Month #2 of 'War and Peace'
On Pamuk and Tolstoy, the sunbeam following sovereigns, gibberish at the frontlines, and a poem
Simon Haisell at
is hosting two readalongs for 2024: one for Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace and the other for Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. I’m participating in both. This post is a stringing together of my notes, observations, and fancies as I read Tolstoy’s bulky novel. Reading these posts doesn’t require you to have any familiarity with War and Peace.The first post can be read here.
Pamuk, Tolstoy, and the sunbeam following sovereigns
On Jan 31, my first monthly post about reading War and Peace commenced with a quote from an Orhan Pamuk novel. It was a sentence that emphasised how total a transformation reading a book can cause (‘I read a book one day and my whole life was changed’). Naturally, I found the quote a good starting point to introduce my year-long reading project, a venture demanding daily dedication.
What I omitted in that first post was how, for a good number of years now, Orhan Pamuk and Leo Tolstoy have been sort of connected in my head. More often than not, a mention of the Russian novelist reminds me of the Turkish one. It is not that I’ve discovered any great similarity or relationship between the two. The reason for this linkage is rather straightforward.
In 2011, at the age of twenty-five, I read Pamuk’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures in the volume titled The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, which, among other things, lent me my first impressions of Tolstoy. I was a Pamuk completist then, and, being as much an amateur as today, was cosy with the fact that I’d read nearly all of Pamuk before I’d read many of the older writers he mentioned in those lectures.
For Pamuk, Tolstoy is a reference that can be invoked to talk of the deepest truths about the art of the novel (and perhaps to talk of nothing less). In the very first essay, he uses a scene from Anna Karenina (Anna reading a novel inside a train) to illustrate how ‘one can enter the landscape of a novel while reading.’1 While introducing this scene, Pamuk calls Anna Karenina ‘the greatest novel of all time’, which is an assessment that I’ve had no trouble holding as my own ever since, despite not having read the novel in question. Likewise, Pamuk’s brief comparison of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski in a later lecture, notably the sentence quoted below, is something that I’ve not had many problems borrowing (with Dostoyevski I can at least claim to have read Notes from the Underground):
Whereas Tolstoy's world is teeming with suggestive, subtly placed objects, Dostoyevsky's rooms almost seem to be empty.2
So Pamuk, you see, enabled a young me to respect Tolstoy as a master. This respect was of a curiously dormant sort—it allowed its object to be ignored without remorse for several years.
Last week, after reading another chapter of War and Peace, I started to browse Pamuk’s The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist for mentions of Tolstoy’s not-quite-the-greatest-ever novel. I did so now with a keen, knowing eye—a sentimental eye, as Pamuk might point out, as opposed to a naive one that I might have had in 2011. It turned out that Pamuk mentions War and Peace just before he mentions Anna Karenina:
Reading Tolstoy's description of how Pierre watches the Battle of Borodino from a hilltop, in War and Peace, is for me like a model for reading a novel. Many details that we sense the novel is delicately weaving together and preparing for us, and that we feel the need to have available in our memory while we read, seem to appear in this scene as if in a painting. The reader gets the impression he is not among the words of a novel but standing before a landscape painting. Here, the writer's attention to visual detail, and the reader's ability to transform words into a large landscape painting through visualization, are decisive.
In my reading as of now, the action in War and Peace is still in 1805, and the Battle of Borodino, which happened in 1812, is a fair distance away. But Pamuk’s point about Tolstoy’s investment in making the reader see things has already been abundantly clear. This is true of Tolstoy not just in battle scenes but all through. In a war council meeting on the eve of the Battle of Austerlitz, for example, Tolstoy finds a way not only to describe the position of each one of the army generals in the room but also their tics and expressions3. This penchant for detailed scene execution was similarly on display during high-society soirees in St. Petersburg or name-day ceremonies in Moscow. Tolstoy loves to show.
The other thing as decisive as this invitation to visualise is Tolstoy’s decision-making before it: what to show; what constitutes a scene or an episode; whose perspective is to be approached when (and when abandoned); and what amount of ‘shared objective time’4 must the scene get. I have read writers who, for an occasional page or even a whole chapter or two, describe more vividly than Tolstoy, but there is nobody in my reading experience who comes remotely close to the Russian at choosing episodes, assorting episodes, and doing justice to them at this—it has to be said—scale.
