This Terrible Affair
War and Peace Week 33: Book 3, Part 2, Chapter 37–Part 3, Chapter 4
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Welcome to Week 33 of War and Peace 2024
This week, we have read Book 3, Part 2, Chapter 37–Part 3, Chapter 4.
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This week’s theme: This Terrible Affair
War and Peace is not a novel.
That is what Tolstoy wrote in 1868 in response to early criticism about the structure of his book. So what is it then? Tolstoy’s answer is delightfully ambiguous.
War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.
What he is saying is don’t judge this book against your preconceived ideas about what a book, a novel, or a story should look like. He’s writing about our lives. Life is messy, and it would be strange, surprising and rather dull if War and Peace were not also a bit of a mess.
Life isn’t a story with a beginning or end. It follows no formula and is not made to satisfy, please or entertain. Life is everything and it cuts all ways.
If we are annoyed that the author thrusts himself into the narrative, we should remember that he's been there all along. And if he's taken us away from Pierre and Andrei, Natasha and Nikolai, it is because he has something to say. Something with a bearing on their lives, and ours.
The key question is the one Kutuzov asks himself:
‘When was this terrible affair decided?’
The commander-in-chief is coming to terms with the inevitability that he is at the helm when an invading army conquers his country. A catastrophe that led to the bloody battle of Borodino and the burning of Moscow.
Tolstoy reveals this moment to us through the eyes of a tiny little girl sitting on the top of an oven. She sees ‘Grandad’ drinking tea, coughing and holding back his tears.
Kutuzov is just another flawed human bumbling through life, and his thoughts are not so different from our own. At some point, we all ask ourselves, ‘How did I get here?’ When did this life I live become inevitable? When was it all decided?
However, we must avoid the paralysis of an existential meltdown. We must go on, we must keep going. We must say, like Kutuzov, it all ‘depends on my head’ for good or for ill. We decide our next move. We cannot do otherwise.
But take a step back, with Tolstoy. And another. See the great sweep of history, the wide river of events. And know that in our hearts, even this cherished moment, so vital and unique, vibrating with possibilities, was decided a long, long time ago.
Here’s someone who knew what Tolstoy was talking about:
Chapter 37: Blood Brothers
In the hospital, Andrei is overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of naked, bleeding human bodies. He recognises the man next to him, who is sobbing as the doctors amputate his leg. As they undress Andrei, he thinks of his childhood and loses consciousness. The cigar-wielding doctor kisses him and hurries away. The man beside him asks to see his leg, and Andrei realises it is Anatole. At this moment, he understands it was for love and compassion that he wanted to live, but now it is too late.
From Austerlitz to Borodino
On the Smolensk Road, Andrei had recoiled in horror and disgust at the naked bathing soldiers and his own pale flesh. It was a ‘presentiment’ of what would happen to them at Borodino: stripped of the useless artifice of honour and glory, reduced to their bare life, their fragile, finite human bodies.
Andrei recalls being put to bed as a child. The kiss of a nanny becomes the kiss of a doctor performing the late rites for a dying man. His beginning and his end.
But who is this beside him? This poor sod who has lost a leg. A tall, well-fed man, strangely familiar – briefly, we may think it is Pierre. But no. Here is Anatole Kuragin. Andrei's enemy. The man whose happiness haunted Andrei the night before battle and recalled him to life. The man he hoped to kill or be killed by.
Now, Andrei feels only ‘pity and love for that man.’ If at Austerlitz he saw a glimpse of the infinite, at Borodino he faces the finite. He realises ‘too late’ that his sister was right. Compassion is what keeps us in this world. Love ‘for those who love us and for those who hate us’ is the reason we hold fast to life.
Do you feel sympathy for Anatole?
If Andrei survives, how will this experience change him?
Chapter 38: Imaginary Greatness
Napoleon is briefly overcome by the spectacle of slaughter at Borodino. But he continues to say what is expected of him and fulfils ‘the cruel, sad, gloomy, and inhuman role predestined for him.’ He describes the battlefield as ‘superb’ and later, in exile, writes that the war was fought for the good of humanity.
