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.