The Cosmopolitan Dream

Day 135 of A Year of War and Peace

Family, as The Scottish Play has it, are “those precious motives, those strong knots of love.” Such knots are capable of binding even the most fractious of families together. Indeed, the bond of kinfolk is strong enough to withstand the damage of distance, disappointment, betrayal, absence, and even ill-informed Thanksgiving political acrimony. So that’s saying something.

In today’s chapter, my favorite of the entire novel, we witness these bonds binding the Rostovs, particularly Natasha and Nikolai, ever closer together.

There is a lot going on in their lives. Nikolai is on leave from a nasty war. Natasha is engaged to prince Bolkonsky, but at the price of having to spend one year separated from him as a condition laid upon the engagement by Bolkonsky’s father. All this while the Rostov family is on the brink of financial collapse. Their night together, spent mostly at Uncle’s with good wine and even better song and dance, concludes with a trap ride home through the dark. As the trap sloshes along the wet earth road and as the horses splash through the mud below the two siblings drop into a deep contemplative quiet under the canopy of the moon-shadowed trees above. It’s a moment we’ve all had: a seemingly insignificant, quotidian moment small to the world but expansive to the individual. Natasha’s sudden soft singing of Russian folksong is the perfect punctuation to the scene as the two share this private and intimate moment while all about them history is on the move and nations are at war.

We’re now approaching the midpoint of the book. As we progress we’ll find that with War and Peace Tolstoy has in mind something much larger than merely telling a narrative story of the Russian experience during the Napoleonic Wars. He’s also interested in developing a theory of history. Part of this theory is investigating the connection, if any, between an individual’s action and the larger social movement of history. Tolstoy’s ideas, fully explored much later in the book, have come to influence my subsequent readings of the novel. So now when I look at how familial bonds bring Natasha and Nikolai closer together I can’t help but ask how the same bonds can be expanded outwards, encircling even more people within their precious motives and strong knots of love.

If this were possible there’d probably be a little less war and a lot more peace. That’s A Year of War and Peace’s cosmopolitan dream anyway.

DAILY MEDITATION