War and Peace puts off many readers with its length. Then it further dissuades readers with its often-dreary themes: wartime Russia, nihilism, the chaos of war. And yet, readers in The District, and across the United States, may benefit greatly from reading this 19th Century novel.
When Tolstoy began work on what would become War and Peace, he initially desired to write about The Decemberists, a failed coup d’état in 1825, which sought to establish a constitutional monarchy in Russia. And yet, Tolstoy did not write this revolt, rather wrote at length on its roots. War and Peace offers the reader a wide panorama of Russian life from 1805, and Napoleon’s successes in Europe, until 1820, with a significant focus on the year 1812 and Napoleon’s failed campaign in Russia. Why, then, is Tolstoy’s interest in The Decemberists relevant to contemporary U.S. American readers?
To answer this, we must first acknowledge that War and Peace does not have one central protagonist, per se, but there are three characters who rise above the large cast to most significantly effect the novel’s wide arc: Countess Natalya Rostov, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, and Count Pierre Bezukhov. Aside from the fact that these three characters experience a kind of existential love-triangle, what unites them is that they each have to confront the painful, and eternal, questions one has about the self in a society: who am I in this world? Am I a good or bad person? What can I do to be a good person in this world? Do I matter?
All three ask themselves these questions amidst the chaos and crisis of war with Napoleon. Prince Andrei, wounded in battle, asks himself as he looks to the sky above, “[h]ow is it I haven’t seen this lofty sky before? And how happy am I that I’ve finally come to know it. Yes! everything [sic] is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that. But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquility.”[1] How can I be a good person if we all end up as cosmic dust, seems to be the question that Prince Andrei most wants answered.
Perhaps, these questions are more relevant to us now in the United States than they have been for many decades. We too are presented with chaos and crisis. What a reading of War and Peace offers us is a chance to understand how others coped with such difficult times. However, in my experience, many readers zero-in on the war of War and Peace, and disregard its partner peace in the novel. While there is much philosophizing, such as Prince Andrei’s thoughts above, to enrich ourselves with in Tolstoy’s novel, my primary reason for recommending this work now, in our current moment, is its peace.
We see characters asking themselves these weighty, moral questions, but we also see them falling in love, celebrating holidays, engaging in petty dramas, spreading gossip and rumor: all of these little moments are what we live for, indeed they are why we live in a society in a first place: to peacefully be around other people. Tolstoy offers us the chance to see individuals experience the chaos and upheaval of total collapse, and all the while be able to love, bicker, cherish, and grow.
Despite this nuance, when I open the novel, I am often reminded of how an acquaintance mentioned that he did not want to read War and Peace, because it seemed, to him, to be simply too depressing. And yet, the novel is filled with joy. In one scene, Natalya and her brother have just finished a hunt and are staying with a neighbor, whom they lovingly refer to as “uncle,” a pastoral elder who treats them to folk music: “[t]he uncle sang as the folk sing, with the full and naïve conviction that the whole meaning of a song is contained in the words alone, that the tune comes of itself, and that the tune does not exist on its own, but only just so, for the sake of the rhythm. Which was why this unconscious tune of the uncle’s, as in the song of birds, was so extraordinarily good.”[2] Tolstoy offers us, time and again throughout War and Peace a chance to see how life can contain beauty, even if that beauty is rare in a world torn by violence and grief.
These are the roots of The Decemberist revolt which Tolstoy chose for us to read. These roots that do indeed contain anguish and uproar, but also carry with them romance, music, and laughter. This continuum of human experience is the crux of Tolstoy’s great work, and indeed it is this range of human possibilities that makes War and Peace such a worthy template for other ambitious novels, such as Vassily Grossman’s largely overlooked masterwork, Life and Fate.
We here in The District have known uproar and chaos over the last several years, and we will likely come to know more. And yet, we have also known joy. In War and Peace, just as in history, the Muscovites burn their city to the ground rather than allow it to become another of Napoleon’s many glittering possessions. Their own city, where their joy and sadness were rooted, and where that joy and sadness would come to flourish once more, burned in the September Russian air. There is poetry in the knowledge that although one may be faced with complete disaster, one has still not given up hope for the future.
I take comfort in that wisdom which Tolstoy affords us, but in the end, all of this leads me to my most significant questions when I page through War and Peace in our current moment: how will we act in our own uncertain times? And, how deep do our own roots really run?
George Koors is a novelist and is the author of Sing Lazarus and Always the Wanderer. You can email him at [email protected], follow him on Instagram or YouTube @gbk7288, or visit his website georgekoors.com
[1] Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, page 281.
[2] Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, page 513.
