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A review by jjupille
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
3.0
Gaaah, I guess I wrote a review then closed out my browser window. It wasn't very profound, I'll try to hit the points.
Overall, I guess I am less interested in the "story" than in the way Tolstoy's mind works. Epistemologically, he rejects any hope of causal explanation in history. He's all about the Verstehen, which is why the book is so bloody long and dwells at such length on the characters' interior lives. Ontologically, he's a relentless holist. He always goes back to social collectivities such as the family and the nation. Individuals don't matter - the action is in the relation of countless millions of individuals (which partly explains the explanatory challenge). Emergent properties are everywhere. God lurks about, and history unfolds as if deterministic, despite our imaginings. People are "the blind executors of the most grievous laws of necessity" (p. 1084).
How these things go together also interests me. If individuals don't matter, why do we spend so much time inside _______'s mind, painting a picture of _______'s particular circumstance in pointillist detail, at capillary level? It's a really interesting synthesis - only wholes matter, and there are no nomothetic generalizations, so it's only by piling up details that we can give even a sense --and it will never be more than a sense, though goodness knows he tries. Some understanding is possible, but only through immersion in, and the compounding of, specifics.
Plot? Not so much. Woody Allen summarized that "It's about Russia", and I can't do much better. Characters? Lots of people, all their lives intertwined, lots of passion among the ladyfolk, protagonistic men who are drawn as bundles of complexity and contradictions who don't really end up making much sense to me (again, I think in Tolstoy's view the sense can only ever be oblique and superficial).
In terms of prose, there were lots of lines and portions that knocked me out, though maybe a little less than Anna K. Here's one I really liked, at the very end of volume 1, the culminating scene from Austerlitz:
""What is it? am I falling? are my legs giving way under me?" he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the fight between the French and the artillerists ended, and wishing to know whether or not the red-haired artillerist had been killed, whether the cannon had been taken or saved. But he did not see anything. There was nothing over him now except the sky-the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds slowly creeping across it. "How quiet, calm, and solemn, not at all like when I was running," thought Prince Andrei, "not like when we were running, shouting, and fighting; not at all like when the Frenchman and the artillerist, with angry and frightened faces, were pulling at the swab-it's quite different the way the clouds creep across this lofty, infinite sky. How is it I haven't seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am that I've finally come to know it. Yes! everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that. But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquillity. And thank God! . . ."
p.s. to self: note Morel p. 1084
Overall, I guess I am less interested in the "story" than in the way Tolstoy's mind works. Epistemologically, he rejects any hope of causal explanation in history. He's all about the Verstehen, which is why the book is so bloody long and dwells at such length on the characters' interior lives. Ontologically, he's a relentless holist. He always goes back to social collectivities such as the family and the nation. Individuals don't matter - the action is in the relation of countless millions of individuals (which partly explains the explanatory challenge). Emergent properties are everywhere. God lurks about, and history unfolds as if deterministic, despite our imaginings. People are "the blind executors of the most grievous laws of necessity" (p. 1084).
How these things go together also interests me. If individuals don't matter, why do we spend so much time inside _______'s mind, painting a picture of _______'s particular circumstance in pointillist detail, at capillary level? It's a really interesting synthesis - only wholes matter, and there are no nomothetic generalizations, so it's only by piling up details that we can give even a sense --and it will never be more than a sense, though goodness knows he tries. Some understanding is possible, but only through immersion in, and the compounding of, specifics.
Plot? Not so much. Woody Allen summarized that "It's about Russia", and I can't do much better. Characters? Lots of people, all their lives intertwined, lots of passion among the ladyfolk, protagonistic men who are drawn as bundles of complexity and contradictions who don't really end up making much sense to me (again, I think in Tolstoy's view the sense can only ever be oblique and superficial).
In terms of prose, there were lots of lines and portions that knocked me out, though maybe a little less than Anna K. Here's one I really liked, at the very end of volume 1, the culminating scene from Austerlitz:
""What is it? am I falling? are my legs giving way under me?" he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the fight between the French and the artillerists ended, and wishing to know whether or not the red-haired artillerist had been killed, whether the cannon had been taken or saved. But he did not see anything. There was nothing over him now except the sky-the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds slowly creeping across it. "How quiet, calm, and solemn, not at all like when I was running," thought Prince Andrei, "not like when we were running, shouting, and fighting; not at all like when the Frenchman and the artillerist, with angry and frightened faces, were pulling at the swab-it's quite different the way the clouds creep across this lofty, infinite sky. How is it I haven't seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am that I've finally come to know it. Yes! everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that. But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquillity. And thank God! . . ."
p.s. to self: note Morel p. 1084