He who is happy is right!
—Tolstoy’s diary, March 1863
If planning is ineffective, success an illusion, and perfection unattainable, is anybody ever happy in a Tolstoy novel? Yes, terribly so! When Tolstoy felt things, you see, he felt them big. And the same is true of his characters, who ache and search, certainly, yet also experience moments of unadulterated joy: Prince Andrei, knowing transcendent bliss as he gazes up at the lofty, infinite sky while lying prostrate on the battlefield; or Natasha, when she dances and sings, as if nobody were watching; or, as we shall see, Nikolai Rostov, experiencing ecstatic oneness with life during the hunt.
But what exactly are we talking about when we talk about “happiness”? A recent visit to the self-help section of my local bookstore suggests that even the experts can’t agree. My head spinning with the superabundance of gurus and guides to personal transformation, I have no shortage of prescriptions about how to achieve this elusive thing we all supposedly want, but can’t seem to define what it is. Pleasure? . . . Joy? . . . Peace? A Google search for the word happiness producing 322 million results doesn’t help matters much, either.
So I return to Tolstoy, whose own search for a personal definition of happiness was no less tortuous (or torturous) than that of the rest of us. Still, he may help us think more clearly about what it is we are really searching for, not by reducing the notoriously elusive concept of happiness to a simple formula, but by revealing just how complex a phenomenon it really is, as well as offering possibilities for happiness we might never have considered.
“[T]he best way to true happiness in life,” Tolstoy wrote in his diary in 1856, at the age of twenty-seven, “is to have no rules, but to throw out from yourself in all directions like a spider a prehensile web of love and catch in it everything that comes along—an old lady, a child, a woman or a policeman.” The very next year would prove a difficult testing ground for his theory. He would live through the death of his older brother Dmitry, carry on a hopeless infatuation with the daughter of a neighboring landowner, and witness a public execution in Paris, which led him to conclude, “I will never serve any government anywhere.” Even “[i]n Russia things are bad, bad, bad,” he writes to his relative Alexandrine Tolstaya, whom he endearingly nicknames “Granny,” less because of her age (she was only ten years his senior) than because of her groundedness, which contrasted so starkly with his own rather flailing tendencies.
If only Granny had seen, as Tolstoy recently had, how a lady in the street beat her girl with a stick, an official clubbed a sick old man, and a village elder abused a drunken peasant, then surely she would have understood how “life in Russia is continuous, unending toil and a struggle with one’s feelings.” And for a young man whose own moods could swing from Towering Inferno to Ice Station Zebra with impressive rapidity, the struggle was especially pronounced.
There was one constant in Tolstoy’s life, however: a “shameful laziness,” which, he admits to Granny a few months later, is the real reason for his failure to reply to her last letter. On the day he received it, you see, everything had been going beautifully: riding in the fields, “I experienced a feeling of joy that Lev Nikolayevich [Tolstoy] was alive and breathing, and a feeling of gratitude for someone for allowing Lev Nikolayevich to breathe.” But by the time he arrived home, all the pleasantness was rudely crowded out by nagging concerns about an upcoming land purchase and frustrations over having to arbitrate a local case of a peasant who’d beaten his wife. Not satisfied with a mere apology to Granny, however, Tolstoy generalizes his personal experience of that day into a theory of happiness accompanied by a series of illustrative diagrams. The head, shaped rather like an egg, contains two sets of drawers, the one on the left containing negative feelings and the one on the right containing positive emotions. The two sets of drawers are separated only by a corridor:
On an ideal day, the good-feeling drawers on the right are stuffed so full of positivity that they won’t shut and even fill the corridors with their overflowing happiness. It works like a good mood catcher:
The normal state of affairs on a usual day, however, is that the drawers on both sides of the corridor slide in and out, filling the corridor now with good feelings, now with bad ones, leaving more or less space for emotional traffic to flow through the corridor between them:
What happened on that particular day, Tolstoy explains, is that the good mood catcher was in full force in the morning. As the day went along, however, the drawers on the left started opening and pouring their nastiness into the corridor to such a degree that the drawer on the right, containing Tolstoy’s joy at receiving Granny’s letter and intention to respond, was rudely slammed shut by the traffic jam of negativity in the corridor.
