Waiting for history to happen
War and Peace Week 6: Book 1 Part 2 Chapters 11 – 17
Welcome to week six of War and Peace 2024. This week, we have read Book 1, Part 2, Chapters 11–17. 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 characters
Explore background and plot summaries for all this week’s characters:
Andrei • Bilibin • Ippolit • Emperor Francis • Murat • Nesvitsky • Kutuzov • Bagration • Weyrother • Kozlovsky • Wintzingerode • Napoleon • Tushin • Dolokhov • Zherkov
This week’s theme: Waiting for history to happen
This week was a sort of limbo. We’re in the devil’s waiting lounge, stuck in a holding pattern to hell.
Andrei is in Brünn, where we must suffer Prince Ippolit’s conversation and spend more time with Bilibin and his wrinkles. The diplomats are on a jolly, savouring the delights of Austrian high society, comfortable in the knowledge that war is something that happens to other people.
But if this is life and this is living, Andrei would rather fight. Death or glory, he heads back to war. The unserious Bilibin asks a serious question: “Why are you going?” and a serious Andrei thinks a silly thought: “I am going to save the army.”
These chapters reveal that Andrei at war is just as lost as Andrei at peace. He couldn’t explain to Pierre why he was going to fight, and he can’t explain it to Bilibin either. An amorphous “hope of glory” with no clear idea of what glory looks like.
Andrei is looking for meaning, but war is senseless. Cunning and folly on the bridge at Vienna. Devastation and drunkenness on the road as the army retreats. A sleepy-eyed general and his complacent troops. A war tourist – an accountant – curious to watch men annihilate each other.
Will you, Andrei, find meaning here?
But there is one strange light in the darkness. Captain Tushin, an artillery officer without his boots. He makes Andrei smile involuntarily as he talks so earnestly about fearing death and all our doubts about the life to come. There is "something peculiar" about him, for he is "quite unsoldierly” and shouldn’t be here at all.
As Andrei shouldn’t be here. And as no one should be here. In a sensible world, they would “unload the muskets, explode the ammunition, and all return home as quickly as possible.”
But this is not a sensible world. And the cannonballs are speaking now.
Chapter 11: The folly of flattery
Bilibin welcomes Andrei into “our set”, a group of “young, wealthy, merry, society men” – just the sort of people Andrei wanted to escape from. You know you’re in poor company when Ippolit Kuragin is the man of the hour. Bilibin tells Bolkonsky to flatter the emperor, but our man’s no diplomat, and he says he cannot.
Chapter 12: Macked by the Three Musketeers
As Bilibin warned Andrei, the emperor is very bad at talking and very good at asking pointless questions. While Bolkonsky hobnobs with the bigwigs, the French have duped the Austrians and crossed the bridge out of Vienna. Bibilin thinks it’s delightful but un-creases his wrinkles long enough to ask Andrei a serious question: “Why are you going?” Andrei thinks he’s joking. Andrei thinks he can save the army.
(Thanks
for this portrait mashup!)Tangent: Gascony, Gascons and Gasconade
In 1844, a teenage Tolstoy went off to Kazan University in southwest Russia. He was a poor student but an avid reader, and two novels he enjoyed were The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo by the bestselling French author Alexandre Dumas. The hero of The Three Musketeers is D'Artagnan, a brave and proud young man from Gascony.
For several centuries, the southwest region of France had a reputation for producing brave soldiers, as well as quarrelsome braggarts. And D'Artagnan’s new musketeer friends aren’t immediately sure what kind of Gascon he is. A gascon is a boaster and a gasconade is a boast, a brag, an act of bravado.
Bilibin is delighted to “observe that all three are Gascons”:
They spin him a thousand gasconades, saying that the war is over, that the Emperor Francis is arranging a meeting with Bonaparte, that they desire to see Prince Auersperg, and so on.
