Notes on WAR AND PEACE Le Fil de La Vierge

                                              Josef Chelmonski, "Indian Summer" (1875)

Le Fil de la Vierge

Scenes of autumn. Glomps of spiderwebs, huge masses of feathery gossamer—their filament gleaming in the autumnal sunlight—blow through the air of Northern Russia, flying to God knows where or why. Little spiders are hitchhiking on the webs. They don’t where they’re going or why they’re going there. Sound familiar?

 I’ve lived in lots of places in the autumnal months, but only in Northern Russia—to be precise in Great Novgorod, the oldest city in Russia—did I view that spectacle of the glomps of flying gossamer. Don’t know what it was for, or if it was for anything, but it was beautiful.

 And just think: Aleksandr Nevsky saw those soaring spider webs too, in, say, October of 1237; the Tatars in 1240, mounted on dashing steeds, rapine on their minds, gazed at the autumnal sky and marveled at the loveliness of those gossamer glomps.

 One theory: the gossamers in the autumn skies over Great Novgorod, oldest city in Russia, are said to be the threads unravelling from the winding-sheet of the Mother of God, which golden gossamer trailed back to earth as She ascended into heaven on the Day of the Dormition. Tolstoy mentions the autumnal flights of spider webs in War and Peace (Epilogue, Part 1, Ch. 16). The context is a dream, in which young Nikolenka Bolkonsky, son of the now deceased Prince Andrei, comes out of a horrible nightmare.

 “A terrible dream had awakened him. In his dream he had seen himself and Pierre wearing helmets—the kind illustrated in his edition of Plutarch. He and Uncle Pierre were marching at the head of a huge army. This army consisted of slanting white lines that filled the air like the spiderwebs that fly about in the fall and that Dessales [his French tutor] called le fil de la Vierge [the thread of the Virgin]. Ahead was glory, just the same as these threads, only slightly denser. They—he and Pierre—were racing lightly and joyfully nearer and nearer to their goal. Suddenly the threads that moved them began to weaken, to tangle; the going became heavy. And Uncle Nikolai Ilyich [Rostov] stood before them in a stern and menacing pose.”

 This passage appears at the very end of Part 1 of the Epilogue, and with it we bid farewell to the major characters of War and Peace. Tolstoy concerns himself for the rest of the novel with his philosophical speculations on history. The implications of this dream at the end concern the coming Decembrist Revolt, only five years into the future (1825) from the time of the dream, but beyond the bounds of the novel’s action.

 Pierre Bezukhov is at the forefront of the liberal policies supported by the Decembrists, and the dream suggests that Nikolenka, who may well be a young officer in five years—inspired by Pierre’s liberalism, and by veneration for his dead father, who he assumes would stand with Pierre—may himself take part in the revolt. Nikolai Rostov, however, is of a more conservative bent, and he will oppose the Decembrists.

 Here’s the ending of Part 1 of the Epilogue. “He’s kind and good, I love him,” he thought of Dessales. “But Uncle Pierre! Oh, what a wonderful man!  And father? Father! Father! Yes, I’ll do something that even he would be pleased with . . .”