For 11/11/2021, to p.1106
Chapter 16
Andrei knows he is dying and feels like he is almost already dead; after the shell came his way, he didn’t fear death and realized that because he loves everything he also loves no one and nothing in particular. But then Natasha makes him hope and love again, and for a moment they had both thought that he would live and that it would be so good. But then he dozes off and dreams of a door he is desperately trying to keep closed as death pushes it open from the other side. As he gives up and the door opens, he dreams he dies as he wakes up, and realizes that death is an awakening. From that point on forward, Natasha realizes that he is detached from life, and dies slowly as the two women watch him go through the motions of receiving communion and blessing his son. Both women are present when he dies, and only then Natasha and Marya weep”with a reverent and softening emotion” as they have witnessed “the simple and solemn mystery of death” (1060-61).
Book Four, Part 2
Scene: Wherever the Russian Army is along the Kaluga Road in October 1812
Chapter 1
Questions of causality and history are raised again by Tolstoi’s narrator: the (apparently famous) “flank march” of the Russian army that took them from the Ryazan to the Kaluga road was not caused by any particular thing, certainly not by a hero / genius commander; it was multicausal, a chain of events in which the availability of provisions for the army along that road probably played the biggest road. The actual plan was a retreat, and it was not a deliberate choice that at Tarutino along this road, they actually encountered the French army; only hindsight creates a fiction of specific intent out of the “innumerable and varying forces” (1064) that led the army there.
Chapter 2
So, the “flank march” through a provision-rich area is very natural, almost as if it were guided by the law of physics, not really orchestrated by Kutuzov, whose main goal is to prevent useless battles and loss of life, as he is trying to figure out whether the French army is already a mortally “wounded beast” (1065) as a result of the earlier battle of Borodino (1065). He refuses Napoleon’s overture at negotiations on Oct. 3 because he thinks they are in position of strength.
Chapter 3
Meanwhile, in Petersburgh, the Tzar and his advisors want to see more action, and the rounds of musical chairs in military leadership after the death of Bagration and the departure of Barclay are especially complex because Kutuzov and Bennigsen, his chief of staff, are at lagerheads. On Oct. 2, the Tzar writes to Kutuzov to urge him to take the offensive, but by the time the letter arrives, the battle of Tarutino, which Kutuzov didn’t want to happen, has already happened; he reluctantly gives his approval because by the time he hears about Cossacks happening on Murat’s French regiment, it is already “an accomplished fact.”
Chapter 4
Kutuzov signs the dispositions, written by the German officer Toll, on October 4, for an engagement on October 5. Again, the narrator makes fun of these precise and elegant dispositions, none of which are or can be implemented. In this case, there is active resistance, if not negligence, because a [general?] named Ermolov is informed of them and just walks off to party and get drunk, so that the orders do not get passed on–allegedly to get yet another [general], Konovnitsyn, in trouble. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE AND WHY ARE WE ONLY JUST HEARING OF THEM?
Chapter 5
The result is that when Kutuzov surveys the scene on October 5, he finds no part of his army in position, the soldiers not ready, and throws a fit, yelling at the senior officers in his vicinity and later letting himself be convinced by Bennigsen, Toll, and Konovnitsyn to have his orders executed the next morning instead.
Chapter 6
Everyone is now in position and the men are excited about an engagement. One commander, Count Orlov-Denisov, hears from a Polish deserter that the Count’s Cossacks (“the least important detachment of all” 1072) would have a chance to capture Murat. Count Orlov sends out two regiments, but then gets cold feet and calls them back. He then advances, and the Cossacks loot the French camp but do not pursue the fleeing French or capture Murat; other parts of the army are in the wrong places, and the battle as a whole is chaos, “everything upside down everywhere” (1074), with men fighting and dying for no reason.
Chapter 7
Kutuzov himself is accompanying a regiment that attacks the French from the front, but they advance only hesitantly; ultimately, the only really “productive” battle remained the engagement of Orlov’s Cossack’s with the French. And yet, Kutuzov and Bennigsen were later highly decorated for this–and that’s not even wrong, the narrator tells us, because a) it is like all battles, chaos and full of unplanned, unexpected events, and b) even though it didn’t do any of the things that the various commanders and regiments wanted to accomplish (list at the bottom of p.1076), it did paradoxically accomplish what was at that point needed: “With a minimum of effort and insignificant losses” it gave the French army the “shock” it needed to begin fleeing (1077).
Scene: Napoleon in Moscow
Chapter 8
Going back to Napoleon’s month in Moscow and describing his actions up to that retreat, the narrator tells us about the errors of inaction (not getting provender, not getting winter clothing, stopping the army from looting) and the wrong actions (remaining in Moscow too far into the winter, but also not deciding to winter there or to advance toward Petersburg or Novgorod) but instead leave along the Smolensk road through the countryside his army had destroyed). But he argues that this is not a lessening of Napoleon’s alleged genius, but just his “personal activity” coinciding “with the lwas that guided the event” (1078). [I am a little surprised that the well-known argument about the French just ignoring what was known about the severity of the Russian winter doesn’t even come up here.]
