War and Peace

I just finished War and Peace, and I have notes.

First: I’ve been thinking about the music to play to during yoga classes, and today during practice teaching I played Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s masterpiece Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (2000), a quartet of ambient post-rock jams averaging 20 minutes each. Godspeed You! is a legend of the post-rock scene, and associated band (sharing three members) The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchesta’s He Has Left Us Alone but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms…, also 2000, is a must-listen.

A friend of mine described Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s music as awesome music with some unpleasant sound. The track “Sleep”, around 11:00 minutes, illustrates this by its distorted theremin solo and fighting drum and base breaking up into noise of theremin wail by minute twelve, to a banshee’s cry. Eventually the breakup ends, the theremin’s power breaks down, and peace returns. Probably not good tuneage for yoga class.

I read War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, because of the musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, by Dave Malloy, which would be excellent music for a yoga class. I was told about this musical during the after-choir social hour of the Apollo choir, which I sang in during the year I lived with my mom between high school and university.¹ It was all the rage among the theater adults. It was big during my breakup with Ellery in 2018 (!), and Anne and I saw it in Skokie, outside Chicago.

The musical adapts volume two, part five² of the novel, with small modifications³ to make the musical stand alone. The majority of the libretto is drawn directly from the text of the novel: after the first chorus number introduces the characters, Pierre has a solo that corresponds to volume two, part five, chapter one:

It’s dawned on me suddenly, and for no obvious reason, that I can’t go on living as I am,

and so on through the musical until

it seems to me that this comet feels me, feels my softened and uplifted soul and my newly melted heart, now blossoming into a new life,

the last sentence of part five and volume two.

I can’t remember whom I was talking to about the book with some time ago, but they said that they had started it and given it up because their goal in reading it had bee to learn about the Russian experience of the Napoleonic wars and were disappointed that it was all court drama. I agreed and shrugged, because volume two, part five, is one of the urban episodes and takes place in Moscow while the war (contrary to the first chorus) is not going on; and the musical was the only part of the story I knew. The first part of the first volume is courtly stuff in Petersburg, but part two cuts straight to the army and doesn’t leave it. It just takes a long time for the story to develop. “It’s a complicated Russian novel, everyone’s got nine different names” – first chorus, Natasha, Pierre. It needs the time, because it covers a huge scope: almost two decades of a dozen major characters’ lives. My edition (translated Pevear and Volokhonsky, published by Vintage Classics, paperback in 2008) is 1200 pages for the four volumes and epilogue, and the part made into the musical is not quite seventy of those pages in my edition.

I’ve been listening to Tchaikovsky – the 1812 Overture, of course – but the first and second string quartets as well as the sixth symphony, which I’m listening to performed by the Berlin Philoharmonic under Herbert von Karajan as I write this. I played violin in the orchestra for the 1812 overture in high school, and the choral theme with which he opens the work⁴ and returns after the climax inspired an early attempt at composition soon after. I never understood the plot of the piece until now, but it, unsurprisingly, traces the invasion of Russia in 1812, the same events described by the remaining two volumes of War and Peace after the events of the musical.

The 1812 Overture uses artillery as part of its orchestra, and the gunshots mark climactic moments in the story. It also borrows the French national anthem La Marseillaise, which it uses as a counter-theme throughout the work to represent the French invaders.⁵ I’m not sure if it’s good for yoga class music, but it shares with Godspeed you!’s work the quality of being beautiful with some aggrivating noise, whether it be the brass wailing la marseillaise or the purcussion banging out a march or the canons firing. Then everything’s beautiful again; and in these lulls Tolstoy discusses the court drama and romance that’s taking place away from the war (“there’s a war going on out there somewhere…” – Natasha, Pierre, first chorus). Now the book begins seven years before the invasion, in 1805.

I was speaking to my cousin Kathleen and mentioned that I’d read a complicated Russian novel that made me want to get an estate and retire to the country. In the epilogue, part one, chapter seven, Nikolai, Natasha’s older brother and (at the time) Sonya’s fiancé who’s wholly absent from the musical in Moscow but who ends up marrying princess Marya, André’s sister. Nikolai settles into his wife’s estate (he’s had to sold his father’s after their affairs were totally ruined; the financial trouble his father was in is one of the reasons some Rostovs were in Moscow in the winter of 1811-1812) and takes to farming first because he has too, but

he quickly developed such a passion that it became his favorite and almost sole occupation. Nikolai was a simple farmer, did not like innovations…, and generally was not taken up with any specific part of farming. Before his eyes there was always only the estate as a whole and not some separate part of it.⁶

