War and Peace Volume Two
Leo Tolstoy
Wordsworth Editions Limited
First published 1869
Translated from the Russian by Louise and Aylmer Maude 1993
Ms. Hen decided to read this because she wanted to read an
epic novel for St. Patrick’s Day. She intended to read FINNEGANS WAKE by James
Joyce, but she read four pages, and thought it was the worst book she had ever
read. She decided to pick up WAR AND PEACE because she had read volume one when
she was an undergrad hen, and loved it. She realizes that this novel has
nothing to do with St. Patrick’s Day, but it’s worth reading.
This novel is about love and war, and the anguish of love
and war. Prince Andrew meets a young woman, Natasha, and they fall in love. His
father thinks she is too young for him, and forbids him from marrying her
for a year. He doesn’t want to go away, but tells Natasha that he will marry
her when he comes back. She suffers while he is away, and thinks that she is
getting older (Though she is just seventeen! Those were different days.) She
gets embroiled with another man, and she becomes ill.
The war is coming to Moscow, and the inhabitants are getting
anxious. The people speak French in everyday speech, because it is the
language of the educated, but while the French are attacking them, they
chastise each other for it. Members of Natasha’s family, her brother and
cousin, and parents, move from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
Napoleon is a character in this novel. Ms. Hen does not know
a lot about him, but from reading this, and the things she has learned, he was
unstable and a tyrant, much like our current president. There have been several
comparisons to Napoleon and Hitler, and some of Hitler and our current
president, but not a lot of Napoleon and the president. Ms. Hen does not know
if they have much in common, but learning about Napoleon briefly from this
novel made her consider this idea. She imagines Napoleon might have been more
intelligent than D.T., but she is not definite on this.
Ms. Hen had an out-of-body experience while she was reading
this novel. She was at work on Wednesday, and she works at a hospital. Her
office was in a state of bedlam because of the corona virus, and everyone was
under stress, fearing the future. When she was on the train home, reading WAR
AND PEACE, a passage struck her that related to her day. The Russians
were waiting for the French to attack them:
At the approach of danger, there
are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very
reasonable tells the man the nature of danger and the means of escaping it, the
other, still more unreasonably says that it is too depressing and painful to
think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and
avert the general course of events, and it is better to disregard what is
painful until it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.
Ms. Hen completely relates to this passage right now in her
life. She does not want to think about danger, so she spends her free time
reading and writing and watching TV. She doesn’t want to think about what could
happen in the future. In this novel, the characters felt the same way. Not much
has changed in the way humanity reacts to danger in two hundred years, except this time, we are not
being attacked in a war (in the United States) we are being attacked by a
virus. A war might be faster than a virus, but either way, while in the moment,
the characters in the novel, and also currently, the people involved do not know what the
outcome will be.
Ms. Hen understands why this is considered one of the
greatest novels ever written. The characters are realistic, and their pain is
sensory. The reader can understand why their lives are so terrible. Russians
look at the world differently from everyone else, it might be a more realistic
way; they always look at the dark side of everything. But for every dark side,
there is a bright side, the hope that things could get better. Maybe they will
be better some day.
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