The first thing that becomes apparent from these annotated drawings is that Tolstoy could go to extraordinary lengths to explain his bad behavior. The second is that he was probably wise to have pursued a career as a writer, rather than a visual artist. And the third is that on any given day there must have been an awful lot of emotional drawers swinging open and closed inside this volatile young man. And so, he concludes his letter with an unsolicited mini-lecture: “It’s only honest anxiety, struggles and toil, all based on love, that constitute what we call happiness.” He goes on to chastise Granny for naïvely thinking, as he once did,
that it’s possible to create your own happy and honest little world, in which you can live in peace and quiet, without mistakes, repentance or confusion, in an unhurried and precise way. Ridiculous! It’s impossible, Granny. . . . To live an honest life you have to strive hard, get involved, fight, make mistakes, begin something and give it up, begin again and give it up again, struggle endlessly, and suffer loss. As for tranquility—it’s spiritual baseness. That’s why the bad side of our soul desires tranquility, not being aware that its attainment entails the loss of everything in us that is beautiful, not of this world, but of the world beyond.
If happiness is what we seek, Tolstoy would seem to be suggesting, then we would do better, rather than attempting to mute the pain of living, to allow ourselves to feel it more deeply—in other words, rather than trying to lift ourselves out of flux, to immerse ourselves completely in it. Only by embracing everything down here do we get in touch, paradoxically, with what is transcendent, “not of this world, but of the world beyond.”
This is a far cry, to be sure, from his giddy “prehensile web of love,” but it does bring us one step closer to understanding Tolstoy’s view of happiness in War and Peace. For happiness in the novel, just as Tolstoy describes it in the letter, isn’t so much a destination we reach by following a prescribed set of behaviors as it is a way of being in the world. It is what we experience when we come to know and embrace life as it truly is. This is what Pierre experiences later, as the French approach Moscow and catastrophe looms:
He now experienced a pleasant sense of awareness that everything that constitutes people’s happiness, the comforts of life, wealth, even life itself, is nonsense, which it is pleasant to throw away, in comparison with something . . . With what, Pierre could not account for to himself, nor did he try to clarify to himself for whom and for what he found it so particularly delightful to sacrifice everything. He was not concerned with what he wanted to sacrifice it for, but the sacrificing itself constituted a new, joyful feeling for him. (753)
Pierre’s desire to sacrifice himself isn’t about some abstract notion of being virtuous. Rather, it’s the expression of his totally irrational wish to throw himself completely into the fray of the extraordinary events underway, without any concern for the outcome, or even whether doing so is good or bad, right or wrong. To be fully alive in Tolstoy’s world, then, is to be connected deeply with that “something” Pierre senses that is bigger than all of our intellectual conceits and familiar frameworks of understanding—to embrace and love life in its totality: the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful.
Which is precisely what somebody like, say, the famous government reformer Mikhail Speransky, a secondary yet significant character in the novel, hasn’t a clue how to do. According to the history books written later in the nineteenth century, this high-powered government bureaucrat held the fate of Russia in his hands. But in the world of War and Peace he is shown to be a dud, whose cold, grating laughter embodies the sterility of the man himself. It is Speransky’s laughter, in fact, that first puts off Prince Andrei when he visits this man he has idolized at a dinner party with colleagues in Speransky’s home. “There was nothing bad or inappropriate in what they said, everything was witty and might have been funny; yet that something which constitutes the salt of merriment was not only missing, but they did not even know it existed” (465). A man convinced that he controls the destiny of a nation, understandably, is not going to be able to feel the deep, irrational joy of living that is at the heart of War and Peace. A humbler, more emotionally attuned man like Pierre, however, can. As can the Rostovs, a family possessing a preternatural capacity for joy, as well as the ability to sense life’s fundamental goodness, no matter the circumstances in which they find themselves.
Have we lost that capacity for finding deeper meaning and perhaps even some measure of joy in the midst of adversity? Have we exchanged an attitude of loving life on its own terms for an arrogant need to control the uncontrollable, on the one hand, or, on the other, a fearful disengagement from the world?
