war and peace (2)

Pierre was an illegitimate son of a very rich aristocrat who was recalled home from France to appear at his father's death bed in Petersburg and inherited tremendous wealth upon his death.

Shy and socially awkward, he was coaxed into marrying the beautiful but shallow daughter of a conniving old aristocrat who pretended to be his elderly benefactor. He went into a duel with a young officer who was rumored to have an affair with his socially active wife and decided to lead a separate life from his wife afterwards.

Always in search of life's true meaning, he joined the Freemasonry Society and became a devoted member, contributing his wealth to help achieve the lofty goals of brotherly love and welfare for the poor, with little or counter effect as people took advantage of his naivete and lack of pragmatism.

As Napoleon's army approached, he decided to stay in Moscow to have a chance to assassinate him when he came to town. A fire accident turned him into a prisoner by the occupying French, where he witnessed innocent people being executed and he himself barely escaped that same fate; he saved a French officer who deemed him a lifetime friend and had a heart-to-heart conversation with; he refused to be in company with other high ranking prisoners but stayed with lowly soldier prisoners where he witnessed a peasant soldier conducting a simple but happy life under the meagerest circumstances:

Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life brought him in contact with, particularly with man—not any particular man, but those with whom he happened to be... To Pierre he always remained what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.

The enlightenment he had long searched for finally arrived:

He had sought it in philanthropy, in Freemasonry, in the dissipations of town life, in wine, in heroic feats of self-sacrifice; he had sought it by reasoning—and all these quests and experiments had failed him. And now without thinking about it he had found that peace and inner harmony only through the horror of death, through privation, and through what he recognized in Karataev.

He was rescued by the Russian army from the retreating French and regarded as a legendary hero when he returned home.

He met Natasha, a girl he had long loved but dared not admit. They talked about their mutual friend Andrei and his death, and Pierre's extraordinary ordeal. They eventually got married and had four children.

Pierre of old vs Pierre of new:

Formerly he had appeared to be a kindhearted but unhappy man, and so people had been inclined to avoid him. Now a smile at the joy of life always played around his lips, and sympathy for others shone in his eyes with a questioning look as to whether they were as contented as he was, and people felt pleased by his presence.

Previously he had talked a great deal, grew excited when he talked, and seldom listened; now he was seldom carried away in conversation and knew how to listen so that people readily told him their most intimate secrets.

Previously he had equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space, where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen.

Now, however, he had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore—to see it and enjoy its contemplation—he naturally threw away the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men’s heads, and gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him.

war and peace (1)

A docu-video on the Napoleonic Wars piqued my interest in that early 19th century period of European history and made me decide to take on that world famous literature classic "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy, a historical novel that centers on Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812.

It seemed a daunting task at the beginning, to read through a 1800+ page long story set on a different land at different times by an iconic author of a different era, but once I got over those confusing Russian name look-alikes (Bezukhovs and Bolkonskys, Denisov and Dolokhov...), vintage military regiments and titles (dragoon and hussar, aide-de-camp and adjutant general...), the many princes/princesses, counts/countesses that seemed to come and go in one soiree after another, and the at times long, segmented sentences Tolstoy (or the book's English translator) liked to use elaborating human state of mind, it became an enjoyable read. I made it a daily pastime by going through two or three chapters a day (if I could refrain from going overboard when being carried away by the story at hand) and finished it in a couple of months.

Several Russian aristocratic families form the core of the story. One main character, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, hailed from a country estate headed by a retired old soldier, a strict disciplinarian and ill-tempered patriarch. A thoughtful and brave (if somewhat arrogant) young man dissatisfied with his married life and the vanity of Petersburg's high society, Prince Andrei embarked on a military career with a tinge of hero worship of Emperor Napoleon who's on a tear defeating European monarchies while nominally spreading French revolutionary ideals across the continent.

He soon met his imagined hero at a battlefield after being injured and taken prisoner, right at the same time an epiphany from his near death experience brought him an ever clearer visions of the world above and the one below:

"Looking into Napoleon’s eyes Prince Andrei thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain."

The delusion of the glory of war gone, the hero image shattered, he became despondent with life, but as a capable man and a caring son went on to care for his father's estate, and observed how infinite power destroyed the ruler (such as his father) morally than the ruled physically:

"To liberate the serfs is a good thing, not for the serfs—for even if they are beaten, flogged, or sent to Siberia, they lead the same animal life, and the stripes on their bodies heal, and they are happy as before. But it is a good thing for the liberator, for if they hold on to unlimited power, they in time grow more irritable, become cruel and harsh, are conscious of it, but cannot restrain themselves and grow more and more miserable.”

