Sausage with obstacles: How to turn "War and Peace" into a literary attraction
In the introduction to his study of War and Peace, Vyacheslav Kuritsyn shares a memory of how he first came across Tolstoy's novel at the age of eight and was struck by the amazing mix of Russian and French on the very first pages. Then the impressionable child could understand little of the strange book, but the feeling of its "outlandishness" struck the future philologist forever and for the past half-century has not faded a bit, but poured into this voluminous volume. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week, especially for Izvestia.
Vyacheslav Kuritsyn
"The main Russian book. On "War and Peace" by L.N. Tolstoy."
Moscow: "Vremya", 2024. - 400 с.
Now, of course, an experienced researcher possesses a rather sophisticated toolkit that allows him to uncover some of the secret springs of this bizarre construction, to show the reader the "inner landscape" of Tolstoy's text: "underwater currents and rhythms, zones of densification, invisible registers and waves, and, of course, speed switches". Without claiming that "War and Peace" was revealed to him in the "true light" (it is not at all possible even as a result of years of rereading within one human life), Kuritsyn tries to give the reader the opportunity to see Tolstoy's epic "all at once, like a sculpture, which does not have to be perceived "in a row", chapter by chapter, but can be walked around it, enjoying new and new angles. Then the meanings, by the way, will fly and sit each on its own branch."
Pompous word "epic" researcher uses only rarely, purely for lexical diversity, preferring to call "War and Peace" simply a book, and even more often, with undisguised tenderness - book. There is something touching, paradoxically tender and in the name used for his brainchild Leo Tolstoy himself, who wrote to A. Fetu on January 23, 1865, two weeks before the first journal publication of "War and Peace" in the "Russian Herald" that his new thing - "a long sausage, which is tight and dense lezhetsya. Kuritsyn talks about this in the first part of the book (where the first six chapters are discussed in detail), a little embarrassed by the crudeness of Tolstoy's "meat-packing plant" association and thinking that a more technical metaphor ("something with levers, with mechanisms") is called for, but he approves of the words "tight and thick" as accurate: "We are dealing with an unwieldy dynamic construction, which stubbornly moves forward, but with spasms, with stumbles, because it is stuffed with internal movements in different directions".
However, the comparison of "War and Peace" with a densely climbing sausage, as Kuritsyn notes somewhere in the middle of the book, "is not the only masterpiece in the genre of bold likenesses". Another belongs to Konstantin Leontiev, who looked at War and Peace as a fossilized Sivaterium, "whose huge skulls are kept in India, the temples of the god Siva. And trunk, and enormity, and fangs, and over and above the fangs still horns, as if in defiance of all zoological propriety."
The grandiosity of this spectacle Leontiev added another gorgeous metaphor: "Or we can liken "War and Peace" to an Indian idol: three heads, or four faces, and six hands! And the size is huge, and the material is precious, and the eyes are made of rubies and diamonds, not only under the forehead, but also on the forehead!!!" Kuritsyn wittily harnesses Leontief's Sivaterium for his various needs, showing how "in the movement of this beautiful creature, dozens of different kinds of failures and short-circuits occur simultaneously", and developing the theme of the confused rhythm of Tolstoy's narrative: "Constant freezes, local shutdowns, the stupor of certain characters - it is not easy for a Sivaterium with diamond fangs".
It is not easy for the reader of Tolstoy's novel, as Kuritsyn explains in the chapter "A Few Words on the Meaning of the Title "War and Peace": "...the title of the book indicates its "themes", but after reading twenty-five chapters, we saw that this is also its structure. The device of individual chapters, the combination of chapters, the device of scenes, most of the conversations - everything works in a roll-up-and-roll-down, attack-defense mode. If in some situation one character outdid the other, won something from him, then in the next situation the loser seeks to win back. Obstacles constantly stand in the way of the characters, the readers, and, it seems, the text itself." Classifying the kinds and types of all kinds of obstacles, diligently scattered everywhere by Tolstoy ("not only under the feet of the characters, but also inside, in their minds, bodies and hearts"), Kuritsyn finds a philosophical justification for them: "In the book, the idea that an obstacle, generally speaking, is a necessary condition for meaningful movement, a condition of life itself, constantly pops up. In Pierre's mind, it is as if the main screw has curled up, spinning on the same slice, capturing nothing: the screw spins unimpeded, and it is empty motion. His Mason friends proclaim the goal of life to be self-improvement, which is achieved only by struggle. <...> Napoleon's army, meeting no resistance, is too stretched out, which becomes the cause of its doom."
It is the abundance of textual obstacles that complicate reading (oddities of internal chronology, rhythmic tricks, different genre and stylistic character of different parts of the text, where sometimes long lines of dots are inserted instead of words, constant change of points of view and stratification of the narrator) turns "War and Peace" into such a fascinating attraction, a kind of literary moon-park with swings-carousels, catapults and Russian slides. Kuritsyn sees the main secret of the appeal and vitality of "War and Peace" in the fact that Tolstoy created it in human image and likeness: "War and Peace" is organized as a human being - a reflective person who experiences external and internal contradictions, tries to responsibly look at himself from the outside, wondering how against the background of endlessly divergent feelings, emotions and interests, the personality still retains unity, and life manages to continue. The levels of our personality and layers of reality are so numerous, diverse and sometimes hostile to each other, their interaction is so difficult that it would seem that this machine should not work - but somehow it does.
Having formulated this main idea of his study, Kuritsyn, however, does not put the point, but proceeds, as he warns, to "the most boring chapter", devoted to the analysis of the huge philosophical epilogue of "War and Peace", which most readers flip through. Even now, they can take advantage of Kuritsyn's kind offer to jump straight to the end of the chapter, where the results are summarized. But before that it still makes sense to observe how Kuritsyn acts in relation to Tolstoy as a kind of "investigator", persistently but vainly trying to "split" Lev Nikolayevich into some consistent truths about the world order and the laws of historical development. In the end, the philologist is forced to humble himself and let go of the reins of his faithful sivaterium, which comes in handy this time already in the form of the whole term "sivaterium", denoting the structural complexity of "War and Peace": "All this is not so much philosophy as a kunstschtuk forged under the philosophical style, which does not fall away from War and Peace, but fits harmoniously into the book, because it corresponds to the structure of the novel as a whole, its fundamental sivaterium."
Clumsy, cumbersome and stumbling, but monstrously beautiful sivaterium helps Kuritsyn to justify and ennoble even such an outrageous, often upsetting romantic and progressive readers of the moment, as the final transformation of "obobilized" Natasha Rostova: "In War and Peace, the transformation of an airy female into a heavy female is the author's heroic attempt to stop the drum of contradictions, to harmonize the movement of cosmic layers, to show the beauty of the sivaterium movement: it sounds absurd, but he succeeded, the carnival of fundamental irreducibilities was reduced to a book that makes you love life and cry on the spring sunlit floor of a home library, even in Ohio, even in Kostroma".
