Crisis 22 - Section 1: A Literary Premise
War & Peace
Tolstoy & Dostoevsky - War, Peace, & Literature - An Artful History - Anna’s Drawing Room - Rights & Balances
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Tolstoy & Dostoevsky
On the next three pages I illustrate my literary angle in Crisis 22: I use literature to highlight the mixture of culture and politics rather than to comment on the quality of the writing itself. While I look at Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on these three pages, I’ll go into Russian literature in more detail in Chapter 3. Cunning Plans: Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, & Bulgakov.
On this page (🦅🕊️ War & Peace) and the next page (🇫🇷 Napoléon Avait Cinq Cent Soldats) I explore the opening scenes of Tolstoy’s 1880 magnum opus, War and Peace. This brief exploration serves as an entry-point into Russian literature and also into what I argue throughout Chapter 1. A Literary Premise: literature helps us get at politics and the Ukraine Crisis in a unique way. It brings us into a vicarious interaction with individuals and societies that might otherwise remain foreign to us, and it unveils the way culture lies behind politics. On the third page, ✝️ “Zosima and the Grand Inquisitor,” I illustrate how my literary criticism is less an analysis of style and genre, and more an exploration of cultural and political directions. In this case, I’ll argue that while the characters Zosima and the Grand Inquisitor are opposites, they both help us see how Russia has rejected Western European notions of individuality, freedom of choice, and liberal humanism.
One thing is very important to keep in mind regarding the way I use Russian literature: I often deliberately take aspects of it out of context, so that I can apply these aspects to Russia’s war against Ukraine. This is a type of distortion, but what I’m trying to get at are modes or patterns of thinking which make Russians unwilling or unable to stop their government from invading Ukraine. For instance, the Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov has, at least on the face of it, nothing to do with Russian politics or the Kremlin today. Rather, it’s aimed at the Roman Catholic Inquisition, as well as at several key premises of Christianity. The character Ivan attacks these two things, and his brother, the earnest acolyte Alyosha, ineptly tries to defend them. Yet I don’t go into either of these things. Instead, I focus on the way Ivan’s depiction of the operation of the Inquisition resembles the present, shall we say, special operations of the Kremlin. I don’t pretend (or intend) to delve into the relation of Russian Orthodox to Roman Catholic, into the theological nuances of Russian Orthodoxy, or into how Dostoevsky and Tolstoy differ in their understanding of religious politics. My aim is to uncover and speculate on modes and manners of thinking that might be applied to today’s situation. For instance, Ivan’s ‘Church’ acts like the Kremlin in that it executes a sort of Hobbesian contract with the people, who are afraid of freethinking and chaos and who are desperate for daily bread rather than Dante’s bread of the angels. The people then willingly give up their own volition, their own individualistic freethinking, and let those in power make decisions for them.
In this way I often breeze over what literary scholars would dive into with specialist knowledge, so that I can draw parallels that are critical of the Kremlin and its war against Ukraine.
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War, Peace, & Literature
Much of Crisis 22 is premised on the idea that literature can give us a qualitative understanding of the history, culture, and personal interactions that lie behind international military conflict. In particular, Russian novels like War and Peace can supply us with powerful arguments against the Kremlin and its present war in Ukraine. The reason I say powerful is that this literature comes from within Russia, rather than from outside. In the case of Tolstoy’s 1869 masterpiece, it comes from a source that all Russians are proud of, a source that Russians can’t easily dismiss — although pro-Kremlin literary critics would of course see the novel in a different light than the one I project in Crisis 22. Yet in the realm of literary criticism it’s difficult to stick doggedly to one interpretation. The prism of interpretation shifts from shade to shade. It allows even those who detect infrared to argue their interpretation. Perhaps my study will open a door for some Russians to rethink the present view espoused by the Kremlin. If not, it may help some Western readers see more deeply into the culture in which the Kremlin operates.
