Book One, Part Two - War

In Book One, Part One, we saw Tolstoy focus on "peace" scenes - family gatherings, parties, and domesticity. As one participant in Wednesday night's chat session pointed out, we seem to see peoples' "normal" lives before the war drops in like a cannonball. But even in these early scenes that are supposedly peaceful, the threat of war is still felt, even from the first lines. This should be a reminder to us that Tolstoy's novel is titled War AND Peace. He, obviously, didn't capitalize his conjunction, but it is an interesting feature of human nature and psychology that even though he combines the two concepts, as readers we still tend to separate war and peace into two different realms.

In Part Two of Book One, we transition to more obvious scenes of war - the Russian troops arriving in Austria and eventually taking part in the battle of Schongraben. The transition, though, from peace to war is not complete: soldiers are depicted as engaging in "peaceful" pursuits (Tolstoy's word), such as cooking food, mending clothes, warming themselves by the fire. The family theme presented in Part One is picked up in Part Two through the relationships between officers and soldiers and members of a regiment. The diplomat Bilibin has more than a little in common with Anna Pavlovna Scherer - when Andrei first arrives at his house, Bilibin complains of being sick (like Anna Pavlovna at the beginning of Part One), he loves to create bons mots in his "laboratory," which is similar to AP being a foreman adjusting the machinery of conversation, and the reappearance of Hippolyte Kuragin connects Bilibin to Anna Pavlovna Scherer's salon.

Another theme that connects the "peace" scenes of Part One with the "war" scenes of Part Two is the use and misuse of language, expressed through both the character of Bilibin (who speaks in French, only using Russian for words he particularly wants to mock), and in the army orders. Orders for the army are often garbled, not clearly expressed, misunderstood, or understood too literally. When Kutuzov asks Andrei to write a memo about the disposition of the Austrian forces, Andrei understands what he needs to do more by what Kutuzov doesn't say than what he does say.

So themes that were highlighted in Part One carry through into Part Two. At the same time, however, the reverse is also true: certain things that were in the background in Part One move to front and center in Part Two. Another issue that came up in Wednesday night's conversation is how well the male characters really seem to understand war in Part One. For Nikolai, the whole thing seems like a game, a way to prove himself as an adult and a man. For Andrei, it is not perhaps so much a game as a way to achieve glory and masculine independence.

In Part Two, Tolstoy highlights the real experience of war - one lived on the battlefield, rather than in the drawing room. Tolstoy himself had been a soldier and had fought in one of the bloodiest and most famous battles of the Crimean War. His "Sevastopol Stories," published a few years prior to War and Peace, are a kind of warm-up to his great novel. In these stories, Tolstoy explores the experience of war, mainly in order to strip the romantic halo from it. War is not what you think it is. The impressions of war that you have from reading books is nothing like the reality of it. In this particular section of the book, Tolstoy's narrator primarily follows two characters - Nikolai and Andrei - as they experience war both in their fantasies and in reality.

So some questions to think about for this section: What experiences do Nikolai and Andrei have? What are their expectations, and what reality do they find? There are two aspects to the army and war, logistics and morale. How does Tolstoy depict both of these? The question of glory, heroes, great men, and the writing of history - all major themes throughout the rest of the book - are explored here. How are these things depicted in this early stage?

Part One was in many ways a foundation for the rest of the book, with major characters and themes being introduced. The same is true for Part Two - all the major "war" themes and ideas are introduced (though these themes and ideas will, of course, bleed into the peace scenes). Perhaps the biggest and most important idea for the rest of the book, one that Tolstoy will return to again and again and again (and again!), is the question of free will. To what extent do we have free will, and to what extent are events organized in a way that is beyond our control and comprehension? And if we really can only see and understand a tiny portion of the events that are unfolding around us, aren't the ideas of glory, action, and heroism at the end of the day nothing but pure folly?

Two figures that will be key in the novel are the two Russian generals Kutuzov and Bagration (pronounced: Bag-ra-ti-on, not "Bagrashun"!). Note in particular the scene when Andrei watches Bagration on the battlefield, and he realizes to his surprise that Bagration is not actually giving any orders. Instead, he acts as if everything that is happening is good and was meant to happen. This passage represents a concept that I have adopted from a former professor of mine called "wise passivity" - Bagration (and later Kutuzov) is the antipode to Napoleon. Napoleon is arrogant enough to think he controls events, Bagration is wise enough to know that he doesn't. But his presence, as the narrator points out, is for all that entirely necessary. It is a difficult concept for 20th- and 21st-century Americans to come to terms with. I often hear the criticism: "But he doesn't do anything!" That's precisely the point, and in this way Tolstoy challenges not just 19th-century Russian assumptions about war and heroes, but our own assumptions today.