Why I Love War and Peace

I love literature, especially Russian, especially from the 1840-1890s. That’s pretty clear from almost any article on this blog. I wrote over a thousand words on how Leo Tolstoy is spelled in English and looked at the Russian roots of the word ‘bistro’. Joker got compared to both Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. We, which is itself a 20th century Russian book, I compared to… Notes from Underground. It’s a great book! So, because there’s no reason I can only write about books I just finished reading, I’m going to take some time writing about books and other literature that I’ve loved and has impacted me. Be warned, they’re going to mostly be Russian novels. The first is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.  

War and Peace is about change. Why does one army rush to fight another? Why is one victorious? Why does love ignite one’s heart? Why is it extinguished? Why do we come to forgive, and why do we live? What people see as the greatest hurdle for reading War and Peace, its prodigious length, is actually its greatest strength. Tolstoy gives us time to be with the characters to watch them change, experience them have false starts and setbacks, and see them transform. And in the time it takes to read the book, we change with them, and have setbacks with them, and transform.

The plot of War and Peace is far too long to adequately summarize. It takes place over almost 20 years, long tangents about the nature of war and power, and there are hundreds of named characters. There’s not even a single main, perspective character; there are at least three, maybe even six. We meet these six main characters, Natasha, Pierre, Andrei, Nikolai, Maria, and Sonya, as young adults or teenagers living and growing amidst the strife and calamity of the Napoleonic Wars. There are times of fierce battles and cavalry charges, there are periods of mundanity and domestic cares. In certain moments, reality is revealed with startling clarity, and in others, all is distant and obscure. And all these moments are carried by the force of Tolstoy’s vivid imagery, I can still smell the gunpowder hanging in the air in the Battle of Austerlitz, and palpable emotion, in both climatic and quiet moments.

What stands out to me most clearly about War and Peace is what’s pictured on the cover of the copy I bought earlier this year: a single, old, oak tree, standing leafless and alone. It’s a powerful image that becomes a symbol for Andrei and a physical manifestation of the internal transformations that work in Andrei. I first read War and Peace the summer after graduating from college, a time of great personal change, as I transitioned to graduate school and truly moved out for the first time. The calamities and cares of my own life are, in a way, smaller than Andrei, Natasha, and Pierre’s. I’ve fought no battles, I’ve ended no engagements, I’ve never been a prisoner of war. But calamities are like gases, they expand to fill whatever life they are in. College was an unhappy time for me, and I could not help but identify with the world weary, cynical Prince Andrei we meet in Petersburg at the beginning of the novel. Andrei sees this oak as a symbol for his own life: blasted by lightning, worn beyond its years, and though rising above it all, it reaches only futility and death. But in meeting Natasha, his life is changed. When Andrei returns to the same forest, he looks for the oak but cannot find it. Unbeknownst to Andrei, he had seen the same oak, but it was robed in verdant spring, Andrei did not recognize this majestic oak for the old blasted tree he expected. And these passages, the changes that I saw in the characters I love, gave me hope that someday, beyond hope and expectation, I might see those same changes bloom in me. 

It is Pierre, though, who experiences the most profound change over the course of War and Peace. When we meet him at a soiree, Pierre is a big, bumbling, buffoon who gets drunk and ties bears to police officers before throwing both into a canal. Pierre is the big-hearted, infantile sidekick to the suave, jaded Prince Andrei. Upon his father’s death, Pierre becomes Count Bezukhov and is quickly forced into a loveless marriage by the machinations of his future father-in-law. At the same time, he’s swindled by his estate managers. To try to make some sense of his life, Pierre joins and then quits the Freemasons. As he spirals into absurdity and despair, he tries to assassinate Napoleon, is captured in a battle outside of Moscow, and is forced to march across the frozen Russian expanse. And all the while, Pierre is falling in love with the lively and equally naive Natasha. But at the end of all this turmoil, Pierre has somehow become the man he wanted to be, and the hero of the novel. He had come to an answer which filled him with peace and joy:    

Now, however, he had learned to see the great, the infinite, the eternal in everything, and therefore, in order to look at it, to enjoy his contemplation of it, he naturally discarded the telescope through which till then he had been gazing over the heads of men, and joyfully surveyed the everchanging, eternally great, unfathomable and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked, the happier and more serene he was. The awful question: What for? Which had shattered all his intellectual edifices in the past, no longer existed for him. To that question: What for? A simple answer was now always ready in his soul: because there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair of a man’s head falls. 

That awful question still perplexed me when I first read War and Peace. The second time I read it, however, I, too, had changed. Like Pierre, I was coming to joyfully survey the everchanging, eternally great, unfathomable and infinite life around me. This is why I love War and Peace. As the characters change, we come to see changes in ourselves, reaching for Peace, which is not merely the absence of war. And when we reach that peace and love, we can look back, even at the hard times, even the dark times, and we can answer with Pierre: “but if I were asked at this moment whether I would rather be what I was before I was taken prisoner, or go through that all again, my answer would be, ‘For Heaven’s sake, let me have captivity and horseflesh!’”