Tolstoy's Prince Andrew Bolkonsky in 'War and Peace'
From our petit philosophe
‘[Your theory] is not that which can convince me, dear friend — life and death are what convince.’
A friend of mine pointed out to me that ‘living in the moment’ also means living in the future, since the present moment inevitably contains an anticipation of the future. The human psyche cannot be stripped of its time-ranging faculties.
We might even say that the more one lives in the moment, the more also one will grasp the wider implications of that moment upon past and future.
Tolstoy’s Prince Andrew1 is observing a mass of soldiers cooling themselves in a lake shortly before the battle of Borodino in 1812. His thoughts are worth noting:
Flesh, bodies, cannon-fodder!’ he thought, and he looked at his own naked body and shuddered, not from cold but from a sense of disgust and horror he did not himself understand.
The bathing soldiers, inebriated by this distraction and gasping for refreshment of body and mind, present themselves to Andrew as a terrible panorama of the upcoming inferno, that is, of war, an event ‘opposed to human reason and to human nature’, in Tolstoy’s words.
No artist with his brush could have made the present scene more suggestive and more chilling. In general, those who are sober by disposition are less apt to engage in creative imagination; but here, in the character of Prince Andrew, we are reminded that in certain extraordinary cases it is possible to find the human trait of imaginative sobriety.
On the eve of that same battle we receive a verbal and doctrinal expression of the cannon-fodder scene. Once again it seems Prince Andrew alone can grasp the insanity of the actions about to be undertaken. Andrew is a prophet: he sees what others do not see and attempts to communicate it. And prophets have a way of inviting both the sympathy of the reader and the indifference—or hostility—of their contemporaries.
Let us hear what this prophet has to say. First, he dismisses both the scientific and the frivolous conceptions of the event of war: a battle is not like chess, with fixed rules and outcomes, nor is it a game at all. The outcome of war, he says, depends ‘on the feeling that is in me and in him and in every soldier’. But lest we think Prince Andrew’s sentiments approach the idealized or the heroic, we are served a second doctrine, this time properly terrifying:
I would not take prisoners. […] As it is we have played at war – that’s what’s vile! We play at magnanimity […] They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate, and so on. It’s all rubbish. […] Take no prisoners, but kill and be killed! He who has come to this as I have through the same sufferings…
Then comes the final blow, striking down our petty moralism and filling us with horror but also with strange admiration:
War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that, and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously.
We recall the images in our mind of Napoleonic warfare—organized lines of well-dressed men, rhythmic and menacing marches even under fire, drummer boys and baton twirlers, a general mass of civilized brutality—and we start to understand Andrew’s revolt against war as play. But the problem Tolstoy has created is that Andrew is sober to the point of cruelty, and elicits an awful mixture of admiration and revulsion in the reader. We love him for his lucidity and force of vision; we are terrified by his bitterness and inhumanity.
This seems to be a general talent for Tolstoy and no doubt for all good writers: to invite our affection and devotion towards characters who are morally broken, or at least very complex; and Andrew remains in this position to the last minute of his life. In the meantime it is not only his solemnity for which we love him; it is also his youthfulness. As a prime symptom of this trait, he discovers the splendour of the sky. More than once he gazes at the sky with childish rapture and longing for the beautiful and the everlasting. First as lay wounded after the battle of Austerlitz:
‘Where is it, that lofty sky that I did not know till now, but saw to-day?’
Later, having been taken by Napoleon to his dressing station, we read that
So insignificant at that moment seemed to him all the interests that engrossed Napoleon, so mean did his hero himself with his paltry vanity and joy in victory appear, compared to the lofty, equitable, and kindly sky which he had seen and understood...
But is this really so youthful? It seems that enchantment with the heavens is tied with contempt for the terrestrial; if Andrew has lifted his gaze upwards it means he has drawn it away from the base and insignificant affairs of the earth, represented here by Napoleon. In my view this is the same kind of ambivalence that we witness before Borodino, the same marriage of nobility and inhumanity. He looks at the sky with the mysticism of a child and at everything else with the ascetism of a hermit.
