War and Peace.
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Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
and
The Heraclitean Principle
“War
is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows
as
gods, others as humans; some he makes slaves of, others free.”
Fragment
82. Heraclitus
The purpose of the following
article is to explore the theme of deception in Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel War
and Peace and with a very particular interest in the events described in
the first three books following the two characters Prince Andrew Bolkónski and
Nicolas Rostóv exploring the motifs of fog, centaur, drunk and manure which are
all described quite vividly in chapters 14- 19 of Book 3 where the author
describes some of the events which happen at the Battle of Austerlitz. I will
also be evoking the ancient figure of Heraclitus in relation to the title of
the novel and how it plays into the whole Heraclitean notion of dichotomy and
indeed how the two key scenes involving both Prince Andrew and Rostov, in the
books aforementioned, bolster the Heraclitean principal and indeed how the four
motifs support such a hypothesis. Tolstoy, after first fighting in the Crimea
War ( 1853-1856) was to famously become a pacifist in later years, and one of
the main causes for such an abrupt change in his perspective was his reading of
philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer ( 1788-1860) who advocated a complete
break with the sensual life if one wanted to attain any kind of peace and
contentment. Tolstoy was to completely embrace this idea which Schopenhauer
himself was to acknowledge first came from Heraclitus, even before Plato.
Nietzsche and later Heidegger were later to take up the case from Schopenhauer,
in acknowledging that Heraclitus, known as ‘the Obscure’, was the King of
Philosophers, a king who also believed that war was an inevitable part of life.
But before I
begin, I would really like to emphasize how the current war in Ukraine provoked
this reading, I had never read Tolstoy before and, like so many people around
the world I would imagine, after following the war in articles in newspapers
and through reports on the media, I really wanted to try to understand better
the history of these two peoples and the history of Russia, in particular, and
so it seemed that the time was finally ripe to take the great tome down off of
the shelf and to give it a good dusting, as they say, and actually, for once,
read the damn thing and, to my absolute surprise, I found myself totally and
utterly captivated by the text.
To begin, I am not an expert on Russian literature,
nor am I a specialist on Leo Tolstoy, but
like Ezra Pound suggests,
I rather focused my rather limited attention on some of the French writers of
the 19th century, in particular Baudelaire,
and the Irish modernist writers of the 20th century, in particular
Beckett and Joyce. So where is the connection here? In a word – Heraclitus. I
must admit to having quite a particular obsession for ‘the Sage of Ephesus’, as
he is also know as, or ‘the Obscure’, as he is otherwise called. I first
presented a paper on Beckett’s lifelong obsession with Heraclitus at a
conference on Beckett in University College Dublin, James Joyce’s alma mater,
in 2013
an experience which I later fictionalized in a short hybrid novella More
Micks than Dicks .
So, apart from the connection with Heraclitus, Tolstoy was completely new
territory for me.
*
“There
is no difference, says Bruno, between the smallest possible
chord
and the smallest possible arc, no difference between the
infinite
circle and the straight line. The maxima and the minima
of
particular contraries are one and indifferent. Minimal heat equals
minimal
cold. Consequently transmutations are circular.”
Even though Beckett is referencing Giordano Bruno in
the above quote, he could just as easily be referring to Heraclitus who is
predominantly known as the thinker of duality; ‘cold things grow hot, a hot
thing cold, a moist thing withers, a parched thing is wetted.’
( fragment 126). Anyone who has swum in intensely cold water, such as the Irish
Sea, will be able to bear testimony to the truth of the above fragment, how
when intense cold ( holding ice) can almost burn with the cold. Opposites are
intrinsic. Nietzsche comments on this apparent notion of dualism which,
according to him, is to profoundly misunderstand, as Heraclitus, according to
Nietzsche, has far more to do with Parmenides in that there can indeed be no
dualities as everything is contained in the One; as for Heraclitus nothing ‘is’
as everything is but becoming- eternal flux. In the context of war and justice
and truth, this point is particularly telling, as indeed Tolstoy knew.
“Becoming
is an injustice and is atoned to be Passing Away. But how
can
that which is encumbered by qualities, Becoming, arise from the
qualityless?
And how might a world of such eternal lawfulness in its
entirety
be
a world full of particular injustice? On the contrary, the course
of
all things, of every individual is predestined and not viable by human
defiance.
Justice shows itself in this lawfulness. But if Becoming and
Passing
Away are the effects of justice, then there is no such dualism
between
a world of the Unlimited qualities, because qualities are indeed
tools
of Arising and Passing Away, thus tools of justice.”
