Terry Eagleton is a Lancaster University professor of English literature. He is also an outspoken socialist. Normally, this shouldn't make any difference. George Saintsbury was the kind of extreme Tory that doesn't exist today, or not openly. World events since the Victorian Age, and developments in the arts and literature, have made such a world view as Saintsbury possessed indefensible. Yet Saintsbury's literary criticism is still valuable because he never allowed his political prejudices to interfere with his aesthetic values.
Using the words "aesthetic values" will immediately have some people reaching for their pistols. But Terry Eagleton, unlike Saintsbury, refuses to check his politics at the library door. Eagleton seems to view all literature as divisible between progressive and reactionary tracts. Since the death of Harold Pinter, he sees contemporary literature as having acquiesced to the perceptible shift in British politics to the Right. But he has always been disinclined to accept the established view of literary legacies. In 1993, he appeared on the BBC Four programme Without Walls to present his J'accuse against the poet Philip Larkin:
"It was Philip Larkin who wrote,
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
A verse that was supposed to have opened up a Brave New Era in modern poetry. But rarely, in my view, have we been more thoroughly duped. The truth is that it's Larkin who 'fucked up' his readers by seducing them into his own dingy world of boredom, self-pity, and disgust."
And so on the programme goes - an extreme exception to the common reception of Larkin - for another 25 minutes. Eagleton called in a number of people, including some of Larkin's closest friends, to confirm what we already know: that Larkin was a miserable specimen of a man, smugly conservative, exactingly selfish in his affairs with women, a bigoted racist, an avid collector of bondage pornography, who entertained pedaephilic fantasies.
But he was also self-loathing in the extreme. He clearly saw his own shortcomings as a human being and in his poetry regretted them some of the time but also sometimes celebrated them. I can think of few poets who had a more thorough and devastating self-awareness. But he made his weaknesses and shortcomings into strengths by making them into a central theme. It isn't exactly his own voice speaking in "A Study of Reading Habits," but it might as well be:
When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.
Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.
Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store,
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.
(20 August 1960)
Exactly where did all that reading get him? And where did all the renown as a poet get him? Left alone with himself, as we all are at the end of the day, he wondered if any of it was worth it. What good was the fame (he was offered, but declined the Poet Laureate title), or the money, when it couldn't improve his looks, his goodness, his worthiness of love and happiness? Those things were for others, not for Larkin. What else could he write about, if not himself? Written in 1954 but not published until 1973, "Continuing to Live" stands alone, like a summation:
Continuing to live - that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it's chess.
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what's the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.
(24 April 1954/A Keepsake for the New Library, 1973)
For Eagleton, the truth that Larkin knew about himself must be rejected because it is not universal. Eagleton is a theoretic critic (as opposed to the non-ideological "belles lettrists"), and he is justifiably defensive about it: "To see The Waste Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without God is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilisation in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem." Of course, if all we have to go on is what is "on the page," academics and critics would have no function outside of simply explaining to us what we have just read. So we are presented with all the salacious stories about a writer's life, his or her sexuality, politics, tastes. Last month I asked, apropos of V. S. Naipaul, if a writer's personal life should have anything to do with our evaluation of his writing. The private Naipaul was a considerably nastier specimen than Larkin, yet his fiction is outstandingly good.
Nobody said you have to like Larkin or, for that matter, any important writer. Plenty of people never liked Shakespeare, and said so in no uncertain terms. One of the people who didn't like Shakespeare and was appalled by his continuing reputation as a great playwright and poet was Leo Tolstoy. When he finally had had enough, Tolstoy wrote a diatribe against him in 1903.(1) All his life, Tolstoy confesses, he had read Shakespeare, first in Russian and German translation and later in English, but he had never been able to agree with the common conclusion about his greatness. Finally, in old age, he could take it no more, so he wrote his pamphlet, which has not, as far as I can tell, changed anyone's mind. It is almost like the book, written in the 1960s by a Swede who would not otherwise be remembered, called Anne Frank's Diary: A Hoax, that tried to convince people that Anne Frank and the Holocaust that consumed her was a scurrilous invention and a slander on the German people.
