Look this might be a cheat pick here. At the time I pulled this book I had two other books in my pocket so to speak. I was in the middle of reading Lanark and Kadambari both of which did not have an audiobook available for me to read. Because they did not have an audiobook, and I found myself with some unrestrained audiobook listening time over the summer, I went back to the well and pulled randomly this time.
(Different from the Colson Whitehead and Robert Louis Stevenson approaches)
I opened up the Big Book List and fired off another random pull, and I kid you not like the reading gods knew what dark materials I was up to and grabbed for me out the Scylla whirlpool the name that shall not be spake, War and Peace, the juggernaut of books, the challenge the metal of mere mortals book and grim I loosely shook my head in horror, cast my eyes befallen on a fickle god and resigned to my fate.
Here, before lofty climes, I stood humbled, embarrassed, ashamed of my secret machinations to go outside of the bonds of the random number list itself, and the list here chastised me severely, or so I thought.
If there is one thing anyone knows about War and Peace is that it is long. The title alone may be known for nothing else but simply the manifestation of a long book. The copy I had was 1400 pages. The audiobook version of it that I found on Audible was 61 hours long. This is an undertaking of a task, and I put my earbuds in and my trusty paint brush and I went to work. I found earlier in the summer that between 4 to 6 hours of audiobook is all that my brain can comprehend in a day, and with that in my mind I figured that with a 60 hour book, I could be done with it in 10 days or 2 weeks of work.
What a dream that would have been. I checked my Goodreads activity on this and it is too far ago to tell me exact dates, but suffice to say that my activity began 3 months ago and ended 2 months ago so it appears it took me a month to read this book. It was worth it. Sorry to spoil the surprise but it was worth it. Read this book now.
It is hard to overstate what a task it was to complete this text in the fashion that I did so but War and Peace is a book that feels like it became my whole life for a number of weeks in the COVID summer of 2021. I love this book with my whole heart. Almost immediately upon interacting with War and Peace, I realized that I did not know nearly enough about the French Revolution or Napoleon as I think the starting reader in the late 1800's would have known and so I asked a history of science professor friend to fill me in as best he could about these developments. This conversation let me know that there was indeed a great deal of information and understanding I was lacking largely still lack about this time period.
I remember this book in its masterful scenes as I write this blog post some months past when I interacted with it.
The first scene is Andre's first battle when he is wounded at the Battle of Austerlitz. Andre disagrees with his father, the elder Count Bulkonsky, about Napoleon. The dying Count thinks Napoleon a petty tyrant and a coward. Andre defends what will be his foe in battle's honor as a military and strategic genius. Andre, a novice in battle, sees the Russian flag falter on the battlefield at Austerlitz, and in order to swing the tide of the battle back to Russia's favor, picks up the flag and charges unarmed at the enemy. He is shortly thereafter wounded. This is an anticipated result. Napoleon surveys the carnage of the battlefield, and comes up Andre wounded and presumed dead, and Napoleon briefly mourns the death of such a young man of clearly noble birth. Andre overhears his remarks simply injured, and is seemingly revived by his now fleeting admiration for Napoleon in the moment and is taken to French military doctors, even the one that attends to Napoleon. This moment is a masterpiece in and of itself. Tolstoy could have ended the book there.
The next moment that sticks out to me is with the villian Dolokhov. Dolokhov had his eye on Sonya Rostov whom Nikolai has had a sort of unspoken/spoken agreement to marry since childhood. Sonya spurns Dolokhov as she continues to hold this flame for Nikolai which the Countess Rostov continues to disapprove of. Nikolai gets in over his head in a game of cards with Dolokhov and Dolokhov, seething with a grudge against the young prince, extracts from him painfully a debt he knows the prince cannot pay but is obliged because of his class to honor. This card game is one of the most villainous moments I can remember in fiction. You feel every ounce of inevitability, pain, tension, and regret of this moment as the villain has the novice, naive hero in his grasp. It is horrifying and enrapturing at the same time.
Then there is the infamous wolf hunt when Nikolai comes back from the front and takes Sonya and Natasha on a wolf hunt with some seasoned wolf hunters. There is a lot going on with class in this moment but this moment could be a book onto itself. It is this delight digression from the top story where Tolstoy literally and in the story just takes you away from the main plot to digress and to show you what might not come through in the main story for these characters. It is just so perfectly executed that it is hard to not see the majesty of it. It might have been a whole 4 to 6 hour shift of listening that was continuously the wolf hunt, and nothing about the main story is advanced. At one point, the lower class uncle that the party stays with plays them some music on the balalaika and it is at this moment where you realize that this is all just a diversion to suit the author's whim. Look here impatience reader, we are going to listen to this old man play the guitar and you will enjoy it. Just after this, we get into the war in earnest. The Battle of Smolensk approaches and we will be on a death march to Moscow. Everything you know about Pierre and Andre and Natasha and Nikolai will change. Everything you thought about the blind and aging Kutusov and the inpatient Napoleon will shift almost without their knowing, and this wolf hunt punctuates this pause deliciously.
A great deal of the philosophizing about the nature of history in this novel is lost on me. I love philosophy. I love history. I love literary theory, and I love to really wrap your noodle around an interesting idea but more than anything I am enamored as you can tell above of the movements of literature and the art of story telling in a way that makes me inpatient for the continuing of the story as Tolstoy digresses into these treatises on history and war. Tolstoy's idea of the spirit of a war is fascinating to me and something that I continue to think about though. I also asked several history people in my life about this idea of history being written by the winners and the role of a scribe or a historian literally at the battlefield recording what happened as a different way to understand this phrase.
The next moment is not really a single moment but a series of experiences that the foolish and colorful Pierre goes on while 'at war' which is wonderful and disturbing and whimsical and strange. It is such an interesting set of experiences that I am more interested in the chosen locus of the story being Pierre rather than the heroic Andre or the curt and ambitious Nikolai or any number of active participants in the Battle of Smolensk or the retreat over the Kaluga Road. Tolstoy's choice to place our eyes with Pierre here is just a masterful move. He frees his peasants and then comes face to face with the ramifications of this decision. He runs into a burning building to save a child to only then see how this choice only further complicates the situation. His choice of attire is continuously commented upon until he becomes something of a good luck charm to the real men of war in a battery outfit.
Andre's foiled romance with Natasha, the return of the villains Anatole and Dolokhov to spoil what should have easily been Andre and Natasha's great love, then for Andre to come back, to be revived back to health by Natasha, for him to slip away in a transfixing death is some of the most captivating writing I have ever read.
Napoleon's defeat at the hands of the old, blind Kutuzov and to feel a kinship to the generations of readers that have come along this ambitious work and cheer along with these echoes of history at Napoleon being foiled, tricked, its hard to think of a word here - pinned or strangled slowly, I am not sure how to describe it, but the most agonizing defeat by a wily opponent. The French army sort of beats itself and is crushed under the weight of their own victory in a way that is hard to understand historically and Tolstoy takes this firmly in his eye to try to understand on his own terms and does so masterfully.
That is all to say, read this book. Give yourself over to it. Spend a month, spend two months. Clear your schedule, and read this book but with the love in your heart of such heading that says, it will be long, many times it will be boring. Scenes will draft. Not everything, especially the ending that continues to end throughout its ending, will frustrate you but the book itself has a sheer gravity to it that you must confront if you count yourself a reader of readers.
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