Scaling Mount Tolstoy
The main problem as far as I could tell was the altitude. Did I have the stamina and the focus to see it through? Would my Internet-ruined attention span be able to handle the demands of reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace?
This is a book that makes me see the point of getting an e-book reader: the edition I am reading weighs 3.5 pounds. Then again lugging the weight around should improve the muscle tone of my arms, even if there is the real danger of smothering to death while reading the book in bed. I knew it would be a long slog but it’s the degree of difficulty that separates the hardcore readers from the wimps. Reading Tolstoy today is a statement against the meretriciousness and mediocrity of contemporary society.
A task of this nature requires a company of like-minded individuals. We learned from the movie 127 Hours that if we are off on a trip we must always tell someone exactly where we’re going. This way if we don’t return, someone will come looking for us. Embarking on W+P is like rock-climbing, and not just because your arm could get crushed by this massive tome. It is best to have people you can discuss the book with, and if anyone’s attention flags you can egg each other on.
Where do you find reading buddies if your circle of friends is preoccupied with work? On the Internet. On my blog JessicaRulestheUniverse.com I put out a call for fellow readers; a dozen or so responded. But how many of us would make it to the end?
There are many available translations of Tolstoy’s masterwork — the recent one by the superstar team of Pevear and Volokhonsky (they’re married to each other) is deemed the most faithful to the Russian original, but none of us knows enough Russian to be able to tell the difference. So the members could read any edition they could get hold of, including the Maude and Garnett translations which can be downloaded free of charge. We gave ourselves two months but hoped to finish the book in less.
Exactly one month ago we began the ascent. Tolstoy is more fun than I’d expected. I think the reason W+P is so long is because each character is accorded... a character (qualities distinctive to an individual). So many people are introduced in the early chapters and they’re not just extras in the party scene: they’re allowed to be human beings with their own quirks and expressions. Tolstoy is not usually regarded as a laugh riot, but his descriptions of people had me laughing because they’re so accurate.
Fellow climber jcvalencia84 noted the “Spurlockian” nature of the challenge — a 60-day diet of Tolstoy’s “super-sized” prose. The long Russian names in several versions — Count Nikolai Ilyich is also called Nikolushka, Nikolenka, Nikolashka, Kolya, Nicolas and Coco — were confusing initially, but I found it best to just keep going. Backtracking causes one to lose momentum, and anyway the characters are so distinct and well-defined that before long one can match the character to the name. “I make no effort to take a mental note of everyone,” Cacs agreed. “With a novel this epic I’d probably get to know many of them intimately anyway.”
“21st-century tennis fans won’t struggle with the long Russian names,” Jcvalencia84 said. Good point! If you can remember that Svetlana Kuznetsova battled Elena Dementieva in the final and whatever happened to Anastasia Myshkina, you can remember Tolstoy’s protagonists.
Another problem: the characters constantly switch to speaking French, the language of the Russian upper class of the time. The P/V translation and others leave the French passages in and provide English translations at the bottom of the page. Unless you read French, your eyes are playing tennis. “Several pages into the novel I ditched the e-book,” ManilaBeans reported. “The French passages were too much of a distraction because you’d have to scroll down to the bottom of the page for the translation then scroll back up to read the rest of the paragraph. At least with the hard copy you only have to glance down the page.” Cacs used a different tack: “I sometimes skip the French translations altogether as I try to imagine myself as a Russian servant overhearing but never quite understanding the language of Russian nobility.”
Kindler did what I always do: cast the movie version in her head. “I’ve a Sampaguita Pictures cast in a Merchant-Ivory production,” Kindler added. “I can’t figure out my director yet, but it’s not going to be King Vidor.” Avignon used the same approach. “‘Her pretty upper lip with its barely visible black mustache was too short for her teeth, but the more sweetly did it open and still more sweetly did it sometimes stretch and close on the lower one. As happens with perfectly attractive women, her flaw — a short lip and half-opened mouth — seemed her special, personal beauty.’ That’s Lise, the young princess Bolkonsky. Rachel McAdams in the film version.” This is a good way to remember each character. I always cast Marat Safin in my Russian film adaptations whether he resembles them or not.
Reading Russian lit is supposed to put us in a solemn, profound, cerebral sort of state, but I have to say: War and Peace is so badass! Think of an epic-scale family drama with complex human beings rather than stock characters: it’s a soap with a high IQ!
“Family stories always turn out as melodrama, don’t they?” drewa observed. “No matter how artfully they’re written? That is, unless they end in a bloodbath of some sort. Just don’t know if families are inherently melodramatic, or if melodramas have used family stories for so long that they’ve become conventions of the genre.”
“Unlike other hefty books, W&P’s events are fast-paced,” kindler noted, “and most chapters bring about yet another small or epic conflict, some real or imagined slight. Princess Dubretskaya, Prince Vassily and Princess Katerina — they’re all piranhas. Between the three of them, I’m trying to figure out who acted most despicably. But it’s hard to believe that Pierre, who was educated abroad, could be so clueless about his position. I’m a fan of W&P for the same reasons I love Dynasty — high camp drama!”
The same thing that puts people off reading War and Peace — its length — turns out to be one of its great advantages. “It is a good thing that War and Peace is not a popcorn thriller that I can finish reading over one weekend,” Jcvalencia84 declared. I have enough time to get acquainted with Tolstoy’s characters, especially with the author’s almost obsessive attention to character development. How his characters look and behave is painstakingly illustrated, as well as what they think and feel, their motivations and fears, down to the tiniest detail. The end result is a group of characters that are very human, not mere archetypes. I am immediately drawn to Pierre and Andrei. Yet I am aware of their shortcomings. Even Prince Vassily and Princess Dubretskaya have their redeeming qualities. I am already attached to a whole lot of them. I would definitely struggle if/when one of them dies in the coming chapters.”
The difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — or the one that jumps out at me — is that Dostoevsky is more of an obsessive. He gets into a character’s head and he just goes on and on and on until you want to yell at him and slap him around. A flaming neurotic. Tolstoy is also obsessive — all the “superfluous” detail — but he’s kinder to the reader, he paints the big picture for us. So Dostoevsky goes inwards: into the brain, into the nerves, into the synapses, and often he gets stuck in a loop, going round and round like crazy people. Tolstoy goes outwards into the whole wide world. Just a first impression, I could be off.
“For the past week, reading W&P is the first thing that I do after I wake up and the last before I sleep,” Angus25 said. “Last night I was a little wild-eyed after finishing Volume 4, Part 1. If someone had seen me, he would have thought that I’d lost it. This part is fierce yet delicately written. The feeling that I had was so intense that I kept seeing white flashes when I closed my eyes and forced myself to sleep (it was 5 a.m.). Then the lonely light of morning shone through the window, which amplified what I was feeling. That emotion is similar to what you feel in that fleeting interval between the last wave of the conductor’s baton to his orchestra, signaling the finish of the last movement of a symphony, and the long applause from the audience.”
You can’t get that sort of intensity from reading tweets. We are at the halfway mark; our expedition continues.
