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From: Titus G <noone@nowhere.com>
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Subject: Re: WAR AND PEACE by Tolstoy
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2025 15:34:09 +1300
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On 31/01/25 10:55, Don wrote:
> It's not really Science Fiction, but it's been mentioned lately.
> 
> The parts pertaining to peaceful romance appeal to me much more than
> the warfare. Ironically, Tolstoy's tome helps me cope with armed
> conflict.
>     Tolstoy's the tonic to sort out the scat show called war. His Rus
> realist savoir-faire offers welcome relief from the relentlessly riven
> mass mind's culture of chaotic current events:
> 
>     A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing
>     and does not want to know anything, since he does not
>     believe that anything can be known.
> 
> As an aside, did the Tiffany Network plagiarize Tolstoy in its
> previously popular prisoner of war TV show?
>     An interesting Tolstoy translation tic: the absent antecedent,
> also missing elsewhere, when Russian is translated into English. For
> instance, the antecedent's apparently an apparition when the pronoun
> "ours" appears in this translated excerpt:
> 
>     "We must let him see Amelie, she's exquisite!" said
>     one of "ours," kissing his finger tips.
> 
> Tolstoy masterfully shares his characters' inner life. This technique
> reveals characters as all too human; enthralled to human virtue and
> vice.
>     The reader receives omniscience; a granular view of humanity's
> triumphs and travails, without a protagonist to lead the reader around
> by the nose.
>     When Russian soldier Andrey Grigoriev killed Ukrainian soldier
> Dmytro Maslovsky in hand-to-hand combat, the latter reportedly said:
> "Let me say goodbye to the sky." A similar situation occurs in WAR AND
> PEACE:
> 
>     "What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way," thought
>     he, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see
>     how the struggle of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended,
>     whether the red-haired gunner had been killed or not and
>     whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw
>     nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky-the
>     lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray
>     clouds gliding slowly across it. "How quiet, peaceful, and
>     solemn; not at all as I ran," thought Prince Andrew-"not as
>     we ran, shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and
>     the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces struggled for
>     the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that
>     lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky
>     before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes!
>     All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky.
>     There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not
>     exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!..."
> 
> Some see events as tightly controlled by powerful Great Men: Cameron,
> May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, Obama, Trump, Biden, Putin, and
> Zelensky. Tolstoy views Great Men as powerless:
> 
>     The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the
>     event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the
>     actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by
>     lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in
>     order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom the
>     event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the
>     concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without
>     any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was
>     necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real
>     power-the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and
>     guns-should consent to carry out the will of these weak
>     individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an
>     infinite number of diverse and complex causes. ...
> 
>     In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving
>     names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest
>     connection with the event itself.
> 
>     Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their
>     own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is
>     related to the whole course of history and predestined
>     from eternity. ...
> 
>     The luring of Napoleon into the depths of the country was
>     not the result of any plan, for no one believed it to be
>     possible; it resulted from a most complex interplay of
>     intrigues, aims, and wishes among those who took part in
>     the war and had no perception whatever of the inevitable,
>     or of the one way of saving Russia. Everything came about
>     fortuitously.
> 
> A few football fans fantasize about war being merely another football
> game. Tolstoy thinks the consequences are greater:
> 
>     An army gains a victory, and at once the rights of the
>     conquering nation have increased to the detriment of the
>     defeated. An army has suffered defeat, and at once a people
>     loses its rights in proportion to the severity of the reverse,
>     and if its army suffers a complete defeat the nation is quite
>     subjugated.
> 
> Witness how enlightened Globalism spontaneously sparked a woke wake
> pyre.
>     The Russian Orthodox Church (a close cousin to the Catholic Church)
> plays a prominent enough role in the novel for Napoleon to remark, "That
> Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy Moscow!"
>     The Mandylion flag, emblazened with IC XC NIKA, is reportedly the
> most popular battle flag in the militias of the Donetsk and Luhansk
> People's Republics. In the end, only God Almighty determines the outcome
> of war.
>     For people who love long stories - WAR AND PEACE is a very long
> story. Tolstoy made a realist out of me and his novel is recommended.
> 

Thank you for those fascinatingly interesting observations and
recommendation.
(It is four or five years since I obtained a copy but the length has
usually influenced shorter novels to be chosen to read first as I do not
like to be reading more than one book at a time.)