Yes, War and Peace. Not so much a book to most people as much as a trope for something too ponderous to bother with. An anvil made of words. I’d devoured it as a teenager and then read it again in my 20s. This time it sort of underwhelmed me.
I’m always amused to read negative reviews of great classic on amazon.com. Joyce, Bellow, Faulkner—there’s always a few shrewd customers who “see through” the pretentious incomprehensible drivel that all the professors and pretenders have fallen for. These folks have nothing to learn from anybody about anything. Am I joining the club?
I don't think I'm saying I no longer like War and Peace—just that it’s apparently not the kind of thing that’s clicking for me right now. Looking back through this blog I seem to have a bit of a problem with 19th century novels in general. I think I must be a bit too infatuated at the moment by more recent themes. Or maybe I’m just more of a philistine than I used to be.
But one thing that has always irked me about this book is Tolstoy’s obsession with his theory of history. Tolstoy states and then restates this theory throughout the book, and then devotes the final 40 pages to a kind of extended essay on the theme. His point is that history is not the result of the actions of “great men,” but the sum of the historical forces acting on an event, including the myriad thoughts, emotions, and actions of everyone present. In the case of Napoleon’s invasion of Russian in the summer of 1812, Napoleon’s army was like a fire that consumed all of its fuel; the ensuing winter was like a steady drizzle that extinguished what was left of the fire. Strategy, courage, and firepower had very little to do with it. The Russian general, Kutuzov, had the simple insight to just let these things happen.
War and Peace almost functions as a museum of the 19th century novel, with a duel at dawn here, an innocent heiress seduced by a rake there, and then over there a young soldier swindled at cards. It is the Ikea of novels, and we walk its circuitous path gazing at tableau after tableau. It tells the story of a group of wealthy Russian families in the time of the Napoleonic wars, between 1805 and 1820. In each of these families there are one or two people who are central to the narrative: Natasha and Nikolai Rostov (sister and brother), Marya and Andrei Bolkonsky (also sister and brother), and Pierre Bezukov. All of these people are rich, but in War and Peace rich is normal. They also all have titles, like Prince or Countess. But they are not particularly spoiled or decadent for the most part, they just happen to have estates and servants. We mostly see them working and praying and striving. They are earnest and never condescending—at least not consciously so.
These central characters are all trying to discover how they should live their lives. They have their various talents and flaws, and they all struggle for love and fulfillment, and all run up against shocks and disappointments. For Tolstoy, the individual is always striving toward some kind of transcendence and in War and Peace when a character is wounded or witnesses death it is often the shock required to annul his (or her) fear and anxiety and to see life as a beautiful but perhaps meaningless spectacle that somehow inspires selfless love.
When later authors write about war they typically depict it more savagely. The confusion and the smoke are still there, but now there is also blood and shit and stench, a wasteland of destruction where things either blow up or fester. Not much opportunity for transcendence.
So then, Count Leo, tell me how can war be random and meaningless at a historical level, but so effective a means to insight and even transcendence for individuals? And you call yourself a great novelist. And then there’s Isaac Newton—optics, very nice, gravity, well done, but alchemy? C’mon Isaac. From where I sit, it’s all so obvious.
