Booklist 2013 # 13: Emma by Jane Austen

Jane Austen is one of my favorite novelists. So it feels like a real accomplishment to complete Emma as it was the only Jane Austen novel I hadn’t read (not including the unfinished Sanditon and the juvenilia).

The novel is the story of the rich and snobbish Emma Woodhouse, a woman confident in her social position and intellectual judgments, who spends most of her days taking care of her hypochondriac father. She befriends a girl named Harriet Smith as a replacement for her governess who has recently left to get married. Mischief ensues as Emma fills Harriet’s head with ideas about her own self-importance and vanity, imagining some grand clandestine origin for her new friend, despite all the evidence of Harriet’s poverty and meager social position. Not just content with friendship, Emma plays matchmaker for Harriet, leading her to reject a farmer who loves her because Emma believes his social position too low, and instead convinces Harriet to pine after various gentleman in the neighborhood who are out of her league. Meanwhile, Emma begins her own flirtations as a rich youth named Frank Churchill comes to town in order to visit his father. However, Frank is hiding some secrets of his own. All the while there is Mr. Knightley, Emma’s brother in law, who is one of the few people unimpressed with all of Emma’s accomplishments and supposed virtues, willing to call out her faults, and who foresees the problems Emma’s friendship with Harriet will cause.

Like most of Austen’s novels, the conflict and theme of the story centers on lack of self-knowledge and misunderstanding the character of other people. Only through self-knowledge and understanding other people can we hope to find love and happiness. In a time where many people married to make alliances, rise in social class, or gain wealth, Austen suggests in her works that true happiness in a relationship isn’t found in acquiring more wealth or improved social position, but in true love. She posits further through many of her characters that true love is similar to Aristotle’s concept of friendship of the good in which two people of good virtue enjoy each other’s character. It also suggests one person of higher virtue and superior reason helps raise the consciousness of their friend or lover over time to a higher level. In other words, a true friend or true lover raises not our wealth or social status, but rather our intellectual judgments and our worth as a human being; they elevate our very soul, even if that means sometimes criticizing and making us aware of our faults and intellectual limitations. Austen avoids slipping in gender stereotypes by giving us two relationships of this sort: Knightley improving the character and ideas of Emma, but also Jane Fairfax improving the character and ideas of Frank Churchill.

Why does Emma need improvement? Well, Emma is hardly a perfect person and contains some real character faults; she is snobby, well aware of her social class, at times condescending, and often lets her imagination get the better of her (such as in the case with Harriet Smith). Worst of all is her vanity. The greatest achievement of the work is that Austen manages to make the reader like a character who has many unlikeable faults. Of course, she does this by also letting us see that Emma possess many virtues as well; she is an extremely caring daughter, she is willing to admit her own faults when pointed out to her, especially when it involves seriously hurt someone else’s feelings.

Poem for 5/3/13: “Sir, No Man’s Enemy” by W. H. Auden

“Sir, no man’s enemy” opens with the speaker sharing his wisdom to the reader or some other unidentified “sir.” The speaker suggests that someone who is your enemy, even after forgiving you, will eventually look inward into himself, and when he does that and sees what really rests in his heart there is no chance that he will be fair and good to you. Therefore, he prays that some force sends power and light, which will cure all our worries and fears and curiosity (described negatively as an “intolerable neural itch”). A power and light will arrive that will end our exhaustion (ennui) will end all our weaning (which has both senses of the word, implying a withdrawal from the joys of life, thus alienation from the world, and our lack of independence like a baby, so enforced reliance on society), all the constant lying, and the joylessness and controlling falsehoods around the concepts of chastity and innocence. The speaker then demands that we prohibit rehearsed responses and get over our cowardly stances. In time, he hopes the light and power will cover those retreating from the world and life and in the the beams of this light become great and rejuvenated. This power and light will reveal the healers in the city and the glorious country houses, break apart the houses of the dead with the life and rejuvenation its brings, then we will look upon the new styles of architecture that dominate the modern world and have a change of heart.

