War and Peace by Leo Tolstoi
10 April 2015
Volume 3.
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Natasha started slowly to recover from her disastrous liaison with Anatole and its calumnious fall out thanks to her loving family, her cousin Sonya and some newly found religious believes. At the same time the whole country was gearing up for an imminent confrontation with the French troops under the command of Napoleon.
In this part of there is also a rather historical correct description of Napoleon, his rise through the ranks, his qualities as a strategist and lawmaker, his quirks and vanities and the army of 400.000 that he used to overrun half of Europe (that consisted for more than half out of non-French allies) whose swiping advance through Europe ran for the first time ran some serious resistance at Smolensk, where they fought the battle of Borodino. Both armies suffered substantial losses, although the Russians could claim to have won the battle, even when the Russian General Kutuzov decided to retreat after learning the amount of casualties that his army suffered. During the battle, Pierre was hanging around the battlefield, his friend Andrei Bolkonsky got seriously wounded at the abdomen while trying to protect a Russian standard and Anatole Kuragin lost a leg.
Because of the Russian withdrawal, Napoleon could march up to Moscow but the withdrawing army torched everything useful during their retreat, thus made it impossible for the invading army to take provisions from the conquered land
Pierre was still lost into masonic esotericism and by doing some numerological deductions, became convinced that Napoleon was the anti-christ and he was the anti-anti-christ. At Bald Hill, the Bolkonsky estates, the old Prince died of a stroke while trying to put up some defense against the French invaders. His daughter Marya was left alone with a band of hostile serfs who refused to let her flee the estates. Nikolas Rostov, on his way to Moscow came just in time to set her free and quell the revolt of the serfs. Marya fell in love with the knight in the shining harness and he also developed feelings for Marya but held back because he made a wedding pledge to his cousin Sonya. His parents were struggling to keep his 15 year old brother Petaya out of harm’s way, but the youngster was so pumped up by the propaganda and the idolatry around the Tsar that he threatened to elope. Finally they allowed him to enlist in a militia funded by Pierre Bezukhov.
Sensing the mood between Nikolas and Marya (at least a financially worthy party), the countess pressured Sonya to write Nikolas a letter to release him from his pledge to marry her.
With Napoleon almost at the gates of Moscow, the Rostovs were still pondering if they should evacuate or not. When they finally made up their mind they started frenetically packing and loading chariots, just at the end to ditch everything and to take instead wounded soldiers upon their chariots.
Amongst this soldiers was Andrei Bolkonsky, but nobody told Natasha. When they left, the city was already engulfed in flames and looting was underway. They passed by Pierre who was trying to make himself invisible by wearing peasant clothes, in an attempt to escape from the responsibilities of his rank by convincing himself that he was on a mission to murder Napoleon.
Instead he saved the life of a French officer, had dinner with him and when he saved a woman from being raped by some French soldiers he got arrested by a passing by French patrol on the suspicion of being a saboteur and arsonist.
11 April 2015.
Volume four.
While being a prisoner, Pierre develops a close understanding with Platon Karatev, a wise, down to the ground and integer peasant. Just the facts of having him around makes Pierre discover the nature of the flow of life and its sense. The prisoners forced to march with the retreating French army during one of the harshest Russian winters without getting much of food or clothing (the French themselves were lacking it). When Platon finally got ill and developed fever, the French shoot him, because he would have slowed them down. Shortly after that the French are attacked by a group of partisans and during the ensuing fight, Petaya Rostov got shot.
Meanwhile his family reached Yaroslavl, where they kept taking care of Andrei, who’s dying of his injuries. Finally Natasha discovered that Andrei was among the wounded soldiers that they evacuated out of Moscow. They reconciled and Andrei forgave her just before dying.
At St Petersburg Pierre’s wife, Helene, died of an overdose of an abortion drug. This left Pierre free to propose to Natasha but custom demanded that they had to respect a period of grief for their lost relatives and friends.
Epilogue
It was seven years later (1820) and the victorious Russians rebuilt Moscow. Natasha and Pierre were married and had four children. Shortly after their wedding Count Rostov (Natasha’s father) died and Nikolas became in charge of the family’s almost bankrupt finances.
Because he always maintained that he would never get married for the money, he almost didn’t propose to Marya, but at the end reason sunk in and they got married. Marya’s fortune gave the much needed boost to the Rostov family’s finances. They took also care of Nikolai Andreyevich Bolkonsky, Andrei’s orphaned son.
Strange enough both men after they got married turned into loving husbands, seasoned estate managers and careful traders. The Tsar was increasingly preoccupied with religious matters and the government fell into the hands of reactionary forces; much to the exasperation of Pierre and his liberal friends who tried to figure out some way to counter that. At the end of the epilogue about the book’s characters, Nikolai exclaimed “That he would do something that would have made even his father proud of him”.
The rest of the epilogue is a monograph about Tolstoy’s vision upon history writing.
His main criticism was that the historians of that époque were too much concentrated upon historical personages that, into their opinion, made things happen instead of investigating the process that made them historical.
For Tolstoy, history was more like infinitesimal calculus; a big amount of small events converging to a point where the right person was at the right place and time to make them cumulate into a cohesive process.
Comments.
Like most Russian aristocrats of that time, Tolstoy spoke fluently French and so do all of his aristocrat characters. Not astonishingly 2% of the text is written in French followed by a translation.
Some translators omit the French texts and publish only the translations but by doing so you don’t realize that the more the Russians got involved into Napoleons battle, the more French started to lose its popularity as a conversation language because it was perceived as the language of the oppressor. It got the reputation to be the language of deceitful and artificial manners while Russian got portrayed as the language of honesty and seriousness.
So the slow process of French fading away into the book gave the book an extra touch of comprehension of the change of mindset that occurred into the Russian elite. Most of them were so unaware of Russian that they had to rent tutors.
Although this book was written sixty years after Napoleon wars, the Russian aristocracy was apparently still firmly embedded into the French culture (note Tolstoy’s mastery of the language).
One has also to admire the enormous amount of time and historical research (he only used primary sources) and the amount of real historical characters he described accurately and in detail. This was also the reason why Tolstoy was reluctant to call this book a novel.
After the Napoleonic Wars, Tsar Alexander was undeniable the most powerful monarch of the world, ruling over a vast Imperium that stretched over three continents; Europe, Asia and North America (Alaska was then still part of Russia) … and did nothing with it.
It was a blessing for the rest of the world that after his victory over Napoleon, he started to sulk and turned his attention to religious mysticism.
The Maharajagar 