Reading War and Peace has been a life-long dream of mine, inspired by my father who took the book on a Gold Coast family holiday and vowed to read a hundred pages a day and finish it over the September school holidays, which he did. Over Christmas and the first half of January this new year, I read my way through the novel’s 1000 plus pages, slowing my pace to allow for the multitude of characters, the historical detail, and Tolstoy’s analysis of battle strategy and musings about the purpose of our lives and the causes of war. It felt like reading a book about all of life.
One of the big questions Leo Tolstoy considers in his four-volume War and Peace is why people go to war and commit mass slaughter as Napoleon did in his invasion of Russia in the early 1800s. He examines this question through the stories of a brilliantly imagined set of sympathetic characters, both Russian and French.
The combination of different kinds of writing in the one book (narrative, historical, analytical, philosophical) is unusual in modern literature. Anna Funder’s Wifedom is the only recent one I can think of that does the same genre-switching except in smaller bites for a modern audience. I enjoyed following the thoughts and the creative genius of Tolstoy and tried to read every sentence, only skimming the second part of the Epilogue, a lengthy abstract discussion of the force underlying all military conflict.
According to the translator of this 2017 edition, Tolstoy came under a lot of criticism for the sheer number of characters in War and Peace. The principal characters were Nicholai, Natasha, Sonya and Petya Rostov, Pierre Bezuchov and Marya Volkonsky although multiple characters in their extended families also play a large part. In addition, Tolstoy gives vivid physical descriptions and stories to the many other characters who include soldiers, peasants, army generals and adjutants, socialites, politicians and even Bonaparte and Tsar Alexander themselves. In showing us their thoughts, Tolstoy reveals the variety of ambitions and motivations people hold and the human flaws whose consequences include military action.
It was a privilege to read War and Peace over the summer holidays. The work deserves its place in the literary canon. If you have time to devote to this classic, you will be rewarded with a wonderful love story and much to contemplate about why we go to war.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy,
translated by Richard Paver and Larissa Volokhonsky
Published by Vintage Books, Random House, 2017
ISBN: 97817848871949, 1296 pages.