War and Peace readalong thread 2022 - thread 3

[VikingNorthUtsire]

Welcome to the third thread. Please see the OP in threads 1 or 2 for the full info.on the readalong, links to different editions and translations, blog posts, etc.

I think most of us are established now so for this post I'll just re-shsre the reading schedule

Different editions name and number their chapters differently - some refer to four books divided into parts (as below), others refer to fifteen books although it's essentially the same structure just with different numbering. Hopefully there's enough info below to keep us all in sync, and always happy to let anyone know via PM what's happening in today's chapter so we can keep together.

Book 1: 1805
Book 1 Part One (25 chapters): 1/1 - 25/1
Book 1 Part Two (21 chapters): 26/1 - 15/2
Book 1 Part Three (19 chapters): 16/2 - 6/3
DAY OFF: 7/3
Book 2: 1806-1812
Book 2 Part One (16 chapters): 8/3 - 23/3
Book 2 Part Two (21 chapters): 24/3 - 13/4
Book 2 Part Three (26 chapters): 14/4 - 9/5
Book 2 Part Four (13 chapters): 10/5 - 22/5
Book 2 Part Five (22 chapters): 23/5 - 13/6
DAY OFF: 14/6
Book 3: 1812
Book Three Part One (23 chapters): 15/6 - 7/7
Book Three Part Two (39 chapters): 8/7 - 15/8
Book Three Part Three (34 chapters): 16/8 - 18/9
DAY OFF: 19/9
Book 4: 1812-13
Book Four Part One (16 chapters): 20/9 - 5/10
Book Four Part Two (19 chapters): 6/10 - 24/10
Book Four Part Three (19 chapters): 25/10 - 12/11
Book Four Part Four (20 chapters): 13/11 - 2/12
DAY OFF: 3/12
Epilogue One 1812-20 (16 chapters): 3/12 - 19/12
Epilogue Two (12 chapters): 20/12 - 31/12

The final bit where the battlefield is described is horrific! Obviously the writing is biased towards the Russians but Napoleon really doesn't come across as even a slightly 'great emperor' here.

I did like the way Tolstoy wrote about his dawning realisation that he'd lost...

Thanks for your comment about Isfuzzy, you're always so kind!

Harrowing remains the word. I really want this section, and this battle, to be over now!

SanFran, I agree, it's compelling the way Tolstoy describes what's going on in Napoleon's head.

I meant 'comment above', not 'comment about', oops! Can't seem to type without making errors at the moment.

I really want this section, and this battle, to be over now!

Me too and I haven't even read today's chapter yet. At this point, I'm definitely ready for some fluffy, drawing room gossip and intrigue. Four more days to go until the end of this section!

11/08/22
Volume 3, Part 2, Chapter 35

Kutuzov is in his tent, listening to people bringing him reports about the battle. He’s not focusing on the details of what people are saying to him – he’s just kind of taking in the whole mood and feel of the place and their tone of voice and general demeanor. He knows that nothing he says is going to matter too much, so he just puts his finger on the pulse of the battle and keeps it there while looking as calm as possible.

•	When good news comes – like that the Russians captured one of the French generals – Kutuzov sends messengers out to spread the info to the soldiers. Always good to boost that morale.

•	Finally, at 2 pm the battle is over.

•	Kutuzov is happy, but his age is showing. He’s doing that old man slumping-over-falling-asleep thing.

•	He has dinner with a German adjutant who busts out, out of nowhere, with info that the Russian army has lost.

•	Kutuzov is all, check yourself before you wreck yourself, you idiot.

•	He tells the German to send word to Barclay that tomorrow they are going to attack the French, who have already been decimated.

•	Talking to Raevsky, the general in charge of retaking the battery barrow, Kutuzov writes out the order to attack the next day, and even before he sends the order out, somehow everyone in the army knows this bit of news, and it cheers all the soldiers right up. It’s the magic of army life, apparently.

Kutuzov is all, check yourself before you wreck yourself

Just amazing summary.. and sums it up very well! Blooming Barclay and his doom and gloom... if Andrey doesn't like him, neither do I!

Kutuzov is all, check yourself before you wreck yourself, you idiot.

Can't help feeling that Tolstoy would be spinning in his grave if he could read that summation of his carefully crafted plot 😂

I know 😅

The three chapters coming up are a tough read. It will definitely be time for a breather and a break from war in the next section!

This section has been intense, loving the summaries. I was reading another book that referred to the battle of Borodino and was glad I could finally get the reference - it was in a why Russians are mournful sense.

12/08/22

Volume 3, Part 2, Chapter 36

•	Andrei’s regiment is one of the reserves, which means they stand around, don’t fight, and keep losing men to stray bullets and random cannon fire. So far, a third of the men have died like this.

