In Part Two, Andrei Bolkonsky seems to have found a new lease on life through his wartime activities, even though during his visit to the diplomat Bilibin and the Austrian court he does the same round of parties and social calls that he had done in Petersburg. And when Nikolai Rostov is wounded on the battlefield, he longingly recalls the family hearth.
Peace and war are now overtly combined in Part Three, a feature highlighted by the very structure of this section of the novel. Rather than being separated (Part One = peace scenes, Part Two = war scenes), Part Three contains both. The first chapters revolve around Prince Vasily Kuragin's attempts - both successful and unsuccessful - to marry off his children. We then switch to the scene where the Rostovs receive Nikolai's letter about his martial exploits, which leads us through association to transition to Nikolai himself, who now fancies himself to be the swaggering war hero. Now that we are focused on Nikolai, once again through association we follow him and then the Russian army throughout the disastrous confrontation with Napoleon's army at the Battle of Austerlitz. The ending of this section, with Andrei on the battlefield at Austerlitz contemplating the sky, encountering Napoleon, and thinking about his wife and family, is one of the most famous and well-known scenes of the novel.
Tolstoy carries through this intertwining of peace and war not just structurally, but thematically as well. Some of the most important themes, scenes, and images from Parts One and Two reappear in Part Three. For instance, the issue of the untrustworthy nature of language can be seen both in the craftiness with which Prince Vasily organizes the engagement of Pierre to his daughter Helene and in this scene's use of French: Pierre knows that "something is supposed to be said" on such occasions, and what he finally manages to utter is cloaked in French - "Je vous aime." It is a fittingly false ending to a completely manufactured situation. As in Part One, we are invited to compare different families and familial relationships: the Kuragins reappear, as do the Bolkonskys and the Rostovs. And once again, as in Part Two, the Battle of Austerlitz is depicted through the lens of the "fog of war" (both literally and metaphorically). It is not accidental that in describing the battle, Tolstoy's narrator over and over again emphasizes not only the confusion experienced by various characters, but their sensory deprivation. What is true for all authors is especially true for Tolstoy - when he repeats something, it's important. Again and again in setting up the battle, his narrator focuses on the early-morning fog, how nothing is visible, nothing can be clearly made out - a detail that finds its mirror in the fact that the high command, for all its battle plans and dispositions, really has no idea where Napoleon's army is located.
However, Tolstoy is not just repeating themes and images, he is building on them. War and Peace was first published serially in one of the "thick journals" that were the backbone of 19th-century Russian literary culture. In a draft to an introduction to the novel, Tolstoy wrote, "It will not be possible to read the second part without having read the first, but having read the first, it will be very possible not to read the second." Now, obviously I don't recommend you take to heart the second half of this statement and stop reading the novel! But the first half is quite revealing: "it will not be possible to read the second part without having read the first." The reason for this, I think, is because, as I mentioned in another post, the novel is constructed as a "labyrinth of connections." Characters, themes, and images constantly refer forward to things to come and backward to things that have already happened. When we read War and Peace, we have a sense of deja vu so that we stop and ask ourselves, now where did I read that before?
War and Peace is a goldmine of compare and contrast situations that professors so love to give as the subject for papers and essay questions. When we start to connect the dots among things in the novel that give us that sense of deja vu, we arrive at a whole web of connections; the whole becomes much more than the sum of its parts. I'll trace a few examples to show you what I'm talking about. Part Three opens with a description of Prince Vasily Kuragin and the words, "Prince Vasily was not given to planning ahead. Still less would he think of doing any harm to other people in order to gain an advantage." As we continue to read, the narrator informs us that "Various plans and considerations were always forming in his mind, according to circumstances and individual encounters, but he was never fully conscious of them, even though they were his main interest in life." Furthermore, Prince Vasily just "knew instinctively" whether a man might be of use to him, and that he would ingratiate himself with a useful person "again instinctively and without any forethought."
