Lev Tolstoy – War and Peace; epilogue & appendix

So now, at last, we are finished with War and Peace.  The two-part epilogue consists of a few chapters with the characters Natasha, Pierre, Nikolai, and Marya, eight years after the war with Napoleon, aging and changing; and lots of Tolstoy-essays about the nature of war, history, freedom and power.  The Appendix, published originally partway through the final text’s publication in a respected journal, consists of Tolstoy himself explaining some of his intention and outright stating that he blames a sense of predestination on the events of history—which I view as something of a cop-out and resist.

As these last sections are for the most part underwhelming and unnecessary and lack passages that jump out to a close reader and as the novel itself is so bloody long, I think I’ll take a page out of Harry Bagot‘s book and opt for general appraisal of the novel rather than summary.

Last week, as she watched me near the end of this book, my girlfriend asked me if it was very difficult.  I thought for a moment and answered that it wasn’t; that it’s grouped in with other extremely long white whales of literature for other reasons:

• Its length
• Its scope and therefore the time-span it covers and large number of characters
• The fact that a lot of people consider it to be one of the greatest novels ever written.

Lev Tolstoy – War and Peace; volume IV

Caught in the chaos of a deserted and burning Moscow, Pierre is accused of arson and put on trial, in a scene echoed in one of Stanley Kubrick’s finest films, Paths of Glory:

These questions, leaving aside the essence of life’s business and excluding any possibility of discovering that essence, like all questions asked at trials, were aimed only at furnishing that channel down which the judges wished the answers of the accused to flow, leading him to the desired goal, that is, incrimination.  As soon as he began to say something that did not conform to the purpose of incrimination, the channel was removed, and the water could flow wherever it liked.  Besides that, Pierre experienced the same thing that an accused man experiences in any court: perplexity as to why all the questions were being asked of him.  He had only the feeling that this trick of furnishing him with a channel was being used only out of indulgence or courtesy, as it were.  He knew that he was in the power of these people, that it was only power that had brought him there, that only power gave them the right to demand answers to their questions, and that the only purpose of this gathering was to incriminate him.  And therefore, since there was power and the wish to incriminate, there was no need for the trickery of questions and a trial.  It was obvious that all answers would lead to finding him guilty.    (960-961)

Pierre’s predicament during his trial is that the purpose of the French trial is not to discover the truth of what happened, but rather to prove his guilt.  The comparison that Tolstoy makes is to directing water flowing down through channels; if it doesn’t go the way the prosecutors and judges want it to, it’s allowed to spill over and is ignored.

Lev Tolstoy – War and Peace; volume III

Two passages for the third volume, the first of which contains something very close to the work’s title (I have to believe that in the original Russian, it was the title word-for-word).  It’s from a conversation between Andrei and Kutuzov before the decisive battle of Borodino:

[C]hanging the subject, Kutuzov began speaking about the Turkish war and the peace that had been concluded.  “Yes, I’ve been reproached a great deal,” sad Kutuzov, “both for the war and for the peace … but everything came at the right time.  Tout vient à point à celui qui sait attendre [Fr.: ‘Everything comes at the right time to him who knows how to wait.’].”    (744)

Kutuzov mentions being blamed for both war and peace; that is, both his success and his failures as a military commander.  This reflects two things: the fickleness of high society and Tolstoy’s revisionist goals with much of his prose, especially the essay chapters since the start of the third volume.

Lev Tolstoy – War and Peace; volume II

Quite a long section; this one was mostly concerned with Peace, specifically the lifestyle of the aristocrats in the novel.

“Well, here you want to emancipate the peasants,” [Andrei] went on.  “That’s very good; but not for you (I suppose you’ve never whipped anyone to death or sent them to Siberia), and still less for the peasants.  If they’re beaten, whipped, and sent to Siberia, I don’t think that makes it any worse for them.  In Siberia he’ll go on with his brutish life, and the welts on his body will heal, and he’ll be as happy as he was before.  But it’s needed for those people who are morally ruined, live to repent it, suppress this repentance, and turn coarse, because they have the possibility of punishing justly and unjustly.  Those are the ones I pity and for whose sake I would wish for the emancipation of the peasants.  Maybe you haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen good people brought up in this tradition of unlimited power, as they can’t become more irritated over the years, become cruel, coarse, know it, can’t help themselves, and become more and more unhappy.    (386-367)

This monologue is spoken by Prince Andrei to Count Pierre as the former’s condescending criticism of the latter’s charitable actions towards the many peasants on his estates.  Pierre has undergone the changes due to his recent admittance into the Freemasons and the value they place on serving mankind.  Though he eventually sours towards his fellow Masons’ inaction and hypocrisy, at this point he is devout in his idealism, and Andrei is cynically critical.  Andrei’s speech is somewhat misleading at first, with his declaration that the emancipation would be good, but “not for [Pierre].”  This may come across as fairly obvious: Pierre isn’t helping his peasants to help himself—unless you want to give credit to a (basically) selfish desire to be selfless—he’s helping them to help them.  But Andrei downplays the importance of the end result of helping someone in order to make their lives better; Andrei only sees the value in redeeming the upper classes from the abuses of the lower classes to which they’ve become used.

