers bring about their own destruction.
"very ten seconds, pushing through the air, a cannonball smacked or a shell exploded in the midst of this dense crowd, killing and spattering with blood those who stood near. Dolokhov, wounded in the arm, on foot, with a dozen soldiers of his company . . . and his regimental commander on horseback, represented the remainder of the entire regiment. Drawn by the crowd, they pressed into the entrance to the dam and, hemmed in on all sides, stopped, because ahead of them a horse had fallen under a cannon and the crowd was pulling it out. One cannonball killed someone behind them, another landed in front and spattered Dolokhov with blood. The crowd pushed on desperately, shrank back, went a few steps, and stopped again.
“Get through these hundred steps and I’m saved for sure, stand here another two minutes and I’m sure to be dead,” each man was thinking.
Dolokhov, who was standing in the middle of the crowd, tore his way to the edge of the dam, knocking two soldiers off their feet, and ran down onto the slippery ice that covered the pond.
“Turn off!” he cried, skipping over the ice, which cracked under him; “turn off!” he cried to the ordnance. “It holds! . . .”
The ice held him, but it sagged and cracked, and it was obvious that it would give way, not only under a cannon or a crowd, but under him alone. People looked at him and pressed to the bank, not yet daring to step onto the ice. The regimental commander, standing on horseback at the entrance, raised his arm and opened his mouth, addressing Dolokhov. Suddenly one of the cannonballs came whistling so low over the crowd that everybody ducked. There was a wet smack, and the general and his horse fell in a pool of blood. No one looked at the general, still less thought of picking him up."
A wet smack; the sound of death. Now, with no voice of reason alive, the soldiers rush onto the ice with their cannon and horses.
." . .The ice cracked under one of the foremost soldiers and one foot went into the water; he tried to right himself and fell through to the waist. The nearest soldiers hesitated, the cannon driver stopped his horse, but shouts were still heard from behind; “Go onto the ice, don’t stop, go! go!” And cries of terror were heard in the crowd. The soldiers around the gun waved at the horses and beat them to make them turn and move on. The horses set out from the bank. The ice that had held the foot soldiers gave way in one huge piece, and about forty of them rushed, some back, some forward, drowning each other."
This scene stuck with me for years since I first read it. It is the juxtaposition of the quaint peasant scene of the miller and his grandson with the death and destruction of the war that is haunting.
TOLSTOY AND HEMINGWAY
The scene on the dam at Augesd draws one into the terror with simple declarative sentences. The first thing that comes to mind is that the writing seems remarkably modern with no unnecessary ornamentation or baroque structure. Ernest Hemingway, the poster boy for modernist literature, comes immediately to mind. Here is a description of a retreating column from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms:
"When we were out past the tanneries onto the main road, the troops, the motor trucks, the horse drawn carts and the guns were in one wide slow-moving column. We moved slowly but steadily in the rain, the radiator cap of our car almost against the tailboard of a truck that was loaded high, the load covered with wet canvas. Then the truck stopped. The whole column stopped. It started again and we went a little further, then stopped. I got out and walked ahead going between the trucks and carts and under the necks of horses. . .
"Come on," I said. We would make for the side-road and work to the south of the town. We all started down the embankment. A shot was fired at us from the side-road. The bullet went into the mud of the embankment.
"Go on back," I shouted. I started up the embankment, slipping in the mud. The drivers were ahead of me. I went up the embankment as fast as I could go. Two more shots came from the thick brush and Aymo, as he was crossing the tracks, lurched, tripped and fell face down. We pulled him down on the other side and turned him over. "His head ought to be uphill” I said. Piani moved him around. He lay in the mud on the side of the embankment, his feet pointing downhill, breathing blood irregularly. The three of us squatted over him in the rain. He was hit low in the back of the neck and the bullet had ranged upward and come out under the right eye. He died while I was stopping up the two holes. Piani laid his head down, wiped at his face, with a piece of the emergency dressing, then let it alone."
***
It’s important to realize that the lives of Tolstoy and Hemingway overlapped, Hemingway born in 1899 and Tolstoy dead in 1910. Even though Hemingway is held out as something utterly new on the scene, even he was in awe of Tolstoy. Hemingway said:
"I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better. Ernest Hemingway"
With that endorsement, I think you should have a good grasp of why War and Peace and Tolstoy are worth learning more about.
CONCLUSION
By connecting the familiar with the lesser known, and the ponderous with the light hearted, we hope that some genuine admiration of Tolstoy has been created. Also, our emphasis on the translator team of Volokhonsky and Pevear will perhaps give a new method of approaching literature; as a fan of its translators. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and Dostoyevski’s Brothers Karamazov have also been translated by the team and are worthy of your attention.
Further Reading
Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox, Ivan R. Dee, 1978
Parini, Jay, The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Last Year, Anchor 2009
Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
Tolstoy, Sergei, Tolstoy Remembered, Atheneum, 1962
Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms, Scribner, 2012
War and Peace Mini series 2016
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."
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."
The Unreadable Book Blog
Obviously tongue in cheek, the Unreadable Book Club began with the observation that there are a number of books that most people know by reputation but probably haven’t read unless forced to in some h
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