Okay, so if you have made it this far on my series on War and Peace, thanks for reading. Make sure you check out the last post here. So if you saw that post you noticed that although the book has many characters in it, I focused mostly on Pierre and Prince Andrey.
Pierre goes on a hunt for spiritual enlightenment by joining the Freemasons. Andrey recovers from a near fatal wound from an army battle, only to come home and have his wife die from childbirth, the child Nikolai survives but Andrey feels bad that he didn't treat his wife better.
Pierre's wife, who Pierre had a falling out with because he believed she was cheating on him, begs Pierre to take her back, and Pierre, urged by the Freemasons' laws of forgiveness, decides to take her back.
Natasha, the Countess of the Rostov family, is engaged with Prince Andrey. However, she meets a new man, named Anatole who seamlessly gets her to fall in love with him, and him with her. Faced with new feelings of loving a different man other than Prince Andrey, she inevitably breaks off the marriage with Andrey, which was scheduled to go on. This entire section devoted to Natasha, her falling in, and consequently out of love is such a heartbreaking part of this book. Because when you see that she could have been happy if not for wanting more, wanting what she couldn't have, you see how capricious love really can be sometimes. What is also interesting is that Pierre realizes he's in love with Natasha. And Prince Andrey coldly accepts Natasha's break off of the engagement, but he doesn't wish to ever see her again.
Meanwhile, the whole of Russia is fighting Napoleon's army. Napoleon is characterized by Tolstoy as a charismatic man, even a good man, although he has his moments of arrogance. At times he sounds like a guy who loves the sound of his own voice. But at other times, he's sympathetic, caring, charismatic, powerful, well spoken, the very best of the best qualities that leaders and generals all share. Napoleon is a man who has many virtues according to this description in the book.
Alright, so all these things are happening right after the next. But it is also at the end of this section [or near it at least], where the rest of War and Peace becomes a reading difficulty, the strain on you from reading the book becomes much more intensified, there's a degree of heaviness that bears upon the soul. Because of that this is probably one of the most difficult, most intense books I have ever read, maybe will ever read, who knows.
Because you see that Tolstoy puts every emotion: joy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, contempt, and sadness, and all the variations on and between them. This is what is meant by the fact that the second part of War and Peace [this part and onward to the end] becomes less a literary novel and more a grand philosophical design. "Tolstoy wrote in a letter to Afanasy Fet that what he has written in War and Peace is also said by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation. However, Tolstoy approaches it from the other side." [wiki]
"Tolstoy said War and Peace is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle." Large sections, especially the later chapters, are philosophical discussions rather than narrative. Tolstoy also said that the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence hesitated to call War and Peace a novel. Instead, he regarded Anna Karenina as his first true novel." [wiki]
So when Tolstoy puts these aristocrat characters in these very personal, intense situations, and then he goes into every detail of their lives in a grand philosophical way, you get to experience philosophy in a much more literal literary form. It's been simplified of course so that we can experience it more from our hearts rather than just from our heads. This is important to note because I think this is what is meant by the fact that Tolstoy says the same thing as Schopenhauer in his The World as Will and Representation, but "from the other side," the other side could perhaps be the heart rather than the head [or brain]. I've also seen this particular comparison in Fritz Lang's Metropolis [the mediator between, the heart and the brain].
The book has become immensely more difficult but I plan to be done with the novel perhaps by early next week, perhaps earlier. At this point its not about how long it takes to read 1200 pages, rather it is about all the thinking that takes place when one reads something like this. You'll be thinking a lot. Nonstop, in fact, it seems.
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