Dignity as the Central Theme in Tolstoy's War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is a novel with many dimensions and layers of interest, but perhaps the most central thematic concern in this epic work relates to an idea of dignity.

War and Peace boasts many, many characters and numerous themes, plots, sub-themes and sub-plots. The novel pursues one particular intellectual question (Is calculus the most appropriate scientific approach to the study of history?), a question that becomes more and more central after the midway point of the book.

Despite the growing intellectual concern with history over the course of the novel, War and Peace is an emotional book at its core, interested in the internal development of its four central characters (Count Pierre Bezuhov, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, Natasha Rostov and Princess Marya Bolkonsky). Themes come and go along with the secondary characters in the novel. Youthful exuberance and hope for glory are two intertwined themes which give way to the stronger and deeper notion of how one is to live, as an adult, with oneself in a world that will allow you to be whoever and whatever you choose to be.

Given the choice to believe in anything, to be religious or not, to trust in love or not, to identify with the gentry and your class or to identify with humanity at large, a person can easily lose his way in the struggle to realize the truth about who he really is. Tragedy and personal loss can challenge a person's ability to believe in happiness '" even when that happiness had once been a big part of a person's character.

The fact of these myriad choices determines the central, emotional interest in War and Peace. One must choose to believe in a self above and outside of the world. One must be able to see an unchanging reality in oneself in order to live steadily. This solidity of self and internal knowledge is a special sort of dignity.

Dignity is a quality related to self-possession, self-control, and self-worth. And it is dignity that Pierre discovers as he experiences the vacillations of war and peace, high class, low class, the rites of the Masonic order and the rest of it. It is dignity that Prince Andrey discovers when he gives up on his disgust with the world and embraces his role as a person, like everyone else, who is capable of love, capable of forgiveness, and ultimately not responsible for anyone's happiness but his own. He discovers that it is ok to be just a man and not a hero.

Natasha discovers her dignity when she loses her lover, twice '" once to her mistake and once to death. She goes through quite a few changes in the novel, as all the central characters do, and as she does Natasha learns to be her own person. Self-possession comes for Natasha as the result of troubled growth, as it does for Princess Marya, Prince Andrey, and Pierre.

The dignity achieved by these characters in Tolstoy's War and Peace is always contrasted with the folly of pride. Dignity, for Tolstoy here, is a virtue, where pride is a vice that leads to delusion. Reality is at the heart of the dignity Pierre and Natasha come to embrace. Delusions of grandeur are at the heart of Napoleon's pride, and his ultimate defeat.

In order to be true to yourself, in War and Peace, you have to recognize your limitations. No character expresses this notion more clearly than the military commander who saves Russia from the French '" Kutuzov.

Kutuzov is described as being a person of little to no intellect, little to no ambition, and a distinct disinterest in matters of state. None of these qualities are detrimental, however. They are positively essential to Kutuzov's success and they feed directly from Kutuzov's humility.

Napoleon is presented by Tolstoy as a petty fool who believes himself wise and powerful but who, in reality, is neither. Napoleon is possessed by history. He is not his own man. He has, essentially, no dignity, regardless of his pomp and bravado. He is small because he falsely believes himself to be expansive and large.

Princess Marya and her brother Prince Andrey recognize their real position and seek only to be themselves. It is this dignity of humble self-possession that keeps them at the center of War and Peace and makes them into the heroes of a novel that refuses to put history into the hands of "great men" and instead insists on finding it in the individuals who fight against illusory abstraction and pride.

More from this Contributor:
Novel Similarities: Grapes of Wrath & War and Peace
Character Pairs in Crime & Punishment
Great Short Novels

Sources:
Tolstoy, Leo; War and Peace, 1869.