All this happened: the French bluffed their way across the Danube. It all sounds so implausible that it really belongs in a book by Dumas. But Tolstoy gets to have his cake and eat it by folding this romantic story into his realist epic, told by the consummate conversationalist Bilibin.
Reflection: Bilbin’s question
This is the fifth time I have read War and Peace. Previously, Bilibin has always struck me as entirely cynical. He loves a good story and a fine turn of phrase, and he doesn’t care much who wins and who loses. He’s a diplomat. A politician. And that is how I have always read his invitation to Andrei to leave the war and take a comfortable seat in his caleche.
However, this time, I was struck by the note of sincerity in his voice:
‘Do you know, my dear,’ said Bilibin following him, I have been thinking about you. Why are you going?’
And in proof of the conclusiveness of his opinion all the wrinkles vanished from his face.
Oh, Bilibin’s wrinkles! It is almost as though they disguise something beneath. His advice to Andrei is one of the more sensible things anyone has said to the young prince:
‘But as you are un philosophe, be a consistent one, look at the other side of the question and you will see that your duty, on the contrary, is to take care of yourself.’
Getting himself killed in a war does not help his father, his sister or his wife. It does not help his unborn child. And it does not help himself. War, Bilibin is telling him, will not complete you. But Andrei thinks he is joking, because Bilibin is always joking.
So Bilibin, the conscientious diplomat, switches back to French and tells his friend what he wants to hear: “My dear fellow, you are a hero.”
What do you think about Bilbin’s advice?
Chapter 13: Pride and pancakes
Andrei sets out to catch up with the army, Kutuzov and his luggage. His mind is full of wounded pride and the hope of glory. But along the road, he sees the “abominable” state of the army. And when he finds Kutuzov, Nesvitsky is there, no longer cheerful. Kutuzov has given Bagration orders for a battle, in which he expects most of the detachment to die. Andrei asks permission to take part.
Background: Andrei’s Toulon
As soon as he learned that the Russian army was in such a hopeless situation it occured to him that it was he who was destinted to lead it out of this position; that here was the Toulon that would lift him from the ranks of obscure officers and offer him the first step to glory!
Later, when the battle begins, Andrei asks himself: “Where and how will my Toulon present itself?”
The siege of Toulon was the military engagement that began Napoleon’s rise from a captain from Corsica to the emperor of France. The battle was fought in 1793 between French republicans and royalist rebels supported by Anglo-Spanish forces. Napoleon’s action secured a victory for the revolution and his promotion to general.
Here’s an excellent article if you want to know more about the siege of Toulon.
Andrei is in a curious bind. He wants to fight his hero but is not entirely sure how he feels about winning:
Bonaparte’s address … awoke in him astonishment at the genius of his hero, a feeling of wounded pride, and a hope of glory. ‘And should there be nothing left but to die?’ he thought. ‘Well, if need be, I shall do it no worse than others.’
This thought betrays the confusion of his ideals: if he wins, what becomes of his hero? If he loses, does he really want to die “no worse than others”? He said to Bilibin, "I cannot argue about it”, but it seems to me he cannot think about it either. It is a feeling, unanchored in his heart.
Have you ever secretly wished that “this” might be your moment? How did you feel before, during, and after?
(Thank you
, for sourcing the map.)Chapter 14: Bluff and double bluff
This is the first chapter without any of our main characters. Bagration has been sent on a suicide mission to delay the French advance while the rest of the army escapes. Napoleon’s righthand man, Murat, is outfoxed by a cool Bagration. The French emperor detects the trick, slaps down his general, and orders the attack.
Focus: What is War and Peace?
A few people this week have asked about the separation between fact and fiction in War and Peace. How much of this description of events is true, and how much is the product of a novelist’s imagination?
The simple answer is that Tolstoy’s descriptions of real historical people and real battles are based on intensive research. Tolstoy visited battlefields, interviewed survivors and read historical accounts and secondary sources at the Rumyantsev and Chertkov libraries in Moscow. While he changed some details and made a few errors, his aim was to create a realistic and accurate living history.