Terry Eagleton has probably read but hasn't learned from George Orwell's essay, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool." Orwell used the Tolstoy pamphlet twice, once in 1941 and again in 1947, as illustrations of "the frontiers of art and propaganda." Orwell was, like Terry Eagleton, a socialist. But he scrupulously rejected orthodoxy, especially when it interfered with judgement. Orwell was aware that every æsthetic preference "is either something inexplicable or it is so corrupted by non-æsthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the whole of literary criticism is not a huge network of humbug."(2)
All art is propaganda, Orwell claimed. But he also insisted that not all propaganda is art. "Æsthetic scrupulousness is not enough, but political rectitude is not enough either."(3) "Every piece of writing has its propaganda aspect, and yet in any book or play or poem or what-not that is to endure there has to be a residuum of something that simply is not affected by its moral or meaning - a residuum of something we can only call art."(4)
Orwell had in mind the Marxist critics who were his contemporaries, like Edward Upward. But he could have had Terry Eagleton in mind when he wrote:
"It is strange how invariably his æsthetic judgements coincide with his political ones. . . The basic trouble with all orthodox Marxists is that, posessing a system which appears to explain everything, they never bother to discover what is going on inside other people's heads."(5)
After parading a selection of witnesses for the prosecution, Eagleton concludes his video essay in the same tone with which he began:
"Defeatist, lugubrious, mean-spirited, implacably negative - in Philip Larkin, post-imperial Britain got the poetic talent it deserved. The Less Deceived, or, one might translate, No Flies on Philip, is the title of one of Larkin's early volumes, though few poets have been more deceptive. His poetry makes a virtue out of incapacity, and the ultimate value is just to live hopelessly, in solitude, without self-deception. Of course, you might claim the poet has a right to his or her misery. It's a way of seeing, after all. But Larkin made a career out of being a miserable old so-and-so who raised boredom, emptiness and futility to a fine art. He was a death-obsessed, emotionally retarded misanthropist who had the impudence to generalise his own fears and failings to The Way Things Are. And in the process he trapped his readers with him in a state of permanent casualty."
Eagleton has the ability to tell us everything he thinks is wrong about Larkin except why so many people continue to read - and enjoy - his poetry. By targeting his readers, Eagleton does manage to explain the origin of his distaste for Larkin. I think the reason Larkin is so widely read is because he writes poetry that avoids being deceptive, difficult, and diffuse. His language is the everyday, yet he often addresses subjects that are immense. Take this "death-obsessed" poem, "The Old Fools," as a prime example. Larkin doesn't avert his - or his readers' - eyes from the terror that awaits us all:
What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange:
Why aren't they screaming?
At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time you can't pretend
There'll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines
How can they ignore it?
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun's
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give
An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taking breath, and them crouching below
Extinction's alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.
(12 January 1973)
The points that Eagleton makes against Larkin are actually the very qualities that make him great, however negative they may seem. As Orwell wrote in closing his answer to Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare:
"There is no argument by which one can defend a poem. It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible. And if this test is valid, I think the verdict in Shakespeare's case must be 'not guilty'. Like every other writer, Shakespeare will be forgotten sooner or later, but it is unlikely that a heavier indictment will ever be brought against him. Tolstoy was perhaps the most admired literary man of his age, and he was certainly not its least able pamphleteer. He turned all his powers of denunciation against Shakespeare, like all the guns of a battleship roaring simultaneously. And with what result? Forty years later, Shakespeare is still there, completely unaffected, and of the attempt to demolish him nothing remains except the yellowing pages of a pamphlet which hardly anyone has read, and which would be forgotten altogether if Tolstoy had not also been the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina."(6)
(1) "Shakespeare and the Drama," published along with another pamphlet, "Shakespeare and the Working Classes" by Ernest Crosby.
(2) "Charles Dickens," 11 March 1940.
(3) "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda," The Listener, 29 May 1941.
(4) "Tolstoy and Shakespeare," The Listener, 4 June 1941.
(5) Review of The Novel To-Day by Philip Henderson, New English Weekly, 31 December 1936.
(6) "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic, 7 March 1947.
Though they were in power for only 75 years, the Soviets saw great significance in anniversaries. The 10th anniversary of the October Revolution inspired them to commission major films on the subject from its best filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein. That Eisenstein's film, October, was released several months after the anniversary was the subject of an essay I published on the centenary of the revolution last November.