Tolstoy’s novel is also powerful because it’s great literature. Tolstoy skillfully weaves his explorations of history, national identity, and war into his characters and their lives. Which is why we can relate so easily to the way he tells the story of the Napoleonic Wars, which overlap precisely with the years covered in the novel: 1805 to 1812. For most of us, it’s alot easier to read and digest than a volume on history would be. And because we’re engaged by the interpersonal and psychological aspects of his story, we’re more open to a deeper understanding of Russian history, politics, culture, and identity. War and Peace shows us Russians in the fullness of their own context, that is, in the context of Russian feeling, thinking, and interacting, not just in the context of their political decisions and military actions.
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An Artful History
As I write these pages, I’m sitting comfortably in front of my computer in the city of Vancouver, Canada. I’m far from the Koreas, Taiwan, Sudan, Syria, and Gaza, and far from the bombed and plundered cities of Ukraine. As a result, I sometimes feel a bit like Anna Pavlovna at the start of War and Peace. Anna talks passionately about politics and war, yet from the comfort of a drawing room at which guests make good impressions and witty conversation. While Anna’s drawing room in 1805 is vastly different from our mediated world 220 years later, it helps me to see Russian history in a new light, not just in terms of dates and battles, but in terms of humans living within history.
The opening scene of War and Peace takes place in Anna’s drawing room, its elegance reminiscent of the famous French and English salons where intellectuals and artists, wealthy ne’er-do-wells and hopeful hangers-on met to converse about the culture and frivolities of the day. The scene also gives us insight into a moment in Russian history that’s the reverse of today’s situation: in Anna’s Russian drawing room the guests worry about the expansion of France; today France and the West worry about the expansion of Russia.
The serious conversation in the drawing room is decidedly political, although at every stage it’s contextualized by the personalities and relationships of the characters. For instance, Anna is intellectual, yet her fearful emotions colour the specifics of the scene. Yet her questions are as germane today as they were 120 years ago: “How can one be well … when one suffers morally? Is it possible to remain at ease in our time, if one has any feeling?”
Under the niceties and social expectations of Anna’s soirée is a heavy undercurrent of politics. This undercurrent eventually surfaces into a heated debate, the climax of which I’ll look at on the next page, 🇫🇷 Napoléon Avait Cinq Cent Soldats. Here I’ll look at the beginning of the debate, as well as the transition we find in the first four sections of Volume One, in which Tolstoy carefully guides us from personal feelings and social conventions to harder political realities. These harder realities are explored extensively throughout the novel, and are hinted at in the opening sections, especially when the Italian abbot Morio says, “Let a powerful state like Russia, famous for its barbarism, stand disinterestedly at the head of a union having as its purpose the balance of Europe — and it will save the world!” I’ll return to Morio’s statement below, given that it has much to say about Russia in its czarist, Soviet, and Putinesque incarnations.
It’s not coincidental that after the drawing room scene, Pierre, the young count who gets worked up in his argument with Morio, enters his friend’s library, grabs a book on political history, and starts reading. The book Pierre picks up appears to be of little consequence: Tolstoy makes a point of saying that he grabbed the first book which caught his attention as he entered the room. Yet its title and its contents are telling: De Bello Gallico, Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars. By referring to this book, Tolstoy suggests that the timeline for Russia at this moment is Rome invades France, France invades Russia. Yet for us, the timeline is more than this. It’s Rome invades France, France invades Russia, Russia invades Ukraine.
Image from the Youtube video. Click the image to go to it.
Although Pierre is reading De Bello Gallico, he doesn’t seem to be very interested in the book itself. Not only is it the first book that struck his eye, but he also starts his reading in the middle of the book! This may be Tolstoy’s way of saying that even those, like Pierre, who get excited by political debates are not necessarily aware of the historical context behind them. Nor are other people necessarily any more interested in the larger historical or civilizational problem of war. When Pierre tries to engage his friend Andrei in a continuation of the drawing room debate on Napoleon, “Prince Andrei was obviously not interested in these abstract conversations.” Andrei then turns the conversation toward his marital problems and the infamy of women, all the while refusing to revisit his decision to join the Russian campaign against Napoleon in Austria.
