Month #4 of 'War and Peace'
On money in novels, the impossibility of speedy emancipation, and homecomings
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 carries my notes, observations, and fancies as I read Tolstoy’s bulky novel. It is the fourth of twelve such planned monthly instalments. Reading these posts doesn’t require you to have any familiarity with War and Peace.The first post can be read here. It talks about the multilingualism of Tolstoy’s novel, the unchanging modalities of social capital, the absence of dancing in the contemporary Indian novel, and the contentious legacies of war-time generals.
The second post can be read here. It talks about the odd phenomena of sovereigns acting like light-emitting objects in fiction and the horrors of war. It ends with a poem.
The third post can be read here. It talks about the traits of the Tolstoyan character and how it is in negotiation with chapter-level segmentations in the novel.
Money Matters
In life, money is important. So it ought to be important in fiction, too, right?
A character in fiction corresponds to a possible person, and this correspondence is achieved through regular (and craftily understated) declaration of relations throughout the length of the fiction. Relations between what? Between the accreting character and various (well-chosen) physicalities, sensations, and abstractions that become subjectivised in the character during and after each declaration. A character is, therefore, a synthesis illustrated through its relationships. And money—which can be physicality, sensation, and abstraction—is a bloody important relationship. A character’s bank balance is tied to their self-worth (which is to say, interiority), their perceived worth in society (which is to say, other characters), and their general agency (which is to say, plot).
Yet, in contemporary fiction, money is largely missing. We are never told the main character’s salary, or the exact amount they inherited from their parents, or even the amount that they feel comfortable spending on a night out with friends. This general reticence about numbers is not just that. The possibility of a difficult relationship with money seems to have become an idea with less and less currency. Naomi Kanakia’s recent essay in LitHub compellingly argues as much through the examples of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., and Torry Peters’ Detransition, Baby. Things are not very different for the Indian novel in English, too.
For whatever reason, authors of literary fiction seem very invested in creating dramas of the meritocracy: stories about the internal, emotional turmoil of talented people who, it is assumed, deserve all their current or future success. I can only assume this is because in the 21st century there is some market for these dramas in a way there was not in the 19th-century. And because to write about money honestly would inevitably puncture the illusion that it plays no role in contemporary life, authors find ways of gliding over the parts of the book where money would naturally come up.
Kanakia notes that ‘authors write openly about money’ in the 19th-century novel. This is most definitely true of Tolstoy. In a chapter in War and Peace that I read at the beginning of April, Tolstoy gives a full account of a key character's expenses after telling us that his income is five hundred thousand rubles a year:
About 80,000 went in payments on all the estates to the Land Bank; about 30,000 went for the upkeep of the estate near Moscow, the town house, and the allowance to the three princesses; about 15,000 was given in pensions and the same amount for asylums; 150,000 alimony was sent to the countess; about 70,000 went for interest on debts. The building of a new church previously begun, had cost about 10,000 in each of the last two years, and he did not know how the rest, about 100,000 rubles, was spent, and almost every year he was obliged to borrow. Besides this the chief steward wrote every year telling him of fires and bad harvests, or of the necessity of rebuilding factories and workshops.
This list has its uses in the context of the novel, for it illustrates a possible situation—if not the situation—of the landed Russian aristocracy during the Napoleonic Wars. I was happy to read it, even without any clear conception of what these expenses amounted to in today’s terms. The heads are a crucial detail, though. It helps to know that about 30% of Pierre Bezukhov’s (that’s the name of the character) goes to his estranged wife, that about 16% goes to the Land Bank, which is presumably some kind of tax, and about 14% goes out as interest payment on past loans. Pierre is rich in income, but he is also caught in his liabilities to the extent that he has to borrow to continue to be rich. He can do better with his money if he can put his mind to it. An incapacity or unwillingness to do so will say a lot about his character. The next line in the paragraph lands impactfully.
So the first task Pierre had to face was one for which he had very little aptitude or inclination—practical business.