If we realize that this sounds familiar, that we've read it somewhere before, it suddenly occurs to us that these statements are very similar to previous descriptions of Bagration, Tushin, and other true heroes in the war scenes. They too act instinctively, without forethought, based on the demands of the moment and the heat of battle - and moreover, this seems to be a good thing, as opposed to all the elaborate battle plans that never work out. But then we might find ourselves in a conundrum: but wait a second, this "living-in-the-moment, go-with-the-flow" attitude is a good thing in relation to Bagration and Tushin, right? So are we supposed to think this is a good thing in relation to Prince Vasily?? I would argue that no, not necessarily. Bagration and Tushin are acting appropriately given the context in which they find themselves. War is necessarily a disorienting experience, and it is complete hubris to think that you can absolutely understand every aspect of it at any given moment. But Prince Vasily takes the tactics of war and applies them to a different context - his supposedly peaceful relations with other people. He treats others as if they were the enemy and he is at war with them, laying traps, ruses, and ambushes. Anna Pavlovna Scherer is cast in a similar light, especially with regard to her role in matching Pierre and Helene, for she is described as a "general on the battlefield."
When we see Pierre together with Vasily, we should remember when we last saw them together. At two points: first at Anna Pavlovna's salon and again at the death scene of Pierre's father, Count Bezukhov. Because these two scenes "sandwich" or "bookend" Pierre's character, they again make their appearance here. We are treated to another salon at Anna Pavlovna's, complete with Helene and even AP's aunt, but invited to see the vast differences between the two parties in terms of both society's new attitude toward Pierre and how the scenes play out. In Part One, Pierre acted extremely passively during the events surrounding his father's death. He gave himself over completely to Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskoy's guidance, thinking that everything that was happening was meant to happen. Pierre acts and thinks the same way in Part Three. He ignores the inner voice inside him that tells him that marriage to Helene would be shameful and instead allows himself to be guided in his actions by others, again thinking that everything that is happening is meant to happen. Again, this makes us think of Bagration and his "wise passivity" - but for me this raises the question, is all passivity in the novel necessarily wise? Is there a fundamental difference between how Pierre acts and how Bagration acts?
Or to put it another way - once Vasily manages to square things with Pierre and Helene, he heads off to Bald Hills to pay a visit to the Bolkonskys and try to get his son Anatole married off to Princess Marya (a scheme cooked up, by the way, by Anna Pavlovna Scherer and Prince Vasily in the first chapters of the book). The scenes are mirror images of each other, with the genders of the protagonists and antagonists reversed. Princess Marya is even described as being "short-sighted," just as Pierre was, and she has some of the same thoughts and feelings that Pierre had, which makes the connection between the two of them and their roles more clear. Like Pierre, Princess Marya hears an inner voice, one that tells her to desire nothing for herself, seek nothing, but live in readiness for anything that God may bring. So she, like Pierre and like Bagration, relinquishes her will in favor of allowing herself to be guided by some kind of external force. But her story ends very differently from Pierre's and we are asked to question why that is. Is it because she is "wise" in her passivity, whereas Pierre is just passive? That is the conclusion that I have been mulling over. To complete the circle, much later in Part Three on the night before the Battle of Austerlitz, Andrei once again dreams of achieving glory and recognition. He also hears an inner voice that contradicts his fantasies, asking "Yes, but what about death and agony?" Whereas Marya listened to her inner voice, both Pierre and Andrei ignore theirs.
There are several other such moments in this section: when Nikolai Rostov recounts the Battle of Schongraben to Boris and Berg, he tells the story not as it really happened but as he wished it had happened, much like the officers in Part Two and even Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskoy's "creative reimagining" of the scene between Pierre and his father in Part One. Nikolai's love for Tsar Alexander I is depicted in the terms of romantic love, which connects his admiration for the Tsar with the matchmaking in the earlier chapters. And both Nikolai and Andrei meet their idols, Tsar Alexander I and Napoleon, respectively. I don't want to give too much away here, in case you're still reading. But the similarities and differences between these two meetings will be worth discussing.
So here are a few questions for Wednesday's discussion: What impulses move Pierre in his relations with Helen? How "free" is Pierre in his actions in these scenes? Why do Pierre and Marya's situations end so differently? One of my students asked in class the other day, "Do the Kuragins exist in the novel just to ruin people?" It's a good question! What does their function seem to be? What is the function of Nikolai's love for Tsar Alexander? How is the Tsar depicted in this section? How can we compare Nikolai and Andrei's encounters with their heroes? And what is the meaning and symbolism of the sky as Andrei views it on the field at Austerlitz?
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