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Of War and Negotiation: Part 2: The Passion Play - Tolstoy’s War and Peace
ABSTRACT: “Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Bonapartes. But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist----I really believe he is Antichrist---I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend....”/ (1805 Book One, Chapter 1. Anna Scherer’s soiree, War and Peace, L. Tolstoy, p. 3.) So begins Tolstoy’s masterpiece with Anna Pavlovna Scherer remarking to Prince Kuragin at her soiree in Moscow in 1805, her view of the then current Napoleonic rampage through Europe that was soon to be directed toward Russia. The tone of that conversation was not so different from one I had with ‘Anne’, a modern day stand-in for Tolstoy’s Anna, at a /petite soiree---/a holiday open-house--- 202 years later and half a world away in Portland, Oregon. Most conflicts, regardless of the circumstances or context, follow the same script, be they personal, geo-political, or business disputes. In one way or another, their substance is about money, property, power and control, or truth, honor, and justice. The character casting, drawn from the original passion play, are, of course, clearly drawn between the hero/victim and the antagonist evil-doer, or Antichrist.** As a negotiator....probably not unlike an entomologist’s fascination with the behavior of ants under attack, I began to listen more closely; not so much with the particulars of the storyline, but for clues about how, if at all, it might be possible to shift and re-direct her anger and
frustration.
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