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).
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