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Moments of Truth

In a celebrated passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a girl is dancing – a young girl not yet out of her teens. She is an aristocrat, a countess from St Petersburg, and she is visiting the village home of a distant relative whom she calls her uncle. He is a jovial character who lives with a serf woman, Anisya, who has prepared a rustic banquet for the hunting party. The girl is Natasha, the heroine of Tolstoy’s novel. She is filled with an ingenuous enthusiasm for life and is enchanted by this sudden slice of bucolic living, so far removed from genteel city circles. After the meal she is enchanted by the sound of the balalaika. At the introductory chord to a folk-dance, ‘Uncle’ genially commands her to dance it. She has never done such a thing before, but she flings off her shawl, sets her arms akimbo, makes the preparatory motion with her shoulders, and proceeds to perform the dance to perfection, to the amazement of her audience – and, it seems, of the author.

Where, how, and when could this young countess, who had had a French emigrée for governess, have imbibed from the Russian air she breathed the spirit of that dance? . . . Her performance was so perfect that Anisya Fyodorovna . . . had tears in her eyes, though she laughed as she watched the slender, graceful countess, reared in silks and velvets, in another world than hers, who was yet able to understand all that was in Anisya, and in Anisya’s father and mother and aunt, and in every Russian man and woman.

In another famous passage in War and Peace the cold and distant aide-de-camp Prince Andrey Bolkonsky lies wounded, in and out of consciousness, during the Battle of Austerlitz, having just rescued his battalion’s standard. As evening advances, he gazes up at the loftiness of the sky as if he had never seen it before. Three riders approach. ‘C’est une belle mort,’ says one of them, looking down on what he assumes to be the corpse of the soldier who had carried the standard. One of the others replies, addressing the first as Sire, and Bolkonsky understands that the man he is now looking up at is Napoleon, whom he actually reveres more than his own tsar.

But he heard the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly . . . Napoleon seemed to him such a

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In a celebrated passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a girl is dancing – a young girl not yet out of her teens. She is an aristocrat, a countess from St Petersburg, and she is visiting the village home of a distant relative whom she calls her uncle. He is a jovial character who lives with a serf woman, Anisya, who has prepared a rustic banquet for the hunting party. The girl is Natasha, the heroine of Tolstoy’s novel. She is filled with an ingenuous enthusiasm for life and is enchanted by this sudden slice of bucolic living, so far removed from genteel city circles. After the meal she is enchanted by the sound of the balalaika. At the introductory chord to a folk-dance, ‘Uncle’ genially commands her to dance it. She has never done such a thing before, but she flings off her shawl, sets her arms akimbo, makes the preparatory motion with her shoulders, and proceeds to perform the dance to perfection, to the amazement of her audience – and, it seems, of the author.

Where, how, and when could this young countess, who had had a French emigrée for governess, have imbibed from the Russian air she breathed the spirit of that dance? . . . Her performance was so perfect that Anisya Fyodorovna . . . had tears in her eyes, though she laughed as she watched the slender, graceful countess, reared in silks and velvets, in another world than hers, who was yet able to understand all that was in Anisya, and in Anisya’s father and mother and aunt, and in every Russian man and woman.