Neither of these approaches is the answer, Tolstoy would say, though both are as prevalent in our times as they were in his. Take the positive psychology movement in America today, a twentieth-century formulation of the conviction that we, as individuals, control our destiny. The original intention behind this movement was, according to Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, two of its foremost practitioners, to help individuals, families, and communities thrive. An admirable intention, to be sure, but the more popularized versions of this movement often advocate a naïve can-doism that overlooks large swaths of human experience, failing to take seriously, Tolstoy would suggest, the possibility that there are, in fact, many situations in life in which we are at the mercy of forces entirely outside our control.
By trying to circumvent, or transcend those forces, to make them conform to our personal will, we only increase our frustration. What with hundreds of current titles of the All-You-Have-to-Do-Is-Set-Your-Mind-to-Whatever-It-Is-You-Want-and-You-Will-Get-It ilk, no wonder I come away from an afternoon in the self-help section of Barnes & Noble feeling, well, pretty lousy about my life. If everybody else is willing their way to happiness, I wonder, why can’t I? What begins as a belief in endless possibility, then, put face-to-face with reality, can devolve very quickly into nihilistic despair.
So are we all supposed to walk around morose and feeling hopeless about things, then? Not at all. Gloomy fatalism, Tolstoy says, isn’t the right response, either. War and Peace, after all, is a terribly life-affirming book that advocates not only realism, but a robust individualism, as well. Frankly, the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Kareev got it all wrong when he insisted that “the whole philosophy of history in War and Peace in actuality comes down to denying the role of individuality and the individual initiative in history: history for Tolstoy is mass movement, which takes place in a fatalistic way.” Alas, Kareev’s line of thinking still persists among certain Tolstoy scholars and Slavists; indeed, for years I was one of them.
Often depressed during graduate school, I consoled myself with the conviction that my suffering gave me special insight into the true (read: tragic) nature of life. It didn’t help my mood that I was surrounded by academics, some of whom were high-minded about their chosen path of bookish self-abnegation, even as the rest of humanity persisted in their blissfully materialistic delusions. “Nobody who studies Russian literature is happy,” a graduate school professor used to say, only half jokingly. Was my unhappiness attributable to my field, I often wondered, or had I, in fact, been drawn to it because I was unhappy? Moreover, as a Slavic scholar, was I doomed to a life of (noble) suffering?
But the more I immersed myself in Tolstoy’s writing, the more I came to see the absurdity of these self-serving notions. Tolstoy himself detected precisely this sort of intellectual arrogance among many members of the intelligentsia in his own time, and responded to such thinking in a diary entry while working on War and Peace: “So-called self-sacrifice and virtue are only the satisfaction of one morbidly developed propensity. . . . He who is happy is right! The self-sacrificing person is more blind and cruel than the others.” Human beings, in other words, are built for happiness. The only problem is that we sometimes try too hard to achieve it, or look for it in all the wrong places. Happiness rears its lovely head, more often than not, when we’re not expecting it to.
This is a core lesson embodied by the Rostovs, one of the most blessed families in all of Russian literature. Yet for years I couldn’t really relate to them. My thinking and writing about them tended to be abstract and full of generalizations about their earthiness, full-bloodedness, and other “-nesses,” without ever quite understanding what exactly I was talking about or why. Nikolai rarely figured in any of my writing about War and Peace until my dissertation. Less fascinating than the questing Pierre or the tortured Prince Andrei, he had been relegated in my mind to the status of “lowbrow.” Modeled on Tolstoy’s own father, a high-spirited, hot-tempered aristocrat of the old school, Nikolai is, as the author describes him in a notebook, “very good at saying the obvious.”
Indeed, his last name in an early draft of the novel, Prostoy, or Simple, captures something of his unconvoluted relationship to life that seemed so foreign to me, and that irked some of Tolstoy’s more radical, “sophisticated” contemporaries to no end. “Since the world of thought is shut for Rostov, his development is finished when he is twenty years old,” wrote radical literary critic Dmitry Pisarev, a brilliant, arrogant, and highly skilled assassin of fictional characters who failed to live up to his social and intellectual ideals. “All that remains for him is to grow more gross and stupid and then more senile and decrepit.” Ouch. But if I never thought anything quite so scathing about Nikolai, I did share with Pisarev an elitism that made it a bit too easy for me to overlook one of Tolstoy’s most important characters. This Mr. Simple appeared to me to be an ordinary bloke with ordinary values. What more was there to say?
