War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Climbing the mountain that is Tolstoy

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Already, I'm hankering to reread this sucker. Twenty or so subplots: impossible to summarize here (for me, anyway). But I look at the book this way: Carl Sagan once wrote an essay arguing that looking at a grain of salt could open up answers to questions about the universe. That's what Tolstoy did here. He used Napoleon's conquest of Russia to examine questions that still resound today: How much can we actually control the events around us, how great are "great" men in history (not very, according to him, merely tools of history), and what motives ultimately benefit a person in the face of tragedy and upheaval?

Tolstoy makes it very clear in his afterword that he does not consider War and Peace a novel. Neither do I. I had to fight through some of his digressions about the war, the military actions and the nature of history. I understand why most critics wish to cut them (that's right, "most" critics, not just a few radicals), but once you junk the term "novel," you have to take the package deal. And if we're to move within the parameters of mimetic realism, there's just no way to cover this material in any other fashion. You have to have a wide array of characters, to prevent coincidence and fortuitousness from intruding, and you have to contrast what is said about the events (by Napoleon, Alexander, Kutozov, or whoever) with what is actually done (by the soldiers, the nobility, etc.).

A few notable observations:

--W&P seems to have a few things in common with Gone With the Wind. Not enough for a doctoral dissertation, alas, but both novels begin with a party and end with a declaration of future change, both revolve around spoiled upper-crust girls who learn their lessons the hard way (if they learn them at all), both deal with women struggling in less-than-ideal marriages. There's no Rhet Butler equivalent, but there's plenty of his edge in scenes like where Pierre flips out against Helene, or the old Count Marya's abuses of his daughter.


--Tolstoy is big on revelation presenting itself through the natural world. Pierre, Prince Andrei, and assorted others get their big wake-up call while dying in a battlefield looking up at the sky, or sitting on a horse looking up at the sky, or staring at an oak tree, or hunting a wolf. His metaphors and analogies, when not classical references, depend on farms and farm activity (sheep being fattened for slaughter, for example: the sheep don't know why it's happening, but other sheep can correlate them being taken away periodically with their fattening bellies). None of this is surprising, I suppose, given the fact that the novel was written smack dab in the middle of an Industrial Revolution that was just beginning to make its way to Russia, but the thing about motifs, obvious or not, you notice them.


--Some of these women are downright seductive to the reader. And that's saying something. Tolstoy's prose is hardly risque, even if his topics sometimes are, so when Helene works her charms at a party, or Natasha flirts with Anatole or Andrei, I can just sense some of Tolstoy's middle-brow readers (myself included) panting with enthusiasm. Why, I'm not sure. Maybe it's the party scenes, with their many and sundry rivalries masked beneath a veneer of civility, that has me looking for further cracks in the armor. Or maybe I'm conditioned by Anna Karenina to equate these settings with eventual sexual forays. Whatever. I'm not proud.


--As far as I'm concerned, Tolstoy would have done quite the job setting this book in Alexander the Great's reign, or the American Civil War, or wherever, for reasons I've already stated. But the great thing here is, even if you know nothing about the Napoleonic Wars, it doesn't matter. Tolstoy walks you through it. A lot of critics find his "lectures" pedantic and boring, and I'd agree that you have to be in the right mood to absorb them. But they're there. My translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2007, Knopf Publishers)has over a hundred pages of footnotes, which, admittedly, I did not make full use of but which will benefit me in a second reading. Furthermore, I like how he characterizes Napoleon in scenes where he appears directly. He doesn't go out of his way to paint him as a scared little boy in scenes where he (Tolstoy) quite clearly would address him as such. But I can see him penning the scenes after the French retreat from Moscow with a dry smile on his face.


So, ultimately, I'm not about to claim expertise with W&P. It ate up the entire month of June for me, like I was having a Great Romance with it (I did cheat occasionally--I dipped into a few short story anthologies and a Michael Moorcock collection, God save me), and now I'm happy to turn to something less demanding.


But this is what Deep Reading is all about. I feel good. I feel like I've cleaned the house, paid my bills, gotten a complete physical and benchpressed eighty percent of my weight. I feel strong. I feel vindicated.

Next up: Henry James. Portrait of a Lady.