Tolstoy #

Biography #

Tolstoy was a complex, contradictory and conflicted individual.

Matthew Arnold claimed a novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece of life; Tolstoy’s realistic works seem to elude all artifice. Like all great literature he releases his messages reluctantly.

1828 - 1910 The scion of prominent aristocrats, born at the family estate, 210 kilometres south of Moscow.

He was born into Russian aristocracy in 1828. Orphaned young, raised by aunts on a massive estate with hundreds of serfs. He gambled away fortunes, slept with peasant women, joined the army and saw combat in the Caucasus. He was reckless, privileged, searching for meaning in all the wrong places: duels, brothels, battlefields. None of it filled the void.

His mother, Mariya Nikolayevna, née Princess Volkonskaya, died before he was two years old, and his father Nikolay Ilich, Graf (count) Tolstoy, followed her in 1837. His grandmother died 11 months later, and then his next guardian, his aunt Aleksandra, in 1841.

Tolstoy and his four siblings were then transferred to the care of another aunt in Kazan, in western Russia. Tolstoy remembered a cousin who lived at Yasnaya Polyana, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Yergolskaya (“Aunt Toinette,” as he called her), as the greatest influence on his childhood, and later, as a young man, Tolstoy wrote some of his most-touching letters to her. Despite the constant presence of death, Tolstoy remembered his childhood in idyllic terms.

His writing started with stories about his youth with Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, an ‘awkward mixture of fact and fiction’, a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world limned with extraordinary clarity, grace and colour. Evident too in its brilliant account of a young person’s emerging awareness of the world and of his place within it are many of the stances, techniques and themes.

After leaving the university in 1847 without a degree, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana, where he planned to educate himself, to manage his estate, and to improve the lot of his serfs. Despite frequent resolutions to change his ways, he continued his loose life during stays in Tula, Moscow, and St. Petersburg.

He first achieved literary acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, and Sevastopol Sketches, based upon his experiences in the Crimean War.

In 1851 he joined his older brother Nikolay, an army officer, in the Caucasus and then entered the army himself. He took part in campaigns against the native peoples - the Avers, and soon after, in the Crimean War (1853–56).

The result was three sketches about the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War: The first sketch, which deals with the courage of simple soldiers, was praised by Tsar Alexander II. Written in the second person as if it were a tour guide, this story also demonstrates Tolstoy’s keen interest in formal experimentation and his lifelong concern with the morality of observing other people’s suffering.

The second sketch includes a lengthy passage of a soldier’s stream of consciousness (one of the early uses of this device) in the instant before he is killed by a bomb. In the story’s famous ending, the author, after commenting that none of his characters are truly heroic, asserts that the hero of my story—whom I love with all the power of my soul…who was, is, and ever will be beautiful—is the truth.

Tolstoy’s last unpublished novel Hadji Murat who was a real Avar warrior fighting against Russian colonization in the Caucasus in the 1850s. Caught between the Russians who want to conquer his homeland and Shamil, the imam leading the resistance who has taken Murat’s family hostage, Murat defects to the Russians. It wasn’t out of loyalty, but out of calculation. He plans to use Russian forces to free his family, then return to fight them. Nobody trusts him, and he trusts nobody. The entire novel is a dance of mutual suspicion ending in blood.

Readers ever since have remarked on Tolstoy’s ability to make such “absolute language,” which usually ruins realistic fiction, aesthetically effective.

Tolstoy married Sofya (Sonya) Andreyevna Bers, the daughter of a prominent Moscow physician, in 1862 (34) and soon transferred all his energies into his marriage and the composition of War and Peace. They had 13 children, of whom 10 survived infancy.

War and Peace: 1,225 pages, 580 characters, the entire sweep of Russian society during Napoleon’s invasion. He wrote it over six years while his wife Sophia copied and recopied the manuscript by hand. Seven times she rewrote the whole thing. Thirteen children they had together. She managed the estate, raised the kids, and transcribed one of literature’s greatest achievements while he paced and agonized and rewrote.

Then Anna Karenina: The devastating portrait of a woman destroyed by society for wanting love, for choosing passion over duty, for being human in a world that demanded women be saints or whores with nothing in between. Tolstoy wrote Anna’s suicide, throwing herself under a train, with such precision, such psychological truth, that readers still feel the impact of those wheels.

And then he fell apart.

The fame didn’t matter, the money didn’t matter, the masterpieces didn’t matter. Tolstoy looked at his life, successful by every measure, and found it empty. He was fifty, at the peak of his powers, and he wanted to die. It wasn’t from depression, it was existential terror. The question that paralyzed him was: “Why do I live? What purpose does my life serve?”

He couldn’t answer it. And without an answer, everything was unbearable.

He turned to religion, not the comfortable Orthodox Christianity of his childhood, but something raw and radical - The Anabaptists. He read the Gospels like a man drowning, looking for meaning. Decided that real Christianity meant renouncing wealth, violence, government, private property. That Jesus’s message had been corrupted by institutions, that the Church had betrayed everything Christ taught.

He was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox church in 1901.

He wanted to give away his estate. Free his serfs. Live as a peasant. Sophia fought him on every point. She had thirteen children to raise, a household to manage. She didn’t marry him to become a pauper. Their marriage that was once a creative partnership became warfare. He wanted renunciation, she wanted survival. Both were right, both were impossible.

Leo Tolstoy wrote the greatest novels in human history, became world famous, achieved everything a writer could want, and then had a complete spiritual breakdown at fifty.

He stood at the edge of suicide: Hid the ropes in his house so he wouldn’t hang himself. Removed all guns so he couldn’t shoot himself. His life wasn’t tragic, it was successful, he’d gotten everything and it meant nothing.

That’s the Tolstoy nobody talks about. The one who looked at War and Peace and Anna Karenina - masterpieces that would outlive empires, and said, “So what? What was the point?” The one who spent the second half of his life trying to figure out why any of us bother existing at all.

At 82 years old, one night, at 3:00 in the morning, he quietly slipped out of his own house and never really came back. Frail. Exhausted. And not just in the physical way. He’s tired in his soul. For years, he had been split in two.

On one side: Tolstoy the literary giant — the man who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, books that tore open the human heart and laid it bare.

On the other: Tolstoy the spiritual radical — the man who believed private property was immoral, that wealth poisoned the soul, that true Christianity required giving everything away.

Those two versions of him had been arguing for decades. That night, one of them won.

Tolstoy wanted to renounce his copyrights. To let the public have his works for free. No royalties. No inheritance. No safety net for his children.

Sophia was horrified. She had sacrificed her youth, her health, her identity to support his genius. And now he wanted to leave their children with nothing?

Their marriage became a battlefield.

There were screaming matches. Tears. Accusations. His icy withdrawal. Her desperate attempts to hold onto something solid.

Yasnaya Polyana, once a literary sanctuary, turned into a house full of tension.

So at 3:00 AM, Tolstoy left.

He took only his daughter Alexandra and his personal doctor. He left Sophia a short note:

“My departure will distress you… Forgive me, but I could not do otherwise.”

He boarded a third class train with no real destination. He just wanted distance. Silence. Escape. When Sophia found the note, she collapsed. Truly collapsed. She threatened to throw herself into the estate pond. Her children had to physically restrain her.

Four days into the journey, he fell ill. Pneumonia. Fever. It was a freezing Russian autumn, and he was an old man in unheated train cars.

On November 7, 1910, he was forced to stop at a small railway station called Astapovo. The stationmaster gave up his own quarters for him.

And then the circus began.

Reporters flooded the tiny station. Photographers. Followers. Onlookers. The world gathered to watch the great Tolstoy die in a railway cottage.

His children arrived. His disciples surrounded him.

Sophia arrived too.

And she was not allowed inside.

His followers believed she would upset him. That seeing her would agitate him. So they kept her outside.

On November 7, 1910, at 6:05 in the morning, Tolstoy died. Only after he had lost consciousness did they finally allow Sophia into the room.

Tolstoy wrote about the complexity of love, the weight of family, the tension between duty and desire. He understood human conflict better than almost anyone.

