Steven Schneider's Blog: The Unreadable Book Blog, page 2

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Author Interview Rotary Club 21

Service above self. For Spokane Rotary Club 21 members, it isn't just a phrase. It's the unifying ideal behind all that they do — and they do a lot.

The club's history is inextricably tied to Spokane's, and its momentum moving forward means it will likely continue to be a powerhouse of service in our community and beyond.

Bailee Neyland, an energetic young professional, says a passion for service is part of the reason Club 21 is so impactful.

"Everyone has bought in, knowing we can make a difference with our time, treasure and talent," says Neyland, Hoopfest's marketing director. "That's huge."

The club champions health, education and peace through fellowship and service, using its resources to make the community and world a better place, according to its mission statement.

"It's putting power in the hands of the individual to do good," says Steven Schneider, a Spokane-based attorney, who authored Through the Eyes of Rotary, a look at 100 years of Rotary history.

Started in 1911, Club 21 — the 21st Rotary founded and one of the largest — provides $100,000 to $200,000 to the local community each year, Schneider says. The Rotary Fountain in Riverfront Park? That was them. Youth Symphony concerts at the Bing? That's them, too.

They've funded instruments for the Pilgrim Slavic Baptist Church youth orchestra program, new equipment for local nonprofits, improvements to Second Harvest Food Bank and motorized wheelchairs and cochlear implants for individuals in need.

Internationally, Rotary has provided clean water wells in Kenya; midwife training in Bangladesh to improve infant and maternal health; cataract surgery in Ethiopia; cleft lip surgery in the Philippines; and more.

"We have a very powerful group," Neyland says.

Club 21 shows no sign of slowing down.

"We're always looking to the next thing," Neyland says. "How do we expand our reach? How do we increase membership? How do we broaden our demographic?"

The first club launched in Chicago in 1905 to kindle fellowship among members of the business community, and though Rotary's aim has grown to encompass service, the relationships Rotarians build foster dedication to the club — and its mission.

"The service piece is what draws people in, but it's the camaraderie and friendships that keep us coming back," Neyland says.

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Proust and Dobie Gillis

DOBIE AND PROUST

Beware, anyone who obsesses this much about literature and love, like Proust and Dobie, won't actually get a girl.


In his book We, Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson brings the power of myth to the human experience of romantic love. In the West, the story of Tristan and Isuelt the Fair is modeled in the common experience of projecting impossible expectations on the target of our love. We demand untouchable, unrequited and romantic love at the expense of the true earthly love we can actually possess. The subject and object of this projection is actually within, from our own subconscious. If our ideal is reconciled within, then the obtainable earthly love of an imperfect creature is our well-deserved reward. Much can be said about this process of individuation

In the old TV series, The Many Loves of Dobie Gilles, the myth is right on the surface. Every girl Dobie meets is a goddess, irresistible and unobtainable (for very long anyway). He gives unconditioned love to each one as an end in itself. Each one soon falls from the heavens and is sullied by the earth. Dobie cannot be satisfied by anything other than perfection.

He also realizes however, that there is no solution for him in this life. Like Tristan, he decides the only way out is to end the possibility of the fall. Tristan chooses death. He chooses death even though he has been given the real love of an earthly wife, Isuelt of the White Hands. Dobie is more complex but reaches the same conclusion, albeit with less dramatic results.

Dobie decides he must get married because then he will be insulated from the siren call of heavenly perfection. He knows one girl, Zelda, who idolizes him. Zelda’s unconditional love will protect him from his own unrequited love. Because he has himself experienced unrequited love, he knows that Zelda (of the White Hands) will marry him. He believes he will grow to love her with a practical earthly love. He reasons that then he will no longer be a slave to the potion of love that chains him to an ideal.

Zelda says yes, of course, but soon realizes that she has no conception of what happens when she gets what she dreams of. Dobie is in the same position. In fact, all of his goddesses find him ever so much more attractive now that he is engaged. They see him as a man now, not a boy. They start to project on him.

Since this must be resolved in a half hour, something’s got to give. Maynard, at the altar, speaks the truth, that Dobie and Zelda cannot yet solve their obsessions. They must be turned loose to continue the quest for the grail, to individuate in the future.

Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past, approaches this problem consistsantly.