•	The men are tense and unhappy. Everyone does his best to ignore the stretchers carrying the dead and wounded away, and instead focuses on things totally unrelated to the battle.

•	Andrei doesn’t know what to do with himself. He can’t help his men, so he does things like try to walk by stomping on other people’s footsteps, or mashing his boots into the grass. It’s basically extreme boredom meets sheer terror.

•	An explosive shell lands near him and some other men. A junior officer screams and gets down, and Andrei starts to think about how much he loves life and doesn’t want to die. Then suddenly he realizes he’s being watched by his men, so he yells at the junior officer to man up. All of a sudden the thing explodes and Andrei falls. Blood is oozing from his chest.

•	Some peasants load him onto a stretcher and take him away to the medic station, where it’s all horrible screaming and moaning.

•	Andrei comes to but can’t figure out where he is or what’s happening. He thinks he’s about to die and feels sad about the parts of life that he hasn’t figured out yet.

Andrey... no😫

Why have troops just been left in range of the artillery like this? It’s senseless slaughter.

Yes, that was a heartbreaking chapter. I also didn't really understand why the Russian troops were meant to be doing nothing.

13/08/22

Volume 3, Part 2, Chapter 37

•	Andrei gets immediate preferential treatment; the doctor sees to him right away. The tent is dark and confusing and Andrei is only aware of screams and mishmash of blood and flesh. He is horrified to see all this cannon fodder.

•	Next to him a doctor is cutting something out of a guy’s back. Remember, kids, no anesthetic or anything here. The guy is shrieking and screaming in an almost inhuman way as a bunch of people hold him down. He cries and starts convulsing as they start doing something to his leg.

•	Next the doctor steps over to Andrei. He has a wound in his abdomen – not a good place to get injured, since it’s easy to get an infection. These were the bad old days before antibiotics, when infection pretty much equaled death.

•	As they dress and clean his wound, Andrei passes out from the pain. He comes to when the doctor finishes. Andrei is kind of hallucinating when he sees a familiar-looking guy who is sobbing over his cut-off leg. It’s Anatole!

•	Andrei at first doesn’t quite get why he knows him and how they are connected. Then he suddenly remembers Natasha, the way she looked when he saw her for the first time. He remembers the whole story and is filled with pity and love for his former rival.

•	Crying, Andrei remembers all the stuff Marya had been telling him about loving his fellow man. He thinks he could do it now – if only he survives.

14/08/22

Volume 3, Part 2, Chapter 38

Napoleon is horrified, disgusted, and disturbed by the battlefield. It’s hard to convey what this would have looked like, but imagine a football field strewn with tens of thousands of bodies on top of bodies on top of bodies, each with some gruesome dismemberment of one sort or another, and all reeking of rotting flesh and blood.

•	A messenger comes to tell him that the two hundred guns firing on the Russians are not having any effect. He orders them to fire more, doing his part to “fulfill that cruel, sad, oppressive, and inhuman role which had been assigned to him” (3.2.38.7).  Wait a minute, assigned to him by whom? Isn’t he the one who started this whole thing? Is Tolstoy talking about fate again? Whatever happened to free will?

•	Later Napoleon would write that the whole point of this war was to end all wars by uniting all of Europe into one giant nation where everything would be shared and hunky-dory. Um, debatable.

•	All total, something like half a million people died in the French-Russian war.

•	Napoleon, thinking that all this happened because he wanted it to, isn’t horrified by the events, but instead proud of himself. We’re guessing Tolstoy, not so much.

As the saying goes, Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.

That's a great saying! (I'll add it to my other favourite: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture" 😂)

This is Andrey's second close call and it's not clear if he's going to make it!

I like the withering choice of words critiquing Napoleon '...though he never, to the end of his days, had the slightest understanding of goodness, beauty, truth or the significance of his own deeds [...] he was forced to repudiate truth, goodness and everything human'.

A strong denunciation.

15/08/22
Volume 3, Part 2, Chapter 39

•	There is blood, smoke, death, and horror everywhere. Then it starts raining on the dead bodies on the field.

•	The soldiers are becoming horrified and disgusted by what they’re doing. They’re exhausted and hungry. But for some reason they keep going, continuing to load the guns, killing and dying.

•	Slowly the battle dies out, even though one more tiny push from either side would have exterminated the other.

•	The Russians don’t make this effort because they aren’t the attackers in this battle – they are defending Moscow.

•	The French don’t because their morale is destroyed. They’ve suddenly experienced a huge loss in the middle of a campaign that they had been winning handily. They’re also shattered by the idea of an enemy who is just as strong and resolute after half its forces have been killed.

