"The tightly packed books burned for a week," or, Yet another way in which it could be worse!

At the close of my post over the weekend about packing my library, I noted that it could be worse: I could be in the position of Robinson Crusoe, limited to a handful of books saved from the seas. Yesterday, however, while reading Jenny Uglow's incredibly good new book about Charles II in the 1660s, A Gambling Man, I was reminded that water is at most the second-greatest foe of books--and that, yes, things could always be much worse:

When the Great Fire roared down Ludgate Hill it swept into a printing house in King's Head Court, off Shoe Lane. John Ogilby's entire stock went up in flames, including the manuscript of his twelve-book epic Carolies--"the pride, divertisement, business and sole comfort of my age."

And that's not even the worst of it:

Many booksellers and publishers, whose shops clustered around St Paul's churchyard, were ruined the same day. Some had placed their stock in Christ Church and Stationer's Hall, where the loss amounted to over £150,000. Others had taken their books and the sheets ready for binding to St Faith's Church, in the cathedral crypt. The great private library of Samuel Cromleholme, High Master of St Paul's School, was also stored here. It was thought to be safe, but the burning roof timbers crashed through the floor into the vault and the tightly packed books burned for a week. Wren's mentor John Wilkins, who had been rector of St Lawrence Jury since 1662, lost his house, his possessions and the manuscript of the Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language on which he had been working for years, and which he had to reconstruct from a proof. Richard Baxter reported that the libraries of most of the ministers in the City were burnt and from his home, six miles from London, he could see "the half burnt leaves of books " whirling in the wind. Pepys's favorite bookseller Kirton lost his house, shop and thousands of pounds' worth of books. He died a year later, having never recovered from the shock.

Uglow's chapter on the Great Fire of London is incredibly gripping. I mostly know the fire from Pepys's irreplaceable eyewitness account, Peter Ackroyd's description in London: A Biography, and other assorted histories; the range of sources and perspectives Uglow brings to her telling brings the scope and ferocity of the fire to life like none I've encountered, from its origins--when the Lord Mayor said, "Pish! A woman might piss it out!"--to its end, when

All the City's finest buildings and churches had vanished: men were bemused and lost, lacking the familiar landmarks. Even the waters in the broken fountains seemed to boil, and evil-smelling smoke swirled up from wells and cellars like fumes from hell.

Uglow pays particular attention to the actions of Charles himself during the fire, which, remarkably, he fought on the front lines all night with his brother, the Duke of York:

[F]ilthy, smoke-blackened, and tired, Charles toured the fireposts, wielding buckets and shovels with the men. Many contemporary accounts mention his bravery and energy, "even labouring in person, & being present," as Evelyn put it, "to command, order, reward, and encourage Workemen; by which he shewed his affection to his people, & gained theirs." The king and duke, wrote Clarendon,

who rode from one place to another, and put themselves in great dangers among the burning and falling houses, to give advice and direction what was to be done, underwent as much fatigue as the meanest, and had as little sleep or rest; and the faces of all men appeared ghastly and in the highest confusion.

Where citizens had fled, Charles and James took charge themselves, exposing themselves to flames and smoke and the danger of falling buildings.

The most memorable of all the many anecdotes and details that Uglow assembles, however, appears at the end of the chapter--which one can't help but read in a rush, the end coming as an almost physical relief--when the fire has finally petered out:

It was a scene of horror, but also one of wonder, a natural curiosity drawing the observant men of the Royal Society. In the broken tombs in St Paul's, they observed the mummified bodies of bishops buried two centuries before, while in the tomb of Dean Colet, a more recent burial, his lead coffin was found to be full of a curious liquor that had conserved the body. "Mr Wyle and Ralph Greatorex tasted it and it was a kind of insipid taste, something of an ironish taste. The body felt, to the probe of a stick which they thrust into a chink, like brawn."

They made scientists out of some very stern stuff back in those days. And, to bring this post back around to where I started: I may have had to pack up all my books, but at least I didn't have to watch them burn, then drink insipid tombwater!

Books did furnish a room . . .

