From Troy to Moscow

Violence and cruelty are part of the sport of war, and no one thinks of forbidding it to themselves or others. The zeal for revenge is nothing more than the outburst of a passion, which with its fury sharpens the desire for victory, but not the angry envy that rots the soul and makes defeat more severe. Even at the height of the battle, the opponents recognize each other's honor and revenge - magnanimity is not forbidden. But everything changes when the criterion of the clash of forces is no longer strength, but the judging spirit. When war appears as the materialization of a deeper duel between truth and error, between right and distortion, then mutual appreciation becomes impossible.

Author Rachel Bespaloff

Homer and Tolstoy are united by the same fierce love, the same manly aversion to war. Neither pacifists nor warmongers, both recognize and bluntly state its profound truth: that eternal oscillation between the human spirit inflamed by the joy of aggression, and the stoic spirit of sacrifice that accomplishes the return to the nameless One. It is useless to look in the “Iliad” or “War and Peace” for noisy denunciations of war as such. People sometimes make war, sometimes suffer it, some curse it and others sing about it, but, like fate, who can judge it? Silence – or, more precisely, the impossibility of words – is the only echo, it alone responds to the fact of war, as well as Hector’s finally disenchanted gaze on Achilles in the moment of agony, or the lost eyes that Prince Andrei seems to stare somewhere beyond his own corpse. Meanwhile, around them, as always and behind them, war continues to tear apart youthful forces that are eager to enter its vortex. War is always greed and youth, bodies that are lured into a roll towards destruction.

My hands are boiling and my courage is crumbling, my legs finally give me a rushing momentum (XIII, 98-9).

Extreme has the mysterious power to produce oblivion, to numb the imagination and memory, to leave only the mute trace of horror. But, at the same time as deafening, war stimulates the imagination by shedding an unprecedented light that reveals the order of the elemental. In the epic, war appears first of all as the prolongation to the boiling point of those furious rhythms that shake nature, of great cosmic shocks. The images of the "Iliad" reawaken the savage brotherhood of man and the elements.

[The hero] fell like a giant oak, poplar, and fir that the feller fells in the forest.

with a sharp axe to forge boats. So he ran in front of the horses and the chariot, screaming, and with his fists he grabbed

behind the bloody ground

(XIII, 479-84).

The roar of the battle rises to the sky, as high and loud as the thunder of the elements:

Nor the waves of the sea pushed by the gust of wind

It doesn't roar as much when it hits the cliffs of the coast, nor does the crackle of fire among the mountain valleys.

When the fire burns the forests and the groves with fury, the wind does not blow over the giant oaks.

how terrible the battle of the Trojans and Achaeans when they rushed one against the other (XIV, 482-9).

But, above the crowd of fighting, above the hero kneeling on the ground

with numb arms, nailed to the spot, who sees death with his own eyes

(XX, 590-91)

The eternal infinity stretches where Prince Andrei dissolves somewhere between the depths of the sky and the flow of time. The wave of war returns everything to the immense whirlpool of Creation that creates, shreds and recreates without ceasing worlds, deities and souls. Where life, on the horizon of its burning, fragility becomes a pedestal. Precisely because war takes everything from us, leaves us with nothing, the World, as something that is suddenly imposed on us, when the shadow of the wound tragically falls on each particular existence, becomes priceless. Everything that is destined to be destroyed, without knowing it yet, or with the blind hope of some salvation – the simple human life, the blessed peace of Andromache carrying the sacks of gold for Hector's horses, the twisted happiness of Natasha before Andrei's departure for war – is illuminated with compassion. In these two epics, the World does not simply serve as a backdrop: it is the transcendence of the One – the invisible actor and set designer of the drama where humans and gods struggle in embrace.

