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War and Peace

 


As I mentioned last week, I was reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I have now finished it. This classic book is one most people have heard of but I suspect not many today have read.

 It should be read.

On the one hand, War and Peace is a novel, with romance, intrigue, and a striving for success. On the other hand, in places, it is almost a history textbook.  If you were a history student wishing to learn about Russia’s involvement in the Napoleonic wars, you could do worse than simply reading War and Peace. It is a scholarly work which delves into the causes of the war, and criticizes historians who try to tell us the answers. Tolstoy points out that there are thousands of moving parts that lead to any eventual outcome. French historians blame the Russians for burning Moscow. Russian historians blame the French for burning Moscow. Tolstoy points out that it may well have been accidental, a natural result when you have looters and campers in a city made of wood and all the fire brigades have been evacuated. Tolstoy mocks the historians who claim that the French did not defeat the Russians the battle of Borodino because Napoleon had a cold. The truth is always more complex. There are a million, million factors that, taken in total, decide the outcome of any enterprise. Heroes are the ones that history crown with glory, but it is up to countless unsung people just doing their job that decide an outcome. I don’t want to imply that the ‘history’ parts of this are a dry, boring slog through a text book, a recitation of facts. The history comes in short bursts woven into the fabric of the story.

But primarily this is a novel. Tolstoy tells a compelling story. We follow the Rostov family, the Bolkonsky family, the enigmatic Pierre and many other major and minor characters who are trying to get on with their lives in wartime and in peacetime. People fall in love, fall out of love, are sometimes betrayed and made to feel the fool. Some of these characters learn from the lessons of life. Others do not. Just like in real life. We meet good people, bad people, and lots and lots of morally gray people. The story is rich in character development. Some of the minor characters are a fascinating study. Some give us their philosophy of life; others just give us snippets of their life that let us see what it was like for them. Most of the major characters are from the upper class of 19th Century Russian society, so we get a pretty good feel for what it was like to be in that class at that time. The salons, the balls and even money problems. We follow them through peace, then war, then peace, then war. It becomes quite obvious that officers in the army come from the upper classes while the grunts come from the lower classes. In fact, they didn’t appear to have to demonstrate any particular skill to be an officer, just be born into the right family (This phenomenon was not unique to Russia. Many 19th Century armies including American armies functioned the same way). Just because a family was noble did not mean they were rich. We see the Rostovs with perpetual money problems as the Count is clueless how the world works. This causes them to seek good marriages for their children . . . I don’t care if you love Sonya, you have to marry a rich girl or the family is ruined!

No one survives the war unscathed. Families have lost brothers, sons. Some soldiers and civilians caught up in events return different people than before the war. Some have changed for the better, realizing that the things they used to worry about were trivial. Others have changed for the worse. The war that they were all living through was probably the largest conflict the world had seen up until that time. (If someone had been thinking along these lines they might have called it World War I). Yet, as we have seen time and again, people will find a way to endure hardships. That I think, may be the ultimate lesson of War and Peace: no matter how hard life gets, there is always hope. War and Peace is a big book, a very big book. But it is not some dry and dusty old tome that should only be read by scholars. It is full of life, love, conflict, altruism, greed, lust, faith, genius, and stupidity. All the things that make us human.

It should be read.

 

(My science fiction novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).

Star Liner

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