Literary Summits

I have to admit that at the halfway point of War & Peace, the character that I like most is Pierre, Count Bezuhov.

He’s got his quirks, for sure; and my first impression of him was not favorable. But it’s a tribute to Tolstoy’s power of persuasion that I find Pierre the most endearing one of the cast.

I like that he’s a skeptic who’s also gullible at times. He like the smart-aleck friend who forgets to bring his passport to the airport.

The scene that cracked me up today was when Pierre is feeling vaguely stirred by the news that Napoleon is threatening to attack Moscow, and the whole town is aflutter. He seems to remember, deep within, his youthful admiration for Napoleon and starts to think that maybe this turn of events is the start of something big — very big, perhaps even the Apocalypse. Thanks to the suggestion of one of his friends in the Masonic Lodge, Pierre starts dabbling in numerology (ascribing values to each letter of the alphabet) and discovers that the phrase “L’empereur Napoleon” adds up to exactly 666. Amazing!

It gets better when he asks himself: Who will be able to “put an end to the power of the beast, that is, of Napoleon”? And he starts trying to make his own name numerologically significant — Pierre gets within 5 points of the magic sum with a mangled version of his name, “Le russe Besuhof”; he decides to drop the “e” (creating “l’russe,” just like “l’empereur”) and — VOILA! — it adds up to 666. So he imagines a face-off between the French beast and “l’russe Besuhof,” hoping that he will be led “to some great achievement and great happiness.”

I suppose some might be annoyed by this passage, but I think it’s funny. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent whole afternoons huddled with my cabin mates during torrential rainstorms at summer camp, reading the Book of Revelations (as we called it) from start to finish, and speculating at which of the dragons was Hitler, which Stalin, etc. Everything John of Patmos describes, someone had an explanation: the large locusts — “helicopters!” It was great fun and it scared me at the same time. That same kind of apocalyptic satisfaction found in the R.E.M. song, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine…”

And then there’s Pierre’s size — he reminds me of Quoyle in The Shipping News. Tolstoy can’t help but remind us about every third scene that Pierre is no lithe officer like Bolkonsky. Rather, writes Tolstoy, Pierre is “so stout that he would have been grotesque, had he not been so tall, so broad-shouldered, and so powerfully built that he carried off his bulky proportions with evident ease.” And morally, Pierre is suspect. He is swept away by the Masons and their esoteric practices. He is not swayed by what everyone else in court is doing, yet he lives in easy dissipation from day to day. He keeps up casual acquaintances with most everyone, but is hardly involved in anything.

And finally, Pierre is shortsighted, literally. His glasses fall off at critical moments, and he can’t quite make out people’s expressions at key moments.

Right now he’s in love, and I think it’s doomed. But that’s part of his charm, isn’t it? I as the reader can see what he can’t.