1. "War and Peace" as a work of the 60s of the XIX century
The 60s of the XIX century in Russia became the period of the highest activity of the peasant masses, the rise of the social movement. The central theme of the literature of the 60s was the theme of the people. This topic, as well as contemporary problems to Tolstoy, are viewed by the writer through the prism of history. Researchers of Tolstoy's work differ on the question of what, in fact, Tolstoy meant by the word "people" - peasants, the nation as a whole, merchants, philistines, patriotic patriarchal nobility. Of course, all these layers are included in Tolstoy's understanding of the word "people", but only when they are the bearers of morality. Everything that is immoral is excluded by Tolstoy from the concept of "people."
2. Philosophy of history, images of Kutuzov and Napoleon
Tolstoy's work asserts the decisive role of the masses in history. In his opinion, the actions of the so-called "great people" do not have a decisive influence on the course historical events... The question of the role of personality in history is raised at the beginning of the third volume (First part, first chapter):
- With regard to history, the personality in to a greater extent acts unconsciously than consciously;
- A person is more free in his private life than in public;
- The higher a person stands on the rungs of the social ladder, the more obvious is the predetermination and inevitability in his fate;
Tolstoy comes to the conclusion that "the Tsar is the slave of history." Tolstoy's contemporary, the historian Bogdanovich, first of all pointed to the decisive role of Alexander the First in the victory over Napoleon, and generally discounted the role of the people and Kutuzov. Tolstoy, on the other hand, set himself the task of debunking the role of the tsars and showing the role of the masses and the people's commander Kutuzov. The writer reflects the moments of Kutuzov's inaction in the novel. This is due to the fact that Kutuzov cannot dispose of historical events of his own free will. But he was given to realize the actual course of events in the implementation of which he participates. Kutuzov cannot understand the world-historical meaning of the war of 1812, but he is aware of the significance of this event for his people, that is, he can be a conscious guide in the course of history. Kutuzov himself is close to the people, he feels the spirit of the army and can control this great force (the main task of Kutuzov during the Battle of Borodino is to raise the spirit of the army). Napoleon lacks understanding of the current events, he is a pawn in the hands of history. The image of Napoleon personifies extreme individualism and selfishness. Self-lover-Napoleon acts like a blind man. He is not a great person, he cannot determine the moral meaning of an event due to his own limitations. Tolstoy's innovation consisted in the fact that he introduced a moral criterion into history (polemic with Hegel).
3. "People's thought" and the forms of its embodiment
The path of ideological and moral growth leads goodies to rapprochement with the people (not a break with one's own class, but moral unity with the people). Heroes are tested by the Patriotic War. The independence of private life from the political game of the leaders underlines the inextricable connection of the heroes with the life of the people. The viability of each of the heroes is tested by the "people's thought". She helps Pierre Bezukhov to discover and show his best qualities; Andrei Bolkonsky is called "our prince"; Natasha Rostova gets carts for the wounded; Marya Bolkonskaya rejects Mademoiselle Bourienne's offer to remain in Napoleon's power. Along with the true nationality, Tolstoy also shows pseudo-nationality, a fake for it. This is reflected in the images of Rostopchin and Speransky (specific historical figures), who, although they try to take on the right to speak on behalf of the people, have nothing to do with them. Tolstoy did not need a large number of images from the common people (one should not confuse nationality and common people). Patriotism is a property of the soul of any Russian person, and in this respect there is no difference between Andrei Bolkonsky and any soldier of his regiment. Captain Tushin is also close to the people, in whose image "small and great", "modest and heroic" are combined. Often, the participants in the hike are not named at all (for example, "drummer-lead singer"). The theme of the people's war finds its vivid expression in the image of Tikhon Shcherbaty. The image is ambiguous (the murder of the "language", the "Razin" beginning). The image of Platon Karataev is also ambiguous, in the conditions of captivity he again turned to his origins (everything "superficial, soldier's" falls from him, and the peasant remains). Observing him, Pierre Bezukhov understands that the living life of the world is higher than any speculation and that happiness is in itself. However, unlike Tikhon Shcherbaty, Karataev is hardly capable of decisive action, his goodness leads to passivity.
In scenes with Napoleon, Tolstoy uses the technique of satirical grotesque: Napoleon is overwhelmed with self-adoration, his thoughts are criminal, his patriotism is fake (episodes with Lavrushka, the awarding of a soldier Lazarev with the Order of the Legion of Honor, a scene with a portrait of his son, morning toilet in front of Borodin, waiting for the deputation of the Muscovites) ... Undisclosed irony is also imbued with the image of the life of other people who are also far from the people - regardless of their nationality (Alexander the First, Anna Pavlovna Sherer, the Kuragin family, Bergi, Drubetskoy, etc.).
The path of the heroes belonging to the aristocracy to spiritual unity with the people is depicted by Tolstoy in its contradictions and ambiguity. The writer ironically describes the delusions and self-deception of the heroes (Pierre's trip to the southern estates, idealistic fruitless attempts at innovations; the riot of the peasants in Bogucharovo, Princess Mary's attempt to distribute the master's bread, etc.).
