by Viv Groskop
And yet. Isn’t the whole of life a wobbly Godzilla jelly? Isn’t life full of non sequiturs, unlikely coincidences, hundreds of characters who may or may not be significant? So much so that it could be argued that the structure of War and Peace is one of the most honest reflections of real life in literature. It’s sequential and chronological. It’s sometimes uneventful for ages and then suddenly far more eventful than you would like. Not everything that happens makes sense. There are many digressions. There are many surprises. There are few happy endings, and even the endings that are happy are complicated and hard-won. But if you can stick with it and sit through the dull bits and find people to champion and elements that you’re passionate about, it is a strange and wonderful thing. (You see? I could be talking about War and Peace. Or I could be talking about life. So clever. Not me. Tolstoy.)
The great challenge of War and Peace is not only to extract the lessons from the stories and characters in the novel – enjoy every sunrise and sunset; know who your friends are; beware the folly of youth; have faith in your own future; be kind and humble – it’s to find the lesson about yourself as a reader which is revealed in how you tackle the process of reading it. Again, like life itself, it seems insurmountable. Sometimes, it seems pointless. Other times, it makes no sense at all. And yet, if you can be patient and kind to yourself, it will slowly open up to you. The trick is to go at it at your own pace and patiently let it go when it’s not working. You can always return to it. The novelist Philip Hensher, who has written beautifully of his intense lifelong love for War and Peace, suggests that, when you’re really into it, it can be read in ten days. I think this is realistic. But it does depend on being really into it. And that is not always easy.
War and Peace started out as a novel called ‘The Decembrists’ and, at one point, Tolstoy considered calling it ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’. (I know War and Peace is not the most imaginative title. But, really. It could have been a lot worse.) He began the novel in 1863, a year after his marriage to Sofya Andreyevna. It was written over six years, at, arguably, one of the happiest times of Tolstoy’s life. The four children born during this period all lived to a ripe old age. This was a very different man to the one who wrote Anna Karenina. The year he started that novel, they lost a child for the first time. Two more babies died over the next three years. I don’t want to make too much of this, as I know that in the olden days infant mortality was more common than it is nowadays. But it doesn’t seem outlandish to suggest that a man who was already deeply moved by life and its injustices could be profoundly affected by the death of three children in a row. No wonder, by the time he had finished writing Anna Karenina, he had a growing obsession with religion and death and had written of his desire to commit suicide. During the writing of War and Peace, though, which is the purest expression of Tolstoy’s most positive philosophies of life, all this was yet to come.
I’m not sure it’s wise for anyone to attempt a synopsis of War and Peace. But we’ve come this far and, in the circumstances, it seems rude not to. The novel opens in the salons of St Petersburg in 1805, where the talk is of an impending war with France. Pierre Bezukhov, the son of a dying count, is finding it hard to integrate into high society, having returned from his education abroad. He is disillusioned. He finds everyone pretentious. His friend Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is married to pregnant society beauty Liza. He is also disillusioned. And he finds his wife pretentious. Prince Andrei is soon to head off for war, leaving his lightly but attractively mustachioed wife with his grumpy father and religious-fanatic sister, Maria.
Meanwhile, in Moscow, the Rostov family, typically for some aristocrats of the time, have overstretched themselves financially and hope desperately for salvation through the marriage of one of their four children, ideally their son Nikolai, who is about to join the army. Their daughter Natasha is in love with Boris Drubetskoy, who is also about to join the army. Inconveniently, Sonya, an orphaned cousin raised by the family, is in love with Nikolai. He loves her back, which is bad because she has no dowry. Poor Sonya.
Nikolai goes off to war and comes back with the dashing officer Denisov, who proposes to Natasha and is rebuffed. Pierre’s father dies and, suddenly, Pierre is a wealthy heir and the toast of society. He is persuaded into marrying Hélène, the bitchy and corrupt (but very beautiful) daughter of Prince Kuragin. Dolokhov (a friend of Denisov) is one of Hélène’s lovers, and Pierre duels with him, with Dolokhov ending up wounded. Pierre is traumatized by this incident and disappears off to travel and join the Freemasons. (I know. Don’t overthink it.)
