non-romance romance, #5: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
taking a long time to read Not a Historical Romance
Another entry in my Non-Romance Romance series, where I talk about literature/film that is not typically classed as romances with romance as a framework. These were some of my favorite things I wrote last year and now that I’m done with War and Peace, a goal is to do the series monthly. Thanks for reading!
Recommending anybody read a really long book feels a little presumptuous: “please give yourself over to this thing I love, for potentially weeks on end.” But I do heartily endorse reading something really long every so often, whatever that is. I’ve developed the habit of starting the year off with a really big book and I like the seasonality of it. It feels like a New Year’s resolution to do a little of something big daily, though I usually start my big books closer to the end November. Plus, so little of what I consume now takes all that long. I love David Lean and even something like Lawrence of Arabia takes less than four hours. A long movie, sure, but I regularly do life things for longer than four hours (work, drive, sleep, putz around my apartment).
A truly big book definitionally resists being a “moment,” even in the scale of an entire life. Most novels I read, I finish in a day or two. War and Peace took me a three and half months—that’s two orders of magnitude longer—in part because I had to live my life in the middle of all the reading. I don’t think a big book is inherently better or more important, but by its nature, my life cannot be just a frame to the experience of reading it, but instead must be seamed with the experience of the book. Time passed, on an undeniable scale, from 1805 to 1820 for Tolstoy’s characters, and from late November 2023 to the end of February 2024 for me. I loved War and Peace and I’m so happy to have spent so long with it. I loved its relationship to my time and how I spent it and its consideration of what it means for time to pass for its characters and for history.
War and Peace is one of the great Napoleon responses1 and after all the biographies I read of him last year, it felt natural to pick up some fiction where he is a major character. I do think having a Napoleonic timeline and its related figures front of mind helped me get through Tolstoy’s massive work and understand the stakes and political actions that surround the lives of the Bolkonskys and Rostovs. I’ve avoided using the word “novel,” kind of awkwardly so far, because question of what exactly War and Peace is taken up frequently by critics, encouraged by Tolstoy’s insistence that is defies genre categorization.
In an appendix published in 1868, after the first four volumes of the book had been published and while Tolstoy was working on the fifth, Leo Tolstoy insists that War and Peace is not a novel. He writes “What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.” In the same way it is Not a Novel, Not a Poem, and Not a Historical Chronicle (how it is party all three), War and Peace is, of course, Not a Historical Romance.
To start, the broadest of broad outlines of the plot: the book starts in 1805 and Russia society is worried about Napoleon. The Duc d’Enghein has been executed, a turning point in Napoleon’s consolidation of power. Some characters are anxious about his bourgeois origins, some about his totalitarianism, some are looking forward to the modern age he promises. Both Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky are at the salon where Napoleon is discussed, and both begin the book with more interest in and sympathy to the revolutionary ideas of the Corsican than their peers. The well-established and wealthy Bolkonsky family is one of the two main families of the private aspect of the narrative. The less wealthy and slightly uncouth Rostovs (Count Ilya and his wife Natalia, and children Vera, Nikolai, Natasha and Petya) are a foil to the Bolkonskys. Natasha and Nikolai are particularly important in the narrative. An illegitimate son of a Count, Pierre is best friends with Andrei and has close ties with the Rostovs as well. Shortly after the narrative begins, Pierre is, to his surprise, made legitimate and his father’s heir by his father on his deathbed.
There are, of course, dozens2 of other characters, but we mostly meet them in the context of our three heroes (Pierre, Andrei and Nikolai) or heroine (Natasha). The first half of the book continues through peace and alliance between France and Russia, arranged at Tilsit in 1807 and ends at the beginning of 1812 as Napoleon and Alexander I break their alliance and begin the war that will take up the next half of the book. The second half of the book takes place almost entirely in 1812 and covers Napoleon’s invasion of Russian and his eventual retreat. Maestro, cue the cannons.
War and Peace is easy to cast as a romance because on the personal side of things is a bunch of young people trying to figure out who they are going to marry and we get two at least relatively happy marriages at the end of the book. The romances are central in the same way that any one plot is central to such a big book. Equal to “what we going to do about Napoleon?” and “what happens if you stare at a tree too long while thinking about death?” Prince Andrei begins the book married to Princess Lise, but she dies in childbirth shortly after he returns from Austerlitz, triggering a crisis of identity in the Prince. Natasha Rostova has been in love with Boris Drubetskoy since she was a child, but they grow apart in adulthood and she meets Andrei at her debut ball, starting an epic and fraught romantic connection.
