War and Peace reminds me of David Lynch's "Dune". Aspects of it are utterly brilliant. Perhaps unsurpassed. As a whole though, it suffers from the effects of poor decisions.
Tolstoy famously said that he didn't even consider War and Peace to be a novel, but something else that sort of passes for one. Where another author with an axe to grind would tell a story that leads the reader to the desired conclusion, Tolstoy spends entire, insufferable chapters hammering home his message, sometimes in seeming contradiction to the plot. His portrayal of Napoleon in particular is comically ham-fisted, perhaps intentionally so.
One of his central points, on which he expounds endlessly, is dealt with in the first part of the article. Namely, that society and war are impossible to understand or predict. They just are. On the battlefield, it's not the army with the better strategy or equipment that prevails, but the one whose soldiers simply decide it's their time to win. It reminds me of Japan's "Shikata ga nai" (It cannot be helped) saying. While this is a valid coping mechanism for the incompetent or someone caught up in the heat of the moment, it's hardly a productive approach for those with the time to tackle tough problems. Kutuzov ends a strategy meeting on the eve of battle recognizing that it's too late for further revelations in understanding to be implemented, which is sane, but Tolstoy does indeed take things further and state such solutions are impossible to come by in the first place, which is unfounded. Complex systems can be understood. Just because they don't immediately surrender to analysis doesn't mean there is no solution. War and society are hard nuts to crack because they change based on the current understanding of them, like self-modifying code. That doesn't mean they're fundamentally impossible to understand.
This, at least, is my belief. Holding this belief made reading War and Peace a bit of a chore. Tolstoy creates wonderfully nuanced and realistic characters, but in War and Peace he hammers you over the head with his own philosophy and it's an unpleasant experience if you happen to disagree with it. The book would be better if he'd been more subtle, and could still benefit from having entire chapters (you know which ones) excised completely.
I suppose a lot of meaning and cultural context is lost in translation. I never understood how people in the West even approach these masterworks of Russian literature. They're challenging even for the natives.
That having been said, War and Peace is my favorite Russian novel by far. First time I read it I was 15, they force you to read it high school. I disliked it intensely. Second time I read it I was 40. I absolutely loved everything about it, even Tolstoy's relentless arguments in favor of his positions on historical events. To understand them, you have to understand the traditionally Russian fatalism, that still exists there even to this day. The overriding belief that things are largely predetermined, and the capacity of any single person (including Napoleon) to change anything is pretty limited. Which is not an unreasonable position to take, IMO.
There are a ton of subtle, impossible to translate details in it that you simply will not get if you read it in any language other than Russian and without the Russian cultural background. Same is true in the opposite direction: Russians will not get some of the subtleties in US classical literature. There's just far less of it, and nothing, as far as I can tell, quite of the same stature as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.
Do you really believe that a person's comprehension of the world must be tied so irreversibly to the land they grew up on? There were some similarly condescending comments in a recent thread about the Master and Margarita. Personally I am more likely to respect someone's views on Shakespeare if they've read a lot of Shakespeare than if they were born in Stratford.
No doubt in my mind whatsoever. Books aren't just the words on the page. They also rely significantly on implied cultural contexts, meanings, things that _do not_ need to be said.
It's not condescension, it's just a simple fact. This actually becomes blindingly obvious only when you move to live in another culture/country about which you might have had some preconceived notions.
Out of curiosity, why would you consider such a thing a philosophy as opposed to something that can be demonstrated, or challenged, with evidence?
For instance the stock market is an example of a complex system that ought be trivial to create a very strong deterministic model of. Though it qualifies as complex, in reality it's quite a trivial system. Things tend to go up on good news, down on bad news, and all actors involved have mostly the same very simple motivation of increasing their returns. Real complex systems in practice are exponentially more difficult than the stock market because motivations and quantifications are far less clear. Yet in spite of its triviality and the fact that there has likely been more manpower and money dedicated to 'solving' the stock market than perhaps any other endeavor ever, we still remain completely clueless.
I'm sure your logic is to suggest that we yet lack the means of deciphering even such simple systems. Yet you are also making one extremely strong implicit statement. Systems with sufficient entropy become impossible to 'decode' to any meaningful degree. Consequently, you're arguing that there is a limited amount of entropy in complex social systems. Where is the logic for declaring this a reasonable view? I am not saying this to antagonize. The reason I'm curious is I imagine your view is quite common, yet I've never once heard it plainly stated (and I imagine most who hold such views aren't even aware they hold them). And now it's quite sparked my curiosity!
