“War and Peace” is a great book.
That might come as a surprise, since most people have only one thought regarding the novel: “‘War and Peace’ is a big book.”
Also true. My copy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larisssa Voldkhonsky, is 1,215 pages long. The current thought is that such weighty classics as “War and Peace,” written by dead white males such as Leo Tolstoy, are something of a scam, a burden unfairly imposed by society to keep young readers from sharper, more relevant authors.
I promise you that isn’t true, as somebody who has read it twice, the second time aloud to my older son. “War and Peace” is the original romance novel, filled with love, adventure, war and, umm, peace.
The book sticks with you. I finished reading it last 10 years ago, the night before my son left for college. (I began the habit of reading aloud to him at bedtime, with “Alice in Wonderland” when he was about 2, progressed through a variety of classics, such as the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” It was a real struggle to finish “War and Peace,” not because of its length, but because he was staying up later than I did.)
“War and Peace” is worth the effort. When Tolstoy writes about a horse, it’s like an actual horse canters into the room, twitching and snorting, redolent of hay and sweat, and you remember Tolstoy ran a farm.
When Natasha tucks herself into her mother’s bed to tell the old countess about Prince Andrei, it could be any 16-year-old today gushing about her crush.
And one section, toward the end, a rumination on power.
How, Tolstoy wonders, did Napoleon — a character in the book — get 600,000 French soldiers to march 2,800 miles into Russia? In winter?
“Napoleon gave orders to gather troops and go to war,” he muses. “We are so accustomed to this notion, we have grown so used to this view, that the question of why six hundred thousand men go to war when Napoleon says such-and-such words seems senseless to us. He had power, and therefore what he ordered was done.”
Not physical power — the 600,000 soldiers have that. Nor moral power, certainly not with a Napoleon. Instead: “Power is the sum total of the wills of the masses, transferred by express or tacit agreement to rules chosen by the masses.”
Trigger alert: In groping for an answer, Tolstoy grows almost woke:
“As long as histories of separate persons are written — be they Caesars, Alexanders, or Luthers and Voltaires — and not the history of all the people, all without a single exception, who participate in an event, it is absolutely impossible to describe the movement of mankind without the concept of a force that makes people direct their activity toward a single goal. And the only such concept known to historians is power.”
Being Tolstoy, he goes on for pages, evaluating various theories. But he keeps circling back to:
“Power is based on the conditional handing over to rulers of the sum total of the wills of the masses, and that historical figures have power only on conditions of carrying out the programs which the will of the people has tacitly agreed to prescribe to them.”
Americans are beginning to realize — took them long enough — that electing a guy who will trash the economy, persecute immigrants, ignore law, scrap our government and set himself up as king, might not have been the best idea. This is not the program they tacitly agreed to.
As his polls crater, you can see Donald Trump thrashing, shrinking, like the Wicked Witch of the West doused with a bucket. He’s ready to prosecute the pollsters, calling them “Negative Criminals.”
We follow rulers because they follow us, leading us where we want to go. This is obviously true for Trump, who plays on the fears and resentments already bone deep. Not a cause, as I’ve said for years, but a symptom.
The closest Tolstoy gets to a conclusion is, “The empire was the real power.” Then he throws up his hands. “Power is power,” he writes, “the meaning of which we don’t understand.”
The present dynamic can be hard to grasp. The United States is set up to dilute power — Congress abdicating its traditional role is a major factor in the current disaster. But the states are also strong, still, and places like Illinois and California are resisting mightily.
Public support has been lavished over Trump. That is the source of his power. But support can be withdrawn in the face of enormous, ongoing failure. We are seeing that now. Whether it is too late, well, that’s the crux, isn’t it?