Then he met Natasha, a young, energetic girl with an angelic singing voice from another well-to-do family. He fell in love and found purpose in life again. He proposed marriage and she accepted, with a young girl's (perhaps over-zealous) infatuation of love and romance. However, in light of Andrei's father's objection to the marriage, the wedding had to be postponed for one year while Andrei went away on military duty.

A playboy son of a corrupted aristocratic family came to seduce the love-craze, distraught young Natasha to break her engagement with Andrei and elope with him. Though the plot fell through at the last minute, Andrei was heart broken and Natasha attempted suicide and became seriously ill afterwards.

At a fierce battle outside Moscow with the French army Andrei was seriously injured and escorted to Moscow along with the withdrawing Russian army, where Natasha's family were preparing to leave town. Though her family tried to keep her from knowing, once Natasha found out Andrei's presence with the family's processing out of town, she braced herself to meet him at his sick bed and started ceaseless nursing for his recovery with fortitude.

The following is to me the most romantically touching and spiritually stirring section of the book:

“Ah, she has come!” thought he. And so it was. Since she had begun looking after him, he had always experienced this physical consciousness of her nearness. She was sitting in an armchair placed sideways, screening the light of the candle from him, and was knitting a stocking. The needles clicked lightly in her slender, rapidly moving hands, and he could clearly see the thoughtful profile of her drooping face. She moved, and the ball rolled off her knees. She started, glanced round at him, and screening the candle with her hand stooped carefully with a supple and exact movement, picked up the ball, and regained her former position. He looked at her without moving and saw that she wanted to draw a deep breath after stooping, but refrained from doing so and breathed cautiously.

At the Tróitsa monastery they had spoken of the past, and he had told her that if he lived he would always thank God for his wound which had brought them together again, but after that they never spoke of the future.

“Can it or can it not be?” he now thought as he looked at her and listened to the light click of the steel needles. “Can fate have brought me to her so strangely only for me to die?... Is it possible that the truth of life has been revealed to me only to show me that I have spent my life in falsity? I love her more than anything in the world! But what am I to do if I love her?” he thought, and he involuntarily groaned, from a habit acquired during his sufferings.

On hearing that sound Natasha put down the stocking, leaned nearer to him, and suddenly, noticing his shining eyes, stepped lightly up to him and bent over him.

“You are not asleep?” “No, I have been looking at you a long time. I felt you come in. No one else gives me that sense of soft tranquillity that you do... that light. I want to weep for joy.”

Natasha drew closer to him. Her face shone with rapturous joy.

“Natasha, I love you too much! More than anything in the world.”

“And I!”—She turned away for an instant.

“Why too much?” she asked.

“Why too much?... Well, what do you, what do you feel in your soul, your whole soul—shall I live? What do you think?”

“I am sure of it, sure!” Natasha almost shouted, taking hold of both his hands with a passionate movement.

He remained silent awhile.

“How good it would be!” and taking her hand he kissed it.

Natasha felt happy and agitated, but at once remembered that this would not do and that he had to be quiet.

“But you have not slept,” she said, repressing her joy. “Try to sleep... please!”

He pressed her hand and released it, and she went back to the candle and sat down again in her former position. Twice she turned and looked at him, and her eyes met his beaming at her. She set herself a task on her stocking and resolved not to turn round till it was finished.

Soon he really shut his eyes and fell asleep. As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now always occupied his mind—about life and death, and chiefly about death. He felt himself nearer to it.

“Love? What is love?” he thought.

“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.” These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former agitation and obscurity. He fell asleep.

He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that he was quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and insignificant people appeared before him. He talked to them and discussed something trivial... Gradually, unnoticed, all these persons began to disappear and a single question, that of the closed door, superseded all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt and lock it. Everything depended on whether he was, or was not, in time to lock it. He went, and tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move and he knew he would not be in time to lock the door though he painfully strained all his powers. He was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear was the fear of death. It stood behind the door. But just when he was clumsily creeping toward the door, that dreadful something on the other side was already pressing against it and forcing its way in. Something not human—death—was breaking in through that door, and had to be kept out. He seized the door, making a final effort to hold it back—to lock it was no longer possible—but his efforts were weak and clumsy and the door, pushed from behind by that terror, opened and closed again.

Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was death, and Prince Andrei died.