Crisis 22 - Section 1: A Literary Premise

War & Peace

War, Peace, & Literature - An Artful History - Anna’s Drawing Room - Rights & Balances

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War, Peace, & Literature

I’ll start this project with a Russian example of how literature can give flesh and blood to what people often see as a largely political and military situation. I’ll also argue that this little excursion into Russian literature can supply us with powerful arguments against the Kremlin and its present war in Ukraine.

The reason I say powerful is that it comes from within Russia, rather than from outside. It comes from a masterpiece that all Russians are proud of: Tolstoy’s 1869 novel War and Peace. It comes from a source that Russians can’t easily dismiss, although pro-Kremlin literary critics would of course see the novel in an opposite light. Yet in the realm of literature it’s difficult to stick doggedly to one interpretation. Perhaps my study will open a door for some Russians to rethink the present view espoused by the Kremlin. If not, it may help some Western readers see more deeply into the culture in which the Kremlin operates.

Tolstoy’s novel is also powerful because it’s great literature: Tolstoy skillfully weaves his explorations of history, national identity, and war into his characters and their lives. Which is why we can relate so easily to the way he tells the story of the Napoleonic Wars, which overlap precisely with the years covered in the novel: 1805 to 1812. For most of us, it’s alot easier to read and digest than a volume on history would be. And because we’re engaged by the interpersonal and psychological aspects of his story, we’re more open to a deeper understanding of Russian history, politics, culture, and identity. War and Peace shows us Russians in the fullness of their own context, that is, in the context of Russian feeling, thinking, and interacting, not just in the context of their political decisions and military actions.

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An Artful History

As I write these pages, I’m sitting comfortably in front of my computer in the city of Vancouver, Canada. I’m far from the Koreas, Taiwan, Sudan, Syria, and Gaza, and far from the bombed and plundered cities of Ukraine. As a result, I sometimes feel a bit like Anna Pavlovna at the start of War and Peace. Anna talks passionately about politics and war, yet from the comfort of a drawing room at which guests make good impressions and witty conversation. While Anna’s drawing room in 1805 is vastly different from our mediated world 220 years later, it helps me to see Russian history in a new light, not just in terms of dates and battles, but in terms of humans living within history.

The opening scene of War and Peace takes place in Anna’s drawing room, the elegance of which reminds us of the famous French and English salons where intellectuals and artists, wealthy ne’er-do-wells and hopeful hangers-on would meet to converse about the culture and frivolities of the day. The scene also gives us insight into a moment in Russian history that’s the reverse of today’s situation: in Anna’s drawing room the guests worry about the expansion of France; today we worry about the expansion of Russia.

The serious conversation in the drawing room is decidedly political, although at every stage it’s contextualized by the personalities and relationships of the characters. For instance, Anna is intellectual, yet her fearful emotions colour the specifics of the scene. Her question is as germane today as it was 120 years ago: “How can one be well … when one suffers morally? Is it possible to remain at ease in our time, if one has any feeling?”

Under the niceties and social expectations of the soirée is a heavy undercurrent of politics. This undercurrent eventually surfaces into a heated debate, the climax of which I’ll look at on the next page, 🇫🇷 Napoléon Avait Cinq Cent Soldats. Here I’ll look at the beginning of the debate, as well as the transition we find in the first four sections of Volume One, in which Tolstoy carefully guides us from personal feelings and social conventions to harder political realities. These harder realities are explored extensively throughout the novel, and are hinted at in the opening sections, especially when the Italian abbot Morio says, “Let a powerful state like Russia, famous for its barbarism, stand disinterestedly at the head of a union having as its purpose the balance of Europe—and it will save the world!” I’ll return to Morio’s statement below, given that it has much to say about Russia in its czarist, Soviet, and Putinesque incarnations.

It’s not coincidental that after the drawing room scene, Pierre, the young count who gets worked up in his argument with Morio, enters his friend’s library, grabs a book on political history, and starts reading. The book Pierre picks up appears to be of little consequence, for Tolstoy makes a point of saying that he grabbed the first book which caught his attention as he entered the room. Yet its title and its contents are telling: De Bello Gallico, Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars. By referring to this book, Tolstoy suggests that the timeline for Russia at this moment is Rome invades France, France invades Russia. Yet for us, the timeline is more than this. It is Rome invades France, France invades Russia, Russia invades Ukraine.

Although Pierre is reading De Bello Gallico, he doesn’t seem to be very interested in the book itself. Not only is it the first book that struck his eye, but he also starts his reading in the middle of the book! This may be Tolstoy’s way of saying that even those, like Pierre, who get excited by political debates are not necessarily aware of the historical context behind them. Nor are other people necessarily any more interested in the larger historical or civilizational problem of war. When Pierre tries to engage his friend Andrei in a continuation of the drawing room debate on Napoleon, “Prince Andrei was obviously not interested in these abstract conversations.” Andrei then turns the conversation toward his marital problems and the infamy of women, all the while refusing to revisit his decision to join the Russian campaign against Napoleon in Austria.

What this suggests, to me at least, is that the human context is paramount. It also serves as an introduction to the way Tolstoy knits the political into the quotidian, slowly at first, and at times even at the reluctance of his own characters. And yet by the end of Volume 1, Part 1, we read that “Tout Moscou ne parle que guerre / All Moscow talks only of war.” Part Two begins, “In October 1805 Russian troops were occupying villages and towns in the archduchy of Austria.”

The integration of the themes of war and peace is delicate in the opening drawing room scene. Although it’s on a smaller, prefatory scale, this integration gets us used to the alternation and interpenetration of the two. It also makes it clear that the human context is at least as important as the historical. As Richard Pevear notes in the introduction to the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, the novel deals with the glorious myth of Russia’s great self-defence,

and at the same time it challenges that myth and all such myths through the vivid portrayal of the fates of countless ordinary people of the period, men and women, young and old, French as well as Russian, and through the author’s own passionate questioning of the truth of history.

Pevear also draws our attention to Tolstoy’s own appendix to War and Peace, where Tolstoy makes it clear that he’s a writer, an artist, and not a historian:

A historian and an artist, describing a historical epoch, have two completely different objects … For a historian, considering the contribution rendered by some person towards a certain goal, there are heroes; for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people.

We can see this all sides of life in Anna’s soirée, which is filled with subtle gradations of class, beautiful women who mesmerize the men, personal feelings and attitudes. All of these things are mixed into the general preoccupation with the rise of Napoleon in Europe.

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Anna’s Drawing Room

The debate in Anna’s drawing room shows us a panoply of Russian perspectives on freedom, war, and society, and also gives us a down-to-earth context, full of human personality and interaction. The debate setting thus gives flesh and blood to the diversity of Russian military history.

The first two words of the novel, Eh bien, suggest to us that the Russian elite was deeply invested in Western European culture, which had been dominated for a couple of centuries by elite French culture. This point is underscored when we see that the entire first paragraph is written in French. Anna doesn’t just throw in a word or two of French. Rather, she speaks it fluently, and expects her audience to understand her. This openness to the West contrasts sharply with what we hear today from the Kremlin. It tells us that Russians have an incompatible Slavic identity and it says that it must protect its fellow Slavic Ukrainians (who it calls Russians) from the woke and poisonous decadence of the West.

In Anna’s drawing room we see that Russians in the early 19th century were like many Europeans at the time. They felt uneasy, having seen the extremes of the French Revolution in the decade from 1789 to 1799. And they felt uneasy as they saw Napoleon turn France back into an organized unity, and then outward into a revolutionary force. Today, on the other hand, it's the expansion of Russia that worries us. Or, to put this more accurately, it worries us just as it worried Russians in 1805, yet it harries Ukrainians, just as it harried Russians when Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Russian Army at Smolensk and marched toward Moscow in 1812.

Tolstoy's novel begins,

“Eh bien, mon prince, Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des estates, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous préviens, que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j’y crois)—je ne vous connais plus, vous n’êtes plus mon ami" ...

Well, my prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than possessions, estates, of the Buonaparte family. No, I warn you, if you do not tell me we are at war, if you still allow yourself to palliate all the infamies, all the atrocities of that Antichrist (upon my word, I believe it)—I no longer know you, you are no longer my friend ... (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky)

With the first sentence in mind, Ukraine and the West might say that Dzhankoi and Luhansk are now just as preposterously the estates of the Russian family. We might even say that Russian denials of atrocity make us feel that we no longer know them, make us feel that they’re no longer our friends.

Prince Vassily, to whom Anna addressed her remarks about atrocity, responds in linguistic kind:

He spoke that refined French in which our grandparents not only spoke but thought, and with those quiet, patronizing intonations which are proper to a significant man who has grown old in society and at court. He went over to Anna Pavlovna, kissed her hand, presenting her with his perfumed and shining bald pate, and settled comfortably on the sofa.