However, after reading Chapter 14, you might be thinking: am I reading a novel or a history? You might be wondering: where is this story going?
The first reviewers of War and Peace were similarly confused:
“The author himself apparently does not know how to define his work … it is impossible to give an account of the work’s basic idea.”
“Everything is mixed up into a general mass where one can see neither the reasons for nor the consequences of the events or the appearance of heroes or facts.”
“Evidentally, the author himself does not know what he is writing.”1
After 1,500 pages, Tolstoy still wasn’t entirely sure what he had written: “What is War and Peace,” Tolstoy writes in the Afterword. “It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle.”
Literature scholar Andrew D Kaufman argues that War and Peace is confounding because it resembles life itself:
Life, after all, doesn’t often have a perfect beginning, middle, and end, nor clear heroes and villains, nor unifying plotlines. Why, then, should a book? Rather than shoving his world into nice, neat conceptual containers, Tolstoy invited readers to loosen up those containers to fit the very largeness of life.
War and Peace is long. But, then, so is the human journey. It is windy, but then so is life. And if its shape is inelegant, this is only because it mimics the shape of life. In short, this pockmarked, feisty, untutored monstrosity of a work reflects life in all its turmoil, all its roiling, overflowing possibility.
How would you describe War and Peace based on what you have read so far?
Chapter 15: Doom and disorder
Andrei convinced Kutuzov to let him go with Bagration’s doomed regiment. When he arrives, he surveys the camp, no one aware that the French are about to attack. He meets Tushin, the artillery captain, with kind eyes and no boots. And Dolokhov is here, of course, taunting the enemy: devil skin your emperor.
They talked of peace, but did not believe in its possibility. They talked of battle and also did not believe in the nearness of battle.
“Perhaps”, writes Yiyun Li in Tolstoy Together, “when we say we live in history, it means we live in shared disbeliefs rather than individual ones.”
Chapter 16: Our souls to the sky
Andrei considers the battle dispositions and works through possible eventualities. Meanwhile, the artillery captain, Tushin, is in a gentle and philosophical conversation about life after death. His thoughts are interrupted by a cannonball and the start of battle.
Theme: The skies above
‘You’re afraid of the unknown, that’s what it is. Whatever we may say about the soul going to the sky … we know there is no sky but only an atmosphere.’
Last week Nikolai noticed the blue sky, so calm and deep. Now, Tushin tells us that there is no heaven up there, only an atmosphere. And that we should be honest about how afraid that makes us feel.
Andrei was busy thinking about “only important possibilities” of battle tactics and strategy in the coming hours. Tushin’s words interrupt his thoughts:
‘—but still, to coneive a future life …’
The important possibility of his own death was not on Andrei’s mind. For a brief moment, Tushin takes Andrei out of himself and shows him another way of being in the world. But it is only a moment because the sky has been asked a question, and it answers with a cannonball:
He did not finish. Just then there was a whistle in the air; nearer and nearer, faster and louder, louder and faster, a cannon-ball, as if it had not finished saying what was necessary, thudded into the gound near the shed with superhuman force, throwing up a mass of earth.
What do you make of Captain Tushin in these two chapters?
What do we learn about Andrei’s character from his behaviour before the battle?
Chapter 17: French pancakes
Andrei finds Bagration and Zherkov. An accountant is here to take a look at the battle. They ride over to Tushin’s battery, where spirits appear high. But the news coming in across the battlefield is bad. Bagration gives the appearance of giving orders, but there are none that can be given. Despite this, he instils a cheerful calm in everyone he speaks to.
Footnote: War tourism
‘He wants to see a battle,’ said Zherkov to Bolkonsky, pointing to the accountant, ‘but he feels a pain in the pit of his stomach already.’
