was i kind enough and good enough?

pierre bezukhov, the great comet of 1812, and wanting to be better

Josh Groban as Pierre

I should probably admit right off the bat that I find Count Pierre Bezukhov from Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 almost painfully relatable. This is, of course, despite the fact that he’s an alcoholic Russian aristocrat and I am… not; I find it hard to draw parallels between his troubles, which have to do with his appalling wife and his being depressed about not currently being off fighting the French, and my own. I am not a Tolstoy protagonist. Yet his constant, painful attempts at finding joy and meaning in his life, at fighting off the rising sense that both he and his life should be somehow better than they are or that at least he should be capable of enjoying himself, are inescapably recognisable under a period of capitalism optimistically termed ‘late’. 

The Great Comet is a frequently joyous, wonderfully strange, heartbreaking musical based on a stretch of Tolstoy’s War and Peace,¹ as adapted by composer and writer Dave Malloy — also the original Pierre — and director Rachel Chavkin. The emphasis, though, is on the latter part of the novel’s title: it’s set only in Moscow as the war against the French unfolds hundreds of miles away. Yet the war is inescapable: not only is much of the narrative set in motion by the conflict, particularly by Andrey’s absence, but part of the show’s genius, as Emily VanDerWerff has argued, is that the maximalist set-piece parties the characters ceaselessly put on and pull the audience into become signs not of joy and defiance but of a decadent emptiness. This is just after the reign of Catherine the Great, at the end of an era, and the monstrous extravagance the show frequently becomes is just part of a profound decay as the characters gaze anxiously at both an uncertain future and a distant war. Standing in this wreckage, as so many of us are today, is Pierre, gripped by a fervent knowledge that things are terribly wrong and a deep desire to be better. I love him a huge amount.

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This piece was originally conceived of as part of a huge deep-dive into basically every aspect of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, talking about every character who’s named in the ‘Prologue’. I belatedly realised that this would not be possible when I’d done like three characters and was over five thousand words in. I might well write more about the musical in future — I love it a huge amount, in ways I’ve only been able to touch on here — but for now, let’s just talk about Pierre.

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The ‘Prologue’ of The Great Comet runs through the essential details for each of the characters in the show, before it concludes with the essential question: 'what about Pierre?' This is partly just an introduction to the second song, 'Pierre', designed to tell you what Pierre’s all about. But it speaks, too, to a lot of other issues. For me, Ellie, I’m unsure on how to start to write about a character who makes me feel so many emotions in so many uncomfortable ways. For him, Pierre, he permanently feels out of place and has reached a stage of his life where he doesn’t know what he wants to do or, really, where he fits in with others around him or in a world he doesn’t quite understand anymore. And for the musical, Great Comet, he can feel occasionally out of place in its overarching narrative, like the show has to find a space for him to exist in. 

He has, really, quite a curious role: while he’s on stage quite a lot — he has three solos, two more than anyone else — and is one of the three titular figures, he’s really quite marginal to the actual plot as it stands. Insofar as he’s part of Natasha’s story, which is really the central narrative of the musical, he’s a bystander up until ‘A Call to Pierre’, at which point the climax has in a sense already been reached. Before then, he’s not been entirely disconnected from what’s happening around him — with Anatole, he discusses Natasha and (separately) the affair, and even joins the pre-abduction party, though doesn’t really understand what’s going on; he occasionally talks about wanting to visit Natasha, but never does. And when he does get involved, what does he do? He tells Anatole off and sends him to St Petersburg — but really only as an expression of Marya’s will. He tries to talk Andrey down from severing ties with Natasha, but the damage is already done. He visits Natasha, and they talk; he comforts her, and almost proposes, but doesn’t quite. His impact on the plot of the show is only very slight.

What makes Pierre justify his central role, however, is that while his action isn’t really a story in the same sense as Natasha’s — really, nothing which happens to him has a material impact on anyone or anything, other than I guess Dolokhov gets shot — it’s still just devastating, one of the two key threads of the story which come together in ‘Pierre & Natasha’ and which he resolves in the finale. It’s too much to say that he’s the only central figure in the narrative, or that his having the final word means that Natasha’s story is only significant in its impact on him. It feels, rather, like the movement he describes as he gazes at the comet:

And this bright star,

having traced its parabola

with inexpressible speed,

through immeasurable space,

seems, suddenly,

to have stopped:

like an arrow piercing the earth;

stopped for me.

The three figures of the musical move in concert with one another, entering one another’s lives — however briefly — and creating these moments of contact, where the events which preceded their encounter take on a greater significance as parts of the ‘parabola’ they’ve traced in getting there. It means that Pierre is always relevant thematically, even if most of his drama is really internal. His having three solos, for instance, is partly because of his prominence and partly because of who played him (the musical’s writer, Dave Malloy, and then its principal star, Josh Groban), but also because it’s not really possible to understand what’s happening for him outside of him telling us, frequently directly translating Trotsky’s words to music.

