Chapter from K. Kedrov’s book “Poetic Space” by M. Soviet writer 1989

The Gottorp globe, brought by Peter I to Russia, which became the prototype of today's planetariums, reminds me of the belly of the whale that swallowed all of humanity along with Jonah.

We say: this is how the universe works - you people are the most insignificant specks of dust in an endless universe. But this is a lie, albeit an unintentional one.

The Gottorp dome cannot show how the whole person, at the level of those very microparticles that Ilya Selvinsky wrote about, is connected and coordinated with all of infinity. This consistency is called the anthropic principle. It was discovered and formulated recently in cosmology, but for literature this truth was an axiom.

Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy never accepted the Gottorpian, mechanistic image of the world. They always felt the subtlest dialectical connection between finite human life and the infinite existence of the cosmos. The inner world of a person is his soul. External world- the whole universe. This is Pierre’s shining globe, opposed to the dark Gottorp globe.

Pierre Bezukhov sees a crystal globe in a dream:

“This globe was a living, oscillating ball, without dimensions. The entire surface of the ball consisted of drops tightly compressed together. And these drops all moved, moved and then merged from several into one, then from one they were divided into many. Each drop sought to spread out, to capture the greatest space, but others, striving for the same thing, compressed it, sometimes destroyed it, sometimes merged with it... In the middle is God, and each drop strives to expand in order to reflect him in the greatest possible size. And it grows, and shrinks, and is destroyed on the surface, goes into the depths and floats up again.”

– “Reins of the Virgin Mary” –

To see such a universe, you need to rise to a height, look through infinity. The roundness of the earth is visible from space. Now we see the entire universe as a kind of shining sphere diverging from the center.

Heavenly perspectives permeate the entire space of the novel War and Peace. Endless perspectives, landscapes and panoramas of battles are given from a flight altitude, as if the writer had flown around our planet more than once in a spaceship.

And yet, the most valuable view for Leo Tolstoy is not from above, but from the height of flight. There, in the infinitely blue sky, Andrei Bolkonsky’s gaze melts near Austerlitz, and later Levin’s gaze among the Russian fields. There, in infinity, everything is calm, good, orderly, not at all like here on earth.

All this was repeatedly noticed and even conveyed by the inspired gaze of cameramen who filmed Austerlitz from a helicopter, and the mental flight of Natasha Rostova, and what’s easier is to point the movie camera upward, following the gaze of Bolkonsky or Levin. But it is much more difficult for the cameraman and director to show the universe from the outside - with the gaze of Pierre Bezukhov, seeing through his sleep a globe consisting of many drops (souls), each of which tends to the center, and all of them are united. This is how the universe works, Pierre hears the voice of a French teacher.

And yet, how does it work?

On the screen, through the fog, some droplet structures are visible, merging into a ball, emitting a glow, and nothing else. This is too poor for the crystal globe, which solved the riddle of the universe in Pierre’s mind. You can't blame the operator. What Pierre saw can only be seen with the mind's eye - it is inconceivable in the three-dimensional world, but quite geometrically imaginable.

Pierre saw, or rather, “became clear” of that aspect of the universe that was forbidden to humanity from the time of the Great Inquisition until... it’s hard to say exactly until what time.

“The Universe is a sphere where the center is everywhere and the radius is infinite,” said Nikolai Kuzansky about this model of the world. Borges spoke about it in his laconic essay “Pascal’s Sphere”:

“Nature is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”

Anyone who carefully followed the cosmological models of the ancients in previous chapters (Dzhemshid’s cup, Koshchei’s casket) will immediately notice that Pascal’s sphere, or Pierre’s globe, is another artistic embodiment of the same idea. Drops striving to merge with the center, and a center directed into everything - this is very similar to Leibniz’s monads, the centers of Nicholas of Cusa or the “point Aleph” of Borges. This is similar to the worlds of Giordano Bruno, for which he was burned, similar to the transformed eidos of Plato or the Pythagorean primordial structures, brilliantly captured in the philosophy of the Neoplatonists and Parmenides.

But for Tolstoy these are not points, not monads, not eidos, but people, or rather their souls. That is why Pierre laughs at the soldier guarding him with a rifle at the door of the barn: “He wants to lock me, my endless soul...” This is what followed the vision of the crystal globe.

The desire of the drops for global fusion, their readiness to accommodate the whole world is love and compassion for each other. Love as a complete understanding of all living things passed from Platon Karataev to Pierre, and from Pierre it should spread to all people. It became one of the countless centers of the world, that is, it became the world.

The novel’s epigraph about the need for the unity of all is not at all so banal good people. It is no coincidence that the word “pair”, heard by Pierre in the second “prophetic” dream, is combined with the word “harness”. It is necessary to harness - it is necessary to couple. Everything that is conjugated is the world; centers - drops that do not strive to connect - this is a state of war, hostility. Hostility and alienation among people. It is enough to remember with what sarcasm Pechorin looked at the stars to understand what the feeling opposite to “conjugation” is.

Probably, not without the influence of Tolstoy’s cosmology, Vladimir Solovyov later built his metaphysics, where the Newtonian force of attraction was called “love”, and the force of repulsion began to be called “enmity”.