In the Indian novels I read, I most definitely want to know whether, say, a character makes 40,000 rupees a month or 200,000 rupees a month. Both would fall in ‘the middle class’, and both could have rich interiorities buttressed by leisure time—but the lifestyle difference between the two incomes is big enough to affect my understanding of the character. In the absence of this detail, I assume things—assumptions that can lead to dissonance if and when they are contradicted by a consumption habit evident later in the novel.1 The lack of these numbers won’t harm believability for the most part, especially if one is in the hands of a skilled writer, but it is also true that doing the labour of stating numbers will likely add to world-building.
I think one reason to avoid figures is the idea that the stated numbers will be meaningless a few decades later. Kanakia did mention the economist Thomas Piketty in her essay, who ‘theorized that the high inflation of the post-war period [the First World War] is what led writers to stop using dollar amounts in their fiction.’ Austen and Trollope and Tolstoy perhaps didn’t have the monster of inflation to contend with. But I feel that the question of whether the numbers will make sense decades or years later is beside the point. The above paragraph from War and Peace did aid sense-making, did it not, even though no single number held any significant meaning for us today.
The Impossibility of Speedy Emancipation
In the same chapter that I’ve quoted from above, Pierre Bezukhov asks the chief steward of his estates to take steps to liberate the serfs. Liberating the serfs seems to be a fashionable thing to do in Russia at the time, especially among the younger, liberal-minded aristocrats. But it’s most definitely a difficult task. Serfdom was abolished in Russia only in 1861, more than fifty years after Pierre’s wish to see it happen under his dominion.
Later, Pierre conducts a tour of his estates to note the progress of his project. The chief steward shrewdly arranges for his boss’s ceremonial welcome everywhere. There is post-emancipation pageantry everywhere Pierre goes. Peasants offer icons to their emancipator, women bless him, children are eager to show him the benefits of school education, and so on. But this is all on the surface. The ground reality is darker, and Tolstoy isn’t sparing with it for us, even as he allows Pierre to be deluded by his ‘success’:
What Pierre did not know was that the place where they presented him with bread and salt and wished to build a chantry in honour of Peter and Paul was a market-village where a fair was held on St Peter’s day, and that the richest peasants (who formed the deputations) had begun the chantry long before, and that nine-tenths of the peasants in that village were in a state of the greatest poverty. He did not know that since the nursing mothers were no longer sent to work on his land, they did still harder work on their own land. He did not know that the priest who met him with the cross oppressed the peasants by his exactions, and that the pupils’ parents wept at having to let him take their children and secured their release by heavy payments. He did not know that the brick buildings, built to plan, were being built by serfs whose manorial labour was thus increased, though lessened on paper. He did not know that where the steward had shown him in the accounts that the serfs’ payments had been diminished by a third, their obligatory manorial work had been increased by a half.
Pierre’s good intentions and utter managerial incapability have made a disastrous cocktail here. His goal was emancipation, but his achievement is quite at the opposite end. To me, this speaks to the difficulty of emancipatory projects even in our times, especially in arenas where exploitation is the X factor of economic activity and there exist multiple agents who benefit directly (Pierre himself) or indirectly (the chief steward, rich peasants, the priest) from the status quo. In such situations, even when liberation comes as a diktat from the top, there is no change in the material ground conditions. Exploitation finds other forms and continues to play its preeminent role in the economic (and social) order.
Without adequate attention to, and awareness of, the processes through which human bondage produces rents and outsized profits, without intentional work that attacks these processes at all levels, including, of course, the lowest levels, and without the resources to be able to do this work consistently for a length of time, and at the widest scope possible, emancipation remains an armchair wish. What is missing in Pierre’s doomed project—if you ask me—is that well-meaning and resourceful and just and ever-active entity that can bribe and buffet and bludgeon and bomb: the State.2
Homecomings
Tolstoy, who was an artillery officer in the Russian army during the Crimean War, knew well the two homecomings that a soldier experiences. The first one is when war ceases and the soldier returns to their family. And the second one is when there is a fresh agitation at the borders, and the soldier returns to their regiment. Tolstoy shows both events in the life of Nikolai Rostov, a key character, as filled with utter joy. During Nikolai’s return to his regiment, the equivalence to an earlier homecoming is stated outright for us (I have emphasised it in the excerpt below):
When he saw the first hussar with the unbuttoned uniform of his regiment, when he recognized red-haired Dementyev and saw the picket ropes of the roan horses, when Lavrushka gleefully shouted to his master, ‘The Count has come!’ and Denisov, who had been asleep on his bed, ran all dishevelled out of the mud hut to embrace him, and the officers collected round to greet the new arrival, Rostov experienced the same feeling as when his mother, his father, and his sister had embraced him, and tears of joy choked him so that he could not speak. The regiment was also a home, and as unalterably dear and precious as his parents’ house.