Militarism: #

Famously, Winston Churchill defined Russia as:

“a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,”

There appears a Western sense of Moscow as the “other”. We do appear threatened.

From about the tenth century, Russia began its expansion east and south. Each of the Romanov Czars prided themselves in growing the empire.

Map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjDjnhOzqIU

More on Czars: https://www.thoughtco.com/most-important-russian-tsars-4145077

During her reign, Catherine the Great Russia expanded her territories into Belarus, Poland, Lithuania. By pushing the Ottoman, the sick old man of Europe back she reclaimed the Crimea in the mid 1700’s. Her chief advisor constructed Potemkin villages to impress Catherine with an external façade to make her believe the country doing well.

Born in Prussia, now Poland, she was aware of the Mennonites reputation as good farmers so she induced them to displace the Turks she had driven from the Ukraine.

Catherine also lured many other outsiders to fill the vast plains of Ukraine from Europe and Greece who settled east of Crimea. Chekhov was highly influenced by the Greeks.

By the 1900’s Russia was the largest country in the world stretching from the Baltic sea 6000 miles to the Pacific crossing 11 time zones, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Caspian Sea.

Russian history appears to have a cyclical continuum; every hundred years a new brutal tyrant emerges: Ivan the Terrible (1533), Nicholas I (1825), Stalin, (1924) Putin. (2022)

Another recurring motif is the expansion and tactical contraction of its empire. When times are tough, they give up part of their territory, only to expand again in good times.

Russia generally had the largest standing army in Europe from 1760. However most were poorly trained and unmotivated serfs, led by privileged but incompetent officers. They were mainly used to keep native ethnic tribes in check. Mobilisation was the main problem due to the tyranny of distance. Soldiers had to march long distances.

In her early years, Catherine the Great held remarkably liberal attitudes. This is best exemplified by the Legislative Commission’s document of Nakaz or ‘instruction’ It contained a model of the ideal government with respect for individual rights and the pursuit of justice.

The French Revolution of 1789 create an ideological shift turning her against the very Enlightenment principles she once championed, as she feared the spread of radical ideas to Russia.

She banned the publication of books deemed revolutionary, ordered bookstores to register with the Academy of Sciences, and imprisoned critics.

Alexander I as a young man had longed to reform his empire and benefit his subjects. He made attempts to free the serfs. His hopes were disappointed, partly by the sheer inertia, backwardness, and vastness of his domains, partly perhaps because of defects of his own character, but also because Napoleon’s aggressive enterprises diverted Alexander’s attention to diplomacy and defense. Russia’s abundant manpower and scanty financial resources were both consumed in war.

The early years of his reign saw two short periods of attempted reform. During the first, from 1801 to 1803, the tsar took counsel with four intimate friends, who formed his so-called Unofficial Committee, with the intention of drafting ambitious reforms. In the period from 1807 to 1812, he had as his chief adviser the liberal Mikhail Speransky. Both periods produced some valuable administrative innovations, but neither initiated any basic reform.

After 1815 Alexander was mainly concerned with grandiose plans for international peace; his motivation was not merely political but also religious—not to say mystical—for the years of war and national danger had aroused in him an interest in matters of faith to which, as a pupil of the 18th-century Enlightenment, he had previously been indifferent. While he was thus preoccupied with diplomacy and religion, Russia was ruled by conservatives and reactionaries, among whom the brutal but honest Gen. Aleksey Arakcheyev was outstanding.

Prince Andrei became utterly disillusioned after his injuries in 1805 due to petty unresolved disputes and the lack of coordination in the Miliary high command. After his return he has no interest in a career in the army until he meets Speránski, the son of a village Priest, who has radical ideas of reform.

The trait of Speránski’s mentality which struck Prince Andrei most was his absolute and unshakable belief in the power and authority of reason.

The Commission for the Revision of the Code of Laws, Speránski told him sarcastically had existed for a hundred and fifty years, had cost millions, and had done nothing except that Rosenkampf had stuck labels on the corresponding paragraphs of the different codes.

“And that is all the state has for the millions it has spent,” said he. “We want to give the Senate new juridical powers, but we have no laws. That is why it is a sin for men like you, Prince, not to serve in these times!”

Tolstoy on the lack of esprit de corp in the Russian Army during the Crimean War 1854-6.

We have no army, we have a horde of slaves cowed by discipline, ordered about by thieves and slave traders.

This horde is not an army because it possesses neither any real loyalty to faith, tsar or fatherland - words which have been so misused - nor valour, nor military dignity.

All it possesses are passive patience and repressed discontent, and cruelty, servitude and corruption.

Another Russian novelist, Mikhail Pagodin, decrying the West’s contempt for Russia:

France takes Algeria from Turkey, England annexes another principality from India, but when Russia occupies Modovia temporarily, - that disturbs the balance of power.

We can expect nothing from the West but blind hatred, and malice, which does not understad and does not want to understand.

Russia’s main defence has been its unforgiving climate. Both Napoleon and Hitler were defeated by cold weather - a scorched earth tactic.

Tolstoy is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77), which are commonly regarded as among the finest novels ever written. War and Peace in particular seems virtually to define this form for many readers and critics.

His fiction includes dozens of short stories and several novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, “After the Ball” and Hadji Murat. Later ones: The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Resurrection.

When Leo Tolstoy was seventy-six years old, internationally famous as a pacifist and moral philosopher, he finished Hadji Murat in 1904. He never published it. It sat in his papers until after his death, perhaps because it undermined everything he’d spent decades preaching.

The novel glorifies exactly the kind of martial courage and violent resistance Tolstoy the prophet had renounced. Tolstoy the artist couldn’t help himself. Perhaps it is his penance for his first assignment to suppress a minority tribe.

The story is stark and historical. Hadji Murat was a real Avar warrior fighting against Russian colonization in the Caucasus in the 1850s. Caught between the Russians who want to conquer his homeland and Shamil, the imam leading the resistance who has taken Murat’s family hostage,

Russia is an alien nation. Major social and political reforms that were being introduced in Europe in the wake of the Renaissance and the Reformation did not reach Russia. Europe developed a middle class; Russia did not. Neither did they enjoy freedom of religion.

Despite Peter and later Catherine the Great’s attempts to open the window to the West, this applied mainly to the aristocracy, 92% of the population were serfs who were unaffected. The reforms of Alexander II, from the 1860’s - when he was assassinated in 1881, created a liberal intelligentsia and began to educate both women and a rising proletariate.

Religion #

Tolstoy turned to religion, not the comfortable Orthodox Christianity of his childhood, but something raw and radical. While the Reformation failed to reach Russia, various Anabaptist sects migrated there from the 1780’s.

He read the Gospels like a man drowning, looking for meaning. Decided that real Christianity meant renouncing wealth, violence, government, private property. That Jesus’s message had been corrupted by institutions, that the Church had betrayed everything Christ taught.

Tolstoy’s critique of institutional religion is especially striking: faith, he suggests, has been buried beneath rituals and authority, while true Christianity—rooted in love, forgiveness, and nonviolence—waits to be rediscovered in lived action rather than preached doctrine.

Russian Mennonites lived primarily in Ukraine and the Volga region, physically overlapping with Tolstoy’s homeland, sharing a profound ideological bond rooted in Christian pacifism based on to the Sermon on the Mount. They strictly opposed violence and military service, practically living out Jesus’ command to “resist not evil”.

Tolstoy’s rejection of religious ritual contrasts markedly with his attitude in Anna Karenina, where religion is viewed as a matter not of dogma but of traditional forms of daily life.

Stated positively, the Christianity of Tolstoy’s last decades stressed five tenets:

• be not angry,
• do not lust,
• do not take oaths,
• do not resist evil, and
• love your enemies.

Nonresistance to evil, the doctrine that inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King, meant not that evil must be accepted but only that it cannot be fought with evil means, especially violence. Thus, Tolstoy became a pacifist. Because governments rely on the threat of violence to enforce their laws, Tolstoy also became a kind of anarchist. He enjoined his followers not only to refuse military service but also to abstain from voting or from having recourse to the courts.

