Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“WAR
AND PEACE” by Leo Tolstoy (first published in 1869; many English language
translations)

I have tackled
Tolstoy’s War and Peace twice in my
life, and both times in the same translation – indeed both times reading the
same volumes that still sit on my shelf. They are a well-preserved three-volume
Everyman’s Library edition which was, according to the publishing history on
the reverse of the title page “last
reprinted in 1949”. I bought it from a second-hand bookshop when I was a
student, and that must have been quite a few years ago, as the pencilled price
on the flyleaf tells me that I paid only $1:50 for all three volumes. I used to
believe that this was the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude, as it was
their (1920s) translation that the Everyman’s people later used when they reissued
the novel. In fact, looking closely at the introductory matter in the first
volume, I discover that my three volumes are an anonymous translation made way
back in 1886, but “revised” (also anonymously) in 1932, when some passages
omitted by the 1886 translator were restored.
It would be
rude, foolish and presumptuous of me to start giving you a plot-summary of this
novel, especially as you have probably got the gist of it either from your own
reading or from one of the many film and television versions that have been
made from it. From 1804 to the 1820s, we follow the reactions of a select group
of Russian characters to both personal and great public events – notably
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
I will content
myself with reproducing the hasty reaction I scribbled out in my reading diary
after my second encounter with the novel.
I noted first
the sheer skill of the novel as a piece of storytelling. The personal and the
historical combine and become interdependent. I was interested to find, especially
in the first volume, that many of the most memorable episodes were based on a
savage and witty social comedy (or social satire?) that I had not expected in
an author whose work is most often described as “epic”. There are the political
twitterings in the drawing rooms of St Petersburg and Moscow in 1805 (their
fatuity later contrasted with the disaster that overwhelms Russia). There are
the unseemly scramblings over the old Count Bezukhow’s will; the manoeuvres of
Prince Basil (i.e. Vassily) as he contrives to have Peter marry his daughter
Helen; and Maria Bolkonsky’s failed courtship.
contrasted with the limited knowledge that any character caught up in the novel’s events can possibly have. Thus we have both Andrew Bolkonsky and Nicholas Rostow at the Battle of Austerlitz only half understanding what is happening, and Andrew, in his brief vision of peace, realizing that ultimate truth must lie outside the conflicting reports of which all historical records are made. In the fiercely satirical scenes where the Peace of Tilsit is negotiated between the French and the Russians, there is Nicholas Rostow’s half-articulated desperation, and his confusion that the tsar can be so easily bested and compromised. [This prepares us for the heavily authoritarian views Nicholas holds by the end of the novel – he is a man who cannot live with uncertainties.] The most vivid use of the “partial view” – the limited view of one individual – comes in Peter Bezukhow’s view of the Battle of Borodino, where the cannonades and attacks become a swirling confusion. Similarly, Napoleon’s capture of Moscow is dramatized first in the absurd demands that Count Rostopchine makes upon the city’s inhabitants, and then in his own callous desertion of the city. In so many cases we follow momentous events through the eyes of someone we know has only a very limited view. Cumulatively, this reinforces Tolstoy’s philosophy of human beings as subject to historical necessity.
Some moments in
this great novel I found murky – or simply uninteresting. Natacha’s abortive
elopement with Anatole merely tells us what we already know – that she is at
this stage an immature young woman. The attraction of Nicholas and Sonia seems
without conviction. Only one episode in the novel, however, strikes me as
melodrama. It is too neat and convenient that Peter’s wife Helen happens to die
when she does – after Andrew is dead and at such a time that the scrupulous
Peter is thus left free to marry Natacha. Oddly, I did not find one of the
novel’s most iconic episodes melodramatic at all. After the Anatole episode,
Natacha’s return to, and nursing of, the wounded Prince Andrew is well
prepared-for with the confusions of the household trying to escape Moscow and
with Sonia’s eagerness to reunite Natacha with Andrew.
It is one
special strength of the novel that the lives of three separate families (and
especially of Peter, Andrew and Nicholas) all assume equal interest and
importance. There is never the irritating sense (as is sometimes the cases in
Dickens) that one is being diverted away from the novel’s major concerns and
into a “subplot”. Each of the three households is essential to the overall
interest and design of the novel, even if Peter ultimately seems a more complex
character than either Andrew or Nicholas. Perhaps it is for his structural
control, rather than for his depiction of momentous events, that Tolstoy
deserves the name of “epic” novelist. In the mass of characters who are introduced,
the design of the novel is never lost. Nearly every character
contributes a new and interesting perspective to the historical situation. For
example young Petia Rostow’s dreams of military glory, and then his sudden
death, are necessary to depict the initial naïve patriotic fervour of 1812; but
they also counterpoint the life of Nicholas Rostow, whose military career
starts with similar fervour but ends quite differently.