This is really heady stuff, not to mention pretty
abstract, so let us now jump ahead to Book 2 of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and
join Nicolas Rostóv in chapter 8, to be more precise, where he is standing by
the bridge in his Hussar’s uniform observing the French artillery firing upon
the Russian troops behind him. The bridge is a crucial strategic point as it is
the only way for the French to continue in pursuit of the Russian soldiers, who
have been retreating over it and the Hussars have been tasked with setting fire
to the bridge in order to destroy it and prevent Napoleon’s troops from the
further possibility of advancing. This is one of the skirmishes between the two
armies before the eventual all- out battle at Austerlitz in Book 3. So, Rostóv
is really in hero mode now,as the Russian army are dependent on he and he alone
to demolish the bridge. Tolstoy describes the scene, and as is typical with
Tolstoy, the situation turns quite quickly raher comic.
Rostóv
absorbed by his relations with Bogdánich had paused on the bridge not
knowing
what to do. There was no one to hew down ( as he had always imagined
battles
of himself), nor could he help to fire the bridge because he had not brought
any
burning straw with him like the other soldiers. (p.114)
And, while our hero stands there quite idiotically, a
bomb falls knocking a fellow hussar to the ground and stretchers bearers are
called for. It is the nearest sign for Rostóv that Reality is nearing, and that
if he continues to stand around on the bridge like an idiot he could very well
be next to fall to the ground. In just this passage, Tolstoy, a former soldier
himself, gives a very vivid picture of war. And then, after painting building
up the scene of battle, he then describes what happens next.
Nicholas
Rostóv turned away and, as if searching for something, gazed into the
distance,
at the blue waters of the Danube, at the sky, and at the sun. How beautiful
the
sky looked; how blue, how calm, and how deep! How bright and glorious was
the
setting sun! With what soft glitter the waters of the distant Danube shone. And
fairer
still
were the far away mountains beyond the river, the nunnery, the mysterious
gorges,
and the pine forests veiled in the mist to their summits…There was peace
and
happiness… ( p.114)
And there we have it, in the middle of this intense
outworldly turmoil of warring armies, there is Nicholas Rostóv amongst it all
having this Heraclitean vision. Anyone, who has been in a car accident, or any
violent confrontation, will recognize what is happening to Rostóv here. His
body, sensing danger, has secreted adrenaline into his blood stream as it is
the body’s defence to prepare him for the battle ahead. Everything slows down
so that it is as if one was able to see things with total objectivity and so
one can prepare to react to the very violence ahead. I remember experiencing a
very similar feeling while flying through the air when a Jeep that I had been
travelling in collided on the road in such a way that the Jeep was sent flying
into the air and as I too was pulled off my seat with the force of the impact,
I experienced this incredible feeling of peace and contentment, and the whole
world was passing before me in what appeared to be slow motion, before I
eventually hit my head off something and reality came crashing back. And this
is Tolstoy’s genius, he renders now the reaction of Rostóv with tremendous
comic effect, as it is totally believable. This is the humour of war.
At
that instant the sun began to hide behind the clouds and other stretchers came
in
view
before Rostóv. And the fear of death and of the stretchers, and love of the sun
and
of
life, all merged into one feeling of sickening agitation.
‘O
Lord God! Thou who art in heaven, save, forgive, and protect me!’ Rostóv
whispered.
The
hussars ran back to the men who held their horses; their voices sounded louder
and
Calmer,
the stretchers disappeared from sight.
‘Well,
fwiend? So you’ve smelt powdah!’ shouted Váska Denisov just above his ear.
This is exactly the moment when Rostóv acknowledges,
finally, that he is in fact a coward. In just this section of the book, a
matter of a mere page, his character is revealed up to him through the intense
brutality of war. This is exactly the moment when the reader has an epiphany
about the title of the book, which up to this moment had been quite a puzzle,
and it is because of the depth of human emotions which the reader is able to
experience through the character of Nicolas Rostóv, a man who is at once both
comic and tragic, in other words - human. Indeed, we are reminded so very much
of Heraclitus’s most famous dictum, fragment
82, which appears under the title of this article. Nicholas Rostóv is
now finally a free man.
*
In The World as Will and Idea, Arthur
Schopenhauer, in the very first chapter, cites Heraclitus before Plato when he
is attempting to trace the origin of reason citing how he lamented ‘the eternal
flux of things’;
We
recognise the simplest form of the principal ( of reason) to be time. Each
moment
in
time exists only in so far as it has effaced the preceding one, its progenitor,
and
only
to be itself in turn quickly effaced. The past and the future ( if we may
disregard
the
consequences of their content) are empty as a dream, and between them runs the
present
as a mere boundary -line without extension and without duration.