For a man who spent his last years in a cork lined room with the curtains drawn, Marcel Proust has written some of the most beautiful and complete descriptions of the life of the human mind and its experiences. As a child and young man in the late 19th century, Proust describes his own awakening to the nature of women spontaneously in a manner that rings It starts like this:

"Sometimes the exhilaration I felt at being alone was joined by another kind that I was not able to separate distinctly from it, and that came from my desire to see a peasant girl appear in front of me whom I could clasp in my arms. "

(Like Adam, he moves from innocence to desire with a wish for something just a little bit more than that which arises naturally from Eden)

"Born suddenly, and without my having had time to identify exactly what had caused it, from very different thoughts, the pleasure which accompanied it seemed to me only one degree higher than that which those other thoughts had given me. Everything that was in my mind at that moment acquired an even greater value, the pink reflection of the tile roof, the wild grass, the village of Roussainville to which I had been wanting to go for so long, the trees of its woods, the steeple of its church, as a result of this new emotion which made them appear more desirable only because I thought it was they that had provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to carry me toward them more rapidly when it filled my sail with a powerful, mysterious, and propitious wind. "

(The boy Adam, through inexperience, can only imagine the woman arising by a mere increase in the intensity of the natural world that is not her.)

"But if, for me, this desire that a woman should appear added something more exhilarating to the charms of nature, in return, it broadened what would have been too narrow in the woman’s charm. It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was also hers and that the soul of those horizons, of the village of Roussainville, of the books I was reading that year, would be given to me by her kiss; and as my imagination drew strength from contact with my sensuality, as my sensuality spread through all the domain of my imagination, my desire grew boundless. And, too – just as during those moments of reverie in the midst of nature when, the effect of habit being suspended, and our abstract notion of things being set aside, we believe with a profound faith in the originality, in the individual life of the place in which we happen to be—the passing woman summoned by my desire seemed to be, not an ordinary exemplar of that general type—woman—but a necessary and natural product of this particular soil."

(Eve, arising from the rib of Adam, also necessarily arises from the soil of Eden, as did Adam.)

"For at that time everything which was not I, the earth and other people, appeared to me more precious, more important, endowed with more real existence then they appear to grown men. And I did not separate the earth and the people. I desired a peasant girl From Méséglise or Roussainville, a fisherwoman from Balbec, just as I desired Méséglise and Balbec. The pleasure they might give me would have appeared less real to me, I no longer would have believed in it, if I had modified its conditions as I pleased. To meet a fisherwoman from Balbec or a countrywoman from Méséglise in Paris would have been like receiving a seashell I could not have seen on the beach, a fern I could not have found in the woods, it would have subtracted from the pleasure which the woman would give me all those pleasures in which my imagination had enveloped her. "

(Clearly, she is not a ‘real’ independent woman. She does not exist apart from her origin. She is, in fact, the only key to the experience of that from which she arises.)

"But to wander through the woods of Roussainville without a peasant girl to hold in my arms was to see these woods and yet know nothing of their hidden treasures, their profound beauty. For me that girl, whom I could only envision dappled with leaves, was herself like a local plant, merely of a higher species than the rest and whose structure enabled one to approach more closely than one could in the others the essential flavor of the country. "

(Eve cannot be separated from the ground of her arising, Adam. The eternal feminine is the internal feminine. This is what is projected upon the true other, the earthly feminine.)

"I could believe this all the more readily (and also that the caresses by which she would allow me to reach that flavor would themselves be of a special kind, whose pleasure I would not have been able to experience through anyone else but her) because I was, and for a long time to come continued to be, at an age when one has not yet abstracted this pleasure from the possession of the different women with whom one has tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general notion that makes one regard them from then on as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that was always the same."

(He was perpetually at such an age and each woman was a unique emanation. Each time, both innocently channeled his expectations.)


"This pleasure does not even exist, isolated, distinct and formulated in the mind, as the aim we are pursuing when we approach a woman, as the cause of the previous disturbance that we feel. We scarcely even contemplate it as a pleasure which we will enjoy; rather, we call it her charm; for we do not think of ourselves, we think only of leaving ourselves. Obscurely awaited, immanent and hidden, it merely rouses to such a paroxysm, at the moment of its realization, the other pleasures we find in the soft gazes, the kisses of the woman close to us, that it seems to us, more than anything else, a sort of transport of our gratitude for our companion’s goodness of heart and for her touching predilection for us, which we measure by the blessings, by the beatitude she showers upon us."

(Here we have the problem described. The immanent and hidden quality arises from the experience of the transcendent in our natural existence. The incremental desire for the Other that calls her into existence from the natural world creates our perception of extraordinary grace being bestowed upon us by her, from the “not I”, in the form of her kisses, caresses, and sheer affection toward us.)


From within his cork lined room in the 1920's, Proust is in a time, and remembers a time, without the constant bombardment of explicit sexual imagery that defines love and desire in the West today. He observes the love of a woman arising spontaneously from the experience of being alone in nature. This is not lust. This needs no justification or apology. He feels, stirring from the sensual, meaning sensory not only sexual, something that is unknown yet immediately recognizable.