The modern world is an alienating place, however, as the poet subtly posits it isn’t the world itself that is bad and alienating, but rather the people in it and how they experience this changing modern world. With the help of the amorphous light and power, people can change their attitudes and only then have a change of heart, returning back to the modern world with joy. In other words, people need not change the physical world itself, but they must change their attitudes and only then will the physical world seem a better place. The light and power that will assist in this changing of minds is presented in extremely abstract and ambiguous terms. They could be symbolic for faith and Jesus or general symbols of hope or perhaps the power of poetry and art itself. In favor of interpreting the abstract symbols as Christian is the opening of the poem, which recalls both turning the other cheek to one’s enemy (which the opening suggests is a futile gesture), and the word “prodigal” in the opening recalls the Parable of the Prodigal Son from the New Testament. The other section of the poem rehearses a litany of human foibles: worries, fears, and curiosity that never lets humanity rest and be happy, the exhaustion of living life alienated from others but also relying on societal institutions in an indifferent and impersonal way, the iniquitousness of lying, and even the controlling aspects of supposed virtues like chastity and innocence. The Second Coming of Jesus would cure all those issues. Harrowing of the Houses of the Dead is especially suggestive given Jesus’s harrowing of hell, which is its own house of death. After this coming of faith, we will look upon the new style of architecture with “a change of heart.” This implies that Auden didn’t particularly like the new style of architecture and hints at the theological concept of the City of G-d; the physical world won’t change, but a spiritual change inside us will transform how we view the external world. Even unattractive architecture can become a New Eden with a spiritual change of heart. The suggestion of the poem is that only through faith can the problems of the modern world (everything from the aesthetic to the psychological) be solved.

Poem for 5/2/13: “Taller Today, We Remember Similar Evenings” by W. H. Auden

The poem opens with the speaker indulging in nostalgia for a beloved past. The opening words (“Taller today, we remember . . .”) and the first line of the third stanza (“It is seen how excellent hands have turned to commonness”) reveal that the speaker is comparing the events of his present moment as he heads home from work across a field with experiences from his past. The first stanza has the speaker remembering a similar evening from his past to the one he is experiencing now in his walk home. It ends with an image of glacier producing a brook that brings him joy, but as an image evokes coldness and solidity, implying that often good things that bring us joy must come from painful or tragic experiences. The second stanza again evokes a romantic image, but ends by mentioning a Captain Ferguson, presumably a friend from his past who the poem implies is dead. The third stanza comes back to the present as the speaker reflects that the excellent hands of his youth “have turned to commonness,” presumably from years of hard work. Then it tells of other faceless figures, perhaps other friends of the speaker, who went insane from his obsessions and blindness towards the world; another who sold all his wealth and land in order to fight for his country, only to falter during battle and presumably die. At this point, there is a sense the poem is invoking that things change, but not usually for the better.

The next stanza speaks of night coming with snow (a common image in poetry for death and desolation), followed by the howls of the dead (the friends from the previous stanza). It talks of The Adversary, a name for the devil, which comes from and alludes to The Book of Job, linking it to some of the deeper questions of that biblical book. The poem implies many of these people are dead and full of regrets “Because the Adversary put to easy questions/On lonely roads.” The “too easy questions” need to be seen in the light of the Book of Job and the friends from the previous stanzas. Why do bad things happen to good people? Or perhaps an even more general question: why is the world so difficult and unfair for the vast majority of people? As the poem has already posited, our friends die, we physically age (and not for the better), people in our lives grow insane, we work hard and tired ourselves out, and our loved ones succumb to folly and die in wars. It is all too easy to fall into despair and curse the world, succumbing to the Adversary’s “too easy questions,” which is exactly what he hopes will happen to Job. The world is unfair and if we succumb to our heartache and bitterness over such a state of affair, we will only have a lonely road that will alienate us further from people and the world around us, preventing us from experiencing the beauty and joy of the world when it is present.

