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2011 Book Review #19: War and Peace
Title: War and Peace
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Classic Literature (Sweeping historic epic)
Thingummies: 5 (for historic significance; 3 for how much I actually enjoyed it)
Synopsis: War. And Peace. And some more War. And then Peace again. And Leo Tolstoy's theory of history. (More seriously--this book consists of two intertwined novels. One is an account of two decades in the lives of five fictional noble Russian families during the Napoleonic era. The other is a fictionalized history of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, featuring fictionalized versions of entirely real people. The two wrap around each other but rarely actually touch. The last epilogue is an interminably repetitive explanation of why all historians are Wrong Wrong Wrong and why we should all be religious fatalists like Tolstoy.)
Thoughts: Again, with the presumptuousness of judging classic literature.
Ok, so this was far more readable than I'd feared. I've waded through The Brothers Karamazov and Les Miserables, so I've certainly done my time in the nineteenth century literature trenches. This is nowhere nearly as maudlinly sentimental as the former and mercifully lacks most of the random six-chapter-long digressions of the latter. You have two plotlines--what happens to the families and what happens in the wars--and pretty much everything pertains to them. The prose is clear and not overly flowery, the characters are not particularly prone to overly dramatic speeches and reactions. Tolstoy tends towards understatement, actually, which makes the sheer bulk of this book (my translation was 1450 pages) all the more impressive as most of it actually contains content directly applicable to one of his plotlines with very little filler.
Deeply impactful, widely admired, blah blah blah.
Things I liked:
- The characters are incredibly three-dimensional. They make you realize how flat almost all literary characters are, actually. With a handful of exceptions, almost all named characters are a true mix of strengths and flaws, and not in that "oh, he's very noble but prone to fits of rage" kind of balancing of two or three traits. Pierre is naive, gracious, bumbling, intelligent, foolish, romantic, idealistic, blind, cold, awkward, bewildered, wise, and a dozen other things in turn or even simultaneously. Nearly all have not even real character arcs, but character roller coasters. Andrei starts overly obsessed with duty, then searching for meaning, then cynical, then loving, then indecisive and fearful, then cruelly cold, then embracing a love of all humanity. Just as all of us carrying within us the capability of being loving and cruel, cynical and idealistic, and fluctuating from one to another as situations change, so do the characters. Just as we make resolutions and then fail to stick to them, fall in and out of depression, feel as if we've come to understand the purpose of life and then lose it again in the bustle of the every day, so do the characters. For that matter, your initial opinions of characters are sometimes proven wrong after you get to know them better, just as real people do. Vasily is presented initially as charming, but you gradually hold him in increasing contempt. Pierre is incredibly annoying to begin with, but becomes the heart of the novel.
- The novel gets a happy, fairly satisfying ending without becoming particularly sentimental or losing its complexity. Some good characters come to bad ends, some bad characters never get punished, just as in life. Most of the people you really care about get happy marriages at the end. But even within the happy marriages, there is still a realistic degree of strife. Wives nag, husbands lose their temper, spouses love each other but don't quite get each other. One husband doesn't particularly like babies (although he adores his children once they start walking). But the bonds between spouses remain incredibly strong. Being happily but not romance-novel-endingly married myself, this rings so very true. It's not that you agree on everything and totally understand each other in every way, the way most book romances end. You still squabble and get petty. But he shows that core resilience of a strong marriage so well. He even has a conversation between a husband and wife that's nearly incoherent to an outsider as they bounce through different topics, half the time using nothing but indistinct pronouns, that's just so true of communication between two people who have lived together long enough that they can talk in half-sentences and still understand each other.
- The women are portrayed as richly and rationally as the men. They have severely constrained gender roles, as is historically accurate, but the women are driven by the exact same level of rationality and emotions as the men are. They are as capable of intellectual pursuits, wisdom, vanity, and foolishness as the men. They're real people. If a nineteenth century count could get this right, there's just no excuse for modern writers not to. Tolstoy throws down, yo.
Stuff that bothered me:
- Tolstoy's philosophy. He's incredibly fatalistic and adamantly against the "great men" theory of history. He believes utterly that individual actions have no impact whatsoever on the movement of peoples, that battles are determined entirely by the spirit of the army and the momentum of the historic age, that tactics and strategy are useless, and that looking for root causes for why a war happened is pointless. Fundamentally, he believes that everything boils down to things happen because God wanted them to. He also believes this applies to individuals in that we can't really much help what happens to us, planning is useless, and the best way to make decisions appears to be to just go with your first impulse. These philosophies start out subtly encoded, become increasingly blatant, and finally end up being hammered home in a thirty or forty page rant after the plot stops. It gets really repetitive, even if you agree with him, which I don't.
