Time and Patience
War and Peace Week 30: Book 3, Part 2, Chapters 16–22
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Welcome to week 30 of War and Peace 2024
This week, we have read Book 3, Part 2, Chapters 16–22.
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This week’s theme: Time and Patience
And so we come to the Battle of Borodino.
Behind us: 800 pages of love and hate, life and death, war and peace. Ahead: three miles of field and meadow, woods and hills and stream. And forty-eight hours for the world to lose its mind.
For the last 800 pages, time has moved faster in the book: seven years in seven months.
But now time slows. We will spend the next twenty chapters in two days of 1812.
Life will do this to you, often without warning or wanting; you'll live forever in a moment.
At Borodino, at least 68,000 people will be killed or wounded. This makes it the deadliest single day of battle in history before the First World War. One historian compared it to ‘a fully loaded 747 crashing, with no survivors, every five minutes for eight hours.’
And almost all of the main male characters in this novel are there, including Count Pierre Bezukhov.
And why not? Nothing else makes sense at this point. Tolstoy tells us that it was in no one's interest to meet at Borodino. We have left the realm of reason behind and are floating free in a space resembling a nightmare.
Pierre is looking for the ‘catastrophe’. He has sought the meaning of life in money, marriage and religion. He has attempted to reform himself and the world, and all his plans have come to nothing.
So he dabbled in numerology and put his faith in chance. He played patience, and patience said there could be no peace. ‘Patience and time,’ said Kutuzov, ‘are the two most powerful warriors.’ But there is no time left.
So Pierre sets off to the End of the World. To the line Nikolai Rostov once saw long ago between the living and the dead. Andrei is there, and Anatole. Dolokhov and Denisov. Boris and Nikolai.
Time has narrowed to a point. The church bells ring; the bright sunshine of late summer; leaves already yellowing on the branch. And somewhere, a fresh breeze blows cold.
We have come to Borodino.
Chapter 16: Time and Patience
Andrei and Kutuzov talk. The commander-in-chief has been reading a French novel and sprinkles his conversation with French proverbs. But Andrei is struck by Kutuzov’s feeling when he says the French will eat horseflesh. Kutuzov tells Andrei that he is his second father and asks him to stay with him. But Andrei insists that his place is with his regiment at the front.
Are you a patient person? Does age make you more patient?
Has Andrei made the right decision here?
‘There’s nothing stronger than those two warriors, patience and time.’
When in doubt, don’t. It is Tolstoy’s great twist that a man of inaction takes the reigns at this moment of high drama. He embodies Tolstoy’s theory of history: not a great man, not a genius. But someone who will not get in the way of the inevitable course of events. And this gives Andrei renewed confidence.
Madame de Genlis
Do you remember Madame de Genlis?
Yes, it was Natasha’s nickname for Vera back at the start of the novel. Félicité de Genlis was a prolific writer of novels, plays, and educational treatises. She appears as a character in the works of Balzac and Victor Hugo, and she will even get a mention next year when we read Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. Jane Austen wasn’t a fan. She returned one of Genlis’ novels to the lending library, saying, it ‘did not do. We were disgusted in twenty pages.’
We warm to Kutuzov, with his nose stuck in a historical romance on the eve of battle. Voracious reading is a vice, but one we readers share with the ‘good guys’ in War and Peace. Andrei made time to stop at a bookshop on his way to Schöngrabern. His books are now on a cart bound for Moscow, where a depressed Pierre finds solace in his own eclectic library. And we should be in no doubt that the Kuragins never, ever read.
Further reading:
Chapter 17: What’s Ostrich in Russian?
As danger approaches Moscow, society grows less serious. Everyone is making jokes, some better than others. In the circle of Julie Drubetskaya, French is prohibited on pain of forfeit. The gossip: will fat Count Bezukhov lead his regiment into battle? What are his feelings for Natasha? The Rostovs have delayed leaving the capital, waiting for Petya. And Marya is in love with Nikolai, who saved her from a murderous mob. Or so they say.
How many languages do you speak, and in what situations do you use them?
Where do you draw the line between harmless and malicious gossip?
At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to forsee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.
It is impossible to read Tolstoy’s words and not think of our world in the week where global temperatures broke records on two consecutive days. Tolstoy doesn’t put much faith in the power of crowds: either they move men to go to war, or they give us permission to forget our fears. There does not appear to be much space for positive collective action or change in War and Peace, and in this, I can only hope that Leo Tolstoy is completely wrong.
