Arguably the perfect read for a period of self-isolation, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is a lengthy and, at times, absorbing book, for which the reader needs to have a sound stomach in order to digest the shenanigans of aristocrats domestically, in political and civil society and in war. It’s like Downtown Abbey crossed with Apocalypse Now, on speed.
Tentative comparisons may be made between the early 19th century, when imperial armies wreaked havoc across Europe, going west to east, then east to west, and early 21st century, when today’s imperial armies ravage eastern and southern regions of the planet. However, War and Peace is an historical novel, while offering insights into social and political processes today. Readers may consider it offers insights into human relationships and behaviour, but this reader is not convinced.
The best bits, in this reader’s opinion, are Books Ten and Eleven, including the run-up to the grotesque Battle of Borodino, as well as the aftermath. The section on the departure of the French forces from Moscow is striking, in particular the treatment of prisoners of war and the role of guerrilla parties of Cossack horsemen, also presented in Books Fourteen and Fifteen.
The First and Second Epilogues are very interesting. They contain the kernel of Tolstoy’s thinking on history and power, as well as some neat narrative tidying up, mainly by getting aristocrats married off in readiness for the new-normal of the post-war period.
The worst bits, in this readers’ opinion, are in Books One and Two, where a slew of aristocratic characters is presented, in a flurry of soirées, balls and happy jaunts to country estates. This reader struggled at that point, finding the ‘bold boy’ antics and jolly japes of young men increasingly tiresome, in particular around a duel and a gambling loss of 43, 000 rubles in Book Four.
If it was a war film, a viewer might ask ‘why are we watching all this?’, while accepting that some set-up is necessary before getting the core story underway, with the invasion from the west in 1812. The French and Russian emperors, Napoleon and Alexander, preside over the story, with aristocrats and commoners all across Europe in their thrall. Tolstoy, as a questioning Russian patriot, treats the Russian Emperor better than he treats the French, though he comes down hard, at various points, on the view of history as the works of ‘great men’.
There are a number of terrific images and scenes involving bees, inserted as parables. In Book Eleven Chapter Eleven, Moscow is described as a hive without a queen, with no life in it. Writing about historical processes in the First Epilogue, Tolstoy describes the proliferation of causes and effects in the actions of a bee to illustrate his theory of history as a multiplicity of interconnections and events beyond human comprehension.
A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilises the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee's existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historic characters and nations.
Rising above Napoleon and Alexander is God, ever present, which is where Tolstoy locates the ultimate purpose that is beyond our comprehension. At a number of points Tolstoy asks why the immolations of war exist and why ordinary men leave their homes, farms, cities and towns to murder one another? He doesn’t supply answers. And his question remains before us today.
The strange thought that of the thousands of men, young and old, who had stared with merry surprise at his hat (perhaps the very men he had noticed), twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and death amazed Pierre.
"They may die tomorrow; why are they thinking of anything but death?" And by some latent sequence of thought the descent of the Mozhaysk hill, the carts with the wounded, the ringing bells, the slanting rays of the sun, and the songs of the cavalrymen vividly recurred to his mind.
This Pierre, the central character of the novel, is the illegitimate son of Count Bezúkhov. He inherits great wealthy in one of a number of twists Fate plays on the central characters, enabling them to move through and often prosper in the novel. Inheriting wealth and securing a fortune by marriage frequently appear as methods of personal advancement.
Pierre Bezúkhov seems to amble through the novel, trying out his new wealth, then ignoring it, while spending time as a voyeur at the Battle of Borodino, then enduring deprivations as a prisoner of war. He finally marries Natasha Rostóva, thereby creating an amiable family life on his estates. If the novel has a through line, it is strung along by Pierre, who embraces Freemasonry, portrayed as a stage in his moral and spiritual development, civic politics, public service, and the pleasures of being a notable land and serf-owner. He feels destined to assassinate Napoleon, whom he earlier admired, but doesn’t go about it with any degree of commitment. It would be reasonable to label him a wealthy dilettante.
Pierre is the character who mostly clearly resembles Tolstoy himself, in attitudes and behaviour. He presents an earnest benevolence in his treatment of his serfs, which foreshadows the release of serfs from servitude in Russia in the 1860s, at about the same time as slavery was abolished in the U.S.A.. This relationship is most clearly seen in scenes with Karatáev, a peasant-soldier who endured imprisonment after the overthrow of Moscow by French forces. Pierre admires him in a patronising and paternalistic manner, typical of the benign feudal lord Tolstoy aspired to be.