War and peace, conjugation and disintegration, attraction and repulsion - these are two forces, or rather, two states of one cosmic force, periodically overwhelming the souls of Tolstoy's heroes. From the state of universal love (falling in love with

Natasha and the entire universe, all-forgiving and all-containing cosmic love at the hour of Bolkonsky’s death) to the same general enmity and alienation (his break with Natasha, hatred and call to shoot prisoners before the Battle of Borodino). Such transitions are not typical for Pierre; he, like Natasha, is universal by nature. Rage against Anatole or Helen, the imaginary murder of Napoleon are superficial, without touching the depth of the spirit. Pierre's kindness is the natural state of his soul.

The love of Andrei Bolkonsky is some kind of last spiritual outburst, it is on the verge of life and death: along with love, the soul flew away. Andrey is rather in the sphere of Pascal, where many spiritual centers are just points. A stern geometer, a parent, lives in him: “Please see, my soul, these triangles are similar.” He is in this sphere until his death, until it turns out and overturns the whole world into his soul, and the room contains everyone whom Prince Andrei knew and saw.

Pierre “saw” the crystal globe from the outside, that is, he went beyond the visible, visible space during his lifetime. The Copernican revolution happened to him. Before Copernicus, people were in the center of the world, but here the universe turned inside out, the center became the periphery - many worlds around the “center of the sun.” It is precisely this Copernican revolution that Tolstoy speaks of at the end of the novel:

“Since Copernicus’s law was discovered and proven, the mere recognition that it is not the sun that moves, but the earth, has destroyed the entire cosmography of the ancients...

Just as for astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the movements of the earth was to renounce the immediate feeling of the immobility of the earth and the same feeling of the immobility of the planets, so for history the difficulty of recognizing the subordination of the individual to the laws of space, time and causes is to renounce the immediate feeling of independence personality."

It is generally accepted that L. Tolstoy was skeptical about science. In fact, this skepticism extended only to the science of his time - the 19th and early 20th centuries. This science dealt, according to L. Tolstoy, with “secondary” problems. Main question- about the meaning human life on earth and about the place of man in the universe, or rather, the relationship between man and the universe. Here Tolstoy, if necessary, resorted to integral and differential calculus.

The relation of one to infinity is Bolkonsky's relation to the world at the moment of death. He saw everyone and could not love one. The relation of one to one is something else. This is Pierre Bezukhov. For Bolkonsky's world fell apart into an infinite number of people, each of whom was ultimately uninteresting to Andrey. Pierre saw the whole world in Natasha, Andrei, Platon Karataev and even in the dog shot by a soldier. Everything that happened in the world happened to him. Andrei sees countless soldiers - “fodder for the guns.” He is full of sympathy, compassion for them, but it is not his. Pierre sees only Plato, but the whole world is in him, and it is his.

The “Copernican revolution” happened to Pierre, perhaps at the very moment of his birth. Andrey was born in the Ptolemaic cosmos. He himself is the center, the world is only the periphery. This does not mean at all that Andrei is bad and Pierre is good. Just one person - “war” (not in everyday or historical terms, but in spiritual sense), the other is man – “world”.

At some point, a dialogue arises between Pierre and Andrei about the structure of the world. Pierre is trying to explain to Andrey his feeling of the unity of all things, living and dead, a certain ladder of ascension from mineral to angel. Andrey; interrupts delicately: I know, this is Herder’s philosophy. For him, this is only philosophy: Leibniz’s monads, Pascal’s sphere for Pierre is a spiritual experience.

And yet, the two diverging sides of the angle have a convergence point: death and love. In love for Natasha and in death, Andrey discovers the “conjugation” of the world. Here at the “Aleph” point Pierre, Andrey, Natasha, Platon Karataev, Kutuzov - everyone feels unity. Something more than the sum of wills, this is “peace on earth and good will to men.” Something akin to Natasha’s feeling at the moment of reading the manifesto in church and praying “in peace.”

The feeling of the convergence of two sides of a divergent angle into a single point is very well conveyed in Tolstoy’s “Confession,” where he very accurately conveys the discomfort of weightlessness in his sleepy flight, feeling somehow very uncomfortable in the infinite space of the universe, suspended on some kind of leash, while there was no sense of the center where these help come from. Pierre saw this center, which permeates everything, in a crystal globe, so that, waking up from sleep, he could feel it in the depths of his soul, as if returning from a transcendental height.

This is how Tolstoy explained his dream in “Confession,” also after waking up and also having moved this center from the interstellar heights to the depths of the heart. The center of the universe is reflected in every crystal drop, in every soul. This crystal reflection is love.

If this were Tolstoy’s philosophy, we would reproach him for the absence of the dialectic of “attraction and repulsion,” “enmity and love.” But no philosophy of Tolstoy, no Tolstoyism existed for the writer himself. He simply spoke about his feeling of life, about the state of mind that he considered correct. He did not deny “enmity and repulsion,” just as Pierre and Kutuzov did not deny the obviousness of the war and even participated in it to the best of their ability, but they did not want to accept this state as their own. War is someone else's, peace is ours. Pierre's crystal globe is preceded in Tolstoy's novel by a globe-ball, which is played by Napoleon's heir in the portrait. A world of war with thousands of accidents, truly reminiscent of a game of billbok. Globe - ball and globe - crystal ball - two images of the world. The image of a blind man and a sighted man, gutta-percha darkness and crystal light. A world obedient to the capricious will of one, and a world of unmerged but united wills.

