A heart needs a home
War and Peace Week 3: Book 1 Part 1 Chapters 15 – 21
Welcome to week three of War and Peace 2024. Everything you need for this read-along and book group can be found on the main War and Peace page of Footnotes and Tangents. There you will find:
The reading schedule with links to daily chat threads for each chapter.
Weekly updates like this one.
All Tolstoy’s parties (for paying subscribers)
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This week’s characters
Read chapter-by-chapter plot summaries for all the main characters mentioned this week:
Countess Rostova • Count Rostov • Marya Dmitrievna • Shinshin • Berg • Vera • Natasha • Pierre • Julie Karagin • Nikolai • Sonya • Petya • Boris • Count Bezukhov • Prince Vasili • Katiche • Anna Mikhailovna
This week’s theme: A heart needs a home
Our third week of War and Peace is all about two young people: Natasha and Pierre.
Natasha on her name-day, in the heart of her family. Adored and indulged. Singing and dancing, laughter and tears. Pineapple ice-cream. She’s playing at being a grownup but can't help but be thirteen. And she’s the only one to notice Pierre and try to make him smile.
Pierre on the day of his father's death. He is awkward and out of place at Count Bezukhov’s house. An enormous palace, far too grand and impersonal to be Pierre’s home. It contains rooms he never knew existed and emotions he never knew he had.
Tolstoy is telling us a story about hearts and homes. What is life without a place to belong? Some of us find a home the day we're born. Others go on looking all our lives, until we eventually, hopefully, find a place where our heart can belong.
A sense of impending doom
Look at William Pitt the Younger and Emperor Napoleon carving up the world in 1805. Anyone else got a bad feeling about what’s ahead of us?
Here is boring Berg, hoping for promotion because “in wartime the company commander might get killed and he, as senior in the company, might easily succeed to the post”. Oblivious of the implications that underly his words.
Here’s the German colonel, thumping the table, declaring, “ve must tie for our Emperor, and zen all vill pe vell.” All will be well? Really? We will see.
And here’s Marya Dmitrievna (much more on her later) with an ominous prediction:
I have four sons in the army but still I don’t fret. It is all in God’s hands. You may die in your bed or God may spare you in a battle.
So let’s not fret, fellow readers. The future may look bleak, but this week we must party!
This week’s story
Chapter 15 (➡️ chat thread)
This week opens with the lavish celebrations for Natasha and her mother’s name-day celebrations. We get to meet the formidable Marya Dmitrievna and the egotistical Lieutenant Berg. Le terrible dragon dotes on Natasha and gives Pierre a piece of her mind.
‘Come right up, come right up, my man! I used to be the only one to tell your father the truth when he was in favour, and in your case it’s my evident duty.’
Oh, we all love Marya Dmitrievna, alias The Dragon! She only speaks Russian and always speaks her mind. We already know that Count Bezukhov has countless illegitimate children, including Pierre. Marya Dmitrievna implies that one of the women Bezukhov was involved with may have been Catherine the Great.
Catherine II was the most powerful woman in the world and presided over the rapid expansion of the empire and Russia’s growing diplomatic standing. She also had 22 known lovers, and this expression “in favour” or “when chance smiled on him” was used at the time for these men who advanced quickly in the Russian court. It’s just a thought, but could our hapless Pierre, be the byblow of Catherine the Great?
Read more about Catherine the Great’s lovers here.
Back to Marya Dmitrievna. The Terrible Dragon calls her goddaughter Natasha “my Cossack”. This is an affectionate nickname that might roughly translate as “my little savage” or “my little barbarian”. The Cossacks were free peasants living on the steppe in southern Russia. They had a reputation for being wild and warlike, and they will play a significant role in the Russian army later in the novel.
Leo Tolstoy was critical of the Russian stereotypes and romanticised view of Cossack life. Just before writing War and Peace, he wrote an excellent novella about a Russian nobleman’s time living in a Cossack village. The Cossacks draws on Tolstoy’s own experience in the military and reflects his developing ideas about war and the meaning of life. These ideas are explored more fully in War and Peace.
Read more about the Cossacks in the Russian imagination here.
Chapter 16 (➡️ chat thread)
Nikolai shows too much youthful enthusiasm as a colonel thumps the table and calls for war. Marya Dmitrievna has an ominous proverb up her sleeve, and Natasha reminds everyone that there is something far more important than war: pudding!
The sharptongued Shinshin pokes the humourless colonel with a reference to the last time the Russians fought the French. He’s talking about the final campaign of Alexander Suvorov, who was forced into a long retreat over the Swiss Alps in 1799. Suvorov died the following year. Many characters in War and Peace will compare the current military leaders with this great “war hero” and the good old days when Russia used to win battles.
But Shinshin dwells rather unpatriotically on Russian defeats and predicts a Napoleon victory. Meanwhile, Nikolai’s display of patriotism is “too enthusiastic” and makes everyone feel awkward, apart from Julie and Sonya, who swoon in harmony.
