BOOKS - War and Peace

Score: 9.1

The title in the least is a cliché to end all clichés, a testament to the ability of a simple phrase to create, and conjure within each person who glimpses it, an indefinable aura of pathos and epic. I mean, just think of a world without War and Peace. It just can’t exist (which is kind of Tolstoy’s point, but we’ll get to that later). Sooner or later someone was going to come up with the two great contrasts of the multitudes in our era of the nation-state, and novelize it with as much force and devotion as Confucius’ philosophized it thousands of years earlier before nation was even a distant science-fiction-esque thought. That Tolstoy did it first, and did it in the manner that has shaped our understanding of that titular phrase, isn’t surprising given his knack for epic, large-scale stories. Like War and Peace’s 1400-page marathon, Anna Karenina is no overly-long novella, and neither will ever be mistaken for the product of an imagination with a short attention span. Indeed, above everything else, the novel is best remembered for its sheer size: spanning two decades, three generations, and the largest war then known to mankind, Tolstoy’s vision was enormous; of course the pathos of the title arises not from millions clashing against millions, but from our seemingly instinctive knowledge that the monstrosity of the title gains it’s gravitas merely in the individual lives that are caught in the midst of the two extremes - it is there that Tolstoy focuses and ultimately falters.

“Falters?” You say. How can War and Peace, a book which I myself have just devoted a rather languid paragraph extolling the virtues and cultural/linguistic impact of, falter in any respect? It is literature qua literature, the end-all and archetype of nearly everything that has come before it. It is faultless, beautiful, eloquent, vast, and timeless. Much of this understanding of the novel is true, and much of it is false.

Take timelessness for example. Sure, the core elements of love, live, death, strife, politics and power, war, and peace, are all present in the book, and all front and centre as they should be. Yet Tolstoy’s understanding of all these things, and even their minuatae, are ultimately very dated. The central love relationship between Pierre Bezuhov and Natasha Rostov, for example, ultimately winds up as merely another Victorian-ideal relationship of subservience and domestication of the female spirit, even though there is no way the character of Natasha (which, up until the last sixth or so of the book, is one of the most vivacious and promising women I’ve read) could in any reality succumb to such domestication. While I’m a big proponent in the idea that socialization plays a huge role in our personalities and the abilities of our personalities to change, there’s a certain level at which a personality simply is: and Natasha’s sudden change to domestic queen is nothing but contemporary wish-fulfillment in the characteristically narrow view of femininity. That Tolstoy himself viewed his own wife’s domestic care as the epitome of love, seems to mean that he translated such love to be universally desired and attainable, by both sexes, throughout war and peace. Such domestication is clearly unsuitable to many people in this day and age, and as such, timeless goes out the window.

Similarly in terms of its effect on literature. While early proto-Modern writers may have borrowed heavily from Tolstoy, his rather limited play in terms of format, style, diction, etc. are nothing compared to say Joyce’s Ulysses (which, admittedly, I am currently reading) which was written a mere fifty years later, and his heavily realist based fiction is light-years distant from the post-modern world of a JPod or a Warrior Woman. Rather than the halberdier of future literature, War and Peace is more the undertaker of its past. In the following years the Dickensian tropes, the beautiful, sentence-long paragraphs that describe the most ornate of details, all the assurance that arose from having a single viewpoint and being absolutely sure that viewpoint was correct (ie. Before God died), largely vanished.

“But,” you exclaim, “this is a contemporary reading of a novel that cannot be read as such. Allowances must be made, the base and superstructure (and the ideology therein) have changed dramatically, human psychology has adapted, the world is not the same!” And such an exclamation is true. But it simply doesn’t matter. It’s not that Tolstoy is a complete failure at touching the deeper cores of the points he is reaching for, it’s that he shies away from them when they naturally arise.

Take, for example, the climax. It is not, as may be thought, the fall of the French army, or Pierre’s marriage to Natasha, or Prince Andrei’s death. Instead it comes at a crossroads between the two extremes of the novel, wherein a wounded Prince Andrei looks upon his rival and foil Anatole Kuragin, who is suffering horrendously in a field hospital alongside Andrei. To understand the moment, you need to know only that the two are foils, and that Kuragin stole Andrei’s fiancé Natasha Rostov (see above), prompting a great amount of subliminal hatred between the two. Yet in that single moment, Andrei views Kuragin screaming in sheer agony, in a quiet, peaceful din in the midst of a field of war, and feels not hatred, or pity, but the indescribable understanding that Anatole Kuragin is human just the same as Andrei himself, and as such his actions were necessitated by nature just as much as were Andrei’s, or Napoleon’s, or anyone else’s. Gone is any sort of trivial emotion in the face of overwhelming understanding, an understanding of human existence that cuts through all sense of culture or socialization, and shoots straight to the essence of being. Within the novel it is expressed in a clearly Christian display of God, but its power is agnostic, and means one thing to all people, regardless of who reads it. This is the climax in that it ties in directly, on both a character and plot level, with Tolstoy’s thesis within the novel – the destruction of free will as a viable metaphysical notion.

To think that versions of the book were made wherein Tolstoy’s rather long-winded philosophical tracts were removed completely from the body of the novel is simply disappointing. Tolstoy’s one gigantic tract throughout War and Peace is to show how the minute and tiny pieces of human and natural interaction combine to form the sweeping forces that, so clearly to Tolstoy, pushed the national forces which formed the central conflict of 1812. This point of view, whether Hegelian or a much firmer determinist point of view, isn’t completely fleshed out at any point, but is merely taken for fact, and all the characters, actions, and events of the book play out with this point of view narrating and controlling each step along the way. That view leaves no room for freedom, and Tolstoy’s long, final essay concerning the appearance of free will is a well argued one that concludes only in the very last paragraph, wherein Tolstoy pleads for human beings everywhere to merely accept that they are not free, and accept their dependence on fate.

Such a thesis is obviously a touchy subject, and one’s acceptance of Tolstoy’s vision will largely be decided on whether they agree on this singular subject. Since I personally agree with Tolstoy, I find it his saving grace, the one point at which he truly does achieve timelessness. So don’t take it wrong, this is not a negative review. Whereas much of his narrative is what I would now consider flawed, I can accept and appreciate the contemporary reading of his novel; I can see how his eloquence could be mistaken for perfection, or how his near exact control and understanding of his characters could be mislabeled as an understanding of sheer reality. Without doubt there are many things Tolstoy does admirably if not perfectly in this work, but he lacks the post-modern understanding of equality of being that shines through so much clearer in a Toni Morrison or Don DeLillo novel. Though it means that this review itself will ultimately be very dated, I cannot help but wonder what someone with Tolstoy’s abilities and vision could accomplish were they born in the current world, wherein they would experience the entire totality of human life, from its smallest most beautiful forms (which Tolstoy all-too-often ignores for his characters of nobility and privilege) to its most horrifying depths (which he actually does a fairly good job of describing). Such a modern novel would be even longer than War and Peace, filled with the internet, nuclear fears, media censure, Kid A, Black History Month, third world sweatshops, Brokeback Mountain and millions of other things on top of the millions Tolstoy himself dealt with in his time. Yet such a book would be much closer to the one thing Tolstoy obviously sought to connect with most radically in his narrative of human life: the truth.