"War and Peace" by Lev Tolstoj (vol.2)

In the second volume of this almost never-ending and sometimes dragged on novel (come on, don't be shocked, Tolstoj really lacks in concision), you will find a lot of war and not as much peace. A great deal of pages are devoted to an important field battle and to the fire in Moscow, when the Russian army inexplicably left their capital city in the hands of Napoleon. In spite of this, there is still time to witness Count Pierre Bezukhov's life-changing experience as a war prisoner and his humanitarian experiments. This was my favourite strand of the novel: I could not help but feel sympathy for Pierre, in spite of his foolishness (at a certain point he starts believing that he is destined to kill Napoleon because of an obscure cabbalah-related calculation he has made). Natasha also changes a lot in this second volume and by the end of the book she is finally a woman. Prince Andrej, instead, ends up being almost the hero and his story line is harrowing but also uplifting. You could argue that “War and Peace” is, among many other things, a buildungsroman. I know that most scholars speak of it as the historical novel par excellence and I am not saying it is not that as well. Only, it is difficult to ignore that every character matures somewhere between page 1 and page 1425 and in order to do that each of them has to live through a war and several tribulations.

The primary intent of the book becomes clearer than ever by the end of the book. The last thirty pages of “War and Peace” are actually an essay, pure non-fiction inserted in a novel. This of course makes you think. More than a family saga, “War and Peace” is the medium employed by Lev Tolstoj to write about history. Tolstoj believed in fatalism and thought that revolutions and wars did not happen because of the ambition and desire for power of single leaders. In Tolstoj's world, great men – Napoleon first of all, but also Kutuzov or Murat – are only one of the many factors that make what we like to call “history”. A part of me would like to say that Tolstoj's attempt in these last thirty pages to explain how history works was a failure: instead of showing us what history is and how it works through the characters in the book, Tolstoj ends his novel with an essay, departing from the narrative texture never to return to it. Nonetheless, it is quite possible that this was perfectly acceptable in the 19^th century when Tolstoj wrote the book and I must confess that his opinions (and his metaphors to explain how he thinks history functions) are alluring to say the least. However, I found the philosophical parts slightly redundant. 

"War and Peace" is an old-fashioned novel, this I can say without feeling guilty. It has become a classic, not only of Russian literature, but of world literature. It is vast and contains many things. It can provoke frustration ("is this book ever going to finish?") or admiration ("how can Tolstoj describe the world so well?"), but surely you cannot dismiss it very easily. It makes you keep thinking about what you have read. In other words, you feel its weight even after you've finished it.

"War and Peace" by Lev Tolstoj (volume one)

In one of his most famous essays, Friedrich Schiller distinguished between naïve poets and sentimental poets, the former writing spontaneously without planning anything and the second being very self-aware of their writing and the problems raised by their work.

Having read the first volume of “War and Peace”, I could not help but think that Tolstoj must be necessarily included in the naïve category, only to realise that this cannot be possible, that a writer like Tolstoj would have known where his story would go. While reading the first volume of Tolstoj’s grandiose effort, I constantly had the impression that the author was consciously writing about the pursuit of one’s happiness in life, but that he did not always have a clear-cut idea of where and how Pierre, Prince Andréj, Nikolaj Rostòv or Nataša could find it. I might be terribly wrong, because Tolstoj kept revising and rewriting episodes of the book for a very long time, so he must have had some idea of where he was going.

At the centre of the story there is history of course: the Napoleonic wars that saw Russia fighting alongside Austria against the French play a big role in the 'war parts', but it is the ultimate meaning of history that is at stake in this book. What is history and can common people ever be a part of it? “War and Peace” is also a huge canvas of Russian aristocracy, of its falseness and affectation above all. Ironically enough, while princes and counts converse in good French, Russia is at war with Napoleon, who is regarded as a charlatan of an emperor and cannot compete with his Russian counterpart, Alexander I. At the centre of the question, there are ideas about Russian identity and the influence of Europe. The characters in the story seem to be more spontaneous when they speak Russian or when they try to live a genuine, simple life that does not involve discussing politics or philosophy. It is not by chance that every major character is looking for happiness, whether through masonry, marriage or war achievements.

“War and Peace” has many, maybe too many characters. For at least 300 pages you need to write them down on a piece of paper and constantly look at it. In spite of this, some of them really stand out: Pierre, the clumsy, illegitimate son of a wealthy count, who is lost and confused to the point of entering masonry was created with tenderness and affection by Tolstoj, who clearly saw much of himself in him. Then there is Prince Andréj Bolkonskij, a young officer with a pregnant wife and an eccentric father, and two siblings, Nikolaj and Nataša. He is a somehow idealistic young man who is in love with his orphan cousin Sonja to the despair of his impoverished parents, while Nataša, still a child at the beginning of the book, grows into a very beautiful young woman who is at a loss regarding her marriage. There are also some purely depraved characters like Hélène Kuraghina and her brother Anatole, libertines who clearly represent the moral corruption of the society of the time (Tojstoj wrote the novel in the 1860s, but set it in the earlier decades, which he probably found more interesting because of the historical events).