4. Historical and philosophical digressions
In the work, the artistic narration itself is at times interrupted by historical and philosophical digressions, in style close to publicism. The pathos of Tolstoy's philosophical digressions is directed against the liberal-bourgeois military historians and writers. According to Tolstoy, "the world denies war" (for example, the description of the dam that Russian soldiers see during the retreat after Austerlitz - devastated and ugly, and comparing it in peacetime - buried in greenery, neat and rebuilt). Tolstoy raises the question of the correlation between the individual and society, the leader and the masses (Pierre's dream after Borodin: he dreams of the deceased Bazdeev (the freemason who introduced him to the box), who says: “War is the most difficult submission of human freedom to the laws of God ... Nothing a person can own as long as he is afraid of death, and whoever is not afraid of it, everything belongs to him ... The most difficult thing is to be able to combine the meaning of everything in his soul. ”Pierre also dreams of ordinary soldiers whom he saw on the They prayed to the icon. Pierre thinks that there is no better lot than being a simple soldier and doing business, and not reasoning like his former acquaintances, whom he also sees in a dream. Another dream is on the eve of his release from captivity, after the death of Karataev. Old teacher geography shows Pierre a globe, which is a huge, oscillating ball. "The entire surface of the ball consisted of drops tightly compressed among themselves. And all these drops moved, moved and then merged from several to one, then from one they were divided into many. Each drop was striving ... to capture the greatest space ... “This is life, - said the old man ... - God is in the middle, and each drop seeks to expand in order to reflect it in the greatest size ... *). Tolstoy is not a fatalist historian. In his work, the question of the moral responsibility of a person - a historical figure and every person - before history is especially acute. According to Tolstoy, a person is less free the closer he is placed to power, but a private person is also not free. Tolstoy emphasizes that one must be able to go broke for the sake of defending the Fatherland, as the Rostovs do, be ready to give everything, sacrifice everything, as Pierre Bezukhov can do, but the eminent merchants and noble nobility who have come to the building of the noble assembly are not able to.
And suddenly Pierre introduced himself as a living, long forgotten, meek old teacher who taught Geography to Pierre in Switzerland. "Wait," said the old man. And he showed Pierre the globe. This globe was a living, vibrating ball without dimensions. The entire surface of the sphere consisted of drops tightly compressed together. And these drops all moved, moved and then merged from several into one, then from one they were divided into many. Each drop tried to spill out, to capture the largest space, but others, striving for the same, squeezed it, sometimes destroyed it, sometimes merged with it. This is life, said the old teacher. “How simple and clear it is, Pierre thought. How could I not have known this before. " God is in the middle, and each drop seeks to expand in order to reflect him to the greatest extent. And it grows, merges, and shrinks, and is destroyed on the surface, goes into the depths and resurfaces. Here it is, Karataev, here it spilled over and disappeared. Vous avez comprised, mon enfant (You see), said the teacher. Vous avez comprised, sacré nom (You see, damn you), a voice screamed, and Pierre woke up. Pierre's dream. Globe.
Taking a common look at Tolstoy's cosmos in War and Peace, we see the universe with a certain invisible center, which is equally in the sky and in the soul of every person. The Earth is one of the most important corners of the universe, where the most important cosmic events take place. The personal, fleeting existence of a person, with all its significance, is only a reflection of the eternal, universal life, where the past, future and present always exist. “It is difficult to imagine eternity ... Why then? Natasha answers. Yesterday was, today is, tomorrow will be ... ”At the moment of death, the human soul is overflowing with the light of this universal life, contains the entire visible world and loses interest in individual,“ personal ”love. But universal love, life and death for others illuminates a person with a universal meaning, reveals to him here, on earth, the most important law the secret of the entire visible and invisible, visible and invisible universe. Of course, these are only general outlines of Tolstoy's world, where the life of each person is intertwined with transparent cobweb threads with all people, and through them from the entire universe.
The rumble of footsteps ... The rumble of blood beating in the whiskey ... He walked along the upper floor, moving from room to room ... He arrived in Yekaterinburg the day before yesterday and only today was able to enter Ipatiev's house. The royal family was transported here from Tobolsk. On the wall of one of the rooms, by the window, he saw the empress's sign drawn in pencil - she put it everywhere - for good luck. Below was the date: April 17 (30). This is the day they were imprisoned in the Ipatiev house. In the room where Tsarevich Alexei was accommodated, the same sign painted on the wallpaper. The sign was also above the bed of the Tsarevich. A terrible disorder reigned everywhere. Piles of ash darkened ominously near the stoves. He squatted down in front of one of them and saw half-burnt hairpins, toothbrushes, buttons ... What happened? Where were they taken? Most likely, it happened at night. They were taken away in what they found them in, not being allowed to gather and grab the most necessary things.
