This book about young aristocratic Russians in the time of the
Napoleonic war is certainly beyond my
complete comprehension. Hence I’ll focus on 2 themes that stood out to me:
power and the pursuit of happiness.
The war provides the perfect background to explore the theme of power and influence over people. „war began. In other words, an event took
place which defied human reason and all human nature. Millions of men set out
to inflict on one another untold evils – deception, treachery, robbery,
forgery, counterfeiting, theft, arson and murder – on a scale unheard of in the
animals of law-courts down the centuries and all over the world, though at the
time the men responsible did not think of these deeds as crimes.“ (Tolstoy,
1868, p.667). „Every last man oft hem clearly knew beyond doubt they were all
criminals, and they had to move quickly to hide all traces of their crime.“
(Tolstoy, 1868, p.1073).
It is power that binds people together in groups: “Pierre could not see these people as individuals; he saw them all
together and in movement.“ (Tolstoy,
1868, p.1131).
„There are two sides to life
for every individual: a personal life, in which his freedom exists in
proportion to the abstract nature of his interests, and an elemental life
within the swarm of humanity, in which a man inevitable follows laws laid down
for him.“ (Tolstoy, 1868, p.669).
But power is not simple: Leaders can’t order and events will happen. Orders don’t correspond to events.
“From the incalculable series of Napoleon’s orders that were never
carried out, one series of orders that were carried out, not because of any
essential difference between these and the ones not carried out, but simply
because this series happened to correspond with the course of events bringing
the French soldiers into Russia.” (Tolstoy,
1868, p.1337).
„It was necessary for those
millions of men who wielded the real power – soldiers, shooting or bringing up
supplies and guns – to do what they were told by one or two feeble
individuals.“ (Tolstoy, 1868, p.669). „If any of these causes had been missing,
nothing could have happened.“ (Tolstoy, 1868, p.669).
So what is the role of leader
and what is the role of those being led - the
leaders provide the moral: „Since time began and men started killing each
other, no man has ever committed such a crime against one of his fellows
without comforting himself with the same idea. This idea is ‚the public good’,
a supposed benefit for other people. No person in control of his passions is
ever aware of this benefit, but a man fresh from committing such a crime always
knows certain where the benefit lies. Rostropchin knew.“ (Tolstoy, 1868,
p.990).
“(1) Power is a relationship between a given person and other persons by
which the less directly a person participates in a collective enterprise the
more involved he is in expressing opinions and theories about it and providing
justification for it.” (Tolstoy,
1868, p.1341).
“(2) The movement of peoples is determined not as historians have
supposed, by the exercise of power or the intellect or both together, but by
the actions of all involved; all the people who come together in such a way
that those who participate most directly in the activity assume the least
responsibility for it and vice versa.” (Tolstoy, 1868, p.1341). “But these justifications are very necessary at the
time, shifting moral responsibility away from the men who produce the events.
These short-term measures operate like brushes on the front of a train clearing
the rails ahead.” (Tolstoy, 1868, p.1339).
“In moral terms power is the cause of the event; in physical terms it is
those who are subject to that power.” (Tolstoy,
1868, p.1341).
The second theme is the pursuit of happiness or a purpose in life: The
main characters live in Russian aristocratic society - a society that favours
shallowness and vanity.
Instinctively the main characters know, that this is no way of living
and is the source of their unhappiness.
When Andrey Bolkonsky lies severely
wounded on the battle field: „How can it be that I’ve never seen that lofty sky
before? Oh, how happy I am to have found it last. Yes! It’s all vanity, it’s
all an illusion, everything except that infinite sky. There’s nothing, nothing
– that’s all there is. But there isn’t even that. There’s nothing but stillness
and peace. Thank God for that!“ (Tolstoy, 1868, p.299).
So all main characters in the book look for a purpose in life and they try out pretty much everything – a journey
through plenty of philosophical ideas. But all of them fail – but towards the
end Tolstoy develops his unique way.
A main source of happiness is
the feeling of being part of a whole and containing this whole in oneself: „Pierre glanced up at the sky and the play oft
he stars receding into the depths. ‚And it’s all mine and it’s all within me,
and it all adds up to me!’ thought Pierre.“ (Tolstoy, 1868, p.1134). In a dream Pierre recognizes this idea
clearer: “’Wait a minute,’ said the little old man. And he showed Pierre a
globe. This globe was a living thing, a shimmering ball consisted of drops
closely compressed. And the drops were in constant movement and flux and
sometimes dissolving from many into one, sometimes breaking down from one into
many. Each drop was trying to spread out and take up as much space as possible,
but all the others, wanting to do the same, squeezed it back, absorbing it or
merging into it. ‘This is life,’ said the little old teacher. (…) God is in the
middle and each drop tries to expand and reflect Him on the largest possible
scale. And it grows, gets absorbed and compressed, disappears from the surface,
sinks down into depths and bubbles up again. That’s what happened to him,
Karatayev: he has been absorbed and he’s disappeared.” (Tolstoy, 1868, p.1185).