In 1899 Tolstoy published his third long novel, Resurrection; he used the royalties to pay for the transportation of a persecuted Anabaptist religious sect, the Dukhobors, to Canada.

In 1901, the Russian Orthodox Church officially excommunicated him.

Tolsoy wanted to give away his estate. Free his serfs. Live as a peasant. His wife, Sophia fought him on every point. She had thirteen children to raise, a household to manage. She didn’t marry him to become a pauper. Their marriage that was once a creative partnership became warfare. He wanted renunciation, she wanted survival. Both were right, both were impossible.

What counts in making a happy marriage is not how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

War and Peace #

Great art releases its messages subtly. It tends to impersonally depict both sides of issues. Above all it should be an honest reflection of the society it exposes.

This historical novel by Leo Tolstoy, 1865–69, is a panoramic study of early 19th-century Russian society, noted for its variety of psychological analysis, and philosophic thought is generally regarded one of the world’s greatest novels. It is the many philosophical digressions that make War and Peace intimidating.

The fact Tolstoy fought in the Crimean War gave him a mastery of realistic detail.

War & Peace is a masterpiece - an epic portrait of Russian society and its descent into the Napoleonic Wars, which has inspired love and devotion among its readers for over a century.

Tolstoy allows his characters to reveal themselves through their dialogue, actions and interactions. As Eleanor Roosevelt put it:

“Great Minds Discuss Ideas. Average Minds Discuss Events. Small Minds Discuss People”

Focusing on the lives of five aristocratic families, ‘War & Peace’ tells the story of three young people whose lives are swept along by events and changed forever: the misfit Pierre, philosophical Andrei and romantic, impulsive Natasha.

Families #

1. Anna Pávlovna Schérer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Márya Fëdorovna, likes to hold receptions or soirees.

All her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered by a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:

“If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible, I shall be very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10—Annette Schérer.”

Schérer and most others revere the young Emperor, Alexander I: (24 - 48)

Our gracious sovereign recognizes his high vocation and will be true to it. That is the one thing I have faith in! Our good and wonderful sovereign has to perform the noblest role on earth, and he is so virtuous and noble that God will not forsake him. He will fulfill his vocation and crush the hydra of revolution, which has become more terrible than ever in the person of this murderer and villain! We alone must avenge the blood of the just one…. Whom, I ask you, can we rely on?… England with her commercial spirit will not and cannot understand the Emperor Alexander’s loftiness of soul

In Chapter 2 we read:

Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about;

Anna agrees to arrange a marriage between Prince Vasili’s dissolute son, Anatole Kuragin to Mary, the sister of Andrei Bolkónski.

2. Princess Drubetskáya, belonging to one of the best families in Russia, came to Petersburg to have her only son, Boris (14) join the Guards so he can remain in Moscow. She appeals to Prince Vasíli to petition Czar Alexander I. Vasili, despite realising he has limited political capital, had the matter mentioned to the Emperor, an exception made, and Borís transferred into the regiment of Semënov Guards with the rank of cornet.

3. Count Cyril Vladímirovich, a grandee from the Catherine the Great era, is the wealthiest man in Russia but all his children, including Pierre are illegitimate.

Prince Vasíli Kuragin, a relative, arrives in Moscow to see Count Cyril Vladímirovich, hearing how ill he is, as he expects an inheritance from him through his wife. However, Prince Vasíli becomes aware that a letter to the Emperor asks for Pierre’s legitimation?

“Who sacrificed everything for him,” chimed in the princess, Catherine, No, mon cousin,” she added with a sigh,

“I shall always remember that in this world one must expect no reward, that in this world there is neither honor nor justice. In this world one has to be cunning and cruel.” (Lady Mcduff - Machiavelli)

Despite this failure, Prince Vasili continues his craven obsequious deference to his Emperor Alexander I, as do most of the characters.

Like Polonious:

Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

Vasili has three indulged children, Hélène, and two sons: Hippolyte and the prodigal- Anatole.

“You know I did all a father could for their education, and they have both turned out fools. Hippolyte is at least a quiet fool, but Anatole is an active one. That is the only difference between them.”

Anatole is costing me forty thousand rubles a year. At a late night party, Anatole, Dolokhov and Pierre get very drunk:

“Those three got hold of a bear somewhere, put it in a carriage, and set off with it to visit some actresses! The police tried to interfere, and what did the young men do? They tied a policeman and the bear back to back and put the bear into the Moyka Canal. And there was the bear swimming about with the policeman on his back!”

Anatole was tranfered to the provinces, Dolokhov demoted in rank and Pierre sent to Moscow.

Vasali hopes to inherit money, but when that fails, marries Hélène, to the beneficiary, Pierre.

Pierre Bezkhov, an illigitimate son, was a stout, heavily built young man with close-cropped hair, spectacles, the light-colored breeches fashionable at that time, a very high ruffle, and a brown dress coat. The young man had not yet entered either the military or civil service, as he had only just returned from abroad where he had been educated, and this was his first appearance in society.

Pierre appears a social buffoon. He turned away from the aunt without waiting to hear her speech about Her Majesty’s health. Anna Pávlovna in dismay detained him with the words:

“Do you know the Abbé Morio? He is a most interesting man.”

“Yes, I have heard of his scheme for perpetual peace, and it is very interesting but hardly feasible.” (Kant)

“You think so?” rejoined Anna Pávlovna in order to say something and get away to attend to her duties as hostess. But Pierre now committed a reverse act of impoliteness. First he had left a lady before she had finished speaking to him, and now he continued to speak to another who wished to get away. With his head bent, and his big feet spread apart, he began explaining his reasons for thinking the abbé’s plan chimerical.

He had no idea of how to enter a room, or how to leave one.

After the soiree, he joins Andrei and Lise for supper and then after midnight, against advice, goes to Anatole’s officer’s barracks for a drunken all night party, where they end up tying a policeman onto the back of a bear and then throw him into the river. Anatole ends up transferred to the country and Pierre to Moscow.

4. Márya Dmítrievna Akhrosímova, known in society as le terrible dragon, a lady distinguished not for wealth or rank, but for common sense and frank plainness of speech. Márya Dmítrievna was known to the Imperial family as well as to all Moscow and Petersburg, and both cities wondered at her, laughed privately at her rudenesses, and told good stories about her, while none the less all without exception respected and feared her.

Countess Anna Mikháylovna’s daughter, Natasha Rostov’s arc from impulsive girl to woman who’s loved and lost and learned that survival requires both resilience and surrender—this hits harder than any artillery barrage. Her near-elopement with the scoundrel Anatole, her nursing of wounded soldiers during Moscow’s occupation, her final transformation into someone who understands that happiness isn’t found in grand romantic gestures but in the quiet dailiness of choosing to continue—Tolstoy makes you live every moment with her. Her brother Nicholas Rostov plays important roles throughout the novel. He too is a reformer.

5. Prince Nicholas Andréevich Bolkónski ruled his household, like the Russian Orthodox Churches, as a Patriarch with total authority; no room for individuality with all decisions made by him.

Prince Nicholas Andréevich (nicknamed in society, “the King of Prussia”) ever since the Emperor Paul had exiled him to his country estate had lived there continuously with his daughter, Princess Mary, and her companion, Mademoiselle Bourienne. Though in the new reign he was free to return to the capitals, he still continued to live in the country, remarking that anyone who wanted to see him could come the hundred miles from Moscow to Bald Hills, while he himself needed no one and nothing. He used to say that there are only two sources of human vice—idleness and superstition, and only two virtues—activity and intelligence.

A widow, he has two children, Andrei, married to Lise, and Mary.

He is reluctant to accept an arranged Marriage between his daughter Mary and Anatole Kuragin, merely to domesticate him.

Mary, when she becomes aware of a plan for her to marry Anatole, is quite submissive:

I look on marriage as a divine institution to which we must conform. However painful it may be to me, should the Almighty lay the duties of wife and mother upon me I shall try to perform them as faithfully as I can, without disquieting myself by examining my feelings toward him whom He may give me for husband.