During his imprisonment in Yekaterinburg, the only permitted place for Nicholas II and his family to walk was the roof of the Ipatievs' house. Photo by Pierre Gilliard
He went down to the lower floor, into the basement, and froze in horror on the threshold. The low barred window barely let in daylight. The walls and floor, like black wounds, covered the marks of bullets and bayonets. There was no more hope. Did they raise their hand against the sovereign? But if so, then it was impossible even to think that the Empress survived him. So they both became victims. But children? Grand Duchesses? Tsarevich Alexei? Everything proved that the victims were numerous ...
He sank down on the stone floor of this ominous room, similar to a prison cell, put his head in his hands and saw the emperor and his daughters walking towards him. Fir-trees covered with snow surround the Tsarskoye Selo lake. Grand Duchess Olga walks with her father by the arm, clinging tightly to his shoulder. Grand Duchess Tatiana, on the other hand, squeezes the sovereign's hand and says something quickly, quickly. The younger princesses run ahead and walk behind. Anastasia comes up with another prank, hammering snow behind the lapels of her velvet coat. The Emperor looks at his daughters with tenderness, he admires the radiant blush of their faces. Kind blue eyes seem to say: "Look what glorious daughters I have!" ... He wanted to bow to the emperor, but he could not get up from the floor. "But why winter?" he thought. And then it was revealed to his mind that both the Ipatiev house and the Tsarskoye Selo park were just a dream ... He woke up ...
There was a peaceful morning silence in Pierre Gilliard's small cozy apartment.
E. Lipgart. "Portrait of Emperor Nicholas II"
I. Galkin. "Empress Alexandra Feodorovna"
Grand Duchess Anastasia
This dream was not accidental, of course. Yesterday Pierre received a letter from Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, sister of Emperor Nicholas II, who lives in Denmark. She wrote that a young woman appeared in Berlin, who calls herself the youngest daughter of Emperor Nicholas II, Anastasia. “Please go immediately to see this unfortunate woman. What if she turns out to be our baby ... And if it really is her, please let me know by telegram, and I will also come to Berlin. "
Pierre Gilliard, together with his wife Alexandra, a former maid of the Grand Duchesses, went the next day to Berlin, to St. Mary's Hospital. The woman who declared herself Anastasia had been unconscious for several days. The emaciated body was like a skeleton covered with leather. Who could recognize Princess Anastasia in her, even if it really was her?
At the insistence of Gilliard, the patient was transferred to a good clinic.
“The most important thing is for her to stay alive,” he said to his wife, who was still in bed. "We'll be back as soon as she gets better."
Three months later, Pierre Gilliard and Alexandra visited the patient. Pierre, sitting down beside her, said:
Please tell me what do you remember from your past?
She in anger threw:
I don’t know what “remember” is! If they wanted to kill you like me, how much would you remember from what happened before?
Gilliard had to leave.
On the threshold, he ran into a woman in a lilac raincoat. Gilliard recognized her: it was Princess Olga, the beloved aunt of the great princesses.
Approaching Anastasia's bed, she smiled at her and held out her hand.
Princess Olga adored her nieces. Every Saturday the princesses who lived in Tsarskoe Selo looked forward to her. They went to Olga Alexandrovna's house, where they had fun, played and danced with other children ...
Do you remember how you enjoyed every minute? she asked Anastasia with a smile. “I can still hear your laugh ringing.
At these words, the impostor nodded and burst into tears. Olga Alexandrovna kissed her on both cheeks:
You will definitely get better.
Again and again she peered intently into woman face, almost nothing like the face of her little Anastasia. Only the eyes were the same huge, bright, blue.
“But she's been through so much! My heart tells me that it is she! How I want it to be her! "
In October 1928, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna died. The next day, a document was published, later called the "Romanov Declaration." It was signed by twelve representatives of the Russian imperial family, who unanimously confirmed that Frau Unbekannt was not the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. This document, which quoted the statements of Grand Duchess Olga, Pierre Gilliard and Baroness Buxgewden, the maid of honor Alexandra Feodorovna, convinced the public that the representatives of the House of Romanov had rejected the impostor.
But the impostor continued to impersonate Princess Anastasia, and there were always people who wanted to settle in their "tsar's daughter". She lived in America, then in England, then in Germany.
In 1968, Anastasia moved to America again, where she married Dr. Menahan. They lived together for fifteen years. In recent years, the impostor has often ended up in a psychiatric clinic. On February 12, 1984, Anastasia Menakhan died of pneumonia.
Royal Martyrs. Icon
Chapter from K. Kedrov's book "Poetic Space" M. Soviet writer 1989
The Gottorp globe, brought by Peter I to Russia, which became the prototype of today's planetariums, reminds me of the belly of a whale that swallowed all of humanity together with Jonah.
We say: this is how the universe works - you people are the smallest specks of dust in the endless universe. But this is a lie, albeit unintentional.
The Gottorp dome cannot show how the whole person, at the level of the very microparticles that Ilya Selvinsky wrote about, is connected, coordinated with all infinity. This consistency is called the anthropic principle. It was discovered and formulated recently in cosmology, but for literature this truth was an axiom.
Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy never accepted the Gottorp, mechanistic image of the world. They have always felt the subtlest dialectical connection between finite human life and the infinite existence of the cosmos. The inner world of a person is his soul. The outside world is the entire universe. Such is Pierre's shining globe in opposition to the dark Gottorp globe.
Pierre Bezukhov sees a crystal globe in a dream:
“This globe was a living, vibrating ball without dimensions. The entire surface of the sphere consisted of drops tightly compressed together. And these drops all moved, moved and then merged from several into one, then from one they were divided into many. Each drop tried to spill out, to capture the largest space, but others, striving for the same, squeezed it, sometimes destroyed it, sometimes merged with it ... In the middle is God, and each drop seeks to expand in order to reflect it in the largest size. And it grows, and shrinks, and is destroyed on the surface, goes into the depths and floats again. "
- "The reins of the Virgin" -
To see such a universe, one must rise to a height, look through infinity. The roundness of the earth is visible from space. Now we see the entire universe as a kind of shining sphere radiating from the center.
Heavenly perspectives pervade the entire space of War and Peace. Endless perspectives, landscapes and panoramas of battles are given from a height of flight, as if the writer flew around our planet more than once in a spaceship.
And yet, the most valuable for Leo Tolstoy is not a view from a height, but from an altitude. There, in the endlessly blue sky, Andrei Bolkonsky's gaze near Austerlitz melts, and later Levin's gaze among the Russian fields. There, in infinity, everything is calm, good, orderly, not at all like here on earth.
All this was repeatedly noticed and even conveyed by the inspired gaze of cameramen filming both Austerlitz and Natasha Rostova's mental flight from a helicopter, and why is it easier to direct the camera upward, following the gaze of Bolkonsky or Levin. But it is much more difficult for a cameraman and director to show the universe from the side - with the look of Pierre Bezukhov, who sees through the slumber a globe, consisting of many drops (souls), each of which tends to the center, and all are united. This is how the universe works, Pierre hears the voice of a French teacher.
And yet, how does it work?
On the screen, through the fog, some kind of droplet structures are visible, merging into a ball, emitting radiance, and nothing else. It's too poor for crystal globe, who solved the riddle of the universe in Pierre's mind. You don't have to blame the operator. What Pierre saw can only be seen with the mind's eye - it is inconceivable in the three-dimensional world, but it is quite geometrically imaginable.
Pierre saw, or rather, “saw the light” that image of the universe, which had been forbidden for mankind from the time of the Great Inquisition to ... it is difficult to say exactly until what time.
“The universe is a sphere where the center is everywhere, and the radius is infinite,” Nikolai Kuzansky said about this model of the world. Borges told about her in a laconic essay "Pascal's Sphere":
"Nature is an endless sphere, the center of which is everywhere, and the circle is nowhere."
Anyone who closely followed the cosmological models of the ancients in the previous chapters (the Dzhemshid bowl, Koshchei's chest) will immediately notice that Pascal's sphere, or Pierre's globe, is another artistic embodiment of the same idea. Drops striving to merge with the center, and the center striving towards everything - this is very similar to Leibniz's monads, the centers of Nicholas of Cusan or Borges' Aleph point. This is similar to the worlds of Giordano Bruno, for which he was burned, similar to the transformed eidos of Plato or the Pythagorean infrastructures, brilliantly captured in the philosophy of the Neoplatonists and Parmenides.
But for Tolstoy these are not points, not monads, not eidos, but people, or rather their souls. That is why Pierre laughs at the soldier guarding him with a rifle at the barn door: "He wants to lock me, my infinite soul ..." This is what followed the vision of the crystal globe.
The desire of the drops to merge globally, their readiness to contain the whole world is love, compassion for each other. Love as a complete understanding of all living things passed from Platon Karataev to Pierre, and from Pierre it should spread to all people. He became one of the countless centers of the world, that is, he became the world.
The epigraph of the novel about the need to unite all good people is not so banal at all. The word “conjugate”, heard by Pierre in the second “thing” dream, is not accidentally combined with the word “harness”. You need to harness - you need to pair. Everything that connects is the world; centers - drops that do not strive for conjugation - this is a state of war, enmity. Enmity and alienation among people. It is enough to recall the sarcasm with which Pechorin looked at the stars to understand what the opposite feeling of "conjugation" is.
Probably, not without the influence of Tolstoy's cosmology, Vladimir Soloviev later built his metaphysics, where the Newtonian force of attraction was called "love", and the force of repulsion was called "enmity."
War and peace, conjugation and disintegration, attraction and repulsion - these are two forces, or rather, two states of one cosmic force that periodically overwhelm the souls of Tolstoy's heroes. From the state of universal love (falling in love with
Natasha and the whole universe, the all-forgiving and all-encompassing cosmic love at the hour of Bolkonsky's death) to the same general enmity and alienation (his break with Natasha, hatred and a call to shoot prisoners before the Battle of Borodino). Such transitions are not peculiar to Pierre, he, like Natasha, is world-wide by nature. Rage against Anatole or Helene, the supposed murder of Napoleon are superficial, without touching the depths of the spirit. Pierre's kindness is the natural state of his soul.