When the 150th anniversary of the 1812 invasion of Czarist Russia was approaching, a film adaptation of Tolstoy's epic historical novel War and Peace was commissioned by the state film production company, Mosfilm. Hollywood had already tackled Tolstoy's novel in 1956. Directed by the silent-era's King Vidor, it was a respectable dud, featuring the miscast Henry Fonda, who was too old to play Pierre Bezuhov, Audrey Hepburn as Natasha Rostova, showing off what Dwight Macdonald called her "good bone structure" and little else, and Mel Ferrer an utter nullity as Prince Andrei.
The movie was a box office success, but the Russians wanted to take back their national epic and the Soviet Ministry of Culture announced that they were going all-in with a mega-production of their own. The film that began principal shooting on the 1962 anniversary was eventually released in four parts between 1966 and 1967. The production was unprecedented, mobilizing the entire state film apparatus in the acquisition of artifacts to lend its production design and costumes the ultimate in authenticity.
The appointed director, Sergei Bondarchuk, announced: “Our duty is to introduce the future viewer to the origins of sublime art, to make the innermost mysteries of the novel, War and Peace , visually tangible, to inform a feeling of fullness of life, of the joy of human experience.” Bondarchuk, who started his film career as an actor, appointed himself to play Pierre, the novel's central character, though he was almost as old as Henry Fonda. The ballerina, Lyudmila Savelyeva, played Natasha gracefully and naturally, and the film's highest-paid actor, Vyacheslav Tikhonov, played Prince Andrei in a finely shaded performance, despite also being too old for the part. But the actors, every one of the cast of literally thousands (one of the very last of its kind), are dwarfed by the scale of Bondarchuk's production. Though the grand balls are impressively staged, it is the battles for which the film is justifiably famous.
And it is here that I must interject a disclaimer. The decision was made by Mosfilm, the film's production company, that the film would be shot on high-resolution 70-millimeter film stock, and not on the usual 35mm film, using anamorphic lenses to create a "letterbox" widescreen aspect ratio. This decision called for the use of special cameras to handle the film format, but also 70mm film projectors when the finished film was screened in cinemas. I have never had the opportunity to see Bondarchuk's massive film on the big screen - I have only seen it in a compressed digital format. Some films (some would insist all films) were designed expressly for the big screen. Bondarchuk's War and Peace exploits the special attributes of an outsized, panoramic big screen - one that can accommodate the 70mm aspect ratio - the same ratio as two television screens side by side. However closely I may hold my device to my face, I can only get an approximate, attenuated look at what audiences saw when the films were first exhibited in cinemas. When he saw the English-dubbed version of Bondarchuk's film in 1969, Roger Ebert was inspired to write: "It is hard to imagine that circumstances will ever again combine to make a more spectacular, expensive, and -- yes -- splendid movie. Perhaps that's just as well; epics seem to be going out of favor, replaced instead by smaller, more personal films. Perhaps this greatest of the epics will be one of the last, bringing the epic form to its ultimate statement and at the same time supplying the epitaph."(1)
My disclaimers out of the way, and mindful of the fact that the experience of watching a film conceived for a cinema screen on a 5 x 3 device is the future of what was once romantically known as filmgoing, I am able to recognize that this 6 3/4-hour War and Peace is a formidable, sometimes beautiful, and momentarily amazing film experience.(2)
There are three battles depicted in Bondarchuk's film - two in Part I, Schöngrabern (which was little more than a skirmish) and Austerlitz, and the major, full-scale Battle of Borodino in Part III. When asked about his experience of directing the battle scenes in the Hollywood production of War and Peace, King Vidor famously claimed to have had an advantage over Napoleon because he was in command of both armies. The first battle, Schōngrabern, takes up almost a half hour, beginning with a detachment of Russian soldiers singing like a Russian National Chorus as they enter the German town. The battle itself is staged as a crescendo of Russian and French soldiers, in serried ranks, converging on each other. One of the characters, Nikolai Rostov, has his horse shot out from under him and finds himself deliriously fleeing the field. On the soundtrack we can hear a strange sort of musique concrète, with modified instruments, attributed in the credits to Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. It is quite effective in contributing to the visual confusion witnessed by Prince Andrei. Such confusion, of course, required extensive (and expensive) preparation and teams of drill masters to marshal all of the extras - including many horses - through their movements - exactly like a general. (Look for the famous "cannonball-view" shot - a first, as far as I know, in filmed battle scenes.)
