And on the seventh day God ended His work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.
While adventure stories typically relate the hero’s improbable escapes from danger and evil opponents, realist novels instead often describe how a hero or heroine, bit by bit, and error by error, comes to understand life and find wisdom. In what is routinely called the greatest of all novels, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, that is the story of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.
As the novel begins, Prince Andrei has already grown disillusioned with an earlier ideal. He had looked for meaning in social success which, when he readily achieved it, proved empty. Having married the best—according to his own demanding standards—woman in high society, he has come to regard her as unspeakably shallow just because she cares for nothing but what he used to regard as important. “My wife is an excellent woman,” he confides to the novel’s other main hero, Pierre, “but, my God, what wouldn’t I give not to be married now!”
If the hero or heroine of a realist novel is married when it begins, that marriage is probably doomed. A happy marriage is what one achieves at the end of the story.
“Drawing rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, frivolity—there you have the enchanted circle from which I am unable to escape,” Andrei explains. After all, when Napoleon “was working toward his goal, he went forward step by step; . . . he had nothing but his goal to consider, and he attained it. But tie yourself to a woman and you’re bound hand and foot.” When Pierre asks Andrei why he is going off to fight in the war against Napoleon, Andrei replies, in the tone of aristocratic disdain he applies to everything he regards as trivial: “‘Because I must. And besides, I’m going—’ he paused. ‘I’m going because this life I am leading—this life is—not to my taste.’”
Napoleon fascinates Prince Andrei, as he entranced so many young people, because, having come from nowhere, he rose step by step to become emperor. Having achieved so much by virtue of intelligence, courage, and will power—qualities Andrei also displays in abundance—he embodies for Prince Andrei the ideal of a meaningful life. The first section of War and Peace, set in the year 1805, describes how Andrei comes to recognize that this ideal is as empty as success in high society.
As an aide-de-camp to the Russian commander-in-chief Kutuzov, Andrei fantasizes about being the one who, at a moment of crisis in battle, offers the only plan that can save the army, and then, braving mortal dangers, carries it out. In his dreams, he eventually becomes the Russian Napoleon who defeats the actual Napoleon.
Something resembling his dreamed-of moment eventually comes. Panicked Russian soldiers are abandoning their cannons, which the French are about to seize and turn against the Russians. “Stop those wretches!” shouts Kutuzov, and “before he had finished speaking, Prince Andrei . . . had leaped from his horse and was running to the standard. ‘Forward, lads!’ he shouted in a childishly shrill voice.” Only Tolstoy, the consummate realist, would give his hero not a sonorous commanding voice, but a childishly shrill one.
“It has come!” thinks Prince Andrei. The longed-for opportunity for heroism has arrived. As he runs forward alone, he soon inspires soldiers to follow him. One grabs the heavy standard from him and is instantly killed. Andrei unsteadily picks it up and rushes forward. Totally focused on what is right before him, he sees some Russian artillerymen fighting, others running away toward him, while the French seize the guns and begin to turn them around. With Andrei and his men only a few paces away, he hears “the incessant whistling of bullets overhead, and the moans of soldiers who were falling to the right and left of him. But he did not look at them; he looked only at what was going on in front of him.”
Tolstoy—again the unsurpassed realist—has Andrei witness something that appears to make no sense. Why had no one before Tolstoy described soldiers, who fear death at every moment, too panicked to realize what they are doing? Andrei sees a “redhaired gunner” struggling with a Frenchman for a cannon’s cleaning rod, as if it mattered. “He distinctly saw the distraught, infuriated expressions on the faces of those two men who were obviously not aware of what they were doing.” Just as another Frenchman runs up and is about to bayonet the redhaired Russian, Prince Andrei suddenly felt as though one of his men had bludgeoned him on the head with all his might. So focused is he on the struggles in front of him that “the worst of it was not the pain, but that it distracted him, preventing him from seeing what he had been looking at.”
Andrei falls. In one of the most famous passages in world literature, he opens his eyes in the hope of learning the redhaired gunner’s fate and whether the Russians had reached the cannons in time, but, because he is now lying on his back, faces something entirely different:
But he saw nothing. Above him there was nothing but the sky, the lofty heavens, not clear, yet immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds slowly drifting across them.
“How quiet, solemn, and serene, not at all as it was when I was running; . . . not like our running, shouting, fighting. . . . How differently do those clouds float above the lofty, infinite heavens. How is it I did not see that sky before? How happy I am to have discovered it at last! Yes! All is vanity all is delusion, except those infinite heavens. There is nothing but that. And even that does not exist; there is nothing but stillness, peace. Thank God . . .”
Andrei has literally changed his point of view. He has ceased to struggle and paused. From this perspective that is entirely new to him, and in this moment of unexpected rest, he recognizes everything that he had considered important as trivial in comparison with infinity, eternity, and (though he is a nonbeliever) God.
Some people would discern meaningfulness in such a moment, but Prince Andrei’s revelation is, but for the last phrase, entirely negative. He realizes what is not meaningful—that all human activity is vanity, all striving delusion. But then, what is one to live for?
Andrei loses consciousness. When he awakens, he first thinks that before that day, “I knew nothing.” Napoleon comes by and, seeing Andrei, pronounces, “That’s a fine death!” Once Andrei would have imagined such a posthumous tribute as glorious, the sign of a life well-lived, like the death of the hero of an ancient epic, but now it is just vanity, in both senses.
Prince Andrei realized that this was said of him, and that it was Napoleon who said it. . . . But he heard the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly. Not only did they not interest him, but he took no notice of them, instantly forgetting them. . . . He knew that it was Napoleon—his hero—but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant creature compared with what was taking place between his soul and that lofty, infinite sky with the clouds sailing over it.
Andrei hears the self-satisfied Napoleon praise Russian officers for their gallantry and the officers reply in words they must have learned from some grand tale of battle. To Andrei, this performance seems vain and entirely fake.
When Andrei groans, Napoleon realizes he is alive and orders his soldiers to care for him. Seeing Napoleon favor this Russian, they return the icon that his pious sister Princess Marya had given him before he set out for war. Thinking of her, he wishes he could believe as she does. Then everything would be “clear and simple. . . . How good it would be to know where to seek help in this life, and what to expect after it, beyond the grave.” Then he could pray as she does, but as it is, he cannot address “that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Princess Marya.”
Once again, Andrei pauses. And once again, the nothingness of all he has known is revealed to him, but this time, he also detects some great and all-important mystery beyond it. “There is nothing certain,” he says to himself, “nothing except the nothingness of everything that is comprehensible to me, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all important!”
I think of this episode on Shabbat. After the greatest of all activity that has ever been or could be, making the universe in six days, God rested. But why should an infinite, all-powerful being rest or need to rest? Perhaps the answer is that He intended to demonstrate the importance of the pause. He wanted us to take a break from energetic activity and view the world from a perspective outside and beyond it. He wanted to give us Shabbat.