Her brother Nikolai is in love with their penniless cousin, Sonya, but a combination of his gambling debts and his father’s mismanagement of properties means he must marry for money, though he drags his feet for nearly the whole book to get there, stringing along Sonya, even as he falls in love with plain, spiritual (and very wealthy) Marya Bolkonskaya, Andrei’s sister. Pierre Bezukhov is manipulated early after his inheritance to marry Helene Kuragina, a beautiful social climber who has no attraction to Pierre. She cuckolds him repeatedly, leading first to his exile and then to her own death. While married to Helene, Pierre develops faraway feelings for Natasha that Tolstoy’s characterizes as godly and otherworldly, fated and inevitable.3
The main emotional romance of the book is between Natasha and Andrei and it is a tragic one. Tolstoy writes a lot about the force of fate in politics and life and the magnetic forces that draw Natasha and Andrei together seem fated. But both Andrei and Natasha’s fathers have reservations, Prince Bolkonsky about the Rostovs’ money troubles and Count Rostov about Natasha’s young age, and the engaged couple agrees to wait a year before marrying. Natasha and Andrei’s romance is thwarted when he is away at a medical spa, recuperating from his long-standing Austerlitz injury, by Anatole Kuragin, Helene’s brother. The known rake and scoundrel seduces Natasha away from Andrei and plays at her anxiety about the scale of her feelings for Andrei, which terrify her. He convinces her to run away with him--she thinks for an elopement, though Kuragin is secretly already married. Natasha breaks off the engagement with Andrei, though her cousin and Princess Marya are able to stop the elopement before Natasha is totally ruined.
Still Andrei cannot forgive Natasha and holds her to the breaking of the engagement. This emotional fallout spurs him to join the army again and insist on refusing promotions that might put him in a safer position. He is fatally wounded at the Battle of Borodino, but in a Dickensian level coincidence, the Rostovs end up being the family in charge of the caravan moving injured soldiers away from Moscow. Andrei is in the caravan and Natasha and he reconcile as she nurses him in his final days.
Pierre and Andrei are in a sort of binary star friendship, circling each other’s philosophies and moods--when one is up, the other has to be in the pits of despair and their respective relationships with Natasha mirror this. Pierre is listless, but amiable, whereas Andrei is driven, but misanthropic (except when they exchange personalities). Through a series of tragic coincidences that Tolstoy might call fate, Pierre ends up a prisoner of war during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. After Andrei’s death, Pierre reconnects with Natasha (after his adulterous wife has died, implied from a fatal abortion) and their respective love for Andrei and each other make it clear to them that they are meant to be together. They settle into a benign domesticity in the first epilogue of the book, though Tolstoy opens back up the political plot, post-HEA, by suggesting that both Pierre and Andrei’s orphaned son, Nikolenka, will be a part of the Decemberist Revolt, a failed revolutionary uprising, a few years after the ending of the novel.
What I’m most interested in is Tolstoy's relationship to both to time4 and history in the context of these romances and how the serves both the sentimental romance and the structural romance. Tolstoy’s frequent historiographical asides are one element that makes the book feel like not a novel, but even the narrative scenes don’t quite function like the linear passage time of a novel. Instead, how time passes makes it feel a structural romance. The setting is historical (the book was written nearly 50-60 years after the events depicted), but Tolstoy’s great anxiety about what do we do with the past, also makes it a historical. It felt like every other chapter, he was attempting a new metaphor to explain how time passes and how causes have effect, untraceable without aggregation.
Borrowing from Northrop Frye’s conception of the structure of romance, developed in Anatomy of Criticism and The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, one thing that makes a romance a romance is an artificiality of time. We can see this falsity in something like the strict happily ever after rule. An HEA is sentimentally romantic because it concerns romantic love, but it is structurally romantic because it artificially severs a timeline, in contrast to the most realist truth of all: mortality. For Frye, this mode of storytelling also has “extraordinarily persistent nostalgia.” In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye gives the example of perennial Gothic “revivals,” a romantic genre always looking to a mysterious past for its setting. A hazy past allows for the heightened suspension of reality needed for the romance, in contrast to the realist novel. So both truncation of narrative and temporal distance are structural elements of the Romance. Tolstoy does split the romantic/realist difference with his ending and epilogue—romantically pairing off happy couples, while hinting at the upcoming realist, political threat.
