In the first chapter of Volume II, Part II, Pierre asks himself the following questions: "What's bad and what's good? What should we love and what should we hate? What is life for, and what am I? What is life? What is death? What kind of force is it that directs everything?"
The questions that Pierre poses are some of the "accursed questions" with which much nineteenth-century Russian literature was obsessed (especially the works written by the "big guns," Tolstoy and Dostoevsky). However, Tolstoy seemed to feel that much contemporary writing - concerned as it was primarily with materialism, positivism, and the natural sciences - could only supply answers that were incomplete and unsatisfying.
The last question - "What kind of force is it that directs everything?" - is one that Tolstoy considers in the novel with regard to both individual human lives and historical events. At our last chat session, one member of the group asked, "What does this book mean?" My response was that ultimately I think War and Peace is about free will - or perhaps more accurately, the extent to which we are free versus the extent to which we are bounded by necessity and dependent on forces over which we have no control and of which we may be only dimly aware. In an essay entitled "A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace," Tolstoy outlined his basic conception of freedom: "it is impossible not to see that the more abstract our activity is and therefore the less connected with the activity of others, the more free it is, and, on the contrary, the more our activity is connected with other people, the more unfree it is." He gives a very simple example: if I am sitting alone I can raise my arm and lower it if I feel like it. But as soon as there is a child present standing next to me, I can raise my arm but I can no longer bring my arm down with the same force, for fear of hitting the child. If a dog attacks the child, I cannot not raise my arm to defend the child. As long as we are alone, we have complete freedom, but as soon as we come into contact with others, that freedom is curtailed. And the more people we come into contact with, the more our freedom diminishes.
We have already seen an example of this philosophy in Volume I, Part III: when Pierre was an outcast from society he was completely free to do whatever he wanted - find a job in the military, find a job in government service, not find a job and just go to parties all the time. But as soon as Pierre becomes Count Bezukhov, he is no longer as free as he once was - now he has social obligations to fulfill and expectations to meet. Now he can't not go to a dinner or a reception because (he thinks) that if he doesn't go, his absence will cause the world to collapse. And just in case we missed the point the first time around, Tolstoy's narrator will tell us in Chapter 10 of Volume II, Part II that Pierre felt much better off when he received 10,000 rubles a year from his father than he does now that he has an annual income of 500,ooo. Before, he could spend his 10,000 rubles any way he wanted; now, he has bills to pay, properties to manage, and princesses to support.
However, the limits to freedom in War and Peace don't just seem to stem from proximity to other people. These limits seem to be pervasive and ever-present: they are both within and without, coming from our characters and personalities as well as the social forces exerted on us. We're not that surprised when Pierre is maneuvered by Prince Vasily into marrying Helene - after all, Pierre had shown himself in the beginning of the novel to be without a firm foundation or convictions, and he had already let himself be taken over by Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskaya at his father's deathbed. At the same time though, when Pierre twice flies into a blind rage - the first time hurling a marble tabletop at his wife, the second time threatening Prince Vasily when he makes an attempt at reconciling the couple - the narrator mentions that Pierre was acting "like his father's son." It would seem that we cannot escape who we are - whether who we are comes from biology or something else innate within us, or whether it comes from our family structures or the expectations placed upon us.
However, chance has its role in the novel as well. One noted scholar, Gary Saul Morson, has stated: "Chance is a central theme of War and Peace." And indeed, it is by chance that Princess Marya sees Anatole and Mademoiselle Bourienne locked in a passionate embrace and therefore decides not to marry Anatole but to devote herself to bringing about the happiness of the couple. It is by chance that Andrei has an opportunity to grab a standard and rush forward at the head of a regiment at the Battle of Austerlitz. It is by chance that Pierre meets Osip Bazdeyev, which later leads him to join the brotherhood of Freemasonry. At the same time, though, I can't help wondering about the extent to which our character conditions how we respond to those chances. It is within Princess Marya's character to react to the scene she witnesses in the way she does, just as it is within Andrei's character to react the way he does. And Pierre has been primed - through his doubts, his philosophical bent, his reaction to the duel with Dolokhov, and the very questions he had been contemplating that I mentioned at the beginning of this blog entry - to accept Bazdeyev's words. What Bazdeyev tells him resonates with him because of everything he is and has experienced up to that point.
Characters in War and Peace often ask themselves, "How did this happen? How did I get here? What was the moment when everything changed?" Pierre poses these questions after getting engaged to Helene, Nikolai poses the same questions after he loses 43,000 rubles at cards to Dolokhov. On a larger scale, this relates in other parts of the novel to questions of history: how did this war start? how did we get to this point? It is a mistake to look for one moment for an answer. A young, indecisive, lustful man with a large fortune and not the strongest will in the world, one who has been living in the same house as Helene and Prince Vasily, cannot not marry Helene, in the same way that a young, pampered man who is spoiled by his family, has a high opinion of himself, and is dazzled by the dashing and daring Dolokhov cannot not lose 43,ooo rubles at cards to him. And yet somebody has made a choice - Prince Vasily engineered the marriage, Dolokhov has decided to punish Nikolai - but to look for one single cause is a mistake. It is chance that Nikolai brought Dolokhov home to meet Sonya, chance that Dolokhov fell in love with her, and then chance that he took out his revenge on the refusal of his marriage proposal by ruining Nikolai.
