I read this yonks ago as a teenager, while wishing to appear more intelligent than I actually was. I even seem to remember contemplating the wearing of lensless spectacles at one point!
Set against a backdrop of Napolean's invasion of Mother Russia, Tolstoy delves deep into the collective human soul of Russian high society to bring us a sweeping soap opera that alternates between the dissimilarity of costumed balls and muddy battlefields.
What is unforgivably true is that I periodically skipped entire chapters, such was my hurry to finish the blessed thing! It is hard work; don't believe anyone who says it isn't. Most probably also trying to pretend that they're cleverer than they actually are! : )
But I can't blame Leo Tolstoy for my teenage incapacity. I knew it to be a magnificent novel then and I certainly know it to be true now.

welcome to...YEAR AND PEACE.

folks. it's with great sadness that i inform you that when you're asked "when did you know you were seeing emma's downfall" you can tell them september 1, 2024.

today i begin the project that will surely bring about my mortal end.

on this day, elle and i will read one chapter of tolstoy's war and peace, and then we will do that again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and so on and so forth for the following 357 days, shaking our heads to show we disagree with war and nodding to show we agree with peace.

it's project long classics like you've never seen it before.

(because this book has 361 chapters, and because goodreads has a character limit, i'll only be updating this periodically. don't worry. you'll see me daily in other places annoying the sh*t out of you.)



VOLUME I, PART I
hello again. we're 25 days and a hundred pages into this project and essentially haven't made a dent.

how to summarize...there's war, there's peace. there are a lot of descriptions of mouths and beautiful princesses. people have died, people have been disinherited, people have inherited. guys are shipped off and girls are knocked up. eventful, and yet this has been 99% people going to each other's houses.


VOLUME I, PART II
coming to you live from 6 weeks and 200 pages into this to tell you: we have stopped going to people's houses and we have gone to war. it's bad vibes here. no one seems to be having much fun at this point. even people who get to ride on top of a tank (fun) are only doing so because they're severely wounded and being dragged out of battle (bad vibes).


VOLUME I, PART III
i thought we might get a complex look at the psychology behind war in this book, but i didn't expect the insight would be "all the soldier guys have huge crushes on the tsar and are showing off for him."


VOLUME II, PART I
it's pretty nice that in this version of war, you get to go home for as long as you want to hang out and lose your family fortune at cards and make impromptu rejected proposals of marriage. the war parts are really boring so i'm happy to mix it up.


VOLUME II, PART II
another thing about war i didn't expect: these guys are seeing napoleon and tsar alexander all the time. if i'm either of them i'm eating grapes in a tent somewhere and having people give me live updates, not sharing some dialogue on the front lines.


VOLUME II, PART III
532 pages in. four months have passed. we've spent so much time in these pages that a character has abandoned one wife, lost her to "death," mourned, become an asshole, healed himself spiritually, met a much younger woman, determined that he has never felt like this before and it's totally not because she's young and hot, and gotten re-engaged. and we're not even close to halfway done.


VOLUME II, PART IV
i really didn't expect engagements would be such a bad vibe in this book. i don't think we've come across a single grand declaration of love that was treated like "oh, nice! good news!"


VOLUME II, PART V
"With every fibre of his being he was convinced of what his instincts told him: there was no other way to live than the way he was living, and he had never done anything wrong in his life." okay me af!


VOLUME III, PART I
we're over halfway done this book both in pages read (755) and in time elapsed (more than 6 months), and i'm ready to call it. this is tsar fanfiction.

This Tolstoyan masterpiece is one of the best-written books on War and its effect on people's lives. The War is the Napoleonic war where Russia was invaded by a strong French army conquering Moscow, and the subsequent defeat and flight of the conquering army. Although some of the previous battles such as Austerlitz have been included, the story's "War" was mainly centered on the 1812 Napoleonic campaign. The Peace is somewhat ambiguous but can be surmised as the everyday life of the upper-class Russian nobles and the effect of war on them. Tolstoy interlaces both these parts well and brings to the readers a memorable story.

If one sections out the story, one finds three distinctive yet interconnected parts: the war, the peace, and Tolstoy's musings. The war occupies most of the book and dominates the story. Tolstoy with his brilliant writing brings out the brutal side of the war in detail. The atrocities committed by both sides of the army - Russian and the French, the callous and cold-hearted actions of the two opposing camps against one another forgetting that they are, after all, human brothers, and the absolute butchery that takes place in the name of fame and glory are spilled from Tolstoy's pen without any scruple. It was hard to stomach it all, knowing that somewhere in history, those deeds were actually committed. However, Tolstoy is determined to show the moments of humanity, in between battles, when the men of war are relaxed and can think for themselves rather than following the commanding orders. It seems that he wanted to counter the hellish side of the war by showing that the men preserved humanity to some extent without totally turning themselves into monsters in the heat of the action.

When the parts of the war are taken out the rest of it occupies the lives of the upper-class Russian nobles. Their ambitions, hopes, and dreams, and their love, loyalty, and betrayal are all portrayed in a fascinating bundle. The Rostovs - Natasha and Nikolai, the Bolknoskys - Andrei and Marya, and the Bezukhovs - Pierre (mostly) and Helene run the show while few other interesting characters - Dolokhov, Denisov, Vasily, and the villain Anatole Kuragin brings up the rear. This is a work of countless characters both historical and fiction, but it still can be narrowed down to a considerably small number for the purposes of the story. The inter-relationship between Natasha, Andrei, and Pierre is instrumental in exposing the themes of love, loyalty, tolerance, and the need to forgive. With sensitivity and a clear mind as to true human nature, Tolstoy has voiced efficiently on his favourite themes. However, I had trouble connecting with the characters. Although I didn't dislike them, I couldn't embrace them with my whole heart either. They were distant and a little cold, and at times, inconsistent. The only steady character was Andrei (to me at least) and his role doesn't run through to the end.