For all that Pierre’s role in the narrative is all about these connections with others, he spends much of the musical casting about for any way to feel connected to others, for anything to mean anything. I know it’s weird for me to find him as relatable as I do. But I think the thing which makes him so endlessly moving to me is that quality he has of never quite fitting in the world others live in. He seems to live with a constant anxiety of there being some thing — secret to him, known to everyone else — which would allow him to feel at ease, fully present; or, alternatively, that really no one is comfortable, everyone’s pretending, and he’s the only one incapable of the illusion. He expresses a lot of these thoughts in his eponymous introductory song, as he tries to grapple with why, exactly, 

It’s dawned on me suddenly, 

but for no obvious reason,

that I can’t go on living as I am.

It’s clear, to us at least, that this final line is true both in the sense that he can’t handle life in its current state and that his drinking and ill-health means he risks an early grave: we’re repeatedly reminded by the ensemble that Pierre is ‘just one of a hundred sad old men, / living out their final days in Moscow.’ But there’s this existential angst that’s essential to the character, and here in ‘Pierre’ he’s just casting around for answers. He keeps talking about how ‘I used to be better’ — a line which invariably breaks my heart in Josh Groban’s delivery — and wonders if the problem might be his inability to encounter the real world, seeming almost to envy his friend Andrey who ‘fights and bleeds’ but at least feels, while he’s ‘abandoned to distraction / in order to forget’, ‘drowning in wine’: anaesthetised. (You could also suggest that part of this angst is that he just misses his friend.) Maybe, though, he’s ‘frozen at the centre’ from his lack of love for his wife, or it’s down to a ‘sickness in the world’ which ‘everyone knows / but pretends that they don’t see’; but then he contradicts this, talking about ‘you empty and stupid / contented fellows, satisfied with your place’, repeating that ‘I’m different from you … I still want to do something’, even as he questions whether perhaps ‘you struggle too?’ There’s an essential problem, as he looks out at these others partying or just going about their lives and questions if they, too, see the world as he does.

He’s caught between these two poles: yearning for some external validation of this fundamental disjunct in his relationship to the world — some connection to others — but simultaneously being trapped by the fact that these concerns are a fundamentally solitary endeavour and that, in any case, sometimes you just want to protect yourself from them, even if doing so involves drinking yourself into an early grave. This is reflected musically: his songs switch in and out of D major and E flat minor, generally tracing the line of the happy Pierre who believes that maybe he can find connection and joy and the sad Pierre who thinks he knows that he cannot. There’s a central tension in the fact that while those around him do occasionally mock him — the women at one point sing that ‘he is charming; he has no sex’ — they’re also obviously fond. The chorus of ‘Pierre’ has the ensemble referring to him as:

Pierre:

our merry feasting crank;

our most dear, most kind,

most smart and eccentric;

a warm-hearted Russian of the old-school;

his purse is always empty

because it’s open to all.

When Natasha, Sonya, and Marya run into Hélène at the opera, Natasha talks about ‘Pierre, that good man: / a little sad, a little stout’ and affirms that ‘he must come visit us’. Connection is out there for Pierre, but he’s trapped by his depression and a loveless marriage and he can never see it. A couple songs after ‘The Opera’, Pierre’s second major appearance is in ‘The Duel’, in which he’s at a fever pitch of self-destructiveness. He’s invited out to the club by Anatole, and accepts seemingly only because it gives him an excuse to drink — although he does evidence a fondness for Anatole, as a symbol of everything he can never be, in ‘Preparations’, suggesting that 

that’s a true sage: 

living in the moment.

What I wouldn’t give to be like him!

It’s nevertheless clear that he wouldn’t be hanging around with Anatole and Dolokhov (who clearly don’t respect him; both may well be sleeping with his wife) if they weren’t the only ones who’d indulge his self-destructive habits — whenever he starts talking, he’s cut off by a refrain of ‘keep drinking, old man!’, and true to form he prioritises getting drunk, even though 

The doctors warned me 

that with my corpulence (corpulence!),

vodka and wine are dangerous for me:

but I drink a great deal

only quite at ease

after pouring several glasses mechanically 

into my large mouth.

Then I feel

a pleasant warmth in my body;

a sentimental attachment to my fellow man.

As the others — which by now includes Hélène — discuss Natasha, an oblivious Pierre’s just sat there bemoaning that ‘I used to love, / I used to be better’, and when Hélène complains about him (‘God, to think I married a man like you’) he tells her that ‘there is something inside me / something terrible and monstrous’. It’s a line which speaks, for me, to this feeling of disconnection that Pierre feels: he feels alien to the world, somehow almost overflowing it — or at least outside of it. He challenges Dolokhov to a duel, which is to say that he attempts suicide; while the challenge is on legitimate grounds, he has no right to even imagine he could win, and that’s clearly the point. Hélène tells him that ‘he will kill you, stupid husband!’, and he just answers ‘so I shall be killed; / what is it to you?’ When Dolokhov aims, Pierre stands with his arms spread and his chest wide open.