{Photos by rocketlass.}

From The Library at Night (2006), by Alberto Manguel

Like Machiavelli, I often sit among my books at night. While I prefer to write in the morning, at night I enjoy reading in the thick silence, when triangles of light from the reading lamps split my library shelves in two. Above, the high rows of books vanish into darkness; below sits the privileged section of the illuminated titles. This arbitrary division, which grants certain books a glowing presence and relegates others to the shadows, is superseded by another order, which owes its existence merely to what I can remember. My library has no catalogue; having placed the books on the shelves myself, I generally know their position by recalling the library's layout, and areas of light or darkness make little difference to my exploring. The remembered order follows a pattern in my mind, the shape and division of the library, rather as a stargazer connects in narrative patterns the pinpoints of the stars; but the library in turn reflects the configuration of my mind, its distant astrologer. The deliberate yet random order of the shelves, the choice of subject matters, the intimate history of each book's survival, the traces of certain times and certain places left between the pages, all point to a particular reader. A keen observer might be able to tell who I am from a tattered copy of the poems of Blas de Otero, the number of volumes by Robert Louis Stevenson, the large section devoted to detective stories, the minuscule section devoted to literary theory, the fact that there is much Plato and very little Aristotle on my shelves. Every library is autobiographical.

At the urging of our sympathetic but insistent realtor, rocketlass and I have spent the past week packing up and storing away nearly all of our books. Back in the autumn, when we first put the condominium in which we've lived for ten years on the market, we packed away a couple of bookcases worth of books that had been kept in one of the bedrooms, but we had hoped that we would sell before having to give up the rest.

Alas, four months and seventy boxes later, we now have a home that is, by our standards, denuded of books. Our living room is bare, and our realtor was right: it does look much larger. It also looks significantly less like home--which I suppose is the idea, after all: the less it looks like our home, the sooner it will no longer be, and the sooner we'll be able to re-establish our library in what we both hope, the gods willing, will be its final destination.

Of course, compared to our neighbors, for whom reading is an occasional way to pass the time rather than one of life's central activities, we still have a lot of books in our small apartment: one seven-shelf case, tucked away in a bedroom. It's a desert island case, I suppose, though not exactly, its holdings an atypical distillation of our vanished collection, a mix of the unread, the forever re-read, and the inexhaustible--from all of Anthony Powell to the letters of Byron to The Anatomy of Melancholy to Boswell's Johnson to Sherlock Holmes and the latest from Hard Case Crime. There's no reason it shouldn't be enough to get us through the next few months, though I'm already dreading the first time I need to look something up in a book that's been consigned to storage.

I take heart, however, from a passage found elsewhere in The Library at Night, a reminder that things could be much, much worse:

On one of the early days of October of the year 1659, Robinson Crusoe returned to the mangled remains of his craft and managed to bring ashore a number of tools and various kinds of food, as well as "several things of less value," such as pens, ink, paper and a small collection of books. Of these books, a few were in Portuguese, a couple were "Popish prayer-books" and three were "very good Bibles." His "dreadful deliverance" had left him terrified of death through starvation, but once the tools and the food had met his material needs he was ready to seek entertainment from the ship's meagre store of books. Robinson Crusoe was the founder--if a reluctant founder--of a new society. And Daniel Defoe, his author, thought it necessary that at the beginning of a new society there should be books.

Manguel's book resides in our remaining bookcase; Defoe's, readily available elsewhere, has been relegated to the ship's hold. (Did I mention that for all my carping in this post, we live half a block from an actual library? Okay, I'll admit it's not exactly the salt mines here . . . )

"A march is clean business," or, Yet another reason to love your local bookstore!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about a catchphrase repeated by a character in War and Peace, and the different ways I have seen it translated. Not knowing the underlying Russian, I could only guess at the reason the translations varied . . . but last night Jeff Waxman, Joyland author and bookseller at my favorite bookstore, 57th Street Books, put the question to a Russian-speaking friend, Olga Romadin, and she offered a detailed and interesting answer:

My first language is Russian, but English is my primary language, and when I read Russian I always find myself struggling to translate some of the most interesting parts of the text. It's frustrating because there are many instances when a phrase or paragraph I want to share with my English-speaking friends just cannot be said with the same effect in another language.