Quite a bit, as it turns out. For not only is Nikolai at the center of some of the novel’s most famous and memorable scenes, but there is also something . . . rather extraordinary about his ordinariness. Nikolai, I would now argue, has a gift for happiness that is uniquely his own, as well as being instructive for the rest of us. For one thing, he embodies the wisdom Tolstoy expressed in the sentence “He who is happy is right!”
It is 1809. Nikolai is still serving in the Pavlogradsky regiment, where he has become a squadron commander, beloved by his comrades, subordinates, and superiors. Ever since the signing of the truce between Tsar Alexander and Napoleon at Tilsit two years ago, things have been relatively calm on the European continent, if not on the Rostov home front. Nikolai, you see, has been receiving letters from his mother telling him that the family’s financial affairs are in trouble, and that if he doesn’t come home right away, the whole family will be ruined. Eldest of the Rostov sons, Nikolai knows that he has no choice but “to go from this clear, good world to somewhere where everything was nonsense and confusion” (489).
And so, a week later he shows up at Otradnoe, the Rostov estate, only to be thrust into a world that, for all its familiar charms, has fundamentally changed. Natasha, his brother Petya, and Sonya are growing up, for one thing, and his parents are arguing more often, mainly about money. Worst of all, he must get involved with “these stupid matters of estate management for which his mother had summoned him” (491). His inaugural executive decision is to visit the chief steward Mitenka. Demanding from this man “a full accounting,” whatever that means, Nikolai proceeds to shower the bewildered peasant with a cascade of verbal abuse, then takes him by the scruff of the neck, kicks him in the rear, and sends him headfirst down a flight of steps.
“ ‘I knew that I’d never understand anything here in this foolish world,’ ” Nikolai thinks to himself the next day after his father meekly remonstrates with him over his rather unorthodox management style (492). Admitting that he is not cut out for the finer aspects of estate management, Nikolai nevertheless proves that he has the makings of a true master in the old, autocratic Russian style. And as such, he develops a sudden, inexplicable passion for hunting with dogs, which has always been to Russian aristocratic culture what baseball is to the American way of life. Tolstoy doesn’t tell us precisely how or why this happens, only that Nikolai pours himself into this new passion with as much vigor as he had in the course of his military duties. To go hunting or not is the only question that concerns him on that frosty September morning of his very first hunt. And like so many questions in the world of War and Peace, this one gets decided by forces lying outside the individual will.
As the hour arrives, the sky is overcast, the bare tree branches glistening with droplets of rain that hang in stillness, while the mist rising up from the warm black soil is like an endless curtain. Nikolai looks at the dogs, the sky, the earth, and Danilo, the wrinkled old peasant huntsman with whip in hand. Inhaling the intoxicating scent of dogs and fallen leaves, Nikolai glances into the dark, bulging eyes of his black-spotted bitch, Milka, who licks him on the nose and mustache, and the matter is resolved: a better day for hunting cannot be imagined. He “was already being seized by that irresistible hunting feeling in which a man forgets all his former intentions, like a lovesick man in the presence of his beloved” (494).
Within an hour about a hundred and thirty dogs and twenty mounted hunters with Nikolai at their head congregate without prompting at the porch. As in a regiment marching to battle, every dog and hunter knows his task, his place, and his purpose. Together they noiselessly spread out along the road and field leading to the Otradnoe woods. Vacillating between hope and despair, as if his life depended on the outcome of this chase, Nikolai crouches near the woods, awaiting his moment. And he prays. That’s right. This earthy young man who pummels his peasants, who proudly bayonets Frenchmen on the battlefield, suddenly finds God: “ ‘What would it cost You?’ he said to God. ‘Do it for me! I know You are great, and it’s a sin to ask it of You, but, for God’s sake, make it so that the old wolf comes my way and Karai, before my uncle’s eyes, gets a death grip on his throat’ ”(499). Such luck is not to be, he concludes. “ ‘I am always unlucky, in cards, in war, in everything.’ ” But he
again looked to the right and saw that something was running towards him across the empty field. “No, it can’t be!” thought Nikolai, sighing deeply, as a man sighs at the accomplishment of something he has long awaited. What was accomplished was his greatest happiness—and so simply, without noise, without splendor, without portent. Nikolai could not believe his eyes, and this doubt continued for more than a second. The wolf ran on and jumped heavily over a hole that lay in his path. (500)
Does God exist, then? The skeptic in me says that it is a matter of random chance that the wolf appears precisely when Nikolai prays for it to. But even this more sober reading of the passage allows Nikolai the meaning of the moment, for in this moment he comes about as close to a religious experience as he ever will. Immersed utterly in the here and now, he touches the transcendent. Our greatest moments of joy are often like that. We struggle and search and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the bliss emerges.