Hope reveals itself in the final two stanzas, which reverses course from all the previous sections of the poem. The fifth stanza begins, “But happy now,” which brings us back to the first stanza in which the speaker is comparing his feelings at the moment with the lost feelings of wonder from his youth. He is happy right now, despite the memories of his dead friends (their howls from the graves) dogging his every footsteps threatening to plunge him into despair and force him to ponder the unfairness of the world (the too easy questions). The sight of farms lit all across the valley fill the speaker with a sense of hope as all the men stop their hard work and return to their homes for the evening. However, his happiness is more than just the cessation of hard work for much needed rest. The tranquil scene itself allows him to recognize the interconnectedness of the world and private intimacy behind those farm doors; he realizes that love and life go on, even in the face of tragedy, unfairness, and potential despair, which fills him with a deep sense of peace and hope. Even though the speaker recognizes this feeling of peace will inevitably pass, for now it is sufficient to give him hope because he comes to realize that all the heartache and unfairness of the world can be endured if it means he is capable of feeling this brief moment of happiness. Ironically, the peacefulness he feels comes from the epiphany itself. Our only two choices in response to despair, other than succumbing to it, is to learn to endure it and wait for those brief moments of happiness or to love our lives for what they are, warts and all. The poem begins with the speaker reflecting on the inevitability of change and ends with him coming to terms with the fact that change is a part of life.

Poem for 5/1/13: “Control of the Passes was, He Saw, the Key” by W. H. Auden

This is a tricky poem in that it reads like a riddle with missing information required to solve it. I understand it as a poem about a man scouting out land in order to make large sum of money who is tricked by the local residence into purchasing a bad piece of property. The scout is convinced of the lands potential if only the authorities would build some railroad stations by it. He tries to convince local officials to do so, but is ignored.

Over time, he becomes a lonely hermit up in the land he purchased, which is described in the poem at this point as a “desert.” From up in his land, he listens to the street music playing in town. He dreams of some companions and is often woken up by the rambling water near the land that he purchased. The most difficult line to unravel is the final one: “They would shoot, of course,/Parting easily who were never joined.” In the end, this lonely spy never truly joins the land and the community, so he parts easily from it; as John Fuller points out in W. H. Auden: a Commentary, the final line comes from an Anglo-Saxon poem.

Like many of Auden’s other poems, it is about the difficulty of developing intimacy and a feeling of alienation from the world around you. Yet another reading seems possible too. Perhaps we should understand this poem as being about a literal spy scouting out an area for its key passes as part of a military operation whose communication to his superiors are ignored and who succumbs to loneliness over time as he remains trapped performing this mission that nobody cares about. This would still make it a poem about alienation from the world around you, but in this case due to one’s job; the military in times of war forces the character to alienate himself from the world and other people since such intimacy could jeopardize the mission. Another possible reading, according to John Fuller, is to treat the poem as an allegory for unconsummated love in which “love is forced to act as a secret agent because the individual doesn’t consciously recognize his desire (the spy) and represses it.” This transforms the different elements of the poem into various symbols related to unfulfilled desire. While I wanted to mention Fuller’s reading since it’s so interesting, I see no reason to treat the poem allegorically in this way.

Works Cited

Fuller, John. W. H. Auden: A Commentary. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Poem for 4/30/13: “From the Very First Coming Down” by W. H. Auden

The poem is about the speaker receiving a letter from his lover. It opens with the speaker reminiscing when his lover first arrived into the valley where the speaker currently resides. Little details presented in the first three lines such as the lover’s frown suggest the lover wasn’t happy with the place and only came because he got lost. In lines 9-10, the poet associates “love’s worn circuit re-begun” with the turning of the year and the changing of the seasons. The fact that love is “worn” implies that their relationship is fatigued and they follow the same predictable patterns over and over again. This is predictability is emphasized in the next line of the poem when we’re told the relationship is “endless with no dissenting turn.”

The speaker receives a letter whose actual words remain a mystery to us, but which we can infer contains further disappointments for the future of this relationship. The next stanza presents the speaker’s reaction to the letter. He suggests that it is natural for love to sometimes be disappointed; a lover who always is happy and tells you everything you want to hear is probably deceiving you. The speaker content with the seasons and therefore the different cycles and moods of his relationship with the absent lover goes about his business changed by the whole affair. The poem ends with an enigmatic image of a nod, a common gesture, being described as the stone smile of a country god, which is “always afraid to say more than it meant.”