Now, having said that, the case of the uncle with the verbal tic unfortunately happens to be one of those things that is untranslatable in any way that would make sense. Literally, it means "A clean business march." (Or "A march is clean business.")

I think it's correct to compare these idioms to a Dickens character because Tolstoy's characters, I noticed (I am currently reading Anna Karenina), as well as other gentry speaking in this era of Russian literature have these phrases that are essentially along the lines of British quips such as "I do say so" and cannot be understood by literal translation except as just decorational additions to their conversations. The author would never write a phrase like that except in dialogue, unless he/she was understood to be in a dialogue with the reader directly (like Dostoevsky does in many of his novellas, although I've never noticed him using these conversational "enhancers").

Also, I'd like to point out that the Russian word for "uncle" does not necessarily mean that the man referred to is even related to the person calling him that. It's a term of endearment for close friends of the family, mostly used by children. The same goes for aunts.

While I haven't read War and Peace completely and cannot verify the relation of the man in question to the Rostovs, I believe that it might be Dunnigan's reason for using the word in quotations, though I personally would have tried to squeeze in a footnote or mentioned in in a preface.

Many thanks to Olga, who managed to fill what I had thought were surely vain hopes for answers, and to Jeff, too, for putting her on the case. In a week when the debate about online versus independent bookselling has unexpectedly flared up once more, what better demonstration could there be of the importance of the local?

Archie and Bertie, Wolfe and Jeeves

I'm far from the first person to point out that Archie Goodwin, Nero Wolfe's right-hand-and-legman, bear similarities to Bertie Wooster--if, that is, you can imagine a Bertie Wooster who is capable, tough, and smart. Which, admittedly, is a difficult proposition. Really, the similarities usually begin and end at the two men's use of language: Archie is the best source of outdated slang I know of outside Wodehouse's world, able to work himself up to a dizzying pitch of idle--or, more frequently, needling--banter.

But every once in a while Rex Stout extends Wodehuose a nod that's a bit more overt, as in this passage from one of my favorite Nero Wolfe novels, The Silent Speaker (1946):

What Wolfe tells me and what he doesn't tell me, never depends, as far as I can make out, on the relevant circumstances. It depends on what he had to eat at the last meal, the kind of shirt and tie I am wearing, how well my shoes are shined, and so forth. He does not like purple shirts Once Lily Rowan gave me a dozen Sulka shirts, with stripes of assorted colors and shades. I happened to put on the purple one the day we started on the Chesterton-Best case, the guy that burgled his own house and shot a week-end guest in the belly. Wolfe took one look at the shirt and clammed up on me. Just for spite I wore the shirt a week, and I never did know what was going on, or who was which, until Wolfe had it all wrapped up, and even then I had to get most of the details from the newspapers and Dora Chesterton, with whom I had struck up an acquaintance. Dora had a way of--no, I'll save that for my autobiography.

Would Jeeves have done any less?

Which can't help but lead a reader to imagine the possibilities: what if Jeeves and Wolfe had met at some point, and teamed up? There's no question that they would have been a formidable duo, but would they have gotten along? Or would Jeeves merely have frustrated Wolfe, his silent efficiency eliminating any need for the drama and flourish that Wolfe loved so much?

Archie and Bertie, on the other hand. . . . Bertie would take one look at Archie and quail, seeing the inner tough guy beneath the dapper exterior, while Archie would instantly cross Bertie off any and all lists of both suspects and rivals, and thus would take barely any notice of him at all, methinks.

Bees and sailors, or, Tolstoy's metaphors

As a descriptive writer, Tolstoy is rich in metaphor; readers quickly get used having characters compared to animals compared to plants compared to ideas themselves. But his metaphors are at their best when they are extended, when he draws out a comparison to the point that what he's really doing is not simply describing something, then mentioning something else to which it's similar, but rather drawing two completely different, fully detailed scenes, joined only by his purpose of showing us how they illuminate one another.

My favorite example from War and Peace is his comparison of Moscow, abandoned by almost all its inhabitants in the face of the French advance, to a beehive that has lost its queen. It's far too long to cite here, but you can find it in Volume Three, Part Three, Chapter XX (page 874 in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation); his description is creepy and convincing on both fronts, depicting a sort of living death exemplified by pointless, habitual activity.

