How Bees Die
War and Peace Week 36: Book 3, Part 3, Chapters 19–25
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Welcome to Week 36 of War and Peace 2024
This week, we have read Book 3, Part 3, Chapters 19–25.
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This week’s theme: How Bees Die
On a bright autumn day, Napoleon looks down at his prize. He has made death and called it life.
Up on his high hill, he takes a superficial glance at the hive. The throb of life, the hum of tiny beating wings.
Unsuspecting drones, living out their lives, making honey for Napoleon's sweet tooth.
But Bonaparte is no bee-keeper. If he was, he'd see what Tolstoy sees. What we see, as we descend into dystopia. The diverse discordant sounds of disorder.
Robber bees and soldier ants, smeared with honey, breaking ranks and looting shops. Until the fire.
An officer in a scarf, caught between duty and disgust, a plump and pimpled shopkeeper and a thin man with a philosopher's tongue:
‘When your head is gone you won't weep for your hair.’
In the Rostov house, the joy is gone. A boy's bad note on the clavichord. The master's mirror, left for the servants' satisfaction. It's their house now. Until the fire.
Out in the street: the fear, a fight, a murderous mob. Who's in charge? Who will save us from the French? And from the fire.
Count Rastopchin, up in his head, believes he's in command. The voice of the people. Their shepherd and their guide.
If for one moment he stops believing this, reality rousing him from his beauty sleep, he will discover himself ridiculous, weak and alone. A senseless man in a city mad for burning.
Fear the powerful man losing his power. He opens the prisons, and sends away the fire brigade. Before the fire.
Bring him a mob and a man to blame. A traitor, a villain, a thin neck filled with blood.
All done for the public good and a greater safety.
He'll regret it later. They all will, briefly. When the crime is done, and the city burns.
They'll wonder what came over them. And what it all meant. Those sleepy shells of bees, sitting in their sanctuaries in a dying queenless hive.
As the keeper chalks his mark and burns it clean.
Chapter 19: Oriental Beauty
Napoleon is waiting on the hills outside the city, fantasising about possessing the ‘oriental beauty’ of Moscow. He orders the city's boyars to be brought to him, but the city is empty. The sublime moment having passed, Napoleon sends his troops into Moscow.
The city was evidently living with the full force of its own life. By the indefinite signs which, even at a distance, distinguish a living body from a dead one, Napoleon from the Poklonny Hill perceived the throb of life in the town and felt, as it were, the breathing of that great and beautiful body.
Up on his hill, Napoleon doesn't understand what he is looking at. He cannot distinguish between life and death. The emperor's orientalist fantasies would be ridiculous if they hadn't helped to cause this devastation – he has made a desert and called it peace.
A beautiful September day. One that is owned by no one and can be enjoyed by all.
From the 26th of August to the 2nd of September, that is from the battle of Borodino to the entry of the French into Moscow, during the whole of that agitating, memorable week, there had been the extraordinary autumn weather that always comes as a surprise, when the sun hangs low and gives more heat than in spring, when everything shines so brightly in the rare clear atmosphere that the eyes smart, when the lungs are strengthened and refreshed by inhaling the aromatic autumn air, when even the nights are warm, and when, in those dark warm nights, golden stars startle and delight us continually by falling from the sky.
But here comes another European who thinks he can bring civilisation with cannons, while dreaming of what he cannot possess and will never understand.
Who is going to tell him?
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An orientalist fantasy
Remember the distinction between Russia’s two capitals? Petersburg is the modern European city, Russia’s ‘gateway to the West’, built by Peter the Great in the eighteenth century. Moscow faces inward and eastward, an oriental city. Napoleon isn’t interested in Petersburg; it complicates his fantasy of an exotic Asian country that he wants to possess and civilise.
He not only uses disturbing sexual imagery to imagine this conquest, but he also shows a complete lack of interest in the reality and agency of the society being destroyed. Tolstoy has Napoleon use an archaic term for the Russian feudal nobility: boyar. We haven’t met any boyars in our journey through War and Peace, only counts and princes. That’s because, by 1812, they didn’t exist. If Napoleon is aware of this fact, he is choosing to ignore it as part of his own Orientalist fantasy.
Is Napoleon sincere? Do you think he intends to make Russia a better place? And what do you think would have happened if his conquest had been successful?
Chapter 20: The Empty Hive
Tolstoy compares Moscow to ‘a dying queenless hive’. Only a fiftieth part of its population remains, and normal life has broken down into death and disorder. Napoleon is told the city is empty, and he can scarcely believe it. Instead of driving triumphantly to the Kremlin, he sulks in a Moscow suburb.