Finally, Tolstoy's musings fill in the gaps wherever a gap can be found. And it is quite often, I assure you. :) As in all Tolstoy literature, the meaning of life runs as an undercurrent here too. It is quite relevant given that death is an expected consequence of War. Some of his thoughts are quite interesting, although he can be exceedingly preachy. His thoughts also run on the deterministic nature of history and a detailed analysis as to the causes that determined the historical events are presented in the form of a second Epilogue! E. M. Forster has once said that Epilogues are for Tolstoy. If you read this complete Epilogue of War and Peace, you'll understand what he meant. :)

I'm really happy to have read this masterpiece of Tolstoy. It was by no means an easy read, but I made it in a little more than two months. The credit goes entirely to Tolstoy's writing. It is simply breathtaking. Tolstoy is a great master of creative compositions, yet, in my view, War and Peace is the best literary product of Tolstoy when it comes to writing.

5 stars! It took me almost 3 months to read the War and Peace, but it was definitely worth the read. I have always been curious about War and Peace but never wanted to actually attempt it-I thought it would be too long, complicated names and uninteresting battles. I happened to be on Hulu and stumbled upon the miniseries, watched it and thought that there is way more to this book than I thought-love, war and scandal to name a few things. I bought a lovely jacketed 3 vol. set from Juniper Books and started reading this lengthy novel. I found War and Peace to be an easier read than I initially thought and absolutely loved the parts containing my favorite characters-Pierre Bezukhov and Mary Bolkonskaya. I fully admit that the war/battle parts wasn’t the most exciting stuff but it wasn’t bad either and of course it’s essential to the book-don’t skip it as I have heard some readers have done.
I won’t get into the plot-as many have written better reviews than I ever could, but I will state that anyone “on the fence” about reading this, should 100% give it a try! It is an incredibly well-written book and though very lengthy-it is well-worth it in the end. A must read.

Depois de mais de 6 meses de leitura acabo  guerra e paz de Tolstói, um livro que ficará para sempre na minha mente e no meu coração como o melhor livro que já li .

Muitos ao verem o título do livro pensam em se tratar só de um livro de guerra e estratégias militares . Obviamente há muito disso , há a campanha de Napoleão Bonaparte para invadir a Rússia  e consequentemente Moscou ,mas a maior luta e na alma  dos personagens !  A luta do príncipe André para achar seu lugar ao sol,vencer sua incredulidade em relação às pessoas. É a luta da Princesa Maria para ter paciência com seu pai,um velho insuportável e também conciliar seu lado de religiosa com a realidade de uma Rússia pecadora, fraturada e contraditória. É a luta de Natasha contra o remorso de ter cometido um ato falho que a prejudicou tanto física como mentalmente. É a luta de Pedro (ou Pierre) para achar um rumo para sua vida que apesar de ser rico   tem um vazio insuportável na sua alma. É a luta de Nicolau para fazer o melhor para a sua pátria e também ajudar sua família que estava se desmoronando. É a luta do General Kutuzov para vencer a descrença dos seus subordinados que o achavam velho e ultrapassado. Isso só pra citar alguns personagens...mas há também a luta de Petia, Basílio  Sônia, Helena e tantos outros personagens nesse livro fenomenal  que não sei porque não o tinha lido ainda .Na verdade o livro conta a saga de 5 famílias desde 1805 até mais ou menos 1820. O número de páginas assusta, mas ao começar a leitura você vai ver que a leitura é deliciosa e dinâmica, você lê devagarinho como que saboreando um bom prato que você não quer que acabe logo.

Obra -prima!!!

“History- the amorphous, unconscious life within the swarm of life- exploits every minute in the lives of kings as an instrument for the attainment of its own ends.”

A poignant perspective on the composition and impact of war. The true influence on the lives of all.

Tolstoy’s War and Peace interweaves an intriguing narrative with a significant message- consistently using the chapters to discuss the mechanisms and mindset behind war, it’s place in history, and ultimately, portraying the author’s own deep criticisms of social class and governance.

The characters of this long novel serve varying purposes, representing the ignorant aristocrats down to the degraded prisoners of war. Natasha depicts a deeply emotive and indecisive woman, stuck between following her head and her heart. Pierre carries a sense of mystery, a philosophical thinker with an underlying insecurity. Andrey, an emboldened soldier surrounded by the true brutality of a battleground, scared to lose all. All of which sit at the head of Tolstoy’s tale, epitomising the experiences of conflict- whilst playing out the themes of the pursuit of happiness, self actualisation and unfulfilled love.

This book can be a difficult read, for both its length and subject matter, however, a worthwhile classic.

Whatever else I am, I am the type of person who reads classic novels out of a sense of obligation. Also, I must admit, out of a sense of vanity. My ego, after all, is as fragile as a goldfish and requires the constant attention of a newborn baby. Every once in awhile, it needs a little boost, and the intellectual challenge of Dostoevsky or Dickens can really work wonders.

Now, I’ve been told that forcing myself to read books I don’t necessarily like is a fruitless waste of time (and that the reviews borne of these endeavors are a fruitless waste of others’ time). That kind of criticism doesn’t go far with me. By my rough estimate, just about 99% of the things I do can be similarly classified as a waste of time, unless my endless games of Spider Solitaire, like “the button” on LOST, is actually saving the world. In which case I am a hero.

Moreover, great literature can be a worthwhile challenge to surmount. Compare them to mountains. Obviously, we don’t need people to climb mountains; it serves no functional purpose. Yet, on a personal level, climbing a mountain (even if it’s just a Class 3 walk-up) is immensely satisfying, mentally and physically. On some level, it’s the same with finishing a tough book. (Mentally, that is. There is very little physical component, unless you defenestrate the book upon completion).

War and Peace is a challenge I set for myself. It was a challenge a long time coming. The reason, of course, is that War and Peace is the go-to book when looking for an example of great literature, or for a contender for “greatest novel ever written.” If it is not exactly Everest or K2 (those are Joycean heights), it is at least comparable to Annapurna or Mount McKinley.