Every word and action of his (Karatáev)was the manifestation of an activity unknown to him, which was his life. But his life, as he regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and actions flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately.
To his credit, Tolstoy despises the elevation of the ‘great’, whether it is a man or a nation, throughout the novel. Though he disdains the ‘great man’ view of history, he places Kutúzov, the leader of the Russian forces at Borodino and during and after the invasion of Moscow, as the key figure, the one person who soared above the intrigues of the military staff to persist with his own purpose, which was to drive the French forces from Russian soil. The widely-held view that the Russian winter destroyed the French forces is expanded to include the destruction of Russian forces, with thousands of men from a number of European countries, dying in the east to west surge. Tolstoy supports Kutúzov’s decision to cease the harrying of French troops at Vilna (modern day Vilnius, in Lithuania), though many military leaders and the Russian emperor wished to carry on to Paris. But Kutúzov decided against it, citing the burden of prisoners of war held by both armies and the decimation of both forces as reasons not to push further west.
Tolstoy hails Kutúzov as the military hero of the novel because of the common touch of his patriotism.
The source of that extraordinary power of penetrating the meaning of the events then occurring lay in the national feeling which he possessed in full purity and strength.
Kutúzov’s speech to assembled Russian forces in Book Fifteen Chapter Three at the beginning of the battle of Krasnoé, as the horrific military engagements were drawing to close, is dramatic and chilling. He points to the French prisoners and seems to offer compassion.
Worse off than our poorest beggars. While they were strong we didn't spare ourselves, but now we may even pity them. They are human beings too. Isn't it so, lads?
He ends the speech by dispatching the prisoners to oblivion
But after all who asked them here? Serves them right, the bloody bastards!" he cried, suddenly lifting his head.
Thus he draws war and peace together into the bitterest of human experiences. The summary treatment of prisoners by both armies is a telling theme in the book.
From the talk of the Germans Pierre learned that a larger guard had been allotted to that baggage train than to the prisoners, and that one of their comrades, a German soldier, had been shot by the marshal's own order because a silver spoon belonging to the marshal had been found in his possession. The group of prisoners had melted away most of all. Of the three hundred and thirty men who had set out from Moscow fewer than a hundred now remained. The prisoners were more burdensome to the escort than even the cavalry saddles or Junot's baggage. They understood that the saddles and Junot's spoon might be of some use, but that cold and hungry soldiers should have to stand and guard equally cold and hungry Russians who froze and lagged behind on the road (in which case the order was to shoot them) was not merely incomprehensible but revolting.
The novel graphically illustrates the ability of imperial force to galvanise and transform men (and, in modern times, more and more women. China has recently announced the ‘passing out’ of its first batch of female fighter pilots.) into beasts of burden, submissive robots under the power of officers, often aristocratic or upper class, to commit horrors of violence and killing that fly in the face of the religious injunctions that underpin their societies. It makes depressing reading.
On reflection, what Tolstoy says in his mini-essays and in the two epilogues is more interesting than the narrative in the novel. Certainly it more clearly states and illustrates his themes, whereas the narrative sections and the ‘journeys’ of the principle characters are no more than ‘going along’ with events, private and public, as if matters were happening to them, rather than being determined by them. Though Pierre Bezúkhov has some qualms, he supports the war effort from the Russian side, even if his own efforts, which some readers may consider to be heroic, could also be considered as self-indulgent and feeble. Towards the end, he skirts the edges of liberalising impulses emerging in St. Petersburg, which later contribute to the Decembrist Revolt by army officers appalled by the brutal experiences of peasant soldiers in the wars against the French.
No character dissents from the thrust of events, though perhaps that is the truth of a society only slowly emerging from the grip of imperialism and feudalism, an awakening which erupted in the violent revolutionary years of the early 20th century.
The novel comes to an end in Book Fifteen, with only narrative tidying up amidst mini-essays on the history and practice of war. The Second Epilogue presents Tolstoy’s thinking on ‘power’ and ‘force’ which he sees as underpinning historical views of the events in the novel. He is cynical towards leaders, because he believes that history is not produced by ‘great men’. He sees history as the outcome of millions of individual chains of cause and effect, often too small to be analysed fully. He considers that people, including emperors, are caught in chains of circumstance, incomprehensible to them. He removes agency from people and rests it with ineffable entities such as ‘love’, a very powerful human emotion and ‘God’, a very powerful human spiritual urge. This absence of agency in the sweep of history limits the capacity for dissent in the characters.
