(If you haven't finished reading Volume II, Part V - Book Eight in the Maude translation - I will give away some important plot elements. You might want to finish this section of WP before you read this entry.)
In a letter of 1867, Tolstoy called this part of War and Peace, the part with Natasha and Anatole, "the most difficult place and the crux of the whole novel." I couldn't agree more. I love this part of the book. To me, it's the pieces of a puzzle coming together.
Parts III, IV, and V of this volume strike me as a perfect illustration of Tolstoy's theory of history. The Russian word "istoriia" means both "history," in the large sense of historical events and the field of inquiry, and "story" in the closer, more intimate sense of "Let me tell you a story." I find it fascinating that the Russian language combines these ideas - the general and the particular - and this is exactly what Tolstoy does in his novel. In the main, the characters of War and Peace experience historical events through their individual perspectives, and the forces of history can be expressed through the events of an individual's life.
As individuals, we are constantly looking forward, trying to figure out where history is going, where our lives are going. We constantly try to read our fate or destiny. It is no accident that Volume II, Part IV of War and Peace - the country scenes at the Rostovs' estate involving the wolf hunt, Natasha's dance, and the mummer scene - are filled with references to fortune telling. When Natasha is bored, she wanders through the house giving random orders just to test her power over the household. One order she gives is to find a rooster and some oats - a reference to a Russian superstition that one can predict the future based on how the rooster pecks at the oats. When the members of the Rostov household arrive at the Melyukovs' estate dressed in their mummer costumes, Madame Melyukov and her daughters are "quietly dropping melted wax into water and watching the shadows of the shapes that came out" - another fortune-telling device whereby one divines the future by the shapes the wax takes when it comes into contact with water. There are other fortune-telling scenes in this section: Sonya is on her way to tell her fortune in the barn when Nikolai catches her up and kisses her, and later that evening Sonya gazes into two mirrors in an attempt to predict the future (she doesn't really see anything, but she makes something up - a seemingly small detail, but actually an important point for later).
But the problem is that we can't predict the future, much in the same way that all those strategists and theorists can't really predict the course of a battle. Anything can happen, and usually does. At the ball where he first dances with Natasha, Andrei watches her and thinks to himself, "If she goes to her cousin first and then to another lady, she's going to be my wife." The narrator then makes sure that we know, "She went to her cousin first." And then lo and behold, a few chapters later, Natasha and Andrei are engaged. If we stopped reading here, it would seem that Andrei's fortune-telling has come true. But the problem is that the book goes on. And by Part V, Natasha has fallen for Anatole Kuragin, made plans to elope with him, and broken off her engagement with Andrei. Who could have seen this coming?? Definitely not Natasha or Andrei. So it would seem that Andrei's attempts at divining the future were wrong, and Natasha won't be his wife. But then again, the book is over 1300 pages long, and we're not even halfway through it at this point! So who knows what could happen - who could have predicted when seeing Nikolai flirt with Julie Karagin at the very beginning of the novel that she would eventually become a rich heiress, and the entire fortune of the Rostovs would depend on Nikolai marrying her?
In the same way, when Andrei first meets the political figure Speransky, he takes him as "a man of genius," "the power behind" the whole reform movement, and a man who holds "in his hands, those puffy white hands, the very destiny of Russia." Readers of War and Peace when it first appeared as well as later readers have an advantage over Andrei due to historical perspective (hindsight is always 20/20), and we know that Andrei is mistaken - Speransky is ousted from power not long after Andrei meets him. The day after the ball, Andrei hears the details about the session of the State Council and the Tsar's speech: "It had been the kind of speech that only a constitutional monarch could have delivered." Andrei's acquaintance claims, "Yes, today's events mark a new epoch, the greatest epoch in our history." Again, from our historical perspective, we know this to be untrue - although Alexander I toyed with the idea of reform and a constitutional monarchy, he later retracted all these ideas and none of them came to pass. If hindsight is 20/20, foresight is 20/200.