What this suggests, to me at least, is that the human context is paramount. It also serves as an introduction to the way Tolstoy knits the political into the quotidian, slowly at first, and at times even at the reluctance of his own characters. And yet by the end of Volume 1, Part 1, we read that “Tout Moscou ne parle que guerre / All Moscow talks only of war.” Part Two begins, “In October 1805 Russian troops were occupying villages and towns in the archduchy of Austria.”
The integration of the themes of war and peace is delicate in the opening drawing room scene. Although it’s on a smaller, prefatory scale, this integration gets us used to the alternation and interpenetration of the two. It also makes it clear that the human context is at least as important as the historical. As Richard Pevear notes in his introduction to War and Peace, the novel deals with the glorious myth of Russia’s great self-defence,
and at the same time it challenges that myth and all such myths through the vivid portrayal of the fates of countless ordinary people of the period, men and women, young and old, French as well as Russian, and through the author’s own passionate questioning of the truth of history.
Pevear also draws our attention to Tolstoy’s own appendix to War and Peace, where Tolstoy makes it clear that he’s a writer, an artist, and not a historian:
A historian and an artist, describing a historical epoch, have two completely different objects … For a historian, considering the contribution rendered by some person towards a certain goal, there are heroes; for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people.
We can see something of this all sides of life in Anna’s soirée, which is filled with subtle gradations of class, beautiful women who mesmerize the men, personal feelings and attitudes — all mixed into the general preoccupation with the rise of Napoleon in Europe.
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Anna’s Drawing Room
The debate in Anna’s drawing room shows us a panoply of Russian perspectives on freedom, war, and society, and also gives us a down-to-earth context, full of human personality and interaction. The debate setting thus gives flesh and blood to the diversity of Russian military history.
The first two words of the novel, Eh bien, suggest to us that the Russian elite was deeply invested in Western European culture, which had been dominated for several centuries by elite French culture. This point is underscored when we see that the entire first paragraph is written in French. Anna doesn’t just throw in a word or two of French. Rather, she speaks it fluently, and expects her audience to understand her. This openness to the West contrasts sharply with what we hear today from the Kremlin. It tells us that Russians have an incompatible Slavic identity and it says that it must protect its fellow Slavic Ukrainians (the Kremlin calls them Russians) from the woke and poisonous decadence of the West.
In Anna’s drawing room we see that Russians in the early 19th century were like many Europeans at the time. They felt uneasy, having seen the extremes of the French Revolution in the decade from 1789 to 1799. And they felt uneasy as they saw Napoleon turn France back into an organized unity, and then outward into a revolutionary force. Today, on the other hand, it's the expansion of Russia that worries us. Or, to put this more accurately, it worries us just as it worried Russians in 1805 — yet it harries Ukrainians, just as it harried Russians when Napoleon defeated the Russian Army at Smolensk and marched toward Moscow in 1812.
Tolstoy's novel begins with Anna’s remarks to Prince Vassily:
“Eh bien, mon prince, Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des estates, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous préviens, que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j’y crois)—je ne vous connais plus, vous n’êtes plus mon ami" ...
Well now, my prince, Genoa and Lucca are no more than possessions, estates, of the Buonaparte family. No, I warn you that if you don’t tell me we’re at war — if you allow yourself to continue to play down all the infamies, all the atrocities of that Antichrist (my word, I believe it) — I don’t know you anymore, and you’re no longer my friend ...
With the first sentence in mind, Ukraine and the West might say that Dzhankoi and Luhansk are now just as preposterously the estates of the Russian family. We might even say that Russian denials of atrocity make us feel that we no longer know them, and make us feel that they’re no longer our friends.
Prince Vassily responds to Anna in linguistic kind:
He spoke that refined French in which our grandparents not only spoke but thought, and with those quiet, patronizing intonations which are proper to a significant man who has grown old in society and at court. He went over to Anna Pavlovna, kissed her hand, presenting her with his perfumed and shining bald pate, and settled comfortably on the sofa. (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky)
Anna has much else to say that can be seen in light of the present crisis:
“Russia alone must be the savior of Europe. Our benefactor [the czar] knows his lofty calling and will be faithful to it. That is the one thing I trust in. Our kind and wonderful sovereign is faced with the greatest role in the world, and he is so virtuous and good that God will not abandon him, and he will fulfill his calling to crush the hydra of revolution, which has now become still more terrible in the person of this murderer and villain" [Napoleon].