One cannot speak of a Homeric world or a Tolstoyan world in the case of "The Iliad" and "War and Peace", as we usually speak of the Dantean, Balzacian or Dostoyevskian world. Tolstoy's universe, like Homer's, is our very life at every moment, a world we don't need to enter, as we are already part of it, just as it is part of us. "It's hard for me to confess everything, I'm not a god." Tolstoy could easily have made Homer's modesty his own. Neither one nor the other needs to tell everything, for the World to unfold as it is. Only they (and Shakespeare occasionally) have those planetary pauses above the flow of events, where history appears in its unbroken progression beyond human wills, never completed and always creative. Hector will not live to see the defeat of the invading armies, nor Prince Andrei the retreat of Napoleon's troops. But the pagan gains eternal glory, and the Christian the eternity of faith. This passion for eternity also nourishes the love of the homeland, which is why the ordeal of war reveals its full depth. Faced with extreme danger, man understands that his connection to the place that, for him or her, has become the center of the world, the hearth where the common gods are honored, the ultimate reason for life and death, that this feeling of compassion and belonging is not at all a feeling of idle comfort, but a ruthless obligation of his entire being. Prince Andrei, still unhealed from the broken engagement and his ultimately failed ambitions, on the very night before the Battle of Borodino, at the height of the crisis, faces the furious force of a passion much fiercer than love and the thirst for glory: the will to regain his humiliated homeland. It is during the most dangerous attack on the defensive wall of the Achaean ships, where he has gathered Trojans and allies, that Hector understands the true strength that each individual possesses when it comes to becoming the master of "their own": the people they love, the land and the sky above it, the family belongings that make up the decor of life. "Only one is the best omen," he replies to Polydamas, "to always fight for the defense of one's homeland" (XII, 294-5). Faced with the dilemma: either strong or defeated, man is forced to invent new forms of love for life, stricter, more persistent. Pierre Bezukhov must fall into the chains of captivity to understand the profound truth that remained hidden to him under the veil of visions and nostalgia: nothing is terrible in life, because all of life is terrible; because there is neither a place nor a scale to measure human pain. Even the terrible Achilles, the razer of cities, in the moment of victory, when he takes revenge on old Priam, does not even know himself whether he is a hero of victory or a prey to despair. These great, omniscient truths are reserved by Homer and Tolstoy for the solitary man: they are the revelations of solitude amidst the vortex of collective action, tensions that man is forced to endure under the threat of slavery or annihilation. But their weight, instead of dissolving his personality in the midst of the anonymous mass, emphasizes it even more, stripping it to the core. Peter, Andrei, Hector, Achilles, are never more fundamentally themselves than when one step separates them from being nothing anymore. Even the cities themselves – Moscow in flames, like a desolate hive, Ilion threatened in its prosperity, with the shadow of plunder and destruction looming over it – have as it were an individual inspiration, a genuine soul, a fatality inseparable from infallible holiness. Holy Ilion, Moscow, the consecrated city, are each the center of gravity of the epic, the geographical place where the threads of the story are tied and untied, and at the same time the metaphysical place where the religious conversion of fact into divine fiction takes place. Even burned, razed, the city survives in the embrace of the epic, an unfading witness to the real and imaginary lives it carried, to the real and legendary battles where its fate was played out.

Neither Homer nor Tolstoy tries to soften the scandal of fruitless suffering, just as they refuse to hide behind the comforting idea of ​​individual survival. Life, for them, is measured only by the box of life. On this plane of vision, no ultimate goal comes to limit the strict affirmation of existence as it is, seen in its entirety and in the detail of individual destinies. Homer indeed hymns individual greatness and delights in it, while Tolstoy punishes and desecrates it, but recognizes no immunity from death. Even Achilles himself, the most transcendental man “is mortal like all others,” since “in body and that the dragon can wound / he has a soul” (XXI, 699-700). The hero is not immortal, he is only the overstretched bow that shoots the sharp arrow of the desire for eternity as far as possible. At any moment, the hero can be plagued by loneliness, he can fall into a zone of dryness where even the fighting ardor itself seems to repent in his soul, where even the highest values ​​that he thought were eternal abandon him. When Prince Andrei enters this zone, none of his previous loves – neither his wife, nor his homeland, nor his glory – survives. And when the fallen hero is enveloped in the black shadow of death and cruel fate closes his eyes (V, 102-3), nothing remains of his former pride and happiness. Consciousness has no wings that would allow it to soar above death and from there embrace eternity beyond the flow of time or in the brilliance of the moment. Life here is not a continuous growth from birth to death, but a time split with the pit of death in the middle. For both Homer and Tolstoy, the blade of death remains ever sharp.

Therefore, neither one nor the other recognizes any superiority to humanity. The fact that humanity does not die – at least from our limited point of view – does not make it more valuable than man. On the contrary, it diminishes its value, in proportion to the mortality it lacks. Christianity restores it, restoring the dimension of death through Christ, the incarnation of humanity.

Eternity thus belongs only to that Being, which Tolstoy calls God, and where, for him, everything is destined to dissolve, as liberation from the sin of the individual – Being that Homer, without giving it a name (in a contrary dynamic), sees living as active solidarity in the background of every mortal existence. However, this Being, however Everlasting, manages to unfold only through the irregular rhythms of the flow of creation, where beyond the ups and downs, the fluctuating progress seems to hide a creative intention. The enemy armies that meet before the walls of Troy or in the suburbs of Moscow, beyond the hostility that separates them, sculpt together in eternity the text of the epic, where the people of the future will find the necessary strength for the new transfiguration of the world. Transfiguration, which will never be retribution, of course. No one can restore, nor save all those treasures of soul and life wasted in vain, sacrifices to the blind routine of force. But the calls of the irreparable awaken the creative will, and only the future responds to them, because it is to it that they are addressed. And if there is genuine solidarity, if the community of isolated individuals is ever possible, their only source is the hope that a new reality can arise from shame and mourning.

The individual, aware of the distortions of a narrow vision of the world, finds liberation not in love for humanity, but in observing this "primary material" lying in the field of ruins (Nietzsche), in obtaining a new image of existence where the entirety of the past with its destructions and achievements, the entire wild and magnificent history, enters.

