How Many Hours to Read War and Peace

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It's 1812 in Moscow. Napoleon has invaded Russia, and he gets nearer to the city every day. Emperor Alexander I has left the urban center behind, and its inhabitants aren't certain of what to practise adjacent. So instead of taking precautions, in the absenteeism of what feels like an authority effigy who knows what he is doing, the people of Moscow instead decide to but have a good time.

This moment is depicted by Leo Tolstoy in his sprawling, intimidating novel War and Peace, where he writes (translation past Louise and Aylmer Maude):

With the enemy's approach to Moscow, the Moscovites' view of their state of affairs did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who run into a great danger approaching. At the arroyo of danger at that place are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: i very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping information technology; the other, yet more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to call back of the danger, since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avoid the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to call back most what is pleasant. In solitude a man mostly listens to the first voice, simply in society to the 2nd. So information technology was at present with the inhabitants of Moscow. It was long since people had been as gay in Moscow every bit that twelvemonth.

I read that passage in mid-July, and it stopped me dead in my tracks. I went back to read it again, so once again — it felt then specific to the earth of Tolstoy'due south cosmos, but besides to right now. What is living in the United States in 2020 just a social club of people trying to disregard what is painful until it comes, in favor of thinking almost what is pleasant?

All of the excuses people give for why they don't want to read State of war and Peace — it's crushingly long, information technology has v billion characters, information technology features long digressions about the nature of history (including a 35-page subtweet of the historians of Tolstoy's 24-hour interval that ends the novel) — are off-white. It is a long book, and it does have lots of characters. It takes a long time to read.

Just you might have time correct now. And what y'all'll likely find equally y'all get deeper and deeper into the book is that information technology's wonderfully readable. At the plot level, War and Peace is an intricately designed lather opera about a handful of Russian families whose lives intersect and explode over the grade of several momentous years, culminating in Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the subsequent burning of Moscow in 1812. The volume has boxing scenes. It has romance. It has comedy — I was surprised past merely how funny Tolstoy is, given the book's reputation every bit a bore. It has plot twists galore.

And in the midst of all of that, you'll find some of the most evocative writing in history — fifty-fifty if Tolstoy follows perhaps the book's well-nigh famous passage (in which death is depicted from the bespeak of view of a major character) with roughly twenty pages of arguing that Napoleon was totally overrated.

As I read, I felt similar I could trace the mode Tolstoy'due south writing in War and Peace went on to influence motion picture and tv set, specially in the way that Tolstoy writes from 1 character'due south point of view until they run into a different major graphic symbol, then easily off the narrative. The volume feels, for all the world, similar a Steadicam in a flashy motion picture with lots of long takes, post-obit one player for a while earlier it follows another. And it was all written decades before the invention of cinema.

Leo Tolstoy lived into the 20th century, 1 of those things I always forget. He died in 1910.

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At that place are reasons to read War and Peace beyond existence able to brag near having read War and Peace. Those reasons are especially pointed right now, at a time when it feels like society might need an unlikely miracle to be saved. Tolstoy is uniquely preoccupied with the nature of history and the means in which history is directed not by great men but past large swathes of people, gathered together to assert their will upon the class of human events. Many times, collective movements fail. Only sometimes, they succeed, and in so doing, they modify the world.

Dramatizing the means in which the small actions of lots of people add up to measurable impact is difficult, because our brains like to latch onto atypical protagonists. Tolstoy'due south solution to this predisposition is brilliant. Instead of portraying the sweep of history, he portrays the lives of ordinary people in the face up of information technology. When he needs to zoom all the fashion out to talk almost major events, he takes an extremely wide god's-eye view, one in which the writer himself is speaking with the xx/20 hindsight of someone looking at the past. But he rarely shifts the book'southward framing into a medium range — say, depicting all of the movements within an individual battle — if he cannot center the knowledge of what's happening inside the perspective of one of his many indelible characters.

History, War and Peace argues, is created by homo beings, who are in turn limited by history. You lot cannot entirely escape your circumstances, but yous tin hope to change them. The concepts of both free will and determinism are ultimately wrong, because you are a production of the globe yous live in, just you lot too can make tiny changes to that earth. And those tiny changes combine with the tiny changes of others, which adds upwardly to a movement. And when properly directed by a leader or a government, they might add upwards to something fifty-fifty greater still.

War and Peace understands that this is truthful for anybody. Napoleon is a mythic figure, simply also only some guy. He eats and sleeps and shits like everyone else, and his ambitions and huge successes do not make him necessarily meliorate or even more effective than whatever of u.s.. Tolstoy doesn't quite argue that Napoleon'due south place at the caput of a massive army that dominated Europe was a full accident, but he does debate that the army created Napoleon and non vice versa. We are all caught in the wave of history.

I read this volume together with a friend, who remarked during our last discussion of it that correct now, when she looks at the world effectually us, she feels a bitter pessimism mixed with tremendous optimism. It is then very piece of cake to see all of the ways that the world our children grow upwardly in might crumble into dust, simply it's besides increasingly possible to see the ways in which ordinary people might seize an opportunity to build something meliorate. History is written by no one, because history is written by everyone.

War and Peace has a keen many themes, but that might be its central 1: We are all people, writing the history that subsequently generations will read nearly, even if we don't realize it. Every action nosotros take makes some small mark upon it, even if that marking is eventually (inevitably) erased. Nothing is certain, until it is. And that is when things change, for better or for worse.

War and Peace is available everywhere books are sold. Most people swear by the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation , which my friend read, but I had a fine old time with the Constance Garnett translation , which has fallen out of favor. In any translation, it is a good book!

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Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/8/19/21372453/war-and-peace-tolstoy-good-read

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