Fulfilled a New Year’s resolution to re-read at least one favorite novel in 2018 — completed this one two weeks before the January 1, 2019 deadline. This time read the Constance Garnett translation (first time through I read the Briggs translation). Also intermittently listened to the audiobook (made that first free Audible download count), playing the disorientating opening scenes over and over, but haven’t made it too deeply into the second part yet.
Felt like a first read in many ways since I didn’t remember that much from eleven years ago beyond major moments like the duel, Prince Andrey at Austerlitz, the wolf hunt, Ellen’s pale bare back and bosom, Moscow in flames, the essay on history and necessity at the end. It’s odd to say “I’ve read this” but not really remember much of it, although I certainly experienced it before, page by page, although a different translation with a slightly different feel. I’ll definitely be re-reading favorites a lot more thanks to my apparently pretty crappy memory.
The 2007 Briggs translation that I read the year it came out seemed a little more contemporary but also mythic/fable-like, aerated (not as dense — possibly related to formatting), and populated by cockney-tongued Brits. The Garnett translation (1904) I just finished is responsible in large part for the novel’s initial reputation in English (although the 1922 Louise and Aylmer Maude and the 1954 Rosemary Edmonds translations surely played major roles as well of course). The Garnett translation felt solid, grand, suitably dated in syntax and word choice (relaying a story that occurred more than two centuries ago), and maybe like 19th-century British novels I haven’t yet read (Austen, Brontes, Eliot, Trollope). It also had a handful of typos (including three on one page!) that have probably persisted since initial publication.
In 2019, I intend to read some W&P/Tolstoy-related criticism, a bio or two, the Maude, the Pevear & Volokhonsky, and maybe even the Edmonds translations, three LT story collections, AK again (in the Garnett translation this time), and whatever else. That’s the plan at least. I haven’t devoted myself to “studying” a novel since college — semi-systematic multiple reads plus secondary sources and biographies could be valuable? I think I’m intuitively drawn to doing something like this in response to a sort of general disillusionment with literature, especially its contemporary variant and its expression online (tweetage, listicles, think pieces, promotion of new publications so often overhyped, leading to disappointment and feeling like I’ve been duped by literary marketers and their electric outposts). I sort of conceive this little Great Russian reading project as antidote and way to rekindle reading/writing enthusiasm by repeatedly jumping through the flames of a novel I trust to offer plenty of instruction on how to live and how to write, all while demonstrating what it is that makes a novel “great” or at least endure and meet/exceed its out-sized reputation.
This time through I was most interested in its structure, how it felt like a color wheel of characterization, with the primary male colors of Pierre, Prince Andrei, and Nikolai blending with the primary females colors of Natasha, Ellen, and Marya to create different effects for the reader. Each character exists on a moral/spiritual/societal continuum, with Andrei, Pierre, Nikolai inexactly corresponding to Marya, Natasha, and Ellen in terms of their progression from most spiritual/least engaged with society and most-to-least intellectual. But then again there are nearly 500 comparatively minor characters, all with their hues, blending and contrasting with the primaries.
Early on, Anna Pavlova (a character easily confused with Anna Mihalovna thanks to their names and general similarity — both seem significant at first and both fall away entirely before too long) is described as attending to those at her party like a mechanic expertly inspecting and perfecting the interlocking gears of a machine:
Just as the foreman of a spinning-mill settles the work-people in their places, walks up and down the works, and noting any stoppage or unusual creaking or too loud a whir in the spindles, goes up hurriedly, slackens the machinery and sets it going properly, so Anna Pavlovna, walking about her drawing-room, went up to any circle that was pausing or too loud in conversation and by a single word or change of position set the conversational machine going again in its regular, decorous way. (pg 8)
That gear metaphor stuck with me in a novel that really doesn’t function on the level of symbol. I read that line metafictionally, relating to the author, expertly organizing the seamless display of the novel’s players — it was a line that seemed to suggest that I should support the author’s authority. Initial disorientation (the first sentence is unattributed dialogue) is intentional and I will clarify it for you if you lend me your patience. It definitely sets you down in the middle of things and not until nearly 200 pages in (a sensation I remember from my first read) does the narrative focus once the primary characters emerge. Just like the French and Russian armies, the troops are gathered and by the end they’re winnowed down to a handful of survivors, either thanks to death or disappearance I suppose thanks to being no longer necessary.
