War and Peace

It was my first time in Boston. This past weekend, I took the bus in on Friday morning and spend Shabbos with my cousin, who's studying in Harvard Divinity school, and then I returned last night. So, with all this traveling, I had the opportunity to finish listening to a dramatization of War and Peace that I have been taking with me on my commute, lately.
A word or two about Cambridge, before I address Tolstoy's work. I like the city, since it's not so much a city as is New York. The neighborhood that I was in, between Harvard and Porter Squares, was a quaint, quiet neighborhood with small, colonial looking homes. It was really lovely to walk around there, with Universities and Colleges at every street-corner, bookcases filled with books lining the laundromat walls. Some of the more athletic students running on the sidewalks in their shorts and tee-shirts. The big Harvard-Yale game was on Saturday afternoon, so there were hundreds of young people walking around sporting Crimson Sweatshirts. Yale won, if you're curious. Apparently, that hasn't happened in a while. It's kind of ironic and sort of telling that, despite all of their academic standing, it is the football league that sets these schools apart from others.
Anyway, we ate at my cousin's apartment for dinner on Friday night, and at Chabbad for lunch. The community is very small, but everyone I spoke to was at least moderately friendly, and some people seemed exceptionally nice. It was nice to get away. I recommend Boston for a getaway weekend to anyone who needs to get out of New York.
This brings me to War and Peace. I originally thought I was getting a regular book on tape from Amazon.com, but when it came in the mail, I realized that it was a dramatization, done by BBC. So all of the Russians, the French people and everyone else, had British accents.
(I've just discovered an website with the entire text on it http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/war_and_peace/)
The author presents the Russian nobility's perspective on the Napoleonic wars. He bounces the reader back and forth between the characters at home, concerned with love, money, pride and religion and the generals and soldiers on the battlefront, faced with starvation, life, death and illness on a daily basis. The sense that I got from the novel was that the author was really saying that there are times of war and times of peace in both the domestic and military spheres. People can discover that their trapped in their home with spouses they do not love, and all they want is to die for a purpose greater than themselves. People at war can be captured, taken prisoner, and starved, and they can meet someone who changes their whole lives and makes them feel more happy than they ever where in their state of physical comfort.
There are, of course, Christ figures in the book, and messages that we are to take away from the novel. For instance: Life's not always fair. Sonia, the poor orphaned cousin who her cousin Nicolai promised to marry, gets left single and alone while her cousins enjoy a life of love, fulfillment and family. Or: After much suffering, people can revive themselves, and discover that they still have a love of life. After Prince Andre dies, Natasha discovers that she can forgive herself for her mistakes and can move on and marry Pierre Bezukhov. And so on.
Before entering 11th grade in Ma'ayanot, we had to read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. We spent the first couple of months analyzing the book in groups and writing logs with an in-depth analysis. This experience made me fall in love-- not only with the book, but with war stories in general. I love reading about the way people are stripped so bare when they are confronted with possible death. The soul is forced into its most naked form, and people are seen for what they are. I love people like that. O'Brien didn't fight in the Napoleonic wars. He fought in Vietnam, and he had a much less noble perspective on the war that did Tolstoy on defending Russian soil from Napoleon in 1812. He writes that if a war story has a moral, then it isn't a true war story. I thought of him especially at moments when Tolstoy used almost identical language to O'Brien with regards to morality. There was a sense, I guess as reflected by much of the era's romantic literature and art, that experiences were meaningful, and that we could learn lessons from everything. O'Brien doesn't feel that way. War is something that takes a lot out of people, and that no one can really justify completely. Granted, Tolstoy does have the same stripped bare sort of soldiers that I find so appealing, but in the end, he needs to find something else to talk about. He needs to transcend the war. O'Brien questions the war from start to finish, but he doesn't need to learn a moral.
I realize that I really am not qualified to discuss Tolstoy's novel in its entirety, since I only listened to BBC's dramatization, and didn't read through the thousand-page novel. But it's a start. And it was great fun, listening to what was a kind of audio book-movie.