Prince Andrei returns from war to find his wife dying in childbirth. Now, he and Pierre are both feeling guilty at having caused the suffering of others. Andrei recovers sufficiently to travel to St Petersburg to further his military career and there, at a ball, he meets Natasha and they fall in love. Prince Andrei’s grumpy father opposes the match, asking them to wait a year before marrying. Prince Andrei goes abroad to have his war wounds treated.
While he’s away, Natasha goes to Moscow and meets Hélène and her creepy brother Anatole. The two siblings conspire to imperil Natasha’s honour, and she is seduced by Anatole, agreeing to elope with him. She breaks off her engagement to Andrei. But their plans to elope are uncovered and Natasha is disgraced. She tries to commit suicide. Andrei returns and refuses to propose to her again. Pierre attempts to persuade him but realizes that he has fallen in love with Natasha himself. The great comet of 1812 is seen in the sky, considered a portentous sign of the invasion by Napoleon.
The little Frenchman is indeed advancing by this point, and Pierre becomes obsessed with the idea that he, Pierre, must kill Napoleon. (This is a really bad idea, as Pierre has no military knowledge or physical strength. Also, he is fairly inept.) Maria tends to her dying father and is left as mistress of the family’s country seat. Nikolai Rostov is among the troops passing through Maria’s district. The two meet and fall in love. Pierre goes to the front and flounders around, distressed by the useless slaughter. Prince Andrei is also at the front. When he is wounded by a shell, he finds himself in the operating theatre next to Anatole Kuragin, who is having his leg amputated.
Natasha sets up her home as a station for wounded soldiers. Prince Andrei is one of the soldiers sent there. Natasha nurses him. By this point, Prince Andrei must be afraid to close his eyes as, every time he opens them, someone from his past is on the bed next to him. Anyway, he dies, but not before forgiving Natasha. Napoleon enters Moscow. Pierre continues to attempt various heroics, at one point saving a child from a fire. Hélène dies, probably from some kind of abortion-causing medicine. Nikolai thinks about marrying Maria. He receives a letter from Sonya, releasing him from any understanding. It’s a letter Sonya has been forced to write by Nikolai’s mother (who still hopes he will marry into money). Pierre is captured by the French. He meets the prisoner Platon Karatayev, who tells him the meaning of life.
Napoleon makes some crucial errors and has to abandon Moscow, while the Russians allow the French to retreat. Dolokhov and Denisov attack the fleeing French and free Pierre. Natasha and Pierre are reunited and, eventually, decide to marry. Nikolai marries Maria. There is some musing about the existence of bees in the epilogue, and Tolstoy concludes that free will is an illusion. He goes on a bit about Copernicus and Newton and Voltaire. That’s it. War and Peace aficionados will note that I have not mentioned much about General Kutuzov, Count Rostopchin or the Battle of Borodino. All I can say in my defence is that we all find our ways of getting through this novel, and let’s not judge.
One of the things that fascinates me most about War and Peace is Tolstoy’s ability to construct these concentric relationship circles and make them seem believable. Just as in Anna Karenina, where Anna and Vronsky can be together only because Kitty and Vronsky do not end up together (and so then Kitty can end up with Levin), so, in War and Peace, the relationship between Andrei and Natasha is doomed in order for Natasha to go off with Pierre. Similarly, Sonya needs to be
dispatched to allow Maria and Nikolai their happiness. Even a minor character like Denisov suffers this ‘domino effect’ fate: his marriage proposal to Natasha is rejected, only for him to be instrumental in Pierre’s rescue later on, so that Pierre can survive and … marry Natasha.
This is a frequent lesson of Tolstoy’s: sometimes our unhappiness facilitates someone else’s happiness. It’s all meant to happen for a reason. And it is all being guided by a hand which has far more power over us than our own hopes and desires. That hand seems, in the end, to be relatively benign: despite all the suffering and misery that have been endured, there is happiness and stability at the end, and a joy in a quiet, hard-won family love that seemed out of reach to both Natasha and Pierre at many points during the novel. We don’t all get what we deserve. But we get what we get and, by accepting it, sometimes it can make us happier than we were expecting to be. Again, it’s a simple lesson: count your blessings.
