I read War and Peace about 1 year ago and it was life changing. It helped me piece together, validate, much of the knowledge I slowly, gradually acquired over the past 4 years, a period of intense learning for me, and added a ton of wisdom in trying to make sense of reality.
I don’t claim to be sophisticated enough to provide a thorough critique of Leo Tolstoy’s genius. What I took from reading his 2 famed classic novels is meaningful to me and I attempt here to write a free-hand, personal interpretation of my thoughts and feelings that this amazing writer was able to stir.
The actual function of war and the quasi-deterministic nature of history is something that I was close to grasp on my own, and yet, I needed a literary master to properly explain it to me.
Facts and figures of the Napoleonic wars are interesting enough but, what I really love, is the enchanting fictional narration, the colours and texture of the moods and souls of the characters.
After so many victories and achieving great (scabrous, criminal?) success, once in Moscow, why did Napoleon make such crucial mistakes as not fully owning the city and leaving at the wrong time? This resulted in the self-inflicted decimation of the already strained French army and, back in Paris, the eventual downfall of this tyrant hero.
War is clearly depicted as a tool of the aristocratic elite, which kept a cosy and chivalry relationship, an ethic of respect for each-other to me previously unkown, while sacrificing poor peasant soldiers and starving civilians.
The novelized nature of Tolstoy’s writing allows for a rich and very deep interpretation of the reality of the time. This historical period, the drivers and actual origin of the happenings, can’t be explained better by historians and social scientists, for whom the author has a feeling of near contempt.
This book treasures also include a well written explanation of the power of emotions, the goodness and pureness of feelings that distinguish the nature of some of the characters and of humans at large.
It covers the fascinating, if often vacuous social environment of the higher classes of the time, the politics, intrigues, alliances, loves and drivers of those in power.
The book also validates my own intuition, the complex, holistic notion of the psychological or soul nature of much illness. The importance of the placebo effect, the soothing of emotional support vs the mechanistic and ineffectual treatments of scientific medicine and doctors, a caste-like group of people that is rather diminished in Tolstoy’s view.
Here a passage from Book Nine:
“Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs.
This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But, above all, that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful, as in fact they were to the whole Rostov family.
Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible, as they were given in small doses), but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and of those who loved her (…)”
Pierre Bezukhov might be considered the main character of the book and the chief example of how to bring to life the personality, thoughts and feelings of a character in a novel. The socially awkward, illegitimate son of a very wealthy count, he takes us through some rather amazing adventures, ultimately reaching an incredible personal transformation, a hero’s journey with a happy ending, and how marvellous that is, how satisfying!
This character’s life includes being tricked into marrying a beautiful and enchanting but cold and unloving noble-woman socialite. Helene Kuragina despises and uses him and his wealth in the most self-serving and calculating manner and meets her karma at the end of the book, freeing Pierre to marry his true love, the soulful Natasha Rostova, a vital, spontaneous, pure and loving representation of the female.
Pierre at some point joins the Freemasonry. This secretive and powerful organisation is introduced and explained in Book 6:
“He divided the Brothers he knew into four categories. In the first he put those who did not take an active part in the affairs of the lodges or in human affairs, but were exclusively occupied with the mystical science of the order: with questions of the threefold designation of God, the three primordial elements—sulfur, mercury, and salt—or the meaning of the square and all the various figures of the temple of Solomon. (…)
In the second category Pierre reckoned himself and others like him, seeking and vacillating, who had not yet found in Freemasonry a straight and comprehensible path, but hoped to do so.
In the third category he included those Brothers (the majority) who saw nothing in Freemasonry but the external forms and ceremonies, and prized the strict performance of these forms without troubling about their purport or significance. (…)
Finally, to the fourth category also a great many Brothers belonged, particularly those who had lately joined. These according to Pierre’s observations were men who had no belief in anything, nor desire for anything, but joined the Freemasons merely to associate with the wealthy young Brothers who were influential through their connections or rank, and of whom there were very many in the lodge.”
For someone like myself who is so fascinated by the search for meaning, Tolstoy resonates like a teacher, a muse, an inspiration.
I am currently at the end of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s second masterpiece, a book that touched me deeply some 15 years ago, when I read it for the first time in Italian. The English version and my grown maturity and ability to understand and contextualise it, make this wonderful piece of literary art feel like a new discovery.
I perceive this book to be chiefly about love and relationship, although it touches many aspects of society, psychology, economics, politics, religion, in all the amazing depth that characterise War and Peace.
A beautiful definition of love can be found in Part 5:
“It was only then, for the first time, that he clearly understood what he had not understood when he led her out of the church after the wedding. He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. He felt this from the agonizing sensation of division that he experienced at that instant. He was offended for the first instant, but the very same second he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was himself.”
My favourite character in Anna Karenina is Konstantin Levin, a somewhat socially awkward nobleman who loves the countryside and physical work, tries to reform agriculture and serfdom in his own estate with a all Russia and even global view. At some point in the book he desires a degree of social change and works towards this progress, but eventually finds his higher meaning in embracing the love for his wife and the simple joys of family life.
The proper understanding of social class and a rare insight into the life of aristocracy, an appreciation for the thinking of the elite, the culture and structure of 19th century European civilisation, form the basis that underpins our modern society too and it is rather invaluable to me.
My quasi-deterministic view of large social phenomena derives from reading Tolstoy much more than anything else. Individual free-will might be preserved, but the glory of individual elite leaders and benefactors, tyrants and enemies in shaping history and progress is somewhat reduced, and so it is the role of my conscious self in personal life. I found Tolstoy after learning karma in yoga and before finding existentialism, philosophies that are very dear to me.
Literature has always been close to my heart, to my soul. I started reading at an early age, thanks to my local public library and maybe, the tedious, mundane nature of my growing up environment. I remember spending hours immersed in the fantasy of adventures that reading provides.
For me reading has always been a healthy way to escape to a multitude of worlds and lives that did not belong to my own reality, but were available in the words of accomplished and enlightened authors.
As much as I read non-fiction, so much I prefer novels, both for the fun of it and for the deep learning hidden in the lives of the characters. Novels hide truths that can’t be written in a non-fiction context. So much joy and real learning has come from the parables of life described in the modern and contemporary mythology of literature, my favourite form of art. And Tolstoy, within this category of learning, is possibly my favourite master author.