The reins-help, on which Tolstoy in a dream felt a sense of strong unity in “Confession”, in the novel “War and Peace” is still in the hands of a “capricious child” - Napoleon.

What rules the world? This question, repeated several times, finds its answer in itself at the end of the novel. The world is controlled by the whole world. And when the world is one, love and peace rule, opposing the state of hostility and war.

The artistic persuasiveness and integrity of such a space does not require proof. The crystal globe lives, acts, exists as a kind of living crystal, a hologram that has absorbed the structure of the novel and the cosmos of Leo Tolstoy.

And yet the relationship between earth and space, between a certain “center” and individual drops of the globe is incomprehensible to the author of the novel “War and Peace.” Looking from above at the “movement of peoples from West to East” and the “reverse wave” from East to West. Tolstoy is sure of one thing: this very movement - the war - was not planned by people and cannot be their human will. People want peace, but there is war on earth.

Going through all sorts of reasons, like in a deck of cards: world will, world reason, economic laws, the will of one genius, Tolstoy refutes everything one by one. Just some kind of comparison bee hive and an anthill, where no one controls and there is only one order, seems plausible to the author. Each bee individually does not know about the unified bee world order of the hive, nevertheless, she serves it.

Man, unlike the bee, is “initiated” into the single plan of his cosmic hive. This is a “conjugation” of everything reasonable and human, as Pierre Bezukhov understood. Later, the plan of “coupling” will expand in Tolstoy’s soul to universal love for all people, for all living things.

“The bright webs - the reins of the Mother of God”, which connect people in the prophetic dream of Nikolenka, the son of Andrei Bolkonsky, will eventually unite in a single “center” of a crystal globe, somewhere out there, in space. They will become a strong support for Tolstoy in his cosmic hover over the abyss (a dream from “Confession”). The tension of the “cosmic reins” - the feeling of love - is both the direction of movement and the movement itself. Tolstoy loved such simple comparisons as an experienced horseman, a horseman, and a peasant following a plow.

You wrote everything correctly, he will tell Repin about his painting “Tolstoy on the Plowed Field,” but they forgot to put the reins in their hands.

Tolstoy’s simple, almost “peasant” cosmogony was not simple in its depth, like any folk wisdom tested over thousands of years. He felt the heavenly “reins of the Mother of God” as a kind of internal law of a swarm of bees, forming the honeycomb of world life.

You have to die like trees die, without moaning and crying (“Three Deaths”). But life can and should be learned from centuries-old trees (Andrei Bolkonsky’s oak tree)

But where, in this case, is the cosmos, towering above everything, even above nature? His cold breath penetrates the souls of Levin and Bolkonsky from heavenly heights. Everything there is too calm and balanced, and the writer strives there with his soul.

From there, from that height, the story is often told. That court is not like earthly court. “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay it” - epigraph to “Anna Karenina.” This is not forgiveness, but something more. Here is an understanding of the cosmic perspective of earthly events. The deeds of people cannot be measured by earthly standards - this is the only morality within the framework of War and Peace. For the actions of people of the caliber of Levin and Andrei Bolkonsky, an infinite celestial perspective is needed, therefore, in the finale of War and Peace, the writer, alienated from cosmological ideas, recalls Copernicus and Ptolemy. But Tolstoy interprets Copernicus in a very unique way: Copernicus made a revolution in the sky, “without moving a single star” or planet. He simply changed the way people looked at their location in the universe. People thought that the earth was in the center of the world, but it was somewhere far from the edge. So it is in the moral world. The person must give in. “Ptolemaic” egocentrism must be replaced by “Copernican” altruism.

It would seem that Copernicus won, but if you think about the cosmological meaning of Tolstoy’s metaphor, then everything is the other way around.

Tolstoy brings Copernicus and Ptolemy down to earth, and turns cosmology into ethics. And this is not just an artistic device, but Tolstoy’s fundamental principle. For him, as for the first Christians, there is no cosmology outside of ethics. This is, after all, the aesthetics of the New Testament itself. In his translation of the Four Gospels, Tolstoy completely eliminates everything that goes beyond the boundaries of ethics.

His book “The Kingdom of God is Within Us” is more consistent in the pathos of bringing heaven down to earth than even the Gospel itself. Tolstoy is completely incomprehensible of the “cosmological” nature of rite and ritual. He does not hear or see her, he plugs his ears and closes his eyes, not only in the temple, but even at the Wagnerian opera, where the music breathes with metaphysical depth.

Well, did Tolstoy, in his mature years and especially in old age, lose his aesthetic sense? No, the aesthetics of space was deeply felt by Tolstoy. With what enormous meaning the sky, strewn with stars, descended to the soldiers sitting by the fire. The starry sky before the battle reminded man of the height and greatness that he deserves and is commensurate with.