In the end, it is a book I wrestled with constantly. Unlike Doris from Goodbye, Columbus, I never considered quitting, only to start back up again the following year. However, there were times my frustrations almost led me to tear huge swaths of pages from the binding, as a primitive editing job. Like so many of the things you are told, as a child, are magical – the circus, love, magic – War and Peace did not entirely live up to its reputation.

If you were to ask me, would you rather retreat from Moscow in the dead of winter than read this book, I would say: "Of course not. I don’t like walking, I don’t like being hungry, and I’d probably die.” But if I had to choose between, say, tarring the driveway or mowing the lawn and reading this book... Again, I’d choose the book. Nothing beats reading. Besides, I’m lazy.

Where to start? With a (second) rhetorical question: What's War and Peace about?

It's a good question, and nobody really knows. (Though many will attempt to explain). There have been longer books – both you and I have read them – but this is 1,200 pages that feels like 1,345,678,908 pages. Nominally, it's about Russia's wars with Napoleonic France from 1804 to 1813. If that seems like a big subject, don’t worry, Tolstoy has given himself plenty of space with which to work. It follows dozens of characters in and out of the decades, as they live and die, love and hate, and generally stun the modern reader with their obtuseness.

The first sixty pages of the novel are a set piece in the Petersburg salon of Anna Pavlovna. You don't have to remember that, though, because Anna Pavlovna will only stick around these first sixty pages, then disappear for almost the entire rest of the book. We are also introduced to Pierre, who is, literally, a fat bastard; Prince Andrei, who is a prick; his wife Lisa, the little princess, who as Tolstoy keeps telling us, has a beautiful mustache (Tolstoy's obsession with beautiful female mustaches is pathological, and not a little frightening); Prince Vassily, who also disappears after a squabble over a will; and various other Russian aristocrats. Readers note: you should probably be writing things down as you read.

Other introductions come later, including Andrei's father, who is also a prick (apple, meet the tree); Andrei's insufferably "good" and "pure" and "decent" and "homely" sister, Princess Marya, who's goodness is as cloying and infuriating as that of Esther is Bleak House; Natasha Rostov, who is sort of a tramp, much like Anna Karenina except that she is redeemed through suffering (unlike Anna, who is redeemed through mass transit); Nikolai Rostov, a young prince who goes to war; Sonya, the simple, poor girl Nikolai loves, etc. I could go on, but it wouldn't make sense if you haven't read the book. It barely makes sense after you've finished. Unless, of course, you’ve kept good notes.

Anyway, Pierre, the bastard, is left his father's estate, and so becomes a rich count. He marries Helene, who is another of Tolstoy's harlots, though she gets her comeuppance, Anna Karenina-style. (There are two types of women in Tolstoy’s world: the impossibly pure-hearted and the whorish. Subtlety is not a Russian trait). Prince Andrei goes to war. Nikolai goes to war. They fight. Everyone else talks. An enjoyably characterized Napoleon flits briefly across this crowded stage, tugging on people's ears. The Rostov's have financial difficulties. Nikolai can't decide who to marry. Pierre has several dozen crises of conscience. At one point he becomes a Mason; at another, he tries to assassinate Napoleon. At all times he is thinking, always thinking; there are approximately 500 pages devoted to Pierre's existential duress. (How I wished for Pierre to throw himself beneath a train!)

There is an old saying that “if the world could write…it would write like Tolstoy. That’s one way of viewing War and Peace. It has a canvas as big as Russia, and within its pages are dizzying high and nauseating lows and bland, lukewarm middles.

The bottom line before I go on, Tolstoy-style, is that I was disappointed. My main criticism is the unfortunate mishmash of fictional narrative with historical essay. You're reading the book, right? (Or maybe listening to it on a long commute). And you're finally getting a hang of who each character is (because you’ve taken my advice and sketched out a character list), which is difficult when each person is called multiple things, and some have nicknames, and others have similiar-looking patronymics. But that's okay, you've moved past that. Suddenly, you're coasting along. The story is moving forward. Napoleon has crossed the Danube. There is drama. Finally, people are going to stop with the internal monologues and start shooting each other! I might actually like this!

And then, with an almost audible screech, like the brakes a train, Tolstoy brings the whole thing to a shuddering halt with a pedantic digression on the topic of History (with a capital H) and free will and military tactics and Napoleon's intelligence.

These digressions do several things. First, and most importantly, they seriously disrupt the narrative. All rhythm and timing is thrown off, which is exactly what happened to all my school concerts when I used to play the snare drum. I knew enough to quit the snare drum to focus on the recorder. Tolstoy, though, plunges on obliviously, casting all notions of structure aside. You lose sight of the characters for hundreds of pages. Instead of wondering what happens next, you start to wonder things like where am I? and how long have I been sleeping?. It tells you something when you actually start to miss Pierre's endless internal psychobabbling.

Second, the essays are Tolstoy at his stupidest (at least in my opinion; this is more a philosophical gripe). He believes that people have no control; that History is a force all its own, and that we act according to History's push and pull. Tolstoy says, in effect, that Napoleon is stupid, but that his enemies were stupider, but that doesn't matter, because they were all doing what they had to do, because History made them. This is all very...much a waste of time. Tolstoy goes to far as to attempt to prove this argument algebraically. Yeah, that's just what I wanted: Math!

Tolstoy's argument breaks down like this: 1. Someone does something. 2. Someone else reacts in a way that makes no sense. 3. Therefore, History is controlling things. The fundamental flaw, of course, is that Tolstoy's argument really boils down to nothing more than hindsight. Sitting in his armchair, decades after the fact, having never been on those battlefields, Tolstoy decides that the players on the scene acted dumbly, and he attributes that to cosmic events. A battle isn't lost because of bad roads, or obscured vision, or a shortage of ammunition (which are realities in all warfare, but even more prevalent in the 19th century). No, in Tolstoy's mind, it’s the Universe unfolding according to its whim.

