War is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as humans; some he makes slaves of, others free.
Fragment 82. Heraclitus
This article explores the theme of deception in Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace, in particular the events described in the first three books, which follow the exploits of Prince Andrew Bolkónski and Nicolas Rostóv. The motifs of fog, centaur, drunkenness and manure crop up frequently in chapters 14- 19 of Book 3, as the author describes the Battle of Austerlitz of 1805, in which Napoleon’s French army defeated those of the Austrian and Russian emperors.
I also evoke the ancient figure of Heraclitus in relation to the title of the novel, and its play on the Heraclitean notion of dichotomy. Two key scenes, involving both Prince Andrew and Rostóv, bolster the Heraclitean principle, and indeed how the four motifs support such an hypothesis.
Tolstoy, having fought in the Crimea War (1853-1856), famously became a pacifist in his advanced years. He was greatly affected by reading philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who advocated for a complete break with the sensual life, in order to attain peace and contentment. Tolstoy would completely embrace this idea, which Schopenhauer attributed to Heraclitus, before Plato even. Nietzsche, and later Heidegger, later took up the cause after Schopenhauer, in acclaiming Heraclitus – known as ‘the Obscure’ – as the King of Philosophers. Yet, unlike Tolstoy, he was a king who also saw war as an inescapable part of life.
I wish to emphasise how the current war in Ukraine prompted my reading of the novel. I had never read Tolstoy before, but after following events through reports in the media, I wanted to develop a deeper understanding of the history of the two sides, and the history of Russia in particular. The time was right to take the great tome down from off my shelf. To my surprise, I found it utterly captivated.[1]
I am no expert in Russian literature, nor a specialist on Leo Tolstoy. As Ezra Pound suggests[2], I have focused my limited attention on certain French writers of the 19th century, in particular Baudelaire, as well Irish Modernist writers of the 20th century, mainly Beckett and Joyce.
So where is the connection? In a word – Heraclitus. I have had a particular obsession with ‘the Sage of Ephesus’, or ‘the Obscure’. Indeed, I first presented a paper on Beckett’s lifelong obsession with Heraclitus at a conference in University College Dublin, James Joyce’s alma mater, in 2013, an experience I later fictionalized in a short hybrid novella More Micks than Dicks . So, apart from the connection with Heraclitus, Tolstoy was completely new territory for me.
There is no difference,’ says Bruno, ‘between the smallest possible chord and the smallest possible arc, no difference between the infinite circle and the straight line. The maxima and the minima of particular contraries are one and indifferent. Minimal heat equals minimal cold. Consequently transmutations are circular.[3]
Even though Beckett is referencing Giordano Bruno in the above quote, he could just as easily be referring to Heraclitus, who is widely considered the foremost authority on duality; ‘cold things grow hot, a hot thing cold, a moist thing withers, a parched thing is wetted.’[4] (fragment 126). Anyone who has swum in intensely cold water, such as the Irish Sea, may bear testimony to the truth of that fragment: intense cold almost burns.
Opposites are intrinsic. Nietzsche comments on this apparent notion of dualism which, he argues, is to misunderstand Heraclitus profoundly. This point is crucial, so bear with me. According to Nietzsche, Heraclitus has far more to do with Parmenides in that there can indeed be no dualities, as everything is contained in the One; as for Heraclitus nothing ‘is’ as everything is but ‘becoming,’ in other words, we are in eternal flux. In the context of war, justice and truth, this point is particularly telling, as indeed Tolstoy knew.
Becoming is an injustice and is atoned to be Passing Away. But how can that which is encumbered by qualities, Becoming, arise from the qualityless? And how might a world of such eternal lawfulness in its entirety be a world full of particular injustice? On the contrary, the course of all things, of every individual is predestined and not viable by human defiance. Justice shows itself in this lawfulness. But if Becoming and Passing Away are the effects of justice, then there is no such dualism between a world of the Unlimited qualities, because qualities are indeed tools of Arising and Passing Away, thus tools of justice.[5]
This is heady stuff, so let us now jump ahead to Book 2 of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and join Nicolas Rostóv in chapter 8, to be more precise, where he is standing by the bridge in his Hussar’s uniform, observing the French artillery firing on Russian troops. The bridge is a crucial strategic point. The only way for the French army to continue in pursuit of the Russian soldiers in retreat, and the hussars have been tasked with setting fire to the bridge to prevent Napoleon’s troops from advancing. This is a skirmish between the two armies before the all-out-battle at Austerlitz in Book 3. So, Rostóv is in hero mode, with the fate of the Russian army dependent on him. In Tolstoy’s description, typically, the situation quickly turns comical.