Tolstoy's visual grammar is definitely ace in multi-character set-ups like dinners at a long table or war council meetings, or, for that matter, surveys of the layout of armies across plains and hills, but it holds its own in more contained episodes as well. There is a good load of interiority, too: entire chapters in which a character is alone with their thoughts, whereby their reactions to an event or a sight are fodder only for their private spectrum of feelings. Tolstoy’s mode of showing an internal monologue may be different from the Modernists (he puts quotes around the more verbalised thoughts), and therefore different from what today’s reader is used to, but this doesn’t work as a demerit in any way.
Among the many, many examples that I can quote of excellently rendered private scenes, I choose one in which something extraordinary happens (there is another reason, which will become apparent as you read on). In this excerpt, a key character named Nikolai Rostov, a young man from an aristocratic Moscow family, and a serving officer in the Pavlograd hussars in the 1805 wars, is approached by his emperor, Tsar Alexander I:
He was filled with happiness at his nearness to the Emperor […] Not daring to look round and without looking round, he was ecstatically conscious of his approach. He felt it not only from the sound of the hoofs of the approaching cavalcade, but because as he drew near everything grew brighter, more joyful, more significant, and more festive around him. Nearer and nearer to Rostov came that sun shedding beams of mild and majestic light around, and already he felt himself enveloped in those beams…
The tsar, incidentally, halts at a level with Rostov, who’s also mounted on a horse. Rostov finds the tsar’s face to be innocent and lively like that of a fourteen-year-old boy (Alexander is actually twenty-eight years old here), and also majestic like an emperor. And then:
Casually, while surveying the squadron, the Emperor’s eyes met Rostov’s and rested on them for not more than two seconds. Whether or no the Emperor understood what was going on in Rostov’s soul (it seemed to Rostov that he understood everything), at any rate his blue eyes gazed for about two seconds into Rostov’s face. A gentle, mild light poured from them.
When I read this episode, I noticed the references to light and illumination. Everything grows brighter when the emperor approaches. A mild light pours from his eyes. And, yes, he is himself akin to the sun, shedding majestic light whose glow envelopes young Rostov. This royal glow is, of course, a product of Rostov’s perception. The emperor is not a luminous thing, literally speaking.
But as I noted all that I’ve mentioned in the para above, I was also stopped in my tracks. The whipping wind of a readerly remembrance knocked on the window. It told me that there had been a similar case in my reading life before, one in which an emperor had shone similarly in the eyes of his subjects. I opened the window, so to speak, and there it was, the recollection. A Pamuk novel, of course! My Name is Red.
Here is a little excerpt from My Name is Red, tr. by Erdağ M. Göknar, in which Sultan Murat III visits his miniaturists’ atelier:
Darkness had overtaken us, when a light flooded the room. There was a commotion. My heart, which had begun to beat like a drum, comprehended immediately: The Ruler of the World, His Excellency Our Sultan had abruptly entered. I threw myself at his feet. I kissed the hem of his robe. My head spun. I couldn’t look him in the eye.
How similar this is to the Tolstoy paragraph! The same luminosity in the sovereign, the same indirectness in the subject’s gaze. Had it been the norm in Nikolai Rostov’s culture for an officer to throw himself at his king’s feet or kiss the hem of his robe, he might even have done that.
This is, in fact, the second of three notable entries that Sultan Murat III makes in Pamuk’s novel.
The first one:
Both their faces were strangely illuminated, a flicker of fear and awe overcame them, and they snapped to their feet. Without having to turn around I knew that we were in the presence of His Excellency, Our Sultan, the Refuge of the World.
The last one:
At that moment, like an ethereal light that illuminated the leaden morning, His Excellency Our Sultan, the Foundation of the World, entered the room.
It is clear from these examples that Pamuk, like a true post-modernist, does not couch the Sultan’s luminosity in a metaphor; nor that he present it as an effect of the viewer’s perception. He presents it as an objective reality. His Sultan really is like a bulb. And in an odd, roundabout way, this perhaps increases the realism of the narrators’ subjectivities in our reading, given that Pamuk’s action is set in 16th century. I don’t know about you, but if I saw my king in the 16th century, when those dudes could send you to your death on a mere whim, I would think of them as the sun.