I remember this experience in junior high. I had been initiated into the world of Playboy and liked it a lot, not just for the articles. One day in class, looking at the back of the girl in front of me, someone close enough to daydream about conveniently, I realized something profound. All of these girls have the same body parts as the centerfolds. The have them, they guard them, they are the gatekeepers of all that I desired and they act like they are nothing special; diabolical!

At that point I was precisely in the position of Dobie Gilles, the Thinker.

As Proust observes, Nature has spontaneously shown them both the face of god in the profoundly Other only one heartbeat away, arising out of a boy’s innocent reveries. If God is closer than your jugular vein, then a woman is not much further away. She is Adam’s own rib presented to him as a gift from God.

Proust is describing love as the commitment to a loss of self, to a fundamental change in perspective, as something outside of, yet within ourselves arises. We know of this subconsciously in the face of our mother appearing from the shapeless void of light in the first opening of our eyes.

It helps to see al later loves, and love itself, through this lens Proust has created. But he is not the only one, of course.

Watch the first season of Leave it to Beaver. Beaver falls in love with his teacher, Miss Canfield, just as Dobie does with his goddesses. It is innocent but palpably something other than playing at being an adult. In the end all is resolved because “My mom says I’m too young to get married.” Miss Canfield will just have to wait.

Wally finds new interest at dancing class as Penny, “the prettiest girl at dancing school” entrances him. He sees only the goddess and no faults. But when she comes between Wally and his brother, to her “a grubby infant”, the spell is broken. Wally tells her she has a face like a flounder. “No girl is going to tell me what to do!” Not until the next one Wally.

So, all have found a way, to at least capture a moment that can explain the transcendence he feels and the unique value of every crush he continues to indulge. It is a simple message. The divine is found within and outside ourselves but is immediately recognizable in what we are sure is not ourselves but assumed to be like ourselves, the object of our love, the intimate other. The divine itself is the ultimate expression of the intimate other. God is love as Isuelt and Penny are love.


Yow! Did I just write that?!

Unreadable Proust

Unreadable Book Club

Marcel Proust
Part I

Remembrance of Things Past

.Noel Coward – “What a tiresome, affected ass he must have been, but what extraordinary, meticulous perception.”



“As he will discover over and over in love, what is imagined and yearned for is more exciting than what is possessed; anticipation is a more pleasant state than occupation. Almost all the love affairs in Proust are variations on Groucho Marx’s insight that any club that wants you is not a club you want to join.” The Year of Reading Proust, Phyllis Rose


Cartoon Caption: “Proust buys a memory foam mattress but is disappointed.”


And in that vein, wink, wink nudge, nudge, say no more, Monty Python’s sketch: The All-England Summarize Proust Competition. “As you may remember, each contestant has to give a brief summary of Proust’s ‘A La Recherge du Temps Perdu’, once in a swimsuit and once in evening dress,”

What’s next, a cross dressing Benny Hill chasing Proust and other wan, sickly young authors in jerky cartoonish motion through fields of posies? Oh, someone did that already? Kidding.

Proust; somehow there are one or two things that have stuck in the popular conscious about Proust. He was a bubble boy, allergic to everything, stayed in his cork lined room in Paris, curtains drawn while patrons and fans supported him in his writing. Remembrance of Things Past is a title we have heard, though the current translation is In Search of Lost Time. It’s long, and it’s French. There’s something about a pastry.

We might have even heard that the book arises out of the taste of a petite madeleine. This is a French pastry, but let’s just say we bite into a donut that we loved above all others as a child, and a cascade of memories associated with that time, that child, that taste come pouring out.

"No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.

"Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind. And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. . . And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. . . so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea."


Proust is hard to read, and hard to give one’s attention to. My granddaughter gave me some advice about my own writing when she was 15, to the effect of ‘Something has to happen every so often or you lose your audience, teenagers have a short attention span.” It’s a bit like a perfect no-hitter baseball game, it’s only perfect and transcendent when nothing happens. But, even adults have trouble with this problem. Certainly, if you are expecting a thrill a minute predictable screenplay in the making, you will never get to the madeleine.

But teenagers are also famously obsessive, angst ridden and oh so tedious when it comes to love. Endless bad poetry has been written and circular narratives spun in the service of tragic first loves as experienced or as remembered at the end of life. So, it is a worthy subject, and one that eventually will speak to you in the first person as you recognize it, ”That happened to me!” So much of our love lives play out in imagination and memory, and so little of it is articulated at the time, that it is almost comforting to have evidence of the wholly interior life of others. Without that, we have no proof that we, singularly, are not the only intelligent mind in the universe.


