6th February 2016
‘We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness.’
from War and Peace by Tolstoy
Tomorrow night War and Peace on BBC1 comes to an end, and that’s why I have chosen the above quotation for my column in today’s Mail. I’m sure you have already guessed how it will end, but if not forgive me. The stories of great novels are a common possession – therefore there is no such thing as a ‘spoiler’, as if this were a common-or-garden thriller.
Tolstoy’s novel is daunting, but I advise people to plunge in and skip the bits they find boring. That’s not a crime! Reading the book changed me, all those years ago. It warned me of the limits of youthful idealism and the danger of political ideas – and reminded me that the love of family (no matter how flawed) matters more than anything else. When I came to the point where Pierre tells Princess Marya and careworn Natasha that ‘When two people quarrel they are always both at fault’ and that he pities his dead wife and her terrible lonely death, tears poured down my cheeks.
Such insights, such compassion were transformed into television gold by Andrew Davies and director Tom Harper. They had the courage to give equal weight to the solemn, sonorous beauty of the Orthodox funeral mass as to the glitter of a ball and the sensuous, swooning pressure of a white–gloved hand at a young woman’s back. This is the essence of life, says Tolstoy: Love hand in hand with Death. Spiritual questions so important to him were conveyed with rare accuracy. When Prince Andrei finally dies of his wounds, Natasha’s anguished questions, ‘Where has he gone? Where is he now?’ came straight from Tolstoy, not Andrew Davies.
If War and Peace leaves you with a sense of the futility of war, and the mystery of human existence, it offers Love as consolation. Love, as we witness, is not won easily. Love makes many mistakes and often flourishes at the very point when all hope appears to be dead. Just as pitiless destiny destroys lives and punishes the innocent at well as the guilty, so compassionate fate swirls unlikely people into each other’s arms.
At the end we realise that the two couples, Nicolai and Marya, Pierre and Natasha would almost certainly not have found happiness in their respective marriages were it not for the upheavals of war. The enormous bad things that happened to their country and to their families and friends led also to good. Is the transformation worth the terrible price they all paid? Yes, says Pierre, he would endure imprisonment again if he knew it would lead to happiness as father to his beloved Natasha’s children.
After the upheavals of war and of passion, Tolstoy celebrates married peace – love grounded in realism and good sense. In the novel Princess Marya worries that she is plain but her dashing husband Nikolai Rostov (now a contented farmer) tells her, ‘It’s not beauty that endears, it’s love that makes us see beauty.’ He says that without his wife he would be lost. In a moving expression of love for her husband, matronly Natasha (in the book she no longer bothers with her looks because she is so happy) dismisses all delusions of romance: ‘What nonsense it is…about honeymoons, and that the greatest happiness is at first. On the contrary, now is the best of all….’
Tolstoy puts profound optimism into Pierre’s mouth: ‘We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness.’ This closing message is a lesson for people – for all time.
For the drama of human suffering we watched in a television serial (squashed absurdly into six weeks) is repeated inescapably, day after day, in the international news. The urge towards conflict is tragically embedded within mankind. Yet Tolstoy reminds us that it is always counterbalanced by the extraordinary resilience of the human soul – and its endless capacity for joy,