‘But how could one say that in Russian?’
Tolstoy’s characters turn to French when they are being insincere, duplicitous and false. So of course Julie doesn’t have the right words in Russian to talk about her old penpal, Marya.
Do you remember all the French at the start of the novel? Now, people are afraid to speak it on the streets, and the francophile aristocracy are taking Russian language lessons. Meanwhile, the French are at the gates.
Careless talk costs lives
We have met Count Rastopchin on a couple of previous occasions. Most notably, he attended the late Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky’s name-day celebration in Moscow, where he spoke out vociferously against Russia’s obsession with French culture. ‘How can we fight the French?’ he said. ‘The French are our Gods: Paris is our Kingdom of Heaven.’
He is now the military governor of Moscow. He attempts to stir up patriotic feelings with his gossip papers, written in pseudo-popular language designed to appeal to the general public. These ‘broadsheets’ were full of false information and lies, such as the idea that Napoleon was Catherine the Great’s illegitimate son.
Tolstoy juxtaposes Rastophin’s rumourmongering with Julie’s spiteful gossip about Pierre, Natasha and Marya. Truth is indeed the first casualty of a war and a crisis.
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Chapter 18: No Patience, No Peace
Pierre reads the news and sees from the governor’s bombast that Moscow will fall. He plays patience to decide his fate, but he doesn’t decide what it means. His cousin Catiche leaves for Petersburg. Everyone was left, except the Rostovs. In the street, he witnesses the flogging of a French cook and resolves to leave for the army. The next day, he goes to Mozhaisk.
Why is Pierre going to the army, and what role did the flogging play in his decision?
Up in the air
Pierre goes to see Franz Leppich’s great balloon. The previous year, the German inventor had approached Napoleon with his design and been sent packing. Tsar Alexander was more sympathetic to the idea. Leppich’s plan was ambitious: a fleet of fifty aircraft, each with a crew of forty men and a cargo of 12,000 pounds of explosives. Like so many other plans in this book, Leppich’s balloon never made it off the ground. It was not until the American Civil War that balloons would be successfully used in offensive operations.
Further reading:
Chapter 19: Pick Your Battles
Tolstoy treats us to a quick history lesson from the battlefield of Borodino. It made no sense for either side to fight, but fight they did. Napoleon attacked Russia’s left flank, leading to a battle fought in a position where it was impossible for Russia to fight and win.
What assumptions does Tolstoy make of the reader in this chapter?
Tolstoy’s White Whale
If you have struggled with this chapter, here are three quotes from Yiyun Li’s Tolstoy Together that offer an interesting perspective:
Tolstoy spent two days in September 1867 studying the battlefield of Borodino and comparing the terrain with historical accounts of the battle, after which he sketched a map correcting the description of the historians.
— Pevear and Volokhonksy
This biographical footnote soothed me while following the painfully detailed battle scenario, and reminded me of Melville’s obsessive chapter on the whale in Moby-Dick.
— Genevieve Wollenbecker
To write a great novel, one must be obssessed, even if crankily, like Ahab with Moby-Dick, his nemesis that, in life, was “only” a creature, not a fate. Ahab’s crazed obsession equals Melville’s obsession to create the great epic tragedy of human life, as he envisioned it.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I come at these historical chapters with the curiosity of wanting to know more about this obsessive narrator, a cranky character called Leo Tolstoy, who wants to prove all the historians wrong. He’s just like all the other characters in this book: infuriatingly flawed and reassuringly human.
No more heroes?
The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are meaningless.
Veterans of 1812 were offended by Tolstoy’s depiction of the war. Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky called Tolstoy a ‘killer of history’ in representing Borodino as a senseless stream of events beyond understanding. Avraam Norov, who lost a leg at Borodino, was outraged by the idea that Kutuzov would have brought ‘a book of light reading’ with him to the battlefield.
Tolstoy shows us the banal, the ordinary, the absurd and the incongruous. But this was not meant to denigrate the courage of real people or the characters in his story. On the contrary, Tolstoy aims for a realism that places finer human qualities within their true context of circumstance and contradictions. Rather than imitating ancient heroic poetry, he writes a very modern and prosaic version of history and of heroism.
Further resources:
Chapter 20: The Bell Tolls for Thee
Pierre leaves Mozhaisk for the battlefield. There is sunshine and church bells, and the wounded file past. The cavalry head to the front, singing merrily and winking at the wounded. Pierre is told to report to Kutuzov and is amazed by how the men wonder at his hat.
