Daydreams and nightmares

War and Peace Week 7: Book 1 Part 2 Chapter 18 – Part 3 Chapter 3

Welcome to week seven of War and Peace 2024. This week, we have read Book 1, Part 2, Chapter 18 – Part 3, Chapter 3. 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.

• Plot summaries for each character

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This week’s characters

Explore background and plot summaries for all this week’s characters:
Nikolai Rostov • Captain Tushin • Andrei Bolkonsky • Pierre Bezukhov • Marya Bolkonskaya • Prince Bagration • Zherkov • Timokhin • Dolokhov • Prince Vasili • Katiche • Hélène • Anna Pavlovna • Nikolai Bolkonsky • Alpatych • Anatole • Liza • Mademoiselle Bourienne • Tikhon

This week’s theme: Daydreams and nightmares

This week was half-war and half-peace. It’s a good opportunity to focus on the similarities between the two. All our main characters have been walking a line between fantasy and reality. Whether on the threshold of death or facing the prospect of marrying a Kuragin, their daydreams slip dangerously into nightmares.

Nikolai Rostov has been waiting for this moment, ever since he left home. “If only they would be quick,” he thinks as he imagines the “joy of attack.” So far, life in the army has not been quite what he expected. But soon, he thinks, he will be a man: a warrior, a hero.

Seconds later, he is running for his life. “Can they be coming at me? To kill me? Me who everybody loves?” War makes him a child, terrified, as sharpshooters take aim.

Captain Tushin swallows his fear with herb vodka and readies the artillery. He will hold his nerve by letting loose his imagination. Deadly cannons are tiny puffing pipes. Little Tushin is "an enormously tall, powerful man throwing cannonballs with both hands."

Only later, when it is all done, will tears fill his eyes.

Andrei Bolkonsky feels the blood rush to his heart. It has begun! Soon, he will prove his bravery, make his mark, and ascend to some happy higher plain.

But all is chaos, confusion and death. And the only good he does is to defend Tushin from the lies of his superiors. "It was all so strange, so unlike what he had hoped."

Pierre Bezukhov dreams he is Napoleon. Now he sleepwalks into a fortune and a marriage to the most beautiful woman in Petersburg. He senses there is something nightmarishly wrong about all of this, but he is alone and adrift.

It is happening, and so it must be. "It is too late now, it's done; besides I love her."

Marya Bolkonskaya has "earthly longings" to escape the suffocating love of her tyrannical father. She is convinced she is ugly, for everyone says so, and she is destined to be alone. "Could the joy of love be for her?"

There are other symmetries between the characters. Nikolai and Andrei's pursuit of heroism met dead ends. Andrei and Pierre mistook war and wealth for life itself. And Pierre and Marya watched helplessly as the Kuragins closed in.

It’s been a busy week of war and peace.

Where in the world are you?

There are over a thousand of us reading War and Peace together, all over the world. We have family and friends forming their own little book circles, and in some cases three generations all on the same page.

Tom P

has very helpfully started a thread to find out where everyone is. Check it out to find other readers near you!

Chapter 18: Your last left step

Everywhere, men are now dying and wounded and dead. Bagration orders the regiment to re-form and advance on the enemy. Andrei witnesses the march, noting, in detail the faces on both sides. Bullets fly, and more men die.

Tolstoy served as an artillery officer during the Crimean War. Source.

Background: Battle of Schöngrabern

“The Russians behaved courageously and, what seldom happens in war, two bodies of infantry were seen marching resolutely against one another without either of them giving way before meeting.” – Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) , French historian

So this is just a reminder to help you put these chapters in context: Prince Bagration has been sent to delay the French advance while Kutuzov and the main army retreat up the road to Brünn. Bagration fools the French general Murat into agreeing on a truce, buying Kutuzov more time. Napoleon sends Murat an angry letter, and to avoid further humiliation, Murat attacked after dark on 16 November.

Prince Bagration held out for around six hours before conducting an organised retreat to the northeast. As we see in chapters 19 and 20, the vastly superior numbers of the French army easily outflanked the smaller Russian army. Napoleon later wrote of the “entire fearlessness” of the Russians at Schöngrabern.

Tolstoy makes Tushin’s undefended artillery battery a decisive factor in this successful withdrawal. Remember from last week that Tolstoy had served as a junior artillery officer in the Crimean War. Artillery dominated that war, and his experience lends realism to his descriptions of what it is like to fire these cannons, and be in their firing line:

“On the earth, torn up by a recent explosion, were lying, here and there, broken beams, crushed bodies of Russians and French, heavy cast-iron cannon overturned into the ditch by a terrible force, half buried in the ground and forever dumb, bomb-shells, balls, splinters of beams, ditches, bomb-proofs, and more corpses, in blue or in gray overcoats, which seemed to have been shaken by supreme convulsions.” – Leo Tolstoy, Sevastopol Sketches

• You can read more about how the horrors of Crimea shaped Tolstoy here.