Children are often spellbound by the sky, but Prince Andrew’s trance at Austerlitz hardly appears childish to us; if anything, it is a confirmation of that single-mindedness and contempt for the frivolous that is so characteristic of him. But further episodes will alter this impression. Later in the book, after conversing with another protagonist, Pierre, about the aims and meaning of their lives, we hear again the strains of that rousing tune:
He looked up at the sky to which Pierre had pointed, and for the first time since Austerlitz saw that high everlasting sky he had seen while lying on that battlefield; and something that had long been slumbering, something that was best in him, suddenly awoke, joyful and youthful, in his soul.
Behind that impregnable face and upright body there lies a child, and he is now awakening from his sleep. The reader is stirred: what brilliant possibilities of transformation await this man, if to his present fascinating qualities could be added the joy of life, laughter, compassion, and forgiveness—that same virtue he not long ago deemed unfitting for a man? After all, children, even when selfish, are inclined to forgive.
Possibility soon turns to reality: Andrew’s great and solemn entrance into childhood takes place at the battle of Borodino. As a shell is about to explode before him, he realizes the strange fact that he loves life, loves ‘this grass, this earth, this air’, and so allows his gaze to comprehend much more than just the lofty sky. The vision is now universal. He is wounded, more badly this time, and is taken to the dressing station, where after a brutal operation he is inundated by memories of his childhood, the ‘happiest moments of his life’, when his nurse would sing him to sleep. Just as in the Christian imagination Jesus is wrapped in white both in the manger and in the tomb, so does Prince Andrew receive the same haunting lullaby at the start of his existence as on the eve of his death. Thus, death is a second birth. Then follow childlike tears, the astonishing sight of his sworn enemy on the bed next to him, ‘ecstatic pity’, and an explicit discovery of evangelic love, all dressed in the pangs of joy, regret, and unbearable suffering.
In the lives of most families, it is only a matter of time before the joy of a newborn child is replaced by the joys of a growing child, and even later by the trials of a child developing in ways divergent from the family’s upbringing. In Andrew a child is born at Borodino but very soon we find something else taking effect on him, some power foreign to that high joy and compassion discovered in the hospital. He lives on for about a month after receiving the wound; and the force that shapes him in this period is the presence of illness and the expectation of death. Like many intelligent people, he acknowledges a paradox: that to love everything and everyone means to love nothing and no one. A dream confirms to him that ‘death is an awakening’, and he is inhabited by a ‘strange lightness’, but we very much feel that in these final hours Andrew is still, after all, fixedly staring at the sky, with nothing but penetration and single-mindedness:
[After] they told him to bless [his son], he did what was demanded and looked around as if asking whether there was anything else he should do.
We as readers feel a parental pain at this indifference. Yet it could not be otherwise; having such a man die in another way would be like getting a statue to lift a different arm.
They wept with a reverent and softening emotion, which had taken possession of their souls at the consciousness of the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished in their presence.
We wonder whether Andrew himself could have perhaps written these words.
Such, then, is the character whose father preferred the pain of grief over the shame of a son unworthy of his name; such is the man who when in love quickly loses the ‘poetic and mystic charm of desire’ and is overcome by fear of his beloved’s devotion and an oppressively joyful sense of duty. We have difficulty imagining Prince Andrew doing anything frivolous: his special ability is to expand himself beyond a situation and be possessed by the true and solemn meaning of things. Faced with Tolstoy’s creation of this enormous personality we feel various and contrary emotions. We are wont to adulate him and detest him; admire him as a model and dismiss him as an anomaly; and just when we deem all this solemnity and singlemindedness cruel and impossible we find ourselves secretly trying to emulate it.
Andrei Lambert
our petit philosophe
Andrew as spelt in the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude. The original in Russian is ‘Andrei’.