Tolstoy also has a real axe to grind with Napoleon and he doesn’t hesitate to inflate his word count letting you know about it. (I suppose Tolstoy can be forgiven for hating Napoleon, but still, the book is 1,200 pages long. Enough). His analysis of the Corsican corporal is reductive and unenlightening. Napoleon was a lot of things (short, funny looking, brilliant, cruel, petty, brilliant, ambitious, oddly-shaped) but "stupid" was not among them.

Yet, there were moments when I loved this novel. Every once in awhile, War and Peace comes alive in that classic way; after plodding through a turgid essay, you’ll suddenly come upon a passage that's drawn so vividly you will remember it forever. There is the battle of Austerlitz, which is impeccably researched (so much so that a narrative history I read on the subject actually cites to Tolstoy) and thrillingly told, especially the fight of Captain Tushin's battery. There is Prince Andrei, wounded on the field of Austerlitz, staring up at "the infinite sky," realizing that he's never really looked at it before. There is Pierre, realizing he is in love with Natasha as he gazes at the stars and glimpses the comet of 1812. There is Napoleon suffering a cold on the eve of Borodino. There is Andrei watching a cannon ball land at his feet, its fuse hissing... There is Petya, the young adjutant, who rides to his doom chasing the French during their retreat.

Every once in awhile, there will also be something clever, showing you that Tolstoy isn't just wordy, but also inventive. For instance, there's a scene in which Tolstoy describes the thoughts of an old oak tree. Indeed! Among the hundreds of characters, there's even a tree.

I was also fond of a passage in which General Kutuzov, the Russian commander, holds a meeting in a peasant's house to discuss abandoning Moscow. Tolstoy tells this story from the point of view of a little peasant girl who, in her mind, calls Kutuzov "grandfather." (It's cute, but Kutuzov was no kindly old man. He was an indifferent drunk. The night before Austerlitz, he allegedly engaged in a four-some with three of the "comfort women" he brought with him on campaigns. Unfortunately, despite writing 1,200 pages, Tolstoy doesn't find space to devote to this occurrence).

The good, though, is surrounded by the bad or the boring. The flyleaf of the book said that Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei were three of the most dynamic characters in literature. I don't think so. Aside from Andrei, I was mostly unimpressed with the main characters (Napoleon was fun, in an over-the-top bit part). Pierre is a boob and a bore, and his sudden heroics during the burning of Moscow come from nowhere. Natasha is a flake. She's the stereotypical girl plucking the daisy: I love him; I love him not; I love him...

The end of the novel is (like Anna Karenina) a huge anti-climatic letdown.

As we approach the final pages, Tolstoy gives us a description of the battle of Borodino. It is a masterpiece of military fiction. The research and verisimilitude. The vividness. Pierre's confrontation with the Frenchman in the redoubt:

Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have done, he thought, aimlessly going toward a crowd of stretcher bearers moving from the battlefield.

Tolstoy’s Borodino is actually one of the great battle scenes I've ever read; afterwards, though, things fall of a cliff. There is no slow decline into mediocrity; no, it happens at the turn of the page. It’s like Tolstoy suddenly stopped taking steroids.

In an unseemly rush, Tolstoy has Napoleon move into Moscow, Moscow burns, Napoleon retreats. All of this occurs indirectly, through digression-filled essays on History. The characters recede into the background; all narrative vitality disappears. There are only a couple exceptions: one scene of the city burning, followed by one (admittedly powerful) scene of the French executing supposed arsons. During the French retreat, there is not a single visceral moment depicting their hard, frozen march. Instead we get Tolstoy nattering on about Napoleon’s stupidity.

Then come the Epilogues. When I reached them, I felt a bit like a cowboy in one of those old westerns who is riding across the desert and finds a well, except the well is dry and full of snakes and then an Indian shoots him with an arrow. We will never know the fates of the dozens of characters we've followed for the previous thousand pages. Tolstoy leaves their destinies to the imagination so that he can rant. It’s a stupefying literary decision, and reminded me of nothing so much as my Uncle Ed on Thanksgiving after five glasses of wine: You can't get him to shut up. Except at Thanksgiving, Uncle Ed usually passes out by the fourth quarter of the Cowboys game. Not Tolstoy. Not even death can quiet him.

War and Peace was an experience. There were times I envisioned myself reaching the end, spiking the book like a football, and then doing some sort of victory dance around the splayed pages. When I got there, though, I simply sighed, leaned back in my chair, and thought: At least this was better than Moby Dick.

"Sopra le vie sporche e semibuie, sopra i tetti neri c'era l'oscuro cielo stellato. A Pierre bastava guardare il cielo per non sentire la bassezza oltraggiosa di ogni cosa terrena in confronto all'altezza a cui si trovava la sua anima (...) Quasi al centro di quel cielo, circondata tutt'intorno da un pulviscolo di stelle ma distinta da tutte per la vicinanza alla terra, per la luce bianca e la lunga coda sollevata all'insù, c'era l'enorme fulgida cometa del 1812, la stessa cometa che preannunciava, a quanto si diceva, sciagure di ogni sorta e la fine del mondo. Ma in lui quella chiara stella dalla lunga coda raggiante non suscitava alcun senso di paura. Al contrario, Pierre guardava gioioso, con gli occhi bagnati di lacrime, quella stella chiara che dopo aver trasvolato a indicibile velocità spazi immensi nella sua traiettoria parabolica, all'improvviso, come una freccia conficattasi in terra, sembrava essersi attaccata a un punto che si era scelta nel cielo nero per fermarsi lì".

I really enjoyed War and Peace for the most part. Natasha and Pierre are wonderfully drawn characters, the time period and culture so interesting, and some parts of the story so moving. I will say that I enjoyed the 'peace' parts more than the 'war' sections, especially when Tolstoy strayed into nonfiction historical and philosophical ramblings - the book could have done without those parts for me. I also couldn't stand Nicholas Rostov, which barred me from truly enjoying his sections. Still, there was so much else in this book that I did enjoy. I would recommend it, though a little hesitantly.

"Who is right and who is wrong? No one! But if you are alive - live: tomorrow 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?"

