'War and Peace:' Done and Dusted

The Economist recently recommended that subscribers might find solace reading War and Peace: “The rhythm of the epic novel is eerily suited to life in lockdown.”
 
I was ahead of the game having ordered an edition for Kindle back in April 2013 as part of my cultural literacy catch-up game.  I had many times previously tried reading the book in paperback only to cast it aside. The print was too small and, more to the point, the pace too slow.

 
Yet the digital edition also gathered virtual dust.
 
Then came Donald Trump. 
 
I had become accustomed to watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the nightly PBS NewsHour mornings while on the treadmill in my Jerusalem gym. After Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, the coverage out of the White House was so bizarre, unnerving, and relentlessly draining that I experimented with reading one thing or another on my early-generation Kindle device.
 
In June 2018, during a visit to the Lake District in England, we met up a relative who years earlier had read Russian at university. He spoke passionately about War and Peace as practically a life-changing experience.
 
I decided definitively – Tolstoy would exclusively replace Trump at the gym on Kindle in 30-minute treadmill installments.
 
When the gym shuttered after COVID-19 hit planet Earth I determined to read the book while seated and maybe for longer than 30 minutes at a stretch.
 
And that is how I managed to reach “the end” on May 3, 2020.
 
War and Peace is a melodramatic novel with heavy doses of Tolstoyan history and philosophy. It is set between 1805 when France defeated Russia at Austerlitz and 1812 when an exhausted France snatched defeat from the jaws of victory while deep inside Russia.
 
The overarching theme is the contest between Tsarist Russia and Napoleonic France for geostrategic hegemony. Tolstoy does not make explicit but the two sides were also fighting over how best to organize European political society.
 
Tolstoy's main take-aways:

Fog of war – It is impossible to know how a battle much less the war will turn out. Fighting occurs under chaotic conditions. Military command and planning are not determinative; if anything, wild luck probably matters more. Napoleon did everything right in carrying out his 1812 invasion of Russia yet still lost. 

Human nature – People don’t think, much less behave, coherently. What we ultimately do is therefore unpredictable; we are pulled in opposite directions in love, friendship, religion. We are steadfast until we are not.

Quest of understanding – Human perspective is limited. We can’t “grasp the cause of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul.”
 
So far, so good.
 
This is not a history book so you will need to go elsewhere to learn that Napoleon’s defeat does have an earthly explanation. For one, he lost many of his troops to typhus.
 
The author's thinking and conduct evolved over a lifetime that began in 1828 and ended in 1910.
 
The Tolstoy, who brought out War and Peace in 1869, identified as a Christian believer and Russian nationalist.
 
He opposed modernity and the enlightenment in favor of authoritarianism and monarchy. The characters in the book are grappling with determining which course of life is best. Arguably, though, individuals can only pursue their ideals in a nurturing political environment. How Tsarist Russia could be such a place is hard to fathom. 
 
My experience as a reader was uneven – which is fair enough in a book that has 587,287 words. The grisly battle scenes are cinematic and harrowing. 
 
Main characters are vividly drawn. Tolstoy lets us feel the intensity of platonic friendships; there’s romance and fraught family relationships. There are grand "Upstairs Downstairs" country estates and city mansions, fancy balls, debauchery, nihilism, incense, deathbeds, and icons.
 
Serfdom – a form of economic bondage in which the peasant class depends on the landed aristocracy for their livelihood – is another constant in the book. The serfs are presented as primitive, basically loyal, and satisfied.
 
It must be special to read Tolstoy in Russian.  In translation, the narrative is only episodically compelling. The dying and dream scenes are strikingly memorable. However, there are long dry stretches that tested my patience starting with the scene-setting opening soiree chapter. By the time I got to the second epilogue or was it the first epilogue, my eyes had glazed over. My twitch to check Twitter (and the several Leo Tolstoy’s who are active there) was intense.
 
Tolstoy sees God as the unfathomable transcendent cause of all causes. His “ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.” Yet He is the power that moves people. All other explanations as to why things are as they are, fall short in Tolstoy’s analysis. 
 