Even websites and blogs devoted to Proust can be tedious and boring. But, trust me, there is something there. And the length of it is no detraction as fans of Game of Thrones will attest. And, Monty Python notwithstanding, if you did go to the website www.readingproust.com, you would see a bare bones synopsis of the plot.

In the first book, the largest section, Swann in Love, is summarized:

"(T)he big news of this first volume is the love of Charles Swann for the courtesan Odette de Crécy, a story that takes place before Marcel’s birth. This section . . . is best summarized in Swann’s closing words: “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!”

That’s 204 pages in the Penguin edition. Having read that book, I can attest to the fact that Swann was a complete boob who should have been made to watch the movie: (S)he’s Just Not That Into You, because that’s the real answer; Get over it buddy, stop and smell the roses, love the one you’re with!

Most of the book is concerned with Swann’s imagination about Odette, what she is doing without him, how to leave town as if he didn’t care but at the same time make sure she knows it. Christ, I did that when I was 20! So you get the idea that Swann will wind down and move on, sadder but wiser.


Au contraire mon frère! The narrator spots a little red haired girl in the woods and falls for her like Charley Brown. In the second book, called, and I am not making this up, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, somehow prudishly yet more explicitly translated as In a Budding Grove. Oh, I get it, it’s one of those coming of age, rite of passage, first love, first sex kind of thing. The Little Red Haired Girl turns out to be Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette. Now, the website says this was revealed when he first saw her in the woods but I did not catch it, because the good parts are, I’m sorry, surrounded by boring parts, but that’s okay.

Anyway, I was blindsided by this. But, at the Champs Elysees where their governesses take them to play and socialize, he gets in good with her governess (‘What a nice young man.’) Then, he gets invited to spend a lot of time with Gilberte, whom his parents may or may not approve of because Swann married below his station.

But, remember this song? Children behave, that’s what they say when we’re together, Watch how you play. . . Little Marcel and Gilberte, indulge in a wrestling match which ends with Marcel having “spent my pleasure.” Christ, that happened to me when I was 14, albeit with less wrestling and a girl who must have paid attention in sex ed taking the wheel, so to speak.

Anyway, this certainly surprised Marcel but when Gilberte wanted to wrestle more, he states that suddenly, inexplicably, he’s no longer interested. Get used to it Bertie.

The thing is, even though it sounds simple, all of the stages of love and loss, as they unfold in our interior imaginings, are hit like a nail on the head, and this is remarkably without drama and angst, no sorrowful suicide attempts over love, etc. The thing about Proust is that he does move on, and sometimes gets what he wants anyway. So the previous hundred pages devoted to interior thoughts, is blown away by one moment of shared imaginings, and that one moment, when the goddess steps off of the pedestal, drives a lifetime of subsequent imaginings. Before and after that moment we really have no idea what could be going on in her head.

"We are aware of how much less disturbing these dreams of prompt but ever-deferred reunion are than a real encounter with her would be, with its likely resurgence of jealously, and so the knowledge that one is going to see her again could cause a recurrence of upsetting emotions. And what we keep postponing, day after day, is no longer an end to unbearable anguish of separation, but the dreaded renewal of futile feelings. How preferable the malleable image of her seems: instead of the real meeting which, in your solitude you can dramatize as a dream in which the girl who is not in love with you assures you that she is! This memory, which can become as sweet as possible, by being gradually flavored with what you most desire, is far better than the future encounter with a person whose words will be put into her mouth not by you, but by her foreseeable indifference and unforeseeable animosity."

In the history of literature, it plugs into the same stream of consciousness era as James Joyce but actually makes great detailed sense without hiding the ball. The ball might be tediously boring but the story telling is for the most part linear if impossibly detailed. Proust actually met Joyce once at a party and apparently didn’t like him much, while Joyce actually described the two of them, artistically, as peas in a pod: “James Joust and Marcel Proyce.” Now that’s a real knee slapper!

In later volumes, which I haven’t read, it turns out that gay and lesbian encounters are described with the same touching accuracy. Proust would never admit to being a homosexual, and as a general proposition, he was perhaps, bi-sexual. He didn’t really hide it either and so the straight narrator is perhaps Proust’s method of distancing himself from that issue. i.e. This happened to a friend of mine, not me.

What is remarkable, I think, is that he treats all of these encounters as normal in the sense that the same human emotions and delusions are involved.
All in all, the beauty of work is bound in how it can reach over a hundred years and somehow describe what you are feeling right now, or what you remember feeling in that one small moment when love became real to you.