Yet he wins. It’s a turning point for the character, but there’s still a moment of appalling pathos in his sad little echo of his victory being announced; as it’s stated that ‘Pierre Bezukhov is the winner’, he just repeats ‘winner’, an implicit question mark around the validity of the term which reminds me of the double meaning employed in Beckett’s Happy Days: does ‘Win’ mean love or death? Despite his immediate reaction, in ‘Dust and Ashes’ he favours the former meaning, lamenting 

every wasted minute, 

every time I turned away

from the things that might have healed me

and how he failed to live the life he wanted, asking

How did I live?

Was I kind enough and good enough?

Did I love enough?

Did I ever look up

and see the moon,

and the stars,

and the sky?

There are some gorgeous images in this song. He contrasts others’ perception of him as clever with his belief that he’s ‘pretending and preposterous / and dumb’; he underlines the idea that ‘if I die here tonight / I die in my sleep’, that he’s ‘frightened like a child / lazy and numb’; and he asserts that the only way to wake up is to ‘fall in love’, to find that meaningful connection with others. Yet, at first, his response is self-effacing: he worries that ‘all that I know is I don’t know a thing’, and his apparent failure — what he attributes to cowardice, ‘hiding in my room at night / so terrified’, never having ‘the nerve’ to be any of ‘the things I could have been’ — leads him to say that ‘life and love: I don’t deserve.’ I can never deal with that fear he has, that there’s some path to a meaningful life that he’s missed and can never return to; it’s physically painful when he just states that ‘nothing’s left: I’ve looked everywhere!’

I love that detail of this song’s structure: that while he starts out questioning if this is really how he wants to die, while he establishes that he absolutely does not, and while he even starts to gesture at the ways he might escape that fate, he still on this first attempt ends up back at the same conclusion — that it’s all over. It’s not easy; it can’t be easy. He’s identified this dissatisfaction, recognised that the anesthesia can’t give him a sufficient life, but he doesn’t know how to make that be enough, how to turn the despair into meaning. Having reached what seems like an easy answer — that ‘nothing’s left’ — he realises, however, that he’s still not satisfied, and asks ‘but then why am I screaming?’. His most heartbreaking question of a song filled with them is to ask ‘was happiness within me the whole time?’; he recognises that his continued investment in the possibility that his life could have meaning means that surely it can. If he cares, then surely there’s happiness there — somewhere. It’s a hugely powerful idea, I think, and though he doesn’t end up reaching any answers in the song, he’s made the leap of becoming open to it, imploring God to not ‘let me die while I’m like this’, shouting that not only does he now ‘want to’ but that he’s ‘ready / to wake up’. That openness is the point: the idea that you can be invested in the possibilities of yourself, and that that investment might allow you to realise them. He ends the song convinced that meaning is somewhere — is immanent in himself — in what’s just a gorgeous contrast with his belief in the previous song that whatever’s inside him is ‘something terrible and monstrous.’

By ‘Letters’, of course, he’s regressed, writing to Andrey that ‘here at home, / I drink and read, and drink and read, and drink’, and he’s still trying to find meaning in the abstract ‘research’ he’s doing — you know, normal things like trying to mathematically prove that Napoleon is the devil and he (Pierre) should kill him (the French emperor) — because that openness in ‘Dust and Ashes’ could only carry him so far. Even as he assigns spiritual significance to Napoleon, he’s still undercutting it: ‘he’s no great man / none of us are great men’, his belief that ‘we’re caught in the wave of history’ leading him to his same old answer, that

nothing matters;

everything matters:

it’s all the same.

Then all the plot happens. Pierre’s called by Marya, and he confronts Anatole; he even manages to coldly tell Hélène that ‘I will not greet you: / at this moment you are more repulsive to me than ever’. He threatens violence against that rascally dyke Anatole, but isn’t violent; he even gives Anatole money for his journey, because some habits (giving everyone all of your money always) never change, however disappointed you are by those you’re encountering. Even though he still hasn’t really recognised the necessity of connecting with others, he’s starting to get it. He tells Anatole that

After all, you must understand

that besides your pleasure,

there is such a thing as other people,

and their happiness and peace — 

and that you are ruining a whole life

for the sake of amusing yourself!

