Thought Piece

Thought Piece

“Pierre, his eyes wet with tears, gazed joyfully at this bright star, which…seemed to have struck here its one chosen spot in the black sky and stopped…It seemed to Pierre that this star answered fully to what was in his softened and encouraged soul, now blossoming into new life.”

Just as Tolstoy closed Volume I with a wounded Andrei contemplating the beauty of the sky, he ends Volume II with Pierre having his own moment in nature, gazing joyously at the comet of 1812.

The comet signifies both what is happening internally to Pierre and Pierre himself.  Pierre’s soul was withering under the strain of his frivolous lifestyle and the disappointment of his loveless marriage.  Natasha is the sun to Pierre’s comet.  Interestingly, a comet is not actually a star as Pierre thinks.  It is a collection of ice, dust, and rocks that orbit the sun and glow whenever they get close enough to the sun to be acted upon by solar radiation.  Natasha ignites Pierre, a loose pile of rubble if there ever was one, so that his soul shines within him like the comet in the sky. Pierre has had little opportunity both to love and to be loved, and this act of loving someone and having that love be appreciated is of such significance for Pierre that it renews his very soul.  With this experience Tolstoy stresses how important but also rare this real kind of love is.

As with Andrei, Pierre’s moment in nature is one of revelation and character development.  In these moments, the characters are alone and for the moment free from the concerns of the war, of society, aka what is manmade and fallible.  They are preoccupied with the beauty of nature, which represents what is eternal and true, and in this escape the two men realize what is important to them and how they want to live.  The whole volume builds to both of these moments as turning points for these two characters.

The tension in these moments is that the characters need to be drawn out of themselves and/or society in order to transform in this way, and the transformation may or may not hold when the characters enter the real world again.  Andrei’s revelation comes too late.  His wife dies before he has the chance to renew their love, and he struggles not to slip back into the man he was before.  Also, given Pierre’s constant failures to live up to the standards he sets for himself, we must wonder if he will be strong enough to allow his newly reborn soul to direct him or whether it will be destroyed again, especially since he cannot always be with Natasha.  The challenge for both of these men is to maintain what they learned in these moments over the long term or else these moments will be fruitless.

(428 words)