/wprg/ Day 16: War and Peace Reading Group

Just read your post. Very interesting stuff. I'm of the complete opposite opinion though. It's true what they say, that you're either a Tolstoy person or a Dostoevsky person.

Thanks dude. Yeah, I agree with you. I like Tolstoy and I actually have been wanting to re-read War and Peace since a few days after finishing it. It's an incredibly entertaining novel, but I just can't get much out of it. It's interesting that two contemporaries can inspire such polar views from their readers, and I'm not entirely sure why that is. They're not so terribly different, as far as I can tell.

What i understand from the book is that there are a lot of things happening around a historical event, so it's futile to try to put the cause of everything on the hands of one man.
It's not that the foot soldiers are more important than the commanders, but the actions of everybody has equal importance on the great scheme of things.

Maybe this isn't what he was trying to say and things will get more clear on the second epilogue, but that's the lesson i'm getting from the book so far.

They're so similar on the surface, but underneath there's monumental ideological differences. I, though I appreciate Dostoevsky's genius as a novelist, find reading his work absolutely hair-raising and soul-destroying. It really disturbs me how his characters are these possessed mannequins, controlled by these forces beyond their control. It's hard to explain what I mean by that; it's not that I think Dostoevsky is bad at characterizing. It's something to do with the fact that he and Tolstoy have almost opposite ideas concerning how a character should be portrayed in relation to the themes of the novel, with Tolstoy giving his characters a kind of autonomy, and Dostoevsky doing the opposite.

This pulling away from the characters and simply letting them be I think is why you see his as cold and computer-like. And I totally understand this view, it's just that exactly the opposite disquiets me about Dostoevsky. Like I say, this kind of thing is very hard to explain, so I'm sorry if this doesn't make much sense.

why was Pierre at Borodino anyway?
It feels like an afterthought in the plot.

"The armies lines up for one last battle to the death. And pierre was there too i guess." - Tolstoy

I think I understand what you're saying, but I think the only thing I'd disagree with you on here is that I don't get the sense that Dostoevsky doesn't give his characters autonomy, doesn't have forces outside the character's control affect them, that is, and this (at least to me) is readily apparent not only with how the characters act, but also with many of Dostoevsky's works featuring free will as a major theme, with the most exemplary examples probably being Notes From the Underground and The Grand Inquisitor. I think that both of them allow their characters perfect autonomy because of this, anyway. What do you think?

Hmm

It's a very difficult question because we're discussing impressions and, even though what you're saying is absolutely true, I still get the impression that someone like the Underground Man is controlled by his own perverse psychology in some way. He doesn't seem in control of the way he acts. Whereas someone like Pierre engages with freemasonry and atheism and countless other ideas across W&P, I never got the impression these ideas were overpowering him, but the ideas which possess someone like Alyosha or the Underground Man, I feel drive them to act the way they do in an almost forceful manner.

None of this is at all a criticism by the way; it's a very valid view of the way ideas can take control of us and use us for their dissemination. But it's a very pessimistic view and I prefer the optimism of a Tolstoy, even if it seems naive and outdated.

It's very strange, because so much of W&P is dedicated to Tolstoy's theory of history, in which there doesn't seem to be a great amount of space carved out for autonomy, while Dostoevsky like you say discusses free will often. Yet they seem to me to both contradict each other in the way they construct their characters.

>I still get the impression that someone like the Underground Man is controlled by his own perverse psychology in some way. He doesn't seem in control of the way he acts. Whereas someone like Pierre engages with freemasonry and atheism and countless other ideas across W&P, I never got the impression these ideas were overpowering him, but the ideas which possess someone like Alyosha or the Underground Man, I feel drive them to act the way they do in an almost forceful manner.

Huh, I never thought about it that way. I think Dostoevsky would argue ( and I would agree with him) that it's their free will that leads them to having that perverse psychology. The Underground Man chooses to be spiteful, Alyosha chooses to be the way he is, etc. I think the best counterexample to your view here would even be Raskolnikov. He becomes consumed by his theory similar to what you're saying, but he always possesses the free will to change what he's doing, and he ultimately does so.

I can't argue that Tolstoy seems to be optimistic, but I think Dostoevsky is as well. The fact that, according to him, we have free will, and that by exercising our free will we can become more spiritually fulfilled (not necessarily happy) people sounds like optimism to me. In reflection, I might even say that Dostoevsky is more optimistic than Tolstoy, just because he often has characters who are in dark places, such as Raskolnikov, come out of them; it's more impressive to murder, confess, and subsequently go through trials and come out regenerated than to be Pierre, who dabbles in a few things here and there searching for answers, and then embracing life and becoming happier and with more spiritual feelings, at least to me.

Probably so he can meet with Andrei

Finished today's reading.

Words read for day 16: 22,039
Time taken: 56 minutes

Total words read so far: 369,398
Total words in book: 563,286
Total time taken so far: 15 hours 43 minutes
Approximate total reading time: 25 hours

>TFW you will never have a cute naive gf like Natasha.

Are you kidding me? She's by for the most tedious character in the whole book. 0/10 waifu, would maybe stick dick in to mess with the plot.

tfw no slavic wife

I feel like I went years without seeing a single W&P spoiler in a random thread and since joining this reading group I am seeing them everywhere.

>he didnt watch the movies first

Here again

I found a review written about George Steiner's "Tolstoy or Dostoevsky", and noticed that it had some things to say about what we're discussing here.

"Steiner's analysis of the broad spectrum of differences between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky hinges upon the distinction between epic and drama. More specifically, Tolstoy is discussed int he context of the Homeric epic, Dostoevsky within the framework of Shakespearan drama."

"The master-puppeteer Tolstoy takes a very different tack [than Homer], however, pushing the reader to accept his personal moral stance. Characters are often employed to support a particular point of view, and seem to be deprived of free will. True, Tolstoy's moral perspective became more rigid with the years, but his didactic purpose is evident already at the time of the "great novels" and even earlier." The author of the review does say that this one is "less-convincing".

"Steiner focuses particularly on tragedy and Gothic melodrama, which serve as generic models for most of Dostoevsky's novels. For instance, The Idiot and The Possessed are constructed in a virtually tragic mode, while Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov feature a transformed melodramatic "happy ending" in the form of spiritual redemption. Dostoevsky's seemingly relaxed control over his characters is consonant with the nature of drama and facilitates the independent dynamics of the action."