Chapter 19: My young and happy life

We learn that Tushin’s battery is isolated and undefended and that the left flank is being outflanked by the French, as Andrei had foreseen. Here are the infantry we met at the start of Part 2, and Rostov’s Pavlograd hussars. Zherkov, overwhelmed with fear, fails to deliver the order for the left flank to retreat. Meanwhile, the commanders argue until it is too late: they are trapped. Rostov’s squadron faces the enemy, and Nikolai is injured. He is saved at the last minute by sharpshooters.

Nikolai running as if playing tag: anyone can write about the loss of innocence in war; Tolstoy writes about the return to inncence.
– Yiyun Li, Tolstoy Together

Theme: Fear

In this week’s chat we’ve talked a lot about Nikolai’s experience in this chapter. As someone said, no one is going to call him a coward. His terror cuts us up because it is the terror we know we would feel. And when “he remembered his mother’s love for him”, we as parents picture our own children put into harm’s way. It is a nightmare to read. Brilliant writing full of emotions that we don’t know what to do with.

But I actually want to talk about Zherkov:

Zherkov, not removing his hand from his cap, turned his horse about and galloped off. But no sooner had he left Bagration than his courage failed him. He was seized by panic and could not go where it was dangerous.

However much I try – and perhaps I am not trying hard enough – I cannot hate Zherkov. This is the first of three occasions in this battle where he fails to deliver a message, and his cowardice undoubtedly leads to other people dying. Zherkov is one of the least likeable characters in the book. He has no redeeming qualities. He was demoted for his buffoonery but sneaked back up the ranks in time to get others killed.

And yet, the realistic way Tolstoy depicts the battle and the open way he writes his characters just stops me from judging the man. For a brief moment, his panic is my panic and I would also not go where it is dangerous. Yes, he shouldn’t be there doing that job. But then again, life is not that simple. We will all get in too deep and lose our nerve, at some point. We just must hope it isn’t as consequential as it is for Zherkov, or as traumatic as it is for Nikolai.

So, I’ve tried to dislike Zherkov, but I can’t. And I’m blaming Tolstoy.

Read more: Who’s Afraid of Cowardice? A thoughtful essay on the history of running away, by science fiction writer Adam Roberts.

• How about you? How do you relate to the moments of fear in this chapter?

Chapter 20: Ways of the brave

In the last chapter, fear overwhelmed Nikolai. In this chapter, different characters find ways to master their emotions. The infantry commander, who fears disgrace. Dolokhov, who wants to be reinstated as an officer. Tushin, lost in his fantastic world. Andrei, who wants to prove his courage to the world and to himself.

Character focus: Captain Tushin

The difference between a man with an ego and a man without one: Prince Andrei’s superhero fantasy is joyless; Tushin’s gleeful.
– Yiyun Li, Tolstoy Together

In the daily chat, the discussion turned to heroism, bravery and courage. What’s the difference? Who is the hero of this week, and why is it Captain Tushin?

He’s the small “unsoldierly” barefoot philosopher, drinking his herb vodka and contemplating immortality. I think Andrei likes him for the same reason Andrei likes Pierre: his simple honesty, stripped of pride and performance. Andrei thinks of himself as a practical and rational man, but really he is a fantasist. As Bilibin says, un philosophe, lost in his head. Readers who spend too much time in their heads will recognise themselves in all three: Pierre, Andrei, and Tushin.

But the thing about Tushin is he puts his imagination to work. As Andrew Kaufman writes, “he turns an unpleasant job he neither chose nor may leave into a daring game that offers fulfilment and even a little fun into the bargain.”

Tushin is a minor character with a giant’s presence in this novel. He has a lesson for us and for the three main male characters: Pierre, Nikolai and Andrei. They are all dreamers, but it is not that they need to wake up. They just need better dreams. His fantasy grounds him in the moment, keeps him alive and gets the job done.

From the defeaning sounds of his own guns around him, the whistle and thud of the enemy’s cannon-balls, from the flushed and perspiring faces of the crews bustling round the guns, from the sight of the blood of men and horses, from the little puffs of smoke on the enemy’s side (always followed by a ball flying past and striking the earth, a man, a gun, or a horse), from the sight of all these things a fantastic world of his own had taken possession of his brain and at that moment afforded him pleasure. The enemy’s guns were in his imagination not guns but pipes from which occasional puffs were blown by an invisible smoker.

• What are your thoughts on Captain Tushin?

Chapter 21: Why did I come here?