From such a conundrum, Heraclitus was to come up with
his famous analogy of the river running and how you could never step into the
same place twice, and so for rationalist philosophers from Heraclitus on, the world
of the senses must be seen as one great deception. Things are never as they
would appear to be, truth, or reason, stands apart from the things that appear
before one. This is the great moment of truth in western civilisation, what
Martin Heidegger was to later call ‘The Inception of Occidental Thinking
Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos’
pinpointing Heraclitus himself, as Arthur Schopenhauer was to, as the beginning
of reason in the west. The first man to see beyond things themselves, the
physical manifestation of phenomenon, and to recognise them for what they
really were. ‘It is Mâyâ’, Schopenhauer says, ‘the veil of deception,’
quoting the Indian philosophers and this is something that Tolstoy really liked
about Arthur Schopenhauer, as unlike so many other European thinkers
Schopenhauer, like Tolstoy himself, was to embrace ideas from many diverse
cultures.
In chapter 14 of Book 3 in War and Peace,
Tolstoy situates us on the Pratzen Heights when the sun is just rising to
illuminate the great fog which will cover the view of the French troops from
the Russian, as deception or feint, as ever, are the tools which he uses to
deceive the Russian Generals into thinking where he will place his armies. And,
they are wrong. The great strategist, who is compared to the Antichrist in the
very first paragraph of the book,is
seen overlooking the scene.
It
was nine o’clock in the morning. The fog lay unbroken like a sea below, but
higher
up at the village of Schlappanitz, where Napoleon stood with his Marshals
around
him, it was quite light. Above him was a clear blue sky, and the sun’s vast orb
quivered
like a huge, hollow, crimson float on the surface of that milky sea of mist.
The
whole French army, and even Napoleon himself with his staff, were not on the
far
side of the streams and hollows of the Sokolnitz and Schlappanitz beyond which
we
intended to take up our position and begin the action, but were on this side,
so close
to
our own forces that Napoleon with the naked eye could distinguish a mounted man
from
one on foot. ( p. 210)
Only Napoleon can see things clearly. Through the eyes
of Prince Andrew, who sees the whole unfurling deception unfolding before his
eyes, we, the readers, are given privy access too to the diabolical deception
that Napoleon has created by strategically placing his troops where the Russian
Generals, and Emperor Alexander, his arch- rival, have not expected him to be.
The reference to the Antichrist is very revealing, and the symbolism of the sun
also. Tolstoy was an aristocrat, we must remember, and a believer in the status
quo. So, the sun is a symbol that is doubly charged as it can at once represent
the Sun King Louis XVI, who lost his head at the climax of the French
revolution some few years before the events at Austerlitz, and who is
representative of the monarchy and its demise, and the sun, of course, can also
represent the age of the enlightenment and which is largely considered to also
have been born in France thanks to rationalist thinkers like Rene Descartes and
Voltaire who were advocates of reason, and of course whom Napoleon is also, to
some degree, representative of in the sense that he is representative of the
new order. Yet, the way he is portrayed by Tolstoy in War and Peace, one
is reminded more of Beethoven’s reaction upon hearing of Napoleon’s
self-crowning. Tolstoy is no dreamer, he is more than aware of how reason can
be used, like in the case of Napoleon, for the most unreasonable purposes.
Through the tragic figure of Prince Andrew, Tolstoy
shows the whole ensuing debacle unfold, and in the most piteous moment, the
Russian Emperor, who only some chapters before was shown like a God parading
with his troops some days before the battle, and now, some days later, is shown
like a pitiful wretch after only just barely managing to escape with his life
from the unexpected French assault. Indeed, in these chapters ( 14,15,16 and
17) it is as if Tolstoy is actually embodying Heraclitus’s dictum on war,
fragment 82. “War is the father
of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as humans; some he
makes slaves of, others free.” Napoleon, using his powers of reason, yet to
evil purpose, is shown here almost as a God, petty, but godlike, while the
Emperor Alexander is brought low (almost human!) and Prince Andrew himself a
slave after his eventual capture by the French troops. Napoleon himself notices
him still breathing while lying falling in and out of consciousness upon the
battlefield. It is a moment of extreme parallelism, as Prince Andrew has the very
same peaceful feeling as Rostov when he does actual see combat, once again
signalling the very Heraclitean notion of dualism in complete Being – War and
Peace, two sides to the same coin.
