War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky)
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I have a long and vexed history with this book. This is my fifth try at reading War and Peace over about 20 years, and in each of the prior attempts I petered out somewhere in the first half of the book. I've never arrived at a satisfactory explanation for why precisely I couldn't seem to finish it. I devoured Dostoevsky's corpus, ate Chekhov whole, and sampled Gogol with pleasure. I clearly enjoy 19th century Russian literature, but every time I arrived at Tolstoy, I'd start, struggle, and eventually give up.
I'm not sure I could've articulated it before now, but I think, ultimately, a combination of Tolstoy's social focus and his tone made for very unsympathetic characters, which I found exhausting. Dostoevsky and Chekhov centered people from a variety of backgrounds, including middle class or working class people, and their characters, while occasionally overdrawn for comic effect, mostly struggled with relatable problems. By contrast, almost everyone in War and Peace is a preening, endlessly self-conscious aristocrat, who is either deeply concerned about their astronomical annual income or ruinously unconcerned about the same. And while I've certainly got a soft spot for the medieval national epics and Arthurian legends (which obviously feature heroic aristocrats), the aristos in War and Peace are overwhelmingly vain, mean, or silly, to include the main characters. In short, I think I wasn't ready to read a book this long centering on relatively unsympathetic characters whom the author, at times, can barely refrain from mocking!
That said, what I hadn't seen in my prior failed attempts was the dramatic shifts in the second half of the book. When Napoleon invades Russia the action accelerates, and the plot suddenly becomes much more compelling. And, more importantly, the characters (well, some of them, anyway) begin to grow as people, although most of the main characters never quite shake off their essential ridiculousness. I still struggled with the first half of the book this time, but the second half mostly paid me for my labor.
Overall, the writing itself is excellent, with some extremely memorable set pieces--the extended metaphor of Moscow as an abandoned beehive was particular remarkable. The occasional glimpses into the rich interiority of a few of the characters were very rewarding.
But there was one genuinely unpleasant recurring stylistic feature. The author periodically begins speaking directly to the reader, ignoring the internal world of the novel, mostly to expound on his preferred theory of history and historical events. These digressions are lengthy, repetitive, and not particularly interesting at this remove. I'm sure his rejection of the "Great Man" theory of history felt fresh and compelling in the 19th century, but his presentation of this singular idea is simultaneously shallow and redundant, playing the same note over and over. Unfortunately, the volume of the historical commentary only increased as the events accelerated, which only sharpened my impatience with content that I already found tedious.
In sum, the book has some excellent and charming portions, but there's just so much to wade through on the way there. I think my initial half-formed prejudice that War and Peace does not compare favorably with Dostoevsky's novels is essentially vindicated. I feel like a philistine saying it, but War and Peace would have been significantly better as a much shorter book, which I cannot say about any of Dostoevsky's equally lengthy novels.