Another example that's short enough to share comes much earlier, when the Russian troops are marching to the doomed battle of Austerlitz:

A soldier in movement is as heed in, limited, and borne along by his regiment as a sailor by his ship. However far he may go, whatever strange, unknown, and dangerous latitudes he gets into, around him--as for the sailor always and everywhere there are the same docks, masts, and rigging of his ship--always and everywhere there are the same comrades, the same ranks, the same sergeant major Ivan Mitrich, the same company dog Zhuchka, the same superiors. A soldier rarely wishes to know what latitudes his whole ship has gotten to; but on the day of battle, God knows how and from where, a stern note is heard in the moral world of the troops, the same for everyone, which sounds the approach of something decisive and solemn and arouses in them an unaccustomed curiosity. On days of battle, soldiers excitedly try to get beyond the interests of their regiment, listen intently, look about, and greedily inquire into what is going on around them.

That passage is also a good example of the constant richness of detail, of attention to the world--and the petty, even risible interests through which we attempt to understand it in our daily lives--that fills and animates the novel, giving it a constant liveliness and spirit that, until you've experienced it, is hard to believe can be sustained for 1,200 pages.

"Fair field, clear course!" or, Hunting for good translations

One minor hope I had for the recent Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace was that it would remove a source of silly, but real, irritation in the first translation I read, Ann Dunnigan's 1968 translation for Signet Classics. When the Rostovs lead a hunt at their country house, they're joined by a distant relative whom they address as uncle, and in Dunnigan's translation he is always referred to as "Uncle," with the quotation marks around the name to remind us that he's not really their uncle. As you can imagine, the repetition of those quotation marks is incredibly grating--almost fingernails-on-a-chalkboard painful--by the end of that scene.

Fortunately, Pevear and Volokhonsky dispense with the quotation marks, but they make another change to that scene that is frustrating in its own way. Uncle is an enthusiastic hunter, and, like an incidental character in Dickens, he is distinguished almost exclusively by a verbal tic, a constantly repeated favorite exclamation of delight--which, in Dunnigan's translation, was rendered as "Fair field, clear course!"

Pevear and Volokhonsky render Uncle's favorite phrase much more simply, as "Right you are!"--which offers some of the same tone, but none of the individuality or memorability of "Fair field, clear course!" Constance Garnett (who also dispenses with the quotation marks around Uncle), I find, translated it as, "All's well and quick march," which seems somewhere in between the two approaches. I don't have Anthony Briggs's 2005 translation at hand to consult, but I recall it being criticized for making the Russian soldiers sound too British, which makes me suspect his version probably falls closer to "Fair field" than "Right you are."

Not knowing Russian, I don't have any real idea which of these versions is closest to what Tolstoy intended, and their sheer range suggests a certain untranslatability at the core of the phrase. But I'll happily admit to still being partial to "Fair field, clear course!" There's an unquestionable tinge of the English countryside in that phrase, but it's memorable and effective nonetheless--when I idly think of War and Peace, as often as not I find myself thinking, "Fair field, clear course!"--and it succinctly conjures up a picture of a hearty, bluff, hail-fellow-well-met sort of character in a way that I imagine Tolstoy, a fan of Dickens, must have intended.

Any readers of Russian want to weigh in with their own translation?

Tolstoy's zoo

{Photo by rocketlass.}

At one point in War and Peace, Natasha--her surfeit of energy having temporarily trapped her in that odd state common to teens of being simultaneously listless and frenetic--orders her maid, almost inexplicably, to bring her a rooster. By the time the rooster has been located, Natasha has already considered and discarded several other thoughts and activities, and has as little interest in the rooster as would a person brought one out of the blue:

During this conversation, a maid stuck her head in at the back door of the sitting room.

"They've brought the rooster, miss," the girl said in a whisper.

"Never mind, Polya, tell them to take it away," said Natasha.

But the rooster did serve a purpose: it got me thinking about the animals of War and Peace. My notes make it:

A bear
Horses
Hunting dogs
A wolf and her cubs
A hare

The bear, of course, is the greatest of these, costarring with Pierre and Dolokhov in one of the novel's--and Tolstoy's--finest scenes, the debauched night that begins with the bear dancing and ends with it tied to the back of a policeman, floating in the Moika.

