Our Second Meeting

We had our second group meeting on Sunday. We met at the Bottleworks again, and we discussed up to page 820 in the novel.

Among the topics discussed: Natasha's age when she attends her coming-out ball; a comparison of the character arcs of Andrei and Pierre; the wolf hunt; War and Peace as an epic; its possible similarities to Moby-Dick in that regard; whether it's still true, if indeed it ever was, that leaders have no real control over large-scale human events, as Tolstoy asserts; and various other topics that slip my mind at the moment (perhaps my fellow group members could chime in if I missed something noteworthy).

I think my favorite turn in the discussion was when we looked at this wonderful passage in which Tolstoy, describing the various generals who comprise the war council, identifies them by their national characters, which he distinguishes on the basis of why each is self-assured:

...only Germans can be self-assured on the basis of an abstract idea—science, that is, an imaginary knowledge of the perfect truth. A Frenchman is self-assured becasue he considers himself personally, in mind as well as in body, irresistibly enchanting for men as well as women. An Englishman is self-assured on the grounds that he is an citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore, as an Englishman, he always knows what he must do, and knows that everything he does as an Englishman is unquestionably good. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and others. A Russian is self-assured precisely because he does not know anything and does not want to know anything, because he does not believe it possible to know anything fully. (639)

Tolstoy is almost entirely uninterested in Americans, but of course we had to ask the question: Why are Americans self-assured?

At first we thought maybe it had to do with military might, but then we decided that wasn't it. Americans are self-assured, we decided, because they believe that anything is possible (even when it manifestly isn't). It's why, according to the Swedish coach of the women's World Cup soccer team, the Americans persisted in the face of seemingly fated defeat and ended up winning against Brazil. It's also why many Americans resist more progressive taxation on the wealthy, because they believe that someday they may be wealthy, too.

In any case, it was a great afternoon and a very enjoyable discussion. Although the end of the summer vacation is always a bittersweet time, our final discussion, re-scheduled for August 28th, gives me something to look forward to.

Shorthand

It's funny how "reading War and Peace" has become a kind of shorthand phrase that means "spending one's time in a worthwhile fashion" or "doing something challenging and meaningful." For example, the following passage from this blog post about a government study of how Americans spend their time:

The findings are unsurprising at first glance: time spent on the job is down from previous years (thanks to the recession), women continue to spend more time housekeeping and caring for children than men, television-watching continues to be our favorite leisure activity, and time spent reading for pleasure remains abysmal (about seventeen minutes a day on average, though the numbers vary largely by age)....

The Journal also notes that the increase in leisure time brought on by the recession hasn’t resulted, as one might think, in Americans finally getting around to all the productive things (like tackling “War and Peace”) they hadn’t had time for before, but in more television-viewing: an average of two hours and thirty-one minutes per weekday.

Why is this the case? Is it the length of the novel? The sheer investment of time and attention it requires? Or does it have something more to do with the ambitions of the novel—the way that it packs so much of life and human experience between its covers?

In some ways, it seems strange that a novel written by a Russian aristocrat almost 150 years ago should occupy this rhetorical position in our culture. Why not the complete works of Shakespeare? Or the Odyssey or the Iliad? Or Moby-Dick?

Our First Meeting

We had our first discussion this past Saturday at the Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood. We had a great time talking about the first 417 pages while drinking beer and eating elk chili. No photos were taken (an oversight on my part), and we didn't appoint anyone to take minutes. But I did want to record some impressions of the conversation. This post is by no means a transcript, but instead a riff on our discussion and two essays on Tolstoy by Isaiah Berlin that I read in the days following the discussion.

Early on, Jim R. made reference to the distinction between foxes and hedgehogs, a dichotomy that has been associated with Tolstoy ever since the publication in 1953 of Isaiah Berlin's celebrated essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (which you can read here, and which is also available in book form and in this volume).

Berlin begins by quoting from the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Berlin uses this fragment to classify writers. The foxes pursue many interests and present a multifarious world without needing to bend their observations to a single unitary vision. The hedgehogs, on the other hand, do seek that type of unitary vision, at times even fanatically. Berlin offers Dante, Plato, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky as examples of hedgehogs; and Shakespeare, Montaigne, Balzac, and Joyce as examples of foxes.