Russian parents exert firm paternal control over their offspring throughout their lives. After the death of Lise in childbirth, Prince Andrei intends to marry Natasha, Prince Nikolay refuses to allow it as it is too early. Andrei complies outwardly, with passive resistance.

In the 1960’s, Bob Dylan sang: “Your children are beyond you command”.

In Book Five, Andrei, commenting on his father:

My father is one of the most remarkable men of his time. But he is growing old, and though not exactly cruel he has too energetic a character. He is so accustomed to unlimited power that he is terrible…

Their stories play out alongside a great cast of characters, from the aristocrat to the peasant, as the great historical events of the period unfold, culminating in Napoleon’s fateful invasion of Russia

War and Peace, not really a novel, containing three kinds of material—an historical account of the Napoleonic wars, the biographies of fictional characters, and a set of digressive essays about the philosophy of history.

Catherine the Great had insisted French be the language of her court. Tolstoy visited France and influenced by Victor Hugo, Rosseau and Hegel. Since high society was essentially French, Napoleon had no good reason to invade Russia.

Why can’t men live without war? School boys are more likely to brawl when the girls are watching. Freud suggested all human endeavour is motivated by our sexuality. Ancient heroes longed for kleos – glory in battle.

Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky tells his son Andrei:

You’re going into the army because you’re not wasting time hanging onto women’s skirts. Service before everything!

A Mother: “You may die in bed or God can save you on the battlefield.”

Prince Andrei Bolkonsky stands apart from the glittering crowd, already disillusioned with life at twenty-five, seeking meaning in military glory, going because he doesn’t like the purposeless life he is living going to endless circles of soirees.

Conflict gives a profound purpose to life. When you feel empty inside you need conflict outside. Young men seek adventure to fill the emptiness.

Another mother sends her son to get him away from his dissolute carousing debauchery.

Men fight wars for two reasons; to get a woman or to escape the heartbreak of losing a woman. War& Conflict

In 1851, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and traveled to the Caucasus. He was young, wealthy, restless, and searching for something he could not yet name.

He drank, gambled, pursued pleasure, and wrestled with dark periods of despair. His diaries reveal a man painfully aware of his own weaknesses. He wrote about vanity, lust, pride, and his repeated failures to become the person he wanted to be. Again and again, he promised himself that he would change. Again and again, he fell back into old habits.

During the Crimean War, Tolstoy served as an artillery officer at the siege of Sevastopol. There, the romantic image of war collided with its brutal reality. He witnessed men dying in chaos, suffering without meaning, and courage existing alongside terror. The glory he had once imagined began to look very different from the reality before him.

In War and Peace, the two Emperors of Austria and Russia reviewing 80,000 troops before battle, in perfect order and highly polished uniforms, is likely written tongue firmly planted in cheek.

but every soldier with his freshly washed and shaven face and his weapons clean and polished to the utmost, and every horse groomed till its coat shone like satin and every hair of its wetted mane lay smooth—felt that no small matter was happening, but an important and solemn affair. Every general and every soldier was conscious of his own insignificance, aware of being but a drop in that ocean of men, and yet at the same time was conscious of his strength as a part of that enormous whole. Book Three, Chapter VIII.

General Kutuzov, commander of the Russian Army, proclaims:

It’s begun,. The battle. It’s terrible; but glorious!

At Austerlitz, thousands die in snow and confusion while generals make decisions based on incomplete information and unearned confidence.

The war sequences demolish every romantic notion about military glory. Tolstoy, who fought in the Crimean War, knows what battle actually is—chaos and terror and young men dying for reasons they don’t understand while commanders claim credit for accidents.

The Battle of Borodino unfolds with documentary precision: the smoke so thick you can’t see enemy positions, orders that make no sense, heroism and cowardice existing simultaneously in the same person’s heart.

Yet Prince Andrei admits:

Death wounds the loss of my family, nothing frightens me. I’d give up everything for an instant of triumph; for the love of men I can’t know and shall never know.

Tolstoy wrote:

“you need to go through war to achieve your peace. Andrei eventually feel that all is vanity and deception, but that we must live and love; we will live forever in everything.”

He could be echoing Lermotov and Pushkin’s philosophy that life is not about finding peace, but a struggle to find meaning in living dangerously.

In a late poem The Sail Lermontov writes:

As if in tempest there is peace.

The paradox remains that a soul finds true solace in struggle and upheaval

But it’s the peace sections that truly devastate.

Prince Andrei gets the novel’s most philosophically complex journey. Wounded at Austerlitz, staring up at an infinite sky and realizing all his ambitions are meaningless. In Book Five, he confides in Pierre:

“I lived for glory.—And after all what is glory? The same love of others, a desire to do something for them, a desire for their approval.—So I lived for others, and not almost, but quite, ruined my life. And I have become calmer since I began to live only for myself.”

Finding brief happiness with Natasha, then watching it destroyed. Finally, dying slowly and coming to understand that forgiveness and letting go are the only victories that matter. His deathbed scenes, where he achieves a kind of transcendent peace while those around him still thrash in their egos, will ruin you in the best way.

The forgiveness theme is further explored in Anna Kereninia.

The French invasion of Russia unfolds like slow-motion catastrophe. Moscow burns not from Russian strategy but from deliberately abandoned houses and a scorced earth policy.

Napoleon’s retreat becomes a winter nightmare where armies dissolve into desperate refugees harried by Russian soldiers. Tolstoy shows that the Russian victory everyone celebrates wasn’t brilliant tactics but simply endurance— attrition; the ability to survive chaos longer than your enemy can. Alexander I takes full credit for this victory and develops a Messiah complex illustrated by his posturing in The Congress of Vienna, by forming a holy alliance with Austria, Prussia and France to turn back the clock, resist democracy, preserve absolute monarchies in Europe.

What makes “War and Peace” timeless is how it captures the gap between how we think life works and how it actually unfolds. We believe we make reasoned choices; Tolstoy shows us stumbling through fog, rationalizing accidents into narratives. We think historical events have clear causes; he demonstrates chaos dressed up as inevitability. We imagine love and war as opposite poles; he proves they’re both just different ways humans try making meaning in an indifferent universe.

The French army general Pierre Bosquet famously declared:

C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre: c’est de la folie

(“It’s magnificent, but it’s not war: it’s madness”).

The French General Henri Navarre:

To make life sweet, a man needs, a horse to ride, an enemy to kill and a woman to bed.

Some Themes: #

Tolstoy famously said that War and Peace belongs to no recognized genre, and that makes it quintessentially Russian since,

“not a single work of Russian literature, from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoevsky’s Dead House ”

conforms to Western norms of genre. It is hardly surprising that the Russian Formalists developed a theory of literature centering on what they called “baring the device.”

The moral urgency of Russian culture, combined with a sense of its conventionality, readily led to the question called “the justification of culture.”

Westerners might ask whether high culture should be transformed, but Russians argued about whether it should be abolished altogether. After all, it depended on the labor of oppressed peasants, and therefore was morally suspect.

As one critic observed, peasants have suffered greatly so that we can sit in our studies discussing social philosophy. There was a tradition of great writers’ rejecting or burning their own works.

Westerners often take for granted that the purpose of life is happiness. Mainstream economics presumes that “maximizing utility” is the only human motivation.

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov exposed the shallowness of such a view of life, and Soviet conditions made it seem, as Solzhenitsyn writes, like the prattle of a child.

Leo Tolstoy absolutely adored Chekhov as a person but thought his plays were garbage. Once, while Chekhov was recovering from an illness, Tolstoy leaned in and whispered:

“You know, I cannot abide Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse.”

Despite the roast, Tolstoy considered Chekhov the “Pushkin of prose” and wept when he died, calling it an “irreparable loss.”

The Russians asked ultimate questions under extreme conditions. One could, of course, question whether extremes, rather than the everyday, are the reality against which ideas should be tested, and Russians have wondered that, too. Tolstoy insisted that it is the sum total of ordinary conditions that comprise life, and one needs to acquire prosaic wisdom, as Levin, the hero of Anna Karenina and Pierre in War and Peace do.