When Homer and Tolstoy want to point out the fatality of force – the inevitable decline of creative power into the automatism of violence, of conquest into terror, of courage into cruelty – they do not express themselves with reproaches of moral indignation. An image is enough for them, a contrast that remains forever engraved in our memory. Nothing better testifies to the deep affinity between the Greek poet and the Russian poet than the fraternal resemblance between Petya, the youngest son of the Rostov family, and Polydorus, the youngest of Priam's sons. Two boys, whose parents had forbidden them to go to war; both joyfully violate the ban, flee from sight with boyish euphoria and go and mow down the battlefield. Faced with the mechanical fury of the brutality of war, Homer and Tolstoy raise the laughing charm of the still young teenager, who plays at war as he crosses the enemy line. Even Achilles, who loves war in itself, because he encounters the strong, does not hesitate to tarnish his glory by tearing apart an unarmed child. Whether the spirit rules matter, or matter rules the spirit, the same force always acts, which at the highest point of its curve is the creative gift that transcends itself in the created object – and then, as if collapsing and falling under the weight of its own law, it exhausts and disintegrates. When Achilles, drunk with power, massacres Polydorus and Lycaon, then he is ready for the arrow of Paris.

But, nevertheless, from the point of view of impartiality, Homer stands incomparably higher than Tolstoy. The Russian poet cannot resist the temptation to constantly belittle and defile the adversary of his people, to strip him of all prestige in the eyes of the reader. The Greek poet humiliates neither the victor nor the vanquished. It is not accidental, but essential, that Achilles and Priam sincerely express their respect to each other. Since humanity and the race of gods are equally immersed in the guilt of universal doom, then understanding and mercy belong equally to everyone, both the fortunate and the unfortunate, both Achilles and Lycaon. Homer makes no distinctions, has no weaknesses for his own - and the hero who, for him, constitutes the model of human nobility: Hector, is not Greek, but Trojan. Moreover, a kind of purity rules violent relationships, the soul does not participate in the clash of forces, and hatred is unmixed with bile.

Violence and cruelty are part of the sport of war and no one thinks of forbidding themselves or others. The zeal for revenge is nothing more than the outburst of a passion, which with its fury sharpens the desire for victory, but not the angry envy that rots the soul and makes defeat more severe. Even at the height of the battle, the opponents recognize each other's honor and revenge - magnanimity is not forbidden. But everything changes when the criterion of the clash of forces is no longer strength, but the judging spirit. When war appears as the materialization of a deeper duel between truth and error, between right and distortion, then mutual appreciation becomes impossible. When in war the true God and false deities, God and idols, clash, then the conflict is unstoppable. The war is total and must extend to all areas, until the complete extermination of idols and the disappearance of distortion. This excludes any respect for the opponent, which would be a guilty veneration of error, a sin against the truth.

For Tolstoy, Napoleon is not only the commander of the invading army, but a rival of God; he is the embodiment of the mythical figure of the great personality who becomes an obstacle to the return of isolated existences to the bosom of the indestructible Being. Just as, on the other hand, Kutuzov is not simply the hero-liberator of the native land, but even more perhaps the anti-hero, the modest spokesman of a historical necessity, which in its significance and scope surpasses human reason.

However, when it reaches the levels of greatness of Homer and Tolstoy, the epic style always implies a kind of noble outlook, a panoramic vision of things, the overcoming of petty perspectives and of any arbitrary judgment. The epic requires slow attention and the gift of summary, the grasp of collective states and the penetration of souls, a broad cosmic vision and a keen anthropomorphic imagination. Partial judgment and partisan sensitivity are evidence of a low spirit, which has no place in it. The true epic poet must be a kind of demiurge, master of a technique where everything is given to us in its fullness, just as the Creator is equally given to every creature. The epic gives us the human bush in the universe of branches, with the plots of earth still clinging to the roots; The hero does not stand out against the dark background of the anonymous mass, but only as part of a living community of individuals, where Pierre Bezukhov stands next to Palton Kratayev, where Achilles and Agamemnon each retain their rank and distinctive features.

The purity of feelings, which is not the opposite of sensuality, but its most authentic expression, takes on special strength in Tolstoy and Homer. There it becomes the support of the will to express, putting a brake on the power of feelings: a dam that contains the waters before the explosion and makes it possible for, for a moment, each leaf to be reflected on the surface with its celestial crown. We recognize the strength of purity whenever a trace, a detail is enough to evoke the most acute sensation, with words that know how not to wither its fragility. We smell it whenever art knows how to make bodies weightless, to say passions in two words, whenever it expresses the extreme with moderation and the excess without excess: the immersion in the abyss of war, but also the flight into the peace of the constellations.

Taken from the volume "Iliad and War", by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, "Aleph" publication, Tirana, 2026

Translated from French:

Orgest Azizi

Published with permission from the translator.