After the storm, a dark sea of injured men. Tushin gives Nikolai a lift on one of the cannons. Prince Bagration summons Tushin to ask about the abandoned artillery. Zherkov and other officers lie about what they saw and did that day. Andrei heaps praise on Tushin. But he is sad: “It was all so strange, so unlike what he had hoped for.” Nikolai is also troubled. “Why did I come here?”

• At the end of Book 1, Part 2, have your views about any of the characters changed?

Congratulations on finishing Book 1, Part 2 of War and Peace!

As usual,

Jennifer S

has supplied us with a badge so we can all pretend we’re in the Tolstoy Scouts:

And

Irena Hindy

has written us a helpful emoji summary of the last 21 chapters:

🥾🧥🔵 - 🪖🦚 -🎖️🤡😤 -💰-💩- 🥧 - 🌊 - 🍇🌤️🔥 -✌️- 🤓 - 🎩🤢 - 🦊🦊🦊 - 🥞😨 -♟️🪤 -🧦- 🗺️🧭 - ☄️🥞 - ☠️ - 🐎🔫🐇 - 🦸🏼‍♂️❤️‍🔥🎖️- 🤥🤕🔥🌌

We will now briefly leave the war behind to catch up with our main characters in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Bald Hills.

Los Cedros, Ecuador. The cloud forest, where I first read War and Peace.

Tangent: How I fell in love with War and Peace

It was Valentine’s Day this week, which is a good moment to tell this story about the first time I read War and Peace. I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I thought some of you may be interested in how War and Peace became my favourite novel.

Listen to this tangent:

Snakes and Ladders

One Valentine's Day, a long time ago, I was bitten by a snake. We were 7,500 feet above the sea, heads in the clouds, feet in the grass.

The cloud forests of Ecuador. The most biodiverse place on Earth, where flowers grow in the air, howlers wake you at dawn and, at dusk, a phalanx of bats flutters from the rafters into the starless night.

We were volunteers at a research station. Five hours by mule and mud from the nearest town. Another hour by truck to the nearest hospital. Biologists stayed at the bunkhouse to count monkeys and epiphytes and set camera traps for pumas.

Our job was to plant cedars. Once upon a time, these giants grew tall in the cloud forest. But when we beat the bounds of the reserve, we could hear the chainsaws in the next valley. The giants were coming down.

Carrying saplings through long grass to their new home, my foot found something thick and moving and alive. The snake bit through my rubber boot. Later we'd fill the welly with water and watch it trickle out the holes.

At the time, the sky split and my legs gave in. I was carried to the bunkhouse. A girl from the nearest village, ashen, made me drink water soaked in forest plants. For the venom, she said.

On the journey down the mountain, each step the mule took was a knife to my leg. As we rested by a river, sounds and sights began to fade, and my initial hope gave way to something dark and endless. I felt very tired.

In the hospital, they took my blood. The snake's anti-coagulants had turned it to water. The bad news, someone said: inside, you're bleeding to death. The good news is we have the anti-venom.

I recovered over the following few weeks, returning eventually to the reserve. I had unfinished business with the cloud forest. Each day, I lost myself in the pages of a book. On each page, its writer seemed to say simply:

This is how it is. This thing called life. And it's alright.

The words rose as a ladder before me. I felt strong again and looked forward to walking back into the forest. This time I'd watch where I put my feet. But I'd also take time to notice the sky. To look and listen and feel.

"How can it be that I’ve never seen that lofty sky before?"

The 1805 Treaty of Potsdam was signed at the Garrison Church. Source.

Book 1 Part 3

Chapter 1: Masters of Illusion

We are back in the two capitals, where Prince Vasili has taken the new Count Bezukhov into his care. Because we are rarely aware of our worst traits, Vasili does not think he is a devious man, and Pierre believes all the flattery he now receives is genuine. Anna Pavlovna ushers him in the direction of Hélène, and once he has seen her as his beautiful wife-to-be, he cannot unsee the illusion. Even though he knows deep down, it is a bad thing.

Footnote: Treaty of Potsdam

Anna Pavlovna’s party was like the former one, only the novelty she offered her guests this time was not Mortemart, but a diplomatist fresh from Berlin with the very latest details of the Emperor Alexander’s visit to Potsdam, and of how the two august friends had pledged themselves in an indissoluble alliance to uphold the cause of justice against the enemy of the human race.

After the horrors of war, there is a dreamlike sense of unreality to life in Saint Petersburg. Pierre is sleepwalking into marriage, surrounded by untold riches, balls and banquets, bosoms and snuffboxes. This detachment from reality is really brought home by Anna Pavlovna’s guest of honour: a diplomat with news of the Treaty of Potsdam.