Chapter 9
The narrator describes and quotes from the various grandiose-sounding policies and measures that were ordered by Napoleon while in Moscow to encourage the Moscovites to return to normal life and commerce under French governance.
Chapter 10
This is followed by a systematic description of how all of these policies and measures failed, including in particular the attempts to stop the French from looting. Instead, the army kept wreaking havoc, destroying the very resources (provender) they needed, and then began to flee from Moscow with their booty like “a wounded animal which feels it is perishing and does not know what it is doing” (1084) and ultimately picks the worst route (i.e. the familiar road to Smolensk). Lots of animal metaphors (herds of cattle etc.) at this point, but Napoleon “acted like a child who holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it” (1085).
Scene: Prison in Moscow
Chapter 11
By Oct 6 (the day of the battle), Pierre has now been in “POW” prison with other soldiers and officers for a month. He is much changed–dressing very simply, bearded, slimmer but also “resolute, calm, and animatedly alert.” He gets along well with his fellow prisoners, and, because he speaks French, also with the French guards, and is often the liaison between the two. When a French soldier comes to get a shirt that he has hired Platon Karataev to make, Pierre translates back and forth and thereby ensures that Platon can keep the leftover linen scraps, which the Frenchman wants returned at first.
Chapter 12
Jail time has transformed Pierre–he has “peace and inner harmony” (1089), partly because of the horrific experience of the executions and partly because it is clearer to him what he would really desire that he is currently deprived of–“good food, cleanliness, and freedom” instead of scraps, lice/dirty clothes, and imprisonment, and even without these, he feels joyful, alert, and also useful to the other prisoners, enjoying the sense that he has a responsibility to them and that they are grateful he is sharing what he has (3 rubles a week for “officers” even though he isn’t one?).
Chapter 13
The French are evacuating the prison during the night from Oct 6 to 7, and although Pierre tries his best to find out what should happen with a seriously ill jailed soldier who should be in a hospital, the French in command are now stern and hostile and tell him the man just has to walk. For the first time, he encounters the other imprisoned officers, who look at him in distrust and also in a very dark mood. For the first time, they all see the charred ruins of Moscow as they are herded forward by their guards.
Chapter 14
As they get closer to the bridge that leads them out of town, they effectively get stuck between various trains of artillery wagons and private baggage vehicles, and just stare at the crowds of people–French soldiers and Russian civilians, all with the “coldly cruel expression” that Pierre has noticed. Eventually, closer to evening on the 7th, the officer in charge of the prison escort forces a merger with the crowd and the prisoners march down Kaluga road, treating them badly, while the prisoners try to avoid talking about their current plight and joke and chat instead. As they camp for the night, he wanders away from commoners and officers and sits on a cart, laughing to himself at the absurd idea of the French trying to imprison his “immortal soul” (1097). He sleeps peacefully among the other prisoners.
Scene: Wherever the Russian Army is along the Kaluga Road in October 1812
Chapter 15
Kutuzov dismisses another envoy from Napoleon and gives way to the pressure of his officers, agreeing to a small offensive against one French Regiment (Broussier’s) led by Dokhturov, a general considered unimportant, a Forminsk. By the time he gets there, not just Broussier, but as per a prisoner’s information, the vanguard of the French army, including Napoleon, is there. Dokhturov is unsure what to do and sends a messenger, Bolkhovitinov, to Kutozov.
Chapter 16
During the night of October 11, Bolkhovitinov arrives at Litashovka, where Kutuzov is, but it takes a while to get through to a) an orderly, b) an adjutant, c) general Konovnitsyn, who is dead asleep and ill, and then finally, with the general’s help, to headquarters, where Toll and others get to hear the news before, finally reaching:
Chapter 17
d) Kutuzov, who listens to the message from Dokhturov in the spirit of his philosophy of waiting for a clear sign that the “wounded beast” (the French army) is clearly mortally wounded. The narrator points out that because of his experience, Kutuzov sees a thousand contingencies and possibilities where his staff only sees a few, and that he wants to make sure that he can destroy the French. When Toll brings Bolkhovitinov to him that night and he hears the account of the French vanguard at Forminsk, he knows that the French are done for and that “Russia is saved”–and weeps (1106).
Chapter 18
And still, Kutuzov’s main focus at this point is to restrain the Russian army, forcing their retreat and the evacuation of Kaluga, just as the French are fleeing in the opposite direction, an army that is self-destructing because since Borodino and the looting of Moscow, it “had borne within itself… the chemical elements of dissolution” (1105), everyone just trying to save their own hide. The shock of realizing that the Russians are so close that, if some Cossacks, who are again just after booty, had tried to, they could have captured Napoleon, is enough to make the French rush off, taking the familiar (but fatefully wrong) road to Smolensk that they came on to flee.