I tried for five months to write something more polished, less rambling. This is all I've got:

"While he is alive, the morning is still fresh and dewy, the vampires sleep. But if the sun sets, if father Tolstoy dies and the last genius leaves - what then?"
-Alexander Blok, as Tolstoy lay dying at Astapovo

"[War and Peace] is positively what might be called a Russian Illiad. Embracing the whole epoch, it is the grandiose literary event, showcasing the gallery of great men painted by a lively brush of the great master... This is one of the most, if not the most profound literary work ever.
-Ivan Goncharov

“Anna Karenina is sheer perfection as a work of art. No European work of fiction of our present day comes anywhere near it. Furthermore, the idea underlying it shows that it is ours, ours, something that belongs to us alone and that is our own property, our own national 'new word' or, at any rate, the beginning of it.”
- Dostoyevsky

"[War and Peace] is the greatest ever war novel in the history of literature."
-Thomas Mann

And of course:
"If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy."
-Isaac Babel

Damn, right? Intense. These are just some of the glowing, adoring quotes that I have drawn from the absolutely glittering gallery of homages that have been written to Tolstoy. On the one hand, it’s hard not to get caught up in the high, especially if you’ve experienced any of it first-hand yourself. But on the other hand… it kind of makes you want to kick back at it, doesn’t it? It makes me understand muckraking tabloid journalism. This is definitely the sort of moment where we could all use a cooling off article about the tax fraud he committed for years or some pictures from a bar fight he started.

Here’s the thing, the wonderful thing about Tolstoy: I think that he feels the same way.

One of the many reasons I love the movie version of The Last Station (which covers the last year of Tolstoy’s life) is the way that it frames Tolstoy’s struggle to control his own identity. The movie brilliantly explored the grand old man standing at the same crossroads over and over again as people tried to force him to take one path or another: either to buy into his own mythical propaganda, or at least to use it to some good purpose and become the sort of icon that Russia needed to begin to undertake serious reforms, that is, to act the part of the pure saint that he often wished that he was and live the way that others felt he owed it to them to live or whether he could simply be and live as the complicated, imperfect, sometimes silly, sometimes angry, loving man that he actually was. At that point, was his life really his own any longer to decide what to do with? What did he owe to the millions who knew his name and thought they knew what he stood for? Did he have the right to be less than what he was constantly told people needed him to be?

I think that Tolstoy struggled with the issue of Great Man syndrome long before he became the purported saint/icon that he was made into at the end of his life. War and Peace is, as so many have noted, about a lot of Serious Ideas and Movements. And here’s the thing, he’s really, really good at writing about them. Although some of his ideas can seem silly from the vantage point of the 21st century, the process that is put into them does not seem so. And at the time, there seemed to be no one who could come up with the words to refute him in any satisfying way. I’m sure that his reputation had a lot to do with it, his place in the social-political fabric as much as his literary talents, his extraordinary position that seemingly allowed him to speak out under an autocratic government. But nonetheless, whatever you might say about the legitimacy of how he got there, it doesn’t change what ultimately happened, which is that both Tolstoy and his ideas ended up elevated into a rarefied sphere where criticisms were fairly ineffectual or easily dismissed.

Under all the rage about Napoleons and Alexanders, it seemed to me that perhaps the major underlying theme of War and Peace was just this: The search for that Great Man (or equivalent idea) that could make Tolstoy stop seeking and asking and live content. It seemed to me that Tolstoy would give anything if he felt he could give up seeking and rest in full trust. This whole book has his thinly veiled author proxies searching for something to give themselves over to, wholeheartedly and without regrets. The read I got was that Tolstoy wanted to find this Great Man, be his servant, follow his dictates and trust that when the day comes that he questions them, the Great Man will be able to justify what he tells him in a way that admits of no argument. He wants to be able to go home satisfied and feel that when he comes back the next day the Great Man’s next set of instructions will always be just as wise, just as inarguable, and just as moral in statement as well as action as they were the day before. More than this, he wants this Great Man to be able to change him and purify him of what he sees as his petty enjoyments, loves, hatreds and cynicisms, and make him into a perfect vessel of love and generosity to those around him, who is only inspired by the greatest of good-doings and rejects worldly pleasures.

So, you can see where this is going, right? Tolstoy isn’t looking for a Great Man, or perfect human or amazing idea at all: he’s looking for God, incarnate. This was the heartbreaking thing about this book for me, watching him try to find this impossible ideal, because it seems like he really thought that this was possible, in his heart of hearts. He never could get rid of the thought that The Ideal, the Utopia, the Perfect Heaven, existed somewhere and he was just missing out on it.

Tolstoy’s two most direct author proxies, Pierre and Prince Andrei, spend this whole novel seeking what I can only call with a capital H, their Happiness, some platonic ideal of Heavenly Bliss in which their souls will no longer question or feel discontent or dissatisfaction. Between them, these two men place their hopes in, respectively: Napoleon, carousing and living for the moment, money and societal success, the quasi-Christian cult/society club that was the Russian Freemasons, and finally Love With That Girl Who Was Too Good For You (Pierre) and the army/war, the Emperor(s), familial obligations, meritocratic success and professional heroes, The Love of A Fresh, Pretty Young Girl, the Army Part II, and, finally, the forgiveness and redemption of Jesus (Andrei). Other members of the vast cast show up to take over the baton for a few moments and chime in about the glories of the Emperor(s), God, the brotherhood that can be found in the army or idea of The Fatherland, and, on the part of the women, religious obsessions, the love of children, and the perfections of a man who deigns to marry them.

It’s rough to watch these people’s hopes get shot down that many times. This book is a thousand pages long. It happens a lot of times, and to almost all the characters that we have any sympathy for. It’s hard to watch these characters put their 110% into something or someone because we know that there’s just nothing in this world that can withstand that sort of pressure. It’s tragic, to think what some people expect of others, and, I think, one of the most powerful insights to come out of this book: there are no ideals, and those who spend their lives trying to find them will be inevitably disappointed.

