I have digested a LOT more Tolstoy since I last commented, and I am now about 400 pages away from finishing War and Peace. I am currently reading right at the start of the Battle of Borodino, and what is really interesting to me right now is that I already know how this battle is going to end. The Russians will win: it seems like a foregone conclusion. Why does Tolstoy let the cat out of the bag so early? Why no suspense?
Interestingly, Tolstoy did the same thing with the battle of Austerlitz. We know the battle plans of both the Russians and French, and we know that the Russians have totally miscalculated the French position and plan. Weyrother, the officer who comes up with the Russian plan for battle, seems way too overconfident, and it seems sure that he will fail. A defender of his plan for war, Dolgorukov, says, “All the possibilities have been foreseen” (265) and Weyrother treats his detractors with the “smile of a doctor being told by a wise woman how to treat a patient” (263). We know that the Russian army is plunged in fog, which is why they are unable to gauge the French position, while Napoleon, high above the fog, godlike, can observe the Russian troops easily. Kutuzov, who seems to intuitively know how battles will turn out, says to Prince Andrei, “I think the battle will be lost” (260). Kutuzov sleeps like a baby during the council of war, and yawns before the pre-battle pep-talk (275), seeming to already know that nothing he can do will change the outset of that day, that the battle has already been lost. Sure enough, just as Kutuzov says, the French win the battle of Austerlitz, despite the best-laid plans of Weyrother.
There is nothing terribly different about the battle of Borodino. Again, Kutuzov treats the battle as a fait accompli. He is not a man of action, but again, a man who simply knows that the time for Russian victory has come, explaining to Prince Andrei “Tout vient à point à celui qui sait attendre” (744). Napoleon is just as confident as he was before the battle of Austerlitz, only this time, the narrator informs us that none of his plans will work. Napoleon thinks this battle will again go his way, because he thinks that he is the most important element in winning the battle (for example, he is unsurprised that the French lost a battle in Salamanca, because he was not present [778]). He tells his soldiers this battle will be just like the others they have won, “Act as you acted at Austerlitz, Friedland, Vitebsk, and Smolensk” (780), failing to understand that not all battles are fated to end the same way, that he is not in control of his own battles. The reader is given full access to strategic information from both armies, and the narrator even TELLS us what will happen exactly when these strategies come into play.
As Kutuzov “the Russian” (745) understands, the battle of Borodino has an importance that transcends the actions of the individual soldiers and commanders, but understands, as Prince Andrei puts it, “that there is something stronger and more significant than his will—the inevitable course of events.” It seems to me that Tolstoy pointedly downplays any possible suspense in these two important battles so that the reader can see the end coming a mile away, giving the reader a sort of “Kutuzov-vision.” Even though there is no major difference between the two battles, they will inevitably have different victors, because there is simply some element of the battle beyond the characters’ control. Tolstoy makes this point perfectly clear to readers by giving them complete, omniscient access to all information, to show how little it actually has to do with the pre-destined outcome of the battle.