Berlin offers the hypothesis that "Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog."

Our group marveled at Tolstoy's foxlike ability to go seemingly anywhere—from the battlefield to the drawing room to the highest realms of political and court life, as well as the most domestic scenes of family life. Despite his panoramic view of the world and the wide-angle scenes of battle he's able to provide, he is also able to zoom in on the most microscopic detail. For example, Chuck H. pointed out a great detail on page 121, when Zherkov prepares to leave on his horse and "it shifted its footing three times excitedly, not knowing which leg to start with, worked it out, and galloped off."

Details like that one that must have led Berlin to describe Tolstoy as "a creator of a world more real than life itself":

The celebrated life-likeness of every object and every person in his world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every ingredient of it in its fullest essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were ... always as a solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space—an event fully present to the senses or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and firmly articulated.

Yet Tolstoy the fox, Berlin argues, wanted to be a hedgehog. He "longed for a universal explanatory principle," and in some sense disdained his own writerly gifts which others so admired (as did Flaubert and Turgenev, for instance, both of whom disdained Tolstoy's flights into philosophical abstraction).

One feels Tolstoy's attraction to this universal, profound explanation in Andrei's near-death experience on the battlefield at Austerlitz (see the final chapter of Volume I), which, as Barbara O. noted, constitutes a remarkable epiphany. It's Andrei's abandonment of his previous search for personal glory in battle; his acceptance of his insignificance (as well as that of even the "great" Napoleon) before the infinity of the sky; his admission that "I knew nothing, nothing till now." And yet, in the end, what does he know now? Barbara wondered.

One thing seemed clear to me as a result of our discussion: that one of Tolstoy's greatest attributes as a writer is love. He loves the details of the world—for example, the horse that doesn't know in its excitement which foot it will start off with. He loves so many of the people that he's writing about, imperfect and human as they are: Pierre, Andrei, Marya, Natasha, Rostov, Denisov, and others. So I was gratified to read the following in another of Berlin's essays on Tolstoy ("Tolstoy and Enlightenment"), in which Berlin describes the "conditions of excellence in art" that Tolstoy laid out in an introduction to a Russion edition of the stories of Maupassant:

...he demanded of all writers, in the first place the possession of sufficient talent; in the second that the subject itself must be morally important; and finally that they must truly love (what was worthy of love) and hate (what was worthy of hate) in what they describe.

War and Peace, I think we all agreed after this first meeting, amply fulfills all three conditions. Tolstoy's talent seems so multifaceted and deep—and modern as well. This epic tale treats so many issues of moral importance—indeed, everything from war to peace—suggesting, for one thing, that in wartime as well as peacetime human beings do not really understand why they do what they do, cannot make sense of all the confusing and chaotic events taking place all around them, but only later fashion these experiences into narratives that, though incomplete or even false, are believed to be true. Lastly, though, I think it's Tolstoy's depth of writerly judgment that we find so enjoyable and engrossing: how much we trust that he does indeed hate what is worthy of hate and love what is worthy of love.

I'm really looking forward to the second meeting, scheduled for Saturday, July 16, at which we'll discuss pages 417-820. I hope to see you there.

Tolstoy and Contemporary American Writers

Lately I've come across a couple interesting references to Tolstoy in interviews with contemporary writers.

For example, this Lee Randall interview with Allegra Goodman:

Which leads me to comparisons drawn by Gabriel Brownstein, writing for The Millions, between yourself and Jonathan Franzen. Brownstein argued that you both wrote similar, epic novels, but that only Franzen’s was hailed as contender for the “Great American Novel” -- because he’s a man.

First of all, it’s nice to be contrasted with Jonathan Franzen. There was Jonathan Franzen’s novel and everybody else’s novel. I’m happy to be the one contrasted, if they want to pick a novel. I think his aesthetic is pretty different from mine. The [critic] made some good points about the differences.

Saying, for instance, that his prose bursts through the door while yours enters quietly.

Yes, but that is not because I am shy or female, it’s because I am interested in disappearing. Franzen [also] admires Tolstoy very much and references Tolstoy constantly throughout Freedom, but his aesthetic is very different from the disappearing negative capability of Tolstoy. His characters all sound like a very articulate Jonathan Franzen. He’s not really a disappearing sort of writer. He’s a bold brash writer. Honestly, I was very happy that a work of literary fiction was number one on the bestseller list and got that kind of attention. We’re on the same team. I applaud him.

