Notes on WAR AND PEACE, Tolstoy Getting Inside Heads

                                             PRINCE ANDREI BOLKONSKY AND THE OAK

Tolstoy’s greatest gift as a writer lies in the way he can get inside the heads of all different persons. The amplitude of War and Peace, the way he explores the inner worlds of even the most minor of characters. And he’s not satisfied with that. Over the course of his career he got inside the heads even of horses and dogs.

 Here he is in a famous scene from War and Peace, in which the writer presents the viewpoint of a querulous old oak tree (Volume Two, Part Three, Chapter One): “At the side of the road stood an oak. Probably ten times older than the birches of the wood. It was ten times as thick and twice as tall as any birch. An enormous oak, twice the span of a man’s arms in girth, with 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, 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 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—back behind me or at my sides. As they’ve grown, so I stand, and I don’t believe in your hopes and deceptions.’”

Pevear and Volokhonsky translation

 Of course, the thoughts of the oak tree, “scowling, motionless, ugly and stubborn,” are mediated through the consciousness of a central character, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. He, not the tree, is the one who has given up on life and cannot appreciate the glory of a fresh new spring. This soon becomes obvious, after Prince Andrei has visited the Rostov estate—and is on the verge of falling in love with Natasha Rostova.

 Returning home, riding once again through the same forest, but rejuvenated, he wonders about the old tree, “the oak that I agreed with.” He seeks it out again, “But where is it? he thought again, looking at the left side of the road, and then, not recognizing it, he admired the very oak he was looking for. The old oak, quite transformed, spreading out a canopy of succulent dark greenery, basked, barely swaying, in the rays of the evening sun. Of the gnarled fingers, the scars, the old grief and mistrust—nothing could be seen. Succulent green leaves without branches broke through the stiff, hundred-year-old bark, and it was impossible to believe that this old fellow had produced them. Yes, it’s the same oak, thought Prince Andrei, and suddenly a springtime feeling of gratuitous joy and renewal came over him.”

 

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