Gradesaver Analysis

Pierre’s participation in the battle of Borodino is one of the novel’s most famous scenes, and it is in some ways its centerpiece. Unlike many of the novel’s subplots, Tolstoy is ambiguous about whether Pierre’s short-lived military career is comic or tragic. There are certainly elements of both modes here. Pierre evokes Don Quixote as he wanders confusedly around the battlefield and keeps stumbling inadvertently into the most violent areas. However, the episode takes a decidedly tragic turn when Pierre sees men being killed and recognizes the true horror of war.
Pierre is the third of the main characters to be disillusioned by the realities of war. In early volumes, we saw Prince Andrei and Nikolai Rostov have similar epiphanies. However, war’s perverse attraction still plays an important role in the novel’s middle section. For all the carnage, there are also opportunities for gallantry, as when Nikolai rescues Princess Marya. Similarly, Pierre notices a kind of beauty in Borodino’s sensory overload. Indeed, it is Pierre's lack of fear that ultimately endears him to the battlefield soldiers who are first annoyed with him.
These ambiguities are consistent with Tolstoy’s meditations about whether language and storytelling can really convey war accurately. Near the end of the section, he writes that victory at Borodino “was not the sort of victory that is determined by captured pieces of cloth on sticks, known as standards” (819). Here, he deconstructs traditional notions of patriotism and valor (represented by the standard) and suggests that the conventional terms used to describe war are inadequate.
Tolstoy pairs the battle’s extreme violence with a departure from the style he uses in the rest of the novel. Like many nineteenth-century novels, War and Peacee_ proceeds at a stately pace and is mostly narrated in long, analytical sentences. Tolstoy forgoes this strategy in the Borodino chapters, reverting instead to staccato exclamations, set off in their own brief paragraphs. These unusual sentences tend to appear at the most graphic moments. In just one example, he writes: “The wounded man was shown his cut-off leg in a boot caked with blood!” This stylistic departure evokes the sheer panic of battle.
This section, which further illustrates the broad canvas of the novel and Tolstoy's great ambition to comment on history itself through his historical tale, employs some of the most omniscient narration yet used in the novel. Not only does he spend a significant amount of time not only observing Napoleon but also getting into the fabled emperor's mind, but he writes some sections as though he were a military historian. It is useful to keep remembering that this is best understood not as stylistic break, but rather another attempt to broaden the canvas, to attempt to capture in this novel more than a story or a history, but rather to illustrate the complex workings of the world and heavens altogether. Ironically, this expansively detailed battle serves as microcosm for the book, a fact Tolstoy emphasizes by focusing exclusively on it in this section and through his many authorial interjections.
By this section, War and Peace has now featured two close shaves with suicide. In addition to Natasha’s brush with arsenic poisoning, we now see Prince Andrei as he considers allowing himself to be shot. Both characters decide at the last minute that they want to live despite their current bad situations. The parallel situations suggest that Natasha and Andrei are kindred spirits, since they both respond to their botched engagement the same way. However, the two near-suicides also suggest that they will be able to move on, since neither has lost their fundamental appreciation for life. Another irony in this section is that Pierre is driven towards such destruction by his love and appreciation for life. In order to feel, he goes somewhere that will make him feel terribly. Perhaps this is not his conscious intention for going to the battlefield, but the impulse that draws him there is the same one that leads him to pursue beauty, and we are reminded again that understanding Pierre's spirituality is in many ways the key to understanding the novel.

Quite traumatic reading those last few chapters .

Good analysis from Gradesaver. This was a really intense part. I'm interested to know how the battle and Napoleon are perceived by modern historians.

That's a really interesting analysis from Gradesaver. Thanks for posting it, Desdamona.

That was a very intense part alright and it was the longest one at thirty-nine chapters. The next part has thirty-four chapters. Volume four after that isn't as long. Even though this was long in length, it had me hooked.

I’d got ahead and finished this section a week ago before going away so I’ve had a bit of a break from it and it’s not fresh in mind. I’ve always felt I could read pretty much anything except military history, which didn’t bode well for this section, but in fact I found most of it more readable than the last. The scene in the village where denial gives way to shellfire, Marya’s struggles with the serfs and the way she steps into the role of her father after his death, Nicholas playing rescuer, were all brilliantly done. The sense of foreboding was expertly ratcheted up before the battle. Thanks for the summaries along the way Desdemona, there were lots of points I’d missed. I’d found Pierre going along as spectator to watch the action bizarre, but the point about Tolstoy having watched subsequent battles as a journalist made some sense of it.

Agree this was a really interesting part and I really enjoyed it. I'm always a little 🙄 when people ascribe feelings and actions to known historical figures but it didn't seem that out of place here.. especially as from the beginning of the book, Napoleon has been hailed as a bit of a genius. Made his downfall all the more believable!