He falls in love with the practice, quickly sorts his affairs out, and buys back his father’s lost estate; the secret is his closeness to the “muzhiks”, the common men, the serfs who live on the land and do the labor for him, whom he (in a certain sense) owns. His attention to their needs and blending with them in the labor is the secret to his success. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace shortly after the emancipation reform of 1861 emancipated the serfs, and the novel emphasizes the Russianness that unites the nobility and the serfs in the national war to expell the foreign invader. The Troparion of the cross in the overture of 1812 (whose text begins “Спаси, Господи, люди Твоя” – Save, oh lord, thy people) emphasizes the spiritual unity and profundity of the Russian nation which, Tolstoy argues, gave them victory over the French (e.g. volume three, part two, chapter thirty-nine, where the French are defeated because they faced for the first time an adversary “stronger in spirit” than they).

The ideal of a farmer working among his land in peace is not at all foreign to the US: Nikolai is settling in to Bald Hills five years after Jefferson has returned to Monticello from the White House, though the relation between Jefferson and the people he enslaved is less cheery than that Tolstoy depicts between Nikolai and the peasants on his estate. The impossibility of uniting into a single nation the groups of Jefferson (wealthy white anglo-americans) and of those he enslaved (descendants of black africans abducted into slavery) haunts the USA today. What is our national character?

My father bought a farm in New Jersey of some 180 acres about fifteen years ago now and has toyed with the farmer lifestyle Nikolai has.⁷ For a long time he said he’d move there after retirement, but that plan’s obviously been aborted: the people living in the vicinity all support the current president, which troubles my father and step-mother. Those are, apparently, the wrong sort of USA; what do I think? I’m not sure. I can’t judge people I’ve never met based on opinions they may have; I believe one sees more signage for Trump than against when driving around the area, and I had during the Bush Jr. and Obama administrations conversations with the tenant farmer about the Iraq war (which he supported because the Iraqis want to take our freedom and the soldiers protect us from them) and with neighbors about Obamacare (which they opposed because nobody in the country goes without healthcare: doctors volunteer to provide any truly necessary, life-saving care). This paints a picture of the ambience in the area and explains why my father and step-mother and half-sisters haven’t moved there.

It’d be a nice utopia to have a community living on a contiguous stretch of land farming, hunting, and producing their needs and exchanging what they have too much of for what they can’t produce enough of themselves. There should be enough people to keep things interesting, but not so many that someone can’t keep up with the over-all structure. Enough people to gather at one time in a large hall if you needed to. It’d be a humble life but not a poor one, if you kept lively exchange with the outside world and left the place regularly.

The novel has many characters, with similar names, almost all of whom know (at least of) one another. They disperse and gather in space over an extended period of time; the novel progresses through a series of such configurations: at the beginning of volume 1, it’s July 1805, Pierre, André, and Anatole are in Petersburg and and Natasha, Sonya, and Marya Dimitrievna are in Moscow. Then André goes to war, and Pierre marries Hélène and they move to Moscow, and so on. It would be fun to graph the progression of the relationships through this novel, and many like it, and see what the result looks like. This might be a challenging task to automate, given how many characters there are, how many names refer to each character, and how many characters share names.

I feel justified in this mechanistic approach by Tolstoy’s second epilogue to the novel, which is a free-standing essay on the study of history and freedom. For Tolstoy, there is a contradiction between the fact that material reality is entirely determined by mechanisms of causation, and therefore all history is just one necessary consequence after another, and humans’ consciousness of our own freedom, which is impossible (according to Tolstoy) to deny. But if there really is free human action that doesn’t just appear free to us, then it’s impossible to discover laws that will govern the otherwise necessary unraveling of human events; but we want to and seem to be able to produce such laws. So we’ve got to admit that human events are determined by necessity so that we can study them historically.

But this leads (besides the connections to Sāṃkhya and Yoga) to a certain kind of melancholy: in volume 1, part 2, chapter 2, Kutuzov, the great geeral who will be commander-in-chief during the invasion of 1812, but for now is just general, receives a report from Dolokhov (the same Pierre duels with later on). Kutuzov winces, “as if wishing to express thereby that all that Dolokhov had said to them and all that he [Kutuzov] could say had long, long been known to him, that it all bored him, and that it was all by no means what was needed.” Kutuzov, throughout the novel, surfs on this kind of necessity, and his greatness, for Tolstoy, springs from his awareness of what is and isn’t necessary or possible. That’s what allows him to defeat Napoleon.

I’ve got to bring this to an end: it’s been sitting in my computer for almost a week now, and this is a blog post, not a real essay. I’ll still be able to reference the book in the future, but for now I’m reading other things.