Tolstoy would have agreed, then, with one of his favorite American writers, Henry David Thoreau, who compared happiness to a butterfly that eludes you the more you chase it, only to come and sit softly on your shoulder as soon as you turn your attention to other things. There are quite a few moments of such butterfly-like softness in War and Peace—for instance, the wonderfully tender one when Natasha and her mother are curled up on the bed beneath the blanket, chatting on a crisp winter evening. But Tolstoy also points to another kind of happiness that isn’t necessarily warm and cozy, but disorienting and intense, overtaking one without warning smack in the midst of life’s chaos. That is what Nikolai experiences during the hunt.
Inevitably such “happiness” departs as mysteriously as it arrives. A second later another dog, unknown to Nikolai, flies down at the wolf, almost bowling him over, at which point the wolf suddenly gets up, snaps at his assailant, and the bloodied dog, its side ripped open, lets out a piercing squeal and buries its head in the ground. Thanks to this delay, Karai has time to head off the wolf, and pounces on him, while other dogs, not far behind, soon join in:
That moment, when Nikolai saw the dogs swarming over the wolf in the ditch, saw under them the wolf’s gray fur, his outstretched hind leg, and his frightened and gasping head with its ears laid back (Karai had him by the throat)—the moment when Nikolai saw that was the happiest moment of his life. (501)
Wait: Wasn’t the earlier instant when God sent the wolf his way Nikolai’s “greatest happiness”? Yes it was, but so is this one. Tolstoy isn’t being logical (there can only be one happiest moment in a person’s life, right?), but he is being truthful in a deeper sense. With the animal-like thrill of the chase coursing through his body, Nikolai experiences things with a concentrated intensity unavailable at other times. If you’ve ever been to a sporting event and had your eyes glued to the ball moving down the court, across the field, or over the net in the final crucial moments, you know this feeling. Each basket made, each first down gained, each serve that goes unreturned—it can feel like the greatest happiness of your life, or most unbearable misery, depending on whose side you’re on, over and over again, all within the span of minutes. To some viewers, it can seem almost like a religious experience. To the players, it often is a religious experience, as I myself know from one unforgettable squash match I played in college.
Darting about the court and literally diving for balls, as sweat pours into my eyes, my mouth, my ears, I hate my opponent every bit as much as he hates me. Not wanting to miss a single drop shot, I crowd behind the enemy so closely that his racket follows through right into my mouth. I fall to the ground, I later learn, though all I will remember is the high tinkling of a wineglass that for some reason has just shattered near me. As it turns out, that is the sound of my two front teeth landing on the wooden floor. I carefully pick them up, walk to the door at the back of the court, and hand them to my coach. He says something, but all I recall from that point on is the taste of the saltiness in my mouth—is it blood or sweat?—as well as the fleshy, toothless feeling and the piercing lemony sting as my tongue grazes the roof of my mouth where the two teeth used to be and now only the nerves dangle. I continue to play, as if nothing happened, winning that game over my shocked opponent, though losing the match to the better player.
Here’s the thing: those forty-five minutes during which I was engaged in what seemed like a dance to the death on a sweat and blood-streaked squash floor were among the very happiest moments of my life—self-consciousness having dropped away as suddenly as my teeth. Everything worked together in perfect harmony. I was focused and flowing, and the world, weirdly right. This, I know, is what Nikolai feels on the hunt, sport having become nothing less than a connection to the divine, to life’s most vital energies.