I can't bear--sorry--to refer to that scene without quoting Pierre's rationalization for being there in the first place after promising his good friend Prince Andrei mere hours before that he wouldn't go near the party:

"It would be nice to go to Kuragin's," he thought. But at once he remembered the word of honor he had given Prince Andrei not to visit Kuragin.

But at once, as happens with so-called characterless people, he desired so passionately to experience again that dissolute life so familiar to him, that he decided to go. And at once the thought occurred to him that the word he had given meant nothing, because before giving his word to Prince Andrei, he had also given Prince Anatole his word that he would be there; finally he thought that all these words of honor were mere conventions, with no definite meaning, especially if you considered that you might die the next day, or something so extraordinary might happen to you that there would no longer be honor or dishonor. That sort of reasoning often came to Pierre, destroying all his decisions and suppositions. He went to Kuragin's.

Quite. As someone who does not generally give in to impulse when it contradicts earlier plans*, I find myself loving Pierre more at that moment than at any other in all 1,200 pages of War and Peace.

The bear, meanwhile, brings to mind another, later bear, this one in Penelope Fitzgerald's strange, beautifully written novel of Russia, The Beginning of Spring (1988). I turned to the scene with the bear in that novel tonight and was immediately impressed by how Tolstoyan the bear's backstory feels:

Frank . . . asked her, out of civility, what Mitya's present was. It was a tame bear-cub, or perhaps not tamed, sent dow from the North. The prices of ordinary brown bear fur, for rugs and coats, had gone down terribly since they had put proper heating into the Trans-Siberian railway. Still, this one's mother had been shot for sport by one of Arkady's business contacts and generously he had ordered them to box up the cub and put it on the train for Moscow.

Still, I was surprised when later on that same page Fitzgerald made her reference to Tolstoy overt:

Frank had never been much amused by the dancing bear [he recalled from his childhood], nor, as far as he could see, was anyone else. This was only a cub, though. When he got back to Reidka's he told Selwyn what he had arranged, largely for the relief of repeating it aloud. At least he can't make it have anything to do with Tolstoy, he thought. But it turned out that at the New Year Lev Nicolaevich had himself taken the part of the performing bear, wearing a skin which had been lined with canvas. According to Selwyn, this enabled him to give a more spiritual turn to the whole occasion.

After reading that I found myself imagining Tolstoy as the author of Bambi . . . oh, what drama he would bring to the forest fire!

"His books move; they show mankind's way of thinking in those times," or, Some reflections on Tolstoy

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I'm deep into War and Peace now, making a concerted press to get through the last twenty percent--but I took a break tonight to turn to some of my favorite writings on Tolstoy, and I found a couple of pieces well worth sharing as a follow-up to last week's post on General Kutuzov.

First, from Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (1953), an account of his role and his evolution as a character through Tolstoy's innumerable drafts:

Such heroes as Pierre Bezukhov or Karataev are at least imaginary, and Tolstoy had an undisputed right to endow them with all the attributes he admired--humility, freedom from bureaucratic or scientific or other rationalistic kinds of blindness. But Kutuzov was a real person, and it is all the more instructive to observe the steps by which he transforms him from the sly, elderly, feeble, voluptuary, the corrupt and somewhat sycophantic courtier of the early drafts of War and Peace, which were based on authentic sources, into the unforgettable symbol of the Russian people in all its simplicity and intuitive wisdom. By the time we reach the celebrated passage--one of the most moving in literature--in which Tolstoy describes the moment when the old man is woken in his camp at Fili to be told that the French army is retreating, we have left the facts behind us, and are in an imaginary realm, a historical and emotional atmosphere for which the evidence is flimsy, but which is artistically indispensable to Tolstoy's design. The final apotheosis of Kutuzov is totally unhistorical, for all Tolstoy's repeated professions of his undeviating devotion to the sacred cause of truth.

In War and Peace Tolstoy treats facts cavalierly when it suits him, because he is above all obsessed by his thesis--the contrast between the universal and all-important but delusive experience of free will, the feeling of responsibility, the values of private life generally, on the one hand; and on the other the reality of inexorable historical determinism, not, indeed, experienced directly, but known to be true on irrefutable theoretical grounds.

