Big Book 2019

Before I begin, I’ll briefly describe my intention for this blog post. My plan for the final paper is to write about three somewhat extended scenes, all of which feature a naive newcomer, and how that newcomer is important to the scene. The three scenes will be Natasha at the ball, which has already been partially drafted in a previous post, Pierre at the Battle of Borodino, and Petya spending time with Dolokhov and Denisov. Here I will discuss how Petya’s is used by Tolstoy. As this is a draft, some notes may be present to indicate places I wish to expand upon.

The scenes leading up to Petya’s death echo those of Pierre and Natasha. All of them have recently arrived at something entirely new to them, be it the opera or bloody fighting. Petya however differs in three major ways. One is that he is actually going against orders by being present, as I believe he was ordered to return, not to attach himself to a new group of soldiers, a fact he lies about in order to join. Another is his open desire to actually participate in the details of the scene. Natasha only desired to see the opera which she had never seen before, and then to understand why people were so interested in it. Pierre also just wanted to view his interest, though this time it was war. Petya alone wished to actually ingratiate himself into the group of soldiers and actually participate in the fighting. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Petya is obviously the only character who dies.

Petya is again used to set the scene for the readers, this time showing how the soldiers are living as they chase down the French. However, he nearly immediately participates in the daily routine, something Pierre never really did, instead staying as an outsider, and Natasha only achieved by the end of the opera. The three therefore cover three ways of approaching a new experience: Petya jumps straight in, Natasha observes before getting involved, and Pierre only observes, excluding when he is forced to defend himself. [Note: expand the set up]

The similarities between the various scenes invite the reader to draw certain conclusions. One is that Tolstoy wanted us to compare the social life in cities with the fighting in the war, and by making the setups so similar, it is easy to say that he actually wants them to be seen as such. Whether at peace or at war, people will still have their rituals, and other people will want to join in. In fact, even deeper similarities can be found between Natasha and Petya than may first be visible. For instance, Petya initially stands out due to his death. However, Natasha met Anatole at the opera, and Anatole is the one who sets off the chain of events that eventually leads her to trying to take her own life. In a way, this can be compared to Petya meeting Dolokhov and Denisov. Both Petya and Natasha held some form of trust or admiration for these figures, and because of Petya and Natasha’s attempted involvement in their lives (in Petya’s case by participating in the attack) both suffered.

This similarity seems to stretch beyond the idea of comparing peace and war, and instead feels like a comment on not being swept away by something you don’t truly understand. Natasha has changed radically by the end of her visit to the opera, now just as enraptured as every other audience member. Pierre nearly gets killed several times because he doesn’t really get what a battle actually means. Finally, Petya even more clearly doesn’t know what he’s getting into, a fact emphasized by how he has to ask someone else to sharpen his sword for the first time ever, and dies as a result of getting carried away and charging ahead of the other soldiers.

In general, Petya fits Tolstoy’s pattern of having characters who don’t really know what they’re doing but are very interested in being involved anyways. This can particularly be seen in Natasha, who is loves the idea of entering society, but is unsure of how to actually do so. It can also be seen in others, albeit in marginally different forms, such as Rastopchin who was overwhelmingly hopeful that he would get to contribute to a glorious defense of Moscow, but only made things worse for everyone.

(The following paragraphs would go with the historical inaccuracies of Tolstoy)

At the time of writing War and Peace, it would have been impossible for Tolstoy to know the cause behind Typhus, which is a bacterium spread through the body and feces of body lice (not to be confused with Typhoid Fever). However, while the cause of Typhus was not well known until 1911, by 1835, its name and symptoms were accurately listed by a French hospital chief, way soon enough for Tolstoy to have encountered the phenomenon (Roberts, 589). **correction** although estimates of Typhus’ death toll are inexact, by the end of his Russian campaign, roughly one quarter of Napoleon’s army had been killed from Typhus, and many, including Napoleon himself, contracted Typhus at some point along the campaign.

A fascinating fact Tolstoy confusingly overlooks (as he could’ve used it to further his own denouncement of Napoleon and his point on the uselessness of leaders is that on the march from the Niemen to Moscow, during the hot, dry, and stifling summer months, most of the army had thrown all their winter clothing to the side of the road. Nor does the Russian winter (the popular understanding of Napoleon’s failure) have no mention in War and Peace. While Napoleon had apparently researched the previous twenty winters of Russia and concluded that sub-zero temperatures start in November, and remain mild until December, in 1812 late October saw a temperature of -4º C, and by November 7th, Napoleon’s army was experiencing -30º (-22ºF).