This is something that Tolstoy clearly struggled a lot with. But God was always the out. It happened in W&P and in the “oh holy shit, I feel like a bad person,” screeching brakes of an ending on Anna Karenina. But of course, this ideal is unknowable and insubstantial in many ways, it’s mysteries therefore customizable and different for everyone who encounters them. God allowed him to hold onto the idea that the Ideal existed and allowed him a vessel into which to pour all his hopes after everything else, inevitably, disappointed him.

It’s really unfair, of course, for Tolstoy to have expected mere humans to do anything different if he��s going to put that kind of insane expectation on everyone and everything around him. It’s almost laughably arrogant to expect that the world will live up to the way that you think that it should be and that it should change itself to suit you. Sometimes I felt like I was the Cary Grant character in The Philadelphia Story, wanting to face down Katherine Hepburn and tell her that she needed to have some regard for human frailty.

If Tolstoy was like that, it would be easy to dismiss him. His rage would have no power. It would be simply a delusion, not an ideal. But he does understand it, is the thing. To his great despair. Tolstoy is afraid of that frailty and spends this whole book running from it. This was some of the great power of Anna Karenina for me, as well as this book. He can’t sustain that fire and brimstone condemnation of the sinful for long. He understands the flaws far too well. In the same way, he can’t sustain his belief in a system, a person, or even a religion for too long. He keeps having to find something else to believe in, something new to try, in just the same way that his characters keep having to “renew” themselves after doing something that they feel is sinful. Tolstoy’s protagonists are always too active in their minds and hearts to settle down to something forever, state their belief and call it good. They keep changing and evolving for a very specific reason: because they keep living. It reminded me of something something he wrote in Anna Karenina about the blissful period after Anna and Vronsky run away together:

He felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires. At first, after he had united with her and put on civilian clothes, he felt the enchantment of freedom in general ...but not for long. He soon felt arise in his soul a desire for desires, an anguish."

People who keep living don’t get to live happily ever after. They get to keep living, and that is all. Tolstoy’s metaphor for this in this novel is Natasha. Natasha, like Anna, is a unique female figure for this time period in literature in that she gets to live, think and love very much as a male protagonist would do. She gets her own inner soul and feelings and Tolstoy is very firm about protecting that, no matter what ideals the men want to project on her from the outside. Natasha is flighty, self-involved and changeable in her feelings depending on the moment or situation. Natasha loves acting the part of romance, but finds that she cannot sustain her feelings long enough to make it worth it. This puts her in sharp contrast to most of the other women in this novel: her childhood friend and cousin Sonya, who remains self-sacrificing and self-effacing and loyal as a dog to the man she declares she loves (in ways that are often humiliating), being one example, and the religious, blushing, pure Princess Marya being another. Natasha’s joys and worries are the simple, straightforward, predictable and all-too-recognizable feelings of a teenage girl:

”Natasha was going to the first grand ball of her life. She had gotten up that day at eight o’clock in the morning and had spent the whole day in feverish anxiety and activity. Since the morning all her powers had been directed towards getting all of them-herself, mama, Sonya-dressed in the best possible way...”

“Natasha was interested neither in the sovereign nor in any of the important persons that Mme Peronsky pointed out-she had one thought: “Can it be that no one will come up to me, can it be that I won’t dance among the first, can it be that all these men won’t notice me, who now don’t even seem to see me, and if they look at me, it’s with such an expression as if they were saying: ‘Ah! it’s not her, there’s no point in looking!’ No, it can’t be!” she thought. “They must know how well I dance, and what fun it will be for them to dance with me.”

Natasha hasn’t a single thought about the greater good of Russia, God, or, really, her family. Natasha wants to be young and admired and have a wonderful time every day of her life. It makes her selfish (she doesn’t want to hear ANYONE’s opinion if they contradict a desire of hers). It makes her heedless and reckless. It also makes her at least the temporary desire or deep love of almost every man that comes into contact with her in this novel. She is another one who throws herself into every moment of her life 110%. But she’s just much more honest about the fact that what makes her happy changes frequently. People judge her for this constantly, which gradually gives her a self-conscious complex which I think has a lot to do with why she agrees to marry Prince Andrei under the worst idea-ever-in-the-world circumstances.

Is anyone surprised when the engagement fails? Anyone? You can say what you want about the repentance afterwards, but the way that Tolstoy sets it up, it is difficult to judge Natasha for the way things go down. She’s sixteen and has been abandoned by her much older fiancé for reasons she hasn’t a prayer of understanding involving the passive aggressive fights of fathers and sons that never end. As far as she knows, she's been told not to live or love for a year, and girl does not play like that. Natasha tries her best, but she’s living proof that we keep on living and being people and having to get through the day no matter how many oaths we swear or how many good intentions lie on that road paved to hell. This is like people who think that Bluebeard’s wife should be condemned for going inside the secret room or that Pandora is the worst for opening the box. You put her in a situation that was completely incompatible to her temperament and personality, made her undergo a test to prove something that you don’t really want her to be anyway and all because YOU got cold feet and realized that maybe you weren’t ready for the reality of marrying a beautiful, passionate sixteen year old who loves society and is probably being set up for Anna the Sequel to happen, especially if you are going to insist on your tortured, strong-and-silent thing continuing, which I am fully sure it would have.

Natasha is loved and adored because she symbolizes passionate, uninhibited, it-goes-on- Life. She hasn’t got a single complex to speak of. Natasha is almost the only one in this book who deals with her feelings honestly and doesn’t hide behind philosophies or false generosity to make herself feel better. She even throws herself fully into the passion of the guy she’s cheating on Andrei with. If she feels bad afterwards, it’s because of pure, human guilt, not because Jesus told her that doing that was bad. She doesn’t like hurting people, especially not the person that she had made her Romantic mind up that she was going to marry and live happily ever after with. Again, human love. When she collapses when she finds out the guy she loves is already married, it’s not out of a feeling of sin, it’s out of grief for the love she feels.