Why do you think Tolstoy introduces Borodino to us through Pierre’s eyes?
The strange thought, that of the thousands of men, young and old, who had stared with merry surprise at his hat (perhaps the very men he had noticed) twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and death, amazed Pierre.
I read this chapter in surround sound and digital technicolour: the slanting rays of light, the ringing bells, the merry singing and the creek of carts carrying wounded down the hill. The generals and commanders are absent, praying for salvation. So Pierre walks among the wounded, the doctors, and the peasants digging.
There are not enough stretchers, bunks or dressers for what's coming. There is not enough time to dig the earthworks. And there is no way to stop time or wind it back: The bell tolls from the newly built cathedral of Mozhaisk.
On one level, Pierre’s behaviour is inexplicable. But then, it is only a continuation of the reader’s own morbid curiosity. We have been told this is one of the greatest catastrophes in human history: the decent thing would be to close the book now and avert our eyes. And yet we keep reading. Pierre is our eyes and ears on the battlefield. We don’t know why we are there, and neither does he.
For Whom the Bell Tolls by John Donne
When reading this chapter, I thought of John Donne’s poem. Why is Pierre here? I think it is because he does not want to be alone. Sometimes, he wants to be part of this mass of humanity; sometimes, he is just amazed by it. Either way, Borodino draws him closer to humanity’s great leveller: ‘Each man’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind.’
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
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Chapter 21: No Atheists in Foxholes
At eleven o’clock, Pierre arrives at the Russian line. He can make no sense of it, so he asks an officer to explain the position. A church procession arrives with the Smolensk Mother of God. Pierre is absorbed by the sight of the crowd gazing at the icon. Kutuzov comes to kneel and kiss the icon. He rises to his feet with difficulty.
How does this religious intervention change the mood of the story?
Nowhere could he see the battlefield he had expected to find, but only fields, meadows, troops, woods, the smoke of camp-fires, villages, mounds, and streams; and try as he would he could descry no military 'position' in this place which teemed with life, nor could he even distinguish our troops from the enemy's.
Pierre's first glimpse of the battlefield reminds me of every time my mental picture of a new place is confounded by its messy reality. Helpfully, there are some officers on hand to show him what's what. But not for long, because here comes the Smolensk Mother of God, the holy icon, and behind her, the white head of Kutuzov.
I talked about the icon back in week 28. This wonder-worker saw off the Mongols in 1238 and the Lithuanians in 1414. Can she work wonders tomorrow? Everyone it seems (except the bald German) is putting their faith in the Virgin to save them from the catastrophe we all know is coming.
Chapter 22: Unnecessary Men
Pierre is recognised by Boris, who offers to lodge him. Boris belongs to Count Bennigsen’s party, where everyone is expected Kutuzov’s imminent failure. Dolokhov turns up with a daring plan. An absent-minded Kutuzov offers Pierre his quarters, and Dolokhov asks for Bezukhov’s forgiveness.
Pierre • Boris • Kutuzov • Bennigsen • Dolokhov
Boris and Dolokhov are both friendly towards Pierre. Are either of them being sincere?
Though Kutuzov had dismissed all unnecessary men from the staff, Boris had contrived to remain at headquarters after the changes.
Nice work Boris! Neither he nor Bennigsen know why Kutuzov is still here. No one knows why Pierre is here, and when Pierre sees Dolokhov pop up, his first thought is: ‘How did that fellow get here?’
At least the ‘left flank’ is ‘extremely strong’, and the militia are all wearing nice clean white shirts and are ready to die. This all makes me feel much more confident.
Someone, tell a joke, quick:
You will always go on writing
And to death your readers bore:
Lectures for the corps inditing
Be a captain evermore.
This is the verse by S N Marin that Kutuzov requests. It was written at the expense of Captain G V Gerakov, a military teacher known for his bad writing. Given that Tolstoy had been in the army and was now a writer, I can’t help but wonder whether this is a joke made at his own expense. Whatever the case, it reinforces the picture from recent chapters of a commander-in-chief who appears to be thinking about everything but the coming battle.
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.
The Donne poem is a part of his Meditation 17. Here is another part of that Meditation, which to me seems fitting at this point: "all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice"
The video of the battle was very helpful Simon. Thanks for that.