> Yet in spite of its triviality and the fact that there has likely been more manpower and money dedicated to 'solving' the stock market than perhaps any other endeavor ever, we still remain completely clueless.
It is precisely because of the effort to predict and exploit the stock market that predicting it is so difficult.
Let's say you see me flipping a coin. It is not necessarily a fair coin. It's a biased coin, and you don't know the bias. I flip the coin nine times, and the coin comes up "heads" each time. I flip the coin a tenth time. What is the probability that it comes up heads?
If you answered "ten-elevenths, by Laplace's Rule of Succession", you are a fine scientist in ordinary environments, but you will lose money in finance.
In finance the correct reply is, "Well... if everyone else also saw the coin coming up heads... then by now the odds are probably back to fifty-fifty."
Recently on Hacker News I saw a commenter insisting that stock prices had nowhere to go but down, because the economy was in such awful shape. If stock prices have nowhere to go but down, and everyone knows it, then trades won't clear - remember, for every seller there must be a buyer - until prices have gone down far enough that there is once again a possibility of prices going up.
According to Nigel Nicolson in "Napoleon 1812," Tolstoy's fatalistic outlook about the war (if not all of his historical detail) is actually fairly accurate. The Russians didn't fend off Napoleon by understanding the nature of the complex system in which they were embedded, but rather through sheer indecision, which had the effect of an accidental Fabian strategy: preserving their army by avoiding any catastrophic battle in which it would have been entirely destroyed. The one major action fought at Borodino — which has a near-mystical significance for Russians — was motivated mostly by political pressure (to avoid the appearance of cowardice), but probably wasn't necessary at all. It was likely that Napoleon had already doomed his army the minute he crossed the Neman, due to his refusal to grasp the sheer scale of the supply and transport problem related to marching half a million troops into Western Russia in late June. In fact, his Marshals had mostly recommended against it — but due to the caprice of one man, one million people died in a year. It's hard to argue that one could understand, predict, or mitigate this.
Nicolson goes on to point out how the Nazis — who were well aware of the example — made many of the same mistakes as Napoleon, who himself was repeating the same mistakes as Charles XII in his doomed invasion a hundred years earlier.
It's not to say that the problems of war and society are impossible to understand — but human factors such as hubris, bias, cults of personality, politics by committee, etc. usually conspire to obscure their solutions, even with the perspective of time.
"On the battlefield, it's not the army with the better strategy or equipment that prevails, but the one whose soldiers simply decide it's their time to win."
whoa- things people say .. here's a chance to reconsider that line ..
Tolstoy famously said that he didn't even consider War and Peace to be a novel, but something else that sort of passes for one. Where another author with an axe to grind would tell a story that leads the reader to the desired conclusion, Tolstoy spends entire, insufferable chapters hammering home his message, sometimes in seeming contradiction to the plot. His portrayal of Napoleon in particular is comically ham-fisted, perhaps intentionally so.
One of his central points, on which he expounds endlessly, is dealt with in the first part of the article. Namely, that society and war are impossible to understand or predict. They just are. On the battlefield, it's not the army with the better strategy or equipment that prevails, but the one whose soldiers simply decide it's their time to win. It reminds me of Japan's "Shikata ga nai" (It cannot be helped) saying. While this is a valid coping mechanism for the incompetent or someone caught up in the heat of the moment, it's hardly a productive approach for those with the time to tackle tough problems. Kutuzov ends a strategy meeting on the eve of battle recognizing that it's too late for further revelations in understanding to be implemented, which is sane, but Tolstoy does indeed take things further and state such solutions are impossible to come by in the first place, which is unfounded. Complex systems can be understood. Just because they don't immediately surrender to analysis doesn't mean there is no solution. War and society are hard nuts to crack because they change based on the current understanding of them, like self-modifying code. That doesn't mean they're fundamentally impossible to understand.
This, at least, is my belief. Holding this belief made reading War and Peace a bit of a chore. Tolstoy creates wonderfully nuanced and realistic characters, but in War and Peace he hammers you over the head with his own philosophy and it's an unpleasant experience if you happen to disagree with it. The book would be better if he'd been more subtle, and could still benefit from having entire chapters (you know which ones) excised completely.