Beyond Understanding
War and Peace Week 39: Book 4, Part 1, Chapters 5–11
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Welcome to Week 39 of War and Peace 2024
This week, we have read Book 4, Part 1, Chapters 5–11.
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.
This week’s theme: Beyond Understanding
Nothing is new, but everything must be known for the first time. You may have read about love, and loss, and loyalty; of death and dying; of war and peace.
But these are only words, an outline on a map, until we pass into the interior of the feeling: beyond understanding.
So it is with Nikolai Rostov, a swagger in his step. Sure of himself at last; smoking in some snuggery, fetching splendid horses for the Tsar.
Until he's reminded of a name: Marya. He feels shy and afraid; black smoke through a clear unreflecting mind. Pay attention to those feelings, Nikolai. Nothing is new, but everyone must know it for themselves.
So it is with Marya, her inner labours light a lantern brighter than ever shone before. Her sufferings and strivings, spinning circles in her father's house, now find a road, a pilgrim's progress, out of grief and into joy.
It's a path well-trodden by lovers longing something new, but everyone must know it for themselves.
So it is with Sonya, who made self-sacrifice her art. She gave and gave until there was nothing left to give, but the one thing she wanted most of all; the someone she couldn't have.
And in bitterness a new feeling took shape: stronger than principle, stronger than virtue. A determination to take and take and take. A force beyond understanding, but human to the bone.
So it is with Pierre. Fallen among the wheels of the wagon, making merry sounds to hell. A smooth machine for killing, for depriving him of life.
His fellow prisoners waiting, between pit and post. Not understanding or believing how something such as life could be taken in a moment by a stranger with a gun. By a stranger, hands still trembling, wishing he wasn't there. Wishing himself gone.
It's nothing new. It's love and death and war and peace. You'll read about it all in books and put your finger to the map.
But when you're there and in it, you'll wonder what it is. Because to live it is another thing. And you'll only know it when you do.
Chapter 5: Feelings We Don’t Understand
Nikolai flirts with the blue-eyed beauty, unaware that what is pleasing to him is unpleasant to the woman’s husband. Nikolai is introduced to the aunt of Marya Bolkonskaya. The governor’s wife proposes to matchmake Nikolai and Marya, prompting Nikolai to confide in her about his conflicted feelings on this matter.
At the mention of Princess Marya he experienced a feeling of shyness and even fear, which he himself did not understand.
Always pay attention to those feelings you least understand. Nikolai has grown into his confidence. He used to boast and swear solemn oaths, poorly disguising his naivety and insecurities.
Now, he has the swagger of a man happy in his skin. A presence that will be attractive to some, and distasteful to others.
But there's something strange inside him. A knot of feelings that encompass his promise to Sonya, his duty to his mother, and his attraction to the young Princess Bolkonskaya.
‘And she is not at all so plain, either.’
’Not at all.’
We know that more or less everyone thinks Marya is plain. And rich. And the governor's wife, in matchmaking mode, sees the perfect solution to the financial woes of the Rostovs.
What does Nikolai feel? That is a mystery, even to himself.
In this chapter we meet Princess Marya’s aunt on her mother’s side. She was not a fan of their father. And she doesn’t seem to like Andrei either. A tantalising glimpse into an earlier time before the book. What was their mother like? Was she happy? The backstories of the Rostov and Bolkonsky parents hint at histories repeating themselves.
When did you last have a feeling you didn’t understand?
Chapter 6: Blushes in Black
Marya arrived in Voronezh sad but at peace – mourning her father, relieved to have stifled her hopes and dreams. Nikolai’s presence disturbs her peace, and she is at a loss about what to do. When they meet, they are both bewildered by the effect they have on each other. Nikolai has ‘a short but sincere struggle’ with his conscience before submitting to fate and circumstance.
It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern and the intricate, skilful, artistic work on its sides, that previously seemed dark, coarse, and meaningless, was suddenly shown up in unexpected and striking beauty.
There is a strange stillness in Marya and Nikolai's courtship dance. The matchmakers and spectators move in calculated circles around the blushing young lovers.
Marya and Nikolai are more alike than we sometimes recognise.
They have complex feelings without the language or means to unpick them. They do a lot of thinking, but unlike Natasha and Pierre, they don’t get satisfaction from their reflections. Their thoughts are a problem to them. The war is in their heads, while peace is in the world.