In another famous passage in War and Peace the cold and distant aide-de-camp Prince Andrey Bolkonsky lies wounded, in and out of consciousness, during the Battle of Austerlitz, having just rescued his battalion’s standard. As evening advances, he gazes up at the loftiness of the sky as if he had never seen it before. Three riders approach. ‘C’est une belle mort,’ says one of them, looking down on what he assumes to be the corpse of the soldier who had carried the standard. One of the others replies, addressing the first as Sire, and Bolkonsky understands that the man he is now looking up at is Napoleon, whom he actually reveres more than his own tsar.
But he heard the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly . . . Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between his own soul and that lofty, limitless firmament with the clouds flying over it . . . He was only glad that people were standing near, and his only desire was that these people should help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so beautiful now, now that he had learned to see it differently.
He manages to move his leg and utter a groan. Napoleon immediately orders him to be given medical treatment – which saves his life. These two scenes each produced a profound impression on me when I first sampled War and Peace in the 1957 Penguin edition at the age of 13. Our English master had informed the class that our households were not properly furnished unless they contained the King James Bible, the Works of Shakespeare and War and Peace. Two years later I read War and Peace properly. Hundreds of scenes impressed me, though at the time it was the two scenes I have described that produced the biggest impact. I wanted to marry Natasha. As I couldn’t, I decided I would at least marry a Russian. Eventually I did. And then BBC Radio 4’s marvellous adaptation of War and Peace on New Year’s Day 2015 prompted me to reread the novel and to marvel anew. Each passage cited above is about life. Each describes an epiphany in which the character experiences a life truth. Natasha seizes a moment in which the genetic memory in her bursts into flower and she feels life on her pulses and in her limbs and whole body. The dance is literally in her blood. Or, putting it another way, it’s an expression of her soul – the Russian soul. The wounded Andrey sees life as he never saw it before. The world is as beautiful for him as it is for Natasha and he wants to be alive in it. Peace and war are the settings, but both these scenes describe life-changing, life-affirming moments. This is where the title of the novel is so important. The title Tolstoy finally settled on was taken from the political theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s book La Guerre et La Paix (1861), a title which means precisely what it says and no more. But when Tolstoy completed and published the final version of his novel Voyna i mir in 1869, the word mir carried a number of connotations and meanings, including a slightly obsolete one referring to society, mankind. In this sense the word could mean, roughly speaking, humanity. Tolstoy’s novel is concerned not merely with war and the cessation of war, it is about human beings, all mankind, for whom war is a vast muddle, which is the curse of society. It is about the triumph of the human spirit in time of war; and the side that wins the war is the side that displays the stronger spirit. Natasha’s dance and Andrey’s sudden understand-ing of what matters are triumphant leaps of the human spirit: each results in an inner joy, a peace. War and Peace is written with a realism which is unprecedented in Russian literature. Tolstoy can persuade his readers of anything, irrespective of the truth or otherwise of his narrative. The truth is in the massive energy of the writing, awesome and terrifying. In the first scene just described Tolstoy is asking us to believe in genetic memory, which allows an impeccably bred and ultra-refined aristocrat – also a slip of a girl – without the necessary rustic upbringing or tuition, or even a moment’s pause for reflection or rehearsal, spontaneously to perform the dance to perfection and to the astonishment and admiration of both the onlookers of her own class and the serfs from whose lives and culture she is so far removed. We accept Natasha’s dance because the author allows us no other explanation, and because it says something about ourselves and why as individuals we can transcend our circumstances and overcome history. By the end of the reign of Catherine the Great Russian society had become fractured, the nobility apeing French manners and dress, addressing each other in French, and slipping into Russian only when addressing their servants or giving way to impulse and emotion. Natasha’s dance heals the fracture. As she dances, society is seamless again (this is the reverberation in Orlando Figes’s choice of the title Natasha’s Dance for his cultural history of Russia, 2002). The dance epitomizes the unquenchable Russian spirit which Tolstoy believed, rather than tactics and battles, made it possible for Russia to win the war against the French. You can work outwards from this scene to embrace the entire meaning of the novel, which is not only about survival but about how one should behave, how one should live. Writing about Maupassant Tolstoy once said that the novelist must have a clear idea about what is good and what is bad, and the moral concerns of War and Peace, all part of plot, people and style, are what contribute to its tremendous impact. In the Austerlitz scene Prince Bolkonsky learns to live, to want to live, and to see what he has not seen before. He is given a glimpse of infinity, a glance at God. Easy to argue that in his weak and wounded state what he experiences is a mere trick of the brain, a near-death experience at the edge of consciousness. But the scene convinces because of the writing and its cinematic power to let you look through the eyes of the supine soldier. Later in the novel, when Bolkonsky does die after wounds received at Borodino, the epiphany is completed. This time the hero-worshipper of Napoleon, again seeing his hero face to face and now actually facing death, has learned a truth which deprives him of words when Napoleon asks him how he is feeling: ‘Gazing into Napoleon’s eyes, Prince Andrey mused on the unimportance of greatness, the unimportance of life, which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.’ Wilfred Owen once famously wrote that he ‘saw God through mud’, the mud-cracked faces of the Great War trenches.
War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.
The troubled characters of Tolstoy’s novel, troubled because they are essentially good people, have found glory and laughter in the end, arising out of war. They have found peace.