Which leads nicely into this complementary passage on Tolstoy's method of revision, from Viktor Shklovsky's Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot (1981), a collection of oblique, pithy, idiosyncratic, piercingly acute observations that should always be close at hand for anyone who is reading Tolstoy:

I'll repeat what's important for me: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy said that he didn't know how to draw a circle; he had to close the line and then correct it.

He knew how to think by juxtaposing words, by awakening them, in a way.

When he wrote his major novels, he would begin with something plotted, i.e., something that was happening or had already happened, and sought the relationship between the incidental and the inevitable.

He studied the thoughts of a child and how cunning emerged at its first stages.

The so-called draft version is not an adaptation of a text to the norms, not sorting through gems, like jewelers do when making necklaces and crowns.

Drafts weigh the essence of events. The scenarios, which the hero of the work goes through, they should be called "hypothetical circumstances."

This is the analysis of how man was created, i.e. his sensation of the world, and how through the movements of scenarios, experimented and tested hundreds of times in fiction, the truth becomes clearer.

This work is like that of a captain who navigates by the stars and moon, using his chronometer to verify and make sure of their hypothetical place in the sky. The captain is testing the ship's course.

The book I'm writing is still moving in front of me, swaying on the waves. I'm cutting away at my subject with words--the way a stonecutter or sculptor works. I'm searching for meaning.

The purpose of my search is art.

The world moved in front of Tolstoy. He was near-sighted and never wore glasses, so as not to introduce yet another convention into his vision. His books move; they show mankind's way of thinking in those times.

Tolstoy's drafts are like parallel universes whose tiny initial differences lead to wildly different outcomes; I like to imagine a different, parallel Tolstoy in each of those universes who was satisfied with, and published, each of those variations. For decades after Kutuzov's death, we lived in a universe in which he was a sycophantic voluptuary--until Tolstoy, to suit his vision, shifted us into a different, one where Kutuzov's resignation in the face of fate was the mark of a hero.

Tolstoy the animist

{Photos by rocketlass.}

When I'm trying to describe Tolstoy's seemingly inexhaustible, uncontrollable, overflowing, enthusiastic empathy (which, frankly, I find myself doing strangely often, an indicator, I suppose of both my personality and the circles in which I tend to run), I tend to tell people about the moment in Anna Karenina when, in the middle of a hunt, he unexpectedly delves into the consciousness of a dog. When Levin orders the dog, Laska, to flush a quail, she thinks,

"But I can't flush anything. . . . Where will I flush it from? I can sense them from here, but if I move forward, I won't be able to tell where they are or what they are." Yet here he was nudging her with his knee and saying in an excited whisper, "Flush it, Lasochka, flush it!"

"Well, if that's what he wants, I'll do it, but I can't answer for myself any more," she thought and tore forward at full speed between the hummocks. She no longer smelled anything, but only saw and heard, without understanding anything

But this time around with War and Peace, I noticed a passage that may trump that one. It comes at a point when, between the wars, Prince Andrei is spending most of his time managing his estates. One day, as he is riding in a carriage through one of them, he sees a tree:

At the side of the road stood an oak Probably ten times older than the birches of the woods, it was ten times as thick and twice as tall as any birch. It was an enormous oak, twice the span of a man's arms in girth, with some limbs broken off long ago, and broken bark covered with old scars. With its huge, gnarled, ungainly, unsymmetrically spread arms and fingers, it stood, old, angry, scornful, and ugly, amidst the smiling birches. It alone did not want to submit to the charm of spring and did not want to see either the springtime or the sun.

"Spring, and love, and happiness!" the oak seemed to say. "And how is it you're not bored with the same stupid, senseless deception! Always the same, and always a deception! There is no spring, no sun, no happiness. Look, there sit those smothered, dead fir trees, always the same; look at me spreading my broken, flayed fingers wherever they grow--from my back, from my sides. As they've grown, so I stand, and I don't believe in your hopes and deceptions."

A tree! A centuries-year-old tree! And Tolstoy makes its haughty voice reasonably convincing!