The love of Andrei Bolkonsky is some kind of last emotional outburst, it is on the verge of life and death: together with love, the soul flew away. Andrei dwells rather in the sphere of Pascal, where many mental centers are just points. A stern geometer - a parent lives in him: "Please, see, my soul, these triangles are alike." He was in this sphere until his death, until she twisted and overturned into his soul with the whole world, and accommodated the room of everyone whom Prince Andrew knew and saw.
Pierre "saw" the crystal globe from the side, that is, he went beyond the visible, visible space during his lifetime. A Copernican coup took place with him. Before Copernicus, people were in the center of the world, but now the universe turned inside out, the center became a periphery - a multitude of worlds around the “center of the sun”. It is about such a Copernican coup that Tolstoy speaks in the finale of the novel:
“Since the found and proved the law of Copernicus, one admission that it is not the sun, but the earth that moves, has destroyed the entire cosmography of the ancients ...
As for astronomy, the difficulty of recognizing the movements of the earth consisted in abandoning the direct sense of the immobility of the earth and the same sense of the immobility of the planets, so for history the difficulty of recognizing the subordination of the individual to the laws of space, time and causes is to abandon the direct sense of independence. personality ".
It is generally accepted that L. Tolstoy was skeptical about science. In fact, this skepticism extended only to the science of his time - the 19th and early 20th centuries. This science dealt with, according to L. Tolstoy, "secondary" problems. The main question is about the meaning of human life on earth and about the place of man in the universe, or rather, the relationship between man and the universe. Here Tolstoy, if necessary, resorted to integral and differential calculus.
The ratio of one to infinity is Bolkonsky's relation to the world at the time of death. He saw everyone and could not love one. The ratio of one to one is something else. This is Pierre Bezukhov. For Bolkonsky world disintegrated into an infinite number of people, each of whom was ultimately uninteresting to Andrey. Pierre in Natasha, in Andrei, in Platon Karataev, and even in a dog shot by a soldier, the whole world saw. Everything that happens to the world happened to him. Andrew sees countless soldiers - "meat for cannons." He is full of sympathy, compassion for them, but this is not his. Pierre sees only Plato, but the whole world is in him, and this is his.
The "Copernicus coup" happened to Pierre, perhaps at the very moment of birth. Andrew was born in Ptolemy's space. He himself is the center, the world is only a periphery. This does not mean that Andrei is bad and Pierre is good. Just one person - "war" (not in everyday life or historical, but in spiritual sense), the other is a person - "the world."
At some point between Pierre and Andrew, a dialogue about the structure of the world arises. Pierre is trying to explain to Andrei his sense of the unity of all things, living and dead, a kind of ladder of ascents from a mineral to an angel. Andrey; delicately interrupts: I know, this is Herder's philosophy. For him, this is only philosophy: Leibniz's monads, Pascal's sphere for Pierre is a spiritual experience.
Yet the two diverging sides of the corner have a convergence point: death and love. In love for Natasha and in death, Andrei opens up the "conjugation" of the world. Here, at the Aleph point, Pierre, Andrey, Natasha, Platon Karataev, Kutuzov - everyone feels the unity. Something more than the sum of wills is "peace on earth and good will among men." Something akin to Natasha's feeling at the moment of reading the manifesto in church and praying for "peace."
The feeling of the convergence of the two sides of the diverging angle at a single point is very well conveyed in Tolstoy's "Confessions", where he very accurately conveys the discomfort of weightlessness in his sleepy flight, feeling somehow very uncomfortable in the endless space of the universe, suspended on some kind of help, while there was no sense of the center where these aids were coming from. Pierre saw this center, permeating everything, in a crystal globe, so that, waking up from a dream, he could feel it in the depths of his soul, as if returning from a transcendental height.
This is how Tolstoy explained in his "Confession" his dream, too, after awakening and also having moved this center from the interstellar heights to the depths of the heart. The center of the universe is reflected in every crystal drop, in every soul. This crystal reflection is love.
If this were the philosophy of Tolstoy, we would reproach him for the absence of the dialectics of "attraction and repulsion", "enmity and love." But no philosophy of Tolstoy, no Tolstoyism for the writer himself existed. He just talked about his feeling of life, about the state of his soul, which he considered correct. He did not deny "enmity and repulsion", just as Pierre and Kutuzov did not deny the evidence of the war and even to the extent of their strength and capabilities participated in it, but they did not want to accept this state as their own. War is alien, peace is ours. Pierre's crystal globe is preceded in Tolstoy's novel by a globe-ball, played by Napoleon's heir in the portrait. A world of war with thousands of accidents, really reminiscent of a game of bilbock. Globe - ball and globe - crystal ball - two images of the world. The image of the blind and the seeing, gutta-percha darkness and crystal light. A world obedient to the capricious will of one, and a world of unmerged, but united wills.
The reins-helpers, on which in a dream Tolstoy felt a sense of lasting unity in "Confession", in the novel "War and Peace" still in the hands of the "capricious child" - Napoleon.
