War and Peace
It’s been almost 300 pages since I last wrote. Who’d’a thunk War and Peace was such a page-turner?
This book is so beautifully written that I have dog-eared as many pages as I haven’t, and some of those pages are double-dog-eared. Yeah, that’s right – double-dog-eared.
Given how much ground there is to cover, I will have to write a skimming entry that focuses on recurring thoughts or observations, despite the number of passages I’ve highlighted for their beauty or clarity.
First, I renounce my judgment based on my reading of five Dostoevsky novels, that Russian literature is dense. While I could time my reading of The Brothers Karamazov in minutes-per-page, while still accounting for the time I would stare blankly into space trying to absorb the arguments, War and Peace is simply a great story that keeps my eyes moving.
This is not to say that it is not without arguments, not without what Shakespeare calls a “necessary question.” Pierre’s dialogue with the Mason Baldeev is certainly a dialogue about the nature of meaning, and Tolstoy uses the narrative devices of letters and journal entries to allow the characters to dialogue with one another about ideas, or to have a character dialogue with actions so as to apply a system of thinking to the incidents of the plot.
The events themselves are in dialogue with one another, given the epic scope of the novel. Take a few young men who have lived lives of privilege in homes of decidedly different character (the “fatherless” Pierre, the dour Prince Andrei, the festive Count Rostov), interpose one of the world’s bloodiest battles (Austerlitz), and then reinsert them into polite society, and you’re bound to see their actions or their thoughts evolve or respond to their previous actions or ways of thinking. So let’s look at some of these characters:
Prince Andrei – Though he was originally my least favorite of the three young men around whom this novel revolves, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky has become the most intriguing character of the novel to me. I am rooting for him to find love, which would complete his transformation from a joyless, ambitious, self-absorbed adjutant trapped in a loveless marriage into a man who has emptied himself of selfishness. This is not to say that he is now without ego or ambition, but that those attributes are focused now on achievements of greater goods. I don’t want to go too far into Prince Andrei’s change because of the whole spoiler alert business, but his evolution is teaching me to suspend judgment of the characters or their actions until I discover the destinations to which the plot’s twists and turns are taking them.
Count Rostov – He is to me the most frustrating character in the book, as he has great difficulty reconciling his noble impulses with his actions. He is not at all malicious, only weak. And before I can blame him for being weak – too weak to say anything to the sovereign, too meek to walk away from the card table when he is losing his father’s money to Dolokhov – I think of myself at age 20 or 22 and realize that I had the same problem of matching my aspirations to my actions, the same problem of being carried along currents created by others rather than rowing to my own tide. (Was that a crappy metaphor or what? Tough stuff, I can’t keep sitting here with perched fingers trying to figure out how to write what I want to write.) So I must be patient with Nikolai and trust that Tolstoy will match his actions to his intent.
Count Pierre Bezukhov – Pierre is the most ambiguous of the three male leads, and at some points, is even aware of this fact. It is interesting that the only Masonic principle he initially forgets is Discretion. He is, as Marya predicted, burdened by his sudden wealth in the way that many contemporary lottery winners are likely to find the jackpot more curse than blessing. His naivete forced him into a marriage he didn’t want, and it prevents him from seeing that he is being manipulated by the manager of his estates, so he is fooled into thinking that he is accomplishing his noble aims of freeing serfs and building hospitals, schools and almshouses, while he is in reality perpetuating the system whose impurity runs contrary to his Masonic beliefs. But at this point, he is becoming aware of the personal corruption within his Masonic brothers, so one gets the sense that Pierre will follow his disillusionment into a more active role in accomplishing his ends.
I think I wrote before about how pleasantly surprised I was by Tolstoy’s use of epic simile; that, along with Prince Andrei’s observations about the sky during the battle of Austerlitz and his later observations about the beauty of nature and things, make me see him as an inspiration for “This is enough” in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I would love to follow up on this connection to see whether or not War and Peace influenced Mrs. D in any way.
I also want to see whether or not Prince Andrei and Count Rostov will find common ground. At this point, Andrei is so advanced in knowing the ways of the world compared to Nikolai, but the fact that both of them have had encounters with the greatness that is supposed to be Napoleon, and both left them disenchanted, provides a unifying element to their characters.
Perhaps someday, I’ll get the words from some of those double-dog-eared pages from the book into the blog, but that’s what I wanted to do with The Brothers Karamazov, too.
On a separate note, some rising seniors have left book recommendations on the Google document shared with all 2011-12 AP English students; I recommend you check them out if you are reading this post.
Labels: War and Peace