- Despite the incredible length and level of detail, he loses track of a couple characters who start out major and then kind of disappear. Boris, Vera, Anna Mikhailovna, what happened to you? I didn't really like you, but you seemed important and then disappeared.
- I realize it's historically accurate, but was it really necessary to name basically four different characters "Nikolai"? And how about the half-dozen "Anna"s running around?
- I hate, hate, hate how Natasha becomes frumpy immediately after her marriage. I get that Tolstoy sees being attractive, tidy, well-spoken, talented, and accomplished as skills women deploy to catch men. Clearly, his society sees all this as flirtation. So for his society, it's a moral issue--Natasha gives these up because she truly loves and focuses on her family, while women who continue to dress neatly and make charming conversation after being married are essentially being slutty. Witty conversation is a sexual come-on, so making it after marriage is trying to lure men to your bed. But I hate the attitude. It's abhorrent to me that being polished or having talent is something solely intended to snare a man instead of being an essential quality of oneself. That she gives up singing is heartbreaking. I am so pathetically grateful to live in the time I do.
Some notes on getting the most out of this, should you choose to read it. First, make sure your edition has a character list including nicknames. The names really are incredibly similar and it gets really, really confusing. If your book doesn't come with a list, get one online. Everyone has a title, a full name, a patronymic, a last name, and up to four or five diminutives. Among all of these, nearly everyone shares at least one with another character. There are two Countess Natalya Rostovas, each who can be called Natasha. So many damn Nikolais, who can be Nicholas, Nikolushka, Nikolyenka, Kolya, etc.
Second, if you're unfamiliar with the Napoleonic Era, the Congress of Vienna, the Hundred Days, the family tree immediately surrounding Aleksandr I, and the Decembrist Uprising, spent an hour on Wikipedia catching up before you start this book. If I didn't already have a pretty good grasp of nineteeth century European history, I would have been so incredibly lost in places. (I still find the whole Polish thing incredibly confusing.) And the ending doesn't make sense if you don't know what's about to happen in Petersburg.
So. Long. Doesn't feel nearly as long as it is until very near the end. The pacing will throw you off, as no one paces like this anymore, but it's interesting. But kind of a marathon, and at the end, you want to strangle Tolstoy yelling "I get it. You don't like historians. Please, stop, for the love of God!"
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Classic Literature (Sweeping historic epic)
Thingummies: 5 (for historic significance; 3 for how much I actually enjoyed it)
Synopsis: War. And Peace. And some more War. And then Peace again. And Leo Tolstoy's theory of history. (More seriously--this book consists of two intertwined novels. One is an account of two decades in the lives of five fictional noble Russian families during the Napoleonic era. The other is a fictionalized history of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, featuring fictionalized versions of entirely real people. The two wrap around each other but rarely actually touch. The last epilogue is an interminably repetitive explanation of why all historians are Wrong Wrong Wrong and why we should all be religious fatalists like Tolstoy.)
Thoughts: Again, with the presumptuousness of judging classic literature.
Ok, so this was far more readable than I'd feared. I've waded through The Brothers Karamazov and Les Miserables, so I've certainly done my time in the nineteenth century literature trenches. This is nowhere nearly as maudlinly sentimental as the former and mercifully lacks most of the random six-chapter-long digressions of the latter. You have two plotlines--what happens to the families and what happens in the wars--and pretty much everything pertains to them. The prose is clear and not overly flowery, the characters are not particularly prone to overly dramatic speeches and reactions. Tolstoy tends towards understatement, actually, which makes the sheer bulk of this book (my translation was 1450 pages) all the more impressive as most of it actually contains content directly applicable to one of his plotlines with very little filler.
Deeply impactful, widely admired, blah blah blah.
Things I liked:
- The characters are incredibly three-dimensional. They make you realize how flat almost all literary characters are, actually. With a handful of exceptions, almost all named characters are a true mix of strengths and flaws, and not in that "oh, he's very noble but prone to fits of rage" kind of balancing of two or three traits. Pierre is naive, gracious, bumbling, intelligent, foolish, romantic, idealistic, blind, cold, awkward, bewildered, wise, and a dozen other things in turn or even simultaneously. Nearly all have not even real character arcs, but character roller coasters. Andrei starts overly obsessed with duty, then searching for meaning, then cynical, then loving, then indecisive and fearful, then cruelly cold, then embracing a love of all humanity. Just as all of us carrying within us the capability of being loving and cruel, cynical and idealistic, and fluctuating from one to another as situations change, so do the characters. Just as we make resolutions and then fail to stick to them, fall in and out of depression, feel as if we've come to understand the purpose of life and then lose it again in the bustle of the every day, so do the characters. For that matter, your initial opinions of characters are sometimes proven wrong after you get to know them better, just as real people do. Vasily is presented initially as charming, but you gradually hold him in increasing contempt. Pierre is incredibly annoying to begin with, but becomes the heart of the novel.
