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