Napoleon is no bee-keeper. ‘In a queenless hive, no life is left though, to a superficial glance, it seems as much alive as other hives.’ Tolstoy kept bees and understood them, and he treats us to this glorious extended metaphor humming with observations of men and insects.
It's stunning stuff, far more evocative than if he had described the city itself.
So many great images stay with me, but I find myself particularly pondering those two old bees, a doddery, bickering couple in their winter weeks:
‘In another corner two old bees are languidly fighting, or cleaning themselves, or feeding one another, without themselves knowing whether they do it with friendly or hostile intent.’
And speaking of crotchety couples, here is Leo’s wife, Sofia Tostoya, on the writer’s bee mania:
He is crouching in front of his hives, net over his head. The apiary has become the centre of the world for him now and everybody has to be interested exclusively in Bees!
Consider the bees
Humans have been harvesting honey for over 15,000 years and began to domesticate them some 4,500 years ago. There are 8,000-year-old paintings of bees in caves in Spain, and they appear in our oldest stories. Tolstoy may have been thinking of Virgil’s Aeneid, where city-building is compared to the industrious bee hive:
Just as work drives the bees under the sun
in early summer throughout the florid countryside
when the adults of the hive lead forth the young,
or when they store the liquid honey
and stuff the cells with sweet nectar.
Or when they receive the deliveries of those
arriving, or ward off, having formed a
phalanx, the drones—a lazy swarm—
from the hive; The work seethes and the
fragrant honey is redolent with thyme.
In War and Peace, the image is reversed. We watch a city’s destruction and the melancholy state every beekeeper must fear: a hive that is a hive no more.
Napoleon’s inability to interpret the health of his new hive has a satirical sting: Bonaparte had integrated the bee into his insignia and the emblem of the First Empire. You may admire the bee, Tolstoy tells Napoleon, but you will never understand it.
Does Tolstoy’s bee analogy work? Can you think of a better one?
Further reading:
Chapter 21: City of Shopkeepers
The Russian army continues to file through the city. Crowds of soldiers and fleeing inhabitants are crushed as they cross the bridges while troops disperse into the city, looting as they go. Shopkeepers despair, and at the Moscow bridge, General Ermolov threatens to fire on the crowd.
‘When your head is gone you don't weep for your hair!’
Napoleon is supposed to have called England a nation of shopkeepers. Well, Tolstoy gives us the grocers of Moscow protecting their wares.
Not from Napoleon. Not yet, anyway. But from the retreating Russian army. Disordered, becoming a looting mob.
In this little sketch, I feel first for the officer in the scarf, horrified and then bewildered by the course of events. ‘It's not my business!’ He never thought he would have to contend with philosophising shopkeepers:
‘Against God's might our hands can't fight.’
I'm also worried about the plump, pimpled shopkeeper, who wants guards to guard his shop from the guards. And I'm worried about the woman on the bridge as the general threatens to blow it up. Sick with worry. The bees are still buzzing in my head, and here they are, fighting each other as the hive destroys itself.
Do any recent events remind you of the chaotic scenes in Moscow?
Chapter 22: The Unknown Officer
The streets are now deserted. At the Rostovs’ house, Vasilich’s grandson Mishka plays on the clavichord until he is told off by the old housekeeper, Mavra Kuzminishna. A young, unknown officer comes to the gate asking for the count. He is a relation of the Rostovs, and Mavra Kuzminishna gives him some money before he departs to catch up with his regiment.
Mishka had opened the clavichord and was strumming on it with one finger. The yard-porter, his arms akimbo, stood smiling with satisfaction before the large mirror.
This is one of the most enigmatic chapters in the whole book.
A domestic mirror of the last chapter: the young men are like the disorderly soldiers, breaking the rules now the masters have gone, though this is harmless fun.
But Mavra Kuzminishna is the tireless general, marshalling her troops to order and continuing as if the count was still at home.
Every time she appears, she does something tender, whether out of loyalty or compassion. She let in the wounded men, then Andrei, and now gives money to this unknown officer.
Who is he? It is strange that Tolstoy does not say. There is something mysterious about him. As though he might be the illegitimate son of Count Rostov. A love child with a back story?
Whoever he is, his brief presence makes the greater absence all the more felt. The house of Rostov joy is empty now, but for a few notes on the clavichord.
Who do you think the young officer is? Is he really a relative of the Rostovs? Far-fetched theories welcome.
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Chapter 23: A Moving Mob
At a tavern, a fight breaks out; the publican is accused of murder as he complains of robbery. They set off to the chief of police to settle matters, and a mob gathers. They read Count Rastopchin’s latest proclamation and are dissatisfied with it. The police superintendent appears, and the mob pursue him.