Rostóv absorbed by his relations with Bogdánich had paused on the bridge not knowing what to do. There was no one to hew down (as he had always imagined battles of himself), nor could he help to fire the bridge because he had not brought any burning straw with him like the other soldiers. (p.114)
While our hero stands around quite idiotically, a bomb falls knocking a fellow hussar to the ground. Stretchers bearers are called for. It is the nearest sign for Rostóv that Reality is closing in, and that if he continues to stand around on the bridge he could very well be the next to fall. Thus, Tolstoy, a former soldier, provides a vivid picture of war. And then, after patiently building up the scene of battle, he describes what happens next.
Nicholas Rostóv turned away and, as if searching for something, gazed into the distance, at the blue waters of the Danube, at the sky, and at the sun. How beautiful the sky looked; how blue, how calm, and how deep! How bright and glorious was the setting sun! With what soft glitter the waters of the distant Danube shone. And fairer still were the far away mountains beyond the river, the nunnery, the mysterious gorges, and the pine forests veiled in the mist to their summits…There was peace and happiness… ( p.114)
And there we have it, in the middle of this intense, otherworldly turmoil of warring armies, Nicholas Rostóv has a Heraclitean vision. Perhaps anyone, involved in a car accident, or other violent confrontation, will recognize what is happening to Rostóv. His body, sensing danger, has secreted adrenaline to prepare him for the battle ahead. Everything slows down, allowing him to view events with apparent objectivity, preparing him to react to the violence ahead.
I recall experiencing a similar feeling when a Jeep I was travelling in collided in such a way as to send it flying through the air. As I was pulled out of my seat with the force of the impact, I experienced an incredible feeling of peace and contentment. The whole world passed before me in what appeared to be slow motion, before I hit my head and reality came crashing back. It is Tolstoy’s genius to render Rostóv’s reaction with tremendous comic effect, and make it totally believable. This is the humour of war.
At that instant the sun began to hide behind the clouds and other stretchers came in view before Rostóv. And the fear of death and of the stretchers, and love of the sun and of life, all merged into one feeling of sickening agitation.] ‘O Lord God! Thou who art in heaven, save, forgive, and protect me!’ Rostóv whispered. The hussars ran back to the men who held their horses; their voices sounded louder and Calmer, the stretchers disappeared from sight.
‘Well, fwiend? So you’ve smelt powdah!’ shouted Váska Denisov just above his ear.
This is the precise moment Rostóv acknowledges that he is in fact a coward. In just this section of the book, a matter of a mere page, his character is revealed to him through the intense brutality of war. It is also the moment for a reader to experience an epiphany about the title of the book, which up to this moment had been quite puzzling. It is due to the depth of human emotions, which the reader experiences through the character of Nicolas Rostóv, a man who is at once both comic and tragic, human in other words. This recalls Heraclitus’s most famous dictum, fragment 82, which appears under the title of this article. Nicholas Rostóv is now finally a free man.
In the first chapter of The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer cites Heraclitus before Plato in tracing the origin of reason, revealing how he lamented ‘the eternal flux of things’:
We recognise the simplest form of the principle (of reason) to be time. Each moment in time exists only in so far as it has effaced the preceding one, its progenitor, and only to be itself in turn quickly effaced. The past and the future (if we may disregard the consequences of their content) are empty as a dream, and between them runs the present as a mere boundary – line without extension and without duration.[6]
From such a conundrum, Heraclitus came up with his famous analogy of the flowing river, and how you could never step into the same one twice. So, for rationalist philosophers from Heraclitus on, the world of the senses must be seen as one great deception. Things are never as they appear. Truth, or reason, stands apart from the things that appear before one.
This is the great moment of truth in Western civilisation; what Martin Heidegger was to later call ‘The Inception of Occidental Thinking Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos.’[7]
Arthur Schopenhauer also identifies Heraclitus as the origin of reason in the West. He was the first to see beyond things themselves, the physical manifestation of phenomenon, and to recognise them for what they really were. ‘It is Mâyâ’, Schopenhauer says, ‘the veil of deception,’[8] quoting the Indian philosophers. This acquaintance with Eastern philosophy was greatly appreciated by Tolstoy. Unlike so many other European thinkers Schopenhauer, like Tolstoy himself, was to embrace ideas from diverse cultures.
