PKD vs Leo Tolstoy

It may sound wierd, I know. Well, I did eventually read The Man in the
High Castle some weeks ago. Then last week I was reading short stories
of a Japanese writer and in one of them the main character was reading
Tolstoy. So I remembered what I read many years ago and juxtaposed it
with PHK's novel.

I hope that someone has read Tolstoy's War and Peace once (which is
quite an achievement by itself) and remembers Tolstoy's view on the role
of a personality in the history. In few words, Tolstoy did not believe
that a person, even very powerful (like Napoleon in case of War and
Peace) had any influence on history and historical events. I don't want
to go into much details, but it is his main idea.

Given that it makes impossible any alternative history, by which PKD was
so facinated. If we take The Man in the High Castle as an example, it
means that it does not really matter if Roosevelt was assinated or not,
Nazis would never win the war because of certain fundamentals.

So what do you think?

"Foxy" <foxy.RemoveThis@foxyhole.com> wrote in message news:St2dnUXJX-ZzkjrfRVnyug@pipex.net...
> It may sound wierd, I know. Well, I did eventually read The Man in the
> High Castle some weeks ago. Then last week I was reading short stories
> of a Japanese writer and in one of them the main character was reading
> Tolstoy. So I remembered what I read many years ago and juxtaposed it
> with PHK's novel.
>
> I hope that someone has read Tolstoy's War and Peace once (which is
> quite an achievement by itself) and remembers Tolstoy's view on the role
> of a personality in the history. In few words, Tolstoy did not believe
> that a person, even very powerful (like Napoleon in case of War and
> Peace) had any influence on history and historical events. I don't want
> to go into much details, but it is his main idea.
>
> Given that it makes impossible any alternative history, by which PKD was
> so facinated. If we take The Man in the High Castle as an example, it
> means that it does not really matter if Roosevelt was assinated or not,

As almost happened, because FDR very nearly was killed before
the war. The assassin's bullet instead hit Anton Cermak, the
Mayor of Chicago, who was beside him.

> Nazis would never win the war because of certain fundamentals.

They might not have lost, though. A negotiated peace was a
very real possibility. It was precisely to forestall it that the
"Unconditional Surrender" doctrine was invented.

> So what do you think?

Sigh....my wife asks questions like that and then complains when
my answer goes past a few sentences.

No offense....of course you recognize that no "answer" is possible.

What makes it so damnably difficult is that the turning points of
history are always hanging by a hair. Tolstoy lays great stress
on this in War and Peace -- the role of accident and the "fog of
war".

If the sun doesn't come out at Austerlitz, Napoleon loses, the war
ends ten years earlier....that's alternative history.

Wellington summed it up for all time after Waterloo:

"It has been a damned serious business," he said, "Blucher and I
have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing - the nearest
run thing you ever saw in your life. Blucher lost 14,000 on Friday night,
and got so damnably licked I could not find him on Saturday morning;
so I was obliged to fall back to keep up communications with him."
....He repeated so often it's being "so nice a thing - so nearly run a thing"...

And now I'm not sure I know how to relate that to High Castle,
a book that becomes harder to pin down every time I read it.
I wind up getting caught up in individual scenes like What's his
Name the unpleasant antiques dealer's visit to the Japanese
couple's home (and they say Phil was not a great stylist --
Bull, that passage is as subtle and nuanced and perfect as
any one of the Big Names could have done, and better
than most.)

.....See, there I go again....sigh

-- Bill Cleere