Ultimately, Tolstoy never ceded the earth to Copernicus as one of the most important centers of the universe. Famous recording in his diary that the earth is “not a vale of sorrow,” but one of the most beautiful worlds, where something extremely important for the entire universe happens, conveys in a compressed form all the originality of his ethical cosmology.

Today, when we know about the uninhabitability of a huge number of worlds in our galaxy and about the uniqueness of not only human, but even organic life in solar system, Tolstoy’s correctness becomes completely undeniable. His call for the inviolability of all living things sounds in a new way, a principle later developed by Albert Schweitzer in the ethics of “reverence for life.”

Unlike his most prominent opponent Fedorov, Tolstoy did not consider death an absolute evil, since dying is the same law “ eternal life» just like birth. He, who eliminated the resurrection of Christ from the Gospel as something alien to the laws of earthly life, wrote the novel “Resurrection”, where a heavenly miracle should turn into a moral miracle - a moral revival or the return of a person to universal life, that is, all-human life, which for Tolstoy is the same thing.

Many people wrote about Tolstoy’s polemic with Fedorov, and it would be possible not to return to this issue if not for one oddity. For some reason, everyone who writes about this dialogue ignores the cosmological nature of the dispute. For Fedorov, space is the arena of human activity, populating distant worlds in the future with crowds of “resurrected” fathers. Tolstoy's report is often cited in the psychological society, where Tolstoy explained this idea of ​​Fedorov to pundits. Usually the conversation is interrupted by the vulgar laughter of Moscow professors. But the guttural laughter of the priests of science, the falsity of which was obvious to him, is not an argument for Tolstoy.

Tolstoy did not laugh at Fedorov, but he was afraid of a purely earthly cosmology, where the sky in the future would be entirely given over to the power of people, while the rule of people on earth and the barbaric destruction of nature were so obvious. The same masses of peoples that Fedorov boldly led from the earth into space moved in the finale of the novel “War and Peace”, senselessly killing each other day and night. For now only on earth.

It would seem that Tolstoy, who was open to the swarm principle with all his soul, should have welcomed the “common cause” of the universal resurrection, but the writer did not at all consider the resurrection of the fathers as a goal. In the very desire to resurrect, he saw selfish perversity. The author of “Three Deaths” and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” who later passed away so majestically, of course, could not come to terms with some humiliating industrial resurrection carried out by entire armies mobilized for such an “unGodly” cause.

Before many, Tolstoy felt the earth as a single planet. In War and Peace, he naturally could not accept Fedorov’s messianic concept, where the resurrection turned into a purely Russian idea, generously given to the peoples.

This is the sense in which Tolstoy remained a Ptolemy in ethics. At the center of the universe is humanity. Ethics contains the entire cosmology. The relationship of man to man is the relationship of man to God. Perhaps Tolstoy even made this idea too absolute. Tolstoy considered God to be a certain quantity that cannot be contained by the human heart and (which distinguishes him from Dostoevsky) measurable and knowable by the mind.

The cosmic importance of what was happening on earth was too significant for Tolstoy to transfer the scene of the human epic (Tolstoy denied the tragedy) into space.

Of course, the writer’s views and assessments changed over the course of a long, spiritually overflowing life. If the author of Anna Karenina thought that what was happening between the two loving people, then, for the creator of “Resurrection,” this ultimately became as unimportant as for Katerina Maslova and Nekhlyudov at the end of the novel. Tolstoy’s “Copernican revolution” ended with the complete denial of personal, “egoistic” love. In the novel “War and Peace” Tolstoy managed to achieve not the vulgar “golden mean”, but the great “golden section”, that is, the correct ratio in that great fraction proposed by himself, where in the numerator of one there is the whole world, all people, and in the denominator is personality. This relationship of one to one includes both personal love and all humanity.

In Pierre’s crystal globe, the drops and the center are correlated in exactly this way, in Tyutchev’s way: “Everything is in me, and I am in everything.”

In the later period, the individual personality was sacrificed to the “single” world. One can and should doubt the correctness of such a simplification of the world. Pierre's globe seemed to become cloudy and stopped glowing. Why do you need drops if it's all in the center? And where can the center be reflected if those crystal drops are not there?

The cosmos of the novel “War and Peace” is as unique and majestic a structure as the cosmos of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Goethe’s “Faust.” Without the cosmology of the crystal globe there is no novel. This is something like a crystal casket in which Koshchei’s death is hidden. Here everything is in everything - the great principle of a synergetic double helix, diverging from the center and at the same time converging towards it.

Tolstoy later rejected Fedorov’s cosmology of the reorganization of the world and space, because, like Pierre, he believed that the world was much more perfect than his creation - man. In the universal school, he was more of a student, “a boy collecting pebbles on the ocean shore,” than a teacher.

