War & Peace: an eyewitness account
Update: rereading the title page . . . I read an abridged version! Should have followed Mortimer Adler's advice and read the informative bits more closely.
Trying to spend less time lost in the swamp of social media, I've been trying to read more. Specifically books. Specifically in codex form . . . book books.
Our library has few titles that I recognize these days. I rarely go to the library and more rarely still to the fiction because it seems so difficult and tiresome to wade through all of the best sellers from 2007. The "biography" section is similarly afflicted: if it's not about JFK, FDR, MLK, or Marilyn Monroe, it's a memoir by a celebrity. How the memoir of an actor or performer could be more interesting than their wikipedia page, I really can't imagine. For instance: Tina Fey does not strike me as a pleasant person. Therefore I avoid her company, even on the written page. Same for any Clinton. Or Barbra Streisand. Or Elizabeth Taylor. And thus you have the substance of our library.
But I did find War and Peace, though alas, I could not locate The One Hundred Years of Solitude.
And surprisingly, War and Peace is actually accessible. Maybe not -- if it's your first foray into Russian literature. But if you've already read Dostoevsky, it's very accessible. I hear that the Russian naming customs can be a stumbling block, but I rather enjoy them. The Wikipedia for War and Peace is helpful here. But really, don't get too hung up on the names: keep pressing on and the characters will cohere and the names will fall to their proper bearers. It helps to know that Pierre is sort of a stand-in for Tolstoy himself and that his philosophical journey will mirror his author's.
Best of all, the chapters are very short. So one can knock out an odd chapter here and there during one's morning toilette, the baby's nap, waiting for the onions to caramelize, or in bed before turning in. The epic seems to fly by. It's also 200 pages shorter than Robert Sewall's 900 page biography of Emily Dickinson. And it's fiction. So the author has included details because they matter to him. Unlike a biographer who includes details because he's trying to find meaning in them. It is very important to Tolstoy that Princess Marya has luminous eyes.
Like most of Dostoevsky and Anna Karenina, this is a philosophical novel. (I did not understand this of Anna Karenina when I read it in high school and thus was thoroughly confused as to why Levin was in the story.)
Like Jane Austen's Persuasion, War and Peace is set around the Napoleonic Wars and is a novel about people. May I repeat that? It's a novel about people. It's not about the plot. And although I said it's a philosophical novel, I would contend that philosophy is ultimately about people and so I made no contradiction. Like Austen, it's novel about class and morality. I did wish now and then for Austen to drop in with her characteristic irony to balance Tolstoy's earnestness. It almost felt like the same characters we've met in Austen, told from a different perspective. Unlike Austen, who has a sharp eye for folly in everyone, Tolstoy has imbibed Rousseau's noble savage and translated him to the Russian serf.
Further, like in every other Russian novel I've read -- Fathers and Sons, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, August 1914 -- War and Peace is about Russian identity. I don't know if this is an ongoing conversation in the Putin era. The question of Russian identity appears to be Peter the Great's fault. It could also be a matter of geopolitics. But back to Peter the Great, a short overview of Peter the Great will also make War and Peace more accessible. For instance: why are all these Russian aristocrats speaking French? If I hadn't known that Peter the Great had made it the official language of court, I would have attributed it to Miss Bingley-level snobbery. I recently read Daniel Brook's History of Future Cities covering St. Petersburg, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Dubai. It's probably already not PC but the history of St. Petersburg gave dimension to much of the novel's backdrop.
War and Peace is an epic novel. Please don't dismiss it a "tome" with a roll of the eyes. It's also Tolstoy telling up what he really thinks in an engaging way. He is attempting to engage the reader in a real conversation; the book alone is proof that he dislikes gossip and small talk. He wants to grasp the essence of life. His conclusion is the same as (spoiler alert) Interstellar. You can disagree with him. I definitely do. But it's a conversation worth having. All part of that unexamined life is not worth living and such.
And may I state the obvious? Wikipedia is super helpful.
Trying to spend less time lost in the swamp of social media, I've been trying to read more. Specifically books. Specifically in codex form . . . book books.
Our library has few titles that I recognize these days. I rarely go to the library and more rarely still to the fiction because it seems so difficult and tiresome to wade through all of the best sellers from 2007. The "biography" section is similarly afflicted: if it's not about JFK, FDR, MLK, or Marilyn Monroe, it's a memoir by a celebrity. How the memoir of an actor or performer could be more interesting than their wikipedia page, I really can't imagine. For instance: Tina Fey does not strike me as a pleasant person. Therefore I avoid her company, even on the written page. Same for any Clinton. Or Barbra Streisand. Or Elizabeth Taylor. And thus you have the substance of our library.
But I did find War and Peace, though alas, I could not locate The One Hundred Years of Solitude.
And surprisingly, War and Peace is actually accessible. Maybe not -- if it's your first foray into Russian literature. But if you've already read Dostoevsky, it's very accessible. I hear that the Russian naming customs can be a stumbling block, but I rather enjoy them. The Wikipedia for War and Peace is helpful here. But really, don't get too hung up on the names: keep pressing on and the characters will cohere and the names will fall to their proper bearers. It helps to know that Pierre is sort of a stand-in for Tolstoy himself and that his philosophical journey will mirror his author's.
Best of all, the chapters are very short. So one can knock out an odd chapter here and there during one's morning toilette, the baby's nap, waiting for the onions to caramelize, or in bed before turning in. The epic seems to fly by. It's also 200 pages shorter than Robert Sewall's 900 page biography of Emily Dickinson. And it's fiction. So the author has included details because they matter to him. Unlike a biographer who includes details because he's trying to find meaning in them. It is very important to Tolstoy that Princess Marya has luminous eyes.
Like most of Dostoevsky and Anna Karenina, this is a philosophical novel. (I did not understand this of Anna Karenina when I read it in high school and thus was thoroughly confused as to why Levin was in the story.)
Like Jane Austen's Persuasion, War and Peace is set around the Napoleonic Wars and is a novel about people. May I repeat that? It's a novel about people. It's not about the plot. And although I said it's a philosophical novel, I would contend that philosophy is ultimately about people and so I made no contradiction. Like Austen, it's novel about class and morality. I did wish now and then for Austen to drop in with her characteristic irony to balance Tolstoy's earnestness. It almost felt like the same characters we've met in Austen, told from a different perspective. Unlike Austen, who has a sharp eye for folly in everyone, Tolstoy has imbibed Rousseau's noble savage and translated him to the Russian serf.
Further, like in every other Russian novel I've read -- Fathers and Sons, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, August 1914 -- War and Peace is about Russian identity. I don't know if this is an ongoing conversation in the Putin era. The question of Russian identity appears to be Peter the Great's fault. It could also be a matter of geopolitics. But back to Peter the Great, a short overview of Peter the Great will also make War and Peace more accessible. For instance: why are all these Russian aristocrats speaking French? If I hadn't known that Peter the Great had made it the official language of court, I would have attributed it to Miss Bingley-level snobbery. I recently read Daniel Brook's History of Future Cities covering St. Petersburg, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Dubai. It's probably already not PC but the history of St. Petersburg gave dimension to much of the novel's backdrop.
War and Peace is an epic novel. Please don't dismiss it a "tome" with a roll of the eyes. It's also Tolstoy telling up what he really thinks in an engaging way. He is attempting to engage the reader in a real conversation; the book alone is proof that he dislikes gossip and small talk. He wants to grasp the essence of life. His conclusion is the same as (spoiler alert) Interstellar. You can disagree with him. I definitely do. But it's a conversation worth having. All part of that unexamined life is not worth living and such.
And may I state the obvious? Wikipedia is super helpful.
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