A Study in Scarlett & Tolstoy
Shamelessly exploitative title, I know. Yet I couldn’t resist the Sherlockian/Scarlett O’Hara pun since after reading War and Peace by the venerable Tolstoy, I found myself thinking paradoxically of “little ole” Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. Both are hefty novels dealing with the devastating effects of a war and both treat tenderly yet critically the time and place and culture their authors evoke: Tolstoy of Russia, Mitchell of the antebellum South. And both compel a strangely enduring fascination even (or most especially) over those who have little to no knowledge of these particular regions.
Why? Ah! There’s the element of mystery. And like Sherlock, we must follow what leads we have.
The word tempestuous comes readily to mind as one point of similarity, not least because of characters like Scarlett O’Hara, Melanie Hamilton, Ashley Wilkes, and Rhett Butler in GWW and Natasha Rostova, Andrei Bolkonsky, and Pierre Buzukhov in W&P whose compelling personalities exert their own unique power.
Then there are the war-torn times in which they live, themselves tempestuous. Here, looming over ambitions and loves, sorrows and passions, is the juggernaut of history that rolls over man and beast alike leaving devastation and loss in its wake. Napoleon marches through Russia; Moscow is looted and burned. Sherman marches through the South; Atlanta is burned to the ground.
The scale of suffering is immense, relentless, and implacable. Death, famine, sickness, cruelty, vice, and various brutalities indiscriminately litter the landscape with their victims. And through it all, the inescapable question: Why? What is this unseeing force of history that yet deals such fury and hate, destruction and death by the hands of petty men and women grappling over thrones and kingdoms?
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