In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy employs a large cast of characters to tell the story of the War of 1812.  Each character offers a different viewpoint either on the front lines of the war or in the domestic sphere, and some even share their experiences with both.  Within the 1,215 page story, the reader is given the opportunity to watch these characters mature and become vastly different people than those we meet in the beginning of the book.  For some characters, the war, and more specifically confronting the possibility of death, most drastically changes their outlook on life. For others, maintaining relevance in their social environment and being active members of their families is what guides them to emotional enlightenment.  In both cases, the people around them who are sharing in their experiences play a large role in constructing their character arcs. Out of all of the secondary characters in War and Peace, I have selected four who can be credited with creating some of the most pivotal points in the storyline and who bring out a side of one or more of the main characters that challenges the reader’s perception of said character.  Without Anatole Kuragin, Mademoiselle Bourienne, Lise, and Denisov, the plot of War and Peace would lack social drama and comedic relief, both of which are important to the reader’s ability to contextualize the war.  Each of these four characters are companions to at least one of the main characters in the book and tend to catch them at crucial moments in their Hero’s Journey.  Secondary characters, or those who are seen accompanying the heroes and heroines rather than leading the story, allow us to see the main characters at their most vulnerable and their most confident.  

I’ve already established that Tolstoy draws clear parallels between opera and war, but why does he do it? Yes, both address the idea of planned events and calculated actions, but what does Tolstoy achieve by demonstrating to the reader that these two phenomena are linked?

Looking beyond the opera scene and instead looking to Tolstoy the essay-ist, it becomes a little more clear what Tolstoy is getting at by drawing connections between theater and war. Tolstoy, when describing the movement of people, explains in a fictitious scenario that “the stage manager, having finished the drama and undressed the actor, shows him to us. ‘Look at what you believed in! Here he is! Do you see now that it was not he but I who moved you?’ But, blinded by the force of movement, people long fail to understand that” (1137). Here, the stage manager is equated to the military genius, while the actor is one of the subordinates out on the battlefield. The stage manager orchestrates the whole ordeal and tells everyone where to be and what to do, much like a military general or high-up official. The actor is the one who actually enters the arena the stage, and determines the outcome of the play. However, ultimately, the genius takes the credit. The stage manager takes credit for being the one to emotionally influence the audience, claims to be the one who was in control of the whole event. Tolstoy mocks the layperson, claiming that the people are too overwhelmed by the action to really understand who is to credit for the outcome, in either war or theater. So here we see Tolstoy utilizing his connection between theater and war to reassert his point about the mirage of military genius. Tolstoy explicitly explains many times his negative views on the perception of a false “military genius,” so why does he feel the need now to use theater to subtly restate this point? Perhaps Tolstoy uses theater as a metaphor for war strategy to make this point more accessible to a wider audience. Today, the idea of watching theater is more accessible to the everyday reader than the idea of war. This likely was true of the readers of the 19th century. Only a select group of men have a thorough understanding of the inner workings of war and how that is all plotted out. In contrast, it is quite well known how theater is performed: there are actors, instructed by a director or stage manager, and these actors perform and recite preplanned lines and walk and dance along precise locations along a stage. The calculations involved in theater are obvious to the viewer, whereas the calculations involved in war are less transparent.

Beyond making one of his main essay points that much clearer to the reader from a different angle, Tolstoy also seems to use the link between theater and war to emphasize the frivolity of planning out war (again, bashing military genius along the way). War is taken to be a serious matter, including war planning, but by comparing it to a form of leisurely entertainment, Tolstoy makes us as the reader reassess why we hold military strategists on such a high pedestal when really it’s just a form of theater. This connection makes us question why various strategists are honored for their success, when really the various actors and soldiers are the gears of the machine that produce that success. He uses this analogy between theater and war to drive home his point that military genius is a myth.

War and Peace is such a unique book for countless reasons, but one that has particularly stood out to me is the way that Tolstoy crafts villainous characters throughout the plot. In typical fictional stories, there is often an antagonist that follows the main character throughout the story with a motive that contrasts that of the protagonist. This concept of villainy in War and Peace is complicated by the pure number of characters we are introduced to and the insight Tolstoy chooses to give us into these characters’ goals and intentions. Throughout the book there are no singular characters who consistently seek to oppose another character; the book is simply too long and too complicated. However, I would still argue that there are villains in this story. There are characters whose rash and unthoughtful actions have detrimental impacts on other main characters in the book.

