Part 3. War and Peace and the Human Heart

Exactly two months, to the day, after I brought it home, I finished War and Peace last night.

I know...I'm a journalism major, the son of a librarian and an English teacher, literary greatness should be expected of me. But I didn't think I'd ever pick up that book. It, more than any other, is the one book that people don't actually read. Some might own it, put it on a shelf, and the declare themselves more cultured for having bought it. But to actually sit down and read War and Peace? Goodness, a non-option.

A non-option, that is, until you come to live, by yourself, in a land with only Austrian MTV. Then you'll appreciate any English books on the local library shelf.

1,444 pages. 61 days. 23.67 pages a day. 6 bottles of wine.

And I loved it.

I've had a tremendous run of good literature here in Hungary, and strangely enough all of the books echo the feelings and experiences I'm going through, almost to a tee. Or at least I'm reading into each book the exact feelings and experiences I want to commiserate so badly with someone. One of the joys of fiction.

"On the Road" had the same wandering urge to explore that I had when I first got here. Frankenstein's monster's awakening and existential questioning either followed or instigated my own exploration of those tendencies here. Intrigued by Ukraine, "War and Peace" gave me a taste of the depth of all things Russian. Conscious of war and peace in the world and love in the heart, it broaches all three.

In the spirit of Christmas, I offer to you this 10th-grade-esque book report on War and Peace and the Human Heart:

War and peace are to all of mankind as destiny and freewill are to each man.

The two fundamentals of human history are war and peace. You can have one or the other, but not both. But at the same time, you can never really have just either. The tide of history is simple the ebb and flow of more war, or more peace, for just a period of time.

"The two fundamentals on which man's whole cosmic philosophy is constructed," destiny and freewill, are the essence of life (1438). Can there be an interplay between the two, could there possibly be a right answer other than the extremity of either? We must certainly either have no control or complete control. But again, only in their synthesis do they define each other in form and content, hints the author.

When Tolstoy tells of war, he tells a story of destiny from a broad viewpoint. Individual actors have no control, no freewill, there is no importance or greatness to even the leaders. The struggle and will of entire nations is the thing of destiny.

But when Tolstoy writes of peace, he writes of love. The actors, their free will, their desires, is the story. His greatness as a writer, as I took it, was the ability to capture completely the emotion of one particular feeling in a single chapter.

Within these questions, as big as they get, Tolstoy is also a puppeteer above his characters, tugging at the heart-strings of those under his control for 12 years of Russian and human history.

With only five main characters of marriageable age and 1444 pages to work with, he has no choice, I suppose, but to introduce intertwining, interdating and interbreeding. I suppose old high school friends work the same way. (Congratulations, by the way, to RJ and Gaby on their recent engagement.)

The love he writes of is epic, monumental; a love encompassing all of a person's soul, if for just a moment in time. Princes and princesses, swept away, in the royalty of love and the love of royalty.

Read for yourself. War. And peace. Pain. And love. Good. And bad. Yin. And yang. Duality to everything.