Tolstoy denied the industrial resurrection of Fedorov also because in death itself he saw the wise law of the continuation of universal, cosmic life. Having realized and experienced the “Arzamas horror” of death, Tolstoy came to the conclusion that death is an evil for the temporary, personal life. For universal, eternal, universal life, it is an undoubted good. He was grateful to Schopenhauer for making him think “about the meaning of death.” This does not mean that Tolstoy “loved death” in the ordinary everyday sense of the word. The entry in his diary about his “only sin” - the desire to die - does not at all mean that Tolstoy really wanted to die. The diary of his personal doctor Makovitsky speaks of Tolstoy’s normal, completely natural desire for life. But besides personal, individual life, there was also a “divine-universal” life, Tyutchev’s. Tolstoy was involved in it not just for a moment, but for the rest of his life. In a dispute with Fedorov, Tolstoy denied the resurrection, but in a dispute with Fet he defended the idea of ​​eternal cosmic life.

Taking a general look at Tolstoy’s cosmos in “War and Peace,” we see a universe with a certain invisible center, which is equally in the sky and in the soul of every person. The Earth is one of the most important corners of the universe, where the most important cosmic events take place. The personal, fleeting existence of a person, with all its significance, is only a reflection of eternal, universal life, where the past, future and present always exist. “It’s hard to imagine eternity... Why? - Natasha answers. “Yesterday it was, today it is, tomorrow it will be...” At the moment of death, a person’s soul is filled with the light of this universal life, it contains all visible world and loses interest in individual, “personal” love. But universal love, life and death for others illuminates a person with universal meaning, reveals to him here on earth the most important law - the secret of the entire visible and invisible, visible and invisible universe.

Of course, these are only general outlines of Tolstoy’s world, where the life of each person is intertwined with transparent cobweb threads with all people, and through them with the entire universe.

1. “War and Peace” as a work of the 60s of the 19th century

The 60s of the 19th century in Russia became a period of the highest activity of the peasant masses, the rise social movement. Central theme Literature of the 60s became the theme of the people. This topic, as well as Tolstoy’s contemporary problems, are considered by the writer through the prism of history. Researchers of Tolstoy's work differ on the question of what Tolstoy actually meant by the word “people” - peasants, the nation as a whole, merchants, philistines, and patriotic patriarchal nobility. Of course, all these layers are included in Tolstoy’s understanding of the word “people,” but only when they are bearers of morality. Everything that is immoral is excluded by Tolstoy from the concept of “people”.

2. Philosophy of history, images of Kutuzov and Napoleon

Tolstoy asserts with his work decisive role masses in history. In his opinion, the actions of the so-called “great people” do not have a decisive influence on the course of historical events. The question of the role of personality in history is raised at the beginning of the third volume (First part, first chapter):

1. In relation to history, personality acts more unconsciously than consciously;
2. A person is more free in his personal life than in his public life;
3. The higher a person stands on the steps of the social ladder, the more obvious is the predetermination and inevitability of his fate;

Tolstoy comes to the conclusion that “The Tsar is a slave of history.” Tolstoy's contemporary historian Bogdanovich primarily pointed to the decisive role of Alexander the First in the victory over Napoleon, and completely discounted the role of the people and Kutuzov. Tolstoy’s goal was to debunk the role of the kings and show the role of the masses and the people’s commander Kutuzov. The writer reflects in the novel the moments of Kutuzov’s inaction. This is explained by the fact that Kutuzov cannot dispose of his own will. historical events. But he is given the opportunity to understand the actual course of events in which he participates. Kutuzov cannot understand the world-historical meaning of the War of 1812, but he is aware of the significance of this event for his people, that is, he can be a conscious guide to the course of history. Kutuzov himself is close to the people, he feels the spirit of the army and can control this great power(Kutuzov’s main task during the Battle of Borodino was to raise the spirit of the army). Napoleon lacks understanding of the events taking place; he is a pawn in the hands of history. The image of Napoleon represents extreme individualism and selfishness. The selfish Napoleon acts like a blind man. He is not great person, he can't determine moral meaning events due to their own limitations. Tolstoy's innovation was that he introduced into history moral criterion(controversy with Hegel).

3. “People's thought” and forms of its implementation

The path of ideological and moral growth leads goodies to rapprochement with the people (not a break with one’s class, but moral unity with the people). Heroes are tested Patriotic War. The independence of private life from the political game of the elite emphasizes the indissoluble connection of the heroes with the life of the people. The viability of each of the heroes is tested by “popular thought.” She helps Pierre Bezukhov discover and express his best qualities; Andrei Bolkonsky is called “our prince”; Natasha Rostova takes out carts for the wounded; Marya Bolkonskaya rejects Mademoiselle Burien's offer to remain in Napoleon's power. Along with true nationality, Tolstoy also shows pseudo-nationality, a counterfeit of it. This is reflected in the images of Rostopchin and Speransky (specific historical figures), who, although they are trying to assume the right to speak on behalf of the people, have nothing in common with them. Tolstoy didn't need it large number images from the common people (nationality and common people should not be confused). Patriotism is a property of the soul of any Russian person, and in this regard there is no difference between Andrei Bolkonsky and any soldier of his regiment. Captain Tushin is also close to the people, in whose image “small and great”, “modest and heroic” are combined. Often the participants in the campaign are not named at all (for example, “drummer-singer”). Subject people's war finds its vivid expression in the image of Tikhon Shcherbaty. The image is ambiguous (the murder of the “language”, the “Razin” beginning). The image of Platon Karataev, who, under conditions of captivity, again turned to his roots, is also ambiguous (everything “alluvial, soldierly” falls away from him, everything remains peasant). Watching him, Pierre Bezukhov understands that living life the world is above all speculation and that happiness is in itself. However, unlike Tikhon Shcherbaty, Karataev is hardly capable of decisive action; his good looks lead to passivity.