What about fate? Fate is everywhere here, of course. So much so that the role of coincidence in War and Peace makes Doctor Zhivago look almost like an accurate historical record. When Dolokhov attacks a French regiment, it just happens to be the regiment holding Pierre prisoner. What are the odds? Of all the places Prince Andrei could end up in his convalescence … it has to be Natasha’s home. But Tolstoy gets away with it by spreading out the coincidences across many, many pages so that you don’t really notice them until you get to the end and look back. But we experience many incredible coincidences and bizarre outcomes in life that would never seem likely enough to use in fiction. And there would be no narrative without the interweaving of these characters who need to interact with each other across fifteen years and a huge geographical landscape. Nonetheless, it does seem a remarkable leap of faith to suggest that, if you went off to war with hundreds of thousands of other soldiers, you would end up bumping into one of your childhood chums … But who are we to criticize?
Setting aside this rich and strangely realistic narrative, Tolstoy’s entire philosophy can be summed up in one scene, in the time it takes for Pierre to eat a baked potato with a sprinkling of salt on it. This episode is the heart and soul of the book and can be read in five minutes: Volume 4, Part 1, Chapter 12 (page 1,074 in the Penguin Classics edition mentioned in the Recommended Reading list). It encapsulates the message of this book and of Tolstoy’s life overall. Of all the characters who represent Tolstoy in his own work – Levin in Anna Karenina, Pierre in War and Peace – the one who speaks the most for the author is the prisoner Platon Karatayev, the offerer of the salty potato, who appears fleetingly over the course of these five pages. Pierre meets him when they have both been captured by the French. Karatayev is a proper Russian muzhik (peasant): plain-talking, wise, the very salt of the earth. He imparts several lessons to Pierre, which take on a profound significance in the context of Tolstoy’s life long after the publication of War and Peace and, later, Anna Karenina.
Karatayev’s life lessons are simple. Be grateful for the relationship you have with your mother. (Tolstoy’s mother died when he was two.) Make sure you enjoy family life. (His father died when he was nine.) Be sure to have children of your own. (He had thirteen, eight of whom survived infancy.) If you have your own house or family estate, know that you are lucky. (Tolstoy inherited the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana in 1847, at the age of nineteen.) Put salt on your potatoes and enjoy them as if they are a special treat. (Tolstoy became an obsessive vegetarian later in life.)
Karatayev adds: ‘The great thing is to get on with other people.’ Tolstoy followed this advice only occasionally, in my view, and certainly not at the moment when he was telling Chekhov that his plays were worse than Shakespeare’s. But we can’t all follow our own advice, can we? The most important things are stoicism and resignation: ‘The beggar’s bowl or the prison hole, you have to take what comes.’ Bearing in mind that Tolstoy is aware that Pierre is the character most close to him personally, he allows Pierre to take Karatayev’s words to heart: ‘… Platon Karatayev would always stay in his mind as a most vivid and precious memory, the epitome of kind-heartedness and all things rounded and Russian.’
If only we could all be like Platon Karatayev. He is described as being over fifty but looking much younger than his years. He has ‘strong, white teeth’ which show whenever he laughs, which is often. (Surely wishful thinking in nineteenth-century Russia? Both the whiteness of the teeth and the frequency of the laughter.) He loves to sing when evening comes. And whenever he wakes up, he’s straight out of bed, giving himself a shake-down and getting on with it. Come to think of it, I imagine Platon Karatayev might have been an extremely annoying person, especially first thing in the morning. But let’s overlook that.