Tolstoy situates chapter 14 of Book 3 of War and Peace at the Pratzen Heights. The sun is rising to illuminate the great fog which will conceal the French troops from the Russian. Deception or feint, as ever, are the tools which Napoleon uses to deceive the Russian Generals, who get it wrong. The great strategist, who is compared to the Antichrist in the very first paragraph of the book, is seen overlooking the scene.
It was nine o’clock in the morning. The fog lay unbroken like a sea below, but higher up at the village of Schlappanitz, where Napoleon stood with his Marshals around him, it was quite light. Above him was a clear blue sky, and the sun’s vast orb quivered like a huge, hollow, crimson float on the surface of that milky sea of mist.
The whole French army, and even Napoleon himself with his staff, were not on the far side of the streams and hollows of the Sokolnitz and Schlappanitz beyond which we intended to take up our position and begin the action, but were on this side, so close to our own forces that Napoleon with the naked eye could distinguish a mounted man from one on foot. (p.210)
Only Napoleon can see things clearly. Through the eyes of Prince Andrew, we see the entire plan unfold. Readers gain access to the diabolical deception that Napoleon has created by placing his troops where the Russian Generals, and Emperor Alexander, his arch- rival, least expect him to be.
The reference to the Antichrist is revealing, and the symbolism of the sun also. Recall Tolstoy was an aristocrat, and at least when he wrote War and Peace, a believer in the status quo.
The sun is a doubly charged symbol, representing the Sun King Louis XVI, who lost his head at the climax of the French revolution, and the wider demise of monarchy in the Enlightenment Age. This is widely viewed as originating in France, through rationalist thinkers like Rene Descartes and Voltaire. Napoleon is also, to some degree, representative of the new order.
Tolstoy is no dreamer: he is well aware of how reason can be used, as in the case of Napoleon, for unreasonable purposes. Through the tragic figure of Prince Andrew, Tolstoy reveals the unfolding debacle. In the most pitiful moment, the Russian Emperor – who had appeared godlike parading with his troops days before the battle – is now in a wretched state after barely managing to escape with his life.
In these chapters 14,15,16 and 17 it is as if Tolstoy is embodying Heraclitus’s dictum on war, fragment 82. “War is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as humans; some he makes slaves of, others free.”
Napoleon, using his powers of reason, to evil purpose, appears godlike, if petty, while the Emperor Alexander is laid low and Prince Andrew enslaved after capture. Napoleon himself notices him still breathing on the battlefield. It is a moment of extreme parallelism, as Prince Andrew has experienced the same peaceful feeling as Rostov when he sees combat, again signalling the Heraclitean notion of dualism in complete Being – War and Peace, two sides of the same coin.
‘What’s this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way,’ he thought, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes , hoping to see how the struggle of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner had ben killed or not, and whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but blue sky – the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds gliding slowly across it. ‘How quiet, peaceful, and solemn, not at all as I ran,’ though Prince Andrew – ‘not as we ran, shouting and fighting.
(p. 217)
Leave the Prince contemplating the clouds and his fate – he thinks he is dying – in the following chapter (17), Nicolas Rostóz takes up the account. We see the French cavalry charging through the Russian hussar’s eyes. He is now a messenger attempting to pass through French lines, although at this stage, after the surprise French attack, the message he had been asked to convey – a warning to prepare Russian sharpshooters for the possibility of just such an attack – is redundant.
This absurdity is part and parcel of the entire mess of this encounter which began with the fog (the fog of war), and which is underlined by the jibes of the Russian troops blaming the Germans for the confusion as they descend into the fog bound valley. ‘Ah those damned Germans! They don’t know their own country!’ (p.210) The “Germans” refer to their Austrian allies, which adds to the farce of the proceedings.
This is reminiscent of the great triptych by Paolo Uccello of The Battle of San Romano in which the great artist of perspective depicts the two opposing armies in carefully assembled rows of cavalry and infantry. This shows how little has changed in terms of battle formations between the Renaissance and the Napoleonic era, bringing an almost cartoonish element to the visual extravaganza.
