LINDSAY: Hey Princess!
Yeah, yeah, for the next It’s Lit episode--what do you want to do for the next topic?
PRINCESS: Something snappy!
We’re thinking fun!
Lindsay: something SHORT
Princess: You know, something quick and digestible.
LINDSAY: It’s not like this script needs to be War & Peace.
LINDSAY: So it’s finally come to this.
It’s finally time we talk about it.
The big book.
The long boy.
That novel you negatively compare everything and anything to when things start to get long
and unwieldy.
PRINCESS: That Ur example of books that are almost too long to be allowed, that only nerds
and pedants read so they can say they have.
The GOAT of literary humble bragging, in whom’s shadow Joyce’s Ulysses and Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow quake.
BOTH: War and Peace.
LINDSAY: So you’ve read it… right?
PRINCESS: I thought you had.
According to Tolstoy himself, War and Peace was "not a novel, even less is it a poem,
and still less a historical chronicle."
And in this day and age of publishing, where word count, “readability”, and topical
relevance are the lifeline of getting a novel to print, we look at books like War & Peace
as something of a relic.
Whereas most publishers today would advise that general adult fiction hover around 120k
words, Tolstoy was perfectly comfortable clocking in at a cool 587k words with War & Peace.
Which, while we’re here, let’s dispel a couple of notions real quick about it being
the longest book.
Other popular books of similar or greater length include: Lord of the Rings, Les Miserables,
Atlas Shrugged
But these other books, despite their length, have embedded themselves in the public consciousness
more than War & Peace-- And yet W&P floats on our periphery as mostly being code for
“long” and “Russian”.
So what gives?
So how does one even begin to describe War and Peace?
In the words of Northwestern University professor and literary critic, Gary Saul Morson.
“With its endless plot lines that go nowhere, its innumerable characters who appear only
to disappear, its endless mass of disconnected and contingent events, the book seems a fabric
of lost threads, a work without structure and backbone, it [...] ought to be a failure.
And yet it is plainly the greatest novel ever written.
Well, that … simplified things???
It’s hard to condense War & Peace’s plot down to something easily digestible--this
is why every adaptation of it tends to be 300 hours long like the BBC adaptations, or
focused on only short sections, like the musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,
or just….
Bad like the Audrey Hepburn version from 1956.
But at its heart, War and Peace concerns itself with the lives of three young nobles throughout
the beginning, height, and post-War years of Russia’s foray in the Napoleonic Wars.
There’s Pierre, a nerd of inhuman strength who comes into wealth and nobility by circumstance,
and angsts about how to use these resources ethically and find personal happiness.
There’s Natasha, the saucy ingenue who feels pressured to marry well because of her family’s
financial carelessness and her disquiet at not being able to follow her heart.
And then there’s Andrei - the jock prince from old money, who finds his life so deeply
unfulfilling to the point of nihilism where he’s like “Die in war for glory?
Sounds cool, pencil me in.”
while the book follows their lives over the span of fifteen years, Tolstoy also manages
to weave in and out of the lives of hundreds of other characters--including real historical
figures, like Napoleon Bonaparte.
even from its first publication, readers were
hard pressed to be able to classify it, with its operatic scale, and large, tangential
essays inserted into the narrative… you know, for flavor.
So what about this makes War and Peace inherently memorable, besides being something literary
size-queens could rejoice over?
War and Peace was first published as a magazine serial between 1865 and 1867 under the title
The Year 1805, and subsequently published in its entirety as War and Peace in 1869 (nice).
Tolstoy originally intended it to be about the life of a Decembrist aristocrat returning
from exile in Siberia in the 1850s.
But then he decided he couldn’t just write about that, so he ALSO needed to give context
and write about--
The Decembrist Revolt of 1825, when a section of aristocrats/military officers politely
rebelled against the new Czar of Russia, Nicholas I.
But Tolstoy, who is a lore fanboy, decides one also can’t talk about the Decembrist
Revolution without talking about the War of 1812 and the Napoleonic invasion of Russia.
So he writes himself into a 600k word corner about that instead.
Relatable author content.
But more importantly, fiction writing du jour was in a strange spot in the 1860s.
Popular fiction wavered between quickly-published, topical stories that Tolstoy despised--thinking
of them as literary clickbait that did nothing to advance the craft--and a love of longer
historical fiction like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which Tolstoy found overly romantic
and solipsistic--only celebrating “important men” when he believed that the day-to-day
lives of average people were what really mattered.