This is a complex novel which blends history with a family saga literally throbbing with life. It contains elements of philosophy, social sciences, politics and god knows what more. So far it has been an enriching experience to read it, but it has been rather demanding. Sometimes it feels like you are reading a very long director's cut, where episodes do not apparently lead to anything important or where you simply miss the point the author is trying to make, but I think it is just because Lev Tolstoj sometimes is in over my head.     

“The Gift” by Vladimir Nabokov

Year of first publication: 1937-38
Genre: novel
Country: Russia

At some point in “The Gift” a man called Valentin Linëv from Warsaw reviews the book written by the protagonist, a mock biography of revolutionary democrat and author Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky. The reviewer dismisses the work, considering that its author has, among other faults, a poor use of the Russian language. This fictitious reviewer, I learn from the afterword to the novel, failed to recognize all the allusions to great Russian authors in the book, thus missing its prominent aesthetic value. I am exactly like this wicked reviewer, because my grasp of Russian literature is sketchy, if not worse. “The Gift” has in fact been written for those readers who are familiar with the works of Pushkin, Tolstoj, Turgenev and many other important Russian authors. If you are not one of these lucky readers, then you are excluded from “The Gift”, because the book is entirely about literature and the plot has little importance.

Fëdor Kostantinovich Godunov-Cherdyncev, a Russian expatriate in 1920s Berlin, has just published a book of poetry in a magazine for Russian émigrés, but nobody seems to care or hail him as one of the new talents among the not-so-tiny Russian community in Germany. The verses, reported at length together with a reviewer’s commentary, are mainly about the author’s childhood in his native Russia. Fëdor Kostantinovich describes that poetry comes to him in sudden blazes and he struggles to catch all the words, an adjective sometimes escaping him. Like Nabokov, Godunov-Cherdyncev also experiences synesthesia, a contamination between the senses that allows him to perceive words or sounds as colours or textiles (he recommends the reader to try his ‘flannel cotton “m”’). What does Fëdor Kostantinovich do apart from musing over his own writing, anyway? He often visits other Russian émigrés, for example the Chernyshevskys, who oddly enough are not related to the aforementioned revolutionary hero. They had a son, Jasha, who died in a way highly reminiscent of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, although the afterword to the novel mentions Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” as the implied allusion. This is how the novel works: in a now-common postmodern way that scatters metaliterary references all over the novel. It is not hard to spot the influence of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (1913-1927), for instance, in the constant remembrance and nostalgia for the protagonist’s childhood. With regards to this, Robert Scholes, an influential literary critic, once said that ‘once we knew that fiction was about life and criticism was about fiction – and everything was simple. Now we know that fiction is about other fiction, is criticism in fact, or metafiction’.
As the novel progresses, the reader understand that the plot revolves around Godunov-Cherdyncev’s maturation as a writer. At first his intention is writing a book about his father, who was an adventurer and an lepidopterist, but then he abandons the project. He meets Zina, a character moulded on Nabokov’s real wife Vera, who is the only one who loved his poems and wants to have a signed copy. She suggests that he should write a biography of Chernishevsky, as an exercise. Here begins the book within the book: more than one hundred pages are devoted to this fake biography of a real man. This chapter of the novel was censored, in the first Russian edition, for the same reasons given for the dismissal of the biography in the novel as a ‘reckless, antisocial, mischievous improvisation’. These words tell us that Nabokov was constantly playing with the reception of the book, because he knew it was not a book for everyone. He constantly mocks and scorns those readers who cannot spot the literary allusions, which can be a little annoying.
In spite of this metafictional feast, the novel failed to arouse my interest above a certain (low) level. Full of juicy titbits (‘the street began as a post office and ended like a church, like an epistolary novel’, p.16 my translation from the Italian), the novel does have some charms, but they are diluted, watered down in a drawn-out book of 450-odd pages, with almost no plot and maybe ruined by a translation that was difficult to make, not to mention an inadequate reader with only a few notions of Russian literature. As he always does, Nabokov tells in a preface what “The Gift” is not: it is not an autobiographical novel, he says, because he did not have an explorer as a father and he never courted Zina Mertz. The problem is that Nabokov never says what his novels really are. It seems to me that, as his other two works I have read so far (read here and here), this is ultimately a novel about writing, the novel that we read being the same novel that the protagonist starts at the end of the book, as if we were in a Moebius strip, a continuum where the end is also the beginning of the novel. The gift of the title is of course the gift of the pen, of poetry and literature, which is all that mattered to Nabokov.

"Invitation to a Beheading" by Vladimir Nabokov

Year of first publication: 1935-36

Genre: novel, dystopic novel

Country: Russia

Cincinnatus C. is the citizen of a fictitious country. He is spending his last days in prison prior to his execution. His charge is something called "gnostical torpitude", a crime no one is willing to talk about. Cincinnatus feels that he is different from everyone else and that people don't feel at ease in his presence. He is, quoting Nabokov, "impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another". The novel is set in a fictional world which is frightfully similar to the real world we live in and this is the real horror of the story.