And then there’s this gem that is always true:

"Because you are now in love with someone who will someday mean nothing to you, you refuse out of hand to meet someone who means nothing to you now, but whom you will one day come to love, someone who you might have loved sooner if you had agreed to an earlier meeting, who might have curtailed your present sufferings (before replacing them, of course, with others.)"

Not just ‘love the one you’re with’ but turn away from your obsession and see who is obsessing on you. And if you never got that girl of your dreams, and realized too late your mistake, this will create a lifetime of regret over the path not taken which, again of course, might have been worse. This is how we actually do live our interior lives.

What saves Proust is that his subject is at the center of every romance novel as well as Anna Karenina, from Superbad to Gone With the Wind. This just means that anyone can find something they recognize in his work, not that they should, or must. It is a very long book after all.

But, hey, this awakening of awareness of what it means to deeply understand or misunderstand the thoughts, feelings and presence of another human being is rarely given the importance it deserves. We are expected to move on, grow up, put aside childish things. But we don’t put them aside; we wallow in them and continue to experience them with the same intensity. So, when a writer mirrors that hidden passion back to us, it is life affirming.

For example, Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, (a great book, leave the movie alone, read the book.) provides a description of how Zhivago felt when first meeting Lara, both children:

"When you, a shadow in a schoolgirl's uniform, stepped out of the darkness of the hotel room's depths, I, a boy who knew nothing about you, understood with all the torment of a force that answered yours; this slight skinny girl is charged to the utmost, as with electricity, with all conceivable femininity in the world, If you go near her or touch her with your finger, a spark will light up the room and either kill you on the spot or electrify you for your whole life with magnetically attractive, plaintive craving, and sorrow. I was all filled with wandering tears, all my insides glittered and wept. I felt a mortal pity for the boy I was, and still more pity for the girl you were. My whole being was astonished and asked: If it's so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful is it to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love."


Pretty heady stuff, and you want to believe that you felt that way as well. We all do. Dante had his Beatrice who he met as a child and obsessed over the rest of his life. Goethe had his Lotte, who inspired his own suicide attempt and through his first novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, inspired more attempts by his readers. Hans Christian Andersen died with a pouch around his neck containing a letter from an unrequited love of his youth.

Proust, on the other hand, approaches the same experience from a more gritty and pedestrian but no less enchanting perspective.

If you feel like reading Proust it is good to know that you have not made a seven volume commitment. If you read the only first section of the first volume, you will be able to make small talk about the petite madeleine incident and the sensual awakening of the boy in nature with an authority that will leave most of your contemporaries in the dust. And for you guys, such sensitivity periodically comes into style, make the most of it.

The truth is, even saying you have read and appreciate Proust, will allow you to appear to be a puzzling, sensitive yet flawed contrarian. Try that at the next Super Bowl party, just don’t go too far. At a party, nobody likes a wan, asthmatic, shut-in in a bad suit.

The Unreadable War and Peace, Part 2

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

The Unreadable War and Peace, Part 1

War and Peace
By Leo Tolstoy
Disclosure: I am not the first one to make fun of War and Peace and some people are funnier than me, for example:

"As to War and Peace I haven’t, well, read it myself. But I have listened to all 44 or so tapes of an audio version produced for Books on Tape Inc. and I have seen a 12 or so episode BBC TV version from the early 1970s and just tonight I copied out from various Web sites some of the novel’s key passages. Equipped, therefore, as I am with a good grasp of what War and Peace is all about I am in as nearly as good a position as someone who has read the novel to authoritatively and unanswerably urge you to read it and in that capacity I hereby do so and herewith are some of the reasons you should.
First of all, there are many references in popular culture to War and Peace. As in, “It’s nearly as long as War and Peace.” Or, “Now that I am retired, I’ll have time to read War and Peace.” War and Peace is common parlance for excessive length and you won’t really appreciate all these jokes until you have plowed through all roughly 1400 pages of the novel.
I myself, as I say, haven’t read the novel. But I have listened to all those audiotapes and watched all those videotapes and both of those activities took plenty of time, I can tell you. Thus, I giggle far more than others might at jokes about the length of War and Peace and once you have read it, you too can laugh heartily at such wisecracks."
hopeyj blog at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21065/Why-Y...

Well hopeyj, I really did read War and Peace, so there.

Why I Read War and Peace

I read War and Peace because I had read a review in Newsweek that concentrated on the translators of a new edition, Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear. The point of the article, which is repeated in the translators’ Introduction to the 2007 Alfred A. Knopf edition, is that Tolstoy was an idiosyncratic writer and that he used repetition, rhythm, and sentence structure in a way that was distinctive for his time.

