War & Peace

I’ve been reading War & Peace since March with the Tolstoy Together plan the folks at A Public Space, in particular Yiyun Li, assembled so that people around the world could read their way through this lengthy classic in manageable chunks (about 12-15 pages a day). I’d read some shorter Tolstoy (although I don’t seem to have written about it here; I’ve read Anna Karenina, What Men Live By, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich). I always admire these kinds of efforts at collective reading and #TolstoyTogether attracted worldwide attention. It seemed at the time so nice to imagine that we’d get through coronavirus by reading together.

That was before we all realized the full extent of how ill prepared the U.S was for a pandemic, how crazy our leadership is, and how disproportionately the poor and people of color have been impacted by the disease. Now we’re in the midst of reopening even though we are still a long way from being done with COVID-19, and Black Lives Matter protests make something as silly as taking time to read a long Russian classic about how powerful egomaniacs can bring their countries’ people to their knees while celebrating how great they themselves think they are seem pointless.

I wrapped up a few days early this afternoon. The main characters in the book are almost all Russian, French, or other European aristocrats. While they grapple with matters of faith, financial “ruin” and war, their problems are not too bad compared with the problems of the few peasants and serfs who appear in the story. Such as being owned by the rich characters. Or being mistreated or harmed. For example, Platon Karataev, who is a peasant and all around good person, has one of the more horrific things in the book happen to him.

Tolstoy interjects several times throughout the novel with nonfiction sections where he holds forth on various topics, mainly the meaning of history and man’s role in it. He points out that if a great man says he’s great but doesn’t actually pay attention to good and evil, he’s not so great, for example. And he notes at the end of the book that trying to make sense of history through these “great” men’s lives (because when he was writing no one would have bothered making sense of history through women’s lives, even noble women) you miss the fact that the story of humans is really stitched together from little stories of individuals, and that because of free will, many of those stories are not great. And therefore, making a grand study of themes of history without considering the illogical acts of willful people, whether historical figures or ordinary people, is fruitless.

At least I think that’s what he was saying. By the time I got to the end I was a little irritable from following actual 2020 egomaniacs with no consideration for good and evil and contemporary illogical acts of willful people in the news. I got a little tangled up in the idea that because of free will, mankind is not free — I get it, I think? The free will of the powerful keeps us all under their thumbs, so the rest of us have free will but only to a point because of the systems that keep us all in place, but is that really what Tolstoy, himself one of the rich and influential who historians credit with the course of history, meant? I am sure if I thought harder about it I’d make more sense of it, but again, since that truth (whether it’s what Tolstoy meant or not) is making itself all too known at the moment in the real world, that’s enough to process right now.

The novel itself was enjoyable enough. Pierre is an interesting character, and Princess Maria. I found it annoying that the kind and good hearted Sonja, an orphan whose true love ends up marrying someone else for money (although he comes to love a rich woman who is also good hearted), is left without a family of her own, more or less waiting on the young and old in the family who raised her.

But that’s probably realistic, and Tolstoy seems to have enjoyed demystifying people and showing them as they are. Even the good hearted have their moments of scheming and/or feeling selfish. And he doesn’t generalize — not all aristocrats are self-absorbed jerks and not all peasants and serfs are good like Karataev. People in War & Peace are mostly excitable and foolish when they are young. Things don’t always go to plan. It’s not a fairy tale, by any means, and Tolstoy is certainly not a fan of neat and happy endings.

I am glad I read it, and I appreciate the efforts of those spearheading #TolstoyTogether. Especially the reminder that everyone can find 30 minutes to read, and if you do so, you can read even a doorstopper of a classic like War & Peace. It’s just not necessarily as fun to read Tolstoy during a global existential crisis as I thought it might be.

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