In scenes with Napoleon, Tolstoy uses the technique of satirical grotesquery: Napoleon is filled with self-adoration, his thoughts are criminal, his patriotism is false (episodes with Lavrushka, awarding the soldier Lazarev with the Order of the Legion of Honor, a scene with a portrait of his son, morning toilet in front of Borodin, waiting for the deputation of the “Moscow boyars”) . The depiction of the lives of other people, also far from the people - regardless of their nationality (Alexander the First, Anna Pavlovna Sherer, the Kuragin family, the Bergs, the Drubetskys, etc.) is also imbued with undisguised irony.

The path of heroes belonging to the aristocracy to spiritual unity with the people is depicted by Tolstoy in its inconsistency and ambiguity. The writer ironically describes the delusions and self-deception of the heroes (Pierre's trip to the southern estates, idealistic fruitless attempts at innovation; the peasant rebellion in Bogucharovo, Princess Marya's attempt to distribute the master's bread, etc.).

4. Historical and philosophical digressions

In the work itself artistic storytelling at times it is interrupted by historical and philosophical digressions, similar in style to journalism. The pathos of Tolstoy's philosophical digressions is directed against liberal-bourgeois military historians and writers. According to Tolstoy, “the world denies war” (for example, a description of the dam that Russian soldiers see during the retreat after Austerlitz - ruined and ugly, and a comparison of it in Peaceful time- immersed in greenery, neat and rebuilt). Tolstoy raises the question of the relationship between the individual and society, the leader and the masses (Pierre’s dream after Borodin: he dreams of the deceased Bazdeev (the Freemason who introduced him to the lodge), who says: “War is the most difficult subordination of human freedom to the laws of God... Nothing a person can own as long as he is afraid of death, and whoever is not afraid of it, everything belongs to him... The most difficult thing is to be able to unite in your soul the meaning of everything." Pierre also dreams of ordinary soldiers whom he saw at the battery and who prayed to the icon. It seems to Pierre that there is no better fate than to be a simple soldier and do business, and not reason like his former acquaintances, whom he also sees in his dreams. Another dream - on the eve of release from captivity, after the death of Karataev. An old geography teacher shows Pierre a globe, which is a huge, oscillating ball. “The entire surface of the ball consisted of drops tightly compressed together. And all these drops moved, moved and then merged from several into one, then from one they were divided into many. Each drop sought... to capture the largest space... “This is life,” said the old teacher... “There is God in the middle, and each drop strives to expand in order to reflect him in the largest possible size...*). Tolstoy is not a fatalist historian. In his work, the question of the moral responsibility of a person - a historical figure and every person - before history is especially acute. According to Tolstoy, a person is less free the closer he is to power, but a private person is also not free. Tolstoy emphasizes that one must be able to go broke for the sake of protecting the Fatherland, as the Rostovs do, to be ready to give everything, to sacrifice everything, as Pierre Bezukhov knows how to do, but the eminent merchants and noble nobility who came to the building of the noble assembly do not know how.

Crystal Globe

Pierre Bezukhov from the novel “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy sees a crystal globe in a dream:

“This globe was a living, oscillating ball, without dimensions. The entire surface of the ball consisted of drops tightly compressed together. And these drops all moved, moved and then merged from several into one, then from one they were divided into many. Each drop sought to spread out, to capture the greatest space, but others, striving for the same thing, compressed it, sometimes destroyed it, sometimes merged with it... There is God in the middle, and each drop strives to expand in order to reflect him in the greatest possible size. And it grows, and shrinks, and is destroyed on the surface, goes into the depths and floats up again.”

Pierre Bezukhov

The desire of the drops for global fusion, their readiness to accommodate the whole world is love and compassion for each other. Love as a complete understanding of all living things passed from Platon Karataev to Pierre, and from Pierre it should spread to all people. It became one of the countless centers of the world, that is, it became the world.

That’s why Pierre laughs at the soldier guarding him with a rifle at the door of the barn: “He wants to lock me, my endless soul...” This is what followed the vision of the crystal globe.

The novel's epigraph about the need for the unity of all good people is not at all so banal. It is no coincidence that the word “conjugate,” heard by Pierre in his second “prophetic” dream, is combined with the word “harness.” It is necessary to harness - it is necessary to couple. Everything that is conjugated is the world; centers - drops that do not strive to connect - this is a state of war, hostility. Hostility and alienation among people. It is enough to remember with what sarcasm Pechorin looked at the stars to understand what the feeling opposite to “conjugation” is.

Pierre Bezukhov. Museum named after K.A.Fedina, Saratov

Probably not without the influence of cosmology Tolstoy built later Vladimir Soloviev its metaphysics, where the Newtonian force of attraction received the name “love”, and the force of repulsion began to be called “enmity”.