The characterization of everyone is superlative — not just each character’s description and consistent POV and way of being in the world but also their modulation and transformation. The major characters are on a journey as long and as arduous and as fraught with emotional, spiritual, and physical plot-propelling obstacles/disturbances as Napoleon’s path from Paris to Moscow and back again. The narrative too, the experience of reading the novel, also feels like the French Army’s campaign in a way, as though the initial experience of fear and delight when embarking on an 1386-page novel gives way to total forward flow halfway through in the heat of battle as the pages turn themselves propelled by love stories (Pierre and Ellen, Prince Andrei and Natasha, Nikolai and Sonya at first and then Marya), each character with a spiritual rise and fall and rise again, supported by wonderfully drawn minor characters like Boris the social-climbing conformist; Petya Rostov, the post-adolescent obsessed by a fervor for warfare; and of course the primary fictional villains/agents of disturbance and thereby plot-propulsion Anatole Kuragin and Dolokhov (page 666, one of my favorite descriptive paragraphs in the novel, perfectly describes their preferred coachman/chauffeur/old-fashioned Uber driver and how these immoral young men raise hell speeding through Moscow, running over peasants, boozing, cavorting with alluring Gypsy hussies etc):
Balaga was a well-known driver, who had known Dolohov and Anatole for the last six years, and driven them in his three-horse sledges. More than once, when Anatole’s regiment had been stationed at Tver, he had driven him out of Tver in the evening, reached Moscow by dawn, and driven him back the next night. More than once he had driven Dolohov safe away when he was being pursued. Many a time he had driven them about the town with gypsies and “gay ladies,” as he called them. More than one horse had he ruined in driving them. More than once he had driven over people and upset vehicles in Moscow, and always his “gentlemen,” as he called them, had got him out of trouble. Many a time had they beaten him, many a time made him drunk with champagne and madeira, a wine he loved, and more than one exploit he knew of each of them, which would long ago have sent any ordinary man to Siberia. They often called Balaga in to their carousals, made him drink and dance with the gypsies, and many a thousand roubles of their money had passed through his hands. In their service, twenty times a year, he risked his life and his skin, and wore out more horses than they repaid him for in money. But he liked them, liked their furious driving, eighteen versts an hour, liked upsetting coachmen, and running down people on foot in Moscow, and always flew full gallop along the Moscow streets. He liked to hear behind him the wild shout of drunken voices, “Get on; get on!” when it was impossible to drive faster; liked to give a lash on the neck to a passing peasant who was already hastening out of his way more dead than alive. “Real gentlemen!” he thought.”
But there’s also the novel’s #1 villain, Napoleon himself, the Antichrist alluded to in the first paragraph, later shown to have a twitching calf muscle when worked up, presented as the novel’s greatest thematic foil/fall guy since the novel is about — the one most explicitly expressed among the swarm of ideas/sub-dualities, beyond the title’s obvious uber-duality, mostly expressed via dramatization — undermining the idea of the great man who forces the hand of history. Instead, Tolstoy (affectionately referred to by a critic as the older brother of God) primarily shows but also tells in pretty clear although super-repetitive straight-up essay, that so many other factors are in play. History proceeds primarily thanks to necessity — on a micro/personal level we think we’re free to act but overall there’s a macro-fate/progress essentially proceeding per necessity that subsumes everyone’s micro-freedom. Leaders like Napoleon or the Russian commander-in-chief Kutuzov aren’t responsible for victory or defeat for example so much as the results are an amalgamated inevitability, a rational progression of next steps guided toward its conclusions by the generalized spirit of the people. In this way, the novel is a supreme champion of complexity, always erring (other than when it reduces the complexity of the history of the world to the history of necessity) on the side of arguments that consider ALL SIDES instead of any one reduction of reality to something easier to digest. In short, it’s the archquaquaversalist text. And here’s its representative sentence, with narrative, social, generational, and sort of psychedelic/kaleidoscopic theological overtones (only one page — pg 1212 — did I dog-ear from the bottom corner to quickly find what felt to me like the book’s representative passage):
Again the facts of real life mingled with his dreams; and again some one, himself or some one else, was uttering thoughts in his ear, and the same thoughts, indeed, as had come in his dream at Mozhaisk.
