Reading ‘War and Peace’

My father was an army officer. He had no illusions about war; in part, this was because he had studied some of the classical writings about the conduct of warfare and had supplemented this with some of the great literary works that took, as their subject, ‘war’. He was, on reflection, an unusual character because he placed virtually no restrictions on the education or life-choices of his four sons. To that extent, I and my three brothers enjoyed a life that was virtually free of surveillance. He did, however, impress upon us the need always to be well-mannered, to be polite and respectful, to avoid excess – and to have what he called, ‘integrity’. He also expected his sons to do well at school and to achieve high – or at least reasonably good – academic standards. He occasionally made some suggestions about those literary works which merited close attention and appreciation if ‘one’ were to have some of the necessary elements of a good education. Amongst them was Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’. My father had been hospitalised during his army career (after his experiences during the Second World War) and this had given him the opportunity, over a period of three weeks, to read every word of Tolstoy’s remarkable achievement. I remember him saying: ‘If you are going to read War and Peace, you will need to set aside three uninterrupted weeks – and read the text carefully.’

Whilst I was at University in Scotland I spent some of my time trying to become better educated. I was studying psychology and philosophy (over a period of four years) but my conversations with some of the students who were ‘reading’ literature, politics and sociology, revealed the limitations – the inadequacies – of my cultural knowledge. I also experienced the scarcely articulated feeling that works of literature were as valuable in learning about ‘psychology’ as were the attempts to place psychology upon some sort of ‘scientific’ foundation. (Later I noticed that writers such as the brilliant Elias Canetti asserted that reading an author such as Balzac would be more or less sufficient to grasp what humans were ‘really’ like and why they did what they did.) And so, once the terms had finished I did not simply read the ‘set texts’ on psychology or philosophy but also various works of French, German, Russian and American literature. Amongst the latter was Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace.’ Sadly, though, I did not follow my father’s advice. I did not read the work nearly as carefully or as painstakingly as I should have. I did not dwell sufficiently on the various stories nor on the range of insights that Tolstoy was able to identify for his readership. Now more than 50 years later I have begun to re-read ‘War and Peace.’ In a way it has been a very sobering experience because – as my father implied – the book requires the increasingly contemporary mind (where everything has been speeded up) to work against itself, to ‘slow down’ and to persevere with the gradual unfolding of the text. It requires a concentration of effort. It requires a willingness to pay close attention to detail and to remember that we now live in a stylistically and expressively very different world. We now see ‘things’ differently: and this is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than when Tolstoy describes the process of a childbirth that was to take place in the Rostov household as, ‘the most solemn mystery in the world …’

But, the effort is worth it – although initially I was sometimes inclined to agree with Henry James’ criticism that ‘War and Peace’ is rather too sprawling and a little over-extended. It might also be preferable to view it as a detailed historical document rather than a novel. The text is also a disturbing case-study in the extreme gendering of mind-and-body that marked human social and cultural existence in Russian (and European) society in the 19th Century. On top of this, the sheer levels of misogyny are often profoundly disturbing. But the various distinct stories within the whole are riveting and unswervingly reflect the fact that no human life is ever free of problems – and always subject to the one unavoidable certainty: death. One of the most striking features of the book is its ability to show the way emotion and irrationality continually triumph over reason and clear, dispassionate critical thinking. It also highlights the extraordinary power that a leader – such as an Emperor or a military commander-in-chief – can inspire in a young man: the phenomenon of charisma is perfectly captured – as are its psychological effects and consequences.

But there is also the telling observation that quite suddenly a person may come to realise that the grandeur and mystery of the world (in its infinitude) can render a once-revered leader no more than an insignificant presence in the totality of a universe – a universe that always profoundly transcends the individual human. This point is nicely made in the case of the thoughtful and yet ‘enchanted’ person of the Russian Prince Andrew Bolkonsky who finds himself (seemingly) fatally wounded during the famous and tragic battle of Austerlitz: Tolstoy describes how a blow to the head causes him to fall to the ground and, as the supine Prince lies on his back, he soon becomes aware that:
 ‘Above him was nothing, nothing but the sky – the lofty sky, not a clear sky, but still infinitely lofty, with grey clouds creeping gently across. ‘It’s so quiet, peaceful and solemn, not like me rushing about,’ thought Price Andrey, ‘not like us, all that yelling and scrapping [with scared and bitter faces] those clouds are different, creeping across that infinite sky. How can it be that I have never seen that lofty sky before? Oh, how happy I am to have found it at last. Yes! It’s all vanity, it’s all an illusion, everything except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing but stillness and peace. Thank God for that.’

