«War and Peace», Leo TolstoyJust over a third of War and Peace is war

Which is there more of: war or peace?

In the Russian original the word “war” occurs 269 times and the word “peace” 207 (in Russian it also means “world”). That looks like an answer. But words are not chapters, so I sorted all 361 chapters into three piles: those set at war (in the army, in battle, in captivity, with the partisans, in Moscow under the French), those set in peacetime life (in drawing rooms, on estates, at balls and hunts), and those with no characters at all, where Tolstoy reasons himself.

It came out at 56% peace and 35% war, and in the other 9% Tolstoy argues with the historians. Volume One splits almost exactly in half: 52,511 words of war and 52,580 of peace. In Volume Two, from 1806 to 1812, war takes only 7%: that is where the oak, the first ball and the wolf hunt are.

In 1812 war fills half of Volumes Three and Four, but peace never leaves the page: Tolstoy keeps showing 1812 from the Rostovs’ house, where the family argues about giving their carts to the wounded. And the second part of the epilogue belongs wholly to the third pile: twelve chapters in a row without a single character.

The sky over Austerlitz

Prince Andrew leaves for the war from the drawing room: “Drawing rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, and triviality—these are the enchanted circle I cannot escape from”, he tells Pierre before he goes. At the war he waits for his Toulon, the moment that “would lift him from the ranks of obscure officers”.

At Austerlitz the moment seems to come. He seizes the flag and runs forward, and the battalion runs after him. Then a blow to the head, and he is lying on his back with nothing above him but the sky, lofty and quiet, with gray clouds gliding slowly across it.

Toward evening Napoleon, his hero, stops over him and says “Voilà une belle mort”, there’s a fine death. And to Prince Andrew Napoleon seems “such a small, insignificant creature” beside that sky. He went looking for his Toulon and found the sky.

The oak that agreed

After Austerlitz Prince Andrew comes home, and that very night his wife dies. He settles in the country and decides his life is over: all that is left is to “live out his life, content to do no harm, and not disturbing himself or desiring anything”.

In spring he drives through a birch wood where everything is already green, and only an old oak takes no notice of spring: “it stood an aged, stern, and scornful monster among the smiling birch trees”. The oak seems to say there is no spring, no sun, no happiness, and Prince Andrew agrees.

The girl who wanted to fly

On estate business he stops at the Rostovs’ at Otradnoe in May, and at night he hears a girl at the window who can’t sleep: “There never, never was such a lovely night before!” She wants to sit down on her heels, hug her knees and fly away. She doesn’t give him a thought.

On the way back, in early June, he doesn’t recognize his oak: it stands “quite transfigured”, in sappy dark-green foliage. And all at once the best moments of his life come back to Prince Andrew: Austerlitz with the lofty sky, Pierre on the ferry, the girl at the window. He found the sky at war, and understood what it was for in a chapter of peace.

A novel that opens in French

The first words of War and Peace are “Eh bien, mon prince.” In the first chapter of the Russian original 378 words of 1,657 are in Latin letters, almost a quarter: Prince Vasili speaks “that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought”. In the whole novel there are 16,247 such words, most of them French.

In 1812 the language turns awkward. At Julie Drubetskaya’s they agree to speak nothing but Russian, and those who slip into French pay fines to the Committee of Voluntary Contributions. The guests keep crying “A forfeit!” at one another, and the chapter ends with a question: “But how could one say that in Russian?”

And the most Russian thing in the book is done by a “young countess, educated by an émigrée French governess”. After the hunt, at “Uncle’s”, Natasha throws off her shawl and dances, and nobody knows where she learned it. Anisya Fyodorovna watches her with tears in her eyes, though she laughs.

Seedless raisins

In Volume One Petya Rostov is “little Pétya, his youngest boy”, running round the drawing room after his elders. In 1812 he is fifteen, and he announces at home that if they don’t let him join the army, he will run away.

In the autumn he joins Denisov’s partisans and first of all treats everyone: “I have some raisins, fine ones; you know, seedless ones”. He bought ten pounds of them because he is used to something sweet, and he offers his clasp knife, a coffeepot and a hundred flints as well.

In the morning Dolokhov shouts to wait for the infantry, but Petya, with a “Hurrah!”, gallops to where the smoke is thickest and falls from his horse: a bullet has pierced his head. Denisov turns the boy’s face toward him and recalls: “I am used to something sweet. Raisins, fine ones... take them all!” His mother is “a fresh and vigorous woman of fifty” when the news comes, and a month later she leaves her room an old woman.

Verdict

Read it. Not for Borodino, though it is worth it, but for the way war and peace turn into each other: Prince Andrew sees the sky on the battlefield and learns what to do with it by an oak. War is a third of the book, and that third is enough to take Petya.

If it gets heavy, skim the second part of the epilogue: for twelve chapters Tolstoy argues with historians about freedom and necessity, and there are no characters there. One point off for it. Though twelve chapters of reasoning in a row is my favourite genre too.