The Beauty of knowing (2): Napoleon’s war and Tolstoy’s peace
‘Napoleon’, and everyone imagines an extraordinary hero (at least I did), but I say, read War and Peace; when someone says ‘Napoleon’ you will say ‘That clown’!
For starters, War and Peace is a novel (though the author does not call it so and he has every reason not to), and a BIIIG one! But big and small have no meaning unless they are relative, so just for the sake of comparision: the number of words in War and Peace is around seven and a half times more than the word count of the first part of Harry Potter. It comprises 17 books (sub-sections). See, it’t not merely huge, it’s humunguous! And it is considered one of the finest work of all time and rightly so. I had heard of the author before; apparently he was one among an awesome threesome! Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw and Rabindranath Tagore were the three bearded writers! But it was through Mahatma Gandhi (his autobiograhy) that I came to know more about Tolstoy than that he had a beard! In fact, Gandhi had such respect for Tolstoy that he named the self-sustaining farm he lived in while in South Africa, Tolstoy Farm. It intrigued me so much that I decided to undertake the Herculian task of reading his apparently unreadably long work!
Well, to be completely honest, it was not at all what I had expected, for, shouldn’t a novel have a sory? This one seemed not to have any distinct one. One story line starts and before you know it a bunch of other story lines come forth and you have to wait a while to get back to the former one. And that is not all! In no other novel have I seen new characters keep being introduced till the very end (only half way through did I find out, while accidentally glancing at the back cover, that it had over 500 characters!) As if all this were not enough, I had to deal with another major factor: digression! Till then I had had to deal with this much digression only in ‘MoDick’ and ‘The Mill on the Floss’, but this was of an altogether different kind. Here, it was not explanations or ruminations going on and on and somehow riveted back to the story, no, here the digressions were plain and frank. The novel just split into three distinct streams: Story, history and philosophy. They were so seperate that, if, say chapter 4 of book 11 dealt with history, you could simply skip that chapter all together and jump on to the story chapter, so to say, and you would not have lost anything! And about philosophy, this gentleman has dedicated a complete epilogue (yes, this novel has two epilogues, the 16th and 17th book) to his philosophy. But beleive me, skipping either philosophy or history part would not be a smart thing to do! I realized it only half way through the novel. Till then whenever these digressions came, though I read each word, I was annoyed all the same, for this was not what a novel was. After I got used to his digressions, annoyance gave way to respect towards the man. I cannot imagine the amount of hard work he must have put in to collect and organize the historic facts; after the end of the novel, from the few words he had spoken about his work, I found that, whenever a historic (non-fictional) character spoke he had used the actual words used the living man itself. The amount of study he would have had to make! It was in those few words that I also found that Tolstoy himself accepted War and Peace was no novel but “what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.”
About the skeleton of the novel, the whole story revolves around the exploits of Napoleon between 1805 and 1812. The crux of the plot surrounds Napoleon’s march from Paris to Moscow and thus centered in 1812. The whole novel is from the Russian perspective, for, Tolstoy was Russian. But it’s not one sided, not even close (Russian soldiers or French soldiers, all were human beings). Tolstoy ruthlessly mocks the members of the highest echelon of society (belonging to both sides), the nothingness of political ambition (the whole concept of ambition, in fact), the foolishness of doing huge wrongs and simply justifying them as for the common good (though, nothing like that exists, except in fancy) and shows “human dignity- which tells me that each of us is, if not more, at least not less a man than the great Napoleon”. As he rightly points out, the higher one gets, the less free he becomes.
As far as his philosophy is concerned, it deals a lot with cause-and-effect and free will and how one is absurd without the other. Also, he ridicules history and historians throuh and through. Did not I say I think Napoleon a clown? Does not history say he is a great hero? There, see, how effectively Tolstoy has convinced me! Well, he is definitely right, too. I am reading this mammoth historical work of Toynbee (Somervel’s abridgement, of course!). He claims to accomplish this that no other historian has yet accomplished: reconcile the macrocosm with the microcosm, and I must say, he definitely has so far (I am almost at the end of the first volume) not managed to convince me in the least. It’s because the view of Tolstoy makes more sense. Each life is a continium on it’s own and no one is a vampire with mind reading powers to completely divine one’s doings; history is an interplay of multitude of such continiums in addition to multitudes of other factors across both space and time. How can history (which ought to concentrate on facts at various instants) make sense trying to thread the dots to comprehend the continium in the microcosm level? Well, Tolstoy goes to such an extent that, through his novel he has proven how, Napoleon, a historic “genius”, is a clown (he does not explicitly say so) and how, the Russian commander General, a man dispised both Russian an French historians as an imbecile, is the one who did his duty in accordance to his conscience and not for popularity.
Coming to the story part of the novel, Tolstoy simply excels in the way he handles social interactions. In ‘The Age of Innocence’, if potrayal of balls (today’s clubs, so to say, only, imagine a less chaotic and more be-polite-and-maintain-your-dignity set-up) and dinners are given A, to Tolstoy’s I give A+. Also, there is love, heart breaks, comedy, tragedy and so on. The cental charactar (who himself only figures in around half the novel) matures through the whole novel. At one stage he thinks he is the ‘chosen one’ to destroy Napoleon, only to be later disillusioned a simple farmer (the ideal Tolstoy man) who lives the present and leaves the rest to God. But, coming to the war part, if you are someone who is watching ‘Game of Thrones’ and think that is how wars are fought, you are in for a big surprise. I had it when I watched ‘Band of Brothers’. And since reality is no match for fantacy in terms of riveting one’s interest, it is bound to be boring. But get over it, and probably you will understand that there is more to life than an American Dream.
In conclusion I must add that it is funny to think all the Peace Tolstoy stands for is being breached time and again patriotism. The first effect of Nationalism on the global scale was effected this very Napoleon. Around seventy years later Tolstoy published this work, and around the same time Germany became a Nation state (seperated from Austria) and around seventy years later, it wanted nothing more than a ‘place in the sun’, which led to the world war two and now, around seventy years later, still every Nation state wants a place in the sun and takes pride in competing for it. So, it will only be fitting to end with another bearded buddy’s (Bernard Shaw) two quotes:
1. Patriotism is, fundamentally, the conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.
2. We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