The hours pass – and then Tolstoy tells us that:

‘Up on the Pratzen Heights Prince Andrey Bolkonsky was lying where he had fallen … bleeding from a head wound and moaning pitifully, without being aware of it … By late afternoon he had stopped moaning and lay perfectly still. He had no idea how long he had been unconscious, but now suddenly he felt alive again, not least from the burning, lacerating pain in his head.’ And then: ‘He listened, and there was the sound of approaching hooves and French-speaking voices. He opened his eyes wide. There was the same lofty sky above him, with clouds floating higher than ever and through them glimpses of blue infinity. He didn’t turn his head and couldn’t see the men who had ridden up and stopped. It was Napoleon himself with two adjutants.‘

As Napoleon looks down on the fallen Prince, he remarks, ‘A fine death this one’; Prince Andrey knew that they were talking about him, ‘but the words sounded like buzzing flies. They were of no interest to him … he knew it was Napoleon – his hero – but at that moment, Napoleon seemed to him such a tiny inconsequential creature compared with everything that was now transpiring between his spirit and that lofty, sky-blue infinity with its busy clouds.’

Then – later and significantly – as Prince Andrey begins to recover, he is brought before Napoleon as a ‘prize capture’; but by now, ‘all the things that Napoleon stood for seemed trivial at that moment, his hero seemed so petty in his squalid vanity and triumphalism, compared with that righteous and kindly sky – all of which led Prince Andrey to muse on the insignificance of greatness, on the insignificance of human life, the meaning of which no one could understand …’

(Occasionally, whilst I was reading ‘War and Peace‘ I would keep up with the latest media presentation of news stories and pay attention to various other media manifestations – and even those posts on ‘Instagram’ featuring such extraordinary levels of self-promotion and narcissism. And, none of it was ever like seeing into the sky-blue infinity …)

Oscar Wilde believed that what helped to make Russian writers’ books – books by, for example, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Gogol – ‘great’ was ‘the pity they put in them’; in truth, their novels, as the translator Anthony Briggs mentions, demonstrate that ‘everyone – even people in advantageous or privileged circumstances – finds the living of life a worrying and difficult business most of the time.’ (My own life has turned out to been a fairly unbroken sequence of discomforts – both physical and mental!) On top of this – and with specific reference to ‘War and Peace‘ – a series of questions confronts and engages a few of the central characters – questions which also await the reader: these include: What is happiness? How do you distinguish it from fun? How is it possible to live on in the sure and certain knowledge of death? Is the concept of God any help? What are the roles of fate and luck in human experience? What should you do with a human life? In many ways, the genius and brilliance of ‘War and Peace‘ lies in its ability to lay bare the ethical shortcomings that lie (probably) at the heart of the human condition. The text continually shows the partiality or self-interest or moral weakness of its various characters: people lie, misrepresent, deceive, cheat and express various evils – and the debates between for example, Pierre Bezhukov and Andrey Bolkonsky, underline the apparent impossibility of achieving any kind of moral agreement in relation to how one ought to live.

Not so long ago my colleagues and I found ourselves in an institution where we really did, in the context of ethics, explore the question ‘What should you do with a human life?’ The very fact that we were addressing this question was one way of answering it. The strange thing about reconsidering ‘War and Peace‘ is that I realise my attempt to ‘teach’ ethics was largely a waste of time. And now, as I live out a life of quiet anonymity, I have to come to terms with the fact that, despite the claims of others, there is very little difference that I can make to any human life and absolutely none whatsoever to the powerful forces which govern the behaviours of people and nations.