What is running the world? This question, repeated many times, finds the answer in itself at the end of the novel. The world is ruled by the whole world. And when the world is one, love and peace rule, opposing the state of enmity and war.
The artistic persuasiveness and integrity of such a cosmos does not require proof. The crystal globe lives, acts, exists as a kind of living crystal, a hologram that has absorbed the structure of Leo Tolstoy's novel and space.
And yet, the relationship between the earth and space, between a certain "center" and individual drops of the globe is incomprehensible to the author of the novel "War and Peace". Looking from the height of the "movement of peoples from west to east" and "backward wave" from east to west. Tolstoy is sure of one thing: this movement itself - the war - was not planned by people And it cannot be their human will. People want peace, but there is war on earth.
Sorting out, as in a deck of cards, all kinds of reasons: world will, world reason, economic laws, the will of one genius, Tolstoy refutes everything in turn. Only a certain assimilation to a bee hive and an anthill, where no one controls, and the order is the same, seems plausible to the author. Each bee separately does not know about the single bee world order of the hive, nevertheless it serves him.
A man, unlike a bee, is "initiated" into a single plan of his cosmic hive. This is the "conjugation" of everything reasonable, human, as Pierre Bezukhov understood. Later, the plan of "conjugation" will expand in Tolstoy's soul to universal love for all people, for all living things.
“Light cobwebs - the reins of the Mother of God”, which connect people in the prophetic dream of Nikolenka, the son of Andrei Bolkonsky, will eventually unite in a single “center” of a crystal globe, somewhere out there in space. They will become a solid support for Tolstoy in his cosmic hovering over the abyss (a dream from "Confession"). The tension of the "cosmic reins" - the feeling of love - is both the direction of movement and the movement itself. Tolstoy loved such simple comparisons as an experienced horseman, a horse lover, and as a peasant walking behind a plow.
You wrote everything correctly, he will tell Repin about his painting "Tolstoy in the Arable Land", only they forgot to give the reins in hand.
Tolstoy's uncomplicated, almost "peasant" cosmogony in its depths was not simple, like any popular wisdom, tested over millennia. He felt the heavenly "reins of the Mother of God" as a kind of inner law of a swarm of bees, forming the honeycomb of world life.
One must die, as trees die, without groans and crying ("Three Deaths"). But life can and should be learned from age-old trees (Andrey Bolkonsky's oak)
But where, then, is the cosmos, towering over everything, even over nature? His cold breath penetrates the souls of Levin and Bolkonsky from heavenly heights. Everything is too calm and balanced there, and the writer strives there with his soul.
From there, from that height, the story is often told. That judgment is not like the judgment of the earth. “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay” is the epigraph to “Anna Karenina”. This is not forgiveness, but something more. Here is an understanding of the cosmic perspective of earthly events. The affairs of people cannot be measured by earthly standards - this is the only morality within the "War and Peace". For the deeds of people of the scale of Levin and Andrei Bolkonsky, an endless heavenly perspective is needed, therefore, in the finale of War and Peace, the writer who is alien to cosmological concepts recalls Copernicus and Ptolemy. But Tolstoy interprets Copernicus in a very peculiar way, Copernicus made a revolution in the sky, "without moving a single star" or planet. He simply changed the way people look at their location in the universe. People thought that the earth was in the center of the world, but it was somewhere far on the edge. So it is in the moral world. The person must give in. "Ptolemaic" egocentrism must be replaced by "Copernican" altruism.
It would seem that Copernicus won, but if you ponder the cosmological meaning of Tolstoy's metaphor, then the opposite is true.
Tolstoy brings Copernicus and Ptolemy down to earth, and turns cosmology into ethics. And this is not just an artistic device, but the fundamental principle of Tolstoy. For him, as for the first Christians, there is no cosmology outside of ethics. This is, after all, the aesthetics of the New Testament itself. In his translation of the Four Gospels, Tolstoy completely eliminates everything that goes beyond the boundaries of ethics.
His book "The Kingdom of God Within Us" is more consistent in the pathos of bringing heaven to earth than even the Gospel itself. Tolstoy is completely incomprehensible to the "cosmological" nature of the ceremony and ritual. He does not hear her and does not see her, plugs his ears and closes his eyes not only in the temple, but even at the Wagnerian opera, where the music breathes with metaphysical depth.
Well, Tolstoy, in his mature years and especially in old age, lost his aesthetic sense? No, the aesthetics of space was deeply felt by Tolstoy. What a tremendous meaning descended, descended to the soldiers sitting by the fire, the sky strewn with stars. The starry sky before the battle reminded a person of that height and of the greatness that he deserves, with which he is commensurate.
Ultimately, Tolstoy never ceded the earth to Copernicus as one of the most important centers of the universe. The famous entry in the diary that the earth is "not a vale of sorrow," but one of the most beautiful worlds, where something extremely important for the entire universe happens, conveys in a condensed form all the originality of its ethical cosmology.