If you’re having a bit of déjà vu, that’s because . . . we’ve been here before—sort of anyway. The similarities between this scene and the earlier one in which Nikolai hears Natasha sing after his huge gambling loss are striking. In both scenes, there is a sense of at once disorientation, and heightened awareness. In both cases, Nikolai is in a state psychologists sometimes refer to as “flow,” Buddhists as “samadhi,” and athletes as “being in the zone.” Totally immersed in what is happening in the moment, he loses his sense of both self and time, so acutely focused on the tiniest details of his surroundings that he has in fact merged with them.
“ ‘No, it can’t be!’ ” he thinks as the wolf comes his way, his prayer having been answered. Much as, when the notes start pouring out of Natasha, he thought, “ ‘What on earth is this?’ . . . And suddenly the whole world became concentrated for him on the expectation of the next note, the next phrase” (343). So, too, here—only he is focused entirely on the wolf’s next move. And just as in the earlier scene, in which, “without noticing it, he himself was singing” alongside Natasha, so now Nikolai “did not hear his own shouts, did not feel that he was galloping, did not see the dogs or the space over which he was galloping; he saw only the wolf” (500).
In the earlier scene Nikolai experiences the world suddenly as infinitely larger than all of his previous frameworks of understanding. In such an expanded state, questions of right and wrong, good and bad play no part. “ ‘One can kill, and steal, and still be happy!’ ” Nikolai thinks as he listens to Natasha sing (343). Something similar happens now: He heads back out to the fields with a distant relative and neighbor of the Rostovs, affectionately known as “uncle,” and runs into Ilagin, a wealthy neighboring landowner who has just crossed over into the Rostovs’ quarry. Greeting one another amiably, Ilagin apologizes for his accidental encroachment and suggests that the two parties join forces and hunt together on his property. As rules of politeness require, they compliment one another’s dogs, and put up a façade of friendliness, with Ilagin going so far as to suggest that “ ‘this counting skins, who brought in how many—it’s all the same to me!’ ” (505).
Like hell it is. What matters most to these men is whose dog sinks his teeth into the hare’s neck first. Violent? Sure. Ungentlemanly? Absolutely. And yet completely authentic, stripped of false modesty or social pretense. Cutting off the hare’s leg and shaking it so that the blood runs down more quickly, uncle’s victorious reaction of joy intermixed with anger and pride tells the larger truth about what this hunt is really all about:
“There’s a dog . . . outran them all, a thousand rubles or one—right you are!” he said, gasping and looking around angrily, as if scolding someone, as if they were all his enemies, as if they had all offended him, and he had only now finally managed to vindicate himself. “There’s your thousand ruble dogs for you—right you are!” (507)
And right he is. For he who is happy is right. Uncle is in touch with a joy of living so visceral and truthful that it merges with disgust, pride, exhilaration, revenge, and a whole host of other feelings. Here is life at its rawest and most real, like something out of Homer’s Iliad, a book that Tolstoy loved and read often, and to which he on one occasion proudly compared War and Peace. Natasha, sensing the intense energy of this moment, expresses its wild, epic thrill, not through words, but through
a joyful and rapturous shriek, so shrill that it made their ears ring. With this shriek she expressed everything the other hunters had expressed with their simultaneous talk. And this shriek was so odd that she herself would have been embarrassed at such wild shrieking, and they all would have been surprised at it, if it had happened at any other time. (507)
But not in this instant they aren’t. Later on, when life returns to its ordinary rhythms and patterns of behavior, the men will recover their “sham indifference.” But in this moment the world is bigger and more heroic, as uncle becomes godlike in Nikolai’s eyes, uncle’s dog marches behind the horse carrying the bleeding rabbit “with the calm look of a conqueror” (507), and Nikolai is flattered beyond belief when, “after all that had happened, uncle still condescended to speak to him” (508).
For those who stand outside it, such full-blooded intensity may appear puzzling, if not repulsive. “Now, is that really the spirit of friendly competition?” asked an interviewer a few months later, bothered by the violent description of that squash match I’d included in a scholarship application. “Oh, I definitely believe in friendly rivalry,” I responded. “I guess I was just trying to communicate my passion for the game,” I added, with an aw-shucks smile. “Maybe I got a little carried away in my description.” Satisfied, everybody on the interview committee nodded. But deep down I knew that I was fibbing, for like Nikolai, I’d experienced something big and special on the squash court that day—something that can’t be captured by an ordinary phrase like “friendly rivalry.” With age I have learned to temper my joie de vivre, to speak about such passionate moments in a more . . . socially appropriate way. But I often wonder with Tolstoy whether this routinely practiced sham doesn’t rather mute our ability to identify the real thing when it happens, if not kill our very ability to experience it.