But Schöngrabern was merely a dress rehearsal compared to the Battle of Austerlitz. The historical battle itself was a demoralising rout for the Russian army, and Bondarchuk makes it into a convincing disaster. The moment when Andrei takes up the standard and screams "hurrah!" at the retreating Russian soldiers, only to be knocked down by a piece of shrapnel and find himself suddenly admiring the peaceful sky above him is one of Tolstoy's greatest narrative triumphs. Bondarchuk's handling of this scene is shaky, as if the sudden shift from the external of the battle to the internal of Andrei's delirium was too much for him.
I am compelled to proclaim that the Battle of Borodino, that takes up the last half of Part 3 has to be the greatest battle scene on film. It looks exactly as if a horrific battle takes place that the cameras were there to capture. The Russian army had retreated from the advancing French for weeks when the Czar demanded of his General Kutuzov that his army stand and fight. Far outnumbered, the Russians fought valiantly but managed only to slow Napoleon's advance in Moscow. Even Napoleon saw it as a pointless, if calamitous, expense of life, estimated at between 72,000 to 73,000 dead, wounded, or missing for both sides. Pierre foolishly shows up in fine clothes and a conspicuous white top hat to watch the battle, and his mounting distress at the desperate carnage around him contributes a personal perspective on the catastrophe. In a cinema, the effects of watching the scene must have been overwhelming. Even viewed on my tablet, the images and sounds combined to create in me a nervous, altogether distressing reaction. Two other war films that I've seen had a similar effect: Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron and Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. After watching Peckinpah's film in a cinema, I found myself trembling uncontrollably as I walked to my car.
After all the expense of rubles and testosterone that went into the re-creation of the battles in Bondarchuk's War and Peace, the single scene that I found most moving was the one you can find at the beginning of Book 6 of Tolstoy's novel, in which Prince Andrei, resigned to a joyless existence after the death in childbirth of his wife, refusing even to recognize the beauty of the spring day when he travels by coach to visit the estate of the Rostovs, sees an old oak standing alone, defiantly bare of new leaves and blossoms in the middle of a verdant forest. He recognizes himself in the oak. Then he sees Natasha, and overhears her at night in the room above his calling out to Sonya to come to the window to admire the night. To simulate the moonlight, the entire night scene in the film was shot with a blue tint - an old technique from the silent era used by Bondarchuk to remarkable effect.
Returning the same way he came, Andrei's coach takes him through the same forest of the day before. But the once bare old oak is unrecognizable - it has come back to life, responding to the irresistible pull of the spring with green leaves and white blossoms.
"Yes, it is the same oak," thought Prince Andrei, and all at once he was seized by an unreasoning springtime feeling of joy and renewal. All the best moments of his life suddenly rose to his memory. Austerlitz with the lofty heavens, his wife's dead reproachful face, Pierre at the ferry, that girl thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night itself and the moon, and.... all this rushed suddenly to his mind.
"No, life is not over at thirty-one!" Prince Andrei suddenly decided finally and decisively. "It is not enough for me to know what I have in me — everyone must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to fly away into the sky, everyone must know me, so that my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!" (Book Six: 1808-1810, chapters 1-3)
This is the scene that every Russian once knew by heart, that the prisoners in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gather together to recount to one another in one of the novel's most moving scenes. The scene is almost like a personal memory to me, and to everyone else who has read it in the 150 years since Tolstoy's novel was published. Sergei Bondarchuk captures the scene beautifully in his film.
Though an impressive, sometimes daunting accomplishment, Bondarchuk's War and Peace fails to maintain a high enough degree of intensity and inventiveness to make it anything more than a series of richly detailed illustrations of Tolstoy's novel. Bondarchuk was tempted, as even some of the greatest filmmakers have been tempted, by the potential for sheer spectacle presented to him in Tolstoy's battle scenes. Although cumulatively effective in capturing some of the excitements and horrors of war (they completely overshadow everything else in the film), Bondarchuk is too much of a little boy, playing with his tin soldiers. Film has to be about more than just explosions to transfix the viewer's attention. I remember watching a television series about silent films when I was in my teens called The Toy That Grew Up. Judging from the box office receipts for the latest superhero/Star Wars movies, film still has a lot of growing up to do.