There’s even an echo of the famous Anna Karenina epigraph (‘Vengeance is mine. And I will repay.’) in the old man’s ramblings. ‘Fate picks you out. And ’ere we be, always passing judgement – that’s not right, doesn’t suit us.’ It is not for human beings to pass judgement or exact vengeance. That is God’s work. We must bear our fate with acceptance and patience. ‘Our ’appiness, me dear, be like water in a drag-net. Swells out lovely when you pulls; take it out and it’s empty.’ Karatayev’s great strength is his spontaneity and the fact that he is not hung up on words and their meanings: he says what he likes, when he feels like it. He is the definition of someone who is natural and at peace with himself. ‘Words and actions flowed from him as smoothly, inevitably and spontaneously as fragrance from a flower.’ If we can learn anything, then it’s this: ‘… he loved and showed affection to every creature he came across in life, especially people, no particular people, just those who happened to be there before his eyes.’ This is the person Tolstoy tried to become when he gave up his ‘frivolous’ novels. It represents the setting aside of the multifaceted fox who is interested in everyone and everything in favour of the hedgehog, one with all its prickles removed, sitting chanting a Buddhist mantra. It’s great life advice, if only anyone could actually follow it.
I feel lucky that I came to War and Peace at a time when I was no longer obsessed with trying to be Russian or even conflicted about the fact that I had spent such a long time trying to be Russian and had turned out to be something different. The further I moved away from trying to be Russian, the closer I came to being myself: someone from a simple yet complicated background who had tried to fill in the gaps with a bit of imagination. Maybe too much imagination. By the time I came to War and Peace as a grown-up who knew who she was, not as a child wishing she were someone else, I had made peace with that story. That is almost certainly the best way to approach it. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t read War and Peace when you are younger. Perhaps many people can. But I really struggled to appreciate it when I dipped into it as a student, my eyes glazing over as I flipped the pages through the ‘War’ bits. It was something I needed to read when I had some idea of my own story and my own thoughts about how life unfolds.
The novelist Ann Patchett has summed up the joy of Russian literature expertly: it’s not so much about reading it as about re-reading it. She describes reading Anna Karenina at the age of twenty-one and believing that Anna and Vronsky were the most charming, romantic people in the world and that Kitty and Levin the most boring, pathetic people in the world. She writes, ‘Last year I turned 49, and I read the book again. This time, I loved Levin and Kitty … Anna and Vronsky bored me.’ As we get older, she concludes, ‘we gravitate towards the quieter, kinder plotlines, and find them to be richer than we had originally understood them to be’. War and Peace echoed the plotline of my own life: lots of bits that I didn’t want to look at or know about; lots of bits I didn’t understand until I had children of my own; lots of bits that only made sense once I had realized that life does not have to be exciting and dynamic in order to be interesting. What matters more is this quieter kindness that Patchett mentions.
This is the key to tackling War and Peace: personalize it. What do you want to get out of it? Why are you reading it? H
ow can you mould your reading of it to your own personal tastes and habits? Not to belabour the point but, again, it’s just like life: what do you want from this experience? Andrew Davies, the screenwriter who adapted the novel for the television series that took me back to the book, was realistic about his task. He got a second-hand paperback copy of the novel, picked up a pair of scissors and cut it up into chunks. If this is what it takes for you to carry it around with you, I do not think this is a terrible thing to do. Tolstoy would rather you read it than didn’t read it, I suspect. And he won’t mind if you buy an extra second-hand copy to cut up. (Although do buy a new copy, too. We want to keep his estate thriving.)
The other trick is to imagine it as several novels and a short story at the end (the epilogue). Whatever gets you through it. I like to read it three or four chapters at a time. I also like to choose a particular family or character to champion at different points. Usually, Pierre’s perspective keeps me going (there’s never that long a wait to get back to Pierre’s story). Or you can follow it from the point of view of one of five families: the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Kuragins, the Drubetskoys. War and Peace is not the same as Anna Karenina at all (which is sort of War and Peace but only about the families), but it was the prototype for Anna Karenina in many ways. So if you have to fool yourself by thinking, ‘It’s okay. It’s just like reading Anna Karenina,’ then so be it. You are not that far off the mark. If you really want to give yourself an easy time (and I fully recommend it), the Penguin Classics edition in Recommended Reading has a chapter-by-chapter synopsis, one line at a time over sixteen and a half pages. In theory, you can use that and say you’ve read War and Peace in half an hour. In reality, it’s a very useful reference guide to help you keep your bearings through the novel. And a great resource to use when re-reading it and wanting to find specific passages or tackle anew bits that you found challenging before.
