A Year with War and Peace
On January 1, 2023 I began my year of reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I joined hundreds of others around the globe in reading one chapter per day (there are 361 chapters), guided by a delightful reader/writer in the UK named Simon Haisell.* I connected with Simon on Instagram (or “bookstagram” as we reading-obsessed term it) years ago and enthusiastically jumped on the year-long slow read of the Russian classic (which I had never previously read) when I saw the opportunity. I have certainly read thick books before, but never in such a paced manner and as January turned to February, then to March, I found myself enraptured by Tolstoy’s great work. I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to pick it up. I also, however, enjoyed the slow pace of reading the short chapters a day at a time. I read the last pages in the early days of December and felt content both with Tolstoy’s conclusion and my own achievement in reading the novel slowly.
But I am getting ahead of myself. When I decided to take on the year-long slow read, my first task was to select a translation. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace predominately in Russian but also used French in his dialogue to realistically reflect the French-speaking Russian aristocracy of the early nineteenth century. I briefly researched the various options and settled on the Maude and Maude translation (translated by a husband-wife team—Aylmer and Louise Maude—who knew Tolstoy personally). War and Peace includes an interesting mix of French and Russian language. The question of how to translate, thus becomes doubly complex. Maude and Maude decided to leave the French intact as it appears in Tolstoy’s final version. Tolstoy himself wavered on the French language he originally included in the novel. The novel first appeared serially beginning in 1865, the same year Charles Dickens finished the serialized publication of his last novel (and my personal favorite among his oeuvre), Our Mutual Friend. Tolstoy then rewrote and published it in its entirety in 1869. He removed all the French language in an 1873 edition only to restore it in his later editions. Because I opted for the Maude and Maude translation, my introduction to War and Peace included lots of French. The novel opens in a St. Petersburg salon in 1804 at which the posh language among the Russian elite in attendance is French. As such, this particular English translation of an iconic Russian novel opens in French (with English translation available in endnotes). If this syntax does not appeal, there are plenty of translations entirely in English. I enjoyed the tone and cultural complexity of the French dialogue in the early portions of the novel.
The celebration of French language and culture with which the novel opens, however, proves paradoxical in time. This novel is, after all, historical fiction covering the Napoleonic War years (1805-1812) which culminated with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. As one might imagine, Russian sentiments shift toward the French, and Napoleon himself, (then shift again and yet again). What I found particularly interesting was the way Tolstoy’s trinity of main characters—Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei—come of age against the backdrop of the Napoleonic era and how that milieu changes the courses of each of their lives. Andrei is the disciplined soldier and obedient son; Pierre, the philosopher libertine who is also somehow kind and steady in his way. Natasha is joie de vivre in girlish form. Each takes his or her own path out of youth and into experience, and all their paths intertwine (as do those of their siblings and acquaintances). Through their lives readers see glimpses of war and peace both on the home front and the frontline as the years pass and Tolstoy’s characters develop.
In addition to the character-rich plot, Tolstoy sprinkles in a hefty dose of philosophy, history, and cultural criticism throughout this masterpiece. The novel is composed of four books and an epilogue in two parts. The first two books focus predominately on the characters and narrative arc of the story. In addition to narrative themes of glory, love, honor, family, faith, and death, Tolstoy includes more and more essay-like interjections about the nature of society, war, and history as the novel draws on. By the epilogue, much of the writing is more expository than narrative. Here Tolstoy considers questions about historiography and the fascination with “great men” like Napoleon. As with the story, there is something for everyone in these essays; some readers may be drawn more to one theme over another. Likewise, there are elements of the plot that will have some readers enrapt while others may feel compelled to skim that section. Regardless, War and Peace is both inspiring and heart-rending, moving and hopeful.
Tolstoy’s realism and social critique alongside his dynamic characters make this novel compulsively readable and vividly memorable despite its exhaustive length (my edition ran over 1300 pages not including appendices and endnotes). Indeed, War and Peace is very deserving of its place in the Western literary canon. What’s more by reading it slowly over a year’s stretch, the novel becomes part of each day, week, month. It also allows for synchronicity if, for example, the local Shakespeare festival puts on a production of the fantastic musical adaptation of the novel’s first half in Natasha, Pierre, and the Comet of 1812. It is a book that becomes an experience; I encourage everyone to spend time—perhaps a whole year—reading.
*Simon continues to host slow reads on his Substack. This year he is doing a second run on War and Peace as well as Hillary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. Find his “Footnotes and Tangents” on Substack here.
Bibliography:
Britannica. “Leo Tolstoy”. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Tolstoy
Nearly, Lynn. “‘War and Peace’ Sparks a Literary Skirmish.” NPR. Oct 22, 2007. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2007/10/22/15524432/war-and-peace-sparks-a-literary-skirmish
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Trans. by Aylmer and Louise Maude. Oxford University Press: 1998.
A Few Great Passages:
“‘How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace” (294).
“‘There is nothing certain, nothing except the unimportance of everything I understand, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all-important’” (308).
“‘Who is right and who is wrong? No one! But if you are alive - live: to-morrow you'll die as I might have died an hour ago. And is it worth tormenting oneself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity?'” (335).
“The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labour - idleness - was a condition of the first man's blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man's primitive blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class - the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness” (519).
“'Does it ever happen to you,' said Natasha to her brother when they had settled down in the sitting-room, 'does it ever happen to you to feel as if there were nothing more to come - nothing; that everything good is past? And to feel not exactly dull, but sad?’
'I should think so!' he replied. 'I have felt like that when every thing was all right and everyone was cheerful. The thought has come into my mind that I was already tired of it all, and that we must all die” (554).
“Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders, as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes” (645).
“'Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source’” (1051).
“This was his acknowledgement of the impossibility of changing a man's convie-tions by words, and his recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, feeling, and seeing things each from his own point of view. This legitimate peculiarity of each individual, which used to excite and irritate Pierre, now became a basis of the sympathy he felt for, and the interest he took in, other people. The difference, and sometimes complete contradiction, between men's opinions and their lives, and between one man and another, pleased him and evoked from him and amused and gentle smile” (1184).
