The half-crazed Pierre prepares his plans to assassinate
Napoleon and goes out with a dagger under his cloak, walking in
a dazed and distracted manner. As if waking up from a dream, he
comes upon a burning house with a woman standing outside, weeping over
a little girl left inside. Pierre circumvents the French guards, enters
the house, and saves the girl. Once outside again, he is unable to
find the girl’s family. Then, attempting to stop a Frenchman from bothering
an Armenian girl, Pierre becomes angry, attracting the attention
of the French authorities, who arrest him on suspicions of espionage.
Analysis: Book Eleven
The idea of renunciation, of surrendering the external
valuables of one’s life, recurs frequently in these chapters as
Tolstoy’s symbol of spiritual achievement. This renunciation is
both private and public, both emotional and military. The citizens
of Smolensk give up their city to the invading French, and Kutuzov
follows suit by regretfully surrendering the city of Moscow. Such
surrender astonishes Napoleon, who in his materialistic fashion
cannot fathom that a country would prefer spiritual freedom to material
loss of property. Indeed, we see that the Russian abandonment of
Moscow is the real undoing of the French. The invaders loot Russian
treasures, but they cannot conquer Russia. The French failure to
conquer the Russian soul is mirrored on an individual level in Pierre,
who, even when held captive, knows that the French cannot touch
his “immortal soul.” We see another willing surrender of the physical
world in the Rostovs’ abandonment of their possessions so that the
wounded Russian soldiers may be evacuated from Moscow. To Tolstoy,
giving up material possessions is not a loss, but rather a spiritual
gain.
Tolstoy constantly emphasizes the absurdity of war in
his portrayal of occupied Moscow through Pierre’s eyes. Pierre’s
awareness of the stupidity of the war is heightened by the fact
that, of the Russians, he is the one most symbolically associated
with the French. Pierre is called by a French name throughout the
novel (the narrator never calls him “Petr,” as the name “Peter”
typically appears in Russian), speaks French beautifully, has lived
in Paris, and gets along well with the French officer Ramballe.
Through Pierre’s example, Tolstoy—himself one of the modern world’s
great pacifists and an important influence on Gandhi’s doctrine
of non-aggression—highlights the human instinct for solidarity and
togetherness that opposes the contrary instinct for division and
bloodshed.
