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Nathan Rosen, Notes on War and Peace Notes NOTES ON WAR AND PEACE Nathan Rosen, University of Rochester 1. Tolstoy's Biolo~ism By the end of the First Epilogue Pierre Bezukhov is happily married to Natasha Rostova and they have four children. As a guide to life he has adopted the philosophy of Platon Karataev. Yet he feels that he must take part in the meetings of a secret society in Petersburg that will eventually lead to the Decembrist uprising. Natasha asks Pierre whether Karataev would have approved of their married life. Yes, says Pierre, he would have approved of their family life but not of Pierre's involvement in a secret political society. It is odd that neither Pierre nor Natasha is at all disturbed by the thought that Karataev would have disapproved of Pierre's political ac tivity. Of course Pierre knows, as Tolstoy does, that only unconscious activity bears fruit--yet "at that moment it seemed to him that he was chosen to give a new direction to the whole of Russian society and to the whole world."' In other words, become a Napoleon. This contradiction between Karataev's philosophy and Pierre's action is, according to Bocharov, Tolstoy's "ironic commentary" on what life is like. 2 I think a good deal more could be said about it. Let us consider a similar case--Prince Andrei Bolkonsky after the battle of Austerlitz. Disillusioned in military "glory," driven by guilt over his behavior to his late wife, he decides to retire from the world and concentrate on managing his estate at Bogucharovo and bringing up his son. He turns out to be a very efficient and progressive manager, doing far more for his peasants than the idealist Pierre. Yet Pierre, on visiting his friend, notices with surprise that Prince Andrei's eyes are dull and listless, as if he is bored with his limited role as a father and estate manager. These activities do not fully engage all that is in him. It takes only a few encouraging words from Pierre (in the raft scene) and the voice of Natasha at Otradnoe to make him decide that he must plunge again into the big world where he can affect others. He decides to work with Speransky on the army code. 'Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: New American Library, 1968), p. 1409. 2S. Bocharov, Roman L. Tolsto~o "Voina i mir" (Moscow: Khud. lit., 1987), pp. 149-54. 109 Prince Andrei needs to break out of the confining world of his estate and Pierre Bezukhov needs to found a secret political society in violation of Karataev's precepts. The cause in each case is biological, springing from some deep inner need to move beyond the domestic sphere into a larger activity that would affect the world. Precisely because it is biological in origin Pierre is not disturbed in the least by the contradiction between his beliefs and his actions. Just as Natasha's biological role is to be a housewife and mother, so a man's role is to go beyond the home and seek to affect the world. This is what Pierre realizes. Tolstoy does not say that Prince Andrei's activity with Speransky or with the Russian army is necessarily useful, or that Pierre's political activity will change the world. Tolstoy is concerned above all with the biological need for such activity. In the closing pages of the novel we find that the children of the major characters have such names as Andryusha (Andrei), Natasha, Petya, and Nicholas. Does this not suggest that their future lives will repeat in important ways the lives of their parents? The closing lines of the novel are not given to a major character but to lS-year old Nicholas Bolkonsky, the son of Prince Andrei. Al though he has been adopted by Princess Marya and Nikolai Rostov, the boy holds the military life in contempt (and Nikolai Rostov as well). His two heroes are Pierre ("he wanted to be learned, wise and kind like Pierre") and Prince Andrei, the father whom he had never seen but whom Pierre and Natasha had told him about. Nicholas dreams of glory, fired up by his reading of Plutarch: "Everyone shall know of me, and they shall all love and admire me." The very same vow is expressed by his father before the battle of Austerlitz. And in the concluding lines of the novel he invokes both his "fathers": "But Uncle Pierre! Oh, what a wonderful man! And my father? Oh, Father, Father! Yes, I will do something that even he would be satisfied with ... " (Tolstoy is reported to have said that Nicholas would become a Decembrist. 