Napoleon: a tragic anti-hero?
We cut from Andrei and Anatole to Napoleon Bonaparte. From two casualties who, like them or loathe them, are not numbers but people. Men with whom we have travelled these last 900 pages.
Compare their tragic stories to Napoleon's, who wrote about the ‘superb’ battlefield strewn with 50,000 corpses. He gives them hell because they asked for it and because he felt it was expected of him to do and say such things.
Twice, Tolstoy calls this an ‘artificial’ fantasy: a comforting delusion. He is a deluded dictator, protected by an imaginary sense of greatness. And yet even Napoleon is appalled by what has happened:
‘A personal, human feeling for a brief moment got the better of the artificial phantasm of life he had served for so long.’ He desires ‘rest, tranquillity, and freedom.’ Like many of the novel’s characters, he craves peace but does not know how to find it. And instead, in pursuit of greatness, he repudiates ‘truth, goodness and all humanity.’
Is Tolstoy fair to Napoleon?
Does Napoleon believe his justifications for the war?
Chapter 39: The Wisdom of Clouds
Over the fields of Borodino, clouds gather, and rain falls. By evening, everyone still alive has lost the will to fight, but some mysterious power prevents them from stopping. But the spirit of the French army has been destroyed. Although they push on to Moscow, they have met an opponent with a stronger spirit, and they have sustained a mortal wound.
Why do we still fight?
Clouds gathered, and drops of rain began to fall on the dead and wounded, on the frightened, exhausted and hesitating men, as if to say: 'Enough, men! Enough! Cease... Come to your senses! What are you doing?’
In the end, Pierre was right. His thoughts at the battery seemed childlike and naive at the time, but moral nausea has spread through both armies, through the falling rain, the drifting smoke and into the fields and meadows themselves. They will stop when they see what they have done. It's a sort of collective dying of the soul.
Tolstoy tells us what happens next: the French stagger on into Moscow. The city burns, and Napoleon retreats across Europe. Two years from now, he will be forced to abdicate.
But no one really cares about Bonaparte, do they? The Rostovs, last we heard, are still in Moscow. Will Andrei survive? Did Pierre make it out alive? And where, oh where, is our good fwend Denisov?
Leo, don't you dare leave us hanging and lunge into one of your history lessons...
How does this chapter relate to Andrei and Pierre’s thoughts on war before and during the battle?
Congratulations on finishing the longest book in War and Peace. As usual,
has supplied us with a merit badge to show off your achievement. See if you can guess the references to a dress and a white shirt:
Book Three, Part Three
Chapter 1: The Laws of History
The mind struggles to understand the continuous motion of history. Events are caused by countless human wills, with no beginning and no end. But we fail to grasp this and focus instead on the actions of a few men who appear to direct history. They do not.
WTF, Leo?
I love the nerve of an author who follows the bloodiest battle in history with some differential calculus. But my three strongest subjects at school were English Lit, History, and Maths… So, I’m as happy as Larry that Lev has included this mathematical tangent.
Tolstoy refers to Zeno’s paradoxes: However far Achilles runs, the tortoise will have always run a fraction further, so the world’s fastest man will never catch up. Moreover, to get anywhere, we must travel half the distance. But if we keep going halfway, we will never get where we are going.
Differential calculus solved these problems by introducing infinitely small numbers into equations. Tolstoy argues that the same must be done to understand the motion of history.
He’s not wrong. In fact, his ideas align with those of theorists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, who focused on the economic and social changes driving history. For Tolstoy, the infinitely small changes taking place within Natasha and Nikolai, Pierre and Andrei are history itself, and cumulatively, they have far greater weight and force than a psychological study of leaders like Kutuzov and Napoleon.
