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Tolstoy on Napoleon

January 26, 2007

In the plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose department, let us return to the battle of Borodino, which is still going on -- men are still being killed and maimed by shells and cannonballs and bullets -- but Napoleon Bonaparte has an unaccustomed bad feeling about it all. His army is outkilling the Russians, but the Russians won't run away. Leo Tolstoy, like Prince Andrei, thinks it's because the Russians are fighting for their own land, but Napoleon -- as imagined by Tolstoy, but obviously based on his own historical words -- doesn't have a clue:

And not for that day and hour alone were the mind and conscience darkened of this man on whom the responsibility for what was happening lay more than on all the others who took part in it. Never to the end of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and all humanity.

You can find this translation online, but I like the one I'm copyediting better. It renders "belauded as they were by half the world" as "extolled by half the world" -- I mean, really, when was the last time you belauded anything?

What if one of the State of the Union commentators had uttered this, of Bush or Cheney, or Osama bin Laden for that matter? I tell you, if I read it in a newspaper, I'd subscribe to that paper, and if I heard it on TV I'd buy a TV and maybe even subscribe to cable (though I'd probably stop short of installing a satellite dish).

I'm listening, not entirely by coincidence, to Pete Morton's Swarthmoor, which includes a song called "Naseby Field." Naseby Field, notes Morton in his liner notes, "is where the Royalists were defeated in the decisive battle of the first English civil war on 14th June 1645. The song does not say which side the soldier is on . . ." On the eve of battle the soldier sings:

Blood turns to mud on Naseby Field
after tomorrow, victory or sorrow
there'll be nothing worth keeping on Naseby Field . . .

The same might be said of the field at Borodino.

What I've been thinking is that "artists" are ipso facto and by definition considered too impractical to meddle in "affairs of state" -- which tend to mean those affairs in which powerful men squelch the dreams, and often the lives, of those less powerful. Tolstoy might have been given a bye on this one -- he'd been to war himself, after all, and he knew his history, including his military history, bloody well -- but not Pete Morton. One Russian, one English, one 19th century, one 20th/21st, one a writer, one a songwriter; still, they danced with the same conclusions.

I've been thinking this a lot. I'm not thinking it because I'm writing Squatters' Speakeasy; I'm writing Squatters' Speakeasy because I think it. If writers and musicians and artists were calling the shots, maybe the guns would fall silent.

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