Across 1178 pages, Tolstoy has spent time crafting images of intricate characters. He gives us internal monologues, 3rd person descriptions, and most importantly, he gives us glimpses of how these characters think and how they react to the world around them. What is so critical about these insights is that they give us the ability to see how the characters change throughout the book. Through Pierre’s discussion with Andrei about the lives and treatment of serfs we can observe how both Pierre and Andrei’s views have been shaped and altered by their experiences. What separates the villains in the book from the characters we learn to love is the fact that they are not given a chance to change, or when given such a chance, they turn their back.

“It is the same with history: what is known to us we call the laws of necessity; what is unknown– freedom. For history, freedom is only the expression of the unknown remainder of what we know about the laws of human life.”

In the second half of the epilogue, Tolstoy acknowledges the fundamental divide between the concept that humans are endowed with free will and the concept that known laws, scientific or otherwise, can be used to predict the actions of humanity. Firstly, he shows that the amount of freedom that we can attribute to any individual action depends entirely on the various points of view that we can see it from. For example, “A drowning man who clutches another and drowns him…appears less guilty, that is, less free and more subject to the law of necessity, to someone who knows the conditions these people were in, and more free to someone who does not know that the man was himself drowning” (IV.IX.1204). That is, the perceived freedom of an action varies inversely with how much someone knows about the conditions surrounding that action. Furthermore, Tolstoy claims that what we can know about these conditions falls under exactly three categories: “(1). The relation of the man committing the act to the external world, (2) to time, and (3) to the causes producing the act” (IV.IX.1205). Interestingly, the nature of these three categories are very different from one another. The laws of science are most closely associated with the spatial frame in which the action occurs. Meanwhile, time is important because it allows people to assign more and more consequences to an action after a fact. The third category is mostly about how an action links up to the causes that come before it and the consequences after it. Finally, Tolstoy attempts to show that it is not possible to view an action as having either total freedom or total necessity. For total freedom, a person would need to be outside the influence of space, time, or other causes. However, to determine zero freedom, one would require knowledge about infinite space, time, and endless causes. Therefore, Tolstoy believes that with increasing knowledge, free will becomes less and less obvious, but that it is also not possible to reach the point in which prediction absolutely eliminates free will.

In this essay, I aim to apply Tolstoy’s thesis, that our understanding of free will is dependent on our knowledge of the universe, to his own argument and examine how his portrayal of free will and causal action relates to his own understanding of physics.

As we have embarked on this long, yet eye-opening, journey of finishing War and Peace, I have truly connected with the characters and their lives. Before reading the actual book, I had heard that everyone takes away something different from reading War and Peace. Even if the same person reads it multiple times, the ideas that resonate with them will differ depending on the contexts of their life. After my three months with Tolstoy, I completely understand and agree with those statements. The ideas that connected with me were all applicable to where I am in life. As I step out into a different life, leaving my family behind, Tolstoy’s writings on familial pressures and the idea of finding your purpose have truly resonated with me.

Particularly throughout the college process, I have had my fair share of familial pressures. However, it was not as much receiving pressure to lean a certain way on the schools, but it was more centered around what I wanted to pursue as a career and in life. Now, more than ever, my parents and I are having more serious conversations about life outside of our household. As the time for me to leave them draws closer, it is becoming more of a reality, so I have been conversing with my family more and more about the type of person I wanted to be and what I wanted to do.

Very similarly, but to a more severe extent, characters in War and Peace have experienced familial pressure. Although their experiences of familial pressures are regarding more concrete and tangible things, like marriage and careers, I still heavily relate to these characters.

Tolstoy on the reactions of the masses to threats:

• Tolstoy’s idea of social defence
  • On one’s own people are prone to look for threats, fight for survival
  • In groups people avoid engaging with threat,  
  • Examples
    • Pierre and battalion at Borodino being jovial while everyone around them is dying
    • People in Moscow ignoring threat of Napoleon
    • Other examples given in Nico’s post
  • Pg 1033 “instead of a crowd opposing a crowd, people scatter, attack singly, and flee as soon as large forces attack them, then attack again as soon as the opportunity arises… “
• Modern “Social Defence Theory”
  • Based on attachment patterns
    • Secure
      • Adv
        • Good leaders/ organizers of groups
        • More efficient in groups than others
      • Dis
        • Can feel/create false sense of security, slowing reaction to danger
        • “the typical human response to danger is to seek the proximity of familiar people and places, even if this means remaining in or even approaching a dangerous situation”
      • Character who fits this
    • Anxious
      • Adv
        • React more quickly to ambiguous signs of danger
        • Alert others to danger
        • Organize to face danger
      • Dis
        • Not expected to contribute much to group efforts
        • Take work less seriously
      • Character who fits this
    • Avoidant
      • Adv
        • Look out for own preservation in face of danger
        • Quickly ID a way to safety
        • Not overwhelmed by emotion?
        • As Marshall (1947) eloquently stated in writing about military behavior during World War II: “It can be laid down as a general rule that nothing is more likely to collapse a line of infantry than the sight of a few of its number in full and unexplained flight to the rear . . . One or two or more men made a sudden run to the rear which others in the vicinity did not understand . . . In every case the testimony of all witnesses clearly [indicated] that those who started the run . . . had a legitimate or at least a reasonable excuse for the action” (pp. 145-146). It is also known that in dangerous situations people tend to follow the route they see others taking (Mawson, 1980).
        • Clear the way for others i.e. breaking window, opening exit doors …
        • Once a threat has been detected they react more quickly
      • Dis
        • Don’t work well in groups
        • Later to perceive danger
      • Character who fits this