‘There now, the gentry and merchants have gone away and left us to die. Do they think we're dogs?’
This chapter is bewildering. I think it is supposed to be.
A fight, a murder, a mob. Confusion about who's in charge and what's happening. Many voices all talking at once, looking for an undefinable authority to restore order. The last bees in a queenless hive.
Who'd be the superintendent of police at this moment? A wad of cash burning a hole in his pocket. No wonder he turns on his heels and runs.
What do the people want?
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Chapter 24: A Senseless Man
That night, Count Rastopchin received a note from Kutuzov to assist with the retreat of the army. The governor-general feels the ground slip away beneath him. The city is about to be abandoned, and his self-appointed role as its protector has come to an end. Someone must be held responsible! He empties the asylums and prisons and orders the political prisoners to be brought to him.
One need only admit that public tranquillity is in danger and any action finds a justification.
Count Rastopchin, like Napoleon, is a leader living in his head. He believes in his heart he is the voice of the people and their guide. Although his intellect tells him otherwise.
Like every demagogue and dictator, he has to believe this fiction because, without it, his position is ridiculous, senseless, and tragic.
Well, reality has come to ruin his beauty sleep.
Now, everyone fears the leader who looks ridiculous. His last orders before losing office can only be calamitous: empty the asylums, open the prisons, bring me a villain or a traitor who I can blame.
Oh, and disband the Fire Brigade. Because Moscow won't need firefighters when the French arrive?
Have you ever known something is logically true but been unable to believe it in your soul, as Rastopchin does here with the fate of Moscow?
Chapter 25: The Public Good
In the morning, Rastopchin’s carriage is ready to take him out of the city. The mob arrive outside the governor’s house, and he brings them Vereshchagin to be punished for ‘the ruin of Moscow.’ He condemns the man and tells the dragoons to ‘cut him down’. Vereshchagin is hit and then lynched by the mob. Rastopchin leaves the city, his head full of self-justifications for what he has done. A lunatic crosses his path, and outside the city, he meets a dejected Kutuzov.
Since the world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed such a crime against his fellow-man without comforting himself with this same idea.
What a horrifying chapter. One of the longest in the book, dedicated to the description of a lynching. Remember, we have already met Vereshchagin. Or at least his father pleading for clemency. And Pierre saw him too.
It's one of those chapters you want to un-read, events you want undone.
And Rastopchin repents them, too, for a time. He experiences the confused horror at his own words (‘cut him down’) and the certainty that this moment will haunt him until the end of his life.
But Rastopchin's head and heart work independently of one another. He must always believe he acted in the public good. If he stops believing it, he will go mad.
And to drive this point home, an escapee from the asylum runs alongside his carriage, a man who appears to think himself Christ resurrected. Rastopchin's horses can outrun the madman, but he cannot outrun himself.
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Le bien public
‘Deal with him as you think fit! I hand him over to you.’
Tolstoy takes the real historical event of Vereshchagin’s public execution and layers it with theological and political allusions. In writing this scene from Rastopchin’s point of view, the event becomes a psychological exploration and critique of political violence.
Rastopchin is cast as Pontius Pilate, washing his hands of the blood of Christ, played by the unfortunate Vereshchagin, with his ‘long thin neck’ and half-shaven head. Christ returns on the Sokolniki field as a lunatic with ‘long thin legs’, crying: ‘They have torn down my body. The kingdom of God will be overthrown.’
Tolstoy also references The Terror of the French Revolution, during which tens of thousands died in the name of le bien public, the welfare of the people. Tolstoy himself had witnessed a public execution in 1857, an experience that set him on the road to pacifism and his opposition to capital punishment. He wrote in his diary:
A stout, white, healthy neck and breast: he kissed the Gospels, and then — Death. How senseless … I have not received this strong impression for naught. I am not a man of politics. Morals and art I know, love, and [understand]. The guillotine long prevented my sleeping and obliged me to reflect.
A final thought: Rastopchin may be one of the most reprehensible characters in War and Peace. But even here, Tolstoy refuses to write a straightforward villain. In entering Rastopchin’s thoughts, he gains insight into how perpetrators of violence are victims of their own crimes. He experiences guilt and bewilderment and seeks self-justification as he flees Moscow. And his murderous hate resulted from the pathetic but very human fear of being ridiculous.
And we will return to this theme of fear of foolishness when we catch up with our old friend Pierre next week.
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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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.
Wow.. that was an emotional week for us all. Thank you, as always, for such detailed summaries. I love sitting down with a coffee and listening to you on a Sunday morning. I am enjoying the experience so much. Happy to hear we will see Pierre next week
These chapters have all been so emotional - thanks again for your summary and explanations, Simon!