This was an amazing, one-of-a-kind book. War and Peace is an absolute epic and Constance Garnett's translation, despite being over 100 years old, is totally readable and enjoyable today. I thought Tolstoy did an incredible job blending history with narrative, fiction with fact, and humor with drama. The book is long with a huge number of named characters, which can make the beginning a little difficult without consulting family trees for the characters. But after a little while I didn't have anymore problems and understood who all the characters were and how they were related to each other.
The book covers the period from the Battle of Austerlitz to the Battle of Borodino. In that seven year period, Napoleon went from being reviled across Europe and Russia to being respected to being reviled again. With his victory at Austerlitz, Napoleon was the dominant power in Europe, but with his victory at Borodino, his forces were mortally wounded and would never recover. Being set in that period, there is sort of a "Bridgerton" vibe, since the characters are all plotting marriages among the nobility. Also interesting about the noble culture is that, despite being at war with the French, all the nobles speak French more than Russian, and some struggle in Russian.
Tolstoy has a great talent for alluding to universal experiences so naturally in his writing. For example, "'Yes, that all happened!' ... he said, with a happy, childlike smile to himself. And he fell into the deep sleep of youth." Or this one: "When Pierre had gone, and all the members of the family were met together, they began to criticise him, as people always do after a new guest has left, and as rarely happens, all said nothing but good of him." He also does fantastic descriptions of war, illustrating the way that you can see an artillery shell explode far away before you hear it and the adrenaline rush of the cavalry charge. But he also does great descriptions of the not-so-glamorous aspects of military life, about the feeling of being deprived of liberty, and of how "Here there was none of all that confusion of the free world, where he did not know his proper place, and made mistakes in exercising free choice." He's also comedic, giving us a whole internal monologue of a woman in society wondering her impact on a man and thinking of how impressed she is with him followed by a look in his mind: "'The poor girl is devilishly ugly,' Anatole was thinking about her."
Tolstoy is through and through a Russian patriot. He writes that, "every Russian gazing at Moscow feels she is the mother; every foreigner gazing at her, and ignorant of her significance as the mother city, must be aware of the feminine character of the town, and Napoleon felt it." Moreover, he despises Napoleon, calling him "the most insignificant tool of history, who never even in exile displayed one trait of human dignity," while referring to Kutuzov, the Russian commander-in-chief, by saying that "it is difficult to conceive of an historical character whose energy could be more invariably directed to the same unchanging aim," and that one cannot "imagine an aim more noble and more in harmony with the will of a whole people," and "so completely attained as the aim towards which all Kutuzov's efforts were devoted in 1812."
In the middle of the book, we start to learn why Tolstoy really wrote the book, which is to denounce the historians who emphasize the "great men" of history and analyze history as the decisions of certain powerful people moving the world. He reflects deeply on cause and effect, power, and free will. One great example from Part 9:
When the apple is ripe and falls—why does it fall? Is it because it is drawn by gravitation to the earth, because its stalk is withered, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it?
Not one of those is the cause. All that simply makes up the conjunction of conditions under which every living, organic, elemental event takes place. And the botanist who says that the apple has fallen because the cells are decomposing, and so on, will be just as right as the boy standing under the tree who says the apple has fallen because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall. The historian, who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and was ruined because Alexander desired his ruin, will be just as right and as wrong as the man who says that the mountain of millions of tons, tottering and undermined, has been felled by the last stroke of the last workingman’s pick-axe. In historical events great men—so called—are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the least possible connection with the event itself.
Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.
Another passage, on the nature of power, as seen from the mayor of Moscow:
Every governing official in quiet, untroubled times feels that the whole population under his charge is only kept going by his efforts; and it is this sense of being indispensably necessary in which every governing official finds the chief reward for his toils and cares. It is easy to understand that while the ocean of history is calm, the governing official holding on from his crazy little skiff by a pole to the ship of the people, and moving with it, must fancy that it is his efforts that move the ship on to which he is clinging. But a storm has but to arise to set the sea heaving and the ship tossing upon it, and such error becomes at once impossible. The ship goes on its vast course unchecked, the pole fails to reach the moving vessel, and the pilot, from being the master, the source of power, finds himself a helpless, weak, and useless person.
Tolstoy declares that power "is a relation of a certain person to other persons, in which that person takes the less direct share in an act, the more he expresses opinions, theories, and justifications of the combined action. But, he states that power is not the cause of the movement of peoples, but just a part of that movement, and "the conception of cause is not applicable."
Tolstoy rejects the idea of true free will over and over again. Everything is the result of some uncomprehensible sequence of events and actions. He says it would all be more obvious to us the law of history did not relate to man, since "A particle of matter cannot tell us that it does not feel the inevitability of attraction of repulsion, and that the law is not true. Man, who is the subject of history, bluntly says: I am free, and so I am not subject to law" [emphasis added]. What little free will exists is something like a dark matter in history, like the "undefined force[s]" that move the planets, generate electricity, etc. and "forms the subject matter of history."
I'll finish up by saying this was an even better book than I expected, and I expected a lot from a book that is considered a classic. It is a beautifully told, genre-defying epic and I could not get enough of it.
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