Life is everything. Life is God. All is changing and moving, and that motion is God. And while there is life, there is the joy of the consciousness of the Godhead. To love life is to love God. The hardest and the most blessed thing is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in undeserved suffering.
“Karataev!” flashed into Pierre’s mind. And all at once there rose up, as vivid as though alive, the image, long forgotten, of the gentle old teacher who had given Pierre geography lessons in Switzerland. “Wait a minute,” the old man was saying. And he was showing Pierre a globe. This globe was a living, quivering ball, with no definite limits. Its whole surface consisted of drops, closely cohering together. And those drops were all in motion, and changing, several passing into one, and then one splitting up again into many. Every drop seemed striving to spread, to take up more space, but the others, pressing upon it, sometimes absorbed it, sometimes melted into it.
“This is life,” the old teacher was saying.
“How simple it is and how clear,” thought Pierre. “How was it I did not know that before? God is in the midst, and each drop strives to expand, to reflect Him on the largest scale possible. And it grows, and is absorbed and crowded out, and on the surface it disappears, goes back into the depths, and falls not to the surface again. That is how it is with him, with Karataev; he is absorbed and has disappeared.”
“You understand, my child,” said the teacher.
“You understand, damn you!” shouted a voice, and Pierre woke up.
But beyond ideas, W&P succeeds simply thanks to innumerable memorable images, often mystical or personal moments of sudden unexpected significance confronted with the natural world that opens up to a momentary understanding/insight into the true nature of reality, most famously when Prince Andrei is injured on the battlefield and gawks at the infinite sky, but also when Pierre sees Halley’s Comet and gets a sense of our insignificance/significance, or Prince Andrei listens to Natasha talk on the moonlit balcony above him (definitely sketchy that she’s 16 and he’s like 32 and also has a young son he pretty much totally stays away from — for all his merits, from a 21st-century perspective, Prince Andrei is a crappy dad), or when Pierre rescues the child from the burning building and later sees a man executed and meets Platon the noble savage-like peasant whose every thought and movement is in tune with existence — or Pierre just after the duel stumbling away in the snow or Nikolai singing with his sister Natasha after he’s lost so much gambling, or Nikolai propelled across the battlefield on horseback thanks to the physical memory of wolf hunts and then smashing a young French soldier with his sword, realizing what the hell am I doing?! — or Petya’s death in battle driven toward the fog of war like mosquito toward bug-zapper or Princess Marya dressing in her best bast shoes and peasant gear about to take off as a wandering super-Christian, or Natasha fasting to repent and recover after poisoning herself after the botched elopement, on and on and on.
Ultimately it’s the sort of novel you want to list every moment, every insight, to record them for posterity, so whenever I read this post about my second read over the course of 2.5 months toward the end of 2018 (half of it read in the first two weeks of December when I fully committed mornings, nights, and weekends to reading it and put everything else on hold) I’ll thereby remember so much more, which is really the primary reason I write these little “reviews” after reading, to outsource my memory so it can remember where I put my wallet, glasses, phone, keys.
On third read, I’ll look for instances of necessity, disturbances that arise due to one character’s necessity conflicting with another’s necessity. I’ll keep an eye on some of the secondary historical characters in the war scenes, particularly Kutuzov. I’ll also pay more attention to Denisov and Bilibin and people like that. I want to do a better job tracking the transitions between primary characters — I might even chart it? We shall see. I also want to track the old verities (“love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice”) mentioned in Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech, which I feel like had this novel in mind.
Anyway, if you haven’t read War and Peace, I guess you could say I recommend it.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).