This final section of the poem I suspect is the crux to understanding the rest of the poem. The nod is a common gesture, a basic symbol of social decorum. It is a weak gesture of acknowledgement, but doesn’t convey any particularly complicated or deep feeling. The speaker’s contentment with the “worn circuit” of his love and the apparent absence of the longed for lover is called into question in the final stanza. He claims to be fine with the situation, yet little hints in the poem imply a discontentment with the direction of the relationship. However, the lover pretends to go along and be happy because social decorum dictates it, just as decorum expects a nod rather than a more grandiose gesture expressing true feelings, hence the final commentary about reticence and “always afraid to say more than it meant.” He goes along with social expectations, which reign over us like a god, but secretly finds them cold and rigid (hence “stone” as an adjective), which fail to express true feelings. There is a sense of emotional repression the speaker is bottling up inside himself. Like the poem, “Who Stands on the Crux of the Watershed” there is a sense of a deeper intimacy that the reader is barred from, a deeper inner life to these characters, which is not revealed to us and remains private. Seen together, the two Auden poems that I have explicated so far are about the difficulty of achieving true intimacy with other people and both poems have a sense of accepting the inevitable, while only putting up a minor struggle at best.

Poem for 4/29/13: “Who Stands, the Crux Left of the Watershed” by W. H. Auden

Here is the poem.

The first interesting feature and difficulty is the poem’s bizarre syntax and point-of-view. It is in 2nd person, which directly addresses us as if we’re the character at the opening of the poem who is standing at the crux left of the watershed. The first half is full of powerful imagery describing the remains of a village laundry industry, all of which is now in disrepair and decline. It leads into a story describing the bravery of two men who attempt to fix the broken water engine, but all for naught. These two men are now dead, while the engine is still in disrepair. The poem makes clear it is selecting these two dead men at random: “though many dead lie under the poor soil, some acts are chosen taken from recent winters; two there were cleaned out a damaged shaft by hand . . .”

The second stanza tells the stranger, which happens to be us the reader, to go home. The land and its inhabitants will not communicate some deeper truth to us or intimate connection with its people. The people of the place refuse to be stirred from their houses to acknowledge our presence. Then the poem goes on to describe the wind arriving from the sea and struggling against the trees and sides of their homes, presumably to destroy them, but the image of “sap unbaffled rises” suggests that nature resists. It ends with some unseen force near us about to make a decision and “scenting danger.”

The general tone of the poem is one of alienation and disrepair. If one supposed goal of poetry is to connect us to the experiences of distant people in distant times and places, this poem challenges that assumption as the people want nothing to do with us, the syntax of the poem is purposefully confusing to increase our confusion and alienation as we struggle to make sense of it, and we don’t get much motivation or information about the characters that do appear.

The two men who attempt to fix the engine are selected at random from hundreds of other dead people; their actions come off as heroic to a certain extent, hinting that heroism need not be winning grand battles like Achilles or some king, but can be in the daily struggles of day to day existence made by the little unknown people. This point is emphasized further by the fact that the poem tells us that it selects the story of these two men at random; it could have been the story of any two men from this village. This heroism, however, is subverted by their failure. By the time we arrive at the village, the engine is in disrepair; their heroic action to repair it proves meaningless then. Or maybe it is just meaningless to us. Maybe the attempt itself, even if futile in the end, was the meaning.
The wind struggling to get inside their homes is “driven from the ignorant sea.” Ignorant is a strange word choice, yet a revealing one. It gives the sense that the sea is far away and like us is a stranger to the village. It sends the wind to break down the trees and into the homes where the people live. This serves as a metaphor for the reader’s actions. We struggle to get inside the homes and meet the actual people of the village, but we’re ignorant like the sea. We know nothing about these people, we’re ignorant of their day to day lives (even though we make assumptions what they must be like based on the setting). It is important to remember that there is probably more to people living in a different world than ours that an outsider will ever know and as in the poem they have no reason to reveal it to us.

The wind serves a second a purpose. When the wind tries to destroy the elm trees the “sap unbaffled rises.” Nature can be destructive, but it can also be an eternal force that resists destruction. All of this parallels the village itself, which is in disrepair and slowly dying, but continues to resist and live on for now.

Genesis 16: Hagar’s Flight and The Birth of Ishmael

There is a ton of drama in this little chapter. Genesis 16 returns to the larger conflict of the Abraham Cycle of Genesis: his childlessness. How will G-d’s promise that Abram will have numerous offspring be fulfilled if Abram can’t produce an heir? This chapter provides an apparent solution with the birth of Ishmael.