*

It was in 1862, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the pivotal Battle of Borodino, that Tolstoy discovered the key to the final form his novel would take – in Victor Hugo’s five-volume Les Misérables. Here he found the epic digressiveness and the lyrical, historical and political mix that would give his own work its unique character and transcend the novelistic genre. To Hugo, Napoleon represented the highest expression of the human spirit, whereas Tolstoy saw him as the lowest. He simply couldn’t bring himself to believe that an arrogant upstart such as Napoleon could control the destinies of nations, and he convinced himself instead that the higher a man rises in the chain of command, the less depends on him or on his will. Opposed to Napoleon is Kutuzov, the pacifist and fatalist, who believes that things will follow their predestined course. Tolstoy portrays him as humble and unaffected, free from Napoleon’s massive vanity. By the time War and Peace was written, Tolstoy’s beliefs had crystallized into a philosophy of fatalism under Providence. We see a similar situation in the Iliad, where the destinies of men and nations are already decided, and, despite all the struggles of individuals and armies, events will unfold according to Olympus. Reading War and Peace with its many complex strata of life and interwoven stories of aristocratic families, you can see Tolstoy working out his view of men as rather like ants or bees, crawling about the surface of the earth, and here there is another parallel with Homer’s cosmic eye and the view taken by gods both merciless and benign. Tolstoy himself said of War and Peace that it was not a novel, even less a poem, and still less a historical chronicle. His aim was to teach by boldly blurring the lines between history and fiction in order to get closer to the truth. He realized, like Plato, that literature is more philosophical than history and therefore more true, even as it departs from mere fact. It was Tolstoy, furthermore, who brought a new kind of consciousness to the novel, with his godlike ability to hover over and within actions and characters, his cinematic use of detail, and the techniques of panning, wide shots, close-ups and aerial artistry, in dramatizing battles or ballrooms. In fact these devices are as old as Homer – take away his hexameters and you find startlingly novelistic and modern techniques. There is something Homeric, too, in the freshness and vigour of Tolstoy’s symbols drawn from the natural world. But they go beyond Homer’s epic similes in their many-sidedness and completeness. A remarkable example is the massive and ancient oak tree seen by Prince Andrey when he is visiting his son’s estate, and is weary of Tolstoy at work shortly before his death in 1910 life. As he looks at the oak he sees an image of himself, gnarled and scarred and grim, spurning the spring sunlight, an image of hopelessness. But one night soon afterwards he overhears Natasha talking excitedly. She is thrilled by the beauty of the moon and wants to fly up into the sky; and when he looks at the oak a little later, on a return visit, it is transfigured. ‘There was nothing to be seen now of knotted fingers and scars, of old doubts and sorrows. Through the rough, century-old bark, even where there were no twigs, leaves had sprouted, so juicy, so young, that it was hard to believe the aged veteran had borne them.’ The veteran is a metaphor, and Andrey is now in love with the young girl who wanted to fly into the sky. Homer’s gods exult in the spectacle of mass slaughter; there is a scene in the Iliad in which Zeus settles down to watch a battle as a man would a football match between his two favourite teams. Tolstoy as omniscient narrator of battles is godlike, and there is no gainsaying his full-on descriptions of the carnage. Unlike Homer, however, he states his own position unambiguously through Prince Andrey: ‘War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern and serious . . . Its aim and end is murder.’ Tolstoy’s god looks down and does not approve, while Tolstoy himself suggests that mankind is a failed project of the universe, prefiguring by half a century the shattering of faith that came in the wake of the two World Wars. He believed that one can’t live in the world as it is, it has got to be changed, so in spite of its patriotism and its religious acceptance and all else, War and Peace is a revolutionary novel.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 53 © Christopher Rush 2017


About the contributor

Christopher Rush has been writing for over 30 years. His books include To Travel Hopefully and Hellfire and Herring, and Will, a novel about Shakespeare. His latest novel, Penelope’s Web, was published in 2015.

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