Death's Door
War and Peace Week 40: Book 4, Part 1, Chapter 12 – Part 2, Chapter 2
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Welcome to Week 40 of War and Peace 2024
This week, we have read Book 4, Part 1, Chapter 12 – Part 2, Chapter 2.
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.
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This week’s theme: Death’s Door
I am a little lost for words this week. Fortunately for us, Tolstoy wasn't. The world is in this book, and this week, the words made us feel so much.
Pierre watched all meaning drain away, only to have it returned to him by a round man with magic potatoes. Platon showed him a different path through life's adversities. I suspect he has saved our hero's life.
Marya has spent so long turning circles in her father's house. This week, we see her a blaze of energy: her own fiery comet.
And Andrei. A man who tried to love life, finds peace at last in the solemn mystery of death.
It's a momentous week in War and Peace, and we can explore some of the book’s central themes in this post.
Chapter 12: Platon and Potatoes
Pierre is pardoned and joins the prisoners of war. After the executions, he feels life is meaningless. But he meets the peasant Platon Karataev, who offers him potatoes with salt. ‘Pierre thought he had never eaten anything that tasted better.’ Platon is sad to learn that Pierre has no one, and he tells Pierre how he became a soldier. He prays to the saints of horses and falls asleep. Pierre remains awake, with something stirring in his soul.
From the moment Pierre had witnessed those terrible murders committed by men who did not wish to commit them, it was as if the mainspring of his life, on which everything depended and which made everything appear alive, had suddenly been wrenched out and everything had collapsed into a heap of meaningless rubbish.
When all is despair, and the world has lost its head, hope for a Platon to cook for you in the dark.
He has a dog and prays for the horses (remember how many have died in this war.) He makes salted potatoes taste like the grandest meal in your life. He calls Big Pierre a little bird.
What a character he is! Perhaps too good to be true? The idealised peasant? The romanticised soldier that Pierre dreamed of after Borodino?
Perhaps. But, sometimes, we meet a stranger like this. And this is just the companionship, kindness, and wisdom Pierre needs right now, when his faith in humanity has drained away.
…and he felt that the world that had been shattered was once more stirring in his soul with a new beauty and on new and unshakable foundations.
When have you met a stranger who gave you hope or set you on a different path?
Chapter 13: Little Falcon
In this chapter, we are given a portrait of Platon Karataev, the little falcon. As round as a potato and just as earthy, his head is full of folk-saying that he uses only in their meaningful context. He never thinks before he speaks and loves and lives ‘affectionately with everything life’ brings him in contact with. Pierre spends four weeks in this shed with 28 other men, but his overriding memory of this time is of Platon Karataev.
But to Pierre, he always remained what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.
How unlike the Freemasons is Platon Karataev. No arcane rituals and guarded mysteries. No secrets, hidden in names. No heroic destiny. The Freemasons sent Pierre looking for meaning in the square – a shape rare in nature but common in the human mind, its exact, precise angles overburdened with artificial meaning. In contrast, Platon embodies the natural simplicity of the circle.
His words and actions flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower.
Tolstoy, like Pierre, hankers after this simplicity. Pierre's life has been anything but simple. One thousand pages in, I think we're all craving a companion with a round smile and some simple potatoes.
For me, there's something a little unreal about Platon. Ethereal. Supernatural. I wouldn't be surprised if he turned to smoke on the wind, and left without trace.
But here’s a question:
Imagine Pierre met Platon instead of the freemason Bazdéev after his duel with Dolokhov. What would Pierre have thought of Platon?
Magic potatoes
War and Peace: one man’s epic quest for the perfect potato. Pierre’s world is collapsing ‘into a heap of meaningless rubbish.’ He’s given up all hope in ‘the meaning of life.’ He has lost everything: family, friends, home, freedom, peace of mind and belief in the goodness of humanity. How can he survive captivity as a prisoner of war?
But here, he meets Platon Karataev, a very round and softly-spoken peasant. When Platon offers him some salted potatoes, Pierre thinks, ‘he had never eaten anything that tasted better.’ He thought the same when eating the soldiers’ mash after the Battle of Borodino. But then again, Pierre is prone to hyperbole.
Pierre’s exchange with the soldiers was awkward. He glossed over his aristocratic background and hesitated over giving them money. The social distance between him and Platon is no less great, but their exchange is more natural and fruitful.