It shows an increasing awareness of his enmeshment with others — but he’s still not realising that he’s harming others by withdrawing, by only being drawn into contact with the world by an imperative from Marya. When he visits Andrey, he’s disappointed again. The Pierre who started the show would have been destroyed by many of these experiences; that he has grown and changed is proven by the fact that he isn’t. Instead of looking inwards, he sees the inadequacies in those he’s with, noticing the malicious smiles that Anatole and Andrey share with their sister and father respectively, and with Andrey he’s clearly stunned by this side of his friend — but newly able to stand up for himself and others in a way which isn’t just another way of destroying himself:

PIERRE: You told me once:

a fallen woman should be forgiven.

ANDREY: But I didn’t say that I could forgive.

I can’t.

He still takes Natasha’s letters back to her; his narrative role as messenger must be met. Yet when he reaches her he finds that his previous attempts to ‘despise her’ melt away; he begins to find something meaningful there. It’s signalled first by how he enters and sees her ‘standing / in the middle of the drawing room’ and initially ‘thought that would give me her hand’, a line which is significant even ignoring its dual meaning. He assumes at first that there would be this movement of connection, of mutual reliance, the gestures of giving one’s hand and of holding another’s being at once active and passive. When he starts to comfort her, to offer himself as a friend, even he ‘grows confused’; he’s not used to this outpouring of emotion, this feeling of connection and love, but he knows that he needs it. 

If the pattern for Pierre is frequently of identifying his own faults in others — criticising Anatole for not caring about others’ well being when he won’t ever open the door, asking Andrey to forgive Natasha when he can’t forgive Hélène — it’s at this point that he realises his error. Natasha rejects his fondness, telling him she’s ‘not worth it’, and he starts to tell her to ‘stop’, that ‘you have your whole life before you’ before she breaks in and it’s surely like talking to himself: ‘before me? No, all is over for me’. As Pierre echoed ‘winner’ in ‘The Duel’, he echoes ‘all over’, turning it over to show its essential falsity — both for him and for her. The music breaks for the first time in the show, and he gives a heartrending speech:

If — I were not — myself — 

but — the brightest, handsomest,

best man on earth — 

and if I were free — 

I would get down on my knees this minute

and ask you for your hand,

and for your love.

It’s not that he finds something in her, or that she finds something in him; it’s that they find themselves in each other, find — as Pierre can’t help repeating at the end of the song — ‘joy’. It’s that connection he’s been searching for — a way for something to mean anything, a way for him to wake up. They don’t end up marrying yet, but that connection is enough, and it doesn’t have to be of a romantic quality. In ‘Dust and Ashes’ he asked to fall in love, but falling in love is really just the act of finding something you want to be in someone else; of wanting them to be adequate to the wound in you, which they can never quite be; of the wound healing regardless, because they let you find the happiness that was within you the whole time. It’s something meaningful being created in the attachment. 

When Pierre steps outside, he knows that anything he’d normally do is inadequate: he rejects the self-destructiveness of the club, the superficial sociality of paying calls. He looks at the comet in the night sky above him, and instead of seeing a portent of doom — despite his unerring willingness to even just invent them earlier in the show — he sees something else. It’s not that he sees a symbol of joy, or love; it’s that he sees something which echoes ‘that softened, grateful last glance / she gave me through her tears’, something he can form a connection with:

It seems to me

that this comet feels me:

feels my softened, and uplifted soul.

The song has this gorgeous scale to it, up to the heights reached by the comet; yet it’s also so tightly personal, so focused not on the divine but on desire, on Pierre’s attempts to become the person he wants to be when he stands touching others — whether Natasha or the comet. It’s a moment of stopping, not of action. The song never breaks into a climax: at the moment it seems ready to, when passion is entering Groban’s voice as he describes his ‘newly melted heart / now blossoming’, he pauses and sings, much more softly, ‘into a new life’. He doesn’t yet know where he’s going; in War and Peace, this revelation is another in a series, always followed by him returning to his previous bad habits. I don’t think it lessens the musical’s ending, though, to recognise that Pierre’s experience with the comet doesn’t suddenly make him someone who’s capable of avoiding all the old mistakes. How could it? But he wants to be different, even if he isn’t yet, even if he might seem to have unlearned any lessons. Wanting is enough.

1. For those who want context, the plot of this section of War and Peace, put briefly, sees Natasha, betrothed to the absent Andrey, visit her aunt Marya in Moscow with her cousin Sonya, where she falls in love with Anatole; eventually, they decide to elope. Meanwhile, Pierre, best friends with Andrey, is depressed and, after seeing his unfaithful wife, Hélène, openly flirt with Anatole’s friend Dolokhov, challenges him to a duel, assuming he will die. He does not. Anatole attempts to abduct Natasha, but is caught and a scandal ensues; she drinks poison, though survives, and Andrey returns to break off the engagement. Natasha and Pierre, both dejected, find some comfort in one another’s friendship, and Pierre sees the great comet of 1811 in the sky above him.