There was a bit of debate in our daily chat about Pierre’s response to all this:
Pierre listened to the colonel’s speech and nodded approvingly.
‘That’s splendid,’ said he.
I’m not sure he really thinks it is splendid. Everything about Pierre suggests his mind is elsewhere, and he’s not really paying attention. The boy has spent the last month on his own in his dying father’s house, knowing he has behaved foolishly in Saint Petersburg and unsure of what to do next. Pierre is sleepwalking, and the joy and life around him do not wake him up but strike him dumb.
Introverts everywhere may recognise the situation.
Chapter 17 (➡️ chat thread)
Natasha comforts her jealous and love-struck cousin, and then they sing with Nikolai and Boris. Natasha asks Pierre to dance and is delighted at playing at being a grownup. Who else is delighted? Her papa! Who amazes everyone by dancing the Daniel Cooper with Marya Dmitrievna. The dragon’s measured levity is appreciated by all.
Many of the characters in War and Peace are inspired by members of Tolstoy’s own family. Count Rostov’s character is drawn from the writer’s grandfather Ilya Andreevich (pictured above), who also relished good food and amiable company. Like Rostov, Tolstoy’s grandfather was inclined to instinctive and indiscriminate generosity.
And this chapter gives us the undiluted joy of watching Ilya Rostov and Marya Dmitrievna dance the Daniel Cooper. The old man has still got it, while the terrible dragon steals the show with her dancing face:
What was expressed by the whole of the count’s plump figure, in Marya Dmitrievna found expression only in her more and more beaming face and quivering nose.
The Daniel Cooper was an Anglaise, a nobility dance inspired or influenced by English country dances. But as you can see from this video, it has a distinctively Russian flavour:
Have you noticed the stark contrast between Anna Pavlovna’s reception and the Rostov name-day celebrations?
Everything is very prim and proper in Saint Petersburg, where high society takes its cue from rarefied French aristocratic culture. Here in Moscow, it’s all a little more chaotic and a lot more fun. The Muscovites prided themselves on their hospitality. Here’s a quote from Orlando Figes’ Natasha’s Dance, a cultural history of Russia:
Generally it was the custom that, after you had dined at a house once, you would be expected to return on a regular basis: not to come again would be to give offence. The custom was so widespread that it was quite possible for a nobleman to dine out every day, yet never go so frequently to any house as to outstay his welcome … Count Stroganov had a guest whose name he did not learn in nearly thirty years. When one day the guest did not appear, the count assumed he must be dead. It turned out that the man had indeed died. He had been run over on his way to lunch.
This is the world of Count Ilya Rostov, where everything is “splendid” and everyone is invited.
Chapter 18 (➡️ chat thread)
But as Count Rostov dances the sixth anglaise, Count Bezukhov suffers a sixth and surely fatal stroke. Prince Vasili takes his bald head and twitching cheeks to see his cousin Katishe. There is, Katishe admits, a “vile, infamous paper” in the count’s inlaid portfolio. It legitimises Pierre and makes him the count’s soul heir. Who does she blame for this errant will? That “infamous vile woman”, Anna Mikhailovna. It’s strong stuff.
Thank you
for sharing this paper about illegitimate children of the Russian nobility. In 1801, Emperor Alexander stipulated that a child should only be legitimised “in recognition of his exceptional merits and circumstances” so as not to harm the institution of marriage.What are Pierre’s exceptional merits and circumstances?
Chapter 19 (➡️ chat thread)
Anna Mikhailovna sneaks Pierre into his father’s house via the backdoor. Pierre decides to do as he’s told, and we are treated to the performance of Prince Vasili being publicly friendly towards Pierre and then tiptoeing jerkily into the count’s room. Count Bezukhov is to receive the last sacrament.
In these chapters, Pierre is twice compared to an Egyptian statue:
He took the glove in silence from the adjutant, and sat down in the lady’s chair, placing his huge hands symmetrically on his knees in the naive attitude of an Egyptian statue, and decided in his own mind that all was as it should be, and that in order not to lose his head and do foolish things he must not act on his own ideas tonight, but must yield himself up entirely to the will of those who were guiding him.
Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt sparked a renewed interest in ancient Egypt in Europe that developed into full-blown Egyptomania in the 1820s and 1830s. Two enormous sphinxes were brought from Egypt to Saint Petersburg in 1832 and installed at the quays in 1834. Sphinxes will appear in the novel much, much later.
In 1852, the Hermitage Museum opened with an Egyptian collection, including the statue shown above. Is this what Tolstoy had in mind?
What are your thoughts about Pierre in these chapters?
