Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Thursday
While attending my brother David’s memorial service, I met his best friend, long-time diplomat Fletcher Burton, with whom I talked about literature’s life-changing potential. In the process, he told me about an email exchange he once had with retired Ambassador John Limbert, who in 1979 was a Foreign Service officer in Iran and one of the hostages. While imprisoned in the American embassy, Limbert read War and Peace, and Fletcher forwarded me their exchange two decades later about the novel.
Limbert shared the experience after reading a 2022 article that Fletcher had written for the Foreign Service Journal on what Tolstoy’s work teaches us about diplomats and diplomacy. Here’s the response Limbert wrote to FSJ, entitled, “Reading Tolstoy in Tehran: Family Endures”:
Reading Fletcher Burton’s excellent article on the diplomats in War and Peace (“Diplomacy, the Third Strand of War and Peace,” July-August 2022 FSJ) reminded me of my own encounters—17 years apart—with Tolstoy’s masterpiece.
I first read it in a college course, “Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.” For whatever reason— perhaps my determination that classes not interfere with my education—I failed to get much from that reading. Discovery and appreciation came 17 years later, in a basement room at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. In December 1979, as our hopes for any resolution of the hostage crisis were disappearing fast, my family sent me a care package that included copies of War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, and George Eliot’s massive work, Middlemarch. Average length of each: 1,000 pages. The message was clear. “You aren’t going anywhere soon. You will have plenty of time to read these epics.”
The Russian novels were most welcome. I must confess, however, that I could never get beyond the first 150 pages of Middlemarch. Too boring for me, even under those circumstances. Re-reading War and Peace, however, was a revelation and delight. So many riches in its pages! I found myself so captivated that I had to put the book down and ration myself to reading only 30 pages a day.
What did I discover? Others have noted Tolstoy’s views of history, diplomacy, and historical personalities. For me, the attraction was different. It was his narrative of family and its power. I found myself riveted by the fortunes of the Rostovs, Bolkonskys, Bezhukovs, and, of course, the depraved Kuragins and Dolokhovs.
As war and destruction raged across the world, family became all. When the degenerate Anatole Kuragin’s friend, the villainous Fyodor Dolokhov (a character based on Tolstoy’s cousin Fyodor), cheats the young and naive officer Nikolai Rostov out of 43,000 rubles at cards, the boy’s father, Count Ilya Rostov, never hesitates. His family had already faced disgrace when the same Kuragin almost seduced the count’s daughter, the beautiful and innocent Natasha. But family honor is all. Debts are to be paid. The count never reproaches his son but sells and mortgages what he must to pay the debt and save his son (and his family’s) good name.
In 1979, amid the madness that ruled Tehran at the time, what better way to find sanity and fight despair than to savor slowly the nobility and depravity, the honor and dishonor, and the strengths and weaknesses of Tolstoy’s amazing characters and their families? Amid chaos and insanity, humanity and family endure.
John Limbert Ambassador, retired
The moment in the novel that Limbert mentions is the following:
The old count cast down his eyes on hearing his son’s words and began bustlingly searching for something.
“Yes, yes,” he muttered, “it will be difficult, I fear, difficult to raise… happens to everybody! Yes, who has not done it?”
And with a furtive glance at his son’s face, the count went out of the room…. Nicholas had been prepared for resistance, but had not at all expected this.
“Papa! Pa-pa!” he called after him, sobbing, “forgive me!” And seizing his father’s hand, he pressed it to his lips and burst into tears.
Before examining further Limbert’s response to War and Peace, allow me to comment briefly on his negative reaction to Middlemarch, arguably England’s greatest novel. Maybe the work failed to interest him because the challenge faced by Eliot’s characters is exactly the opposite of that faced by the Iranian hostages. Eliot begins her novel by contrasting her heroine Dorothea with St. Theresa of Avalon, whose “passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life.” Dorothea, despite having a passionate, ideal nature of her own, doesn’t live in epic times, so the larger world never experiences her potential greatness. Limbert, by contrast, was living in epic times. Here’s Eliot:
Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness…
There was nothing inconsistent or formless about the behavior of Limbert and his fellow hostages. Living as History was being made, he craved an epic work, and War and Peace ranks up there with The Iliad, The Aeneid, Paradise Lost, and Les Misérables as one of the world’s great epics.