There is one
matter which troubles me, however. Are Tolstoy’s women entirely believable?
Certainly their husbands are men of firm character, but do Maria and Natacha
have to so completely submit to their husbands’ wills in the novel’s
denouement? Both seemed to have more independent spirit than they finally
display. Or was this in tune with Tolstoy’s odd views on marriage?
We let a writer
of genius have his eccentricities and peculiarities of style. I am not at all
worried that Tolstoy has some favourite metaphors that he repeats often and
often. He loves comparing human society with a beehive, and he frequently has
variations on the image of a frustrated leader “raging like a child who beats his hand against the floor which has hurt
him.” Somehow these repetitions, like the novels interlocking family
concerns, make the novel’s rhetoric tough and forceful.
Now what of that
matter which deters so many readers of War
and Peace? Tolstoy interlaces his narrative with historical and
philosophical lectures, delivered in direct address to the reader. This is
especially true in the last volume and after the campaign of 1812 is underway.
I am the sort of eccentric reader who actually enjoys the self-contained
lectures, essays and homilies that appear in novels by George Eliot, Henry
Fielding and (in chitter-chatter form) Thackeray. Tolstoy’s lectures therefore
did not upset me. Indeed I find, looking back through my three volumes of War and Peace, that I have often marked
the lectures marginally to highlight their importance.
In some respects
Tolstoy’s expressed philosophy of history altered the views I had before I
first read this novel. For the first time I saw Napoleon, Murat and the others
as a real menace rather than as picturesque figures from the distant past. This
is as much a matter of Tolstoy’s commentary as of the historical events that
are depicted – the tragic account of the Grande Armee’s winter retreat and
dispersal. As Tolstoy presents him, there is something fatuous in Napoleon, who
cannot see that many of his own actions are sheer play-acting, and that he
himself is not in control of the direction of history. This is particularly
true in the novel’s episode of Napoleon displaying his nephew’s portrait as if
this is a security of his dynasty’s future.
Yet there is
another strain in this novel that I find harder to accept. Tolstoy does not
gloss over the confusions and petty rivalries within the Russian camp
(particularly at the beginning of Book 10), but he does ask us to admire
Koutouzow’s military waiting game – the Fabian tactic – much more than I am
inclined to do. At certain points, this novel is, after all, the great hymn to
Russian national feeling, and this motif does become oppressive – perhaps
because subsequent history tells us that Russia has never found a higher unifying
ideal than national chauvinism.
There is another
matter, too. Directing his spleen (justifiably) at Napoleon, Tolstoy sets out
to damn the “Great Man” theory of history by showing us that the force that
moves history is beyond any individual’s control. In the process, however, he
also damns any “progressive” view of history. He is on the side of deep-rooted
national feeling – not of schemes to better the lot of humanity. Now I could
happily join in any discussion on the shortcomings of Western European “Enlightenment”
thought, and its nonsensical ideas of human perfectibility. Even so, I do not
think Tolstoy depicts such ideas accurately or gives them a fair hearing. In
the character of Peter Bezukhov, we are given one who becomes disillusioned in
romantic illusions, in the illusions of class and in the silly clannishness of
Freemasonry – but Tolstoy appears to believe that these represent the sum of
modern Western European thought. In this he was, of course, quite wrong.
And yet this is
a novel filled with such a wealth of insight into human behaviour that it is
probably blasphemous of me to raise these objections.
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There now. That
is how I skewered War and Peace in my
reading diaries after I had given the great novel two readings. It remains to
add that I am obviously no expert on Tolstoy (1828-1910). Apart from War and Peace, I have read his odd
religious novel Resurrection, the Master and Man parables and his tales of
military life in Sevastopol. But (despite having seen Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh
and various other actresses performing in the role) I have never made my way
through what is regarded as Tolstoy’s other great masterpiece, Anna Karenina. I began reading it some
years ago, got sidetracked by other things, and never resumed it. For this I am
occasionally rebuked by a very good woman I know who tells me that Anna Karenina is her favourite novel
and that she re-reads it every year. I must get back to it some day, as it
hangs over me accusingly like four or five other Great Canonical Novels that I
have never cracked.


Silly Francophile Footnote: By the way, for the honour of French literature, I feel bound to
point out that Tolstoy’s view of Napoleon as a fatuous role-playing charlatan
was anticipated by a French writer. In his Servitude
et Grandeur Militaires, published in 1835 (over thirty years before War and Peace), Alfred de Vigny has his
wrenching satirical chapter in which Pope Pius VII, imprisoned by Napoleon, has
a private conversation with the emperor and quickly diagnoses him as
histrionic, role-playing and an historical mountebank. Tolstoy goes no further.
Have you discovered yet who did the 1886 translation?
ReplyDeleteAlas, no.
ReplyDelete