Recently during one of our chat sessions, a participant made the comment, "The characters live in the moment, but they often don't understand its significance." This is entirely true, as the characters in War and Peace constantly over- or underestimate the significance of events as they unfold. To make matters worse, they "creatively remember" the past, making it fit into the pattern they want it to assume. We've already seen this in the war scenes - the way that soldiers "remember" the events of a battle not according to what actually happened, but according to what they wanted to happen. Here as well, after Natasha and Andrei become engaged, they are convinced that they fell in love at first sight during Andrei's previous visit to the Rostovs' estate. As readers, we know this to be ridiculous - Andrei was keenly aware that Natasha had no idea he even existed, and although her admiration of the moon had a profound effect on his psyche, she herself as an individual did not. And yet, the entire household "expressed amazement at the way things had turned out, and how clear the omens had all been." There are "many other auguries, noted by various family-members, foreshadowing what was to come." One of these "omens" is the fact that Andrei and Nikolai had met in 1805 - even though when they met, they disliked each other and almost fought a duel. But they so badly want to see Andrei and Natasha's engagement as fated, that they pick out details that prove it to be so. Other details - like Natasha's fear of Andrei, her feeling of "strangulation" when he comes to propose, Vera's doubts that Natasha is capable of being constant in her affections, the Countess's desire to love Andrei like a son but inability to do so - are forgotten because they don't conform with the story in which the characters so desperately want to believe. When Andrei bids farewell to Natasha before he goes abroad, she pleads, "Please don't go!" and she says it "in a voice that made him wonder whether he ought not to stay after all, a voice he would long remember." But of course he doesn't stay - he underestimates the importance of the moment and the real omen that is being presented to him. As readers, we also might not note the importance of this detail when it's presented to us. It's only if we go back to it later, with the knowledge that Natasha has broken off their engagement because of her infatuation with Anatole, that we understand its true significance. Andrei did not let Natasha's words and the tone of her voice affect him at the time - he remembers them later presumably because now he is searching for omens and signs that would prove that this event was fated to come to pass.
This has implications for the writing and understanding of history as well. In the grander scheme of things, we so desperately want to see certain historical events as fated that we remember only those events that support that interpretation. Historians, in trying to prove that the Russians were fated to lose at Austerlitz, or that they were fated to defeat Napoleon at Borodino, or that they were ultimately to destroy Napoleon's army and drive it back to France, choose only those events that support their conclusions, ignoring a whole string of contrary events along the way.
The characters in War and Peace are limited by their puny human perspective. They can't foresee the future, even though they try to, they often think that their "fate is being decided," even though it's really not, and they often completely misunderstand the significance of both the present moment and past events. When Natasha is driving back from "Uncle"'s house with Nikolai, she states, "I'm certain I'll never be as relaxed and happy as I am right now..." It is a moment that I always find very poignant and sad. This is true fortune-telling: Natasha is being prescient with even realizing it.
However, all of this is not to suggest that fate is not at work in the novel. The point is not that fate does not exist or that certain events are not fated, but simply that the characters are unable to realize from their limited perspective what is truly fate. They are unable - whether in war or in peace - to see the bigger picture, or often even to see that a bigger picture exists. In Tolstoy's outlook, there is only one entity that knows that bigger picture: God.
Usually when I teach War and Peace, my students react very negatively to Princess Marya (although not this time so much, interestingly enough!). They see her as too passive, too wishy-washy, not independent or forceful enough. And yet, she is the character who, more often than any of the others, voices the great truths of the novel. In a letter to Julie Karagin in Part III, chapter 25, Marya expresses the realization that although the death of Lise Bolkonsky, Andrei's wife, seemed like a tragedy when it happened, only now can she start to see "why it was necessary for her to die, and how that death was but an expression of the infinite goodness of the Creator, whose every action, though for the most part passing all understanding, is but a manifestation of His infinite love for His creation." Marya states that "Perhaps, I often think, she was too angelic, too innocent to have enough strength to perform all the duties of a mother." Her conclusion is that although as a wife Lise was beyond reproach, she might not have been so as a mother, and that although she would have been horrified to admit this at the time, she is starting to realize that Lise's death was actually a blessing to her and Andrei. Her ultimate conclusion is that "not a hair of our head shall fall without His will. And His will is governed only by His infinite love for us, and so it is that whatever comes to pass, all is for our good."