- The novel gets a happy, fairly satisfying ending without becoming particularly sentimental or losing its complexity. Some good characters come to bad ends, some bad characters never get punished, just as in life. Most of the people you really care about get happy marriages at the end. But even within the happy marriages, there is still a realistic degree of strife. Wives nag, husbands lose their temper, spouses love each other but don't quite get each other. One husband doesn't particularly like babies (although he adores his children once they start walking). But the bonds between spouses remain incredibly strong. Being happily but not romance-novel-endingly married myself, this rings so very true. It's not that you agree on everything and totally understand each other in every way, the way most book romances end. You still squabble and get petty. But he shows that core resilience of a strong marriage so well. He even has a conversation between a husband and wife that's nearly incoherent to an outsider as they bounce through different topics, half the time using nothing but indistinct pronouns, that's just so true of communication between two people who have lived together long enough that they can talk in half-sentences and still understand each other.
- The women are portrayed as richly and rationally as the men. They have severely constrained gender roles, as is historically accurate, but the women are driven by the exact same level of rationality and emotions as the men are. They are as capable of intellectual pursuits, wisdom, vanity, and foolishness as the men. They're real people. If a nineteenth century count could get this right, there's just no excuse for modern writers not to. Tolstoy throws down, yo.
Stuff that bothered me:
- Tolstoy's philosophy. He's incredibly fatalistic and adamantly against the "great men" theory of history. He believes utterly that individual actions have no impact whatsoever on the movement of peoples, that battles are determined entirely by the spirit of the army and the momentum of the historic age, that tactics and strategy are useless, and that looking for root causes for why a war happened is pointless. Fundamentally, he believes that everything boils down to things happen because God wanted them to. He also believes this applies to individuals in that we can't really much help what happens to us, planning is useless, and the best way to make decisions appears to be to just go with your first impulse. These philosophies start out subtly encoded, become increasingly blatant, and finally end up being hammered home in a thirty or forty page rant after the plot stops. It gets really repetitive, even if you agree with him, which I don't.
- Despite the incredible length and level of detail, he loses track of a couple characters who start out major and then kind of disappear. Boris, Vera, Anna Mikhailovna, what happened to you? I didn't really like you, but you seemed important and then disappeared.
- I realize it's historically accurate, but was it really necessary to name basically four different characters "Nikolai"? And how about the half-dozen "Anna"s running around?
- I hate, hate, hate how Natasha becomes frumpy immediately after her marriage. I get that Tolstoy sees being attractive, tidy, well-spoken, talented, and accomplished as skills women deploy to catch men. Clearly, his society sees all this as flirtation. So for his society, it's a moral issue--Natasha gives these up because she truly loves and focuses on her family, while women who continue to dress neatly and make charming conversation after being married are essentially being slutty. Witty conversation is a sexual come-on, so making it after marriage is trying to lure men to your bed. But I hate the attitude. It's abhorrent to me that being polished or having talent is something solely intended to snare a man instead of being an essential quality of oneself. That she gives up singing is heartbreaking. I am so pathetically grateful to live in the time I do.
Some notes on getting the most out of this, should you choose to read it. First, make sure your edition has a character list including nicknames. The names really are incredibly similar and it gets really, really confusing. If your book doesn't come with a list, get one online. Everyone has a title, a full name, a patronymic, a last name, and up to four or five diminutives. Among all of these, nearly everyone shares at least one with another character. There are two Countess Natalya Rostovas, each who can be called Natasha. So many damn Nikolais, who can be Nicholas, Nikolushka, Nikolyenka, Kolya, etc.
Second, if you're unfamiliar with the Napoleonic Era, the Congress of Vienna, the Hundred Days, the family tree immediately surrounding Aleksandr I, and the Decembrist Uprising, spent an hour on Wikipedia catching up before you start this book. If I didn't already have a pretty good grasp of nineteeth century European history, I would have been so incredibly lost in places. (I still find the whole Polish thing incredibly confusing.) And the ending doesn't make sense if you don't know what's about to happen in Petersburg.
So. Long. Doesn't feel nearly as long as it is until very near the end. The pacing will throw you off, as no one paces like this anymore, but it's interesting. But kind of a marathon, and at the end, you want to strangle Tolstoy yelling "I get it. You don't like historians. Please, stop, for the love of God!"