Both men have suffered a great deal and ended up in the same miserable situation. But Platon has persevered where Pierre has floundered. The peasant’s name is a Russian variation of the philosopher Plato and means ‘broad-shouldered.’ With stoic philosophy and some well-worn sayings, he lives lovingly and with laughter. After so many grim chapters, he offers us some badly needed hope.
But is he too good to be true? Is Platon a Pollyanna? Or is he a romanticised idea of the Russian peasant?
Tolstoy had a lifelong obsession with the virtues of a simple peasant’s life, leading him to renounce his wealth and title later in life. Idealised peasants crop up elsewhere in his fiction: Nikita in Master and Man, and Gerasim in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
I find Platon the least convincing character in War and Peace. But more than any other character, I want to be convinced by him. And that’s kind of the point. In a book that is all about seeking meaning in life, Platon appears in the darkest moment with a lantern to lead us out. Or, at least, a magic potato.
Chapter 14: Marya in Movement
These last few days have been the happiest of Marya’s life. She now makes the long and hazardous journey from Voroenzh to meet her brother at Yaroslavl. Her nephew and Mademoiselle Bourienne accompany her. She meets the Rostovs: feels hostility towards Sonya and unexpected warmth towards Natasha. Natasha tells her that two days ago, something terrible happened to Andrei, and his condition became much worse.
Natasha • Sonya • Marya • Countess Rostova • Count Rostov • Tikhon • Nikolushka • Mademoiselle Bourienne • Andrei
Marya’s journey
Princess Marya Bolkonskaya has never been so happy. And so sad:
But this happiness on one side of her spiritual nature did not prevent her feeling grief for her brother with full force; on the contrary that spiritual tranquility on the one side made it the more possible for her to give full play to her feeling for her brother.
She has spent most of the book cooped up in her father’s house at Bald Hills, dreaming of becoming a penniless pilgrim. Now she is racing 500 miles across a dangerous country between Voronezh and Yaroslavl. Her ‘energy and firmness of spirit’ astonish everyone around her. She is the first up and the last to bed. And despite all the emotions coursing through her, she stays calm when she meets the Rostovs.
I would happily read a whole novel about this new energetic Marya, seemingly capable of anything. Several events have led to this change: the death of her father, the loss of her home, and meeting Nikolai. And yet she remains the same Marya, driven by duty and loyalty to her family.
And this I think is significant. The dowdy princess that Anatole met at the start of the novel is the same radiant Marya rushing to her brother’s deathbed. One of the overarching themes of War and Peace is that first impressions are usually deceptive. And we should never underestimate someone’s capacity to astonish.
The bittersweet note of this chapter is that Marya’s rising happiness inevitably comes at the end of Andrei’s own long-suffering journey.
So, how has Marya changed since the start of the novel?
Chapter 15: Silence and Softness
Marya goes in to see Andrei. She hopes for tender words from her brother, but instead finds a man already resigned to death who is now far from them. He speaks coldly to Marya, cruelly of Natasha and kisses his son without knowing what to say to him. After this, Marya understood there was no hope left to save Andrei’s life.
Andrei • Marya • Natasha • Nikolushka
Evidently only with an effort did he understand anything living; but it was obvious that he failed to understand, not because he lacked the power to do so but because he understood something else—something the living did not and could not understand—and which wholly occupied his mind.
Marya expects the gentle, sympathetic face of Andrei's childhood. Instead we get the aloof coldness that marked his arrival onto the pages of War and Peace.
Except his indifference is not his detachment from society at Anna Pavlovna's soirée, but from life itself. It's heartbreaking.
Heartbreaking because the gentle loving words are gone. The few there ever were. And it contrasts with his father's death, which allowed Nikolai Bolkonsky to finally say how he felt.
His grandson, also Nikolai, seems to understand what is happening now. As though this knowledge is elemental and shared by those closest to birth, and to death.
Chapter 16: Awakening From Life
Two days previously, Andrei was lying in bed when Natasha came in silently and began knitting. His love for her binds him to life, even as it slips from him. Asleep, he dreams of a closed door he cannot bolt. Death enters, Andrei dies and he wakes up. He perceives that death is an awakening and he loosens his grip on life. Soon after he dies, as the living bear witness to the solemn mystery of death.
Andrei • Natasha • Sonya • Marya • Nikolushka • Count Rostov • Countess Rostova
The solemn mystery
When we last saw Andrei, he was seeing visions in his darkened room. These included two sphinxes, mythological beasts found guarding gateways and setting riddles. Now, at the end, Prince Bolkonsky dreams of a door:
…a single question, that of the closed door, superseded all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt and lock it. Everything depended on whether he was, or was not, in time to lock it. He went, and tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move and he knew he would not be in time to lock the door though he painfully strained all his powers. He was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear was the fear of death. It stood behind the door.
