Literary Summits

The end is near . . . I’m in Book 14, less than 200 pages still to go!

[To get you up to speed, the French are retreating as quickly as possible from Moscow and the Russian army is trying to chase them out. Pierre, my favorite character, has been dragged along by the French as a prisoner of war. He’s bare-footed with threadbare clothes and meager rations. The weather is turning cold, and people are dropping left and right — French and Russian alike — from sickness, cold and exhaustion.]

Pierre, always seeking, always learning, has come to a hard-fought realization: in spite of the horrible situation, he’s found a measure of peace and contentment. Pierre finds he’s grateful for the little food, clothes, and companionship he has. Tolstoy writes:

Pierre passed through hardships almost up to the extreme limit of privation that a man can endure. . . . And now without any thought of his own, he had gained that peace and that harmony with himself simply through the horror of death, through hardships, through what he had seen in [his fellow prisoner] Karataev.

Peace through pain . . .

Recently I visited a Lutheran worship service where the pastor preached on truth and pain. He said:

“To seek the truth is to subject yourself to pain — the pain of change or the pain of regret.”

This line rings true with what Pierre is going through. He’s finding truth — about his privilege, his limits, his vulnerability — and he’s enduring physical pain in a way that’s new to him. And in the process, he finds truth.

Yet this moment of clarity is just that — a moment. As the prisoners are driven farther through rain and mud, Pierre loses some of his “fresh perspective” and settles into survival mode.

That’s something I like about Tolstoy. The characters have ebbs and flows. Earlier in the book, Pierre sees himself as the Russian counterpart to Napoleon. And by this point in the book, Tolstoy isn’t shy about telling readers that the historians got it wrong: Napoleon was not great hero of history, no “grand homme.”

As Book 14 winds down, Tolstoy inverts one of Napoleon’s favorite phrases — “Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas” which I’d translate as “The sublime is only a step away from the ridiculous” — and declares Napoleon nothing more than a stupid, conceited fool.

In Tolstoy’s game of Chutes & Ladders, Napoleon has fallen, and Pierre is on the path to redemption. He finishes the chapter with:

“And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness and truth.”