Tolstoy satirizes the artifice and conventionality of aristorcratic society, as opposed to a peasant’s life more in touch with natural and biological rhythms. His works share a vision of human experience rooted in an appreciation of everyday life and prosaic virtues.

He elevated the peasants and soldiers as the real activists of history as leaders are merely fictional heroes. Napoleon is just a small man with a huge ego.

He agreed with Rosseau’s philosophy that,

humans are innately good but corrupted by society; born free but everywhere in chains.

We are all flawed with redeeming qualities. Hegel claimed we are products of our times. The antipodal view is that all men are evil and need to be constrained by society. Machiavelli indicated that in politics expediency and pragmatism was often more successful than honour, virtue and idealism. Tolstoy rejects that.

Tolstoy’s final, most radical statement: that ordinary life, lived with consciousness and compassion, is the real victory. Not military glory or social triumph, just the daily work of being human with other humans.

Obsequious deference

Authoritarian states demand heirarchical deference to superiors in command. Tolstoy illustrates the the banality, futility and absurdity of this throughout the novel.

Most, at the soirees, profess total obeisance to the health and opinions of the Emperor and Empress.

From the way the regimental commander saluted the commander in chief and devoured him with his eyes, drawing himself up obsequiously, and from the way he walked through the ranks behind the generals, bending forward and hardly able to restrain his jerky movements, and from the way he darted forward at every word or gesture of the commander in chief, it was evident that he performed his duty as a subordinate with even greater zeal than his duty as a commander.

Book Three Ch. XI

The gentlemen assembled at Bilíbin’s were young, wealthy, gay society men, who here, as in Vienna, formed a special set which Bilíbin, their leader, called les nôtres (Ours). This set, consisting almost exclusively of diplomats, evidently had its own interests which had nothing to do with war or politics but related to high society, to certain women, and to the official side of the service. These gentlemen received Prince Andrew as one of themselves, an honor they did not extend to many. From politeness and to start conversation, they asked him a few questions about the army and the battle, and then the talk went off into merry jests and gossip.

The sergeant, who was evidently wiser than his general, goes up to Auersperg and says: ‘Prince, you are being deceived, here are the French!’ Murat, seeing that all is lost if the sergeant is allowed to speak, turns to Auersperg with feigned astonishment (he is a true Gascon) and says: ‘I don’t recognize the world-famous Austrian discipline, if you allow a subordinate to address you like that!’ It was a stroke of genius. Prince Auersperg feels his dignity at stake and orders the sergeant to be arrested. Ch. XII

In Book III , Andrei acknowledges the fact that now Kutúzov with his staff and all of us count for nothing. Everything is now centered round the Emperor.

There is no greatness where there is no pain, suffering in grace.

We humans need a battle, a struggle of conflict to keep us going; to give us a purpose.

Pierre feels empty until he falls in love with Natasha. We need drama or chaos in our lives. Falling in love is like going to war.

Marriage is supposed to be peaceful, blissful and comforting, it is in fact conflict, contradictory, even chaotic. Almost all of the arranged marriages prove to be loveless.

Narrative Technique #

The entire novel is written with a satiric tone, mocking pretentious Russian High Society, absolute governance and utterly incompetence of the military. Sometimes the satire is soft Horatian, while at other times it become scornful Juvenilian.

Distinctive characters reveal themselves by their words, actions and interactions.

The novel is episodal, switching from one scene to another, and then back to the first. Suspence derives from information not divulged until much later. Pierre’s inheritance is confirmed in a letter by Anna written to Mary.

Tolstoy shows you that your small domestic dramas matter as much as empires rising and falling, that confusion and searching are permanent human conditions, that the war between who we are and who we think we should be never really ends.

That’s Tolstoy’s real magic: showing you that everyone is lost, everyone is seeking, and the only honest response to existence is equal parts humility and wonder.

Tolstoy’s art addresses the reality of life – the essence. The goal of the artist is to give people hope, to get them to love life in all its complexity. It deals with crises – rupture, upheaval – Things falling apart. We will overcome!

Main Characters #

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSK7dQLYxL0&t=4s

or:

Most are based on historical and ancestral figures. Tolstoy is exploring historical change in Russia from the Decembrist uprising in 1825, resulting from former aristocratic soldiers who had seen the results of the French Revolution in 1789 and had agitated for the end of Absolutism in Russia.

Catherine the Great started as a liberal free thinker and reformer, however became increasingly repressive, especially after the French Revolution in 1789 when she began to suppress dissent.

Alexander I (24 years old) considered any criticism of government as an attack on God given authority - blasphemy. He exiled Pushkin and others for writings on liberty. He is highly revered by most of high society.

Nicholas I had ruthlessly crushed the Decembrist revolutionaries, many of whom were of high status in Russian society and risked everything for reform. However he realised the value of having writers on his side, (As LBJ so elegantly put it: it is better to have them inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.) so he brought Pushkin back in from the cold, allowing him to write under his censorship. As usual, writers then resort to subtle satire - like Horace under Augustus.

Others, like Dostoevsky, were exiled and only allowed to return after the liberal Alexander II toke over in the middle of the Crimean War in 1855.

Many other writers self-exiled and wrote from Rome, Paris or England.

Tolstoy’s main writing began after Alexander II’s liberal reforms so his characters freely express enlightened thinking desiring a better society.

Later Sholokhov was permitted to act as private critic and advocate only because Stalin cynically valued Sholokhov, touted by the regime as the Red Tolstoy, for his cultural capital. Stalin defended Sholokhov to preserve his prize cultural asset, no more so than when the menace of the Terror came for Sholokhov himself.

Prince Andrei #

Prince Andrei enlists as an aide-de-camp To General Kutuzov. Andrei insists on getting into the action, riding around to familiarise himself with the layout and talking to all the men.

When Captain Tushkin retreats, accused of abandoning two cannons, he didn’t want to get anyone into trouble by claiming he had no men covering him, Prince Andrei come to his rescue:

“When I got to Tushkin’s battery, two-thirds of the men and horses were dead or wounded, two guns destroyed and no cover whatsoever.”

Tushkin was recognised for his courage and valour.

Later in the battle, Prince Andrei is injured and lying on the battle field looking up into the clouds in the vast sky when Napoleon on his horse rides by.

He sees Napoleon as a fictionalised hero. The Anti-Christ. Tolstoy portrays Napoleon as an ineffective, egomaniacal buffoon

So insignificant at that moment seemed the interests that engrossed Napoleon, so mean did his hold himself with his paltry vanity and joy in his victory appear compared to the lofty equitable and kindly sky which he had seen and understood.

Looking into Napoleon’s eyes, Prince Andrei thought of the insignificance of greatness the unimportance of life which no one can understand and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.

In the second battle, as a nihilist, despising everything fake, shallow, or merely conventional, repeatedly discovering the emptiness of the activities to which he has devoted himself, Prince Andrei, becomes one of the brave sacrificial casualties, in defending his country. Prince Andrei shows he is a bigger man than Napoleon because he forgives his enemy, Anatole Kuragin for attempting to elope with Natasha and dies in her arms, also forgiving her.

Tolstoy’s description of his death in 1812 is usually regarded as one of the most-effective scenes in Russian literature.

To Andrei, death is an awakening, because life is a dream and death is like waking up from that dream.

Tolstoy, like Napoleon’s “History lies agreed upon” believes it is unpredictable, has no direction, and fits no pattern. The causes of historical events are infinitely varied and forever unknowable, and so historical writing, which claims to explain the past, necessarily falsifies it.

Andrei Bolkonsky is cynical, competent, contemptuous of the aristocratic world he navigates perfectly. He goes to war seeking glory, gets wounded at Austerlitz, lies on the battlefield looking up at the infinite sky and realizes glory is a child’s fantasy. That scene is Tolstoy at full power - Andrei’s entire worldview collapsing while Napoleon walks past and Andrei thinks how small and meaningless the Emperor looks from this angle, bleeding into the earth.