As you might expect in a novel published in 1869 and set largely among military aristocrats, roles for women are meagre. Princess Hélene Kurágina causes a stir by her philandering and comes to a sorry end, in a sort of unrighteous reflection of the moral strivings of Pierre Bezúkhov, with whom she shared a loveless marriage of convenience. Countess Natasha Rostóva first appears as enchanting and talented, but by the end she is matronly and plain. No woman is presented as having an inner life beyond meditations on survival, love, marriage and child-care. Their choices appear to be hard-labour and servitude or idleness.
A striking feature of the novel is the degree of intimate social and cultural relations existing between aristocratic Russians and aristocratic French people. Many wealthy Russian households speak French on a daily basis and only speak Russian to domestic and land-working serfs. There are a number of French tutors, companions, musicians and aristocrats scattered through the novel. This adds to the reader’s sense that the early 19th century wars in Europe, and the devastation wrought in human life and economic well-being, were in part instigated by the outworking of power struggles and personal antipathies between French and Russian aristocrats. Ironically similar spats between aristocratic cousins contributed to the immolations visited on Europe in the early 20th century.
There are hunt scenes in Book Seven which pointedly set the scene for the violence of battles to come. They also show the relationships between the social classes. When we meet Daniel and Uvarka, huntsman and serf, ready to take Count Nicholas Rostóv wolf and fox hunting on his estate, the men are presented as simple beasts, out of sorts in the grand house of their master, better suited to the yard, the fields and the forests.
Five minutes later Daniel and Uvarka were standing in Nicholas' big study. Though Daniel was not a big man, to see him in a room was like seeing a horse or a bear on the floor among the furniture and surroundings of human life. Daniel himself felt this, and as usual stood just inside the door, trying to speak softly and not move, for fear of breaking something in the master's apartment, and he hastened to say all that was necessary so as to get from under that ceiling, out into the open under the sky once more.
During the drive from east to west, the French forces were harassed in guerrilla actions by Russian forces, most notably by Cossacks, from independent, self-governing groups on the banks of the Don and Dnieper rivers. They appear as expert horsemen in support roles to officers and are shown in a poor light for their acts of plundering, which were no doubt widespread among all elements of both armies.
Some Cossacks on the prowl for booty fell in with the Emperor and very nearly captured him. If the Cossacks did not capture Napoleon then, what saved him was the very thing that was destroying the French army, the booty on which the Cossacks fell. Here as at Tarutino they went after plunder, leaving the men. Disregarding Napoleon they rushed after the plunder and Napoleon managed to escape.
Does the book make good ‘lockdown reading’? This reader thinks it does, not simply because it is a classic in the canon of world literature; Virginia Woolf is quoted as saying that ‘There is hardly any subject of human experience that is left out of War and Peace’. It is long enough to sustain the reader through a lengthy and tiresome period of self-isolation. The reader may find the early sections difficult to unravel, with the slew of characters brought on stage and the fascinating variety of Russian names in their three part form: first name, patronymic and surname. Bear with it, because by Book Three the domestic and social whirl gain pace and lead to the Battle of Austerlitz, in 1805, where 17, 000 people were killed and over 20, 000 taken prisoner and marked the lift-off of early 19th century imperial wars in Europe and across the globe.
By way of recommendations for further big-book Lockdown Reading, readers could try Middlemarch by Mary Anne Evans aka George Eliot, which is more about ‘peace’ than ‘war’ and is terrific – the last paragraph is worth a read at any time.
… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Moby Dick by Herman Melville is also terrific. It is more about war than peace, this time the war against nature by a rapacious whale-oil business. It would make good lockdown reading. And for not-so-big war books, there’s none better than The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bao Ninh and All quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller stands high and alone among war satires.
Which leads to a controversial note upon which to end: is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy a humourless paean to a lost imperial age, where devastation, death and destruction were simply part of an incomprehensible given order?
War and Peace, novel, Leo Tolstoy, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1942
War and Peace, film, King Vidor, Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica, Rome,1956
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgC38YZzQ-c
Catch 22, tv miniseries, George Clooney et al., Hulu, Santa Monica, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46wZVmKM-es
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