Time as the independent variable in a cause and effect is also structured differently in a romantic narrative than a realist one. Frye distinguishes between the realist “and then” narrative, which links one action to the other, in a series of direct cause and effect to create a horizontal sequence of events, beginning at one moment and ending at the other, from the romantic “hence” narrative. The discontinuous events are not connected by temporal cause and effect, but by narrative coincidence, controlled by the all-powerful author, either as an endorsement of providence or for narrative neatness that distinguishes romantic fiction from the sprawl of life. The logic comes from artificial unity. (See: Dickens’ focus on the “romantic side of things” in his most coincidence driven novel, Bleak House). The conception of time and result can be thought of as a vertical sequence. These are all the things that are happening; draw a conclusion from a narrative bird’s eyes view.
The way time passes and is depicted in War and Peace can be jarring, especially for a Victorian novel reader who might hold something like Middlemarch as the peak of 19th century structural integrity. In an early scene, after Pierre has left a salon where he has promised Andrei that he will stop cavorting with the likes of Anatole Kuragin, Pierre sheepishly makes his way to the Kuragin party and indulges in drink again. There is a young bear at the party, showing the level of mayhem these scapegraces get up to. The bear is important to a sequence of events that deeply affects Pierre, but that is not yet clear in this scene as read by the reader. What exactly Pierre gets up to is reported in the next chapter by Princess Drubetskáya to the Rostovs: he, Dolokov and Anatole Kuragin took the bear in a carriage with them on the way to a brothel. When a policeman tried to stop them, they tie the policeman to the bear and put the bear in a canal. The policeman is saved from drowning, but this behavior leads to Pierre’s exile from St. Petersburg. His shame about the event and his exile is one of the first dominos in his fated sequence of the novel. But we’re not with Pierre when it happens!
This effect is repeated throughout the first half of the book: many scenes that make up the “plot” of the book are revealed through nested storytelling. Marya and Sonya’s sabotage of Natasha’s elopement with Anatole is similarly reported after the fact, so we first seen the elopement fail and then get the explanation of the subterfuge.
A main structural difference that I noticed between the first half and the second half of the books relate to this nesting of information. The first half, so all that takes place before Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the reversion and relation of nested events is controlled by the characters, while the narration plunges forward. Past anecdotes are being reported in salons or private conversations, but the frame conversations take place mostly linearly. But in the second of the book, where we get seven books taking place in the year 1812, time frequently circles back on itself, controlled by the narrative voice revisiting moments again from different angles. In Book X, for example, we get multiple passes at the events of the Battle of Borodino, from Tolstoy’s narrator, a history and an assessment, and the same day multiple characters’ perspectives--not reported in nested frames, but as the main narrative of the scene.
EM Forster wrote in his Aspects of the Novel that “Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.” Tolstoy may not be beholden to time, but he does fixate on it. He emphasizes at the beginning of each book the year that the narrative will take place, starting in 1805 and ending in 1820, with most pages given to 1812. Tolstoy compulsively considers time, particularly if we mean time as the aggregate of past (history) and future (consequence). In one of his many metaphors of history, Tolstoy uses ideas from calculus to explain his conception of history:
Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.
The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe present an extraordinary movement of millions of people. Men leave their customary pursuits, hasten from one side of Europe to the other, plunder and slaughter one another, triumph and are plunged in despair, and for some years the whole course of life is altered and presents an intensive movement which first increases and then slackens. What was the cause of this movement, by what laws was it governed? asks the mind of man.
To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved. No one can say in how far it is possible for man to advance in this way toward an understanding of the laws of history; but it is evident that only along that path does the possibility of discovering the laws of history lie, and that as yet not a millionth part as much mental effort has been applied in this direction by historians as has been devoted to describing the actions of various kings, commanders, and ministers and propounding the historians’ own reflections concerning these actions.”
Tolstoy’s focus on the infinitesimal is both anti-Napoleon and anti-Thomas Carlyle sentiment. Great men, at the most generous reading of their impact, are the aggregation of all the little decisions that got them into positions power. When it comes to small moments in War and Peace, I often think of our three heroes during three different battles and their moments of extreme humanity in the face of violence.
