War and Peace and War

Zherkov touched his horse with his spurs; it shifted its footing three times excitedly, not knowing which leg to start with, worked it out, and galloped off, going ahead of the company [of soldiers] and catching up with the coach, also in time with the [soldiers'] song.

This single sentence, in so many ways, encapsulates the wonder that is War and Peace. In a novel that runs to more than 1,200 pages, a novel that swirls from Napoleon's inner thoughts to a baby's dirty diaper, from death in childbirth to death in battle, Tolstoy takes the time to carefully unpack exactly how a horse's legs sort themselves out before a canter. The horse belongs to a minor character. The scene is brief. But for Tolstoy, nothing is a throwaway. A horse's confused legs are as important as Waterloo.

There's an article in the most recent New Yorker titled "Novels of Empire." In it, the scholar and novelist Elif Batuman considers her beloved Russian novels in the age of Putin, when we now read them, and in the age of imperial Russia, when they were written--when future luminaries such as Tolstoy and Pushkin themselves served in the military in the Caucasus and were thus complicit in annexing present-day Georgia, Dagestan, and other Caucasus states into the empire. It's a compelling read, and reminds me also that I should read Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, which, among other things, addresses the imperial underbelly of novels such as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Batuman writes:

Novels and empires grew symbiotically, defining and sustaining each other. "Robinson Crusoe," one of the first British novels, is about an English castaway who learns to exploit the natural and human resources of a non-European island. In an influential reading of "Mansfield Park," Said zooms in on a few references to a second, Antiguan property--implicitly, a sugar plantation--belonging to Mansfield's proprietor. The point isn't just that life in the English countryside is underwritten by slave labor, but that the novel's plot itself mirrors the colonial enterprise. Fanny Price, an outsider at Mansfield, undergoes a series of harrowing social trials, and marries the baronet's son. A rational subject comes to a scary new place--one already inhabited by other, unreasonable people--and becomes its rightful occupant. What does a story like that tell you about how the world works?

All of this has nothing to do, and everything to do, with Tyre Nichols's brutal beating by Memphis police officers--a video I have not watched because I know it will damage me . . . a privileged choice, in many ways a contemptible choice. A black man beaten to death for pleasure, by five other black men . . . five men who had stepped into roles of power that had been created for them by a state apparatus dedicated to "public safety."

Batuman writes of Tolstoy's late novel Hadji Murat, set in the Chechnya where he had served as a young man. The main character was a real historical figure, "a rebel commander who fell out with Imam Shahil [the Caucasus defender] and offered his services to Russia, but ended up getting decapitated."

His head was sent to the Kunstkamera museum, in St. Petersburg. . . . In the novel Tolstoy likens Hadji Murat's severed head to a beautiful Tartar thistle he uprooted one day from a ditch.