Like every other protagonist, she wants forgiveness and purification for her sins before she is able to be well again. But she wants forgiveness from a man, from Prince Andrei, not from a philosophy or a religion or a government. She wants to be able to love and have her love be worth something in her eyes and anyone else’s. Love is at the center of her own sense of self, and if she is not allowed to give love she feels that her life is not worth anything.

Natasha’s erstwhile fiancé, Andrei, is allowed to find peace and purity before he dies. He is allowed to give himself entirely over to Jesus and find the serenity that he has always lacked. But here’s the thing, he only does it through feeling inhuman:

“Yes, love.. but not the love that loves for something, for some purpose, or for some reason, but the love I experienced for the first time when, as I lay dying, I saw my enemy and loved him all the same. I experienced the feeling of love, which is the very essence of my soul and needs no object… To love everything- to love God in all His manifestations. You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.”

All this and martyrdom too so that he can somehow find a way to express and get over what he feels is his unacceptable anger at a woman who betrayed him. But she’s around and he suddenly starts to feel human, not God-like love again. He starts thinking about the man who she cheated with and how he wanted to kill him. He thinks constantly about how near she is in the room. He starts to hope and negotiate with death. But life is too scary for him to do that. He ends up retreating away from confusion into death.

Seriously, screw the men in this novel. If there’s a hero here, I think it is Natasha. I would argue that the gauntlet thrown down to all these characters at the start of the novel is to find their way to honesty and peace. Natasha is the only character who consistently tackles the world with honesty, so she is the only one who can lead us to peace. Draw your wider metaphors for the implications for world affairs.

Which, you will notice, I did not touch on in this review. This is because they could not possibly matter less, except as a manifestation of everything else I am talking about here, just on a bigger and more impersonal scale, for those who can only recognize Truth when it is stated to them in a titanic voice with pomp and circumstance attached.

Partway through the novel, Tolstoy puts these words into the mouth of the Freemason who converts Pierre:

”Look at your inner man with spiritual eyes and ask if you are pleased with yourself. What have you achieved, being guided by reason alone? What are you? You are young, you are rich, you are educated, my dear sir. What have you done with all these good things that have been given to you? Are you content with yourself and your life?

Tolstoy’s never done asking these questions, which is why he was never able to find that Great Man in reality and lay down his burdens. It’s sad, in a way. From reading his two great works of fiction, it seemed like the one thing he always wanted. But on the other hand, he already told us, implicitly, that if he ever found the ideal he always said he was seeking, he would be dead inside. He would no longer be human. He would be God. Nirvana. Whatever you want to call it.

Is this really what he wanted? Or did he want to want it? Did he want that feeling of wanting it… that intense passion that only a human could feel? That desire for desires that never went away. There’s no way to know.

But for God’s sake, if these thousands of pages have taught me anything, it’s this: We’re pretty much stuck with being human. So we’d better make the best of it.

Find joy where you can. And realize, in a quote by Stoppard that I will never tire of repeating, “It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.” I wish Tolstoy could have found God in that ideal, if he had to have one. I feel sure that that is perhaps the one way he could have avoided being disappointed.

Tolstoy is two for two on breaking my heart with words. And yet I feel sure that I’ll be back again for him to break my heart a third time.

I moved back home for lockdown in April 2020 and, having been “too busy” to read much for quite some time, I found a dusty, neglected-looking copy of War & Peace on my parent’s bookshelf (printed in London in 1957 — and judging by the scribbled note inside the cover it appears to have been a wedding gift to my grandmother from some indecipherable someone now lost to the depths of time). In what retrospectively seems like a moment of naive ambition, I snatched up this much-yellowed artefact and announced with confidence to the world at large that I was going to read it, for when better to read a monster book than when living in forced isolation?

So, what’s left for me to say about something as ingrained and respected as War & Peace? Perhaps all I can offer is an account of my personal experience with it, which went something like this…

0-100 pages: The early chapters of this book took me an embarrassingly long time to read. Tolstoy throws the reader into a busy social gathering which disorientates because of the sheer number of names he expects you to keep track of as you slide through dense conversation after dense conversation.

100-250 pages took me about 2 weeks. I finally figured out how these people relate to one another. At some point in this phase, I found myself reaching for the book more often, without that heavy sense of resignation which had hindered my progress earlier on.

250-700 pages took me about a week and a half. I’d become stimulated by the existential crises and battles and was finally falling into the almost hypnotic rhythm of Tolstoy’s crazy long sentences. His description of the Russian army as the mechanical wheels of a great clock that inevitably cycles slowly forward through history stuck in mind. Soon, I was associating this image with the slightly entrancing pacing of his book — slow; but momentum is the product of velocity and mass, and Tolstoy’s writing has a weight that begins to feel unstoppable even though it moves at a steady speed. This world of his felt entirely real to me, and I was impressed by how modern both the plot themes and the narrator’s outlook seemed to be. Tolstoy has an uncanny ability to drop incredibly astute observations and conflicting philosophical questions into his text without ever seeming to try all that hard. Now and then I’d pause on a sentence just to marvel at it in isolation, aware that I’d almost missed it (Tolstoy slips these things in so seamlessly). Soon, the run-up to a big battle hinted that the structure was moving towards the main climax, but I’d note with some confusion that there were still over 500 pages to go.

700-1000 pages: I was reading as much as I could by this phase. The big battle of Borodino was gripping but raised as many narrative questions as it answered, and once the story pushed through the fighting there seemed to be no signs of falling action or resolution. In fact, the action kept rising and there was now a sense of pushing onwards, beyond the norm, and into realms deeper than I’d imagined this story would go. The asides of historical discussion were both interesting in and of themselves, and added weight to the building drama, like we were taking a bird's eye view of the action from above, contextualising the landscape of the events before shrinking back down to the comparatively microscopic world the leading characters were experiencing.

