War and Peace

I've reading War and Peace by your man, Tolstoy. It's one of those famous Great Books which are frequently mentioned in jokes as proverbial examples of a Big Ponderous Tome.

I've avoided it all these years, partly (I think) because Chesterton never had very much good to say about Tolstoy. Or rather, he had little good to say about him as a social reformer. He was most complimentary about his writing. Still, I knew about Tolstoy's (later) social views from Chesterton, and they seemed quite needlessly ascetic and miserable.

I also knew from reading Paul Johnson's Intellectuals that he was quiet the hypocrite, and behaved abysmally towards his long-suffering wife. Still, if we were to avoid authors on that account, we'd miss out on an awful lot of great stuff-- sad to say.

I'd watched the 1972 BBC series based on the book, starring Anthony Hopkins, about ten years ago. I watched all fifteen-hours in a few sittings, with the result that I barely remember it. I don't remember being greatly impressed with it, though. (I persisted with it because I had bought it on DVD. That was back in my bachelor days when I would regularly buy DVDs on a whim.)

I'm not sure what impelled me to finally try War and Peace, but I'm glad I did. It's an absorbing experience-- just like The Brothers Karamazov, which I read six years ago.

When I read Russian literature of the nineteenth century, I'm struck by the similarities between the Russia of that time and the Ireland of that time, at least as they are portrayed in literature. Perhaps these traits have even endured, although I'm never sure about that. What traits am I talking about? Well, here are a few; lyricism, melancholy, piety, a preoccupation with martial honour, an inner conflict between tradition and modernity, Western Europe and insularity. And, of course, alcohol.

Anyway, here are my Facebook posts:

Have any of my friends read War and Peace? About five hundred pages into it and it continues to be absorbing. It's like a panorama of human life, although it pays very little attention to the commercial classes.

It's exactly the sort of book I hoped Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time might be, but we disappointed in that case. Powell was too ironic and flippant and satirical for my taste. I want an epic novel to be serious.

I'm about four hundred pages into War and Peace. It's a very good read! Full of incident, drama, and variety.

I've read a few novels by Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov was my favourite) and now I'm reading this. They seem to have this in common, that they are novels of ideas. We are privy to the character's thoughts (sometimes pages and pages of them) and the characters have long conversations about their beliefs and views. For instance, there is a good scene between one character who has become a Freemason and is suddenly passionate about schemes of social improvement, and another character who is more fatalistic and cynical about such things. (Although later, ironically, we learn that the latter character actually made all the improvements the first character, with the best of intentions, never could. They are both landowners.)

What I like about these Russian novels is how direct they are. Somewhere in the twentieth century, it seems to me, obliqueness became obligatory in literary fiction. Nothing can be spelled out, everything has to be implied. It's the job of literary commentators to draw out the meaning. I find that tiresome and childish. I like authors who are happy to supply the commentary themselves.

I'm still reading War and Peace, about halfway through. It might as well be called War and Peace and Everything Else. It's really about all human life.

But I'm particularly impressed by Tolstoy's depiction of war. Tolstoy was famously a pacifist. He also had first-hand experience of war and was decorated for his courage. Apparently when the book came out, people with experience of battle praised it as an accurate description.
Tolstoy is scathing about war and portrays it as evil, anti-human, and mostly farcical and chaotic. But he doesn't portray it as sheer hell. In fact, he makes it quite clear that many soldiers enjoy it on some level, including the experience of facing enemy gunfire

As a confirmed physical coward who would certainly pee his pants on a battlefield, and undoubtedly get killed within minutes, I find this hard to understand. But not hard to believe. It's quite clear from history and biography that it's true. In fact, "war is unadulterated hell" fiction has always seemed very unconvincing to me.

I suppose the best anti-war novels acknowledge this already. I read All Quiet On the Western Front in my teens. The part that stands out to me the most is when the protagonist is given home leave and can't wait to get back to his comrades because civilian life suddenly seems meaningless to him.

This is an interesting passage in War and Peace. It reminds me of the Celtic Tiger and its aftermath!

"The cause of the destruction of the French army in 1812 is clear to us now. No one will deny that that cause was, on the one hand, its advance into the heart of Russia late in the season without any preparation for a winter campaign and, on the other, the character given to the war by the burning of Russian towns and the hatred of the foe this aroused among the Russian people. But no one at the time foresaw (what now seems so evident) that this was the only way an army of eight hundred thousand men—the best in the world and led by the best general—could be destroyed in conflict with a raw army of half its numerical strength, and led by inexperienced commanders as the Russian army was. Not only did no one see this, but on the Russian side every effort was made to hinder the only thing that could save Russia, while on the French side, despite Napoleon’s experience and so-called military genius, every effort was directed to pushing on to Moscow at the end of the summer, that is, to doing the very thing that was bound to lead to destruction.

"In historical works on the year 1812 French writers are very fond of saying that Napoleon felt the danger of extending his line, that he sought a battle and that his marshals advised him to stop at Smolénsk, and of making similar statements to show that the danger of the campaign was even then understood. Russian authors are still fonder of telling us that from the commencement of the campaign a Scythian war plan was adopted to lure Napoleon into the depths of Russia, and this plan some of them attribute to Pfuel, others to a certain Frenchman, others to Toll, and others again to Alexander himself—pointing to notes, projects, and letters which contain hints of such a line of action. But all these hints at what happened, both from the French side and the Russian, are advanced only because they fit in with the event. Had that event not occurred these hints would have been forgotten, as we have forgotten the thousands and millions of hints and expectations to the contrary which were current then but have now been forgotten because the event falsified them. There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that however it may end there will always be people to say: “I said then that it would be so,” quite forgetting that amid their innumerable conjectures many were to quite the contrary effect."

I don't want to be a bore about War and Peace, but it continues to be excellent. One of Tolstoy's arguments in the book (and I love that it's didactic) is that history is not swayed by "great men" like Napoleon. In fact, his argument is that very often what happens is the opposite of what everybody is trying to achieve. For instance, that the famous tactic of luring Napoleon's army into the depths of Russia was not at all what the Russian army was trying to achieve, but quite the opposite. And also that Napoleon himself had no intention of a prolonged winter campaign but found himself irresistibly drawn onwards by circumstances or his own army.

Anyway, this occurred to me today with the whole question of "equality and diversity" today. Never has "diversity" been such a totem as it is today. And yet we seem to be achieving quite the opposite-- homogenization-- and very often it's THE VERY POLICIES which are imposed in the name of "diversity" which bring about this homogenization, or at least assist it.

Now, you might say that this is quite deliberate, and you might be right. At a high level, perhaps it is. But I'm sure there are some deluded souls out there who sincerely believe they are on Team Diversity when they're actually on Team Homogenization.