The barren Sarai encourages her husband Abram to sleep with her maidservant, Hagar. Hagar gets pregnant with Ishmael, invoking Sarai’s jealousy since Hager no longer respects Sarai as she should. The gist is that Hagar is no longer acting like a servant, but rather as mistress of the house because she is pregnant with Abram’s child. To appease his wife, Abram lets Sarai “deal with her as [she] think[s] right.” Sarai treats her maidservant harshly, which causes Hagar to flee. At a spring, an angel appears before Hagar and promises that if she goes back to her harsh mistress, her offspring will be numerous; he also tells her the name of her future child will be Ishmael and what his life will be like. Then the chapter explains the origin of the name of a watering-well located at the springs where Hagar meets the angel. Hagar returns back to Abram and Sarai for the birth of Ishmael.

This chapter builds drama around a common Near Eastern practice of the time; if a wife couldn’t conceive she sometimes offered her maidservant to her husband to act as a kind of surrogate in order to produce an heir. No doubt such a practice caused all sorts of problems with social class structures since maidservants were typically slaves. Genesis 16 addresses this problem of social classes when the pregnancy of the servant threatens to displace the status of her mistress. For those inclined to look poorly upon the Bible, I don’t think this should be understood as a moralistic tale warning against uppity servants who fail to recognize their place, but rather a tale that briefly tries to explore some of the real social problems that possibly arose from this type of practice.

Sarai attempts to do the socially acceptable thing of the time by giving her permission for the maidservant to sleep with her husband and produce an heir, but is repaid with derision by Hagar. Understandably Sarai is embarrassed and livid. Not only from Hagar’s behavior I suspect, but also by the fact that Hagar was able to get pregnant. It isn’t Abram who is infertile, but Sarai. One value of the story then is the insight it offers about the cultural values of the time. The story suggests that during these times the worth of women was based on their ability to reproduce. Sarai feels shame because she cannot produce a child, while Hagar acts superior to Sarai because by the standards of the day she is superior due to her ability to reproduce. However, we need to be careful in reading this as only reflecting attitudes towards women. Based on the Covenant outlined in the earlier chapter, we see the ability to produce children isn’t just a quality the culture values in women, but something the culture values in general. What prizes is G-d offering Abraham? Land, property, and heirs. From this we can infer that one of the greatest treasures a person in this culture could attain was children. Without children, not only is your name lost forever, but any land and property you acquired are wasted; they are inherited by nephews, cousins, loyal servants, and such. The land and property have more worth when the person has children to one day inherit it.

More problematic is the fact that this story seemingly justifies slavery. Hagar is a slave who runs away because of her mistress’s harsh treatment. She is confronted by an angel at a spring who tells her that G-d wants her to return and endure the harsh treatment, but that she will be rewarded in the future for doing so. One possible message here is that slaves should accept harsh treatment from their masters, rather than attempt to run away, and eventually they will be rewarded by G-d. However, another possible interpretation exists when one considers the work in its possible context. As I’ve pointed out in an earlier post, many scholars believe that Genesis, especially the Abraham cycle of stories, was written during the Babylonian exile and was written with the purpose to give the exiles hope that G-d hasn’t abandoned them or the Covenant. Therefore, the Israelites readers of the time weren’t looking to justify the slaves they owned or to justify their own slavery, but rather to express their experience as slaves under Babylonian captivity. When this context is considered, the purpose of this tale is not a justification of slavery, but a plea to keep hope for a better future after slavery rather than attempt a futile escape and starve in the wilderness.
The story also raises other fundamental moral questions. Abram returns Hagar to Sarai’s rule in response to his wife’s indignation and essentially tells his wife to “treat her as you think right.” Sarai responds by treating her harshly. Obviously this is Abram’s attempt at restoring the peace. However, one gets a sense that this is a kind of moral test as well much in the same way that G-d encourages Cain to be morally upright, despite the rejection of his offering. Later in the Bible we will hear the idea of the importance of showing kindness towards strangers. It would seem that Abram is hoping that Sarai will be the better person and treat Hagar well. Sarai fails to do this, giving into her resentment and desire to take revenge once Hagar is back under her power. One purpose of Genesis I think is to continually show that even the patriarchs and matriarchs at times fail to follow the law and be righteous; each of these characters is very human precisely in the way they are morally flawed.