Other translators had been disturbed by this, varying his words and sentences to “fix” these peculiarities. These two however, proposed that their work had for the first time recreated the pace, rhythm and structure of the Russian language in the English translation. Their method was unique. A married couple, Volokhonsky, a native Russian speaker, first makes a translation from Russian into English preserving some of the literal translation of Russian meaning. Pevear, who is British, then translates that into more standard English. Finally they confer to make sure the author’s intent is reflected in the final edit.

As an example of the idiosyncratic language used by Tolstoy, the translators give this passage, introducing a quiet night scene: “Drops dripped. Quiet talk went on. Horses neighed and scuffled. Someone snored;” and, describing a young girl coming out of an isolating depression: “Love awoke and life awoke.”

I found that his prose at times read like Hemingway, at times like Gertrude Stein. (confirmed in the next post.) Beyond that, I found that Tolstoy was such a unique writer and human being that he became my favorite author.

It is rewarding then to pay attention to the care and efficiency behind these phrasings. You will be surprised at the joy of discovering these small gems in the larger narratives of the book.

That having been said, War and Peace is a difficult read not only because it involves a history that the modern reader is not familiar with, requiring frequent reference to footnotes, but because its structure does not fit neatly into any familiar category of literature. Tolstoy himself agrees, but states that no Russian work worth reading does fit into our expectations.

The book has three different stories for three different audiences but with an overlap of characters and ideas such that it would be hard to separate them out.

1. First, it is a story of the trials and tribulations of families, a love story right out of Pride and Prejudice. Will the aristocrats find true love and avoid temptation at the balls, salons and soirees of the rich? Will the young men and women, all called “Prince” and “Princess”, marry to their advantage or chase rakes and fallen women? (Usually they do both.) It is the story of upper class Russians trying to deal with the events of the Napoleonic Wars which, by 1812, brought the French Emperor all the way to Moscow before he gave up and was chased back to France. It is also the story of these same Russians dealing with their own cultural changes, dealing with contemporary and timeless ideas of how life and society could be better. Is it better to look forward to modern ideas, or to look back to a simpler past? These are questions that we still deal with, to look forward to the cyber age or back to a simpler local economy?

2. Second, the book is an extraordinarily detailed description of the battles that bookend the story. From the Battle of Austerlitz between Austria, Russia and Napoleon, to the Battle of Borodino between Russia and the French, to the occupation and retreat from Moscow, the characters walk us into the fray so that we can visualize what it was like to be right there among the sounds and sights of battle. From emperors to foot soldiers, we share their delusions and fears. To Tolstoy, this was never heroic in the usual sense, but confusing, absurd and insane. At the same time, it was the height of life and excitement, the most sought after experience of brotherhood and camaraderie.

3. Third and more to the point of Tolstoy’s purpose, War and Peace presents Tolstoy’s own theory of history, specifically, the uselessness of the “great man” and the non-existence of individual free will. Now, history was a great philosophical subject in the 18th and 19th centuries. Karl Marx had a big theory you may recall that had something to do with history. He got the idea from Hegel who thought the “World Spirit” became conscious of itself through the eyes, hands and feet of “great men.” (He especially thought this when he saw Napoleon marching with his troops past his apartment.)

Tolstoy’s view however, was that there is no such thing as history controlled or guided by great men, and that there was no such thing as the free will of individuals affecting history. The most that generals can do in battle is put thousands of men in a spot where they can be killed by guns and cannons. Whatever else happens is outside of their control. Later, historians find the one or two orders that actually correspond with what happened and forget the rest, thus the great man made history with his prescient orders.

Free will is also an illusion because individuals can never act outside of the larger context of society within which decisions are made. So, if there are neither great men guiding history, nor free will of individuals to decide whether or not to follow such men, if all history is fabricated after the fact according to the conceit of historians, then on what basis can you and I judge how to act in the present?



TOLSTOY’S THEORY OF HISTORY

The mistake everybody makes with War and Peace is to start reading it at the beginning. I figured this out when I got to the Epilogue and suddenly was told what was going on all along.

So, let’s get right to the point, History Makes No Sense. That’s about it. Here’s Tolstoy’s Tonight Show monologue on the French Revolution and Napoleon from the Epilogue.