War and peace, conjugation and disintegration, attraction and repulsion - these are two forces, or rather, two states of one cosmic force, periodically overwhelming the souls of heroes Tolstoy. From the state of universal love (falling in love with Natasha and the entire universe, all-forgiving and all-containing cosmic love at the hour of Bolkonsky’s death) to the same general enmity and alienation (his break with Natasha, hatred and call to shoot prisoners before the Battle of Borodino). Such transitions are not typical for Pierre; he, like Natasha, is universal by nature. Rage against Anatole or Helen, the imaginary murder of Napoleon are superficial, without touching the depth of the spirit. Pierre's kindness is the natural state of his soul.

Pierre, Prince Andrei and Natasha Rostova at the ball

Pierre “saw” the crystal globe from the outside, that is, he went beyond the visible, visible space during his lifetime. The Copernican revolution happened to him. Before Copernicus, people were in the center of the world, but here the universe turned inside out, the center became the periphery - many worlds around the “center of the sun.” It is precisely this kind of Copernican revolution that he speaks of Tolstoy at the end of the novel:

“Since Copernicus’s law was discovered and proven, the mere recognition that it is not the sun that moves, but the earth, has destroyed the entire cosmography of the ancients...

Just as for astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the movements of the earth was to renounce the immediate feeling of the immobility of the earth and the same feeling of the immobility of the planets, so for history the difficulty of recognizing the subordination of the individual to the laws of space, time and causes is to renounce the immediate feeling of independence personality."

Pierre in a duel with Dolokhov

The relation of one to infinity is Bolkonsky's relation to the world at the moment of death. He saw everyone and could not love one. The relation of one to one is something else. This is Pierre Bezukhov. For Bolkonsky, the world fell apart into an infinite number of people, each of whom was ultimately uninteresting to Andrei. Pierre saw the whole world in Natasha, Andrei, Platon Karataev and even in the dog shot by a soldier. Everything that happened to the world happened to him. Andrei sees countless soldiers - “fodder for the guns.” He is full of sympathy, compassion for them, but it is not his. Pierre sees only Plato, but the whole world is in him, and it is his.

The feeling of the convergence of two sides of a diverging angle into a single point is very well conveyed in “Confession” Tolstoy, where he very accurately conveys the discomfort of weightlessness in his sleepy flight, feeling somehow very uncomfortable in the infinite space of the universe, suspended on some kind of support, until a feeling of the center appeared, from where these supports come. Pierre saw this center, which permeates everything, in a crystal globe, so that, waking up from sleep, he could feel it in the depths of his soul, as if returning from a transcendental height.

So Tolstoy explained his dream in “Confession”, also after waking up and also moving this center from the interstellar heights to the depths of the heart. The center of the universe is reflected in every crystal drop, in every soul. This crystal reflection is love.

War is someone else's, peace is ours. Pierre's Crystal Globe is preceded in the novel Tolstoy the globe-ball with which Napoleon's heir plays in the portrait. A world of war with thousands of accidents, truly reminiscent of a game of billbok. Globe - ball and globe - crystal ball - two images of the world. The image of a blind man and a sighted man, gutta-percha darkness and crystal light. A world obedient to the capricious will of one, and a world of unmerged but united wills.

Pierre goes to watch the war

The artistic persuasiveness and integrity of such a space does not require proof. The crystal globe lives, acts, exists as a kind of living crystal, a hologram that has absorbed the structure of the novel and the cosmos Lev Tolstoy.

“Light cobwebs are the reins of the Mother of God,” which connect people in prophetic dream Nikolenki, the son of Andrei Bolkonsky, will eventually unite in a single “center” of a crystal globe, somewhere out there, in space. Will become a strong support for Tolstoy in his cosmic hover over the abyss (a dream from “Confession”). The tension of the “cosmic reins” - the feeling of love - is both the direction of movement and the movement itself. Tolstoy I loved such simple comparisons as an experienced horseman, a horseman, and a peasant following a plow. You wrote everything correctly, he will tell Repin about his painting “Tolstoy on the Plowed Field,” but they forgot to put the reins in their hands.

Pierre at the Battle of Borodino between the Russian army and Napoleon

In Pierre’s crystal globe, the drops and the center are correlated in exactly this way, in Tyutchev’s way: “Everything is in me, and I am in everything.”

In the later period, the individual personality was sacrificed to the “single” world. One can and should doubt the correctness of such a simplification of the world. Pierre's globe seemed to become cloudy and stopped glowing. Why are drops needed if everything is in the center? And where can the center be reflected if those crystal drops are not there?

The cosmos of the novel “War and Peace” is as unique and majestic a structure as the cosmos of the “Divine Comedy” Dante and "Faust" Goethe. “Without the cosmology of the crystal globe there is no novel,” asserts TO. Kedrov-Chelishchev. This is something like a crystal casket in which Koshchei’s death is hidden. Here everything is in everything - the great principle of a synergetic double helix, diverging from the center and at the same time converging towards it.

Pierre the reader

If Tolstoy depicted dreams as a transformation of external impressions (for example, the dream of Pierre Bezukhov, who perceives the words of the servant waking him up “it’s time to harness” in a dream as a solution to the philosophical problem - “to harness”), then Dostoevsky believed that in dreams people’s forgotten experiences emerge into spheres controlled by consciousness, and therefore through their dreams a person knows himself better. The heroes' dreams reveal them inner essence- the one that their waking mind does not want to notice.