And indeed, although Andrei had been depressed and broken by Lise's death, one has to wonder what would have happened had she not died. Perhaps he would have returned from Austerlitz, full of determination to appreciate his wife in a way that he hadn't before. And maybe he would have succeeded. Or maybe he would have eventually found her to be even more shallow and preposterous than he remembered. Maybe this would have driven him to an even deeper depression and bitterness than the one he found himself in, one that he could never really get out of. Maybe he would have ended up like Pierre, constantly depressed and with a wife who constantly had extramarital affairs. Perhaps his son Nikolai would have had two parents who avoided each other, each embracing the social whirl or government duties, just so as to escape from each other. Instead, Andrei became a devoted father, freed his serfs, and worked to renovate his estate, and Nikolai was brought up by a devoted aunt.
Natasha is devastated when the elopement with Anatole is foiled - but he was already married, so what would have happened to her if their plan had succeeded? Anatole is a character that thinks only about himself and never considers the consequences of his actions. A few days after the ruined elopement, Pierre sees him driving dashingly through the streets, not a care in the world. Pierre doesn't know at that point what has happened, but the reader does. We realize that if Anatole can forget Natasha so quickly, what would have happened to her after a few weeks - or a few days - when the novelty of their affair had faded? After all, he'd already married one young woman in Poland and abandoned her, why wouldn't he do the same to Natasha? Natasha is also distraught at having hurt Andrei, and although he refuses to show it, he is deeply hurt as well. But what kind of marriage would they have had? We've already seen how depressed, angry, and resentful Natasha was starting to feel towards him - his letters to her only aroused her anger that he was off enjoying himself while she was wasting away in the country.
But when we get into the question of Natasha falling for Anatole and almost eloping with him, the inevitable question arises: why did this happen? And this leads us to another aspect of Tolstoy's theory of history, one that he elaborates on in more didactic, essayistic form at the beginning of Volume III. When we look backwards at events, we try to isolate the one single thing that caused something to happen. But according to Tolstoy, this is a mistake: events happen not due to one single cause, but to a whole myriad of causes.
First of all, it is entirely in keeping with Natasha's character to do this. She craves attention, especially male attention, and she has a history of falling in and out of love - with Boris, Denisov, her dancing instructor, Boris again, even with everyone in the room. In addition, Natasha has been feeling increasingly more depressed and anxious, and she keenly feels that her youth is slipping away. But to say that if she had just had "more will power" none of this would have happened is to ignore a multitude of other factors that influenced her.
Just one of these influences is the setting itself and the mindset it puts her in. Natasha meets Anatole at the opera, a high-society function in marked contrast to the natural, homey, cozy Russian scenes in Part IV. Instead of the natural music and dancing at Uncle's cabin, she experiences the extreme contrast - the highly artificial world of the opera. In Part V, chapter 9, Tolstoy utilizes a literary device that the literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky called "estrangement" or "defamiliarization" or "making strange." The scenes of the opera are described through Natasha's perspective: "The stage consisted of flat boards down the middle with painted cardboard representing trees at both sides and cloth-covered boards at the back. Several young girls in red tops and white skirts were sitting in the middle of the stage. One very fat girl in a white silk dress sat to one side on a low bench with green cardboard glued on the back of it. They were all singing something. When they had finished their song the woman in white came forward to the prompter's box, and a man with fat legs squeezed into silk tights, with a feather in his hat and a dagger in his belt, came up to her and burst into song with much waving of his arms."
It is a device that Tolstoy uses in much of his work, so if you read anything else by him you will encounter it again. When we describe things, we use conventional terms. If Tolstoy had used conventional terminology, there would have been nothing odd about this passage, and we would have taken it for granted. But by presenting it to us without the use of conventional language, we are forced to view the scene in a new way that highlights its strangeness and artificiality. Art depends on the suspension of disbelief - we have to believe that what is being presented to us is "real." When we view an opera, we are not supposed to think about the prompter's box. We are supposed to describe "scenery" or "sets," not boards, painted cardboard, and pasted-on trees. We are supposed to go into raptures over "the princess," not "the woman in white." We are supposed to describe "costumes," not "fat legs squeezed into silk tights," and we're supposed to use terms like "aria," not "they sang something."