"At the end of the eighteenth century, some two dozen men got together in Paris and started talking about all men being equal and free. That led people all over France to begin slaughtering and drowning each other. These people killed the king and many others. At the same time there was a man of genius – Napoleon. He defeated everybody everywhere – that is he killed a lot of people. . .and he killed them so well, and was so cunning and clever, that on coming back to France, he ordered everybody to obey him. And everybody obeyed him. Having become emperor, he again went to kill people in Italy, Austria, and Prussia. . In Russia there was an emperor Alexander who decided to restore order to Europe and therefore made war with Napoleon but in year seven, he suddenly made friends with him, then in year eleven, quarreled again, and again they started killing a lot of people. And Napoleon brought six hundred thousand men to Russia and captured Moscow; then he suddenly ran away from Moscow. . . All Napoleon’s allies suddenly became his enemies, and this armed force marched against Napoleon. . . defeated Napoleon, entered Paris, made Napoleon abdicate, and exiled him to the island of Elba, not depriving him of the dignity of emperor and showing him every respect, though five years earlier and one year later everybody considered him a bandit and an outlaw. . . "

This is pretty funny. He is being about as sarcastic and witty as a Russian aristocrat can manage without speaking French. There is a rather famous essay about this historical view called The Hedgehog and the Fox, by Isaiah Berlin. The Greek poet Archilocus wrote “the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The hedgehog knows how to repel the fox with its spines even though the fox might be smarter, like then Tortoise and the Hare or Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote. Berlin’s theory is that Tolstoy is a fox, seeing many things but desperately wanting to fit all of these things into one big truth, like the hedgehog.

Berlin observes:

"And so Tolstoy arrives at one of his celebrated paradoxes; the higher soldiers or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect of the words and acts of remote personages, despite all their theoretical authority, upon that history.
. . .the harshest judgment is accordingly reserved for the master theorist himself, the great Napoleon, who acts upon, and has everyone hypnotized into believing, the assumption that he understands and controls events by his superior intellect, or by flashes of intuition,. . .The greater the claim, the greater the lie."

This then, is the great illusion which Tolstoy sets himself to expose: that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control events. Side by side with these public faces. . .side by side with all this elaborate machinery for concealing the spectacle of human impotence and irrelevance and blindness, lies the real world, the stream of life that men understand, the attending to the ordinary details of daily existence.

Tolstoy’s overarching hedgehogian purpose then, is to place his characters into situations where they discover this truth. Some of the most moving and affecting writing in War and Peace therefore, has to do with descriptions of the experience of being in a battle, the target of cannonballs, bullets and bayonets, interspersed with descriptions of the absurdity of the “great men” sending soldiers into the fray.

Here, Tolstoy describes the disconnect between Napoleon and the battle itself:

"From the battlefield the adjutants he had sent and his marshals’ orderlies constantly came galloping to Napoleon with reports on the course of events, but all these reports were false; both because in the heat of the battle it is impossible to tell what is going on in a given moment, and because many of the adjutants did not reach the actual place of battle, but told what they had heard from others; and also because, while an adjutant was riding a mile or more that separated him from Napoleon, the circumstances changed, and the news that he was bringing became incorrect. . . .
An adjutant came galloping from the fleches with a pale frightened face to inform Napoleon that the attack had been repulsed and that Compans had been wounded and Davout killed, but meanwhile the fleches had been taken by another section of troops, just as the adjutant was being told that the French had been repulsed, and Davout was alive and only slightly bruised. On the weight of such unavoidably false reports, Napoleon gave his instructions, which either had been carried out before he even gave them or were not and could not be carried out. . . .
For the most part what came out was the opposite of what (was) ordered. Soldiers who were told to advance would come under canister shot and run back; soldiers who were told to stay where they were, suddenly seeing the Russians appear unexpectedly before them, sometimes ran back and sometimes rushed forward, and the cavalry galloped without orders in pursuit of the fleeing Russians. . . .
They were not afraid of being punished for non-fulfillment of orders or for unauthorized instructions, because in a battle it is a matter of what is dearest to a man – his own life – and it sometimes seems that salvation lies in running back, sometimes in running forward, and these people, finding themselves in the very heat of battle, acted in conformity with the mood of the moment. In reality, all of these movements forward and backward did nothing to alleviate or alter the situation of the troops. All their assaults and attacks on each other caused almost no harm; the harm, death, and mutilation were caused by the cannonballs and bullets that flew everywhere through the space in which these men were rushing about. As soon as these men left that space through which the cannonballs and bullets flew, their commanders, who stood in the rear, formed them up, established discipline, and, under the effect of that discipline, again led them into the zone of fire, in which (under the effect and fear of death) they again lost discipline and rushed about according to the chance mood of the moment."

The reader might expect Tolstoy to be writing about patriotism, heroism, bravery, the genius of commanders and the unswerving loyalty of the troops. Instead, here is the withering critique described by Berlin; of chaos and the fallacy of the writing of orderly and logical histories after the fact. This is a key reason why War and Peace continues to speak to us today. The absurdity of war is a continual and repeated revelation as each new generation confronts violence in its own world.