There is one important difference between Nikolai’s experience of the hunt and his experience of hearing Natasha sing. The earlier scene occurs on the heels of a major rupture. Nikolai has just lost forty-three thousand rubles, along with his sense of honor, and he is ready to put a gun to his head. Whereas in the hunt scene no such rupture has taken place. Sure, he’s had to deal with estate management issues, but beyond that, nothing major has happened. As often as it takes a crisis to catapult us into these states of intense experience, Tolstoy is showing, it is also possible to achieve them in the midst of everyday living and ordinary family life.
That Tolstoy chooses a hunt to communicate this message makes sense. Hunting, after all, had been a staple of Russian aristocratic life for generations. Whenever his writing wasn’t going well, or he was out of sorts, Tolstoy himself would get his guns, pack his bags, call his huntsman, and head off for the woods for a day or more. He’d kill anything—fox, hares, wolves, even bears; in fact, once he was almost mauled to death by one of the last, a mishap he’d later recount in an adventure story for children.
The tradition lives on in the Tolstoy family. The writer’s great-great-great-grandson Ilya still loves to hunt at Yasnaya Polyana. As he described to me his passion recently, I was acutely aware of myself as an American City Slicker, quite literally out of my element. What Ilya was trying to describe, and what Tolstoy depicts so effectively in War and Peace, is what it feels like to be in sync with life’s most elemental forces. For generations of Russian peasants who lived in harsh landscapes through subpolar winters that lasted almost five months out of the year, hunting was a direct confrontation with those forces. Hunting in such an environment was a form of survival. But to later generations of aristocrats, like the Rostovs or the Tolstoys, it would become a ritualistic reenactment of those good ol’ bad ol’ days on the Russian steppe, when man was put into direct contact with nature’s simplest, most visceral truths.
Is it any wonder, then, that with centuries of hunting practice the Russians ousted the French in 1812? For the earthy wisdom and feeling for nature that are required of a good hunter were the very qualities Russians needed to lure and then destroy the French beast. And the novel’s many analogies between hunting and warfare would seem to suggest that these connections were hardly lost on Tolstoy.
If you’re not one for metaphors, you might also just enjoy these pages as some of the most thrilling Tolstoy ever wrote: you almost feel as if, rather than reading a work of fiction, you were experiencing, in Matthew Arnold’s apt description of Anna Karenina, a “piece of life. . . . The author has not invented and combined it; he has seen it.” And heard, touched, smelled it—all of it. In these pages there is brutality and bloodiness and beauty almost beyond words. There is unbearable rightness of being. This, Tolstoy is saying, is what it feels like to live in the now.
These scenes don’t advance the plot, or tell us any more about Nikolai or Natasha than we already knew. They don’t really seem to serve any purpose at all beyond themselves, and as such, would have been an easy target for those contemporary critics who blamed Tolstoy for breaking the rules of good novel-writing. But try to imagine War and Peace without them! You can’t, for they are War and Peace. They contain its essential DNA. “The hunt is described so seriously, precisely because it is equally important,” Tolstoy wrote in a draft of the novel’s epilogue, anticipating readers’ bewildered reaction to these scenes. In the 1860s, an era of grandiose thinkers with big plans for the human race, the hunt as Tolstoy describes it invites readers to come down from their castles in the sky and behold the gorgeousness of the here and now, in all of its raw splendor.
Russians have a saying: “In nature there is no bad weather.” And in War and Peace Tolstoy says something similar: The bad times, like the good ones, are inseparable aspects of our human experience, and just as it takes both the sun and the rain to make a rainbow, so it takes both the joy and the pain to make a complete human being. Close yourself off to the flow of experience, live in fear of the unfamiliar, and you will enjoy a predictably comfortable numbness. Embrace life on its own mysterious terms, on the other hand, take the risk of living fully, and you will know your share of pain. But you will also feel the consummate joy of being alive.