Cincinnatus is not allowed to learn the day of his execution and this causes him sorrow, because it does not let him think properly or lay out his written thouhgts with a clear intent. Nonetheless, when he learns the hour of his execution he is equally frought with anxiety.

Nabokov wrote this novel in Russian while he was in exile in Berlin. It was first published in a magazine for Russian expatriates and translated into English by his son Dmitri in the 1950s. I think you can feel that the book was written in an era of totalitarisms (Stalinism in Russia, fascism in Italy and, of course, the rise of Adolf Hitler's party in Germany), despite the fact that Nabokov considers his works as completely detached from any moral or social message. The book has been defined "kafkaesque" by many, but Nabokov said more than once that at the time he didn't speak German and was completely ignorant of Kafka's work. There is to be sure an affinity between "Invitation to a Beheading" and, let's say, "The Trial". You really do not know what Cincinnatus has done and you start doubting if he has ever committed a crime or whether he is just being executed for the way he is.

Somehow I couldn't relate to this book as much as I did with Nabokov's masterpiece, "Lolita". I was absent-minded while I read it which is never a good sign. Picking up the book on the train or after a tiring day at my computer, I had the impression that I wasn't quite understading half of what Nabokov intended to say. Certainly "Invitation to a Beheading" is very different from "Lolita": a lot less "aesthetic blessings", a lot less making fun of other people (psychiatrists, bourgeoisie etc) and a lot less making readers' eyebrows raise. In other words, a lot less Nabokov. Ok, so I'll give "Russian Nabokov" another chance to enthrall me with "The Gift", ok?

A last random thought: I have the impression that Nabokov is so not read in Italy, am I wrong?

I also wrote something on Nabokov here and here (in Italian).

"Il Maestro e Margherita" di Michail Bulgakov

Anno di prima pubblicazione: 1966
Genere: romanzo, romanzo satirico, realismo magico
Paese: Russia

La mia recensione de "Il Maestro e Margherita" è uscita su Paper Street ed è disponibile a questo link. L'opera ha ispirato numerosi artisti, nonchè sceneggiatori teatrali, cinematografici e televisivi. Io scelgo quest'immagine un po' art nouveau.

Filosofeggiando con Dostoevskij

"[...] voglio compromettermi di persona e perciò dichiaro arditamente che tutti questi bellissimi sistemi, tutte queste teorie che spiegano all'umanità i suoi veri, normali interessi, affinchè essa, tendendo necessariamente a raggiungerli, diventi subito buona e nobile, per il momento, secondo la mia opinione, sono semplici sofismi! Sissignori, sofismi! Infatti, affermare anche solo questa teoria del rinnovamento di tutto il genere umano grazie al sistema del suo tornaconto, equivale, secondo me, a... diciamo affermare, per esempio, con Buckle, che per effetto della civiltà l'uomo si ingentilisce, di conseguenza diventa meno sanguinario e meno incline alla guerra. Proprio secondo la logica, infatti, Buckle pare pervenire a questo risultato. Ma l'uomo ha tanta passione per il sistema e la deduzione astratta, che è disposto ad alterare deliberatamente la verità, è disposto a non vedere e non sentire, pur di giustificare la propria logica. Prendo questo esempio proprio perché è un esempio troppo lampante. Ma guardatevi attorno: il sangue scorre a fiumi, e oltrettutto in maniera così allegra. [...] E che cosa ingentilisce in noi la civiltà? La civiltà elabora nell'uomo solo una multiformità di sensazioni e... decisamente nient'altro. Anzi, attraverso lo sviluppo di questa multiformità l'uomo forse arriverà al punto di trovare piacere nel sangue. Questo infatti gli è già capitato. Avete notato che i sanguinari più raffinati erano quasi sempre dei signori più che civili, di cui certe volte tutti i vari Attila e Sten'ka Razin non valevano le suole delle scarpe; e se non balzano agli occhi violentemente come Attila e Sten'ka Razin, è proprio perché s'incontrano troppo spesso, sono troppo comuni, perfino scontati. O almeno, per effetto della civiltà l'uomo è diventato, se non più sanguinario, certamente sanguinario in modo peggiore, più abietto di prima. Prima vedeva nello spargimento di sangue un atto di giustizia, e con la coscienza tranquilla sterminava chi bisognava; adesso, invece, anche se consideriamo lo spargimento di sangue una nefandezza, tuttavia lo pratichiamo, e ancor più di prima."

[Memorie dal Sottosuolo - Fedor Dostoevskij]

PS: Ma perché nei romanzi di Dostoevskij (ma oserei anche dire in quelli russi dell'ottocento) c'è sempre gente che ammattisce rimuginando su cose insignificanti e poi delira durante la notte e gli sale la febbre? E poi passeggia sulla Prospettiva Nevskij e si reca a trovare delle persone che vivono in camere ammobiliate, non succede niente di che ma il protagonista è convinto che siano successe cose gravissime, tipo offese mortali? Ma è questo il bello di questi romanzi, sia chiaro! Che cosa sarebbe Raskolnikov senza tutto ciò?