Tolstoy’s frustration with writing that pertained to real life and history could be
best summed up in hi own words:
When an officer fell on the field of Borodino [...] do not imagine that he rejoiced about
saving his fatherland [...]. On the contrary he thought about his mother, the woman he
had loved, the joys and smallness of life [...]. And Napoleon, Kutuzov, the Grand Army...
all seemed to him pitiful and insignificant by comparison.
With that in mind, War & Peace becomes a Las Vegas buffet of questions regarding ethics:
What does it mean to love one’s country when its actions wreak violence and sow discord?
What obligations do we have to our fellow humans when wealth has placed us in a position
of comfort?
Is glory of the self greater than love of another?
And should you really, truly be allowed to wrestle a bear after drinking enough vodka
to kill a horse?
(Yes, this also happens.)
Even though it was immediately popular upon publication, War & Peace was criticized on
both sides of the political aisle--it focused too much on the nobility and Russian’s serfdom
and imperial past to progressives, and to conservatives it dragged notable figures of
the country’s past through the mud and was generally “unpatriotic.”
And perhaps that is War and Peace’s most enduring quality---that, while Tolstoy understood
capturing objective truth was impossible, it was important to look at the interior lives
of the common Man to get to the heart of truth.
That literature is not just about heroes and villains, but, as writer Henry James once
described War & Peace, the “wonderful mass of life.”
There’s a relative lack of English-language scholarship devoted specifically to War & Peace,
especially in recent years, and one has to wonder how much of this is because of the
book’s sheer scale and intimidating reputation and how much of it is because it was Tolstoy’s
intention to not make it easy to dissect.
In his essay for the Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, Gary Saul Morson had this to say:
Tolstoy explains that he has deliberately avoided structure and closure, because those
usual literary devices violate presentness.
Where there is structure, there is no contingency, and each present moment is already weighted
by the advance plan into which it must fit.
But life is not like that; it is rife with contingency and loose ends are never all resolved.
An author who truly aspires to realism must find an alternative to structure…
Life for Tolstoy was not characterized by the binaries of good or bad, hero or villain,
great or small, comedic or tragic--but by where people’s actions fell on the constantly
changing gradient between.
He understood that characters feel more real to readers in their small triumphs--comforting
a friend, picking away at a balalaika--and failures.
He understood that nuance is a feature, not a bug.
He clearly had never been on Twitter.
LINDSAY: War & Peace’s legacy to the literary world is not so much its length but it’s
contribution to Realism and the the idea that everyone--from kings to sled drivers--has
a vast interiority within them.
PRINCESS: Pair this with Tolstoy’s own words on art--“If art is an important matter,
a spiritual blessing, essential for all men [...] then it should be accessible to everyone.
And if, as in our day, it is not accessible to all men, then one of two things: either
art is not the vital matter it is represented to be or that art which we call art is not
the real thing.”
LINDSAY: Though we take it for granted in general fiction today, Tolstoy helped to up-end
the idea that literature should only concern itself and be written for the feelings of
larger-than-life characters and heroes.
Midway through the novel, after our heroine Natasha has disgraced herself and been shunned
by Moscow society, Pierre goes to visit her to rebuke her as everyone else has.
But when he sees her complete despair, he is inevitably compelled to comfort Natasha
as a friend would and quietly realize his love for her.
Tolstoy describes the small and intimate revelation as Pierre leaves her house as follows:
“An immense expanse of dark starry sky presented itself to Pierre’s eyes.
[...] Surrounded and sprinkled on all sides by stars [...] shone the enormous and brilliant
comet of 1812…. which was said to portend all kinds of woes and the end of the world.
In Pierre, however, that comet … aroused no feeling of fear.
On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, at this bright comet which,
having traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed
suddenly—like an arrow piercing the earth—to remain fixed in a chosen spot… shining and
displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars.
It seemed to Pierre that this comet fully responded to what was passing in his own softened
and uplifted soul, now blossoming into a new life.”
PRINCESS: In War and Peace, Tolstoy gave us a defining viewpoint of hope: that in a weary
world of global upheaval, war, death, and political machination, the goodness of everyday
people all feels minute and fleeting--but that the goodness is what survives.
(But please don’t wrestle bears, we beg you)