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.