But, hey, the question is, did Pamuk borrow a trick from Tolstoy?5 Or is there a longer tradition of seeing one’s ruler as, you know, LIT? I guess it will take even more reading to get a conclusive answer. As for now, I’m happy I’ve discovered a more solid-grounded connection between Pamuk and Tolstoy, one that I think I’ll never forget. As I said in the first post about my slow read of War and Peace: “I read a book one year and my whole life was changed.”
What War Brings Out
Women During War
In January, the last three or four chapters included scenes of war in Austria. The French were winning, the Russians were retreating. It was here that the first rape joke of the book was cracked between a bunch of officers, a speculation about what a meeting with the nuns in a nearby convent might entail.
We stayed with war through most of February, with the action set around the battles preceding the Battle of Austerlitz. Women, whenever they found themselves between soldiers, ran the risk of rotten insult if not molestation. In a very cinematic episode that I read early on in the month, the entire Russian army—with its artillery, its supply wagons, its horses, and its foot soldiers—has to cross a narrow bridge over the Danube. Civilians escaping war must also pass the same bridge at the same time. In one civilian vehicle, there is seated a young girl who has to countenance the leery eyes of practically the whole segment of an army. Nothing untoward happens, but it is horrible nonetheless to imagine being her in that moment. I credit Tolstoy massively for not shying away from showing this animalistic aspect of war-time reality, and especially showing it to be an element on the Russian side. He’s not interested in whitewashing for sure.
The Difficulty in REALLY Accepting that ‘I Can Die Tomorrow, or Soon’
The glittering interface with the tsar makes young Nikolai Rostov fall in love with the idea of dying for the sovereign (preferably in an action that the sovereign witnesses and finds remarkable). This has a dash of the ridiculous about it, for just a few days ago, the same Rostov was in a possibly fatal situation in which a panic in the face of the possibility of imminent death had his thoughts coagulate around a set of ideas that can only be termed childish. I paraphrase: How can the French want to kill me!? Everybody loves me. Everybody back home loves me and adores me. How can anybody want to kill me!? To be fair, Rostov is only seventeen; I’ve been calling him a man only because his day and age insists he is one.
Tolstoy renders young Rostov without much self-consciousness. And so Rostov sees no condiction in fantasising about death one day and being paralysed in the face of it the next day. He is keen to brag, and easily offended when his bragging is challenged. He doesn’t know how to manage his finances and is sent a fair amount of money by his parents while he is at war.6
But the war efforts on all sides must be full of such Rostovs: full of children, so to speak, with minds bursting to seams with notions of bravery and honour and patriotism, eyes hungry for experience, and limbs eager for action. It takes a special kind of ardour—or bhakti, as Indian readers will comprehend—to see your supreme leader as a light-emitting object; just as it takes pure childishness to mistake the wish to be regarded as a good pupil as devotion to grand ideas.
It’s not that those who are mature are not given to fantasy—more specifically, the fantasy of dying tomorrow in a battle. Andrei Bolkonsky, another key character who’s slightly older than Nikolai Rostov (Andrei is in his twenties), and definitely way more mature, also thinks of his own death on the eve of the Battle of Austerlitz. But Bolkonsky’s fantasy is more considered, more self-conscious. It has in it at least some room for the argument that to die in battle might be meaningless in and of itself. Bolkonsky reasons against this argument, in fact, articulating to himself that nothing—not even family—matters more to him than the sense of community he has found with the men of the army and the consequent glory that shall be all his if he dies in significant action.
Laughter at the Frontlines
On the eve of the Battle of Schöngrabern7, Tolstoy describes, through the eyes of Andrei Bolkonsky, the position of the two armies on the field as they await orders about engaging in battle. At one place, the soldiers are literally face to face, with barely a cricket pitch’s length between them. There is time and occasion—astonishingly, one might think—for banter between enemies. The language difference between the two sets of soldiers is also not surmountable. The Russian upper class speaks French (in fact, they speak French better than Russian). And the Russian soldiers find amongst them a demoted soldier named Dolokhov who speaks the enemy’s language. He is brought to the front to talk with the enemy. A conversation begins.
Dolokhov takes Napoleon’s name. The French soldier reminds him insists that Napoleon is now Emperor. To this, Dolokhov says, ‘The Devil skin your Emperor,’ and follows it up with a course insult in Russian before walking away. Then:
‘Ah, that’s the way to talk French,’ said the picket soldiers.