In the above excerpt, I find the mention of ‘the picket ropes of the roan horses’ as a most satisfying brushstroke, the kind of thing Tolstoy seems to be able to do so casually and so frequently that its genius at times evades the reading consciousness. It offers a clear visual while also (magically) conveying how we compose ‘home’ as a collection of visions. Just as sighting a feature of one’s house—a tree along the driveway, say—might be for one the first flutter of home, sighting the uniform of the regiment, or roan horses, or picket ropes might be the same for an early 19th-century Russian officer returning to his regiment.
In the novel, this homecoming and its bonhomie provide only a prelude to horrific things. The regiment suffers badly in the next war. Their food supplies become non-existent, foraging yields no return, and disease grows rampant. The turn of events eventually takes Nikolai Rostov on a visit to a hospital filled with the dead and the dying.
The hospital chapter—Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 17—is the most harrowing chapter of the novel till now. It unflinchingly illustrates the horrors of war, especially as visited upon the bodies of combatants. The ‘unflinchingly’ here is important, for elsewhere, even when he shows us the unseemly sides of the theatre of war, Tolstoy has a tendency to hurry through it3. Inside the soldier’s ward in the hospital, there is a hellish atmosphere. Rostov sees the sick and the wounded ‘lying on the floor on straw and overcoats.’ A man with a purple face (cholera? typhoid?) whispers for water. An old amputee as thin as a skeleton struggles to speak a word. There is a dead body next to him, which hasn’t been removed despite entreaties since the morning. Rostov—who comes from nobility, and is an officer—fails to ensure that the attendant responsible helps the two men, and himself hurriedly leaves the scene. He can’t bear what he’s seeing.
‘I’ll send someone at once. He shall be taken away—taken away at once,’ said the assistant hurriedly. ‘Let us go, your honour.’
‘Yes, yes, let us go,’ said Rostov hastily, and lowering his eyes and shrinking, he tried to pass unnoticed between the rows of reproachful envious eyes that were fixed upon him, and went out of the room.
Somehow, I didn’t blame Nikolai for rushing away. A hospital that is also a morgue: can one be farther from home when one is there? He’s the same character who fell from his horse during a cavalry charge at the Battle of Schöngrabern and panicked at the idea that he, who was loved by all in his family, could be killed by the enemy. He’s the same character who on the eve of the Battle of Austerlitz can’t help dozing off on his horse. He’s the same character who can’t stop himself from losing 43,000 rubles (Tolstoy specifies the amount, of course) at a game of cards. What I mean is—Nikolai Rostov is still more boy than man.
Later, peace is signed with the French, rendering meaningless all the suffering Nikolai has witnessed. “Terrible doubts rose in his soul.” As he gets drunk that evening, he shouts cynical words about the duty of a soldier (to fight, not to think), betraying his inner turmoil.
Look at the rulers below be all “Let’s go to this nightclub together.” And to think Alexander didn’t consider Napoleon his equal just a few days prior:
In the 2023 novel History’s Angel by Anjum Hasan, which I reviewed here, I missed money details now and then—most so when the protagonist and his wife aimed to buy an apartment in Delhi. The protagonist is a teacher in a private school (it doesn’t pay much) and his wife is a manager-level worker at a retail store (it doesn’t pay much either). How the hell are they able to think of buying an apartment!? What magic is this!?
Ahem, yes, the State. There is no emancipation without the State.
An earlier chapter could arguably be called ‘unflinching’ too, where in a scene at the Battle of Austerlitz a horde of soldiers trying to cross a frozen river is cannon-shot by the French. But that scene was pure spectacle and did not have the moral urgency of the hospital chapter.
Wow, that painting is really something, isn’t it? The Queen’s dress sort of redefines sexy power.