Also omniscient in War and Peace is Tolstoy’s narrative voice. As he says about Prince Andrew: “He had read everything, knew everything, and had an opinion about everything.”
 
The cast of characters is long (and many have those difficult Russian names). Over 14+ sections and innumerable chapters, there were indeed stretches where I gave up worrying about who was who.
 
My book came with a list of characters in the back. Anyway, with months of reading and dogged efforts at recall, the important actors did become distinct personalities.
 
Among those that resonated for me was Mary, the long-suffering daughter of a curmudgeonly old prince. And her brother Andrew who falls out of love with his wife Elizabeth (who then dies in childbirth).
 
Pierre is arguably the most prominent personality of the book. The illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov, we meet him at that boring opening soiree. He inherits his father’s fortune (with the help of his mother who I think gets written out in the first season) and spends many a chapter dithering. He becomes super enthusiastic about various schemes searching for a place for himself in which he can maybe do the right thing. His idealism is matched by his naiveté.
 
He mercifully gets it right at the end.
 
My favorite minor character is Denisov, who thanks to a lisp, and a good heart emerges from a very crowded field. But don't confuse him with Dolokhov as I did for much of the book.
 
Be aware that the Tsar of War and Peace is Alexander I.
 
Remember the scene in “Fiddler on the Roof”?
 
Leibesh: Is there a proper blessing for the Tsar?
Rabbi: A blessing for the Tsar? Of course. May God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us.
 
Alexander I is the Tsar who restricted one million Jews living under his rule to a Pale of Settlement (and later added more Jewish subjects after Poland was annexed in 1815).
 
A nasty piece of work, historians nonetheless consider Alexander I as not being among Russia's worst of rulers.  They set a low bar. While some advisers urged him to slaughter the Jews, he was willing to see if they could be absorbed into Slavic society. Pursuing a "resistance is futile" approach he stripped Jewish institutions of communal autonomy. As if rabbis depended on him for their moral legitimacy. 

To inspire acculturation, he held out the prospect of granting Jews the right to attend university. In practice those that had not completed Christian secondary school were ill-equipped to enter university and few did
.
He forbade Jews from leasing Russian land. He was ready to uproot thousands by tightening residential restrictions when in France (1806), Napoleon offered his Jews new rights and freedoms.
 
Alexander did not want Russian Jews sympathizing with Napoleon, so he rescinded the most egregious of his anti-Semitic decrees.
 
Naturally, in War and Peace, I was rooting for Napoleon.
 
In real life, the story is more complicated. Napolean had mixed motives. And France’s Orthodox rabbinate was wary of him fearful (not unreasonably) that religious liberty would contribute to assimilation. 

Back in Russia, rank and file Jews preferred to keep a low-profile during Franco-Russian fighting. Ultimately, Napoleon’s forces pulled out of Mother Russia in disarray.
 
The departure of French forces spurred on the Tsar to ever more oppressive measures against the Jews.  
 
When Alexandar I died in 1825, his even more malevolent brother Nicholas I took over. 

Now, maybe, you understand why the "blessing" for the Tsar.
 
Tolstoy’s own record toward Jewish people adds up to ambivalent. His literary references to Jews were condescending. By my count, Jews are thrice mentioned in War and Peace always in passing and never in a positive way. In his later years, he condemned state-sanctioned Jew-killing sprees known as pogroms.
   
To sum up my experience with War and Peace. Done and dusted.
 
 
FURTHER READING

TOLSTOY

Howard Sachar in The Course of Modern Jewish History.  

“What Is A Jew?”
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/what-is-a-jew-written-by-count-leo-tolstoy-1891/


“Was Leo Tolstoy Really an Anti-Semite?”
https://forward.com/culture/208545/was-leo-tolstoy-really-an-anti-semite/


N.B.


The translation of War and Peace I read on Kindle was by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Various publishers use their translation.

ALEXANDER I

NAPOLEON