As Berlin tells us, the real stuff of history consists of:

". . .that alone which is genuine, the individual experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the colours, smells, tastes, sounds and movements, the jealousies, loves, hatreds, passions, the rare flashes of insight, the transforming moments, the ordinary day-to-day succession of private data which constitute all there is, which are reality."

Here then is the key to the structure and beauty of the writing. The everyday, mundane and petty details of life, love, death and social interaction, are hung on the meaningless but grand framework `of war, precisely to contrast the two histories that result. Characters disillusioned with ordinary life, wander into the field of battle and recognize nothing that looks like what they expect from accounts of past wars.

Pierre Bezúkov, a bear of an aristocrat of great size and greater sentiment, (like Hagrid from Harry Potter) being heartsick over one romance or another, and affected by the general Russian aristocratic angst, decides to wander into the thick of the battle of Borodino, where the French are trying to move forward to Moscow.

Though a non-combatant, he finds himself drawn into the chaos:

"He had only just run into the earthworks, when a gaunt yellow man with a sweaty face, in a blue uniform, with a sword in his hand, came charging at him, shouting something. Pierre, instinctively defending himself against the shock, because they were running into each other without seeing it, put his hands out and seized the man (it was a French officer) by the shoulder with one hand and by the throat with the other. The officer, letting go of his sword, seized Pierre by the collar.

For a few seconds the two men looked with frightened eyes into their mutually alien faces, and both were perplexed about what they had done and what they were to do. “Am I taken prisoner, or have I taken him prisoner?” each of them thought. But evidently the French officer was more inclined to the thought that he had been taken prisoner, because Pierre’s strong hand, moved by involuntary fear, squeezed his throat more and more tightly. The Frenchman wanted to say something, but suddenly a cannonball came whistling, low and terrible, just over their heads, and Pierre fancied that the French officer’s head had been torn off, he ducked so quickly.

Pierre also ducked his head and released his grip. No longer thinking who had captured whom, the Frenchman ran back to the battery, and Pierre ran down the hill, stumbling over the dead and wounded, who, it seemed to him, tried to catch him by the legs.
This is almost slapstick comedy although frighteningly beautiful in its brevity and concise imagery. Pierre now arrives at the spot where he had visited and joked with soldiers a few minutes before.

Crowds of wounded, familiar and unfamiliar to Pierre, Russian and French, with faces disfigured by suffering, walked, crawled, and were carried on stretchers from the barrow where he had spent more than an hour, and of the family circle which had taken him to itself, he found not a single one. There were many dead who he did not know. But some he recognized. The young little officer sat in the same curled up way, by the edge of the rampart, in a pool of blood. The red-mugged soldier was still twitching, but they did not take him away. Pierre ran down.

“No, now they’ll stop it, now they’ll be horrified at what they’ve done!”

. . . the roar of the gunfire, musketry, and cannonades not only did not abate, but intensified to the point of despair, like a straining man crying out with his last strength."

Part 2 - Tolstoy and Robert Burns, Tolstoy and Hemingway.

The Unreadable Book Club Introduction

THE UNREADABLE BOOK CLUB
By Steven Schneider
Introduction
Obviously tongue in cheek, the Unreadable Book Club began with the observation that there are a number of books that most people know by reputation but probably haven’t read unless forced to in some high school or college English or Literature class. These books, though unread, have the interesting quality of being familiar enough in some respects to be the butt of jokes understood by most of the population. We all know that War and Peace is really long and perhaps boring because of this, and so we understand that a joke by Woody Allen is funny even if we haven’t read the book: “I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace. It’s about Russia.” Badda Bing!

Even so, the people that have decided that these books have great value, other than to torture high school students, must be sort of like us, right? A so-called Great Book is merely a book that speaks to some of us over the centuries in a familiar language of human emotion and intellect that we may have thought was ours alone. At a certain time in our lives this connection can become an unparalleled siren call out of our family of origin into the depth and breadth of humanity.

You alone will know if a book touches you deeply, but you might need a guide to even recognize the possibility that this can be true. These lessons then are not meant to comprehensive or authoritative, but merely to share my own experience of this phenomenon, assuming again that my audience may share my appreciation.

In my own experience, before Les Miz was even imagined on Broadway (in the 70’s) I was required to read Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo, another massive book about France, Napoleon, War, Revolution and Love. I liked it so much that I read it three times before I was 20. Mostly it impressed me in the way people so far removed from me in time, circumstance and geography had feelings and passions that I could understand. After all, what is more familiar to a teenager than unrequited love, obsession, unreasoning idealism and despair?

If you follow along here, you may not be touched, but will at least understand more jokes about War and Peace without having read it.