War and Peace

Free will is an illusion, war is inevitable, let's all marry our cousins.

 Well, it took many months but I finished the damn thing. It was like climbing a mountain but instead of a life-changing view at the end there was a thirty-six page essay on history and historians, power and freedom, written in the dense prose you'd find in a philosophy book. Why Tolstoy didn't publish that separately is a mystery to me. It's almost like he wanted you to hate him.
 I understand why many are passionate about this book, which is one third novel, one third history textbook and one third philosophy book, and reading it once is not enough, but I won't be reading it again. As I neared the end, I realized that there wasn't one moment during the time I was reading it that I enjoyed it. I'm not saying books should be light entertainment, but I've learned much from books that I've enjoyed reading. War and Peace was a slog to me.
 A tip if you plan to tackle it: Write down the first and last names of the main characters presented in the beginning on an index card and use that as a bookmark. As you're reading, mentally insert the first or last name (it's usually the last) of the person in the scene you're reading until you know them cold. There are five families and it will help you know what's going on if do this.

For many years, I have been working through a rather long list of literary classics in chronological order of publication. I have reached the late 1800s, and it just so happened that the start of 2021 coincided with La Guerre et la Paix, or War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy. Looking back, it seems like a completely unreasonable project for me to start the year with such a dense classic. This book spans more than 1600 pages and features more than 500 characters. Lockdown life demanded ambitious personal goal-setting, and so I did what I could to stay the course.

Every day, I opened my beautiful green paper edition of this novel and read a few short chapters. War and Peace is the historical and philosophical novel by excellence. It narrates the invasion of Russia by France, and alternates between scenes of military conflict and high society. The complex web of characters is made accessible by the serial format - very short chapters allow for a rapid pace reading of this long-winded novel.

It took me 4 months to read War and Peace - I started on January 15 and finished, with a great sigh of relief, on April 19. It was a ridiculously long and epic adventure. Of course, it was worth it! Like many Russian novels, War and Peace lends itself extraordinary well to the colder months - do read it in the winter.

TMI, DNF.
Prodigious translation, but I couldn't care less about the conversations.

So, War and Peace. It's a big one, for sure.

But I feel like it's a lot shorter than people think it is. War and Peace has become our archetypal "long book," but it's shorter than Les Miserables (which I read last year) and reads a lot faster. It's a book more on the scale of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is still long, but is also fairly widely read.

With that out of the way, let's get into it.

Russian Names

This is probably a common barrier to people understanding this book and others like it. In my case, I worked my way up to War and Peace by reading some of Dosteovsky's work: The Gambler, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov. At one point when I was reading Brothers K, it just clicked and I started to get how the names worked.

The narrative tends to either refer to characters by first name (and sometimes first plus the middle one, which is just the name of one of the parents with "vitch" or "ovna" tacked on) or by last name depending on the context.

I will say that it got a lot easier to keep track of the characters after the first quarter of the book because you start to see who's important and who isn't and can tell from their characters. For that first part, though, I'd recommend you have a chart or something where you write down each new character and who they are so you can reference it. I didn't do that, but I wished I had.

I do recommend you read some other, shorter, Russian literature before this one. I highly recommend Crime and Punishment, that was my favorite. It reads a bit slower than this, but it's also a lot shorter.

War Narrative and Philosophizing

One of the more annoying things to me was Tolstoy's constant philosophizing about the inevitability of events in a war and how the "leaders" of armies aren't really in control. It makes sense and is an interesting perspective, but it was repeated so many times. The entire Second Epilogue (12 chapters long) is about it. So yeah, that's one thing to brace yourself for.

I mean, if political commentary is your thing, you might enjoy it.

Characterization

So far I've been addressing hard things about the book, but that's not the case with this. The characterization was phenomenal. All of the characters had so many different layers and seemed extremely real.

And the development was fantastic. It was fascinating to watch all these dozens of characters growing and changing over the course of the book.

So yeah, this book is worth reading, if only for the characterization.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, this book was fantastic. There were, as I mentioned, some slow parts, but it was really well written and was actually a much easier read than I was led to expect.

Oh, and Tolstoy has got cliffhangers figured out. Once I picked it up to read a chapter or two and didn't put it down until hours later when I realized I'd read through about 150 pages.

Oooooh so close to being a masterpiece. This book was amazing right up to part 2 of the epilogue. I felt that Leo's very very long winded theories on why man does stuff was not needed at the end, or maybe it was and I was just tired getting to the end. If that little bit was shortened right down and turned into a conclusion instead of an essay, then this book would go down as being the first masterpiece I have ever read.

I thought the toughest part of this book would be the length but that was not a problem at all, the issue I had was with having so many characters being thrown at you within the first 100 pages, it felt like 40 characters. So I made notes as I went along, turns out there wasn't too many characters, they just had lots of names. Once I realised that I was able to enjoy the ride. If you can get past page 100 then you'll be ok to the end.

I constantly pictured this book in my head like a soap, bizarre seeing as I hate soaps, but with all the families, the plotting for marriages and characters you love or hate it was a lot like a soap.

I really liked Prince Andrey the most in this book, a very likable character...and then you have the Kuragins, every time one of them popped up in the story I wanted to give them a slap, especially Anatole the spoilt little brat!

The war scenes were amazing, Tolstoy has this ability to transport you there, you can almost hear the bullets whizzing over your head.

I learnt quite a bit too about Napoleon in this book. For much of the story you only get glimpses of him and all you know about him is the rumours that the Russian soldiers talk about. I am going to have to do more research to find out why he leaves Russia, Tolstoy has his theories and he really attacks other historians for having different ideas to him.

This book covers such a large area of time and includes so many characters that I am certain I have missed bits, so one day I am going to have to revisit this book to fully grasp it all.