Being part of a whole and containing it, leads to unconditional
love of the world:
„’Yes, it’s love ...’ (his
thoughts were lucidity itself), ‚but not the kind of love that loves for a
reason, a purpose, a cause, but the kind of love I felt for the first time when
I was on my death bed and I saw essence of the soul, love that seeks no object.
(…) .... When you love with human love
you can change from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not
even death, nothing can destroy it. It is the essence of the soul.“ (Tolstoy,
1868, p.1021).
Unconditional love also implies the danger of being
indifferent to the world and life:
„Karatayev enjoyed no
attachements, no friendships, no love in any sense of these words that meant
anything to Pierre, yet he loved and showed affection to every creature he came
across in life, especially people, no particular people, just those who
happened tob e there before his eyes. He loved his dog, his comrades, the
French, and he loved Pierre, his neighbour. But Pierre felt that for all the
warmth and affection Karatayev showed him (an instinctive tribute to Pierre’s
spirituality), he wouldn’t suffer a moment’s sorrow if they were to part.“
(Tolstoy, 1868, p.1080).
Thus there is a catch to this principle
uncondititional love. It more or less means renouncing life. „Loving everything and everybody, always
sacrificing oneself for the sake of love, meant loving no one person, and not
living this earthly life. And the more he absorbed this principle of love, the
easier he found it to renounce life, and the more effectively he destroyed the
dreadful barrier that the absence of love sets up between life and death.“
(Tolstoy, 1868, p.1091).
Thus love should be unconditional but it never ends up
being undiscriminating. The character who live a happy life in ‘War and Peace’
always find a partner that they cannot help but love more than the rest of the
world. „It was a sudden awareness
that life, seen though his love for Natasha, was still precious.“ (Tolstoy,
1868, p.1091). „’Love gets in the way of death. Love is life. Every single
thing I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is –
everything exists . only because I love. Everything is bound up with love, and
love alone. Love is God, and dying means me, a tiny particle of love, going
back to ist universal and eternal source.’“ (Tolstoy, 1868, p.1093).
So in the end, this love means restriction in the
world. So for Tolstoy happiness doesn’t exist in freedom, but in restriction: „It was Natasha, and he loved her. (...)
By now Pierre’s embarrassment had almost disappeared, but he felt that all his
former freedom had disappeared with it. He felt that now there was a judge
listening to his every word and every action, someone whose judgement mattered
more than the judgement of everybody else in the world.“ (Tolstoy, 1868,
p.1241).
And this restriction applies not only to
love, but also to the material world:
„It was only here and now that
Pierre had fully appreciated fort he first time in his life the enjoymentof
eating when you are hungry, drinking when you are thirsty, sleeping when you
are tired,keeping warm when it is cold and talking to a fellow creature when
you feel like talking and you want to hear men’s voices. Through deprivation
Pierre now saw the satisfaction of his basic needs – good food, cleanliness and
freedom – as the ultimate happiness, and the choice of an occupation or
lifestyle, now that this choice was so restricted, seemed such a simply matter
that he forgot that a surfeit of luxury takes all the pleasure oout of
satisfying our basic needs and maximum freedom in the choice of occupation,
which had been provided for him through education, wealth and his position in
society makes the actual choice of an occupation extraordinarily difficult,
because it destroys the need and desire for any such thing.“ (Tolstoy, 1868,
p.1126).
“In his prison shed Pierre had learnt, though his whole being rather
than his intellect, through the process of living itself, that man was created
for happiness, and happiness lies within, in the satisfaction of natural human
needs, and any unhappiness arises from excess rather than deficiency. (…) He
had learnt that just as there is no situation in the world in which a man can
be happy and perfectly free, neither is there any situation in which he should
be unhappy and not free. He had learnt that there is a limit to suffering and a
limit to freedom, and those limits are never far away (…) He learnt that when
he had married his wife by his own free will (so he had thought), he had been
no freer than he was now when they locked him up in a stable for the night.” (Tolstoy, 1868, p.1179).
The best purpose in life is no purpose “And from habit he
would start asking himself questions. ‘What comes next, then? What am I going
to do?’ And immediately he knew the answer: ‘Nothing, I’m just going to live.
Oh, it’s marvellous!’. And it was the lack of any purpose that gave him the
complete and joyous sense of freedom underlying his present happiness. He could
seek no purpose now, because now he had faith – not faith in principles, words
or ideas, but faith in a living God of feeling and experience.” (Tolstoy, 1868, p.1230).