Today, when we know about the uninhabitedness of a huge number of worlds in our galaxy and about the uniqueness of not only human life, but even organic life in the solar system, Tolstoy's correctness becomes completely undeniable. His call for the inviolability of all living things, a principle later developed by Albert Schweitzer in the ethics of "reverence for life", sounds in a new way.
Unlike his most prominent opponent Fedorov, Tolstoy did not consider death to be an absolute evil, since dying is the same law of "eternal life" as birth. He, who eliminated the resurrection of Christ from the Gospel as something alien to the laws of earthly life, wrote the novel Resurrection, where a heavenly miracle should turn into a moral miracle - a moral rebirth or the return of a person to a world-wide, that is, all-human life, which is the same for Tolstoy.
Many have written about the polemic between Tolstoy and Fedorov, and it would have been possible not to return to this question, had it not been for one oddity. For some reason, everyone who writes about this dialogue ignores the cosmological nature of the dispute. For Fedorov, space is the arena of human activity, populating distant worlds in the future with crowds of "resurrected" fathers. Often the report of Tolstoy in the psychological society is cited, where Tolstoy explained to the learned men this idea of Fedorov. Usually the conversation is interrupted by the vulgar laughter of the Moscow professors. But not an argument for Tolstoy, the uterine laughter of the priests of science, the falsity of which was obvious to him.
Tolstoy did not laugh at Fedorov, but he was afraid of a purely earthly cosmology, where the sky in the future was entirely surrendered to the power of people, while the rulership of people on earth, the barbaric destruction of nature were so obvious. The very masses of peoples that Fedorov boldly brought from the earth into space, moved in the finale of the novel "War and Peace", senselessly day and night killing each other. So far, only on earth.
It would seem that Tolstoy, open with all his heart to the swarm principle, should have welcomed the "common cause" of the universal resurrection, but the writer did not at all consider the resurrection of the fathers as a goal. In the very desire to resurrect, he saw selfish perversity. The author of "Three Deaths" and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", who in the future died so majestically, of course, could not reconcile himself to some humiliating industrial resurrection carried out by whole armies mobilized for such a "not godly" cause.
Before many, Tolstoy felt the earth as a single planet. In War and Peace, naturally, he could not accept Fedorov's messianic concept, where the resurrection was turning into a purely Russian idea generously bestowed upon the peoples.
In this sense, in ethics, Tolstoy remained a Ptolemy. At the center of the universe is humanity. All cosmology is contained in ethics. The relationship of a person to a person - this is the relationship of a person to God. Perhaps Tolstoy even too absolutized this idea. Tolstoy considered God to be a certain quantity that could not be contained by the human heart and (which distinguishes it from Dostoevsky) measurable and cognizable by the mind.
The cosmic importance of what is happening on earth was too significant for Tolstoy to transfer the scene of the human epic (Tolstoy denied the tragedy) into space.
Of course, the views and assessments of the writer changed over the course of a long, spiritually filled life. If the author of "Anna Karenina" thought the most important thing was happening between two loving people, then, for the creator of "Resurrection" it became ultimately as insignificant as for Katerina Maslova and Nekhlyudov in the novel's finale. Tolstoy's "Copernican coup" ended with a complete denial of personal, "egoistic" love. In the novel "War and Peace" Tolstoy managed to achieve not a vulgar "golden mean", but a great "golden ratio", that is, the correct ratio in that great fraction, proposed by himself, where the numerator contains the whole world, all people, and the denominator is personality. This relationship of the one to the one includes both personal love and all of humanity.
In Pierre's crystal globe, the drops and the center are correlated in this way, in Tyutchev's way: "Everything is in me, and I am in everything."
In the later period, the individual personality was sacrificed to the "one" world. One can and should doubt the correctness of such a simplification of the world. Pierre's globe seemed to have grown dim, stopped glowing. Why do you need drops when everything is in the center? And where is the center to be reflected if there are no those crystal drops?
The cosmos of War and Peace is as unique and majestic as the cosmos of Dante's Divine Comedy and Goethe's Faust. There is no romance without the cosmology of the crystal globe. This is something like a crystal box, in which the death of Koshchei is hidden. Here everything is in everything - the great principle of a synergistic double helix, diverging from the center and simultaneously converging towards it.
Tolstoy later rejected Fedorov's cosmology of the reorganization of the world and space, because, like Pierre, he believed that the world is much more perfect than his creation - man. In the universal school, he was more a student, "a boy collecting pebbles on the shore of the ocean" than a teacher.
Tolstoy denied Fedorov's industrial resurrection also because he saw in death itself the wise law of the continuation of universal, general cosmic life. Realizing and experiencing the "Arzamas horror" of death, Tolstoy came to the conclusion that death is an evil for temporary, personal life. For universal, eternal, universal life, it is an undoubted blessing. He was grateful to Schopenhauer for making him think "about the meaning of death." This does not mean that Tolstoy "loved death" in the usual everyday sense of the word. The entry in the diary about the "only sin" - the desire for death - does not at all mean that Tolstoy really wanted to die. The diary of his personal physician Makovitsky speaks of Tolstoy's normal, completely natural desire for life. But apart from his personal, individual life, there was also a “divinely universal” life, Tyutchev's. Tolstoy was involved in it not for a moment, but for the rest of his life. In a dispute with Fedorov, Tolstoy denied the resurrection, but in a dispute with Fet he defended the idea of eternal cosmic life.