Cavalry, in Napoleonic times – just as in the battles between competing city-states in 15th century Italy – remained the true sign of military might. Its origins can be traced back even to before the medieval knights. In Tolstoy’s depiction of the Horse Guards charge in chapter 17, which Rostóv witnesses, I was reminded of the ancient Greek mythological figure of the centaur, which, after along with the motif of the fog or mist, is the linked to the theme of deception.
The last of the Horse Guards, a huge pock-marked fellow, frowned angrily on seeing Rostóv before him, with whom he would inevitably collide. This Guardsman would certainly have bowled Rostóv over ( Rostóv felt himself quite and tiny and weak compared to the gigantic man on the horse) had it not occurred to Rostóv to flourish his whip before the eyes of the Guardsman’s horse. The heavy black horse, sixteen hands high, shied, throwing back its ears; but the pock-marked Guardsman drove his huge spurs in violently, and the horse flourishing its tail and extending its neck, galloped on yet faster. Hardly had the Horse Guards passed Rostóv before he heard them shout, “Hurrah!” and looking back saw that their foremost ranks were mixed up with some foreign cavalry with red epaulettes, probably French. He could see nothing more, for immediately afterwards canon began firing from somewhere and smoke enveloped everything. (p.219)
The contemporary Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito in Pensiero viventi – Origine e attualità della filosofia italiana ( 2010), seeks to identify a common theme to Italian philosophy, distinct from French theory, German idealism or British empiricism. The trait he comes up with is the physicality of Italian thinkers from Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno to Giambattista Vico.
It is at the figure of Leonardo da Vinci, however, in the central section of his study that Esposito halts. In particular, focusing on his sketch for The Battle of Anghiari which for Esposito comes to signify, in one exquisite image, the notion of bio-philosophy, which he believes singular to Italian philosophy. This incredible image, of which only Peter Paul Ruben’s 1603 copy remains – da Vinci’s original tragically went missing – for Esposito at least, summons up, the ‘inextricably entangled,’[9] relationship between man and beast.
Among the earliest examples of the image of the centaur dated to 900 BC Lefkani, where a terracotta figure (h. 36 cm, 14.8 in.) – housed in the Museum of Eretria[10] – was found depicting an anthropomorphic creature with the body of a horse and the torso and head of a human. This we now recognise as the centaur.
In mythology the creature is associated with the Lapiths, peoples descending from Ixion, who had a horse cult in common.[11] The centaurs are always associated with drunkenness, violence and rape. Thus, after drinking potent wine for the first time, having been invited to a noble wedding, they wind up in a pitched battel with the Lapiths after attempting to sexually assault their women folk, including the bride.
The notion of drunkenness and warfare is common. This is the third motif aligning with the overall theme of deception in the present text. One often reads accounts of drunken or otherwise intoxicated soldiers throughout history committing atrocities and war crimes. The theme is as old as Homer, and of course Tolstoy is aware of this when he paints the vast tableaux of the warring armies at Austerlitz.
The more you contemplate the chapters depicting the famous battle, the more they seem like friezes from the Pergamon say, or those adorning some great arch in the Roman Forum. Take for example the scene in chapter 17, when Rostóv the Russian hussar is found wandering about the battlefield after his encounter with the House Guards in the previous chapter.
Where is the Emperor? Where is Kutúzov?’ Rostóv kept asking everyone he could stop, but got no answer from anyone.
At last seizing a soldier by his collar he forced him to answer.
‘Eh, brother! They’ve all bolted long ago!’ said the soldier laughing, laughing for some reason and shaking himself free.
Having left that soldier who was evidently drunk, Rostóv stopped the horse of a batman or groom of some important personage and begun to question him. The man announced that the Tsar had been driven in a carriage at full speed about an hour before along that very road and that he was dangerously wounded.
(p.221)
The phrase ‘the fog of war’ is attributed to the German military analyst Carl von Clausewitz, whose book Von Kriege/On War (1832) Tolstoy would surely have been familiar with. Along with the fog, representing unreason, we have already looked at the motifs of the centaur representing the beastly side of man, caught in the vortex of negative passion, in a sense ‘drunk’ on battle. To become worked up for a battle, it has long been the case that soldiers get intoxicated, numbing them to the horrific tasks ahead.
