gosh dang, just finished reading WAR AND PEACE.

it's hard to even begin a reaction to it, which is common according to john bayley who wrote the intro to the signet edition that i read.

i remember on one of THE TEACHING COMPANY'S tapes, the lecturer, michael sugrue i think, told of a scene in one of woody allen's movies. someone asks, "what is WAR AND PEACE about? and allen's character pauses and says "it's about russia."

it is about russia; and france, and war, and peace, man and woman, marriage, man and god, life, death, and god.

a "wonderful mass of life" is how henry james described it, intended as a put-down according to bayley, because it seemed so shapeless and didn't fit into any standard western literary category.

tolstoy himself categorically denied that it was a novel. it "is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed," is how he described it.

in that sense of being difficult to categorize, of being not quite western and not quite eastern, it is like russia itself.

it is also about BEING russian, about being fatalistic and about suffering, about living in a cold climate and as a consequence of all of these, having a certain coldness about oneself.

but it is not about being pessimistic although there is much that happens in the book that could cause pessimism.

it was surpisingly humane to me and life-affirming. tolstoy's message is that life is good and in life in all of it's forms one can find god.

it is a profoundly spiritual work and is utterly dismissive of attempts to understand events as other than the mysterious work of an unseen almighty.

whether history or logic or science, any attempt by man to explain things comes under withering, contemptuous assault by tolstoy.

the book's setting is the war of 1812 between russia and napoleonic france. the french invasion and the early routs of the russian army are not due to napoleon's greatness or russia's political and military ineptitude. they occurred because they were meant to be and could not have been otherwise under those precise circumstances.

moscow's abandonment by its citizens and the city's burning were not the result of the muscovites cowardice or of their wily strategy. it was what they did and only what they could do.

that the burning of moscow and it's sacking by napoleon's troops turned out to be their denouement, that it resulted, after five weeks of occupation, in their simply leaving the city and beginning the march home, the same: it could not have been otherwise.

there is so much duality in WAR AND PEACE, so many contradictions all to make the point of the meaninglessness of human will and direction and of the purposelessness, as seen from the human perspective, of nation and world-changing events:

-napoleon's triumph in "capturing" moscow was neither a capture nor a triumph but the beginning of the end for him.

-count pierre bezukhov's imprisonment as a p.o.w. is the time in his life when he is, and feels himself to be, the most free.

-only on his deathbed does prince andrei bolkonsky first begin truly to live.

-the lassitude of the russian commander in chief, general kutuzov, becomes the "quality" that lets events of the war run their course and results in the destruction of napoleon's army and the liberation of russia.

-there is compassion shown by captors toward their captives, but in the context of course of war, where thousands are killed and where the captives will eventually die either of starvation, exposure, or exhaustion but also by being mercilessly executed by those who in a different setting had shown them such humanity.

all of this is very zen-like, very consistent with those eastern philosophies that hold that the surest way of never reaching one's goals is to pursue them. and vice versa.

it is only by faith that we can come to understand. in this way tolstoy is very much like soren kierkegaard, utilizing human intellectual constructs like science and logic and all the rest but believing that their utility is confined to circumscribed areas of the human experience.

like WAR AND PEACE, human existence is what god wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.


-benjamin harris