Michael's Reviews > War and Peace

This is one of those books that can be life-changing. I read this as a teenager and I remember exactly where I was (sitting on my bed, in my grandmother's house, in southern Germany) when I finished it. I must have spent an hour just staring out the window, in awe of the lives I'd just led, the experiences I'd just had.

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I'm now re-reading this, enjoying it immensely and no doubt appreciating it much more than I did the first time. Tolstoy has the most amazing ability to make us feel, when he zooms out and examines historical events, that the individual is nothing--and then when he zooms in and paints intimate portraits of his characters, that the individual is everything. Breathtaking.

By the way, I'm reading the Anthony Briggs translation (Penguin Classics), and it's marvelous. I'm quite picky when it comes to translations and this is one of the best I've read.

It's in the sweeping battle scenes that Tolstoy shows how insignificant the individual really is--how even generals and emperors are at the mercy of random and unpredictable events. Then when Tolstoy switches to the intimate drawing room scenes, the entire perspective shifts, and nothing matters more than the individual consciousness that he depicts. The juxtaposition of these two feelings is just, well, genius!

I'd forgotten how mystical Tolstoy gets with respect to Pierre's "conversion" or "enlightenment" or "getting religion." It's fascinating how Pierre becomes animated by these great ideas and that's a sign of his maturity, whereas Prince Andrey matures in an almost opposite way: by eschewing his former great ideas regarding military heroism and focusing instead (at this point in the narrative) on his baby son.

The contrapuntal movement of Pierre and Andrey's development is only highlighted when they're together, debating whether one ought to try to improve people's lives (Pierre) or just focus on one's own happiness and leave the world alone (Andrey). It's actually a profound debate, which then ends when Andrey beholds the vast sky again and something stirs inside him, something long dormant, and we as readers can't help anticipating that Andrey will be "back."

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One of the great glories of reading War and Peace is to encounter, in a novel, characters struggling with serious philosophical issues--not as airy abstractions but rather in terms of how they ought to live. Pierre and Prince Andrey are the prime examples of this. I kept thinking, as I read the sections in which they struggle earnestly with such questions, that contemporary American fiction has precious little of this. I wonder if it's because we've all drunk the kool-aid that says "show, don't tell," making contemporary novelists shy away from such material. But this little mantra, while seemingly objective, renders entire realms of fiction off-limits. Tolstoy is constantly "telling" us what Pierre and Andrey are thinking, and the novel is so much better for it.

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Tolstoy's "peace" is of course anything but: it's full of anticipation and intrigue and philosophical yearning, from the bursting bewildering sallies of youth (Natasha) to the resigned feeling that life isn't what you dreamed when you were young, and perhaps you aren't either (Pierre). The deftness and sheer range of human drama is staggering.

And the war, when it returns, is no abstract matter. Everywhere there are people caught up in this great event, bewildered by it. Here's Rostov on seeing the French officer he's brought down: "This pale, mud-stained face of a fair-haired young man with a dimple on his chin and bright blue eyes had no business with battlefields; it was not the face of an enemy; it was a domestic, indoor face." Rostov can't help seeing him as a human being, and in that moment his "enthusiasm suddenly drained away."

It's interesting how, when Rostov chases the French officer on horseback, he thinks about the wolf hunt he was recently on. When I read the scene of the hunt, where the hunters capture the old She-Wolf and her cubs, I couldn't help feeling sorry for those animals, for that animal family hunted for pure sport. I wondered how that scene would come back into the narrative because of the obvious symbolic weight of it, and here it is, in the scene of war. The characters hadn't empathized with the She-Wolf in the same way that Rostov does with the French officer, but I wonder if we're meant to anyway, or at least be made somewhat uncomfortable (as I was) by such sport-killing, perhaps seeing it as a prelude to another kind of sport-killing altogether: namely war.

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Tolstoy can't help wearing his patriotism on his sleeve a bit, as he describes Napoleon's advance and the rival Moscow social circles, one of which has eschewed anything French while the other clings to its Francophile ways. Of course the French-speaking social circle is that of Helene, who's cold and manipulative and whose brother schemed to snatch away Natasha in such, well, French fashion. But this is no bald tale of Russian virtue and French perfidy. Tolstoy is finely attuned to the chaos of war and to the humans that engage in it, so much more alike than not as everyone tries simply to survive and perhaps claim a little glory in the end.

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I love how Tolstoy peppers his narrative with keen insights into human nature. Here he is, when describing the attitude of Muscovites on the approach of Napoleon: "At the first approach of danger two voices always speak out with equal force in a man's heart: one tells him very sensibly to consider the exact extent of the danger and any means of avoiding it; the other says even more sensibly that it's too wearisome and agonizing to contemplate the danger, since it is not in a man's power to anticipate future events and avoid the general run of things, so you might as well turn away from the nastiness until it hits you, and dwell on things that are pleasant."

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Tolstoy describes the cavalcade of human affairs as well as anyone, and the evacuation of Moscow is a great example of it: so many little stories described with the deftest brushstrokes. The irony and humor also shine through when he describes Berg's ridiculous recitation of war stories or Count Rostov's childlike diffidence when it comes to the issue of whether they should empty their wagons of belongings in order to make room for wounded soldiers.

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Hurtling toward the end now, and Tolstoy is hammering his theme that the individual is a slave to fate and mysterious forces. This adds much irony to his tale, and some biting commentary as well, as when he says: "These man, carried away by their passions, were nothing more than the blind executors of the saddest law of necessity; but they saw themselves as heroes, and mistook their doings for achievements of the highest virtue and honour."

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In the final pages the scenes return to domestic life full of family, as the war generation ages and their children are born. So many mixed emotions in the characters and in me, the reader, as our story ebbs to a close, as this towering and monumental work of art draws ever nearer to silence. "Memento mori," the characters are described as feeling in the face of an old countess, and the same can be said of this entire work, which is a testament to the fragility and beauty and fleetingness of life itself.

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And then, finally, we see Pierre and Natasha together, but the last lines of the dramatic narrative belong to young Nikolay, Prince Andrey's son, who thinks: "Father! Father! Yes, I'm going to do something even he would have been pleased with."

Tolstoy then delves more directly into a philosophical treatise on free will, capping his narrative with the final summation that "it is no less essential to get away from a false sensation of freedom and accept a dependence that we cannot feel."

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With that, the book closes, and I feel again what a monumental work I've just encountered. I'll spend many days and weeks pondering these pages, recalling little scenes and thinking about Tolstoy's grand arguments. The scope is breathtaking and profound, yet on every page you feel the frantic beating of the human heart. Despite all its spiritual claims, it's a deeply humanistic work.