‘What’s
this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way,’ he thought, 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 ben killed or not, and whether
the
cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw nothing. Above him there was
now
nothing but blue sky – the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty,
with
grey clouds gliding slowly across it. ‘How quiet, peaceful, and solemn, not
at
all as I ran,’ though Prince Andrew – ‘not as we ran, shouting and fighting,
(
p. 217)
While we leave the Prince contemplating the clouds and
his fate, he thinks he is dying, in the next chapter ( chapter 17), Nicolas
Rostóz takes up the account and we see the French cavalry charging through the
Russian hussar’s eyes, he is now a messenger and is trying to get through the
French lines in order to pass it on to his superiors, despite the fact that at
this stage in the game, with the surprise attack of the French, the message
that he has been asked to convey, which had been a warning to prepare Russian
sharpshooters for the possibility of just such an attack, has now been rendered
redundant. But then this absurdity is all part and parcel of the whole mess of
the whole encounter which started with the fog ( the fog of war) and which is
all the more underlined by the jibes of the Russian troops as they are marching
blaming the Germans for the confusion that ensues as they are descending into
the fog bound valley. ‘Ah those damned Germans! They don’t know their own
country!’ ( p.210) The ‘Germans’ referring to their Austrian allies, which just
adds to the farce of the proceedings and which is rather reminiscent of the
great triptych by Paolo Uccello of The Battle of San Romano in which the
great artist of perspective depicts the two opposing armies in carefully
assembled rows of cavalry and men underlining how little things had changed as
regards battle formations from renaissance times to Napoleonic, and which bring
an almost cartoonish element to the whole visual extravaganza.
Cavalry, in Napoleonic times, just as in 15th
century in the time of the princely states of Italy, were of course the true
sign of might of a force and whose origins far outdated the medieval knights of
old going back to even more ancient times. Indeed, in Tolstoy’s depiction of
the Horse Guards charge in chapter 17, which Rostóv witnesses, I was reminded
of the ancient Greek mythological figure of the centaur, which, after the motif
of the fog or mist, is the second motif linked to the theme of deception that I
wish to now treat.
The
last of the Horse Guards, a huge pock-marked fellow, frowned angrily on
seeing
Rostóv before him, with whom he would inevitably collide. This Guardsman
would
certainly have bowled Rostóv over ( Rostóv felt himself quite and tiny and
weak
compared to the gigantic man on the horse) had it not occurred to Rostóv to
flourish
his whip before the eyes of the Guardsman’s horse. The heavy black horse,
sixteen
hands high, shied, throwing back its ears; but the pock-marked Guardsman
drove
his huge spurs in violently, and the horse flourishing its tail and extending
its
neck,
galloped on yet faster. Hardly had the Horse Guards passed Rostóv before he
heard
them shout, “Hurrah!” and looking back saw that their foremost ranks were
mixed
up with some foreign cavalry with red epaulettes, probably French. He could see
nothing
more, for immediately afterwards canon began firing from somewhere
and
smoke enveloped everything. ( p.219)
The contemporary Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito in
Pensiero viventi – Origine e attualità della filosofia italiana (
2010), seeks to identify a common theme to Italian philosophy distinct say as
indeed French theory, German idealism or British empiricism, and the
distinctive trait that he comes up with is the physicality of Italian thinkers
from Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno to Giambattista Vico. But it is to Leonardo da
Vinci, in the central section of his study that Esposito halts, and in
particular to focus on the sketch for The Battle of Anghiari which for
Esposito comes to signify, in one exquisite image, the notion of bio-philosophy
and which he believes is so singular to Italian philosophy, as a school
distinct from any other. This incredible image, of which only the copy by Peter
Paul Rubens ( 1603) remains, as the original by Da Vinci has tragically gone
missing, for Esposito, at least, summons up, so ‘inextricably entangled’
the relationship between man and beast.
One of the earliest examples of the image of the
centaur dates back to around 900 BC to Lefkani where a terracotta figure ( h.
36 cm, 14.8 in.) was found depicting an anthropomorphic creature with the body
of a horse and the torso and head of a human that we have now come to recognise
as the centaur, and which is now housed in the Museum of Eretria
. Of course, in mythology they are always associated with the Lapiths, both
peoples descending from Ixion and who both had a horse cult in common
and if we think of the mythological tale the creatures are forever associated
with drunkenness, violence and rape. The mythological tale tells how the
centaurs, after drinking potent wine for the first time, having been invited to
a noble wedding soon ended up in a pitched battel with the Lapiths after
attempting to sexually assault the women folk, including the bride, and so
which provoked all- out- war between the two tribes.
