So, to quote Sir Edmund Hillary after he had reached the summit of Everest, I “have knocked the bastard off”. In my case, the Herculean achievement in question is to have finally read War and Peace– all 1,234 pages of Leo Tolstoy’s novel which was published, after five years of work, in 1869 when the legendary Russian author was 41 years old. Well, might you ask, why would you want to do that?
My answer is, to use another famous Everestian quote, “because it was there”. And has been there for most of my conscious life. It was my father’s favourite book and it is almost a cliché to hear it described as the greatest novel ever written.
And it is famously about Russian wars, and we do have one of those going on right now, and about Russian peace, which seems to be in short supply. Maybe there are some lessons to be found from the distant past. As a university student I went through the trendy ritual of pretending to enjoy the all-night arthouse cinema showing of the six-hour Russian movie of War and Peace(made in the 1960s with 10,000 Soviet soldiers as extras).
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In truth, I was much more taken by Woody Allen’s hysterical parody, Love and Death,which appearedin 1975. I have consumed my fair share of Russian literature and history in the five decades since those youthful film nights, and have developed a mild obsession with Mother Russia, but could never bring myself to take on The Big One. It was an established metaphor for something way too long, and “not enough time” was always the excuse.
But now I had the time, so I girded my loins. It was, as a friend commented, like taking up a new extreme sport. The long journey did not begin well.
At my local Exclusive Books I enquired at the desk whether they had a copy of War and Peace. “Do you have the author’s name?” came the nonchalant reply. Cue frothy, old-man rant in my head about the state of the world when someone working in a bookshop, for chrissakes, doesn’t know the name of the author of War and Peace!
However, I spared the hapless soul my vitriol and the Vintage Classics version translated by the husband-and-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, with a lovely cover and nice flaps for placeholding, was procured. The first challenge was to hold the damn heavy thing upright while reading it in bed for months on end. (Donald Trump would claim that he brought peace to at least six wars during the time it took me to finish the book.) The second challenge was to work out what the hell was going on.
There are a reported 580 characters in the monumental story and a plethora of main figures who all have, to an Anglicised eye, confusingly similar names. My more literate sister, who had been across this terrain well before me, advised reading it with a white board handy to write out names and family links to keep track. After a lengthy battle trying to navigate the matrix of Bezukhovs, Rostovs, Bolkonskys, Denisovs and Dolokhovs (and who was courting whom and who hated whom), I found the best approach was to give up and go with the narrative and to let it all reveal itself.
Which, indeed, it did, thanks to Tolstoy’s skill. The story is exactly what is on the tin. It is a majestic sweep of times of war and of peace as Russia engages in lengthy, intermittent conflicts with Napoleon between 1805 and 1813.
Tolstoy called it a work of realism as much as fiction. His astonishing descriptions of the chaos of battle, informed by his own experience as a soldier in Crimea, are pieces of war reportage which rival Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front from World War 1, or Michael Herr’s Dispatches about Vietnam.
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