The chapter offers an etymology for the name Ishmael and explains the origins of the name of a well that probably existed during the time of the readers. The name of Ishmael, which means “G-d heeds” suggests that G-d is always watching and protecting everyone, from a lowly maidservant to grand kings.

Weekend Essay: “We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means by Michel De Montaigne

Montaigne opens his essay by suggesting there are two ways to soften the hearts of an attacker who has us at their mercy:

1) We can move them to pity and sympathy by being submissive.

2) We can impress them with our “bravery and steadfastness” by facing our attacker without fear, fighting to the bitter end, even when we know all is lost, which is the complete opposite of choice # 1.

The problem is we never know exactly what sort of person will respond to which method.

In his exempla, he describes an event in which Edward Prince of Wales, known as the Black Prince, captured the city of Limoges in France. Edward is unmoved by “the lamentations of the townsfolk, the women, and the children,” but the sight of three French noblemen still resisting the triumphant army moves him enough to grant mercy. Montaigne then goes on to offer numerous other examples of men displaying bravery in the face of death and torture.

Montaigne ends his essay by describing a hard-fought battle that proved so difficult that Alexander the Great had no pity for the vanquished enemy, even when they displayed extreme valor. Montaigne surmises that perhaps someone like Alexander the Great was so used to seeing mighty feats of valor that it no longer impressed him; he had grown desensitized. Another possibility he gives us is that Alexander’s vanity (a belief that valor belonged to him and only him) prevented him from showing pity to those brave soldiers he defeated.

By pointing out that people respond emotionally to different things, what moves one person will fail to move another and vice-versa, he is also suggesting that a single end can be reached by different means (we shouldn’t assume one path fits all). This idea also calls into question a fixed singular human nature shared by all human beings; if there truly was a shared human nature, then we would all be moved by the same things.

Booklist 2013 # 8: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Dead Souls is the story about a mysterious man named Chichikov who arrives in a town one day with the secret agenda to buy the rights to dead serfs from their masters. He befriends all the high officials of the town, until a scandal ensues after they discover his strange business acquisitions that force him to flee from the town. It turns out Chichikov was formerly a civil servant who lost his government positions because of previous scandals involving bribery. Essentially Chichikov is an unscrupulous and calculating man who wants so desperately to be rich, but who continually fails to make his way in the world.

Gogol isn’t as intellectual as his Russian compatriots, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Certainly you’ll find some references to history and other arts, but nowhere near the scholarly breadth and range you would find in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky’s work. After all, one thematic goal of War and Peace is to criticize the historical practices of the times with many long chapters dedicated to critiquing the Great Man Theory of History. If you’re writing a novel with the express purpose of challenging a scholarly theory of an entire discipline that is intellectual as you can possibly get. Gogol, on the other hand, prefers satire. He relies heavily on a tongue-in-cheek narrator, absurd events and behaviors, and over-the-top characters succumbing to various vices and comical habits. The goal of Dead Souls is to criticize Russian society in all its facets, especially the habits of the nobility, the government bureaucracy, and the desire to get rich. After all, Chichikov’s desire to purchase dead souls to sell them to the government is not only outlandish, but it is get rich quick scheme.

His work satirizes the behaviors and habits of the upper class. For example, this early scene when Chichikov (also called Pavel Ivanovich) visits the landowner Manilov illustrates the farcical tone perfectly, lampooning the social decorum and good manners practiced by the upper-class social circles. In one scene, Manilov and Chichikov are trying to enter a room during his visit, but social etiquette causes both men to want the other to enter the room first:

“Kindly do not worry so for my sake, I will go in after,” Chichikov said.

“No, Pavel Ivanovich, no, you are a guest,” Manilov said, motioning him to the door with his hand.

“Do not trouble yourself, please, do not trouble yourself. Go in, please,” Chichikov said.

“No, excuse me, I will not allow such an agreeable, well-educated guest to go in after me.”

“Why well-educated? . . . Go in, please.”

“Ah, no, you go in, please (24).”

This goes on for a little while longer, until finally the two decide to squeeze their bodies sideways so they can enter the room together.

