The Giant of all Novels

 Dear Friendishkalayas,

So I read Tolstoy's War and Peace at last---the whole thing! One, one, one, zero pages. (I’ve seen mass market paperback editions of this book with over 1500 pages.) Not that the number of pages matters so much . . . unless there are over a thousand! I read that since there are 365 chapters (all pretty short), you can read this book in a year by reading a chapter a day. Well, I didn't want to take a year, but it did take me some months, just because it was so daunting and I took breaks by reading many other lighter books simultaneously. I mean, even the pages were dense, with small print. I timed myself once and it took me over 2 minutes to read each page. Isn’t a page only supposed to take one minute? Plus, I found myself rereading a lot because I wasn’t paying enough attention and it was important to keep all the characters straight. And I didn’t even spend any time underlining like I usually do because I had a borrowed book–- a nice trade paperback instead of my mass market copy.  My daughter sold me on reading the trade paperbacks: they are bigger and heavier but are made of better paper, stay open better, more space between the lines, hold up better. Also, I wanted that copy so I could more easily use my nifty book holder (my thumb joints really hurt when I hold a book for any length of time, ever since reading 80 books that one year).

One thing you have to get quickly used to when reading Russian authors is their way of assigning innumerable endearing nicknames to everyone. Shortening, lengthening, changing a name completely, you name it.  If you don’t go with that, you’ll never know who anyone is.

In spots I thought this book was the Moby Dick of the Napoleonic war with Russia in 1805—. It was written fifty years after the war actually happened. I didn’t follow the general war intrigues very well. But he didn’t stay too long there; he wrote mostly about the actual individuals involved, their motives and movements and the details of what happened to them in the trenches in quiet times and in battles, and then always going back and forth from the war to the peace pretty regularly. The title is exactly right on. It’s about these certain interconnected people/families (aristocrats) whose young men joined up with the war and then also these individuals’ and families’ lives outside the war stuff: at home, family relations, private life, private thoughts and aspirations–good and bad, romances, marriages, children, money, mistakes, sins, selfishness, selflessness, handling estates and serfs, deaths, births, heartbreak, happiness, changes of heart . . . even  heaven. I could see why Prince Andrey’s slow death is famous in all of literature.

I disagree with Fadiman’s assessment of this gigantic novel in some ways. (Fadiman who wrote The Lifetime Reading Plan which I am in the middle of. ) I don’t  think Tolstoy was all in love with his characters or the grand spectacle of life. I think he was disgusted with a big portion of  humanity. He had at least some of his main characters very critically examining themselves, and was very critical of humanity itself, of blindly worshiped leaders, and of historians specifically. Throughout the book he goes off on these topics, and particularly the last 30 pages are a tortured treatise on what it means to be human, what war is and how it happens, why leaders get to be leaders and what they really are, what history is for, how inaccurate it is, and so on. He was obviously a serious historian himself and it bugged him to no end how historians are too lazy to search out and record what really happened and instead always come to the easiest conclusions all tied with a neat little bow. He says this happens in all disciplines or fields of study, including science, owing to people’s self-serving motives or laziness. For a simple example in this book of history being oversimplified or misrepresented, according to Tolstoy, the great capital city of Moscow was not intentionally razed by the invading French; it was just the result of strangers of all ilks occupying and living day to day in the deserted city (the Russians had mostly fled) and being careless with cooking and smoking and garbage and such, not caring enough to put out any fires that started, which ended up burning practically the whole place down. This is what humans can do! He also talks about how battles were not necessary, or were not necessarily won or lost, how leaders were not necessarily heroic, how soldiers were not necessarily informed and did lots of things on their own, how things happened that shouldn’t have happened all because of carelessness, thoughtlessness, blind ambition, greed, in fact, all those seven deadly sins. War (and even peace if you can call it that) are extremely messy because of human temptation, sin, and stupidity. Much messier than we are led to, or want to, believe.

Tolstoy was a genius. I did want to underline some very important passages. One was about how a man eats a meal and that is sufficient for nutrition; his body is not made to eat two meals at once and that extra food would be wasted or do harm. He said marriage is like that. It is made for one man and one woman to procreate children and anything more or less (more than one man or more than one woman) would be superfluous and good for nothing and ruins the whole thing. Funny how most people knew this 200 years ago, but don’t realize it now! How many kinds of families are held up as ideal today! A little time is going to tell what havoc this departure from reality and truth and rightness will cause.

I want to get a new book just out called The Diversity Delusion I’ve been hearing about on the radio. The author, just like C. S. Lewis said, says we are going to self-destruct if we stay on this juggernaut proliferated in our universities which are bent on annihilating/recharacterizing the values and riches and wisdom accumulated by centuries of  western civilization. Who do people think they are—suddenly deciding that everyone who went before was stupid and their enduring life work suddenly worthless compared to what certain ignorant and strongly uninformed people living now are saying? As Euripides said, “What brashness has the human heart? How far will it push?”

Thank you, Tolstoy, for recording the human experience as you observed it. You got it right.

And now you have my War and Peace of a blog post!