What War and Peace is About

Tolstoy's problem is: how do you write about something really, really big and complex? How do you describe and explain the Napoleonic Wars, for heaven's sake? His solution seems to be to say that there's not really a good way to do it, that you have to look at big history and individual lives and figures and shit with a weird kind of double- or triple-vision so that you're always blinking to shift the emphasis from one way of looking at it to another. (At the end of the novel, in the boring 42-page second epilogue where he considers what this has to do with choice and fate and comes out as pretty skeptical about individual freedom, he writes, "In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious," 1351.) The way that individuals are indebted for their conduct to much larger world-historical events means that both sides of the war, French and Russian, are both equally HUMAN.

So here's how that philosophizing works out in the dramatizing of actual events in the narrative. It's the last major battle of the war. The Russian troops haven't taken Napoleon prisoner, but they've done everything but, and it's time for things to be over. The old Russian field marshal Kutuzov gives a speech to the men at night in the ice. Afterward,

Kutuzov's words were hardly understood by the troops. No one could have repeated the field marshal's address, begun solemnly and then changing into an old man's simplehearted talk; but the hearty sincerity of that speech, the feeling of majestic triumph combined with pity for the foe and consciousness of the justice of our cause, exactly expressed by the old man's good-natured expletives, was not merely understood but lay in the soul of every soldier and found expression in their joyous and long-sustained shouts. Afterwards when one of the generals addressed Kutuzov asking whether he wished his caleche to be sent for, Kutuzov in answering unexpectedly gave a sob, being evidently greatly moved. (1210)

As it turns out, this ISN'T a great passage to illustrate what I'm talking about. But it's what I underlined and circled and wrote "this passage matters a lot" next to when I was at Panera this afternoon. So.

War and Peace—Pierre's still alive, although Andre died

I went to Lemongrass and bought myself lunch ("Table for one?" the waitress asked me—I was so grateful to her for not saying "just one," or "only one" or "all by yourself?") and sat and ate it while reading War and Peace. Pierre's in POW camp somewhere outside Moscow, except before he was there he'd been arrested for being an arsonist (although he isn't—he was just in the fire because he was rescuing a little girl, because Tolstoy is a goddamn sentimentalist). And he was being troublesome, wouldn't give his name, and the French soldiers in charge of him wanted to teach him a lesson, so they put him with these five other guys who were executed by firing squad for being arsonists (is this a joke that's available in Russian—fired on for starting fires?), and Pierre's supposed to be the last, and so he has to watch the five other guys being blindfolded and bound and shot and shoved into the pit in the kitchen garden of the estate that the French have occupied. It's absolutely horrifying. The fifth prisoner is a young guy—the narrator keeps emphasizing that he's only about 18, and a factory worker, and skinny—and the novel shows in excruciating detail how he adjusts the cords on his blindfold because it's too tight around the back of his head; how he shifts against the post where they've bound him to be shot at. The point is that he's still painfully human and ordinary, just a guy wanting to be a bit more comfortable a couple seconds before he's shot to death—and then the narrator tells you that the French soldiers running the firing squad are just as human as the prisoner. And because Pierre's the one watching it, Pierre with his stupid boring love of the Masons and the Emperor and second-rate crappy mysticism, you get this overwhelming sense of how horrible it is to watch one group of people kill another person because that's what they're supposed to do. How horrible it is that that's what they're doing. Pierre's waiting to be executed himself (the narrator tells you that Pierre doesn't know he's actually being let off—that he's just here to be frightened into behaving) and he thinks of how it's not a PERSON executing him, but this IMpersonal "system" that wants him dead. Except that the system doesn't know he's a specific person (because the system itself isn't interested in personhood), so it's not even that specific—he's just sort of being eliminated. It's a very, very nineteenth-century machine-phobic scene (the eighteenth-century LIKES machines and impersonal things; the nineteenth starts to think that machines hate humans), but it's also incredibly affecting. I was weeping into my curry, and I felt ridiculous, but I couldn't stop. Anyway, I'm glad Pierre is still alive. Now that he's in POW camp, he lives with a nice peasant who makes shoes and shirts and tells stories, and Pierre has lost a lot of weight (the narrator thinks this is good, because it's trying to get him married off to Natasha in a couple chapters, although Pierre doesn't know that yet), and given up his stupid love of the stupid Masons who were annoying to begin with, AND mysteriously he's not clinically depressed anymore. (Being almost executed as a form of therapy—this novel is extremely odd.) But he seems like he's doing better now. It's good to see.

Horrible Bodies in War and Peace

I spent a lot of time today hiding out in Para and Bowers and wherever, reading War and Peace. Prince Andre is dying, and Natasha is taking care of him in some hut on an estate they've all retreated to outside Moscow; Andre shouldn't be there at all, and it was only an accident that he ended up at Natasha's family's place, but he thinks it makes perfect sense because he's hallucinating with fever from the gangrene that's killing him, and Natasha keeps nursing him out of guilt and because he says he loves her, even though he smells terrible because his body is rotting. The last book's been full of disgusting horrible things—after Kuragin's amputation and the bullet being taken out of Andre's leg, then a young rabble-rouser Vereschagin who was arrested in Moscow for some kind of political crime is ripped to pieces by a mob on Rostopshchin's orders; this also is gross. And a little girl is almost burned to death and rescued by Pierre, who picks her up and carries her away but she's so freaked out she tries to pull out his hair and keeps biting his face, and he has to force himself not to throw her to the ground. People keep being horrified by other people's bodies; Helene, Pierre's wife, also kills herself, perhaps by accident, with some kind of medicine that's supposed to get her to abort the baby she's carrying at the moment and needs not to be; this also is gross. Also Moscow is on fire, and until recently in the novel, Moscow was a big sleeping woman's body, and sometimes it's also Napoleon's mother. Horrible shit keeps happening to bodies, which I suppose is what a war is about—and the way the extreme description of physical horror evokes the emotional horror that it's really about.