And both believe instinctively in loyalty and obedience. Guilt rises up in them when they think otherwise. They have a peculiar faith in fate and the will of the world.
Nikolai is afraid, and both blush. But for now, I want to remember one image: the man Nikolai whirling the boy Nikolai around in his arms.
He took the boy on his knee, merrily started to whirl him around, and looked round at Princess Marya. With a softened, happy, and timid look she watched the boy she loved in the arms of the man she loved. Nikolai also noticed that look, and, as if understanding it, flushed with pleasure and began to kiss the boy with a good-natured playfulness.
Why can’t Nikolai picture his future with Princess Marya? Why does it make him afraid?
Chapter 7: Ordinary Coincidences
Marya resolves to go in search of her brother. At the cathedral, Marya and Nikolai exchange words – the encounter has a strong impression on Nikolai, who prays to be released from his promise to Sonya. As though answering his prayers, letters arrive from Sonya and his mother. They are at Troitsa. Sonya wants Nikolai to consider himself free. His mother tells him about Natasha and Andrei. Marya sets off to reach Andrei, and Nikolai returns to the regiment.
Nikolai • Marya • Lavrushka • Countess Rostova • Sonya
In men Rostov could not bear to see the expression of a higher spiritual life (that was why he did not like Prince Andrei) and he referred to it contemptuously as philosophy and dreaminess, but in Princess Marya that very sorrow which revealed the depth of a whole spiritual world foreign to him, was an irresistible attraction.
What do you make of Nikolai’s assessment of Andrei as having ‘a higher spiritual life’? And why do you think Nikolai finds spirituality attractive in women?
He prays, not for snow to turn into sugar, but to be freed from a childhood promise. His prayers are answered, and he puts it down to coincidence.
Coincidences happen all the time in real life. But they feel strange and out of place in stories. Nikolai doesn’t really believe in miracles, and he doesn't know he's in a story.
The irony is that Nikolai can marry his spiritual Marya because of practical Sonya. Only this self-sacrificing woman would write this letter. He puts Marya on a pedestal, but the woman who has freed him wrote this:
And my love has no aim but the happiness of those I love.
Even now, Nikolai doesn't know how lucky he is to know Sonya.
An unexamined life
Nikolai has always regarded himself as a man of action. Restless at home, he yearned for both the order and momentum of army life. He has also always worn his heart on his sleeve, at times overwhelmed by his love for the emperor and his country. A romantic and an idealist, he hates anything diplomatic and practical.
But he has changed. There was a time when the news of Borodino and the loss of Moscow would have seized him ‘with despair, anger, the desire for vengeance.’ Now he feels ‘an indefinite feeling of shame and awkwardness,’ perhaps like the dull ache of a muscle he has ceased to exercise.
He doesn’t really understand how or why he has changed, because he is not taken to deep introspection in the manner of Pierre or Andrei. He detests men who think and reflect.
But he must reflect if he is to negotiate his current entanglement of love, duty and loyalty. It’s a three-sided problem: feelings ‘he himself did not understand’ are pulling him towards Marya. This would please the mother he loves, but ‘marrying for money is repugnant to me.’ And then there is Sonya. Only last Christmas, she dressed up as a man with the mummers, and he fell in love with her all over again.
I say he must reflect – but that is not strictly true. He tells the governor’s wife that ‘this is fate’ and when Sonya’s letter arrives, he sees an ‘ordinary coincidence’ that appears to answer his prayers. ‘Resigning himself now to the force of circumstances’ is something he decides is ‘very very important’ and it absolves him from thinking too deeply on the matter.
Who would make a better partner for Nikolai: Sonya or Marya?
Chapter 8: The Art of Self-Sacrifice
The story behind Sonya’s letter is revealed. Before leaving Moscow, the countess had asked Sonya to release Nikolai. For the first time, Sonya felt bitterness towards the Rostovs, for whom she had sacrificed so much. But the arrival of Andrei, the possibility of a renewed engagement between him and Natasha, emboldened Sonya to consent to the countsss’ wishes – hoping that a marriage between Nikolai and Marya would ultimately be unlawful.
Sonya • Natasha • Andrei • Count Rostov • Countess Rostova
But now they wanted her to sacrifice the very thing that constituted the whole reward for her self-sacrifice and the whole meaning of her life.
Ah, Sonya! What a riddle you are! I am happy to see your bitterness for the Rostovs, for they deserve it. They have taken you for granted.