And this, from part two of Patrick Dacey's interview with George Saunders:

I’ve started to think that this is one of the hardest and most important things a young writer can do: look at his/her heart-influences and ask, very respectfully: OK, given that this great master existed in the world, what else is there left for me to do? That is, you love (for example) Tolstoy, you give Tolstoy his due. But then you have to say: All right, given that Tolstoy has already existed, is there anything in his world-view that I might, slightly, disagree with? Is there anything that I have known and seen and felt in my life that, perhaps (sorry, maestro!) is not fully accounted for in his work? If not—well, there are other things to do in this life. If so, go for it.

For example, I remember reading Hemingway and loving his work so much—but then at some point, realizing that my then-current life (or parts of it) would not be representable via his prose style. Living in Amarillo, Texas, working as a groundsman at an apartment complex, with strippers for pals around the complex, goofball drunks recently laid off from the nuclear plant accosting me at night when I played in our comical country band, a certain quality of West Texas lunatic-speak I was hearing, full of way off-base dreams and aspirations—I just couldn’t hear that American in Hem-speak. And that kind of moment is gold for a young writer: the door starts to open, just a crack.

As a literary model and inspiration, Tolstoy, it seems, is alive and well in the imaginations of contemporary American writers. I particularly like Goodman's point about Tolstoy's negative capability—his talent, that is, for disappearing as a writer and seeming to let his characters speak for themselves and live independent of his authorial domination.

Family and Freedom

In Part One of the Epilogue, Tolstoy gradually shifts his attention from the political and historical to the domestic. Andrei having died (after being reborn at least twice), the two remaining male seekers—Pierre and Nikolai—find fulfilling lives within the context of families that they create with their wives and children.

The general opinion was that Pierre was under his wife's heel, and in fact it was so. From the very first day of their marriage, Natasha had announced her demands. Pierre was very surprised by his wife's view, which was completely new to him, that every minute of his life belonged to her and the family; Pierre was surprised by his wife's demands, but was flattered by them and submitted to them. (1156)

Natasha reciprocates with her own submission: "At home Natasha put herself on the footing of her husband's slave" (1156).

These characters thus seem to exemplify the idea that I explored in that graduate school essay (mentioned in this earlier post), the idea that “freedom necessarily involves some submission or surrender, either to a human community or to a powerful God"; or, as D. H. Lawrence puts it, that “It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be.”

Given that Tolstoy eventually comes to reject as illusory the very notion of individual freedom, these characters' submission or surrender to their family lives seems to be part of a profound statement by Tolstoy about human life: Since one is never really free, true freedom consists in choosing that to which one will be bound.

Of all the lives that his characters have chosen to bind themselves to (lives of military or political service, lives of vice and dissipation, lives of societal gossip and scheming), Tolstoy strives to show us in the epilogue that family life can be the most fulfilling of all.

This familial devotion becomes a type of filial piety, exemplified in the adults' forbearance of Countess Rostov in her rather annoying dotage:

Everyone in the house understood the old woman's condition, though no one ever spoke of it, and everyone made every possible effort to satisfy her needs.... they said that she had already finished her business in life, that all of her was not in that which could be seen in her now, that we would all be the same, and that it was a joy to submit to her, to restrain oneself for the sake of this being, once so dear, once as full of life as we, and now so pathetic. Memento mori.... (1163)

The submission to family life, as Tolstoy depicts it here, creates relationships that lend meaning to life (Nikolai says he always feels as if he's "lost and can't do anything" (1152) whenever he's away from Marya or fighting with her), that provide structure for the rearing of children and the care of the old.

And thus, I think, it makes sense that the final sentence of the novel is this: "[I]n the present case, it is ... necessary to renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we do not feel" (1215). Though we may be tempted to believe that happiness is to be found in shaking off all duties and claims on us that seem to take away our autonomy, in fact we are never autonomous. The best we can do is find something deep and meaningful to bind ourselves to. In the intertwined stories of Natasha, Pierre, Nikolai, and Marya, Tolstoy suggests how family may be the best avenue for doing so.