On 3 November, beside the tombs of his ancestors, Frederick William III, King of Prussia, signed a treaty with Tsar Alexander. Prussia had not joined the Third Coalition, and Napoleon was confident it would remain neutral. But this new treaty required Prussia to raise troops and enter the war against France. However, the Russians soon lost the battles of Schöngrabern and Austerlitz, rendering the treaty worthless. Historian Andrew Roberts wrote that "rarely has a treaty ... been more swiftly overtaken by events.”

So while thousands are dying in the real war, Anna Pavlovna is celebrating this meaningless “indissoluble alliance” between emperors, while engineering another match between Pierre and Hélène.

• How do you feel about being back in society after our time at war? Do these society chapters feel different from those at the beginning of the novel?

Snuffbox with portrait of Catherine II. Source.

Chapter 2: An accidental marriage

Prince Vasili is in a hurry to marry off his children, and Pierre is failing to propose to Hélène. So Vasili puts on a name-day party for Hélène, where he announces their engagement, saving the couple the trouble of ever having to speak of love. Pierre takes off his glasses and sees something unpleasant. They kiss and, six weeks later, are married.

Theme: Beauty

Or he would suddenly feel ashamed but he did not know why. He felt it was awkward to attract everyone’s attention and to be considered a lucky man and, with his plain face, to be looked on as a sort of Paris possessed of a Helen.

This is a reference to Helen of Troy. In Homer’s The Iliad, her abduction from Sparta by Paris sets off the Trojan War. Her beauty was worth fighting over, or as Christopher Marlowe wrote: “was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships?”

All of Saint Petersburg society thinks Hélène is beautiful: “Happy the man who wins her!” says Anna Pavlovna, warming to her new role as an old maid. In superficial Saint Peterburg society there is nothing more splendid than possessing beauty. Pierre once dreamed of being a Napoleon with radical ideas to change the world. But now high society has turned him into a Paris, a man whose only desire is to possess a beautiful woman.

We’ll talk more about Hélène in future weeks, but here I just want to flag an absent friend:

‘Never, never marry, my dear fellow!’

These days, Pierre is never alone. “His whole time was taken up with dinners and balls.” But he seems more lonely than ever. He desperately needs “to open his mind by intimate talks with a friend older than himself and whom he respected.” He needs Andrei. In fact, these two chapters give a sense of the same societal pressure that probably led to Andrei and Liza’s marriage. It’s a claustrophobic world where it is impossible to think clearly and know oneself. All is dazzling beauty:

The wax candles burned brightly, the silver and crystal gleamed, so did the ladies’ toilettes and the gold and silver of the men’s epaulettes; servants in scarlet liveries moved round the table, and the clatter of plates, knives, and glasses, mingled with the animated hum of several conversations.

Andrei has written Pierre a letter, but we don’t get to read it. He has also written to his sister Marya. We can only imagine what he would think to know that two of his greatest friends in the world look set to marry Kuargins.

Paris and Helen by Jacques-Louis David (1788). Source.

Chapter 3: The Kuragins are coming!

Vasili and Anatole are on their way to Bald Hills. Old Prince Bolkonsky is in a huff about it, so orders for snow to be shovelled back onto the road. The Kuaragins arrive, and the father tells the son to behave himself. Meanwhile, Liza and Mademoiselle Bourienne try to prettify Marya. She tells them to leave her alone, where she considers her earthly desires and God’s mysterious will.

Moscow in Winter from the Sparrow Hills by Ivan Aivazovsky. Source.

Theme: Happiness

‘I say, old man, joking apart, is she very hideous?’ Anatole asked in French, as if continuing a conversation, the subject of which had often been mentioned during the journey.

If everyone thinks Hélène is beautiful, the world believes Marya Bolkonskaya is ugly. As society makes Pierre doubt his true feelings, Marya internalises the way the world sees her: happiness is impossible because “I am too ugly.”

This is a sad note to end the week, with the Kuragins circling. Anatole “regarded his whole life as a continual round of amusement which someone for some reason had to provide for him.” Contrast this idea of happiness with Marya, who regards “her strongest most deeply-hidden longing for earthly love” as a temptation from the devil.

We are left wondering whether either Pierre or Marya will find happiness. It is unlikely happiness lies with the Kuargins. But if not there, then where?

Thank you for reading

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And that’s all for this week. Thank you for reading, and goodbye.

1. There may be a bit of a delay on the next instalment of All Tolstoy’s Parties. Unfortunately, I have lost contact with our entertainment correspondent. This week he sent me a rather cryptic note about investigating the legendary vampires of Saint Petersburg. Rather concerningly, I haven’t heard anything since. Let’s hope he is okay and reports back soon.