But you also reveal yourself to be something of a schemer. I am tempted to admire you for it. You turn self-sacrifice into an art, to be ‘great-hearted’ but keep what you give away.
And now everything depends on Andrei's hold on life. A chain of happiness and sorrow links him to Natasha to Sonya to Nikolai to Marya and back to him.
There is hope for happiness. But not everyone can be happy.
‘How happy I am,’ says Natasha, ‘and how unhappy!’
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Sonya’s self-sacrifice
Sonya is hemmed in on both sides by rules prohibiting marriage between kinsfolk. She would need a dispensation from the religious authorities to marry her cousin Nikolai. But if Andrei survives and marries Natasha, Marya and Nikolai will become brother and sister and, therefore, unable to marry. From a secular point of view, it is bewildering that the future happiness of these young people will be determined by a congregation of priests who know nothing of the Rostovs or Bolkonskys.
But this is also about class, status and money. Sonya has built up her entire identity around self-sacrifice and her indebtedness to the generosity of the Rostovs. She is an orphan with no wealth of her own – everything she has comes from Nikolai’s family.
Does the circumstances of Sonya’s letter to Nikolai change your opinion of her? Are you more or less sympathetic towards her?
Sonya divides opinion. Her letter is deceptive and disingenuous. She wishes to appear virtuous while hoping in her heart that Nikolai will not marry Marya and that Andrei will survive. Both Nikolai and Tolstoy value honesty and authenticity highly. And this shows Sonya as calculating in the performance of self-sacrifice.
And yet I love her for this.
For the first time she felt bitterness against those who had been her benefactors only to torture her the more painfully.
The Rostovs do take her love for granted. The count has mismanaged the estates. Nikolai gambled away his father’s money. If they are an impoverished aristocratic family in need of a good marriage, it is not because of their care of Sonya, who dutifully made an inventory of their Moscow property before it was burned and looted.
And while Nikolai is putting his faith in fate, Sonya is gambling on Andrei’s wound. At this stage, I worry exceedingly for her, and I am quietly cheering her on.
Chapter 9: Number 17
Pierre is initially treated with some respect by his guards, but soon becomes merely No. 17 – a big, thoughtful Russian who speaks good French. He is interrogated on suspicion of incendiarism and they are only interested in answers that flow towards conviction. On the fourth day, the fire causes the prisoners to be moved to the Crimean bridge, where they await the decision of a mysterious ‘marshal.’
These questions, like questions put at trials generally, left the essence of the matter aside, shut out the possibility of that essence being revealed and were designed only to form a channel through which the judges wished the answers of the accused to flow so as to lead to the desired result, namely a conviction.
Pierre, No. 17, is horribly alone. The other prisoners make fun of him. The guards distrust him. He is far from the Bolkonskys and the Rostovs.
Pierre awaits the decision of a mysterious authority figure who holds his life in his hands.
It doesn't really matter what he says in the examination. But it can't help that there is no logical means of explaining why he was where they found him.
No wonder these days ‘were the hardest of all for Pierre.’
Pierre and thirteen others were moved to the coach-house of a merchant’s house near the Crimean bridge. On his way through the streets Pierre felt stifled by the smoke which seemed to hang over the whole city. Fires were visible on all sides. He did not then realize the significance of the burning of Moscow, and looked at the fires with horror.
The burning of the city is beyond understanding. And Pierre’s progress through it feels like a journey into hell.
Has Pierre always been alone? Is there anywhere that Pierre might find home and friendship?
Chapter 10: A Concurrence of Circumstances
Pierre is brought before the iron marshal, Davout. For the first time, Pierre discloses something of his identity and offers some proof. A shared glance between Pierre and Davout appears to save his life, but an adjutant interrupts Davout’s thoughts, apparently setting Pierre on the road to execution. Pierre asks himself: ‘Who was it that had really sentenced him to death?’ ‘A system – concurrence of circumstances.’
Then who was executing him, killing him, depriving him of life—him, Pierre, with all his memories, aspirations, hopes, and thoughts? Who was doing this? And Pierre felt that it was no one.
We met Davout many pages ago, before Borodino. A brute on a barrel.
In typical Tolstoyan fashion, he shares a moment of humanity with Pierre. It's not what we expect from ‘the Iron Marshal’ and it catches us off-guard. But it could save Pierre from execution:
Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war and law, that look established human relations between the two men. At that moment an immense number of things passed dimly through both their minds, and they realized that they were both children of humanity and were brothers.