Tolstoy, History, and Freedom

One of the major themes of Tolstoy's novel, one that he returns to vigorously throughout the final third of the novel (and especially in the second part of the Epilogue) is, essentially, an attack on the "great man" theory of history.

Tolstoy asserts that historians have gotten it all wrong by focusing on history from the top down:

To study the laws of history, we must change completely the object of observation, leave kings, ministers, and generals alone, and study the uniform, infinitesimal elements that govern the masses. No one can tell to what extent it is given to man to achieve in this way an understanding of the laws of history; but it is obvious that the possibility of grasping historical laws lies only on this path, and that on this path human reason has not yet made one millionth of those efforts the historians have made in describing the deeds of various kings, commanders, and ministers, and in setting forth their reflections on the occasion of those deeds. (823)

Why should we leave kings, ministers, and generals alone? Because, in Tolstoy's view, those people have the least to do with why history unfolds in the way it does. Though kings, ministers, and generals may feel that their efforts and orders are the driving forces of historical events and mass movements, Tolstoy sees those with "power" as merely pawns of much larger forces, figures whose prominence puts them in "the center of a most complex play of intrigues, cares, dependency, power, projects, advice, threats, deceptions"; meanwhile, "Imperceptibly, moment by moment, an event is carved into its meaning" (825).

The passive voice here is telling, for Tolstoy's vision is one that I am tempted to call historical fatalism. According to Tolstoy, although Napoleon may have given countless orders, the only ones that could make any difference were the ones that the larger historical forces and the masses of human beings involved allowed to be carried out, "just as in stencilling, some figure or other gets painted, not depending on the direction or manner in which the paint is applied, but because the figure cut out of the stencil is smeared in all directions with paint" (1196). In other words, it didn't really matter how Napoleon smeared his paint; the eventual design was preordained by the stencil of history. Why did the stencil have that preordained design? Tolstoy considers the answer to that question beyond human knowability.

Tolstoy goes further, investigating the very nature of the idea of freedom (and surely Jonathan Franzen must have been thinking of this part of the novel when he was writing and titling his 2010 novel Freedom) and, finally, rejecting the notion that we as individuals are free. Although in the moment we may feel that we are free to do as we please, Tolstoy notes that, as time passes and we look back at a particular action (especially ones that occur in concert with other human beings), we realize that there were countless circumstances that influenced our action.

In any case, I think that, especially in academia, the "great man" theory of history has largely been abandoned. Academic historians now are much more likely, it seems to me, to accept Tolstoy's vision and to look for larger forces to explain the movements of history, or to try to get a sense of the role that the masses of people played—instead of focusing on the kings and ministers and generals.

I was talking about this with the father of one of my daughter's friends the other day (he's a graduate student in American literature and bio-politics, and one might call him a New Historicist), and he pointed out a couple problems with this trend in academic history:

1) It seems to leave out the possibility of human agency and, with it, the possibility that individuals (whether leaders or not) can actually effect change. If we're not free and leaders are the least free of all, then why bother struggling to elect leaders we think will be good? Why bother with anything?

2) As Jill Lepore has apparently argued in one of her books, it leaves the story of history's "great men" to be told by popular historians—or even by demagogues like Glenn Beck and the pseudo-historians of the Tea Party. And since the mass audience has a great appetite for the story of history's great men (e.g., the Founding Fathers), whoever controls the narratives about these figures can potentially control an important political instrument.

Tolstoy's theories are also making me second-guess this piece I wrote in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden. In my essay, I credit President Obama for accomplishing something that President Bush did not. I argue that bin Laden was killed because Obama made it a priority and Bush did not. I believe the evidence bears out the latter part of that claim, but would Tolstoy reject the first part of it? In other words, would Tolstoy say that it didn't matter what Obama or Bush ordered because the pre-cut stencil of history is what it is regardless of the orders of leaders?

Climbing the Mountain

I finished the book on Monday. I do feel that I've climbed a mountain, especially when I look at the slope on this graph of my reading progress, generated by goodreads.

Here were the benchmark dates in my reading of the novel:

2/16 page 8

2/21 page 52

2/24 page 112

3/03 page 200

3/09 page 303

3/11 page 347

3/17 page 418

3/21 page 503

3/25 page 603

3/31 page 700

4/09 page 800

4/15 page 901

4/21 page 987

4/28 page 1075

5/01 page 1129

5/02 page 1215