In this same chapter, after we meet Manilov’s wife, the narrator goes on an amusing short tangent about the education of women. The narrator begins posing a series of rhetorical questions about the poor behavior of the household serfs in this house, suggesting the house is mismanaged by husband and wife, and then chooses to drop the subject because “these are all low subjects, and Mrs. Manilov had received a good education (23).” The narrator then informs us that one can only get a good education from a boarding school, which is spoken tongue-in-cheek since the mismanagement of the house suggests she didn’t have a useful education at all. At a boarding school, the primary subjects of study are the French language (“indispensable for a happy family life” as the narrator reminds us), pianoforte, and crocheting of purses and other surprises. All of this is said ironically and is extremely reminiscent of Charles Dickens; the line about the French language being indispensable for a happy family life, which is obviously meant to be taken ironically, could’ve been pulled right out of one of Dickens’s novels. After all, how does one’s ability to speak French increase the happiness of family life!

The author continues to lampoon the upper-class’s usage of French over Russian in later sections of the novel.

“But filled though the author is with reverence for the saving benefits that the French language brings to Russia, filled though he is with reverence for the praiseworthy custom of our high society which expresses itself in it at all hours of the day—out of a deep feeling of love for the fatherland, of course—for all that he simply cannot bring himself to introduce any phrase from any foreign language whatsoever into this Russian poem of his. And so let us continue in Russian (185).”

People who like a comical novel will surely like this one. However, I suspect I appreciated some of the elements Gogol is poking fun at precisely because I had just recently read the far more serious Russian masterpieces: Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. To understand all the jokes one has to have some familiarity with Russian Literature and culture. Other problems with the novel is it’s incomplete and unfinished. The introduction to my edition tells me Gogol intended and even completed later parts, which he burned. Little footnotes in this edition reveal that paragraphs and pages and sometimes whole chapters are missing. In quite a few sections parts of a conversation are missing, then it jumps to the next scene, but usually these omissions aren’t too hard to follow; it’s pretty easy to get back into the flow of narrative and figure out what went missing. The final chapter, which finds Chichikov in jail and all his misdeeds from the earlier books exposed, clearly was meant to have many interceding chapters in between. Likewise, at the end there seems to be a moral shift in which many characters pontificate on the meaninglessness of Chichikov’s quest for wealth; as one of his benefactors at the end suggests he should have been practicing a virtuous and self-less way of life, and not been so caught up in material concerns and in acquiring riches and selfish ephemeral pleasures. Such a material life leads only to unhappiness and embroils one in complications and unethical behaviors of others who seek the same thing.

Booklist 2013 # 7: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

After many brutal months slogging through the vast stretch of Russia during the Napoleonic age, trudging through endless tangents on the nature of history, while distressed by the sad fates of my companions, and overjoyed with the happier outcomes for some my other dear friends, I have finally conquered War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.

It is a story about how the lives of various members of the nobility change during the Napoleonic Wars. There is Pierre who is the illegitimate child of a nobleman and considered vulgar when he first appears in society, whose life changes forever after the Emperor legitimizes him and he inherits one of the greatest fortunes in all of Russia. Pierre marries into a loveless marriage with Helene, a beautiful and fashionable woman who lives mostly for her own pleasure, and has many affairs with other men. Throughout the novel he struggles to find a deeper meaning and happiness to his life, joining the freemasons, and eventually attempting to assassinate Napoleon, believing it to be part of some greater destiny. Then there is Prince Andrew, the son of a once great general turned eccentric old man, whose world-weariness leads him to join the military. He, too, has an unhappy marriage and feels guilty when his wife dies during childbirth. Then there is Natasha, a young romantic girl full of vitality, searching desperately for love and the happy family life in which she was raised. Her brother, Nicholas Rostov, is a young man of proud spirit who joins the military. At times, his pride gets him into trouble like when he gambles a large amount of money away right after his father told him the family is having money problems because his pride won’t let him withdraw from the game with a former friend turned enemy. There are too many other members of Tolstoy’s wide and vast cast to talk about them all.

One of the primary goals of the novel is to question the Great Man Theory of History. He challenges the idea that history should be seen as a series of great men and it moves primarily around their genius. However, his own ideas about history appear equally confusing. At times it seems Tolstoy is suggesting the events of history, especially battles, transpire due to the decisions of the smaller forces, the little guys and commanders in the trenches. According to Tolstoy, there are too many variables in battle for there to be such a thing as military genius or strategic planning. Often the outcomes of battles are determined by decisions conceived in the heat of the moment rather than any sort of pre-planning or direction from the higher ranks. At other times, Tolstoy seems to be suggesting destiny or providence or G-d is controlling history, and that the events that unfold are inevitable.

“Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity (344).”

Sometimes, Tolstoy also seems to be saying history is a product of multiple events of the past coming together so that the present cannot help but take a certain direction. As much as I loved the novel in certain parts, these meditations on history get to be a bit excessive and redundant.

War and Peace is much like Tolstoy’s later novel, Anna Karenina, in that the characters’ struggle to find happiness and purpose in their lives. The Napoleonic War serves as a wonderful backdrop to explore this question as many of the characters join the military in their quest for meaningful activity (glory or ambition or the transcendental joy of giving your life for a greater cause).

Pierre begins to suffer from the hypocrisy of the world. People think his cheating wife is the height of wit and intelligence, despite the fact that she cares only about the beauty and pleasures of the body and is actually quite stupid. The religiosity of the Free Masons and the Church is more for appearance’s sake than out of deep feeling and belief. The supposed meaningful actions of the world such as participation in government, military, women, ambition in general are really just attempts at “seeking refuge from life (305).”

After a failed relationship with Natasha and the invasion of the French into Russia, Prince Andrew also reexamines what he once found meaningful in life.

“Glory, the good of society, love of a woman, the Fatherland itself—how important these pictures appeared to me, with what profound meaning they seemed to be filled! And it is all so simple, pale, and crude in the cold white light of this morning which I feel is dawning for me (438).”

Does having money and a beautiful wife make one happy? Well, as Pierre’s story and experience shows us, apparently not. Does caring for the welfare of others and not more intimate love make for happiness? Princess Marie’s part of the tale implies otherwise.

Characters find happiness only through the love of humanity and finding their soulmate. Pierre finds this with Natasha in the end, as does Princess Marie with Nicholas Rostov. Prince Andrew finds a deeper truth about life through his slow death after a battle injury.

“But not love which loves for something, for some quality, for some purpose, or for some reason, but the love which I—while dying—first experienced when I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I experienced that feeling of love which is the very essence of the soul and does not require an object. Now again I feel that bliss. To love one’s neighbors, to love one’s enemies, to love everything, to love G-d in all His manifestations. It is possible to love someone dear to you with human love, but an enemy can only be loved by divine love. That is why I experienced such joy when I felt that I loved that man (524).”

The characters find happiness only when they discover the deeper nature of the world’s interconnectedness. Pierre finds the deeper love in Natasha that he was missing in Helene and also ascertains the true nature of the Christian message, which comes back to the interconnectedness of all people and to take loving thy enemy literally. Only when he and Prince Andrew realize this do they no longer fear death. So is Tolstoy advocating Christianity?

The impression I get from War and Peace and Anna Karenina is that Tolstoy is critical of Christianity and other religions (such as freemasonry) that focus on ritual. He also is critical of mystical speculations, a perversion of religion that seeks only metaphysical secrets about the world with no goal to transform one’s own behavior and change the world for better; it is esoteric knowledge for the sake of esoteric knowledge. His Christianity seems centered on the idea of love and the interconnectedness of all men, great or small. When Pierre and Prince Andrew undergo these epiphanies, their entire behavior and attitude is transformed by the experience. Basically, Tolstoy wants us to take the ethical messages he finds in the Gospels quite seriously; stop focusing so much on the details of ritual and searching for secret truths hidden in the words, and start loving thy neighbor and thy enemy as thyself, only then can we be truly happy.

Tolstoy also envisages good relationships as a transformative experience on a person’s character and virtue. Pierre’s initial marriage to Helene is based on physical attraction, while Nicholas’s initial promise to marry Sonya and refusal to change his mind when it becomes inconvenient stems from his pride. Helene barely spends time with her husband, preferring the company of other men and the various social circles of society. Later, we see that Natasha’s entire life revolves around Pierre and her children, disconnecting from society and even disparaging it. When understand that Nicholas marries Princess Mary because he admires her deep spirituality and obvious kindness. In a sense, he realizes that she is a better person than him. However, through their relationship she helps him become a better man and overcome his pride. A true relationship isn’t about physical attractive, but an attraction between souls that improve one another by being together.