Putin is now the “murderer and villain,” yet how many Russians are convinced of “his lofty calling”? How many “will be faithful to it”? How many believe that “he is so virtuous and good that God will not abandon him”? Freedom of expression being what it is in Russia, one can’t be sure. Yet what kind of “saviour” and “benefactor” isolates his people and sends them to an unnecessary war against their closest and most important neighbour?
Anna continues with her praises of the czar and his lofty soul, contrasting it with England’s “commercial spirit,” its willful stupidity, and its distrustful nature:
“England with her commercial spirit will not and cannot understand all the loftiness of the emperor Alexander’s soul. She refused to evacuate Malta. She wants to see, she searches for ulterior motives in our acts.”
In the 19th century there was much suspicion between the British and Russian empires, as exemplified in The Great Game, their long-standing competition in Central Asia. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace between 1863 and 1868, which was seven years after Russia lost the Crimean War (1853-6) to Britain and its French and Turkish allies. This antagonism continues today, with Britain being one of the staunchest opponents of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet in general Russian suspicions have shifted toward Britain’s Anglo successor, the U.S., who the Kremlin calls the puppet-master of both England and Ukraine.
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Rights & Balances
The first three sections of War and Peace also make interesting points about rights and balances of power. The question of rights is brought up by an Italian abbot Morio, who Pevear & Volokhonsky note is based on the Italian abbot Scipio Piatolli, who had “access to the highest circles in Petersburg, where he presented his plan for eternal peace by means of a European union against Napoleon.” What the abbot says presages today’s complex relation between Europe and Russia. It also, sadly, presages the possibility that Russia could have been a unifying force in the world — yet hasn’t been, largely because of communist ideology and oligarchic repression.
The abbot starts by saying, “The means are European balance and the droit des gens.” The droit des gens translates literally as the right of people. Pevear & Volokhonsky translate it as the right of nations. This ambiguity is opportune, as it might be used to suggest that Russia is violating both the ethnic rights of the Ukrainian people and the sovereign rights of the Ukrainian nation.
The abbot continues,
“Let a powerful state like Russia, famous for its barbarism, stand disinterestedly at the head of a union having as its purpose the balance of Europe — and it will save the world!”
Experts could write entire books on each one of these notions. To begin with, Russia remains infamous for barbarism, as we see ▸ in Grozny, Bucha, and Mariupol, ▸ in the bombs they drop daily on Ukrainian infrastructure, hospitals, and apartments, ▸ in their deportation (or theft) of Ukrainian children, ▸ in their alliance with the likes of Bashar al-Assad and Kim Jong Un, and ▸ in their unforgivable threats of nuclear war. [Note: this page was written in November 2024, just before the fall of al-Assad].
Russia also seems incapable today of standing disinterested, as we see in the Kremlin’s partial and divisive propaganda and in its educational indoctrination. Russia today is likewise unable to stand at the head of a balanced Europe. Rather, it has enlarged NATO membership and it has created a new iron curtain between NATO on one side and Russia and Belarus on the other. Finally, far from saving the world, Russia continues to destabilize the world by attacking its neighbour, destabilizing Europe, fabricating legitimacy for Iran and North Korea, and threatening nuclear war.
I’d like to stress here the literary mode in which Tolstoy is operating. He skillfully embeds abstract political ideas — about barbarism, impartiality, balance, and saving the world — in the world as we live it, complete with parties and soirées, with national pride and cultural idiosyncrasies, personalities, distractions, duplicities, pretensions, and prejudices. That is, the world with its flesh and bones.
“How are you going to find such balance?” Pierre began; but just then Anna Pavlovna came over and, with a stern glance at Pierre, asked the Italian how he was taking the local climate. The Italian’s face suddenly changed and acquired an insultingly false sweetness of expression, which was probably habitual with him in conversations with women.
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I leave the last words of this brief foray into the first pages of War and Peace with Anna’s clear and simple question,
Dites moi, pourquoi cette vilaine guerre?”
Tell me, why this nasty war?
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