Or is it? Isn't it sort of inevitable that Nikolai would bring an adored acquaintance home to meet his family? Isn't it inevitable that Dolokhov would fall in love with Sonya? He had told Nikolai that he was "looking for a woman with the purity of a saint and complete devotion" - isn't that a perfect description of Sonya? He had also warned Nikolai that "The only people I want to know are the ones I love. But those that I do love, I would lay down my life for them, and I'll crush anybody else who gets in my way." That's exactly what he does to Nikolai, and we had already seen his cruel behavior towards Pierre over the love of a woman.
So are all these things chance? Or fate? Or both? Part I of Volume II is in many ways concerned with the question of fate. At first glance, the chapters seem to be a hodge-podge of different things, switching back and forth from Nikolai and the Rostovs to the Bolkonskys, to Pierre and Dolokhov, to Nikolai and Dolokhov. But they are all united in a concern with fate and chance. Andrei had been so concerned with finding glory on the battlefield so he took his chance at Austerlitz, but as we read in this part, nobody had heard of his exploits - they were fated to be forgotten. And then he returns - as if from the dead- quite by chance but at a most fateful moment. Tolstoy plays a wonderful game in this section with two events most marked by the concepts of fate and chance - the duel and gambling. Both are supposed to be the ultimate test of fate and luck, but he of course puts his own spin on them. By all standards, Pierre should have lost his duel with Dolokhov. Dolokhov is not only a soldier, used to handling and firing a weapon, he has also participated in several duels. Pierre does not even know how to fire a gun. He fires at Dolokhov randomly, by chance, and wounds him, but even when he is standing just a few paces away from Dolokhov, his broad chest exposed, Dolokhov misses. At the same time, that ultimate test of luck - gambling - turns out to be the complete opposite. Dolokhov is obviously somehow controlling the cards - he has even decided ahead of time on the amount that Nikolai will lose, since 43 is the sum of Dolokhov's and Sonya's ages - but Nikolai somehow can't not continue gambling. To add insult to injury and drive home the point, Tolstoy has Dolokhov allow Nikolai to win 21 rubles at the end, making the total loss an even 43,000.
All of this still begs the question: what kind of force is it that directs everything? One answer might be: God. And Tolstoy. One point that Tolstoy makes later in the novel in several of the nonfiction essays that start to crop up is that we tend to make observations about our freedom and free will based on our very limited perspective. All we see is the world around us and so we mistakenly ascribe our decisions to free will, but only because we are unaware of the vast chain of events and the bigger picture.
How can we see an example of the vast chain of events? In snuff-boxes. There are snuff-boxes throughout the novel, but they are particularly evident in Volume I, Book III. Helene leans forward so that Anna Pavolovna Scherer's aunt can pass Pierre a snuff-box, and this is the moment he realizes that Helene is a woman he could possess, thus sealing his fate. Prince Vasily is holding a snuff-box and he takes a pinch of snuff when Marya comes into the room to tell him the fate of his son Anatole. Countess Rostov gazes at a snuff-box with a portrait of Nikolai in order to prepare herself for fateful news about him; after she is told about his letter, she kisses the letter and the snuff-box. At a war council, Count Langeron twirls a gold snuff-box in his fingers. Langeron objects to Weierother's plans for Austerlitz. His objections later turn out to be sound, but nobody heeded him. Perhaps if they had the battle would have ended differently. So what do all these snuff-boxes mean? They are pointed out in various contexts, in the hands of different characters. Are they supposed to indicate fateful moments??
Maybe. Or maybe not. In chapter 7 of Volume II, Part II, at yet another of Anna Pavlovna Scherer's soirees, conversation revolves around one reward bestowed by the Tsar - a snuff-box with his portrait on it. This doesn't seem to be a particularly fateful moment or to mark anything crucial, so why the snuff-box?? How does it fit in to the general plan? But maybe all those snuff-boxes themselves, their very existence, is the general plan.
In many ways, Tolstoy stands in relation to his text as God to His creation. Only a divinity - and Tolstoy's narrator - can see events in their true magnitude. Tolstoy's narrator is in a privileged position, for he can see events both up close and personal, occasionally narrating from the perspective of a particular character or even using "us" and "we" to become a character himself, and from a broad perspective that allows him to view the entire chain of events and the bigger picture. Through the narrator, the reader also occupies a privileged position: we see things that the characters themselves do not. We see Captain Tushin as he meets both Nikolai and Andrei in battle, so we can compare their experiences. We see the similarities between Pierre and Helene's engagement and Marya and Anatole's lack thereof. We have seen the situations that Dolokhov has previously been in, so we can view Nikolai's closeness to him with trepidation. We see all these snuff-boxes, we are aware of all of them in a way that none of the other characters are (Countess Rostov has no idea that Count Langeron has a snuff-box, for example), and we see a pattern emerge. We may not be sure what the pattern means - if it means anything - but we know it's there in a way that the characters do not. Tolstoy's narrator gives us the advantage of rising above the characters' puny perspective to see the larger picture, a link in the chain of events.
If only we could see the snuff-boxes in our own lives, we might be aware of the pattern there too.
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