‘Now, Sidorov, you have a try!’
Sidorov, turning to the French, winked, and began to jabber meaningless sounds very fast: ‘Kari, mala, tafa, safi, muter, Kaská,’ he said, trying to give an expressive intonation to his voice.
‘Ho! ho! ho! Ha! ha! ha! ha! Ouh! ouh!’ came peals of such healthy and good-humoured laughter from the soldiers that it infected the French involuntarily, so much so that the only thing left to do seemed to be to unload the muskets, explode the ammunition, and all return home as quickly as possible.
Tolstoy’s ‘Kari, mala, tafa, safi, muter, Kaská’ reminded me of my own ‘How fow shau shau jamjow kapow lau feesh vish,’ from my novel Manjhi’s Mayhem. My gibberish is from a dream sequence, in which the protagonist Sewaram Manjhi dreams of a conversation with his dead father. The nonsensical words are what the father hurls at Manjhi after he is asked to speak in English.
Under the childish impulse to make fun of another’s language, I find in this act a political strain too, as a gesture of overtly making nonsense while imitating a language that has turned oppressive, or is the language of the oppressor, or is, at least, a signifier of class difference. English is such a language for the milieu of Sewaram Manjhi and his father in my novel. And French is definitely such a language for Russian picket soldiers: their aristocrats speak it; the aristocrats become officers automatically and lord over the lay soldier; and this the order of the world, a world divided between those who speak French and those who don’t. Merde!
Lastly, a poem
There is a genocide taking place. In the heart of empire, a man burnt himself alive in protest. I’m reading War and Peace.
I wrote this poem, perhaps, to record for myself the irreconcilability of what is happening.
Book 1 Part 2 of War and Peace during Gaza
We’ve moved from frippery to grapeshot To sinusoids of land marked by the raw order of unlimbered cannons worn shoes hellish latrines You can see he doesn't know how to write it That he is inventing how to work around it Like the droopy-eyed general who issues no orders Just nods languidly at every frazzled news or report Making it all appear a part of his plan The similes here are awkward Blood flows from a shot arm like a bottle Blood flows from a shot horse like a spring Perhaps it is an ethical matter Perhaps good similes are silly for such a scene In a more simply heartbroken life you wrote: 'Life is a fucking war novel' You now know no part of that was true. Novels are novels, a maze of semblances, but Only war is war Only life is life And that is their only likeness.
Thank you. The next War and Peace newsletter will reach you on March 31.
The illustration is done, in fact, through an example of the opposite. Anna fails to read the novel well enough. She’s happened to meet Vronsky in Moscow, and is probably thinking about him in the train ride back to St. Petersburg. And so, curiously, it is ‘unpleasant for her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She wanted to too much to live herself.’ Bad, bad reader: Anna. Pamuk claims that had been able to focus on her novel, ‘she would visualise the scene as if she were gazing out a window and would feel herself slowly entering this scene she observes from the outside.’ I can attest to feeling like that while reading novels in trains.
While this comparison of furniture density in the rooms imagined by the two writers is easy to remember, a different paragraph in Pamuk’s lecture puts the point forward more clearly:
The knowledge or wisdom that Dostoyevsky provides us speaks not to our visual imagination, but to our verbal imagination. With regard to the power of the novel and an understanding of the human psyche, Tolstoy is sometimes equally profound […] Yet the greater part of Tolstoy's insights are different in kind from Dostoyevsky's. Tolstoy addresses not just our verbal imagination, but—even more—our visual imagination.
Our man Kutuzov (the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army) goes to sleep in that meeting. He even snores. When the Austrian general Weyrother finally ends an hour-long read-out of the dispositions and orders, Kutuzov even gives the party a little reminder of the importance of sleep before a battle.
The Russians and Austrians lose at Austerlitz, of course, but not because of Kutuzov.
Pamuk’s term.
Not that it would be a bad thing if he did. I intend to borrow a lot of tricks from Tolstoy.
He is like how I was in tech school. Tech school is war, of course.
Happens before the Battle of Austerlitz. The Russians win. Rather, the Russians hold the French for a length of time that is enough for their army to move to a more advantageous location.
The LIT leaders-lol.
So interesting that Pamuk loved Anna Karenina! It makes total sense, because I’ve always thought that The Museum of Innocence reminds me so much of AK - not necessarily in its plot, but in its vibe and essence