When people thing of big books often War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is mentioned. This Russian classic depicts the French invasion of Russia in 1812. True to Tolstoy form, War and Peace also looks at classes and the impact of the Napoleonic invasion on the Tsarist society. While this book can be considered an epic historical war novel, for me this was a work of philosophical ideas. This is one of the hardest books to review, not because I have nothing to say but rather there is so much to cover and I have no idea where to start.

Just to put things into perspective, I started this book in October and have been slowly chipping away at it for four months. It is a hard battle and you really need to take your time with a book like this because Tolstoy has a lot to say. This is the kind of book that feels like you‘ve climbed a mountain when you finally finish and you can just feel your pretentious levels rising. For those interested, I read the Oxford World’s Classics edition which has the translations by Aylmer and Louise Maude. Many people debate on which translation is the best but I thought going with an Oxford World’s Classics would be a safe bet; I love this publisher and know I’m always getting a decent copy of the book.

Right off the bat you are flung into this world and you meet so many people. Tolstoy has an amazing ability to give the reader a sense of a person with a few lines, so even the minor characters in this book get some sort of personality. There are hundreds (over 500) characters within War and Peace and I often found it difficult to keep up with them all but thanks to Leo Tolstoy’s writing ability I could relax a little because even if I forgot about a character, when they reappear further in the book I still had a sense of who they are. This is possible due to the way this book was originally written and I will talk more on that later.

Most of the major characters within War and Peace are members of the aristocracy and it is interesting to see them all fighting for a higher position in society, government or the military. People like Boris rise in society while others like the Rostov fall, Dolokhov gets demoted while Pierre plots an assassination. Not only do we have the Napoleonic war happening within these pages, a battle for social standing rages through this novel. It is all about power but paradoxically the people with the most power within this book are the ones that seem to give up control.

If you don’t have the knowledge of Russian or Napoleonic history, this novel accommodates the reader. I found myself at times looking up information about the history just to satisfy my curiosity but as the book progressed, my research subsided. It is in Leo Tolstoy’s style to give you as much information as possible, this does make the book longer but for me I think it was a huge bonus. But you must realise this is a work of fiction and most of the people are fictional. Tolstoy was telling a story of the invasion and the harsh nature of war. You can even look at the second epilogue and read more of the authors thoughts on the subject and the philosophical ideas held within this book.

War and Peace was originally serialised in the literary magazine The Russian Messenger between 1865 and 1867. This magazine plays host to many of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels. This means that originally people read War and Peace over the course of three years. This means at times the novel may feel repetitive and covering plot points done before but this is just a result of the original format. It comes in handy with characters as they are reintroduced and because I took my time reading this classic, it became a vital part.

There is so much going on within War and Peace and it took me a long time trying to work out what I wanted to say and what to leave out. This is the kind of book that needs to be revisited in the future, Tolstoy has a lot to say and I’m interested in exploring the themes. I loved this book; it is a roller-coaster of emotions and philosophical ideas. I’ve only scratched the surface of what is happening in this novel and then wrote a small amount of what I discovered. I can’t imagine ever being able to fully understand the brilliance of Tolstoy and War and Peace. For me, Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a better writer but Leo Tolstoy has a unique ability to capture the lives of everyone involved in one war.

This review originally appeared on my blog; literary-exploration.com/2014/03/20/war-and-peace-by-leo-tolstoy/

“What took me so long?”, and “I’m glad I waited.” I’m experiencing both sensations. Ultimately I’m joyful to have discovered this magnificent work.

War and Peace has acquired an unfortunate reputation as the roll-your-eyes eccentric uncle of the literature world. An undeserved reputation. OK, it’s long. But it is oh so worth it. It took me a while, many nights and weekends, but every time I sat down to read it was with anticipation. I am wiser, better, and happier for having read it.

Tolstoy’s insights are astounding and as sweeping as the book itself. Would I have understood them ten years ago? (Do I understand them now?) It’s not just that: his writing, his ability to range from the epic to the minute, his ability to make you feel. I’ll never read the original, but Pevear’s and Volokhonsky’s translation is beautiful, their copious footnotes and endnotes rewarding.

Life is short. Too short not to read this book.

On m’a obligée !! Bon certes pas longtemps et pas contre mon gré, mais tout de même !
J’ai donc lu ce pavé prévu depuis des lustres grâce à la semaine russe de Cryssilda et Emma.
Il s’agit d’une version peu connue du roman, allégée des passages les plus ennuyeux digressifs ce qui rend la narration plus enlevée et trépidante. Et pourtant, les longs et interminables passages consacrés à la guerre, s’ils sont formidablement écrits, n’en sont pas moins rébarbatifs et trop techniques pour moi. Certes, ces passages nous montrent ô combien la guerre est question de pas grand-chose finalement, que tout ne tient qu’au fil ténu de l’absurdité lié à la fatalité. Il faut donc tout de même s’accrocher pour ces épisodes fort bien documentés, mais l’ensemble des 1248 pages vaut l’effort fourni.
Du romanesque nous en avons à la pelle. Les personnages sont nombreux, mais réussissent à être attachants. On sourit à la puérilité des comportements de certaines aristocrates tout juste pubères, mais le drame ambiant demeure et on sent que chacun court à sa propre destinée sans le savoir, poursuivant ses propres idéaux.
Un roman dense, riche, foisonnant dont il est difficile de parler, et encore plus de résumer. Je pourrais en dire plus en faisant un petit effort, mais je préfère retourner lire, c’est comme ça et je ne vous demande pas votre avis.
Sachez donc que je recommande fortement ce pavé jouissif, c’est un incontournable, et si vous le pouvez, choisissez cette version qui est sans doute plus « équilibrée » que les autres.
Il m’a donné envie de relire Anna Karénine, que j’avais adoré il y a des années.