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(Cross-posted from Goodreads, with a few minor changes.)

January 4, 2010 ~

In all likelihood, I will be chipping away at this slowly. As much as I’d love to steamroll through this in less than a week (like I did with A Suitable Boy), I have several other books on my plate, including the last installment of a rather awesome trilogy.

January 5, 2010 ~

So much for chipping away slowly. I just finished the first of the three volumes in my set, and my brain is fried. So much to process. I wish that I still had my notes from the Russian literature course I took in college. The introduction to my edition alludes to Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, suggesting that some of Tolstoy’s characters are cut from the same character archetype. If this is true, then we can look as far back as Pushkin’s titular anti-hero, Eugene Onegin–arguably the original recipe “superfluous man” of Russian literature. Prince Andrew in particular fulfills several of the hallmark traits of the superfluous man, and bears striking resemblance to the nihilistic Bazarov from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

I own copies of all three aforementioned works. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to reread them at some point.

January 8, 2010 ~

*spoiler warning*

I have about 700 pages behind me now. I love this book. I’ll probably be posting random updates like this to jot down my thoughts.

If Prince Andrew were to roll with his literary homeys, his posse might include not only Bazarov, but Eugene Onegin as well. They could lay down hit tracks about lovin’ ‘em and leavin’ ‘em and really get down with their superfluous, commitment-phobic selves.

Andrew’s response to Natasha after proposing to her was straight from the pages of the Eugene Onegin Guide to Dating: woo a girl with unapologetic fervor and, once you’ve won her, fall immediately into a pit of existential ennui that propels you as far in the other direction as humanly possible. The thrill, after all, lies only in the chase. Seeing unborn children and future arguments over china patterns in your teenage lover’s eyes is heavy, man–and, for our bumbling anti-hero, kind of a buzzkill. Poor, withering Natasha. So young, so full of life–so encumbered by a fiancé who ran screaming in the other direction (on some trite “eat/pray/love” excursion abroad) about five seconds after proposing to her.

This should come as no surprise. While the little princess (Andrew’s ill-fated first wife) looms large on his mental horizon, he cared little for her while she was actually alive and pregnant with his son.

In other news, there were some interesting homoerotic undertones in Pierre’s journal entry concerning a dream about fellow Freemason Joseph Alexeevich. Will search for scholarly articles about this–Google turned up precious little.

If there were such a thing as “cultic criticism” (i.e., the analysis of text from a cult dynamics perspective), one could do a mighty interesting critical analysis of this book. Maybe I should spearhead the movement.

January 12, 2010 ~

I almost wish that someone had assigned me a paper to write about the superfluous man archetype as presented in War and Peace. The following passage would represent the trump card of textual evidence:

[Prince Andrew] thought not of this pretty child, his son whom he held on his knee, but of himself. He sought in himself either remorse for having angered his father, or regret at leaving home for the first time in his life on bad terms with him, and was horrified to find neither. What meant still more to him was, that he sought and did not find in himself the former tenderness for his son which he had hoped to reawaken… (821)

It doesn’t get much more clear-cut than that. Superfluity, thy name is Prince Andrew. In the subsequent moments, he leaves the room without finishing the story he is telling and feels an urge to “escape from these memories and to find some work as soon as possible.” He must remain in perpetual motion, because to stop would mean to downward-spiral into his own emptiness. Perhaps he finds fault not with his family’s various quirks; perhaps their existence alone is an uncomfortable reminder of what he isn’t capable of feeling.

There are strong, rather beautiful anti-war undertones in Book Three. The first chapter of Part I reads like a pacifistic tract. Unfortunately, this philosophical ideal quickly gives way to the reality: that all is not well between Emperors Napoleon and Alexander, and that thousands more Europeans will die to settle the score between these sparring figureheads. It all seems rather senseless, doesn’t it? Tolstoy certainly seems to think so.

January 15, 2010 ~

(Warning: Contains spoilers from both War and Peace and Anna Karenina.)

*

Is there more meaning in the unspoken? Does verbalizing intense emotion cheapen it? Tolstoy might have thought so. I just finished Prince Nicholas’ deathbed scene and, in it, found striking parallels to the card table scene between Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina. In both scenes, someone is trying to decipher an obfuscated message. In Anna Karenina, Kitty and Levin speak to one another in acronyms and, miraculously, understand one another. In War and Peace, Prince Nicholas struggles to communicate his feelings to Mary after a debilitating stroke. But, miraculously, she understands him.

In this encoded interplay between characters, in that world of subtext between the lines, we find the most honest of emotions. Perhaps these characters cannot express their rawest feelings explicitly, as they run contrary to that certain aloofness they find socially adaptive. But, despite all social posturing, these characters are so intimate with one another that no translation of these garbled emotional confessions is necessary.

Perhaps this is a more poignant mode of scene-building than an explicit expression of emotion. There is a certain element of shock when Kitty successfully decodes Levin’s longest acronym (“w,y,a,m:t,c,b,d,i,m,n,o,t?”). He has asked her about her past refusal, but the real romance lies not in his angst-ridden question, but the fact that she understands him on profound enough a level to decode it. So, too, is the case between Prince Nicholas and his embattled daughter, Mary. She has endured years of abuse from him, but on his deathbed, it is she (and not the insipid doctor) who interprets his stroke-impaired speech correctly.

In both books, Tolstoy approaches pivotal, intensely emotional scenes by imposing some sort of linguistic obstacle on the dialogue. In doing so, he proves that there are elemental feelings that pass between loved ones, feelings that require no translator.

This is poignant stuff, people.

January 18, 2010 ~

*contains spoilers*

From pp. 1390-1: “While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned, not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. [...:] Only now did Pierre realize the full strength of life in man, and the saving power he has of transferring his attention from one thing to another, which is like the safety valve of a boiler that allows superfluous steam to blow off when the pressure exceeds a certain limit.”

With this passage, Tolstoy has opened a can of superfluous worms. Does this establish Pierre as the anti-Andrew, or does Andrew’s deathbed conversion signify victory over his lifelong superfluity? In these parallel narratives, we encounter a soldier who has moved from agnostic to religious, and a prisoner of war who has moved from religious to agnostic and back to religious again. Both have seen unspeakable things, things that have led them to abandon all former ideology (or lack thereof). Were they both opposite faces of the superfluous coin? Did the presence or absence of faith determine whether or not they were superfluous?

If I ever reread this, I will certainly have to read Pierre through a different lens in light of the aforementioned passage.