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In July 2009 Newsweek placed War and Peace at the very top of its list of one hundred great novels, just ahead of Orwell’s 1984, which came in second, and Joyce’s Ulysses, third. A 2007 edition of the AARP Bulletin, read by millions, included the novel in their list of the top four books everybody should read by the age of fifty.
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An idea is something you can argue for or against, but a work of art, if it is great, transcends polemics altogether, offering a portrait of life in all its irreducible contradiction. No one understood this better than Tolstoy. How, after all, can you “agree” or “disagree” with War and Peace? You can’t, for what Tolstoy gives us in that novel is not so much a set of answers to life’s every challenge as an attitude toward living.
“The hero of my tale,” Tolstoy wrote when he was just twenty-seven, “whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all its beauty, who has been, is, and always will be beautiful— is Truth.”
But War and Peace is all these things. In fact, we are forced in the end to make the apparently vapid judgment that the subject of War and Peace is Life itself. Not life seen from a special angle, or given a special interpretation, but just Life. It is hard to name another novel of which the same statement can be made with equal justice.
“Why is War and Peace not depressing? Probably because it has expanded over space as well as time, and the sense of space, until it terrifies us, is exhilarating and leaves behind it an effect like music.
Those three got hold of a bear somewhere, put it in a carriage, and set off with it to visit some actresses!
They wept because they were friends, and because they were kindhearted, and because they—friends from childhood—had to think about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was over. . . . But those tears were pleasant to them both.
He used to say that there are only two sources of human vice—idleness and superstition, and only two virtues—activity and intelligence.
“No, friend,” said a pleasant and, as it seemed to Prince Andrew, a familiar voice, “what I say is that if it were possible to know what is beyond death, none of us would be afraid of it. That’s so, friend.”
“My God, how happy I should be if he ordered me to leap into the fire this instant!” thought Rostov.
Just as in the mechanism of a clock, so in the mechanism of the military machine, an impulse once given leads to the final result; and just as indifferently quiescent till the moment when motion is transmitted to them are the parts of the mechanism which the impulse has not yet reached.
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“Hurrah!” shouted Prince Andrew, and, scarcely able to hold up the heavy standard, he ran forward with full confidence that the whole battalion would follow him.
How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace.
Who is right and who is wrong? No one! But if you are alive—live: tomorrow you’ll die as I might have died an hour ago. And is it worth tormenting oneself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity?”
“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here,” said the spirit of the place.
It was as if the thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in the same place.
What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all?”1
Nothing has been found out, nothing discovered,” Pierre again said to himself. “All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.”
I am afraid I am very far from understanding—how am I to put it?—I am afraid my way of looking at the world is so opposed to yours that we shall not understand one another.”
“Why is it wrong?” urged Prince Andrew. “It is not given to man to know what is right and what is wrong. Men always did and always will err, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
“I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and illness. The only good is the absence of those evils. To live for myself avoiding those two evils is my whole philosophy now.”
“on the contrary one must try to make one’s life as pleasant as possible. I’m alive, that is not my fault, so I must live out my life as best I can without hurting others.”
Life meanwhile—real life, with its essential interests of health and sickness, toil and rest, and its intellectual interests in thought, science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, and passions—went on as usual,
The old oak, quite transfigured, spreading out a canopy of sappy dark-green foliage, stood rapt and slightly trembling in the rays of the evening sun. Neither gnarled fingers nor old scars nor old doubts and sorrows were any of them in evidence now.
“No, life is not over at thirty-one!” Prince Andrew suddenly decided finally and decisively.
It was evident that the thought could never occur to him which to Prince Andrew seemed so natural, namely, that it is after all impossible to express all one thinks; and that he had never felt the doubt, “Is not all I think and believe nonsense?”
Natasha was happier than she had ever been in her life. She was at that height of bliss when one becomes completely kind and good and does not believe in the possibility of evil, unhappiness, or sorrow.
The chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable within him and that limited and material something that he, and even she, was.
Prince Andrew held her hands, looked into her eyes, and did not find in his heart his former love for her. Something in him had suddenly changed; there was no longer the former poetic and mystic charm of desire, but there was pity for her feminine and childish weakness, fear at her devotion and trustfulness, and an oppressive yet joyful sense of the duty that now bound him to her forever. The present feeling, though not so bright and poetic as the former, was stronger and more serious.
And they all struggled and suffered and tormented one another and injured their souls, their eternal souls, for the attainment of benefits which endure but for an instant.
our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle.
He knew that young and old wolves were there, that the hounds had separated into two packs, that somewhere a wolf was being chased, and that something had gone wrong.
“does it ever happen to you to feel as if there were nothing more to come—nothing; that everything good is past? And to feel not exactly dull, but sad?”
So they went through their memories, smiling with pleasure: not the sad memories of old age, but poetic, youthful ones—those impressions of one’s most distant past in which dreams and realities blend—and they laughed with quiet enjoyment.
For Moscow society Pierre was the nicest, kindest, most intellectual, merriest, and most magnanimous of cranks, a heedless, genial nobleman of the old Russian type. His purse was always empty because it was open to everyone.
He had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it.
To Pierre all men seemed like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in toys, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in governmental affairs.
“There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy,” she said to Boris, repeating word for word a passage she had copied from a book. “It is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and despair, showing the possibility of consolation.”
He was incapable of considering how his actions might affect others or what the consequences of this or that action of his might be. He was convinced that, as a duck is so made that it must live in water, so God had made him such that he must spend thirty thousand rubles a year and always occupy a prominent position in society.
And Anatole, with the partiality dull-witted people have for any conclusion they have reached by their own reasoning, repeated the argument he had already put to Dolokhov a hundred times.
“Yes, indeed, that’s a true sage,” thought Pierre. “He sees nothing beyond the pleasure of the moment, nothing troubles him and so he is always cheerful, satisfied, and serene. What wouldn’t I give to be like him!” he thought enviously.
To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged.
We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand).
A king is history’s slave. History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes.
When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur.
But Napoleon did not let him speak. He evidently wanted to do all the talking himself, and continued to talk with the sort of eloquence and unrestrained irritability to which spoiled people are so prone.
Already from his military experience and what he had seen in the Austrian campaign, he had come to the conclusion that in war the most deeply considered plans have no significance and that all depends on the way unexpected movements of the enemy—that cannot be foreseen—are met, and on how and by whom the whole matter is handled.