3) These concluding lines suggest two points. First, Nicholas Bolkonsky's prayer at the end echoes the b~ological movement that we have traced in both his fathers: the deeply felt need to make use of all one's energies and talents even if that 'neans breaking out of the private sphere into the larger one where one C2r. influence the world. Second, the glory that Nicholas Bolkonsky seeks is not the military glory that earlier Tolstoyan heroes had sought: Nikolai Rostov, Prince Andrei, and Petya Rostov. In these characters Tolstoy showed how youthful idealism (biology!) expressed itself on the battlefield, with disappointing and sometimes fatal results. It often seemed like nothing more than an exciting "ego-trip." But with two such fathers as Pierre and Prince Andrei, Nicholas will--such is the prayer- 3E. E. Zaidenshnur, "Voina i mir" L. N. Tolstogo (Moscow: Kniga, 1966), p. 150. 110 -express his idealism on a higher level. 2. Determinism and Freedom The Second Epilogue is mostly a long restatement of Tolstoy's theory of history, but tacked on at the end is a short discourse on necessity (determinism) and freedom. Although this discourse is just as unorthodox and irritating as Tolstoy's theory of history few scholars think it is worth serious discussion. Gustafson dismisses it as vague because Tolstoy had not yet developed his doctrine of God. (After Gustafson develops the full doctrine of God the reader remains no less perplexed by Tolstoy's view of freedom and determinism. 4) Morson devotes less than a page to it, finding it "totally irrelevant to human life and the practice of historiography. "5 Isaiah Berlin finds the conflic t between freedom and determinism a terrible dilemma that Tolstoy never finally resolved. 6 If Tolstoy's theory of freedom and determinism is vague and just an "empty truth" (Morson), why would Tolstoy choose to end his great novel on a vague and empty note? There is nothing vague or tentative about the way he expresses himself. From the standpoint of reason, says Tolstoy, man is completely determined (the law of necessity). Yet if he were to admit this as true, man would not be able to live for a single moment. Fortunately, he is ignorant of all the innumerable factors that determine each action of his, and what he does not know he assumes to be an area in which free will can operate. This area of freedom is, of course, illusory--based only on ignorance of the truth--but if man believes he is free, he feels that he is alive. From the standpoint of reason, says Tolstoy, free will "is only a momentary, indefinable sensation of life." Tols toy 7 gives us a series of equations: free will - consciousness = life = God. These terms may express an illusion, but that illusion is the basis of 4Richard F. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 224. The full "doctrine of God" that Tolstoy eventually developed did recognize the reality of freedom in a limited sense: man was free to choose to follow God, but he remained unfree in all other matters. Since most decisions are not of a spiritual nature, the area of illusory freedom remained almost as large as it was in Uar and Peace. For the full "doctrine of God," see Gustafson, p. 445. SGary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 92. 6Isaiah Berlin, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," in Russian Thinkers (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 43-45. 71 have combined and equated terms used in the second Epilogue with those in Pierre Bezukhov's dream of the vibrating liquid globe in which God at the center is equated with Life. See p. 1272. 111 morality and culture as well as of life. I think we would all agree that each of our actions is the result of a combination of factors involving freedom and necessity. But Tolstoy drives on to a wild and reckless extremism in his logic. The closing lines of the Second Epilogue, that is, the closing lines of the whole novel, thunder at the reader: "It is ... necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist and to recognize a dependence [on the laws of nature--nr] of which we are not conscious." End of novel. Observe that Tolstoy does not qualify this statement by such a phrase as "from the standpoint of reason... " His command is absolute. Even though he has told us that "a man without freedom is conceivable only as a man bereft of life," yet he recommends this heroic insanity (resulting in death) to living in a human world of necessary illusions. Scholars agree that Tolstoy is definitely on the side of freedom rather than determinism--but they ignore the last lines of the novel, and this is troublesome. Why did Tolstoy insist on the primacy of determinism? Several reasons could be suggested.
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