On War and Peace

Some thoughts after finishing Tolstoy’s War and Peace:

1. The sheer number of aristrocatic parties and balls featured in the book was mind-boggling. The peasants and aam-aadmi perspectives are conspicuously absent.
2. Tolstoy goes to great lengths to dismiss the ‘Great Man of History’ theory. For him, its sheer foolishness to describe historical events as grand narratives driven by particular individuals.
3. The level of detail with which Tolstoy describes the Battle of Austerlitz and the Battle of Borodino was damn impressive. The former was also stunningly portrayed in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon released last year.
4. A family tree of the main characters was handy to get going with the novel.
5. I’m not sure if a book like this would have found a publisher today – too many digressions and philosophical ramblings (an entire section of the Epilogue is devoted to the idea of Free Will).
6. Tolstoy’s depiction of love, longing and marriage is probably what makes this a masterpiece. But in his own personal life, he was anything but a good husband (more on this soon).
7. The Siege of Moscow by Napoleon’s forces and life in the city during the French occupation was a standout section. The depiction of a deserted Moscow as a beehive bereft of its Queen Bee was THE paragraph of the work. Reproducing it here in full:

Meanwhile Moscow was empty. Some people were still there – up to one in fifty of the inhabitants had stayed behind – but in essence it was empty. It was as empty as a dying beehive with no queen. All life has gone from a hive without a queen. Yet a superficial glance at that kind of hive suggests it has as much life as any other. Under the hot rays of the midday sun the bees circulate just as happily round a queenless hive as they do round other hives that still have life; at a distance it still smells of honey, and the bees fly in and out just the same. Yet you only have to watch it for a while to see there is no life there. The flight of the bees is not the same as in living hives; the beekeeper is met with a smell and sounds that are different. When the beekeeper taps on the wall of a sick hive, instead of getting an immediate and unanimous response in the ominous lifting of stings and the buzzing of bees in their tens of thousands as they fan their racing wings into a healthy, living roar, he is greeted by a desultory buzzing from odd corners of an empty hive. The entrance no longer gives off a heady whiff of sweet-smelling honey and venom; there is no smell of fulness from within. The scent of honey intermingles with an odour of emptiness and decay. There are no guards round the entrance raising their stings, sounding the alarm, ready to die in defence of the hive. Gone is the low, even tenor of toil that sounds like water on the boil; all you hear is the broken, desultory noisiness of nothing. Long, black, honey-smeared scavenger-bees fly in and out, timid and shifty; instead of stinging they sneak away at the first sight of danger. Where once they flew in with nectar and flew out empty, now they fly out with honey. The beekeeper opens the lowest section and peers into the bottom of the hive. Instead of clusters of fat black bees clinging to each other’s legs, subdued by their hard toil and hanging down to the floor while they work away with a ceaseless murmur to draw out the wax, sleepy, desiccated bees listlessly roam the roof and walls of the hive. What should have been a floor nicely polished with glue and swept clean by bees’ wings is now a spattering of wax, excrement, bees in their last throes waggling their legs, and dead bees that haven’t been cleared away.

Moscow was not like Berlin, Vienna and other cities that emerged unscathed from the enemy occupation. The difference was that her inhabitants, instead of welcoming the French with the keys of the city and the traditional bread and salt, preferred to walk away.

The novel’s sheer size was why I kept procrastinating from reading it. Now, having begun the year with it and finishing it in 20 days, I’m mentally ready for the other massive 500+ page-tomes that need to be tackled! 🙂

Image Source: (Simon Haisell’s year-long War and Peace Slow Read group)