Pierre Bezkhov #

The quirkiness of the bumbling and sincere Pierre Bezukhov becomes one of the three main characters of War and Peace. Despite being illegitimate, he inherits his dying father’s estate and becomes one of the wealthiest men in Russia. Is Tolstoy questioning the concept of inheritance and legitimacy?

Pierre’s courtship and eventual marriage to Helene Kuragina dramatizes one of the most awkward proposals ever. Arranged by her parents, Pierre never actually proposes but is congratulated by her father. He comes to suspect she is unfaithful to him, and Pierre duels with the other man, almost killing him. He soon becomes overwhelmed by his marriage and leaves Helene.

Joining the Freemasons, involves some dark clandestine rituals but ends up influencing his personal and business fortunes and giving him a purpose in life - the universal brotherhood of man.

Three aims:

The first object is the preservation and handing on to posterity of a mystery from the remotest ages, of a nature that nobody can know or use it unless he be prepared by long and diligent self-purification.

The aim, to reform their hearts, to purify and enlighten their minds,

Thirdly, “By purifying and regenerating our members we try to improve the whole human race, by an example of piety and virtue, to combat the evil which sways the world.

7 Virtues:

1. Discretion, the keeping of the secrets of the Order. 2. Obedience to those of higher ranks in the Order. 3. Morality. 4. Love of mankind. 5. Courage. 6. Generosity. 7. The love of death.

Pierre believes Freemasonry is the expression of the best, the eternal, aspects of humanity. The teaching of Christianity freed from the bonds of State and Church, a teaching of equality, brotherhood, and love.

Later he attempts to change the world, and in 1812 harbours delusional aspirations of assassinating Napoleon.

Pierre spends the first third searching for meaning through Freemasonry and agricultural reform and marriage to the beautiful, cold Helene who cheats on him openly because she can. He’s Tolstoy’s stand-in for every idealistic person trying to live ethically inside a system designed to prevent that, and watching him fail repeatedly is painful because his failures come from actually caring while everyone around him performs caring as social currency. He wants truth and keeps finding emptiness dressed in expensive clothes.

History of Freemasonry in Russia

Freemasonry in Russia started in the 18th century, pursuing humanistic and educational purposes, and ethical issues. It was a spiritual community of people united in an effort to contribute to the prosperity of the Motherland and the enlightenment of the people living in it.

Freemasonry was brought to Russia by foreign officers in service to the Russian military. Saint Petersburg in 1732–34.

Under Catherine II, Russian Freemasonry consisted of a far-reaching nationwide system that united some 14 lodges and about 400 government officials.

Catherine the Great suspected the Masons of turning her son Paul against herself, of being a tool in the hands of her enemy King of Prussia, and viewed their attitude toward women as backwards. In 1785, she clamped down upon Novikov’s printing house and had it proscribed. Novikov was jailed, and other leading Freemasons had to flee Russia.

Initially Czar Paul supported them but the spectre of the French Revolution, threatened autocracy and within three years of his reign all secret societies were suppressed, and the lodges closed of their own accord. Two years later Paul was assassinated and the lodges flourished under his successor Alexander I.

According to Filipp Vigel, Freemasonry did little but to provide a fashionable pastime for bored nobles.

As Emperor Alexander grew increasingly conservative, the Masonic-style political clubs were outlawed in 1822. This interdict was extended by Nicholas I in the wake of the Decembrist revolt, since the Decembrists had sprung from the Masonic lodges.

Freemasonry was legalized and enjoyed a brief revival after the Revolution of 1905. In 1922, in the wake of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks had all the lodges closed.

Natasha Rostova, #

We meet the thirteen year old Natasha at the end of 1805. When Andrei meets her later in 1812, he is interested in marrying her, but his father tells him to wait, in the meantime he suspects her of being unfaithful so he rejects her.

Natasha Rostova, who appears bursting into rooms with uncontainable life, and Tolstoy tracks her growing up through first love and betrayal and grief, never losing the essential vitality that makes her the emotional center. She nearly elopes with Anatole Kuragin, a seducer who’s already married, and the scandal destroys her engagement to Andrei. Tolstoy doesn’t punish her for this or make it a moral lesson - he just shows you a young woman making a catastrophic mistake and then living through the aftermath without redemption arcs or easy forgiveness.

Later Pierre also falls in love with her, marries her and they have four children.

General Kutuzov, commander of the Russian Army, #

The real life Russian general Mikhail Kutuzov is depicted as a good level headed leader who understands the limitations of human will and planning. A good example of a stoic. He may be the only character to escape the censure of Tolstoy.

He realises that in the “fog of war combat causes sheer chaos. Generals may imagine they can “anticipate all contingencies,” but battle is really the result of “a hundred million diverse chances” decided on the moment by unforeseeable circumstances. In war as in life, no system or model can come close to accounting for the infinite complexity of human behaviour.

His most pertinent advice is for all to get a good night’s sleep before a battle as what happens is often governed by ungovernable forces and chaos - Shakespeare calls “havoc”.

Kutuzov was also a realist and a skeptic about military power. When the Russians and their allies were routed by the French at Austerlitz he was openly appalled by the incompetence of leadership and the sheer waste of life. Over his long career―marked equally by victory and defeat, embrace and ostracism―he grew to despise those whose concept of war had devolved to mindless attack.

Kutuzov ―a master and survivor of intrigue, moving in and out of royal favor, committed to the welfare of those under his command, and an innovative strategist. When, reluctantly and at the 11th hour, Czar Alexander I called upon him to lead the fight against Napoleon’s invading army, Kutuzov accomplished what needed to be done not by a heroic charge but by a strategic retreat. Across the generations, portraits of Kutuzov have ranged from hagiography to dismissal, with Tolstoy’s portrait of him in War and Peace perhaps the most indelible of all. This immersive biography returns a touchstone figure in Russian history to human scale. Napoleon.org. review on Alexander Mikaberidze’s biography.

Napoleon #

Born to an elite, but poor family on Corsica, Napoleon rose to prominence as a soldier. From 1792, the new revolutionary government set about waging war with other European nations, giving Napoleon the chance to make a name for himself as a brilliant military strategist.

He led the French army to win several battles. During the turmoil following the “Reign of Terror”, Bonaparte’s decisiveness and willingness to fire cannons on the demonstrators - to “give them a whiff of grapeshot”—both consolidated the government’s control and revealed how much the revolutionary state after Thermidor was dependent on the military.

On May 18, 1804, Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor and his wife Josephine de Beauharnais empress.

His lavish coronation ceremony took place on December 2 in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. When the Pope attempted to crown him, Napoleon simply snatched the crown and placed it on his own head.

Napoleon realised he needed the Church to control the masses, so he re-established it with a concordat in 1801 with limited powers to the Pope and the right of the state over the church.

Napoleon next moved to recreate an aristocracy, a long-held French tradition that had been eliminated by the Revolution.

In 1808, Napoleon started granting titles of nobility to people who served him particularly well.

The Napoleonic Code, is still the legal framework underpinning Europe. It strengthened the authority of men over their families, deprived women of any individual rights and reduced the rights of illegitimate children, of which he had many.

Failures

1. Abandoned 37,000 troops in Egypt eventually returned by British Navy. (1799)
2. In Syria, (1800) at Jaffa, Napoleon had 1,500–2,000 prisoners led out to the beach and then shot, bayoneted, or drowned.
3. Forced to flee Russia in 1812 due to “scorched earth policy” losing up to 400,000 soldiers.
4. Lost the battle of Leipzig 1813 – sent to Island of Elba as King. “Able was I ere I met Elba” – Palindrome
5. Defeated at the Battle of Waterloo – 1815. Died in 1821 on the St Helena Island, aged 51 of suspected stomach cancer.

Did Napoleon really say of the British army he faced at Waterloo:

“My God, what troops. If I had two such regiments I could conquer the world.”?

Napoleon thought he faced a mostly British army - which he referred to as ‘the English’. He was not aware that many of the red-coated troops he saw opposing him before the battle started, were German speaking infantry of the King’s German Legion and Hanoverian brigades.