Andrei, at least, is convinced:

"Yes, it's right, a thousand times right, this oak," thought Prince Andrei. "Let others, the young ones, succumb afresh to this deception, but we know life--our life is over!"

Oh, but Andrei, it could always be worse: you could, after all, be deeply mired in yet another Chicago January, where even the false promises of spring would seem like a gift from the gods!

Tolstoy's general

In his introduction to the translation of War and Peace that he made with his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, Richard Pevear, in the course of pointing out a paradox that is obvious to readers of the novel--that

the most real and even, in Tolstoy's sense, historical figures in War and Peace turn out to be the fictional ones; and the most unreal, the most insubstantial and futile, the historical ones.

--notes that the one important exception to that rule is the supreme commander of the Russian forces, Field Marshall Kutuzov, "who for Tolstoy is 'historical' in both senses of the word and thus becomes a touchstone figure in the book."

Kutuzov--old, half-blind, tired of both the trappings and the reality of war--is a character who has stood out in each of my readings of the novel. His weariness, if not his lack of resolve, is familiar from photos and accounts of Ulysses Grant,the reluctant destroyer. Before the battle of Austerlitz, Kutuzov sleeps through a high-level council of generals, knowing its pointlessness; only at the end of the meeting,after various impossible alternative battle plans have been proposed, more for the glory of their designers than for any hope of their actual implementation, does he rouse himself:

Kutuzov woke up, cleared his throat loudly, and glanced around at the generals.

"Gentlemen, the disposition for tomorrow, for today even (because it's already past twelve), cannot be changed," he said. "You have heard it, and we will all do our duty. And there's nothing more important before a battle . . . " (he paused) "than a good night's sleep."

General Grant comes to mind again when Prince Andrei reflects on a meeting with Kutuzov in the early days of Napoleon's invasion in 1812:

How and why it happened, Prince Andrei could in no way have explained, but after this meeting with Kutuzov, he went back to his regiment relieved with regard to the general course of things and with regard to the man to whom it had been entrusted The more he saw the absence of anything personal in the old man, in whom there seemed to remain only the habit of passions, and, instead of intelligence (which groups events and draws conclusions), only the ability to calmly contemplate the course of events, the more calmed he felt over everything being as it had to be. "He won't have anything of his own," thought Prince Andrei, "but he'll listen to everything, remember everything, put everything in its place, won't hinder anything useful or allow anything harmful. He understands that there is something stronger and more significant than his will--the inevitable course of events--and he's able to see them, able to understand their significance, and, in view of their significance, is able to renounce participating in those events, renounce his personal will and direct it elsewhere."

But the moment when Kutuzov most fully comes to life as a character is in a quiet moment with Prince Andrei earlier that day. The general, "flabby and swollen with fat," tired from a day in the saddle, dismounts:

He straightened up, looked around with his narrowed gaze and, glancing at Prince Andrei, obviously without recognizing him, strode towards the porch with his dipping gait.

"Phew . . . phew . .. phew," he whistled and again glanced around at Prince Andrei. Only after several seconds did the impression of Prince Andrei's face (as often happens with old men) connect with the remembrance of his person.

"Ah, greetings, Prince, greetings, dear boy, come along . . ." he said wearily, looking around, and went heavily up the steps, which creaked under his weight. He unbuttoned his jacket and sat down on a bench that stood on the porch.

"Well, how's your father?"

"Yesterday I received news of his passing away," Prince Andrei said shortly.

Kutuzov looked at Prince Andrei with wide-open, startled eyes, then took off his cap and crossed himself: "God rest his soul! His will be done with us all!" He sighed deeply, with his whole chest, and fell silent. "I loved and respected him, and I sympathize with you wholeheartedly." He embraced Prince Andrei, pressed him to his fat chest, and did not let go of him for a long time. When he did, Prince Andrei saw that Kutuzov's swollen lips were trembling and there were tears in his eyes. He sighed and took hold of the bench with both hands in order to stand up.

The mix of sincere emotion and ritual performance, the sense one gets of Kutuzov calling up and deploying reserves of genuine sadness generated by other, more important losses--it all serves to make Kutuzov believable and memorable in a way that Tsar Alexander and Napoleon simply can't ever be.