A long time ago, Andrei stood on the other side of another door. He tried to open it, but ‘someone was holding it shut.’ Behind that door, his son was being born, and his wife was dying. Life and death, just out of reach.
Tolstoy originally planned to kill off Andrei at Austerlitz, ‘a brilliant young man’ cut down in his prime. So much unrealised potential. A tragic waste of life. But Tolstoy’s decision to save Andrei sets up a far greater tragedy. A man desperate to love life and feel more, but unable to open that door and let in its mysteries.
Superficially, he is like Boris Drubetskoy. Young, intelligent and ambitious – destined for greatness. But unlike Boris, he senses there is more to life. He glimpses it in the lofty sky at Austerlitz, on a ferry with his old friend Pierre, and in a moonlit night at the Rostovs’ country house. He even senses it in the buzzing of a fly, drawn to his festering flesh.
But he can never get that door open. He stands before the sphinxes but cannot answer their riddle. Only now, at the end, does a solution appear to him:
‘Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.’ These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun.
His revelation is not dissimilar to Platon’s wisdom: all is love. But it is a hollow realisation because Andrei only understands it intellectually, whereas Platon knows it in his whole being. And while Platon has lived his life according to this philosophy, Andrei has repeatedly failed to do so.
This tragedy is far more affecting than if Andrei had died at Austerlitz. We weren’t sure if we even liked him back then. But having watched him over and over again reach to open the door of life, we know he will never make it to the other side. Instead, we witness an even greater mystery, as he makes peace with his death as an awakening of its own.
What was Andrei searching for in War and Peace? Did he find it?
Congratulations on finishing Book 4, Part 1! And thank you
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Book 4, Part 2
Chapter 1: Tolstoy’s Obsession
In which our hero, the narrator, saddles up his hobby horse and rides once more into battle against the historians. Pursuing the Russians beyond Moscow, Murat lost sight of the enemy. Kutuzov led the Russians across country to a strong position on the Kaluga road. Military genius, say the historians. Not so, says an increasingly grumpy Lev Tolstoy.
The human mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but to desire to find those causes is implanted in the human soul.
Love a book for its imperfections. Love a book despite and because of its author's obsessions.
A scrupulous editor would have removed this chapter. And substituted a paragraph. Or a line. He's said all this before, in other words, about other battles.
But consider this: the author is a character in their own novel.
Above (or below) all the human moments of War and Peace, there's this tragi-comic tussle between Tolstoy and Napoleon, between Tolstoy and History, between Tolstoy and the World.
He's no better and no worse than any of his characters. He's right, until he's wrong. He's interesting, until he's dull.
This book has all of life, in its maddening contradictions. For how many times have we caught ourselves, or someone else, saddling up the hobby horse to repeat our favourite arguments?
Chapter 2: Full Circle
Had there been no leaders, the Russian army would have behaved identically, argues Tolstoy. Knocked back past Moscow by the French, the army moved towards the region with the best provisions. Napoleon sent overtures of peace. Kutuzov rebuffed them. Gradually, the mood shifted as the Russians became conscious that they now had the advantage.
Napoleon • Kutuzov • Alexander
And at once, as a clock begins to strike and chime as soon as the minute hand has completed a full circle, this change was shown by an increased activity, whizzing, and chiming, in the higher spheres.
I love this chapter for its inconsistencies and contradictions. No one controls history, and there are no Great Men. But Kutuzov, and "he alone", understood the true nature of things. He alone restrained the army from useless engagements.
Tolstoy is consistent in his obsessions and inconsistent in his argument. And I love him for it.
Meanwhile Napoleon wants peace and Kutuzov wants war (but not yet). The tide is turning, the clocks are whirring. The famous retreat of the French army has begun.
Thank you for reading
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of War and Peace.
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And that’s all for this week. I love to read your thoughts in the comments and the chat threads. Have a great week, and I’ll see everyone here next Sunday for more War and Peace 2024.
I don't think I would have ever brought myself or even managed to read this book without this readalong. And it's so much more fulfilling this way - slow reading is so valuable in its gentle trickling way.
I really love the moment of Pierre and his potato. I once had a similar moment with a salami and butter sandwich on an all-day European train trip. The train car only took cash, and I had no cash, so I hadn't eaten anything but a small chocolate bar all day. The porter apparently took pity and brought me the sandwich, and it is still to this day one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted.