Re: WAR AND PEACE by Tolstoy

On 31/01/25 10:55, Don wrote:

It's not really Science Fiction, but it's been mentioned lately.
 
The parts pertaining to peaceful romance appeal to me much more than
the warfare. Ironically, Tolstoy's tome helps me cope with armed
conflict.
    Tolstoy's the tonic to sort out the scat show called war. His Rus
realist savoir-faire offers welcome relief from the relentlessly riven
mass mind's culture of chaotic current events:
 
    A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing
    and does not want to know anything, since he does not
    believe that anything can be known.
 
As an aside, did the Tiffany Network plagiarize Tolstoy in its
previously popular prisoner of war TV show?
    An interesting Tolstoy translation tic: the absent antecedent,
also missing elsewhere, when Russian is translated into English. For
instance, the antecedent's apparently an apparition when the pronoun
"ours" appears in this translated excerpt:
 
    "We must let him see Amelie, she's exquisite!" said
    one of "ours," kissing his finger tips.
 
Tolstoy masterfully shares his characters' inner life. This technique
reveals characters as all too human; enthralled to human virtue and
vice.
    The reader receives omniscience; a granular view of humanity's
triumphs and travails, without a protagonist to lead the reader around
by the nose.
    When Russian soldier Andrey Grigoriev killed Ukrainian soldier
Dmytro Maslovsky in hand-to-hand combat, the latter reportedly said:
"Let me say goodbye to the sky." A similar situation occurs in WAR AND
PEACE:
 
    "What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way," thought
    he, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see
    how the struggle of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended,
    whether the red-haired gunner had been killed or not and
    whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw
    nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky-the
    lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray
    clouds gliding slowly across it. "How quiet, peaceful, and
    solemn; not at all as I ran," thought Prince Andrew-"not as
    we ran, shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and
    the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces struggled for
    the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that
    lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky
    before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes!
    All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky.
    There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not
    exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!..."
 
Some see events as tightly controlled by powerful Great Men: Cameron,
May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, Obama, Trump, Biden, Putin, and
Zelensky. Tolstoy views Great Men as powerless:
 
    The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the
    event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the
    actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by
    lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in
    order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the
    event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the
    concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without
    any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was
    necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real
    power-the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and
    guns-should consent to carry out the will of these weak
    individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an
    infinite number of diverse and complex causes. ...
 
    In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving
    names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest
    connection with the event itself.
 
    Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their
    own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is
    related to the whole course of history and predestined
    from eternity. ...
 
    The luring of Napoleon into the depths of the country was
    not the result of any plan, for no one believed it to be
    possible; it resulted from a most complex interplay of
    intrigues, aims, and wishes among those who took part in
    the war and had no perception whatever of the inevitable,
    or of the one way of saving Russia. Everything came about
    fortuitously.
 
A few football fans fantasize about war being merely another football
game. Tolstoy thinks the consequences are greater:
 
    An army gains a victory, and at once the rights of the
    conquering nation have increased to the detriment of the
    defeated. An army has suffered defeat, and at once a people
    loses its rights in proportion to the severity of the reverse,
    and if its army suffers a complete defeat the nation is quite
    subjugated.
 
Witness how enlightened Globalism spontaneously sparked a woke wake
pyre.
    The Russian Orthodox Church (a close cousin to the Catholic Church)
plays a prominent enough role in the novel for Napoleon to remark, "That
Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy Moscow!"
    The Mandylion flag, emblazened with IC XC NIKA, is reportedly the
most popular battle flag in the militias of the Donetsk and Luhansk
People's Republics. In the end, only God Almighty determines the outcome
of war.
    For people who love long stories - WAR AND PEACE is a very long
story. Tolstoy made a realist out of me and his novel is recommended.
 

Thank you for those fascinatingly interesting observations and
recommendation.
(It is four or five years since I obtained a copy but the length has
usually influenced shorter novels to be chosen to read first as I do not
like to be reading more than one book at a time.)