A closing note to film restorers. I can't say for certain that efforts to restore this 50-year-old film haven't already been undertaken. All I can say is that the digital version of the film available online is in sometimes execrable condition. I understand that the 70mm film stock used for the film was Soviet-made and often of such sub-standard quality that more than 10 per cent of the exposed footage had to be re-shot by Bondarchuk. The color in several scenes is in flux, as if the colors printed on the celluloid had bled into one another. This is especially noticeable in the battle scenes, in which the shifting colors seem to be a part of the atmospherics of sky, smoke, cannon blasts, and swarming masses of extras. In a strange way, the horrible condition of the film actually contributes to the hellish pictures of battle. The film I saw is in quite desperate need of restoration.
(1) Roger Ebert, June 22, 1969. Ebert's review can be found HERE.
(2) The film is advertised on Wikipedia (consider the source!) at 431 minutes, more than 7 hours. The version I have seen, which has no perceptible lapses in continuity, is 405 minutes. Interestingly, the version cited on Roger Ebert's website is 415 minutes.
Over the past several weeks, I have had the immense pleasure (tinged with some disappointment) of seeing once again the twenty-episode BBC adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, made in 1972. I first watched the programmes, one episode per day, on summer afternoons in 1974, and it is one of my most cherished memories of television viewing. I was 16 and had yet to read Tolstoy's novel. Since I didn't know the novel's plot, nor how it would end, every new episode held me in suspense until the next one arrived. When it finally did arrive, I felt exactly as I did upon finally reading the novel in 1979 - not that it was too long, but that it was too short, so vivid and real were Tolstoy's characters - at least as real to me as people I had actually met.
The BBC production cast the young Anthony Hopkins as Pierre, Alan Dobie as Prince Andrei, and a large cast of marvelous supporting actors. (Morag Hood, who was cast as Natasha, bore the unenviable burden of having to embody Natasha Rostova, and doesn't quite pull it off.) But the staging and costumes and the patience of the script (by Jack Pulman) provides plenty of room for the viewer to settle into the splendor of Tolstoy's tale. And it actually spares us those - to my mind - superfluous history lessons that Tolstoy occasionally indulges in once Napoleon enters the story.
Of course, everyone has their own favorite scenes, like Prince Andrei's sight of the old oak tree stubbornly resisting the tumult of spring just before he meets Natasha, or the great battle set-pieces that Tolstoy handles so brilliantly, like Austerlitz and Borodino. One of my own favorite scenes, that I wrote about in a blog post from 2014 (see Look to the Sky), involves Andrei in a near-death experience at Austerlitz.
But much later in the novel, Andrei is mortally wounded at the battle of Borodino, and finds himself, half-conscious, caught up in the evacuation of Moscow. Also among the evacuees is Natasha, who was engaged to Andrei before it was called off. Natasha does her best to help Andrei convalesce, until it becomes clear that his condition is hopeless and he dies in one of the most moving scenes ever written:
He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that he was quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and insignificant people appeared before him. He talked to them and discussed something trivial. They were preparing to go away somewhere. Prince Andrei dimly realized that all this was trivial and that he had more important cares, but he continued to speak, surprising them by empty witticisms. Gradually, unnoticed, all these persons began to disappear and a single question, that of the closed door, superseded all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt and lock it. Everything depended on whether he was, or was not, in time to lock it. He went, and tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move and he knew he would not be in time to lock the door though he painfully strained all his powers. He was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear was the fear of death. It stood behind the door. But just when he was clumsily creeping toward the door, that dreadful something on the other side was already pressing against it and forcing its way in. Something not human — death — was breaking in through that door, and had to be kept out. He seized the door, making a final effort to hold it back — to lock it was no longer possible — but his efforts were weak and clumsy and the door, pushed from behind by that terror, opened and closed again.
Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was death, and Prince Andrei died.
But at the instant he died, Prince Andrei remembered that he was asleep, and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke.