Anna has much else to say that can be seen in light of the present crisis:

“How can one be well … when one suffers morally? Is it possible to remain at ease in our time, if one has any feeling?”

How can we not be deeply disturbed at the atrocities we see today?

“Russia alone must be the savior of Europe. Our benefactor [the czar] knows his lofty calling and will be faithful to it. That is the one thing I trust in. Our kind and wonderful sovereign is faced with the greatest role in the world, and he is so virtuous and good that God will not abandon him, and he will fulfill his calling to crush the hydra of revolution, which has now become still more terrible in the person of this murderer and villain" [Napoleon].

Russia is now the menace of Europe, although many Russians still believe in their leader. The Russian Orthodox Church strongly supports the Kremlin’s war, even to the point of blessing an intercontinental ballistic missile …

Yet what kind of a benefactor isolates his people and sends them to an unnecessary war — against their closest and most important neighbour?

“England with her commercial spirit will not and cannot understand all the loftiness of the emperor Alexander’s soul. She refused to evacuate Malta. She wants to see, she searches for ulterior motives in our acts.”

England isn’t the global power it was, yet in the past there was much suspicion between the British and Russian empires — as exemplified in the term The Great Game, which refers to their competition in Central Asia. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace between 1863 and 1868, which was seven years after Russia lost the Crimean War (1853-6) to Britain and its French and Turkish allies. Finally, one might note that suspicion has shifted toward Britain’s Anglo successor, the U.S., who the Kremlin calls Ukraine’s puppet-master.

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Rights & Balances

Sections I-III also have some interesting things to say about rights and about balances of power. The question of rights is brought up by an Italian abbot Morio, who Pevear & Volokhonsky note is based on the Italian abbot Scipio Piatolli, who had “access to the highest circles in Petersburg, where he presented his plan for eternal peace by means of a European union against Napoleon.” What the abbot says presages today’s complex relation between Europe and Russia. It also, sadly, presages the possibility that Russia could have been a unifying force in the world (yet hasn’t been, largely because of communist ideology and oligarchic repression).

The abbot starts by saying, “The means are European balance and the droit des gens.” The droit des gens translates literally as the right of people. Pevear & Volokhonsky translate it as the right of nations. This ambiguity is opportune, as it suggests that Russian is violating both the ethnic rights of the Ukrainian people and the sovereign rights of the Ukrainian nation.

The abbot continues,

“Let a powerful state like Russia, famous for its barbarism, stand disinterestedly at the head of a union having as its purpose the balance of Europe—and it will save the world!”

Experts could write entire books on each one of these notions. To begin with, Russia remains infamous for barbarism, as we see ▸ in Grozny, Bucha, and Mariupol, ▸ in the bombs they drop daily on Ukrainian infrastructure, hospitals, and apartments, ▸ in their deportation (or theft) of Ukrainian children, ▸ in their alliance with the likes of Bashar al-Assad and Kim Jong Un, and ▸ in their unforgivable threats of nuclear war.

Russia also seems incapable today of standing disinterested, as we see in the Kremlin’s partial and divisive propaganda and in its educational indoctrination. Russia today is likewise unable to stand at the head of a balanced Europe. Rather, it has enlarged NATO membership and it has created a new iron curtain between NATO on one side and Russia and Belarus on the other. Finally, far from saving the world, Russia continues to destabilize the world by attacking its neighbour, destabilizing Europe, fabricating legitimacy for Iran and North Korea, and threatening nuclear war.

I’d also like to stress here the literary mode in which Tolstoy is operating. That is, he embeds these abstract political ideas — about barbarism, impartiality, balance, and saving the world — in the world as we live it, complete with parties and soirées, with national pride and cultural idiosyncrasies, personalities, distractions, duplicities, pretensions, and prejudices. That is, the world with its flesh and bones.

“How are you going to find such balance?” Pierre began; but just then Anna Pavlovna came over and, with a stern glance at Pierre, asked the Italian how he was taking the local climate. The Italian’s face suddenly changed and acquired an insultingly false sweetness of expression, which was probably habitual with him in conversations with women.

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I leave the last words of this brief foray into the first pages of War and Peace with Anna’s clear and simple question,

Dites moi, pourquoi cette vilaine guerre?”

Tell me, why this nasty war?

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