Lev Tolstoy

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Every person with the onset of night inevitably plunges into the power of dreams and dreams. Dreams are an integral part of our existence, the voice of our own “I”, which at an unknown hour of the night tries to explain what we see, feel, and experience in reality. IN literary works The dreams of heroes often anticipate the onset of turning points in the course of events.

In the novel L.N. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" we see that dreams are inextricably linked with the life, soul and destinies of the main characters - Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov. These people have an unusually rich inner world, a broad and receptive soul and, finally, exceptional fortitude. That is why, probably, the dreams of these people are very vivid and imaginative, and, of course, they carry certain symbolism.

Prince Andrei is seriously wounded on the Borodino field. From the novel we see how he suffers from pain and what physical torment he has to endure. But at the same time, despite all the suffering, the soul of Andrei Bolkonsky is occupied by thoughts about the true nature of happiness: “Happiness that is outside of material forces, outside of material external influences on a person, the happiness of one soul, the happiness of love!” The fruit of these thoughts was Andrey's dream, which was more like delirium. In it, he saw how “a strange airy building made of thin needles or splinters was erected above his face.... He felt that he had to diligently maintain his balance so that the building he was erecting would not collapse; but it still collapsed and slowly rose again.”

It seems to me that the building erected before the eyes of Prince Andrei is a symbol of love that awakens and grows in his soul. This love leads to a change in Bolkonsky’s worldview, to his spiritual renewal, to a deeper understanding of the meaning of life and himself. However, as we see from the description of the dream, the “building” of Andrei’s love is built from “needles” - it is still unstable, fragile and at the same time burdensome for him. In other words, the ideals of love and happiness have not yet been fully established in his soul and fluctuate under the influence of the torment and suffering that he endured, and in general under the influence of life circumstances.

One of the important symbols of this dream is the fly that hit the building. Portraying the new “world” of Andrei Bolkonsky as wavering, L.N. Tolstoy nevertheless speaks of its indestructibility: “... hitting the very area of ​​​​the building erected on the face of it, the fly did not destroy it.” Compared to the magnificent “edifice” of love, everything else seems unimportant, small, insignificant, like the proverbial fly.

In Bolkonsky's dream there is another one key moment- “a statue of the sphinx, which also crushed him.” Of course, the sphinx is connected with the image of Natasha Rostova, which remains unsolved for Prince Andrei. At the same time, the sphinx personifies the incompleteness of their relationship, which internally weighed on the prince and became unbearable for him.

Through images and visions, Andrei’s dream established understanding in his soul true love: “To love everything - to love God in all manifestations... Loving human love“You can go from love to hate, but divine love cannot change.” Under the influence of a dream, Prince Andrei realized how much he loved Natasha, felt “the cruelty of his break with her,” and from that moment the “sphinx” stopped pressing him.

Thus, we see that this dream symbolizes a turning point in the life of Andrei Bolkonsky.

The path of his friend Pierre Bezukhov is also a path of discoveries and disappointments, a complex and dramatic path. Like Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre’s dreams indicate the main milestones of his path. He is more impressionable, more subtle, has a more sensitive and receptive soul than his friend. He is constantly looking for the meaning of life and the truth of life, which is reflected in his dreams.

After the Battle of Borodino, Pierre hears in a dream the voice of his Mason mentor: “Simplicity is submission to God, you cannot escape him. And they are simple. They don't talk, but they do." By this point, Pierre was already close to understanding who “they” were: “In Pierre’s concept, they were soldiers - those who were at the battery, and those who fed him, and those who prayed to the icon.” When Bezukhov remembers his fear, he feels that he cannot unite with the soldiers and live the way they live: “But although they were kind, they did not look at Pierre, they did not know him.” However, in a dream, a new truth is revealed to him: “It’s not all about connecting, but it’s necessary to connect!” To pair means to correlate, compare, contrast oneself with those who were called “they” in a dream. This truth is what Pierre strives for. From his dream we see that he discovers one of the laws of existence and becomes one step higher in his spiritual development.

Pierre sees his second dream after the murder of Karataev. Obviously, it is connected with the previous dream, where the spiritual search still did not reach an end. After all, Pierre faced a new question: “How to put everything together?”

Pierre remembers Karataev’s thoughts: “Life is everything. Life is God... To love life, to love God...” In his second dream, Bezukhov sees an old geography teacher and an unusual globe - “a living, oscillating ball that has no size.” This globe is the personification of life, that is, God. The symbolism of this globe is deeply revealed in the words of the teacher: “In the middle, God and every drop strives... to reflect him in the greatest size and grows, merges... goes into the depths and emerges again.” The idea expressed here is that God is the basis of all things, and people are just drops trying to reflect him. The dream helps Pierre understand that no matter how the drop people increase and grow, they will always be only a part of the great, a part of God.

This is, in my opinion, the symbolism of dreams in the novel by L.N. Tolstoy "War and Peace". With its help, the author was able to deeper reveal the images of the characters and show their internal dynamics. It seems to me that dreams unusually enliven a novel and make it more interesting.