There’s something else going on here: Tolstoy’s ideas are developing as he writes War and Peace. By this stage in this great book, you can almost hear him thinking, what is this book really about? Like Andrei and Pierre, he’s wondering what is the point of it all. In these short essays, he’s grasping for an answer. Whether his solutions satisfy will vary from reader to reader.
Are we any closer today to understanding the laws of history? Do such laws exist?
Do we still focus too much on leaders to explain historical and current events?
Chapter 2: Armchair Generals
After Borodino, the Russians retreated past Moscow, and the French occupied the city. Five weeks later, Napoleon abandoned the city and fled Russia. Historians who think it could have been otherwise do not understand how wars are fought. Decisions are made in the ‘midst of a series of shifting events’ that drive everyone inexorably into the future.
In medias res
There are no beginnings, and there is no end. War and Peace began halfway through a sentence, in medias res at one of Anna Pavlovna’s parties. It isn’t much of a spoiler to suggest the book may end in a similar way.
‘A commander-in-chief is never dealing with the beginning of any event—the position from which we always contemplate it.’
You can read this chapter as an analysis of Kutuzov's retreat and the decisions of generals, and a general critique of armchair strategists.
But it is also a commentary on all our decisions, all of the time. We never start from the beginning, and none of our choices are free or perfect.
So, perhaps it is a call for kindness toward all who make choices in the midst of life and a word of caution to those who comment carefree from the sidelines.
How do the ideas Tolstoy has laid out here relate to the lives of the main characters in the story?
Chapter 3: Council of Despair
Four miles outside Moscow, Kutuzov and his generals stop. They argue about what should be done, and Count Rastopchin and Bennigsen say that Moscow must be defended. He, Kutuzov, sees it as impossible but cannot fathom when this became inevitable. Conscious of his own failure, he summons his most important generals, and they ride to Fili.
Kutuzov • Rastopchin • Bennigsen
‘A sixth group was talking absolute nonsense.’
This feels like it should be an iron rule: whenever six or more are gathered together, there will always be someone spouting utter rubbish.
This chapter builds on the previous, with Kutuzov asking himself where all this began: ‘When was this terrible affair decided?’ The answer we already know: at all times and none. At every moment, the future becomes more fixed. However, it is impossible and intolerable for us to live like that. So Kutuzov speaks a fiction we all must live by:
‘My head, be it good or bad, must depend on itself.’
When have you asked this question in your own life: when was this affair decided?
Chapter 4: Grandad and Long-Coat Are Fighting
Kutuzov holds his council of war in a peasant’s house at Fili. The peasant’s granddaughter is called Malasha, and we observe this historical occasion through her eyes as Bennigsen and Kutuzov argue about whether to engage the French army. Finally, Kutuzov orders the retreat, and Malasha goes for supper. A grumpy Kutuzov wonders again when this catastrophe was decided.
Kutuzov • Bennigsen • Barclay de Tolly
A child’s eye
She was nearest to him and saw how his face puckered; he seemed about to cry, but this did not last long.
Malasha transforms this chapter. Perched on the oven, sucking her sugar lump, making sense of this strange spectacle. For her, it is not a historic moment. It is a colourful interlude before supper, where her grandfather’s house is crowded by strange men in buttons and ribbons with maps and glittering eyes.
Of course, she likes Kutuzov best: a kindly old man with sweets, hiding in the corner with his cough and his tea. I can picture her telling this story to her grandchildren many years later; disentangling the memory from everything else that happened in that year burdened with too much history.
Instead of Malasha, imagine we witnessed this scene through the eyes of Andrei, Pierre, Nikolai or Boris. How would they have regarded the meeting and considered Kutuzov’s decision to surrender Moscow?
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 hear 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 have been an avid reader of your weekly summaries all year and just want to drop a note to say how much fun I am having with this read along! Thanks so much for the brilliant content Simon, I especially love the paintings you include. I read widely but Tolstoy somehow always felt a bit beyond me, but my worries were unfounded.
David Byrne - ah, he was so young and wonderfully quirky in that video! 🙂
Great summary, as always, Simon, thank you.