reading war and peace - war and pierre's transformation

"Have you got to the Battle of Borodino yet?" one of my bookstore colleagues asked. I was again in the break room reading War and Peace, and as he began to talk about Napoleon - whose grey horse was called Marengo, my mind wandered. I'd been glossing over Tolstoy's insights into the Napoleonic Wars while I read.  Tolstoy goes on and on about military strategy, the characters of Napoleon and Czar Alexander, and how historians have misrepresented events. But as far as I'm concerned, nothing would have been lost if those pages had been cut.*

It's really through his characters that Tolstoy gives us the war.  At one point he uses an extraordinary device, by putting Pierre in the heart of the battle. The bumbling Pierre, who knows nothing about military strategy, decides to satisfy his curiosity by riding into the most hotly contested piece of land in the Battle of Borodino.  He's not a combatant but an observer, fearless and unaware and in this way, the reader becomes Pierre - an observer who doesn't belong there, who can't comprehend what's happening.  This is how Tolstoy gives us inside access, letting us imagine the battle we don't understand.

And from this point on, Pierre plays many parts. He dreams on a pile of blankets in the back of a cart;  he disguises himself and flees Moscow. Later, after rescuing a child from a fire, he's captured by the French as a prisoner of war.  Only once is he briefly recognized, when everybody is packing up and leaving Moscow. Natasha Rostov identifies him as he hurries across the square.  I doubt it's a coincidence that Tolstoy gives Natasha this role, since she is the most transparent character in War and Peace, never disguising any of her feelings, even when disguise might be expedient (as in her interview with Prince Andrei's father Nikolai and Princess Maria).

Tolstoy writes extensively about the destruction of Moscow. Sometimes he goes on too long, like a man at the head of the table, pontificating after a dinner party.  But I love his description of Napoleon entering Moscow. The sight of the city's strange architecture, Tolstoy writes, must have filled him with  "the rather envious and uneasy curiosity men feel when they contemplate an alien form of life which ignores their presence."

Tolstoy develops this theme.  Napoleon's declarations and proclamations are powerless, since he can do nothing to stop the looting and pillaging of Moscow.  "[He] was like a child holding onto the straps inside a carriage and imagining that he is driving it."

So Moscow is empty - "in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty. In a queenless hive no life is left, though to a superficial glance it seems as much alive as other hives".

Again, it is Pierre's journey and Pierre's transformation that matters to us most. He gradually becomes less clumsy, more at ease with himself and at peace with the world.  He witnesses executions, traveling with the French as a prisoner of war. He sees how at the point of death people were "incredulous because they alone knew what their life meant to them and so they could not understand, could not believe that it could be taken from them."  Finally Pierre begins to understand that God IS.  That love is.  This is all that matters. And he comes to understand that being financially ruined has made him spiritually richer.

It's a remarkable journey to read this book - through war, through life and love and death and most of all, through Pierre's transformation.   Without Pierre's transformation there could be no resolution after the war - and no love between himself and Natasha.  She is never anything other than herself, although her character also grows. There is never any pretense about her, even as she nurses Andrei on his deathbed.  And although at times she might be annoyingly at the mercy of every emotion she feels, Natasha gives so much of herself to everybody around her, that we always want her to come out on top.

Tolstoy describes the tender reunion of Princess Maria, Natasha and Pierre after the end of the war. In their loss, the three talk deeply into the night and early morning, revealing their true selves, so that when Pierre leaves for St Petersburg, Natasha's parting words I shall look forward very much to your return   "are the source of all joy, so many interpretations of feeling and exquisite day dreams over the next several months.  'Oh how happy I am? What is happening. How can I be so happy,' said Pierre to himself."

Pierre's happiness is described as a form of insanity  Only, it isn't insanity. It's the truth. When he looks back on these days, he realizes he was so happy and in love, that he never tried to find a reason for loving others or seeing the good in them. "I was not so mad as I seemed," he thinks. "On the contrary. I was wiser and had more insight than at any other time; and I understood all that is worth understanding in life... because I was so happy."

My son Alex standing on one of Napoleon's canons at the Kremlin in 1993

*Tolstoy tells us that the Battle of Borodino did nothing but bring Moscow closer to destruction and the French closer to the destruction of their army - outcomes dreaded by the Russians and French above all else.  But they were caught up in it - and it was destined to play out and there was no going back once it had begun.

 In the last pages he pontificates about history - the causes of historical events the nature of power  and the collective will of the masses vested in one person.   "On what condition is the will of the people delegated to one person?" he writes.  "On condition that that person expresses the will of the whole people.  That is, power is power.  That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand."  He also he talks about collective consciousness, about the laws of necessity and free will.  I will leave this analysis to others, because for me the novel ended pretty much with the marriage of Pierre and Natasha.