"Yes, it was death! I died — and woke up. Yes, death is an awakening!" And all at once it grew light in his soul and the veil that had till then concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual vision. He felt as if powers till then confined within him had been liberated, and that strange lightness did not again leave him.
When, waking in a cold perspiration, he moved on the divan, Natasha went up and asked him what was the matter. He did not answer and looked at her strangely, not understanding. [Book Twelve: 1812, Chapter XVI]
As I mentioned, I was reading War and Peace in 1979 for a seminar college course in Russian Literature. I was reading the passage above one evening in my bedroom with my door closed, and when I came to the exact point at which "the door noiselessly opened" and death entered, my father opened my bedroom door. The timing couldn't have been more perfect, and I leapt to my feet and cried out in fright. But it was only my father - and not death - who had come through the door.
Looking at the same scene in the BBC television production, in Part Seventeen, with Alan Dobie playing Prince Andrei, I was surprised to find that they omitted the dream altogether. Andrei drifts in and out of sleep, with Natasha sometimes there, or his sister Maria. They even bring his little son, Nikolai, to see him. And then he awakes from a dream, tells Natasha that he loves her and . . . dies. It's a moving scene all the same, but I was waiting to see the dream in vain.
There is a great deal to be said in praise of the BBC production of War and Peace, as well as all such adaptations of literary classics. The careful, exceedingly patient dramatization of a big 19th-century novel, from the casting of actors to the creation of sets and costumes is one of the most respectful and faithful approaches to literature imaginable. But whether it was my age at the time I first watched the BBC production, or the expectations that an intervening lifetime of television and film viewing have inspired in me, but seeing each episode again after a interval of 44 years, I found the re-encounter with the BBC's War and Peace disappointing. The faces of the actors, which I carried over in my imagination as I was reading the novel - so that I saw Anthony Hopkins face in Tolstoy's scenes of Pierre Bezuhov, or Alan Dobie's face when I read about Prince Andrei Bolkonsky - were still there, but the awfully flat television lighting of every scene seemed so unreal to me and the movement from one scene to the next felt so studio-bound, and the occasional outdoor scenes, especially the battles (which were shot in the former Yugoslavia) seemed almost silly in their lack of any real scale. I will always cherish the memory of watching the series when I was 16, but there lies the greatest hazard of trying to recapture the past, unless one applies some Proustian intellectual effort of recollection.
I have also recently had a chance to see the four parts of Sergei Bondarchuk's landmark film adaptation of War and Peace, produced at enormous cost in the former Soviet Union in the mid 1960s. I think I will write at greater length about the film, it is so extraordinary - so epic at precisely those points at which the BBC production couldn't hope to succeed on the small screen - namely, the great battle scenes that Tolstoy himself described so bravely. While the BBC was better at depicting the peace half of the novel, Bondarchuk is reported to have had thousands soldiers of the Red Army at his disposal with which to re-create Austerlitz and Borodino.
Unfortunately, what Bondarchuk's War and Peace proves, with a breathtaking finality, is how a big budget can be an even greater liability to a filmmaker than a low budget. Bondarchuk started to shoot Andrei's dream exactly as Tolstoy described it. Andrei (played by Vyacheslav Tikhonov) is in the same room in which he had fallen asleep or into a delirium, but he is dressed in full military regalia. There is a large white wall and at its bottom left corner is a small door. A crowd of people, all dressed as at a ball or on military parade (and appearing to be transparent as phantoms) are coming towards him. They are talking but he can't hear what they're saying. The crowd of people are suddenly gone, and Andrei rises from his bed. There is a sudden disruption, like an earthquake - the camera lurches and the whole room tilts to one side. Andrei - phantom-like - walks in slow motion toward the door of the room and presses with both hands against it, trying to prevent it from opening. But it opens. Only the look of fear on Andrei's face suggests to us what it could be that has entered the room. All Tolstoy needed to do was call it Death - death entered the room. But how could Bondarchuk show death to us? He could simply have cut to Andrei opening his eyes - but before he does so, he shows that the doors have become enormous and Andrei is a tiny figure walking into the darkness beyond. Which is it to be - does death break in on Andrei in his room or does Andrei enter the darkness beyond the opened door? Why is Andrei leaving? Where is he going? Bondarchuk's contribution to Tolstoy's simple dream doesn't quite work.