In the daily chat, he has divided opinion. He always does. People either want to slap him or hug him. I’ll always belong in the latter camp. The boy is only twenty and a stranger in the house where his father is dying. He’s easily led and has been led astray, and clearly wants to do the right thing but doesn’t know what that thing is. His relationship with his father is ill-defined, and he even feels awkward calling him “my father”. My heart goes out to him.
Chapter 20 (➡️ chat thread)
Count Bezukhov receives Extreme Unction in a solemn ceremony, while Prince Vasili and Katiche sneak around the count’s pillow doing heaven knows what. Pierre is perplexed and then terrified by the sight of his dying father.
When Pierre came up the count was gazing straight at him, but with a look the significance of which could not be understood by mortal man. Either this look meant nothing but that as long as one has eyes they must look somewhere, or it meant too much.
A look that meant nothing, or that meant too much. Count Bezukhov is the first death in War and Peace, but it won’t be the last. Tolstoy was fascinated by death: the only human experience that a writer has no access to and no knowledge of. What do the dying see, and how does it feel to die? And what do they know and understand that we cannot? We will come back to this theme before we are done.
Chapter 21 (➡️ chat thread)
A tussle in the reception room for the inlaid portfolio. Strong words are spoken. Anna Mikhailovna is the victor, and doesn’t she know it! The old count dies, and we catch Prince Vasili off-guard in a rare moment of sincerity. Next day, Anna Mikhailovna is busy spreading her own version of events.
“The death of old Count Bezhukov leads to the first real war in the novel. Bloodless battles are often fought more heartlessly than bloody ones. One feels internally wounded just by reading.” - Yiyun Li, Tolstoy Together
I know the tooth-and-claw fight between Katiche and Anna Mikhailovna gets all the attention in this chapter. But it is Vasili who I really notice. So far, we have seen two faces to Vasili Kuragin: his solemnity in public and his cheek-twitching scheming in private. But when he staggers out of the count’s room, his voice betrays “a sincerity and weakness Pierre had never observed in it before”. I think we have to take this at face value. It’s a human moment amongst all this pantomime:
‘How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? I am near sixty, dear friend … I too … All will end in death, all! Death is awful …’ and he burst into tears.
It’s the wonder of Tolstoy’s writing that he sees the whole in people. And teaches us to do the same.
Bonus: All Tolstoy’s parties
What happened when our entertainment reporter returned to the Rostovs for dinner? Did he get an earful from the dragon, and what did he make of the pineapple pudding? Paying subscribers can find out…
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Character of the Week: Marya Dmitrievna
We took a poll last year, and I think Marya Dmitrievna was by far the most popular female character in War and Peace. It’s just humanly impossible not to love her no-nonsense magnificence: “Marya Dmitrievna was known to the Imperial family as well as to all Moscow and Petersburg, and both cities wondered at her, laughed privately at her rudeness, and told good stories about her, while none the less all without exception respected and feared her.”
And watching her nose dance the Daniel Cooper with Ilya Rostov is just one of the most delightful scenes in the whole book:
The count danced well and knew it. But his partner could not and did not want to dance well. Her enormous figure stood erect, her powerful arms hanging down (she had handed her reticule to the countess), and only her stern but handsome face really joined in the dance. What was expressed by the whole of the count’s plump figure, in Marya Dmitrievna found expression only in her more and more beaming face and quivering nose. But if the count, getting more and more into the swing of it, charmed the spectators by the unexpectedness of his adroit manoeuvres and the agility with which he capered about on his light feet, Marya Dmitrievna produced no less impression by slight exertions—the least effort to move her shoulders or bend her arms when turning, or stamp her foot—which everyone appreciated in view of her size and habitual severity.
What a woman!
That’s all from me this week. Thank you for reading and taking part. If you have any questions, thoughts or ideas about this week, join us for a discussion in the comments.
And if you valued this post and haven’t already done so, please consider becoming a paying subscriber so that I can keep creating these resources for slow, creative and curious readers all around the world.
Next week we head west, first to the Bolkonskys of Bald Hills and then to Austria and the War of the Third Coalition. I’m afraid it might be a while before we again eat pineapple ice cream or dance the Daniel Cooper.
See you next week,
Simon
That moment when Vasili bursts into tears is extraordinary. Just when we think that this man has no heart at all, he is struck by the universal tragedy of mortality and the transitory nature of worldly possession. It reminds me of the end of Beowulf, when the Geats bury the treasure after the hero’s death and the poet remarks that it was as “useless to men as it ever was.”
I didn't make it into the chat this week but wanted to share a linguistic observation. Whereas in the Maude translation we hear the stout Colonel speaking English with a German accent (with zees and zats) in the Russian he pronounces the Russian vowel "ye" as "e" and adds a hard sound to certain words versus the soft sound. As opposed to the English text where the Colonel just launched into Germanized English, in the Russian text, Tolstoy early on explains the specific mispronunciations. Maybe Russian readership in the mid-1800s had never heard a German speaking Russian.