The notion of drunkenness and warfare is a common one,
and which is the third motif aligning with the overall theme of deception in
the present text, one reads about reports of the Russian troops today,
apparently drunk while committing countless atrocities and war crimes. But,
again, soldiers found drunk and at war is as old as Homer,
and of course Tolstoy is aware of this when he paints the vast tableaux of the
warring armies at Austerlitz. In fact, the more you contemplate the chapters
depicting the famous battle, with their astonishingly accurate portrayals, the
more you see them like friezes at Pergamon, say, or adorning some great arch in
the forum. Take for example the scene in chapter 17 when Rostóv the Russian
hussar is to be found wandering upon the battlefield after his encounter with
the House Guards in the previous chapter.
‘Where
is the Emperor? Where is Kutúzov?’ Rostóv kept asking everyone he could stop,
but
got no answer from anyone.
At
last seizing a soldier by his collar he forced him to answer.
‘Eh,
brother! They’ve all bolted long ago!’ said the soldier laughing, laughing for
some
reason
and shaking himself free.
Having
left that soldier who was evidently drunk, Rostóv stopped the horse of a
batman
or groom of some important personage and begun to question him. The man
announced
that the Tzar had been driven in a carriage at full speed about an hour
before
along that very road and that he was dangerously wounded. ( p.221)
The fog of war is the phrase that is attributed to the
German military analyst Carl von Clausewitz whose book Von Kriege/On War (
1832) Tolstoy would surely have been familiar with, and along with the fog,
representing unreason, we have already looked at the motifs of the centaur
representing the beastly side of man, caught in the vortex of negative passion,
in a sense ‘drunk’ on violence. In order to get men worked up before battle, it
has long been the case of soldiers to get intoxicated before going into action
in order to be able to numb themselves for the horrific tasks ahead, and for
Tolstoy in War and Peace the appearance of the drunk is deeply symbolic
of the folly of the whole episode. Tolstoy was to famously embrace pacifism
later in life, he is even reported to have been a decisive influence on Mahatma
Ghandhi who had apparently read Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You (
1894) and which is largely attributed to convincing Gandhi that passive
resistance was the way forward. Tolstoy was, of course, a world celebrity at
that stage in his life, mainly due to his two most famous novels War and
Peace ( 1869) and Anna Karenina ( 1878).
Heraclitus was contemptuous of alcohol and
particularly drunkenness, if the fragments are anything to go by. ‘A man when
drunk is led by a boy, stumbling and not knowing where he goes, having his soul
moist.’ (
fragment 106). Yet, for soldiers fallen in battle Heraclitus would seem to be
more benign, as the following aphorism, or fragment, says the following- ‘Souls
slain in war are purer than those that perish in diseases.’ ( fragment 107).
This is where Tolstoy certainly departs from the pre-Socratic thinker, as in
Chapter 18 of Book 2 he makes his feelings about war very clear, and here we
must treat the final motif, dung or excrement, as the final chain in the theme
of deception which underscores the novel. Here we finally bid goodbye to Rostóv
as he wanders hopelessly through the battlefield after seeing the Russian army,
once so proud and dashing, now in a complete state of chaos and defeat so much
so that his whole world seems to be defeated.
Rostóv
considered, and then went in the direction where they said he would be killed.
‘It’s
all the same now. If the Emperor is wounded, am I to try to save myself?’ he
thought.
He
rode on to the region where the greatest number of men had perished fleeing
Pratzen.
The
French had not yet occupied that region, and the Russians – the uninjured and
slightly
wounded-
had left it long ago. All about the field, like heaps of manure
on
well-kept, well-ploughed land, lay from ten to fifteen dead and wounded
to
each couple of acres. The wounded crept together in twos and threes and one
could
hear their distressing screams and groans, sometimes feigned – or so it seemed
to
Rostóv.’ ( 222)
Bibliography
Beckett,
Samuel: Disjecta,
Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, Edited by Ruby Cohn, Grove Press
( 1st paperback edition), New York, 1984
Esposito, Roberto: Pensiero vivente, Origine e
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Heidegger,
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Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, Translated by Julia Goesser Assaiante
and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury, London, First English Edition, 2018.
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Arthur: The World as Will and Idea, Edited by David Berman and
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