Lev Tolstoy – War and Peace; volume I, part 3

The French, who had stopped firing on this field strewn with dead and wounded because there was nothing left alive on it, seeing an adjutant [Nikolai Rostov] riding across it, aimed a cannon and fired several shots.  The sensation of these whistling, fearsome sounds and the surrounding dead merged for Rostov into a single impression of terror and pity for himself.  He recalled his mother’s last letter.  “What would she feel,” he wondered, “if she saw me here now, on this field, with cannon aimed at me?”    (286)

This passage comes as Rostov is galloping along the Russian line at the start of the attack.  That he is even there during the combat is due entirely to a coincidence of multiple events at once: the (coincidentally Georgian) commander of the right flank is prince Bagrationi (pronounced “bah-grah-tee-own” and with a final “i” to respect the Georgian language’s convention of pronouncing names as ending with “ee” in the third person; Georgians tack on the final syllable but Tolstoy does not) and in (warning: brief editorializing imminent) typical Georgian passive-aggression wishes to avoid combat that will surely result in loss, so in order to avoid later charges of insubordination, sends a messenger to ask permission to charge, fully aware that such a trip would take the better part of the day if the messenger even survives, allowing his men to survive mostly unharmed and retreat safely when the battle has already been lost.  Bagration chooses Rostov to find the commander-in-chief or sovereign to ask for orders and return, and it is on this trip that Rostov moves through the fighting forces and, in the above passage, finds himself fired upon by French troops.

Lev Tolstoy – War and Peace; volume I, parts 1 & 2

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s War and Peace being as infamously long and complicated as it is, a format change seems prudent.  Rather than a general overview, these posts will be devoted to close readings of particularly intriguing passages and maybe, as the book turns to essays on the nature of war in the second half, discussion of how Tolstoy’s musings relate to the themes expressed in the actions of characters.

The rest of the infantry hurriedly crossed the bridge, squeezing into a funnel at the entrance.  Finally all the carts passed over, the crush eased up, and the last battalion entered the bridge.  Only the Hussars of Denisov’s squadron remained on the other side of the bridge facing the enemy.  The enemy, visible in the distance from the opposite hill, were not yet visible from the bridge below, because from the bottom where the river flowed, the horizon was bounded by the opposite heights less than half a mile away.  Ahead was a deserted space over which clusters of our Cossack patrols moved here and there.  Suddenly on the road going up the opposite heights appeared troops in blue coats and artillery.  It was the French.  A Cossack patrol moved down the hill at a trot.  All the officers and men of Denisov’s squadron, though they tried to talk about unrelated things and look elsewhere, constantly thought only about what was there on the hill, and kept peering at the spots that appeared on the horizon, which they recognized as enemy troops.  After midday the weather cleared again, the sun shone brightly, going down over the Danube and the dark hills around it.  It was still, and once in a while from that hill floated the sounds of bugles and the shouts of the enemy.  Between the squadron and the enemy there was now nothing but some small patrols.  They were separated by an empty space of about six hundred yards.  The enemy stopped shooting, and that strict, menacing, inaccessible and elusive line that separates two enemy armies became all the more clearly felt.

“One step beyond that line, reminiscent of the line separating the living from the dead, and it’s the unknown, suffering, and death.  And what is there? who is there? there’ beyond this field, and the tree, and the roof lit by the sun?  No one knows, and you would like to know; and you’re afraid to cross that line, and would like to cross it; and you know that sooner or later you will have to cross it and find out what is there on the other side of death.  And you’re strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and surrounded by people just as strong and excitedly animated.”  So, if he does not think it, every man feels who finds himself within sight of an enemy, and this feeling gives a particular brilliance and joyful sharpness of impression to everything that happens in those moments.    (143)

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Idiot, part 4

I’ll start off by quoting David Foster Wallace’s quick summary of some of the major characters in The Idiot, listed along with other major Dostoevsky characters in his review of the first four volumes of Joseph Frank’s five-volume literary biography on the writer, Dostoevsky: A Writer in his Time:

[T]he beautiful and damned Nastasya of The Idiot (…who was, like Faulkener’s Caddie, “doomed and knew it,” and who’s heroism consists in her haughty defiance of a doom she also courts.  FMD seems like the first fiction writer to understand how deeply some people love their own suffering, and how they use it and depend on it.  Nietzsche would take Dostoevsky’s insight and make it a cornerstone of his own devastating attack on Christianity, and this is ironic : in our own culture of “enlightened atheism” we are very much Nietzsche’s children, his ideological heirs, and without Dostoevsky there would have been no Nietzsche, and yet Dostoevsky is among the most profoundly religious of all writers.) …     (CtL 264)

…the fawning Lebyedev (sic) and spiderish Ippolit of the same novel…    (CtL 264)

…the cynically innocent Aglaia (sic)…    (CtL 265)

…the idealized and all-too-human Myshkin…, the doomed human Christ… (CtL 265)

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Idiot, part 3

Nope, not quite done with The Idiot just yet.  This penultimate section was especially hard to get through because it’s all people talking and reading their letters despite the fact that it all takes place over the course of one night.

