Joy and Sorrow

War & Peace | Week 49 – Contains spoilers up to Epilogue 1 Chapter 6

Hi, Simon here. If you’ve recently signed up to read War and Peace in 2024, read no further! This is the tail end of the 2023 reading and has wall-to-wall spoilers!

Welcome to week 48 of the War and Peace read along, a chapter a day. This is a Footnotes and Tangents newsletter for our community of slow readers. Today’s post is free for all. Enjoy.

Sirin and Alkonost. The Birds of Joy and Sorrow by Viktor Vasnetsov. Source

I’ll be straight with you. This post is coming to you from the house of coughs and colds, and I don’t have it in me to write very much tonight. But I wanted to give you something, so here I am.

I have read so many joyful messages from readers this week. We are feeling reflective. We sense the end and how far we've come. We’re cherishing the journey and the company we’ve kept. Some of us (although admittedly not I) are wondering what we’re going to do with ourselves come 1 Jan 2024.

I would love you to use these last four posts as an opportunity to share your thoughts on this year of War and Peace. The book, the characters, the read-along.

Has your opinion of the book or the characters changed since those first weeks in January? Has the book changed you? Which parts do you feel will stay with you longest? Do you think you may one day read it again?

Cartouches of Ramses II. Karnak. Source.

What are bees for?

This week, one of my favourite passages comes when Tolstoy returns to his bees. What are they for? he asks. From every vantage point, he finds a different answer: from the stung child, the admiring poet, the beekeeper and the botanist. “The ultimate purpose” of bees is beyond our comprehension, and

All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to other manifestations of life.

It’s typical Tolstoy. On the one hand, the fatalism of a mystic who will ultimately put his trust in God. On the other, the sweet honey of life itself. For, isn’t it beautiful to consider that all life’s accessible meaning derives from the lives of others?

This is part of Pierre’s revelation. Life gives us two immeasurable gifts. A mind that some will call a spirit or a soul. A secret place, known only to ourselves and some invisible maker. And the gift of seeing that spirit alive in others. A seeing that is also a form of listening that becomes a form of love.

The House of Joy and Sorrow

Not unlike Hogwarts, War and Peace has four houses with four distinct personalities. The Bolkonskys value duty and self-sacrifice. The Rostovs believe in a profligate, boundless joy. The Kuragins are conceited and out for themselves. The Bezukhovs are one man, Pierre, in search of truth, happiness and peace.

These four archetypes take on an elemental quality in the story. Joy seems to vibrate through the Rostov house. Cold, cruel duty seeps silently through the draughty rooms at Bald Hills.

With the Rostovs, we’ve always known that sadness and sorrow wait in the shadows. The Count couldn’t count his expenses. And his sons were careless with their lives. And now one son is dead, killed when the war was won. And the father follows him soon after, broken-hearted.

On the final page of the final book, Natasha’s love for Pierre remained the only flame of Rostov joy. Now, there is a house of sorrow and a new count drowning in debt.

Nikolai Rostov is no longer the joyful youth but has become like a Bolkonsky, tied to his family through a burning sense of duty:

Friends and relations advised Nikolai to decline the inheritance. But he regarded such a refusal as a slur on his father’s memory, which he held sacred, and therefore would not hear of refusing, and accepted the inheritance together with the obligation to pay the debts.

Joy Division

Then something remarkable happens. Marya steps back into the story. Nikolai is too proud and ashamed to let himself love her again. He thinks he would be marrying for money. He thinks there are “a thousand reasons why” they cannot be together.

Marya almost accepts this. It is impossible because “he is poor now and I am rich.” She would once have walked out the door and never returned again. She would gladly have sacrificed her happiness for some higher purpose.

The bees buzzing in the trees. Making honey just for me.

But something has changed. Somewhere between the death of her menfolk and the friendship of the joyful Rostov siblings, something has slipped into her heart.

It is as strong as the rest of her, but it bends towards her own happiness and her own right to be loved:

‘I don’t understand your why, Count,’ she continued, ‘but it’s hard for me … for me … I will confess this to you. For some reason you wish to deprive me of our former friendship. And that hurts me.’ There were tears in her eyes and in her voice. ‘I have had so little happiness in life that every loss is hard for me … Forgive me, goodbye!’

Those tears are like some sacrament. They convert the deepest sorrows into a new living joy. She, a Bolkonsky, from the house of sorrow, boldly returns the flame to the house of Rostov:

She looked back. For a few seconds they gazed silently into one another’s eyes—and what had seemed remote and impossible suddenly became very close, possible, and inevitable.

OK, I had a little more to say, and I thought I did. But now I am done. Over to you.

Thank you for reading.

Simon