Taking a common look at Tolstoy's cosmos in War and Peace, we see the universe with a certain invisible center, which is equally in the sky and in the soul of every person. The Earth is one of the most important corners of the universe, where the most important cosmic events take place. The personal, fleeting existence of a person, for all its significance, is only a reflection of the eternal, universal life, where the past, future and present always exist. “It is difficult to imagine eternity ... Why then? - Natasha answers. - Yesterday was, today is, tomorrow will be ... "At the moment of death, the human soul is overflowing with the light of this universal life, contains the entire visible world and loses interest in individual," personal "love. But universal love, life and death for others illuminates a person with a universal meaning, reveals to him here, on earth, the most important law - the secret of the entire visible and invisible, visible and invisible universe.
Of course, these are only general outlines of Tolstoy's world, where the life of each person is intertwined with transparent cobweb threads with all people, and through them from the entire universe.
In the epilogue, the reader is given the opportunity of another choice: to side with the defenders of Decembrism (Pierre Bezukhov, Andrei Bolkonsky, Nikolenka) or his opponents (Nikolai Rostov).
It is very significant that in the finale of the epic novel, Tolstoy created an attractive image of the recipient of the ideas of Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky - the future participant in the December events of 1825 - the son of Bolkonsky, who sacredly preserves the memory of his father and an enthusiastic admirer of his father's friend - Pierre, whose ideas he would approve ... Nikolenka's “prophetic dream” in the epilogue reflects in a figurative form his perception of real circumstances, the content of conversations and disputes of adults, reflects his affection, dreams of courageous heroic activity in the name of people, his premonitions of a dramatic future.
He and Pierre in helmets, which were drawn in the edition of Plutarch, are joyful in front of a huge army, glory awaits them. They are already close to their goal, but their uncle Nikolai Rostov is blocking their way. He stops in front of them in a "formidable and stern posture." "I loved you, but Arakcheev told me, and I will kill the first one who moves forward." Pierre disappears and turns into a father - Prince Andrei, who caresses and pity him, but Uncle Nikolai moves closer and closer to them. Nikolenka wakes up in horror, he still has a feeling of gratitude to his father for his approval and persistent desire to accomplish the feat. “I only ask God about one thing: that what happened to Plutarch's people happened to me, and I will do the same. I will do better. Everyone will know, everyone will love, everyone will admire me. I will do what even he would be pleased with ... "
Natasha's path is not devoid of "delusions (passion for Anatoly Kuragin) and suffering": a break with Andrei Bolkonsky, his illness and death, the death of his brother Petit, etc. But responsiveness to living life, the purity of moral feelings prevail. Natasha finds her place in life - a wife and a mother. Young readers are often disappointed (or puzzled) by her evolution: from a charming, gifted, poetic girl to a busy mother enjoying a yellow spot on the diaper of a recovering child.
For Tolstoy, on the other hand, maternal concerns, an atmosphere of love, friendship, mutual understanding in a family created by a creator and guardian of the hearth are no less a manifestation of femininity and spiritual wealth. And this does not exclude (as can be seen from the example of Natasha in the days Patriotic War) the participation of a woman in national concerns and assessments of what is happening, into which she also brings particles of her soul ("I know that I will not submit to Napoleon"), does not exclude an internal connection with the people ("where did this decanter get into herself ...") and the ability not to be rational, but to emotionally react to inequality, falsehood in modern life... (In church she wonders: “why pray so much for the royal family name”). At first glance, the distance between Natasha Rostova, a "graceful poetic imp" in childhood, a "Cossack" free to willfulness in her youth, and Natalia Ilyinishna Bezukhova, absorbed by her family, is too great.
But, looking more closely, you see that at all stages of its path it remains itself: fullness vitality, the ability of love, a heartfelt understanding of another person, the courage to make decisions. All this makes the feat of the "Russian woman" - the wife of the Decembrist, quite organic for her nature.
Tolstoy portrays the Rostov and Bolkonsky families with great sympathy, because: they are participants in historical events, patriots; they are not attracted by careerism and profit; they are close to the Russian people. Characteristic features of the Rostovs Bolkonskys 1. Older generation ....
Creating the image of Pierre Bezukhov, L.N. Tolstoy started from specific life observations. People like Pierre often met in Russian life at that time. This is Alexander Muravyov, and Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, to whom Pierre is close to his eccentricity ...
Kutuzov goes through the entire book, almost unchanged outwardly: an old man with a gray head "on a huge thick body", with cleanly washed folds of a scar where "the Izmail bullet pierced his head." N "slowly and sluggishly" rides in front of the shelves at the inspection ...
In the center of the novel, L.N. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is an image of the Patriotic War of 1812, which shook the entire Russian people, showed the whole world its power and strength, put forward simple Russian heroes and the great commander - Kutuzov. In the same time...