Nikolai, who was eagerly awaiting glory when he enlists in the army, when knocked off his horse at Schöngrabern and as enemy soldiers approach him, thinks “Can they be coming at me? And why? To kill me? Me whom everyone is so fond of?’ He remembered his mother’s love for him, and his family’s, and his friends’, and the enemy’s intention to kill him seemed impossible.”
Andrei approaches early battle not for glory, but out of personal malaise, and when he is wounded at Austerlitz, he looks skyward and in the most moving scene in the whole book, thinks “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!...”
And finally, Pierre, who is only even at Borodino out of misplaced judgment, looks how at the battlefield and realizes that the setting for this great upcoming battle, is little more than a literal field: “Nowhere could he see the battlefield he had expected to find, but only fields, meadows, troops, woods, the smoke of campfires, villages, mounds, and streams; and try as he would he could descry no military ‘position’ in this place which teemed with life, nor could he even distinguish our troops from the enemy’s.”
I don’t buy that historical romance needs to didactic about “what happened” in history, any more than romance at large needs to be didactic about “what is a good relationship.” I think sometimes the history lesson of it all is proffered as a reason to take histrom seriously and I don’t need any excuse to be very serious about historical romance. I also don’t know if Tolstoy ever quite lands the conclusion about what we’re supposed to do with history and the past—the whole second epilogue is Tolstoy’s attempt to coalesce his theories and everything I have read about War and Peace struggles with how dry and ununified with the rest of the text this tacked-on historiography feels. But Tolstoy’s narrative at least shows that when we take up backward looking narratives, it may be most honest and fruitful to yoke together the questions of “what are we going to do about Napoleon” and “who ought Natasha marry?” since in life, we don’t experience them in disconnected silos.
recommendations
Abandon great men of history, embrace the little freaks (biopics that argue weirdos are what make the world go round), which has substantial overlap with this list (just movies that make me think about Napoleon.)
Kiss an Angel by Susan Elizabeth Philips: the closest thing I have read to a Russian romance novel! I guested on an upcoming episode of
about this book. It is a contemporary, but one that I think works particularly well for historical romance fans.Just on the topic of Russians, I saw Prokofiev’s Fifth at the Philadelphia Orchestra last week (outstanding! as ever!) and when is the last time you listened to Peter and the Wolf? In my worst year of panic attacks (2016), I used to play Peter and the Wolf on a loop until I calmed down. Also if you have a preferred Peter and the Wolf narrator, sound off. I’m indiscriminate. But I do think we should let Bradley Cooper do one!
I picked up the book also in part because of Tolstoy’s place in Tchaikovsky’s imagination. Tchaikovsky was his harshest critic to an extreme fault, but admired Tolstoy greatly. Once during a private performance of his first string quartet, Tchaikovsky found himself sitting next to Tolstoy. The Great Russian was moved to tears by the second movement, the andante cantabile, and it was the proudest moment of Tchaikovsky’s career. So much of Tchaikovsky’s biography is marked by a deep self-loathing, so I wondered as a man whose cultural achievements could be so bright as to outshine, however momentarily, Tchaikovsky’s anxiety about his legacy.
Bilibin and all his well-studied bon mots are my favorite thing that I don’t talk about here.
See: Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812!!
Before I read War and Peace, I read Rosamund Bartlett’s biography of Tolstoy and early life anecdote that stuck with me was the structure of his diaries when he was 18, that he later abandons. In his “Journal of Daily Activities,” he would create a column on the left hand side of a page called “The Future,” and he would plan the blocks of his activities there. The right hand column was labeled “The Past” and allowed for reflective commentary after the fact on the day’s work. He maintained this journal for six months and kept honest, admitting on days when he would do nothing of his plans for “The Future.” I am telling you this now because I think it is darling.
The summary of War & Peace (really, just the part about Pierre and Andrei and Natasha) had me wondering if the 2001 movie Pearl Harbor was inspired by the story because the romantic set up is SO similar (my googling does not seem to find a connection but I believe.)
I grew up with the version of Peter and the Wolf narrated by Cyril Richard. My parents had the LP, of course, played on our "hi-fi". Yeah, I'm a Boomer. I haven't listened to it in decades, but when I just listened to a minute of it now on YouTube now, to confirm that was the right one, I immediately recognized his voice. So no other version sounds right to me.