1000-1250 pages: At some point in this final stretch of the story proper, I realised that I’d started treating my copy of War & Peace a little bit like a sacred text, leaving it open on the table as though I might suddenly pore over it for reassurance. After over 1000 pages of commitment to realism, there were now several passages in which Tolstoy finally reaches out in earnest for spiritual and ascetic high-minded ideas — for answers to the soul-searching questions his characters had been skirting around for so long. These passages were profoundly moving and during this phase you’d most likely have found me out on my own in the chill of a winter night, wandering around the Belfast docks (so much time had passed by this point that Lockdown Mark 1 had ended and I’d moved back up North) in a state of advanced dismay, listening to sacred Russian choral music and meekly staring up at the moon, feebly hoping to divine meaning from the glistening heavens. (Not that the heavens are usually visible through Belfast’s perpetual overcast.) The famous character death in this section inspired in me the strongest visceral reaction I've ever had while reading. Tolstoy does something with time in this lengthy, cerebral passage, folding it over and over on itself, disorientating the reader’s sense of order. By using this technique, he conjures a single perfect moment of confusion between life and death. Nobody, and I really do mean nobody (possibly not even Shakespeare), writes about death with quite the same penetrating force as is achieved by Tolstoy.

First Epilogue: I had successfully calmed myself down by this phase and now resembled a slightly less ridiculous human specimen. The epilogue rounds off the narrative neatly, but I wondered if it was possible that all that truly needed to be said had already been done so in the main body of the book.

Second Epilogue: It seems that Tolstoy had abandoned all notions of what a novel is by this stage and impressed as I am by the mind behind the philosophical spiel with which he chose to end his so-called “novel”, I have three reservations with what he wrote in this 40-page closing thesis. (1) This passage is akin to an artist standing next to their painting and telling me exactly what they want me to see in their work. This is problematic because I instinctively subscribe to the opinion that art should be able to stand on its own outside the intentions of its creator and that if the artist hasn’t got their message across within the art itself, they have failed. (2) I feel like what was said could have been said in a lot less than 40 pages (does Tolstoy not understand that I have very important things to be doing with my lockdown?). (3) I’m not sure I quite agree with his conclusion. He arrives at the fundamental problem of determinism and argues that within the paradox between free will and inevitability, there must exist a force, and he saw within this the source of the seemingly predetermined events of 1812. I suppose the modern interpretation of this would be that what he would undoubtedly call God is another name for the unexplained processes at play during wave function collapse in quantum mechanics. You can call this inexplicable force God if you must, but my quibble is that he says the necessity of the existence of this force strengthens the foundations on which church and state are erected which, to me, would imply that moral implications and religious values can be extracted from this understanding of God. However, as I understand his arguments, he has only proven that “God” exists, not that this God has an agenda in accordance with the moral framework of church and state. Nonetheless, foibles aside, this touching the infinite finale is still an oddly effective way of closing this story. It provides some of the most memorable and powerful quotes in the whole book; there were even a few moments that gave me chills. By zooming right out beyond the bird’s eye view of earlier chapters and on to a cosmic vantage (as though viewing the Earth from the perspective of Pierre's comet) Tolstoy had left me with the final impression that I was backing away from a forever changed early 19th-century Russia and was, in an even broader sense, closing a book that had covered something of the whole of human existence: War & Peace had presented me with one possible answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything.


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n  Final Thoughts:n

I don’t think War & Peace could be described as a perfect work of art in the way you might describe a book like The Great Gatsby, with its exquisitely tuned (and brief) plot; however, the level of ambition and artistic feeling on display is of a higher order altogether. It feels like the work of a deeply genuine, angry, frightened, mystical genius who was writing for no reason less than their belief that they could change the world. It could be compared to something like Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (written at the same time as War & Peace), if only in the sense that The Ring was also a grandiose conception that has come to represent everything the late Romantics have come to be associated with: unquestionably great, deeply philosophical, and uncompromisingly ambitious, but not without some rough edges and a beguiling lack of creative self-control. I get the sense that Wagner and Tolstoy had similarly sized egos on them too, both harbouring the belief that their genius was so profound their audiences would be struck dumb by their every note. At its best, War & Peace is unsurpassed — ascending to those sublime heights, rare in literature, upon which the writer seems to have briefly become a vessel for modes of expression that could otherwise only have come from somewhere afforded a higher connection to the Universe than the lowly human mind. And, even if there are times when it can be a bit of a bore (at least on my first read), ultimately, as time goes by, I imagine I’ll take my own bird’s eye view of this monumental novel. I’m sure I’ll forget the slow bits, or learn to see them as all of a piece with something greater that has much bigger aspirations than elegantly concise self-containment. The impact of pivotal chapters, the incomparably vivid characters, and the slightly dazed feeling that hung over me for a time after I finished will come to haunt my mind for a long long time.

This book looks to a kind of cosmic infinite further beyond the physical realms of reality than the hotel room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey; yet, it remains as earthbound, detailed and humane as any of the great works of 19th-century realism. Even though I now have a small collection of expensive War & Peaces with sexy-looking covers, printed in numerous modern and acclaimed translations, it is the battered copy that I actually read (by all accounts a piece of old junk) that sits in pride of place on my bookshelf. That says it all, really.

n  “As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and yet at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to comprehend, so each individual has within himself his own aims and yet has them to serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man.”n

n  Musical pairing:n

n  “ ‘Where has he gone? Where is he now?…’
When the body, washed and dressed, lay in the coffin on a table, everyone came to take leave of him and they all wept. Little Nicholas cried because his heart was rent by painful perplexity. The countess and Sonya cried from pity for Natasha and because he was no more. The old count cried because he felt that before long, he, too, must take the same terrible step. Natasha and Princess Mary also wept now, but not because of their own personal grief; they wept with a reverent and softening emotion which had taken possession of their souls at the consciousness of the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished in their presence.”n

If there’s a piece of music that captures the emotion Tolstoy was trying to describe when he wrote the fantastically moving collection of sentences above, and that expresses the spirit of War & Peace more generally, I think it might well be one of these two little Orthodox jems:

We Praise Thee, Pavel Chesnokov

3 Khora (3 Choruses): No. 2. Lyubov Svyataya, Georgy Sviridov

Take your pick.