I read War & Peace when I was a teenager, but recall almost nothing of it. I dashed through it, finishing it in the waiting room of Accident and Emergency in Auckland Hospital. (I can’t remember why I was there – hand, foot, one of the many injuries in my accident-prone life. Now I’m re-reading it again, slowly. I’ve read the first hundred pages so far, and need three bookmarks: one for my place, one for the references at the end, and one for the cast list at the beginning.
When I started, I wrote a close reading of the first page, as an exercise and to make myself linger.
The novel begins in French, and with dialogue – someone is addressing a person of stature (mon prince), and talking politics. There’s mention of Genoa and Lucca, of the Bonaparte family, of the Antichrist – implicitly Napoleon. So we begin with talk of la guerre in the first paragraph. But the conversation is informal, among intimates. The first words of the novel are Eh bien – or ‘well now’ – and by the end of the paragraph the speaker is using Russian rather than French to wish the prince ‘good evening, good evening’, and asking him to ‘sit down’. This is talk of war rather than war itself, and the news is about places far away, in Italy rather than Russia. But a novel that has announced its interest in war in its own title has begun the way it means to go on.
This is drawing room talk, as we learn in the next paragraph. The speaker is Annette (Anna Pavlovna) Scherer, host of a soirée. The person to whom she’s speaking is the first guest to arrive, Prince Vassily. It’s July 1805, we’re told directly. So we know, from the perspective of history, that there’s still ten years of Napoleon ahead.
We also know that we’re hearing from members of the aristocracy. Characterisation of the two relates largely to status. Annette is ‘maid of honour and intimate of the empress’. She’s coughing because she has the grippe – ‘a new word then, used only by rare people.’ Not used rarely, but ‘by rare people’, again suggesting elite status. She’s invited guests by sending notes ‘with a red-liveried footman’. Red is a regal colour, an imperial colour; it’s bold and hard to miss. She employs footmen in livery, so she is wealthy. The notes only went out that morning, but there seems no doubt that guests will come. So she’s high-status enough to summon people like Prince Vassily. He is described in this paragraph as ‘important and high-ranking’.
We’re given the note she sent in full. It’s in French, the language of society people. The notes are to Monsieur le comte (or mon prince), only high-ranking people like Prince Vassily. It’s casual to the point of being disingenuous. Annette tells the guests to come if they have nothing better to do, and calls herself une pauvre malade – a poor sick woman, asking for their pity and indulgence.
The note tells is that the soirée is scheduled between seven and 10. I don’t know if that’s after dinner, or if guests are expected to come before or after their dinner. It’s July, so it’s summer and light outside. What time did ‘high-ranking’ people eat dinner or supper then?
I look at Tolstoy’s diaries online to see if I can get a clue, and I’m instantly distracted by lines like ‘Got up late. Turgenev is a bore’ and ‘Spent all evening chasing after wenches.’ It’s also confusing because dinner sounds as though it was a late lunch, followed by tea and supper. So maybe everyone has eaten their big meal of the day, and a tea or supper can be fitted in around a soirée. Elsewhere in his diaries I read that Tolstoy goes out for supper at nine PM. On another day he says it’s 10 PM and he plans to have supper then go to bed.
Annette and Prince Vassily are invented characters, but the empress Maria Feodorovna is not. She is the former Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, second wife of Tsar Paul I. She married Paul the month before her 17th birthday, chosen as his bride by her mother-in-law, Catherine the Great. Paul was still the crown prince then, and had only been a widower for six months. In July 1805 Maria Feodorovna is 44 years old and a dowager empress. Her husband, Tsar for only four years, was assassinated in 1801. Her son, Tsar Alexander I, is 27 years old, and she insists on taking precedence over his wife, so Maria Feodorovna is the most important and powerful woman in Russia.
Prince Vassily is unfazed by Annette’s welcoming diatribe. Dieu, quelle virulente sortie! he says. ‘God, what a violent outburst!’ For him we get no colours, just the most basic description. ‘He was wearing an embroidered court uniform, stockings, shoes and stars’. Are the stars medals? I’m guessing that the mention of stockings and shoes means Prince Vassily is wearing dress clothes rather than boots, or that those items are part of formal court attire. He’s come over in his work clothes, as it were, and perhaps he’s a man who never stops working, or working the room.
The status of the Prince is emphasised again: he is ‘a significant man who has grown old in society and at court’. We also learn a little of his character. He is ‘not ruffled in the least’ by Annette’s heated greeting. He speaks in ‘quiet, patronising intonations’, suggesting a superiority or arrogance of manner and attitude. And he speaks ‘refined French’ and the narrator tells us that this generation – ‘our grandparents’ – ‘not only spoke but thought’ in refined French. At this time, in this society, French is the status language, the natural language for people of power and influence. French culture is superior to Russian. What implications does this have for a country about to go to war with France? Are the Russian nobility clinging to the culture of pre-Revolutionary France, when aristocrats ruled – as they still do in Russia in 1805 – and the rise of a man like Napoleon would be unthinkable?
So, that’s my close reading of page one. Now I’ve read on, I’m interested to see how Tolstoy keeps expanding the circles, from these initial two people to the larger number that attend the soirée, and then to other locations – initially just in St Petersburg, the Imperial capital, then in Moscow, the old capital, and then in estates in the countryside. More and more people are drawn in, and distinctions are made between those Russians who speak French more fluently than their native language (like Prince Ippolit) and those who don’t understand French at all (his footman).
I’m also taken with the Russian aristocracy’s horrified discussions of the French revolution, a recent memory in 1805, because Tolstoy is writing this in the 1860s, just after the emancipation of the serfs by Alexander II (and before Alexander’s assassination by a bomber in 1881). Russia’s own revolution, which will have much larger consequences for the world than the French revolution, is only 50 years away – closer to Tolstoy in time than the French Revolution.
He lived long enough to see the first attempt at revolution in Russia, in 1905 – a century after the setting of War and Peace’s opening chapter. But Tolstoy died in 1910, so he didn’t live to see the destruction of Imperial Russia, and of the world of ‘our grandparents’. By then he was a supporter of pacifist anarchist thought, an opponent of the Tsar’s regime, and determined to renounce his own inheritance of feudal privilege. A ‘landlord obsessed with Christ,’ Lenin said of him in 1908, because Tolstoy preferred peace to war.
More on the novel as I read on.
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