For Tolstoy in War and Peace the appearance of the drunk is deeply symbolic of the folly of the whole episode. Tolstoy famously embraced pacifism later in life. He is even reported to have been a decisive influence on Mahatma Ghandhi, who drew inspiration from Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), which apparently convinced him that passive resistance was the way forward. By then Tolstoy had become a global celebrity due to his two most famous novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878).
Heraclitus was contemptuous of alcohol, and drunkenness in particular, if the fragments are anything to go by. ‘A man when drunk is led by a boy, stumbling and not knowing where he goes, having his soul moist.’[12] (fragment 106). Yet, for soldiers fallen in battle Heraclitus took a more benign view, as the following aphorism, or fragment, puts it: ‘Souls slain in war are purer than those that perish in diseases.’ (fragment 107).[13] This is where Tolstoy departs from the pre-Socratic thinker, as in Chapter 18 of Book 2 he makes his feelings about war very clear, and here we must treat the final motif, dung or excrement, as the final chain in the theme of deception which underscores the novel.
Here we finally bid farewell to Rostóv as he wanders aimlessly around the battlefield after seeing the Russian army, once so proud and dashing, in a complete state of chaos. To such an extent that his whole world seems to have been defeated.
Rostóv considered, and then went in the direction where they said he would be killed.
‘It’s all the same now. If the Emperor is wounded, am I to try to save myself?’ he thought.
He rode on to the region where the greatest number of men had perished fleeing Pratzen.
The French had not yet occupied that region, and the Russians – the uninjured and slightly wounded- had left it long ago. All about the field, like heaps of manure on well-kept, well-ploughed land, lay from ten to fifteen dead and wounded to each couple of acres. The wounded crept together in twos and threes and one could hear their distressing screams and groans, sometimes feigned – or so it seemed to Rostóv. (p.222)
Tolstoy’s symbolism is incredibly bleak, and the metaphor utterly modern. The notion of a field of cadavers, men reduced to a pile of corpses that are compared to a field of, basically, shit or excrement. No sooner do you picture the image and you might remember being confronted by the formidable figure of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, who released a film of himself against a backdrop of dead bodies just like Tolstoy’s very vivid image, while he accused the Russian government of inaction, holding them accountable for the death of so many young men due to political infighting between Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
I have come to the end of this exploration of Tolstoy and his formidable novel War and Peace. I found it a humbling experience. Among its striking features, is the depiction of the many Russian characters, all rather loveable really, and identifiably European. Indeed, they break into French throughout the novel. Albeit, Tolstoy was an aristocrat, so his portrayal of Russian society is from the vantage of a privileged member of that society. The humour of the characters is highly endearing too.
It is hard, as an Irish and European person, to contemplate the ongoing war in Europe we have today. All the talk now appears to be of WAR, not PEACE. In fact, anyone talking about peace remains curiously on the periphery. Economies are already on a war footing. There are so many guns and missiles to sell.
Do you hear those bells, reader? Do you hear them? There in the distance? The chimes of history! The chimes of history.
Feature Image: In 1812 by the Russian artist Illarion Pryanishnikov.
[1] The text I refer throughout the article is: Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, Wordsworth Classics, 2001.
[2] See ABC of Reading, 1934.
[3] Beckett, Samule: Disjecta, Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn, Grove Press, (1st paperback edition), New York, 1984, p.21.
[4] McKirahan, Richard D., Philosophy Before Socrates, An Introduction and Commentary, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1994, p.123.
[5] Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, translated from the German and with an introduction by Greg Whitlock, University of Illinois & Chicago, first paperback edition, 2026, p.63.
[6] Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Idea, edited by David Berman and translated by Jill Berman, Everyman, London, 2004, p.7.
[7] Heidegger, Martin, Heraclitus – The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, translated by Julia Goesser Assaiente and S. Montgomery Ewegen, Bloomsbury, London, First English Edition, 2018.
[8] Schopenhauer, p.8.
[9] Esposito, Roberto, Pensiero vivente, Origine e attualita della filosofia Italiana, Piccolo Biblioteca Einaudi, Torino, 2010, p.91.
[10]Spivey, Nigel, Greek Art, Phaidon, London, first published 1997, p.58.
[11] Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths, Penguin Books, London, 1992, p.361.
[12] McKirahan, Richard D., Philosophy Before Socrates, An Introduction and Commentary, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1994, p.106.
[13] Ibid.