Just to be on the safe side, Tolstoy's narrator lets us know the effect this spectacle has on Natasha: "Just back from the country, and now in a serious frame of mind, Natasha saw all this as astonishingly grotesque." The contrast between the grotesque artificiality of the opera and the naturalness of the country is disorienting for her. She begins "to glide steadily into a state of light-headedness" and "she lost all sense of what she was and where she was and what was going on before her eyes." Enter, at that precise moment, Anatole.
When we were discussing the early war scenes of the novel, someone stated that the war scenes are a series of "what ifs." The same is true, perhaps even more true, for this section of the novel and Natasha's infatuation with Anatole. What if Natasha hadn't gone to the opera that night? What if she hadn't been sitting next to Helene? What if she hadn't been so dazzled by Helene and vulnerable to her influence? Natasha feels quite strongly the absence of a "moral barrier" between herself and Anatole - what if she hadn't felt that? But there's more - Natasha is not only dazed and confused at the opera, under Helene's spell, flattered by Anatole's attention, and upset and depressed over her separation from Andrei, she's also still reeling from the disastrous meeting with Andrei's family. And there's still more - when Natasha returns home after the opera, she is confused about her feelings and needs to discuss them with someone. She can't talk to Sonya - who is a bit of a prude in matters such as these - and she can't talk to her father. "Her mother, the old countess, was the only person to whom Natasha could have confided all that was on her mind - at night and in bed." But the countess isn't in Moscow with the family because she has taken ill due to her argument with Nikolai. The whole reason the Rostovs are even in Moscow at all is because they need to sell some property because of their financial troubles. And why are they having financial troubles? Because Nikolai wants to marry Sonya rather than a rich heiress, the Rostovs had to give Berg 80,000 rubles for Vera's dowry, Nikolai lost 43,000 rubles at cards, and the count is a well-intentioned spendthrift who can't manage their finances.
So then we start getting into a whole long line of "what ifs": what if the Rostovs had been greeted differently when they arrived at the Bolkonskys', and Natasha hadn't been offended and become so surly? What if Mademoiselle Bourienne hadn't been present at the meeting between Marya and Natasha and they had been able to speak more freely? What if Old Prince Bolkonsky hadn't insisted on the one-year separation, or what if Andrei had refused to comply? What if Sonya had dressed up as an old hag and Nikolai had dressed up as a Cossack and the two hadn't fallen in love under the moonlight and finally decided to get married? Would he still have quarrelled with his mother? What if Nikolai hadn't lost the 43,000 rubles at cards - but that would require Dolokhov not to have fallen in love with Sonya, so what if he hadn't? What if Natasha weren't so inexperienced and fickle, and what if the Count were better with money, and Nikolai weren't so concerned about his honor and were willing to marry Julie Karagin, and, and, and... You get my point. It's a series of "what ifs" that could take us all the way to the beginning of the novel.
It's a commonplace to say "if I knew then what I know now...," implying that if we could somehow go back in time and do things differently we would. But later in the novel, Tolstoy will say something along the lines of, even if you could go back in time, given the exact same factors and the exact same combination of circumstances, you would still make the same decision you made then. We make the only decision we can make at the time.
I'm going to get a bit personal and philosophical here: I had mentioned awhile ago that War and Peace is one of the two books that have profoundly changed my way of thinking and way of looking at life. At our last chat session, someone asked me what I meant by that, and this section is it. First, I like to think that Princess Marya is right - that there is a bigger plan out there, and that everything happens for a reason that is in our best interest, even if we don't see it at the time. So there is no point worrying excessively about the future, because everything will work out the way it is supposed to. Second, there is no one moment that determines the course of our lives, and there is no point in having excessive regrets about the past because the decisions we make are the only ones we can make at that particular time. Instead, we have to live in the present. And figure out how to get it right.
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