War and Peace (1868)

I spent nearly a full year reading War & Peace, taking it one chapter a day. This beautiful book. It's going to take me a while before I can write anything much about it; I'm in mourning that I have to leave Pierre, Natasha and all the others to finish their stories without me. I've never spent so much time with so many richly drawn characters.

In the epilogue, Tolstoy wrote: "For a historian, considering the contribution rendered by some person towards a certain goal, there are heroes; for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people."
( )

An intensely mediocre book, sliding to bad in a few places.

I have often been told that classics are classics because they posses some characteristics which enable them to transcend their time of composition and appeal to readers across time and space. If this is true, War and Peace is not a classic.

This book essentially seeks to deal with the period from roughly 1805-1812 and focus on the Napoleonic conflicts in Europe as well as the fortunes of a few Russian families.

First, the stuff that I liked - The first 20% of the book is very good. Tolstoy does deft social satire and critique. The writing is compact and witty. The battle descriptions are graphic, powerful and carry a flavour of authenticity.

Unfortunately, all of this goes rapidly downhill as the book progresses.

My biggest problem with this book is the dominance of Tell vs Show. Tolstoy loves to Tell. He embarks on long lectures and these go on for pages and pages and get extremely tedious. There are essentially three types of lectures:

Philosophical: These became more common in the latter half of the book and is Tolstoy musing on life, human nature, history, ethics, god etc. They can be extremely tedious.

Historical: In these Tolstoy sums up and narrates historical events to move his story along. While these can be informative, they are very clumsily integrated into the book and therefore make the narrative more cumbersome. To make matters worse, Tolstoy starts spouting of on long rants against Napoleon and on the virtues of the Russians.

Story Based: These are the worst. Tolstoy really does not do a good job writing character changes and transitions over long periods of time. So he resorts to character narration. For example: "X decided his life was going badly. So he listened to Y and Z. He thought deeply on their advice. He realized [Insert badly written internal monologue here]. Therefore X started doing a, b and c, and Started visiting P." These character passages in passive voice were intensely irritating and seemed to be a symptom of the authors inability to internalize his own characters and instead use them as convenient mouthpieces.


Apart from the dominance of Tell, a major problem I faced while reading was the intensely bad dialogue and the even worse internal monologues. A significant portion of dialogue is inane and seemed to serve no purpose. This was quite puzzling for me as the dialogue in the initial parts of the book was pretty good.

Also Tolstoy does not seem to understand the point of having an epilogue. He takes this opportunity to wax eloquent about his own rather idiotic ideas about the nature of history, how Napoleon the man had no redeeming features and how Tsar Alexander was a misunderstood genius. My favourite was when he defended the suppression of liberalism in post-1815 Europe. To him if following reason, freedom and equality had been allowed this would have made the various liberal revolutionary movements in Europe unnecessary and destroyed their potential. Therefore history governed by reason is somehow antithetical to life.

So, to conclude, War and Peace is an unwieldy, clumsy, tedious preachy accumulation of ideas. It does not really need to be read. ( )

Whew. I read somewhere, #tolstoytogether perhaps, that reading this one is alternately “yes, exactly!” Or “wait, what??”

Yup. Both sublime but also rooted in so much mid-1800s Russian cultural context that flew right past; still wonderful. ( )

That epilogue tho ( )

This is a very long book. I can't remember when it last took a month to read a book but it is an interesting book. What you get at the superficial level where I live, is a story about humans constantly seeking happiness in a changing world. You also get a lot of Russian history and long rants against historians or anyone trying to explain why events actually took place.

The characters are interesting. There is Natasha whose love of life is so contagious that it can barely be contained. There is Pierre who desperately tries to find a meaning with life. There is Nikolai Rostov who I never quite got a grip on. There is Prince Andrew and Helene and Denisov and Berg and dozens of other characters who all try to find happiness in their own way.

All this happens as the Napoleon wars keep coming and going and the characters get swept with the tide.

Some sentences in the book are in French and my weak school French was not quite up to the task but luckily someone (translator?) had added translations. I guess this is similar to how someone might drop English phrases in a Swedish book today.

War and Peace could probably be an exciting thing for a book club where you discuss where each chapter brings you because there is a lot of philosophy in the book. I do doubt that any book club would sign up for a 1,500 page book though.

A general thought about classics like this. They are often classics because they broke new ground, but objectively speaking, there are less well known successors that are superior in many ways. Not that I can think of anything quite like this but that is probably because I'm not classic enough.

I'm giving it 4 stars for the trip, but the second epilogue, about 100 pages of rants, I should have skipped and almost sank my star count. ( )