Dreamstate revelations

• Examples
  • Pierre dreaming about Iosip
  • Pierre’s dream about war and fear 842
  • Pierre’s tiny droplet dream about platon
  • Andrei’s near death experiences
    • Dream of death at the door
    • Seeing natasha for the first time after the injury
    • Andrei at austerlitz
  • Petya’s musical dream
• through lines
  • Reveal something about the character
    • Pierre is searching for his purpose/ role in life
    • Andrei is grappling with mortality and the vastness of the universe

Brainstorm and Rough Outline:

Main Topic: French Influence and Russia’s transition to an Identity of its own

Begin by talking about the French influence in high society in PEACE

       — Buying exotic foods, hosting soirees (a sign of nobility and honor to host), speaking French is high class and viewing Russian speech as lesser are all evidence of the rejection of Russia’s own identity

      — Speak about Natasha’s dancing and the extreme reaction by the Russian’s (her knowledge of Russian tradition is surprising to the nobles around her)

Evidence and Page Numbers:

— Exotic food in the book

-”an herb cordial, liqueurs, mushrooms, flat cakes made from dark flour and buttermilk, honey in the comb, still and foaming mead, apples, fresh and roasted nuts, and nuts in honey” (509) → turtle soup (62), pineapple ice cream (64), champagne (67)

— Louis XIV’s court established what formal dining was for the rest of European Nobility → Russians also drank French wine

Transition to French influence even in WAR:

     Andrei’s comments before the battle of Borodino about the cruelty of war that is becoming normalized by French influence of Chivalry

— “playing war” makes it less cruel and thus generals are more willing to wage this terrible killing

— Route of Chivalry is French → stems from French ideals of nobility and honor

     Forced to offer battle at Borodino even though the Russian’s didn’t want to fight because not doing so would be dishonorable

TRANSITION TO REJECTION OF FRENCH IDEALS LED TO RUSSIAN SUCCESS

After the Burning of Moscow → Russians start to reject French culture

Fines for speaking French and lack of knowledge in Russian

They found their native language “boring—impossible to speak!” (748), not knowing how to express themselves in Russian, asking “how do you say it in Russian?” (749). Wartime poet Denis Davydov noted that Russian officers were “mistook for the enemy because of their foreign accent in Russian”. The attachment and faithfulness to French language and culture

Gained a sense of national identity → no more orders from nobility just attacked French

Partisan Warfare → not facing the enemy at a given point head-on like the Russians were ‘forced to do’ at the battle of Borodino

Scorched earth policy led to diminishing supplies for the French army → had previously survived on stealing the food of the country they invade

As I read War and Peace, I frequently encountered Tolstoy referencing circumstance in some way. Tolstoy would often say that a certain event was inevitable due to the events that preceded it. I want to focus my essay on the different ways Tolstoy uses the theme of circumstance to explain how certain events occur. Tolstoy uses circumstance to explain many events that happen during the war and he also uses characters like Pierre, Andre, and Kutuzov to make conclusions based on his theory of circumstance.

One example of when Tolstoy brought up circumstance was when Pierre was about to be lined up next to other prisoners and killed and he had accepted it. “It was the other of things, the turn of circumstances. Some order of things was killing him — Pierre — depriving him of life, of everything, annihilating him” (965). In this example, Tolstoy uses Pierre to once again reiterate his idea of how everything is based upon the preceding events.

Another example of Tolstoy using circumstance is when he is explaining Napoleon’s war decisions. Tolstoy says, “if Napoleon had not been insulted by the demand to withdraw beyond the Vistula, and had not ordered his troops to advance, there would have been no war” (604). “Without any one of these causes, nothing could have happened. Therefore, all these causes — billions of causes — coincided so as to bring about what happened” (604). Tolstoy is saying that if any of the events leading up to the war, didn’t happen, the war wouldn’t have happened.