Napoleon pretty much laughed at Wellington for not choosing to retreat, and he called them bad troops when advised by his generals that they were very capable soldiers and well led. He was unaware he had walked into a trap set by Wellington and Blucher, planned the night before.

Church and Napoleon #

Napoleon had a more nuanced relationship with Rome.

His great contribution was to shut down the 400 year barbaric abuse of power of the Spanish Inquisition when he invaded Spain in 1804, appointing his brother to the throne.

The French Revolution had broken the tyranny of the Church by disestablishing it. As the First Estate, the Church too had lost touch with the masses. The disparity of pay between the privileged upper clergy and the lower parish priests was enormous resulting in the hierarchy aligning with the nobility. Rabid revolutionaries attacked Churches and all aristocratic privilege.

Napoleon soon recognised the value of the Church controlling the masses and re-established it with his Concordat in 1801.

Napoleon and Pope Pius VII were the two most powerful men of their age, the one the would-be master of the world, the other the Vicar of Heaven, locked in ferocious combat. In 1809, Pius had been invited to Paris for his coronation, but in a powerful symbolic act, Napoleon decided to crown himself, as the Pope sat by and watched. Despite this discourtesy the two men admired and liked each other - for a time.

Soon enough they fell out, embroiled in a bitter quarrel over the respective powers of the kingdoms of Christ and Caesar. In, 1812 Napoleon abducted the Pope and under extremely harsh conditions had him brought to Fontainebleau to demonstrate his supremacy. The Pontiff gazed up at his physician and murmured of Napoleon, ‘‘May God forgive him. I already have.’’ He later cautioned Napoleon by telling him that the Church was much greater than its officials and that its parishioners would prevail.

In 1815, with the banishment of Napoleon, the Church re-established the central authority of the Pope (ultramontanism) through a Holy Alliance with the Holy Roman Empire.

Media #

When Napoleon escaped from Elba and began his return to Paris, the following announcements appeared in the Moniteur of France from March 9 – 22, 1815:

March 9:

The Monster has escaped from his place of Banishment.

March 10:

The Corsican ogre has landed at Cape Juan.

March 11:

The Tiger has shown himself at Gap.

The troops are advancing on all sides to arrest his progress. He will conclude his miserable adventure by becoming a wanderer among the mountains.

March12:

The Monster has actually advanced as far as Grenoble

When faced with armed soldiers, Napoleon approached them unarmed, offered to surrender, but then gave an impassioned speech which prompted many to join his endeavour.

March 13:

The Tyrant is now at Lyon.

Fear and terror seized all at his appearance.

March 18:

Usurper has ventured to approach to within 60 hours march of the capital.

March 19:

Bonaparte is advancing by forced marches

It is impossible he can reach Paris.”

March 20:

Napoleon will arrive under the walls of Paris tomorrow.

March 21:

The Emperor Napoleon is at Fontainbleau.”

March 22:

His Majesty the Emperor makes public entry

Yesterday evening His Majesty the Emperor made his public entry and arrived at the Tuilleries.

“Nothing can exceed the universal joy!”

https://nebo-lit.com/film/frontline/media-and-truth.html#the-historical-bias

Pierre at first defends Napoleon

Prince Andrew (captured) his eyes fixed straight on Napoleon…. So insignificant at that moment seemed to him all the interests that engrossed Napoleon, so mean did his hero himself with his paltry vanity and joy in victory appear, compared to the lofty, equitable, and kindly sky which he had seen and understood.

The Essays #

The essays in War and Peace, which begin in the second half of the book, satirize all attempts to formulate general laws of history and reject the ill-considered assumptions supporting all historical narratives. In Tolstoy’s view, history, like battle, is essentially the product of contingency, has no direction, and fits no pattern. The causes of historical events are infinitely varied and forever unknowable, and so historical writing, which claims to explain the past, necessarily falsifies it. The shape of historical narratives reflects not the actual course of events but the essentially literary criteria established by earlier historical narratives.

According to Tolstoy’s essays, historians also make a number of other closely connected errors. They presume that history is shaped by the plans and ideas of great men—whether generals or political leaders or intellectuals like themselves—and that its direction is determined at dramatic moments leading to major decisions. In fact, however, history is made by the sum total of an infinite number of small decisions taken by ordinary people, whose actions are too unremarkable to be documented. As Tolstoy explains, to presume that grand events make history is like concluding from a view of a distant region where only treetops are visible that the region contains nothing but trees. Therefore Tolstoy’s novel gives its readers countless examples of small incidents that each exert a tiny influence—which is one reason that War and Peace is so long.

Tolstoy’s belief in the efficacy of the ordinary and the futility of system-building set him in opposition to the thinkers of his day. It remains one of the most-controversial aspects of his philosophy.

Between the narrative sections, Tolstoy interrupts with essays about historical determinism and free will, arguing with other historians about why events happen the way they do. He doesn’t trust fiction to carry the argument so he just stops the plot and makes the argument directly, then goes back to Pierre and Natasha like nothing happened.

Historical Essays #

The essays in War and Peace, which begin in the second half of the book, satirize all attempts to formulate general laws of history and reject the ill-considered assumptions supporting all historical narratives. While Tolstoy’s research is assiduously based on primary sources and his patterns of history sound, critics like Turgenev were unimpressed with his conclusions, branding him as a charlatan not based on genuine knowledge.

How are societies are governed? Churchill, observed that:

in England everything is allowed except what is forbidden, in Germany everything is forbidden except what is permitted, in France anything goes even that which is forbidden, and in the Soviet Union everything is forbidden even what is allowed.

Tolstoy’s stereotypes of Nations is interesting:

Germans were overly self - confident on the basis of abstract scientific notions of truth.

The French regard themselves as personally attractive.

The English are self-assured as being the citizens of the best organised county.

The Italians are excitable and easily forget themselves and others.

Russians know nothing and don’t want to know anything, as nothing can be known.

The Germans are the most dangerous.

Philosophy #

Philosophy is a not series of epistemological puzzles - rather concerns what it means to be human. Tolstoy saw Philosophy as a struggle between the rationalists and the empiricists; reason and experience. Free will does not exist as history is random.

Tolstoy, like Napoleon’s “History lies agreed upon” believes it is random, has no direction, and fits no pattern. The causes of historical events are infinitely varied and forever unknowable, and so historical writing, which claims to explain the past, necessarily falsifies it. Human beings are largely irrational, unexplainable and subject to forces beyond their control.

“The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is totally meaningless.”

Tolstoy, exploring philosophical questions about the meaning of life in the face of death.

Nihilism #

Initially the disillusionment and questioning of self, drove Tolstoy to nihilism; a philosophy underpinning the belief that nothing in the world has a real existence.

He came to appreciate reality as: random, absurd, sometimes painful, often lovely, completely my own, and totally meaningless. In that way, nihilism made him feel free.

Nihilism becomes Tolstoy’s rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless; and we are in charge of our destiny to make it meaningful.

Existentialists conclued “The gods have not withdrawn or abandoned us, we have kicked them out.”

Descartes also moved toward nihilism by making the will the basic aspect of human being, thus undercutting our ability to be receptive to the world. Kant sealed our fate by making us the source of the world’s order, and autonomy the highest good.

Similar feelings of negativity, cynicism, pessimism, rejection, repudiation, renunciation, denial, abnegation, disbelief, non-belief, unbelief, scepticism, lack of conviction, absence of moral values, agnosticism, atheism, non-theism,

Historically Nihilism was adopted as the doctrine of an extreme Russian revolutionary party c. 1900 which found nothing to approve of in the established social order.

Pacifism #

Tolstoy mixed with a sect called the Duokabors, near the Crimea. Influenced by a group of Anabaptists, called the Mennonites in The Ukraine, they had adopted a simplified form of individual worship of Jesus Christ.

Tolstoy became a strict pacifist in the last three decades of his life, and wrote at length on a central issue of politics, namely, the use of violence to maintain order, to promote justice, and to ensure the survival of society, civilization, and the human species. He unreservedly rejected the use of physical force to these or any ends. His pacifism was rooted not in a moral doctrine or political theory but in his straightforward reading of the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Sermon of the Mount. Matthew New Testament

Eye for Eye

38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’[h] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. 40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. 41 If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

Love for Enemies

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Tolstoy stands as one of the great dissidents of twentieth-century Russia, a man who condemned the system utterly and who refused to perform any act that could be construed as compromising with it. He left behind a powerful statement of the urgent human need to connect our daily living to a deep and fulfilling conception of the meaning of life.

Yet his last novel Hadji Murat in 1904, never publishe, in his papers until after his death, undermined everything he’d spent decades preaching.

The novel glorifies exactly the kind of martial courage and violent resistance Tolstoy the prophet had renounced. Tolstoy the artist couldn’t help himself.

The story is stark and historical. Hadji Murat was a real Avar warrior fighting against Russian colonization in the Caucasus in the 1850s. It is likely based on his first assignment as an officer in the Russian Army.

Caught between the Russians who want to conquer his homeland and Shamil, the imam leading the resistance who has taken Murat’s family hostage, Murat defects to the Russians. It wasn’t out of loyalty, but out of calculation. He plans to use Russian forces to free his family, then return to fight them. Nobody trusts him, and he trusts nobody. The entire novel is a dance of mutual suspicion ending in blood.

We move between Murat in his temporary Russian allegiance, Tsar Nicholas I in St. Petersburg making decisions that will kill thousands without thought, and the ordinary Russian soldiers who will die implementing those decisions. The scaffolding is simple. The effect is devastating.

Tolstoy presents Murat as a fully realized consciousness with his own logic, his own honor code, his own entirely reasonable hatred of Russian imperialism. When Russian officers describe him as treacherous, Tolstoy shows us exactly why Murat has no reason to be loyal to people conquering his homeland. The novel is shockingly anti-imperialist for a Russian writer in 1904, though Tolstoy always had a complicated relationship with Russian power.

Some wars have to be fought. Was this novel an attempt to assuage his conscience?

Origins of Pacifism

The modern conceptualization of pacifism draws upon the doctrinal sacredness of life and abrogation of violence in the Christian religion, strains of philosophical anarchism and socialism, nineteenth-century internationalism, and a religious principle of social responsibility.

The oldest element of modern pacifism is the tradition of religious nonresistance that was formed in the first three centuries of the Christian church, under Roman rule. Abandoned for the concept of just war, in fact by the time of Constantine I and in theory Saint Augustine, nonresistance pacifism appeared again with Christian sects in the medieval era. It emerged in the Protestant Reformation, notably under Peter Chelčick´y and the Unity of the Brethren (Bohemian Brethren) in the fifteenth century and among the Anabaptists. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, it was institutionalized in the writings and practice of so-called peace churches: the Mennonites, the Quakers, and the Brethren.

Nonresistance characterized the thought of leaders in the early-nineteenth-century peace societies of the United States. It was officially recognized as ground for exemption under the conscription systems of the Civil War and World War I. Many of the Mennonites and Brethren who immigrated to the United States late in the nineteenth century at least partly sought to escape conscription abroad. Traditional nonresistance implied not only the repudiation of violence and warfare but, frequently, dissociation from government, based as it seemed to be on physical force.

Pacifism, has been a way of life for individuals and religious sects, and it has characterized peace organizations founded in the wake of wars. The first peace groups started after the Napoleonic wars, notably the American Peace Society (1828). It was the basis of the Garrisonian New England Non-Resistance Society, founded in 1838 by abolitionists and others dissatisfied with the moderate position of the American Peace Society, and of the Universal Peace Union, founded in 1866 by Alfred A. Love following the collapse of peace societies during the Civil War. ….

Mohandas K. Gandhi was another great modern pacifist. Gandhi led a high-profile life dedicated to political and social reform through nonviolence.

Passive resistance, according to Gandhi, had to be supplemented by an active effort to understand and respect adversaries. In an atmosphere of respect, people could find peaceful, creative solutions.

Martin Luther King #

As a theologian, Martin Luther King reflected often on his understanding of nonviolence. “True pacifism,” or “nonviolent resistance,” a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love”.

King was introduced to Henry David Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience. King was “fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system”

Gandhi, King later wrote, was the first person to transform Christian love into a powerful force for social change. Gandhi’s stress on love and nonviolence gave King “the method for social reform that I had been seeking” (King, Stride, 79).

While intellectually committed to nonviolence, King did not experience the power of nonviolent direct action first-hand until the start of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. During the boycott, King personally enacted Gandhian principles. King came to understand how nonviolence could become a way of life, applicable to all situations. King called the principle of nonviolent resistance the

“guiding light of our movement. Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method” (Papers 5:423).

King’s notion of nonviolence had six key principles. First, one can resist evil without resorting to violence. Second, nonviolence seeks to win the “friendship and understanding” of the opponent, not to humiliate him (King, Stride, 84). Third, evil itself, not the people committing evil acts, should be opposed. Fourth, those committed to nonviolence must be willing to suffer without retaliation as suffering itself can be redemptive. Fifth, nonviolent resistance avoids “external physical violence” and “internal violence of spirit” as well: “The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him” (King, Stride, 85). The resister should be motivated by love in the sense of the Greek word agape, which means “understanding,” or “redeeming good will for all men” (King, Stride, 86). The sixth principle is that the nonviolent resister must have a “deep faith in the future,” stemming from the conviction that “The universe is on the side of justice” (King, Stride, 88).

“Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end.

“We maintained the hope while transforming the hate of traditional revolutions into positive nonviolent power. As long as the hope was fulfilled there was little questioning of nonviolence.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. The beauty of nonviolence is that in its own way and in its own time it seeks to break the chain reaction of evil” (King, Where, 62–63).

Nelson Mandela #

Nelson Mandela is another noble leader who adopted the philosopy of passive resistance.

While his early actions were against white power infrastructure, it did not involve killing people.

War and Peace contains everything - the intimate and the historical, the psychological and the philosophical, the daily texture of life and the massive impersonal movements of nations at war. Families eat dinner and argue about inheritance while armies march across frozen rivers. Women negotiate marriages in drawing rooms while men die by thousands in fields. Tolstoy refuses to let you look away from either scale, insists both matter equally, and the book’s impossible length is him refusing to simplify what actually happened when individual human lives intersected with historical catastrophe.

Evaluation #

Historical Accuracy

David A. Bell – NYRB in An Unlikely Life claims Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is a biopic that manages to omit or distort most of the central elements of Napoleon’s life and career.

Peter McPhee, Emeritus professor, The University of Melbourne maintains Ridley Scott is calling on us historians to ‘get a life’ – and he has a point. Art is about more than historical facts.

How should historians respond to creative works about history? Do historians have a public responsibility to apply their specialist knowledge to contest spurious claims about the past? Or should they simply respect creative licence, and let audiences have their fun?

Historical accuracy matters. But more important for historians should be whether creative works pass the test of authenticity: whether a creative work “rings true” to the historical context as a whole.

My objection centres around the glorification of a warmonger for the sake of war. While Napoleon made significant contributions to history, he did it with the sacrifice of thousands of Europe’s young men for his own kudos.

There can be no doubt Napoleon was an inspiring leader who radically altered the course of history by liberating peoples from the power of existing monarchs. His law reforms still endure today across Europe. His time in Egypt began the archeological digs with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone allowing us a window into the world’s oldest and longest dynasties. He reportedly said:

“The months in Egypt were the happiest in my life.”

He immortalised the classical art and sculpture of Classical Greece and Rome. However he did it by raiding, pillaging the spoils of his conquests in Egypt, Austria, Italy and the Vatican relocating it to a new venue, The Louve in Paris.

By the time of his defeat at Waterloo in 1815 he had depopulated 80% of able bodied young men in Europe. Not a good legacy.

Most of the damage in the world has been to feed the egos of great men: Gilgamesh, Agamemnon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hannibal, King Henry VIII, Charles V, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Putin, Trump… I may have missed a few.