How a 19th Century Masterpiece Provides Valuable Insight on the Problems We Face Today
A review of ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy
“Everything he does succeeds. The plague leaves him untouched… He has no plan at all; he is afraid of everything; but the parties seize upon him and demand his participation… He alone with his ideal of glory and greatness… with his insane self-adoration, with his boldness in crime, with his sincerity in lying — he alone can justify what is to be performed… he is drawn into a conspiracy the purpose of which is the seizure of power… he says senseless things that should have been his ruin. But the rulers of France, once sharp-witted and proud, now, sensing that their role has been played out, are still more confused than he is, and do not say the words that needed to be said in order to hold on to power and destroy him” — Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
So says Tolstoy of Napoleon in War and Peace. The Jungian concept of synchronicity asserts itself again. The world speaks to us through mysterious correspondences. What else could lead me, as we approach the most consequential election in American history, to Tolstoy’s epilogue, written almost two hundred years ago?
Inspired by the parallels, I plowed through the most famous work of the most famous Christian Anarchist. Twelve hundred pages of translated Russian and untranslated French and German leave me with these thoughts.
A book to break your back
One has to start by accepting the popular judgment that War and Peace is not an easy read. The first hundred pages where we are introduced to Russian high society, family intrigues, and potential romantic entanglements, are the failed draft of a British Masterpiece series.
Readers are deluged with a tsunami of characters with unpronounceable names. On top of that, nicknames flood the beginning chapters in a narrative that, in the words of my high school English teacher, “Needs work.”
And then it draws you in
Things pick up as War and Peace shifts to an eminently readable and detailed recounting of the French invasion of Russia and the destruction of Napoleon’s Grand Army.
Tolstoy was a veteran of a later war. His grasp of strategy shows. His nationalism is also in evidence. Tolstoy occasionally shifts his narration from an omniscient third person point of view to the first person (e.g. …he saw our artillerists… these were our horse guards). These observations are not quotes from characters. The author cannot constrain himself. He steps down from behind the curtain and inserts himself into the battle scenes.
The tense velocity of the war chapters carries the reader through to a denouement which resolves family intrigue and compromised romances. The book ends in a curious metaphysical dialogue by the author himself. More on that later.
Use your enemy’s aggression against him
One comes away with a great admiration for old and infirm Field Marshal Kutuzov. Did Muhammad Ali read Tolstoy? Kutuzov planned the greatest rope-a-dope tactic of all time drawing the French Army into a fatal trap in the interior of Russia as winter approached.
Think of Kutuzov as a Russian Winfield Scott. Like Scott whose Anaconda plan to cut off and starve the Confederate Army was derided in favor of costly frontal assaults, Kutosov withstood heavy criticism, sacrificed Moscow and saved his army as the French were drawn into a disastrous campaign. Of the 612,000 combatants who entered Russia only 112,000 returned.
Influences on modern film and literature
Some say the book is a character study masterpiece — think of the young tragic princes Bolkonsky and Rostov, and their lovers. The complexity of those relationships resulted in terrific performances by Mel Ferrer and Sydney Hepburn but evaded the likes of Henry Fonda in the 1956 movie.
Fonda as Pierre Bezukhov is appalling. He’s too old, skinny, and focused. The novel’s Pierre is more akin to John Kennedy Toole’s befuddled protagonist in Confederacy of Dunces.
Tolstoy’s searing images of Pierre wandering cluelessly on battlefields and through the streets of scorched Moscow could have influenced Toole as he created his bumbling, oversized intellectual buffoon, Ignatius J. Reilly. Aimlessly pushing his hot dog cart around New Orleans and eating the profits, Reilly is the archetypal victim of events.
Curiously, the leit motif of Dunces is “O Fortuna!” — a reference to the the 13th century classic Carmina Burana, (“…Fate — monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel…”) a work that the well-read Tolstoy had to know.
Flotsam in the river of time
Tolstoy exhausts himself and the reader for 1200 pages creating an allegory to convince the reader that events consume us and move us along according to a cosmic wheel rotating independently of human free will. If that’s true, then his hero is not Pierre searching for something he’s not sure of. It’s Platon Karataev, a humble peasant who accepts his place as mere flotsam drifting down the river of time, accepting that he has no free will but carrying on as if he does.
Just as Tolstoy switches to the first person while narrating the battles, in another jarring shift of point of view he closes the book with a long dissertation on predestination. It’s like this. Picture a movie theatre. The credits are rolling as High Noon ends. Suddenly the lights come on, the film stops, and out steps Stanley Kramer himself to explain to the audience that the film is a metaphor.
Tolstoy beats us over the head with the epilogue. We get it, but just as High Noon would be a terrific Western without the allegorical underpinning, War and Peace is a great book taken solely as a vibrant portrait of nineteenth century Russia. It’s an impressionistic work which dispels many of the myths inculcated into the minds of American children of the Cold War:
- Russians are godless. No. The deep religious conviction of Russians is undeniable in War and Peace.
- Napoleon was a genius. No. He too was a chunk of flotsam in the river of time, and Tolstoy’s depiction of his disastrous campaign is as well written and understandable as anything by Shelby Foote or Bruce Catton.
- Free will is a myth. Maybe.
Tolstoy leaves the door open on that one. One cannot escape the conclusion that his characters and indeed, he himself, talk as if there is free will, but do nothing but drift along. Exactly as we may be doing now.