Except an adjutant interrupts proceedings and Davout forgets that shared humanity, casually giving the order, ‘Yes, of course!’, that condemns Pierre.
No one wants to kill Pierre. But there is a system, and he is ‘an insignificant chip fallen among the wheels of a machine whose action he did not understand but which was working well.’
A system, a ‘concurrence of circumstances,’ that wants to deprive Pierre of life.
Both Nikolai and Pierre have resigned themselves to their own notions of fate and circumstance. Nikolai’s version of destiny wants him to be married and happy. Pierre’s destiny wants him to be dead.
When have you felt trapped in a ‘concurrence of circumstances’ out of your control?
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Chapter 11: Torn Souls
Pierre and the other prisoners are taken to a place of execution where a pit has been dug. They are shot in pairs and Pierre is the sixth in line. The fifth man, a factory lad in a loose cloak, is taken without Pierre, who does not realise he has been saved. He watches the execution and the boy’s body being buried. A young sharpshooter appears stricken with terror with what he has done. Pierre and the other prisoners are led back to their cell.
They could not believe it because they alone knew what their life meant to them, and so they neither understood nor believed that it could be taken from them.
No one survives an execution. Tolstoy saw a man guillotined in Paris. It haunted him and confirmed him in his opposition to capital punishment.
Half way through this chapter we learn Pierre will not be killed. I think Tolstoy does this so we pay attention to the wider atrocity at work.
The trembling hands of the sharpshooters, burying the bodies. The workman, clinging to Pierre and waiting to be blindfolded, with glittering eyes. And the sharpshooter swaying above the pit, unable to understand what he has done.
The crowd disperse with drooping heads. No one survives an execution.
How do you think Pierre’s experience of the executions will affect him?
Three executions
On 22 December 1849, members of the Petrashevsky Circle faced a mock execution in St. Petersburg. Tsar Nicholas I considered this liberally-minded literary discussion group a threat to his regime, in the wake of the 1848 revolutions in Europe. The circle included the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. They were sentenced to death and submitted to a ritual execution. A staged last-minute Imperial pardon commuted their sentences to hard labour in Siberia.
The near-death experience had a profound effect on Dostoevsky. He wrote about it through his character Myshkin in The Idiot, who struggles to recover from his sentence of execution:
The uncertainty and feeling of aversion for the new thing which was going to overtake him immediately, was terrible.
On 6 April 1857, Tolstoy witnessed the guillotining of the murderer Francis Richeux in Paris. The capital punishment took place before some 12,000 people. The young Tolstoy was horrified. He wrote about the haunting image many years later:
When I saw the head separate from the body, and how they both thumped into the box at the same moment, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress can justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world, on whatever theory, had held it to be necessary, I know it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, and is not progress, but is my heart and I.
In the summer of 1866, Tolstoy was halfway through the serial publication of War and Peace. He was distracted from his work by two officers of a regiment stationed nearby. They asked him to intervene in defence of a private soldier accused of assaulting an officer. Tolstoy bumbled his way through the trial and failed to prevent the sentence of execution. Two weeks later, he witnessed Private Vasily Shabunin die by firing squad.
Tolstoy forever blamed himself for Shabunin’s death. And in War and Peace, he may have written Shabunin into the story. Tolstoy is Pierre watching on helplessly as the fifth prisoner, a young man, is shot by sharpshooters. What was Tolstoy reliving when he wrote:
Pierre glanced into the pit, and saw that the factory lad was lying with his knees close up to his head and one shoulder higher than the other. That shoulder rose and fell rhythmically and convulsively, but spadesful of earth were already being thrown over the whole body.
Nobody survives an execution. And this week leaves Pierre and us as spectators to a barbaric machine, ‘a system of some sort’ that saves and destroys lives with the nod of a head.
Further reading:
Thank you for reading
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of War and Peace.
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@simon, I'm having trouble with the main chat – I can't post because it says I need to join the chat. So I join but it still doesn't let me reply. It is on a few chats, but thankfully this one is ok. Do you have any ideas?
"Why can’t Nikolai picture his future with Princess Marya? Why does it make him afraid?"
I just had a thought... Marya is an unknown -- even though by marrying her, Nikolai would be treading a well-worn path, making an advantageous match, one approved by all the elders around them. Whereas he & Sonia grew up together and know each other well (perhaps all too well?). But a match with her would go against his mother's wishes, which would be unfamiliar territory for him.