Also, my girlfriend arrived in the country about a month ago so I haven’t been able to shut myself off in a reading cave and really have at it like I’m used to doing.

Anyhow, part 3 continues the triangular relationship between prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov, and Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchin (some would say a four-way between those three and Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin).  The first, most significant for this section, is the relationship between the prince and Aglaya.

The first night of the section follows after the prince makes amends with Aglaya’s family and they all go to hear a concert at a vauxhall.  While the atmosphere in the group is initially strained, the air is cleared in a puzzling way when the prince stammers out “I only meant to explain to Aglaya Ivanovna … to have the honor of explaining to her that I never had any intention … to have the honor of asking for her hand … even once…” (343, ellipses in the text).  Somehow, this rejection lightens the mood, despite coming after another ambiguous betrothal/rejection switch by Aglaya (the first being Nastasya’s at the end of part 1):

No one, no one here is worth your little finger, or your intelligence or your heart!  You’re more honest than all of them, nobler than all of them, better than all of them, kinder than all of them, more intelligent than all of them! … Why do you humiliate yourself and place yourself lower than everyone else?   (342)

The answer to her question is contained within the question: if the prince is better than everyone gathered, it’s precisely because he places himself lower.  “The Idiot”‘s idiocy has been shown time and time again to be honesty and humility as compared to his contemporaries. in terms of status.  This praise is followed by a repetition of the “poor knight” Don Quixote imagery by Kolya in response to Aglaya’s proclamations (343) and then shortly thereafter by Aglaya explicitly telling the prince that she will not marry him.  “I won’t marry you for anything! … Can one marry such a ridiculous man as you?” (343; N.B., note the similarities with Nastasya’s reason for rejecting the prince).

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Idiot, part 2

The second part of The Idiot takes the Prince’s exit to Moscow as an excuse for a break in the narrative.  As David Foster Wallace notes in his essay “Josef Frank’s Dostoevsky”, the writer had such distaste for Moscow that he went out of his way to never mention it specifically in any of his novels, and this habit is its most noticeable in The Idiot: the narrator gives the cop-out excuse “of the prince’s adventures in Moscow … we can supply very little information” (179) despite the fact that the narrator is privy to all sorts of other information throughout the course of the novel.

Anyway, the narrator takes a break from focalized narrative and instead uses the first chapter to give a broad overview of what the main characters are up to.  Other than a brief mention in the first chapter and a few times she crops up in conversation, Nastasya has disappeared from this part of the novel so far.  She is an entity whose mention is avoided by most of the characters; gone are the mentions of her portrait and the soaring descriptions of her beauty.  She is a woman of implication, a character of innuendo.  Several references to her as simply “her” or “that woman” are concluded with an instance of mistaken identity: Lebedev tells Prince Myshkin that “a certain person is friends with [Darya Alexeevna] and apparently intends to visit her often in Pavlovsk.  With a purpose” (203).  Because Darya Alexeevna was originally introduced to us at Nastasya’s party that concluded part 1, the reader probably initially thinks that this “certain person” is Nastasya Filippovna, but Lebedev soon reveals it to be her rival/nemesis Aglaya Ivanovna.

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Idiot, part 1, chapters VII-XVI

In this second section, it’s become clear that all of the plot’s action revolves around Nastasya Filippovna.  Ganya has been courting her out of greed as Totsky has evidently promised him seventy-five thousand rubles to marry her, though Ganya has attempted to get out of the marriage.  Soon after the prince finishes speaking to Elizaveta Prokofyevna and the three Epanchin daughters, Ganya gives Myshkin a note to give to Aglaya that essentially says that he will break off the coming engagement to Nastasya Filippovna with only a word of assurance from her.

Both Aglaya and Nastasya criticize Ganya for his need for guarantee in this.  Aglaya to the prince about him:

He knows, however, that if he broke it all off, but by himself, alone, not waiting for a word from me, and even not telling me about it, without any hope in me, I would then change my feelings for him… But his soul is dirty: he knows and yet hesitates; he knows and still asks for a guarantee.  He’s unable to make a decision on faith.    (84)

And Nastasya to Ganya directly as she taunts him and the prince at the end of Part 1:

And you, Gnachka, you’ve missed Aglaya Epanchin; did you know that?  If you hadn’t bargained with her, she would certainly have married you!    (169)

Torn between financial necessities created by his fallen family (his father is shown to be entirely mentally unstable and unpredictable, and they’ve resorted to renting out their insufficient apartment as a boarding house) and love for Aglaya, Ganya misses both.