Leo Tolstoy fought in the Crimean War and witnessed the siege of Sevastopol in 1854-5. He recorded his experiences in three short stories called the Sevastopol Sketches. One feature of the Crimean War was the development of war tourism: Mark Twain and other international tourists visited the destroyed city. You can read his account here, in The Innocents Abroad. Later in the century, there were picnics to watch battles during the American Civil War and Thomas Cook's battlefield tours during the Second Boer War in southern Africa.
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Character focus: Bagration
"Russia has no good generals. The only exception is Bagration." - Napoleon
Pyotr Bagration will be in and out of our story for the next thousand-odd pages. He was descended from the royal family of Georgia, and unlike most of the Russian aristocracy, he did not speak French. He served under Suvorov, the old war hero mentioned in previous weeks. This link to a heroic past seems especially important to Andrei:
Prince Andrei remembered the story of Suvorov giving his sabre to Bagration in Italy, and the recollection was particulary pleasant at that moment.
He was known for his successful offensive tactics and tightly organised formations. “Persistence and courage,” he wrote, “have won more battles than all other military talents taken altogether.”
We can see how this combination of strategy and bravery would appeal to a young Prince Andrei. Bagration might be the closest Russia has to a Napoleon.
But to Andrei’s surprise, Bagration isn’t issuing any orders:
Prince Andrei noticed however that though what happened was due to chance and was independent of the commander’s will, owing to the tact Bagration showed, his presence was very valuable. Officers who approached him with disturbed countenances became very calm; soldiers and officers greeted him gaily, grew more cheerful in his presence, and were evidently anxious to display their courage before him.
Compare this to Andrei before the battle, picturing “the course of events” and all “important possibilities”. Andrei is like the nervous freshman, overpreparing for the exam and getting stumped by a question he did not expect. The more experienced Bagration, understands that staying calm in a crisis is far more important than sticking to a plan or trying to control what cannot be controlled.
Finally, there’s an interesting tangent about Bagration. In 1800, the emperor Paul I married him to the beautiful Princess Catherine Skavronskaya, apparently without either’s consent. They were ill-suited: he was the serious soldier, and she was the lively Saint Petersburg socialite. It’s a match very reminiscent of Liza and Andrei.
By 1805, when we meet Bagration in War and Peace, Catherine has left her husband to become the “wandering princess” of Europe, travelling in a purpose-made “sleeper” carriage. In Vienna, she was known as the “Naked Angel” for her revealing attire. She set up a pro-Russian salon and a covert diplomatic mission in Vienna, while having an affair with an Austrian prince. Bagration was forced to cover her debts and claim her illegitimate daughter as his own.
Thank you for reading
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Next week, if we survive the battle of Schöngrabern, we will find ourselves again in the company of Pierre in Moscow and Marya at Bald Hills.
See you next week. Thank you for reading, and goodbye.
Quotes from Andrew D. Kaufman’s brilliant book, Give War and Peace A Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times.
I am very pleased to find the seductive Princess Bagration in this week‘s round-up! Her existence throws a new light at Andrei‘s relief at not being made a laughing-stock on account of any infidelities on Lise‘s part. Surely the St Petersburg tongues were all a-wag at Princess Bagration‘s exploits.
This week‘s reading has really brought home the brilliance of the slow read for this particular book. As a voracious and usually very fast reader, I would have felt myself hampered and bogged down in my pursuit of plot and excitement and would probably not have paid much attention to the cooking of kasha, dispensing of vodka and wisdom and drying of boots and foot-wrappers. Being made to stick with the characters while they‘re waiting is an experience that can only be had by reading so slowly (and in my case, repeatedly). And that‘s why I agree that War & Peace is more like actual life than like a novel or a history. Thanks again, Simon, for making this possible.
Thank you for this wonderful summary, Simon! The daily chats are great, but it is so helpful to have it all in one place at the end of the week. I am perhaps interested in the book you mentioned by Andrew D. Kaufman. Would I have to be careful of spoilers if I read it?