I particularly like how Limbert focuses on a small moment occurring amidst world-shattering events. All of the epics I have just mentioned have a genius for doing this (I think of Achilles slaughtering multitudes at one point and sensitively comforting a grieving father at another), and Tolstoy’s ability to move seamlessly from cataclysmic warfare to intricate drawing room conversation is similarly dazzling. I can see why this dimension of War and Peace would have struck a nerve with Limbert: Napoleon’s invasion, like the Iranian revolution, may be upending society, but, to a prisoner, thoughts about family are likely to dominate. As the diplomat noted in a follow-up email to Fletcher, “At first I didn’t understand the source of its power, but gradually saw how Tolstoy is telling us how family protects us in a world gone mad. And our world had certainly gone mad.”
Elsewhere in their e-mail correspondence, Fletcher noted how Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, who was released in 2024 after spending over a year in a Russian prison on trumped-up charges, also read War and Peace, along with other Russian novels. Fletcher wondered whether Gershkovich, like Limbert, drew strength from Tolstoy’s family depictions given that his mother Ella was “the prime mover” behind his release.
Fletcher noted that Gershkovich also read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, another epic Russian novel, this one about the bloody Battle of Stalingrad. He informed Limbert that Ella became worried that her son was reading “too many dark and voluminous tomes drawn from Russia’s tragic past” and suggested lighter fare.
To this Limbert reported that he too had read another dark Russian novel, this one by Solzhenitsyn. If it was (as I suspect) A Day in the Live of Ivan Denisovich, then it might have helped him cope with his imprisonment. The novel, drawn from the author’s own experiences, is about a day spent in the Siberian gulag. Although grim, it is also surprisingly uplifting as we see the importance of tiny victories for prisoners.
Commenting on Ella’s concern, Limbert noted that he too had read and enjoyed lighter fare, especially the novels of Jane Austen. (In other words, he wasn’t bored by all novels set in rural England.) Learning this, I think of how Austen’s novels comfort combatants in the Rudyard Kipling story “The Janeites” (1924). Set in the World War I trenches, a group of soldiers founds “the Society of Jane,” which helps them fantasize about an orderly world. They even name their missile launchers after characters (Mr. Collins, General Tilney, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh).
Austen’s voice of ironic detachment provides Kipling’s narrator with a means to cope with the horrors that he witnesses as he adopts an emotionally distanced and slightly comic way of recalling events. And when, after all his comrades have been killed and he is wandering through the blasted landscape, he finds that his knowledge of Emma gets him a transport spot and an extra blanket from a nurse who is also a fan. “You take it from me,” he concludes, “there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place.”
For Kipling’s Society of Jane as for Limbert, great literature can remind us of people back home at a time when we long for a return to normalcy. Here the narrator mentions characters in Pride and Prejudice and Emma:
They [Austen characters] was only just like people you run across any day. One of ’em was a curate—the Reverend Collins—always on the make an’ lookin’ to marry money. Well, when I was a Boy Scout, ’im or ’is twin brother was our troop leader. An’ there was an upstandin’ ’ard-mouthed Duchess or a Baronet’s wife that didn’t give a curse for any one ’oo wouldn’t do what she told ’em to; the Lady—Lady Catherine (I’ll get it in a minute) De Bugg. Before Ma bought the ’airdressin’ business in London I used to know of an ’olesale grocer’s wife near Leicester (I’m Leicestershire myself) that might ’ave been ’er duplicate. And—oh yes—there was a Miss Bates; just an old maid runnin’ about like a hen with ’er ’ead cut off, an’ her tongue loose at both ends. I’ve got an aunt like ’er. Good as gold—but, you know.’
For all the worry that literature is going the way of the dodo, during tough times it shows its worth over and over. The Iliad has been with us for almost three millennia, and if humans are around in another three thousand years, I predict that, like Limbert in that embassy basement, they will still be reading War and Peace and the novels of Jane Austen.
