War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - Essay Example

Your full here Your here here here War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: The Inspection In his lifetime, Leo Tolstoyexperienced both war and peace. He was brought up in a well-to-do family, one of the oldest and best of Russian society, and enjoyed a peaceful childhood. He went to the University of Kazan in 1844 but ultimately shunned academic learning, only attending some classes in jurisprudence before returning to his ancestral estate, with the good intention of improving the lives of the peasants who worked there, but ultimately giving in to a dissipated life for a couple of years in the wake of their evident distrust. He then began his military career, in 1852, subsequently fighting against the Chechenians in Georgia and against the Turks in Sevastopol, then retired from the army and later married Sofya Andreyevna Bers, with whom he was deeply in love and had nine children. In a nutshell, Tolstoy’s life experiences made him extremely qualified to write a novel about war and peace, having lived both extremes. When we consider Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the first thing we are drawn to is the title, which implies the interplay of two opposites. Here, and for the purposes of this essay, war can be likened to chaos and peace can be likened to structure (or vice versa, as will be shown later on). In and of itself, this historical novel’s very name draws us to the possibilities of two very different processes or outcomes and instills high expectations in the reader as to the scope of treatment and depiction of these two distinct states of being, and the situations that lead to and revolve around them both. Within Tolstoy’s epic work, perhaps one of the best passages to embody the representation of chaos and structure is found in Book Two: 1805, Chapters I and II, which describes the military inspection of a Russian infantry regiment led by a Commander of Austrian origin nicknamed “The King of Hearts.” His regiment has just reached the town of Braunau, Austria when he receives word that Commander-in-Chief Kutuzov will be inspecting them on the march. Not only in the description of this event, but also throughout the entire novel, in addition to objective, straightforward prose Tolstoy often employs rather light-hearted and comical narrative and dialogue that belie the inferred solemnity of its title. In describing the ambiguity of the inspection order’s wording and going on to clarify that Kutuzov means “to show [...] the wretched state in which the troops arrived from Russia” as an argument to not have them join up with the army of the Archduke Ferdinand and Mack, Tolstoy aptly foreshadows the state of things to come, since “The King of Hearts”, after consulting with the battalion commanders, had decided to present the regiment in parade order, having the men stay up all night after a twenty-mile march mending and cleaning so that the next day they appear as a “well-ordered array of two thousand men, each of whom [knows] his place and his duty, [has] every button and every strap in place, and [shines] with cleanliness.” While the commander proudly walks the front of the line of his now neatly organized regiment, Kutuzov’s messenger is approaching to clarify the order issued the night before, that is, “that the commander in chief wished to see the regiment just in the state in which it had been on the march[...], without any preparation whatsoever.” As a matter of fact, given the position the commander in chief wishes to take regarding the junction of his troops with the others, “the worse condition it was in, the better pleased [Kutuzov] would be[!]” This leads them to a major scramble to get back into their marching uniforms within the hour, before Kutuzov gets there. This scene plays out so ingeniously, perfectly showing the contrast between order/structure and disorder/chaos, that one would be hard-put to find any other single event that so accurately depicts the ultimate outcome of a dynamic set of possibilities anywhere else in the book. The ensuing dialogue between “The King of Hearts” and his subordinates is also hilariously satirical, as he tries to place the blame on others for the decision that he had, in the end, made himself. Tolstoy deftly uses metaphor to show the reprimanding mood the regiment commander is in and the respect and even fear that exists between commanding officers and their subordinates, first when he describes how he checks the troops before Kutuzov’s arrival. A captain who has been called out shows “the uneasiness of a schoolboy who is told to repeat a lesson he had not learned.” Afterward, the simile that “the regiment fluttered like a bird preening its plumage” prior to the arrival of Kutuzov could be described as a well-used “reverse anthropomorphism” or, in other words, a zoomorphism, clearly indicating how important the Commander-in-Chief’s approval is to the troops. The phrase “the clear blue eyes [...seemed...] by their expression to tear open the veil of convention” bestows physical qualities on an abstract concept by likening convention to a veil, and then endows eyes with the ability to “tear,” using both a simile and a metaphor in the same sentence to describe the attitude Private Dolokhov assumes when he becomes the scapegoat of the Commander’s ire. Tolstoy also makes use of puns such as “In a word, a hearty one,” a phrase attributed to one of the subalterns who is giving his opinion on the regimental commander’s character, making a wordplay of his nickname, King of Hearts. There is a rich use of many literary devices throughout this passage, all serving the common goal of conveying a moment in time, a situation or event that, though apparently military and serious in nature, is rendered humorous by the wording, imagination and tone of the writer, one of matter-of-fact story-telling coupled with a varnish of frequent general comicality and sympathetic understanding of his characters. This passage is also representative of an important transition in Tolstoy’s world of “War and Peace.” He takes us from the gay and carefree life of upper-scale Russian society, from the balls, soirees, dinners and family goings-on, from the personal lives and dramas of his characters, to the tumultuous rigidity and starkness of peoples at war. He takes us from settings and situations that are familiar to most people, to settings and situations that are experienced by only a small percentage of the population, to the male universe of war and conflict, the taking of sides and the pledge of allegiance to the apparent order and stringency of the militia, the acceptance of a place within a pyramidal structure based on strict organization but meant to generate chaos to further the causes of those at the top, the nations’ leaders. He successfully establishes a contrast between the institutional and the familial, between the military and the civil, between bondage and freedom. So the first two chapters of Book Two are important not only as a small story within a story that accurately reflects the message of its author as intended on a grander, novel-size scale, but also as a stand-alone episode that introduces the reader to the military trappings of wartime and, on some level, makes folly of the notion of order, proving to some extent that there can be chaos in order, and order in chaos. The apparent lack of order of a civil society at peace, also akin to freedom in which everyone is free to follow the path they see fit, resulting in a disparity of individual actions and interactions, contrasts with the deceivingly rigid structure of a machinery that, despite the meticulous arrangement of its inner circles, outwardly furthers the chaos that is destruction, the taking of lives and the upheaval of customs, traditions and established societal structures. Works Cited Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Project Gutenberg E-book. April, 2001. (February 26, 2006) Read More