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authorguy's review against another edition
4.0
Exceptional translation of this classic. I gave it 4 out of 5 stars because while the book is magnificent, Tolstoy devolves into political philosophy in the last few chapters which to me were heavy handed and went on too long. It's like he wrote one enduring classic novel and then tacked on a political essay which should have been published separately. . But other than that he's a master storyteller with his dual settings for the novel the war against the invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte's army in 1812 and the high society soirees and lifestyles of the wealthy in Moscow and in their other enclaves. It's rich in actual, detailed history populated with real persons. Tolstoy has the wealthy speaking and dressing like the French, a holdover of the influence of Catherine The Great.
While reading the Wiki article on this book I became aware of details I'd missed the first time. Therefore, I'll be reading it again. But due to the length and complexity of this book, you don't merely read it, you experience it.
While reading the Wiki article on this book I became aware of details I'd missed the first time. Therefore, I'll be reading it again. But due to the length and complexity of this book, you don't merely read it, you experience it.
erinhmm's review against another edition
4.0
All I knew of this book was that my friend read it for AP Lit and she could answer every single prompt based on this plot. I am so glad I finished this book via Reddit sub.
As a book, it’s a classic. It’s part essays, part fiction covering years and multiple families. We get a few chapters from Napoleon’s perspective. It’s funny and sarcastic at times and other times I have no idea what point Tolstoy is making.
I really recommend reading it.
As a book, it’s a classic. It’s part essays, part fiction covering years and multiple families. We get a few chapters from Napoleon’s perspective. It’s funny and sarcastic at times and other times I have no idea what point Tolstoy is making.
I really recommend reading it.
catnbooks's review against another edition
5.0
I heard this book on tape via you tube while cleaning the house. I’d find myself drifting into the images- such a spectacular writer!
viscountess_black's review against another edition
3.0
Finally finished it.
What to say about it? I absolutely despise the ending couples, the endings of the characters, how Natasha and Sonya could have such an awful life at the end. Pierre too. I kind of liked him at the beginning, two books later, I don't anymore. I loved the political and socio-cultural analysis of Tolstoy and his descriptions of the war, tho. It was interesting to read the development and end of the war through the author's eyes.
What to say about it? I absolutely despise the ending couples, the endings of the characters, how Natasha and Sonya could have such an awful life at the end. Pierre too. I kind of liked him at the beginning, two books later, I don't anymore. I loved the political and socio-cultural analysis of Tolstoy and his descriptions of the war, tho. It was interesting to read the development and end of the war through the author's eyes.
bthanson's review against another edition
5.0
COVID read. Recommend audiobook for those scared of length.
helenbellauthor's review against another edition
3.0
I had mixed feelings about this book - mostly annoyance, but occasional moments of satisfaction.
As one of the great Russian classics, it's been on my to read list for some time, I guess I'd expected the characters to be more developed and individual in the way the Brontes or Jane Austen would have made them, but I spent most of the first half of the book trying to distinguish the key characters, other than Pierre and Natasha. Andrei and Nicholai were annoying indistinguishable from each other, making it difficult to follow the plot, and all the women were very underwritten except for Natasha (who stood out for me less as the beautiful heroine than as a girl who made strange affected noises all the time - I couldn't make myself like her) and Marie who managed to redeeem herself by falling short of saint-like status every now and then.
There are the whinges. The good points - Pierre's growth from man to boy, but without losing his essential innocence; the war scenes, from pitched battles to the soldiers' unwilling involvement in the vengeful aftermath, and the recognition that you should ignore the final analysis of any battle which suggests that one side gathered better intelligence and then acted with great wisdom. Tolstoy argues, correctly I feel, that no great leader really knew what was going on during their battles, they just made choices that paid off in the end and, as Wellington admitted of Waterloo, could have gone very differently.
As a fan of writers like Bernard Cornwell, it was good to see a non-British view of some key European conflicts too. I shan't be put off reading other Russian classics - yet! - and I feel inspired to get more alternative points of view on conflicts that I know only from the British point of view.
As one of the great Russian classics, it's been on my to read list for some time, I guess I'd expected the characters to be more developed and individual in the way the Brontes or Jane Austen would have made them, but I spent most of the first half of the book trying to distinguish the key characters, other than Pierre and Natasha. Andrei and Nicholai were annoying indistinguishable from each other, making it difficult to follow the plot, and all the women were very underwritten except for Natasha (who stood out for me less as the beautiful heroine than as a girl who made strange affected noises all the time - I couldn't make myself like her) and Marie who managed to redeeem herself by falling short of saint-like status every now and then.
There are the whinges. The good points - Pierre's growth from man to boy, but without losing his essential innocence; the war scenes, from pitched battles to the soldiers' unwilling involvement in the vengeful aftermath, and the recognition that you should ignore the final analysis of any battle which suggests that one side gathered better intelligence and then acted with great wisdom. Tolstoy argues, correctly I feel, that no great leader really knew what was going on during their battles, they just made choices that paid off in the end and, as Wellington admitted of Waterloo, could have gone very differently.
As a fan of writers like Bernard Cornwell, it was good to see a non-British view of some key European conflicts too. I shan't be put off reading other Russian classics - yet! - and I feel inspired to get more alternative points of view on conflicts that I know only from the British point of view.
squid_vicious's review against another edition
5.0
500th review!!!
The "Abridged Classics for Lazy People" comic summarizes "War & Peace" as follows: "Everyone is sad. It snows." Hmmm. Accurate, but I have a bit more to say about it than they do. This book has left me full of thoughts and words the way few books have done before.
Though to be fair, how exactly is one supposed to review this? This book might be titled “War & Peace”, but it’s also about the human experience as a whole: the high, the lows, the beauties, the agonies and pretty much everything in between. There are schemes, passionate encounters, fancy soirées, massacres, religious conversions, suicide attempts, duels! The title, in hindsight, is actually a bit reductionist… Everyone knows that the story focuses on four families living in Russia on the eve of the French Invasion led by Napoleon, and how this conflict impacts and changes them - directly or indirectly. This format enabled Tolstoy to create a detailed, layered tapestry of a country and culture – while keeping his readers entertained with what is basically a HUGE soap opera! Albeit, a very well written, very engaging one, with deep philosophical mussing interjected throughout. But let’s be honest here: this is Russia, so melodrama is as inevitable as snow.
I had planned to read “War & Peace” in small increments, spread over a few months, so it wouldn’t feel too imposing – and so I wouldn’t give myself carpal tunnel syndrome carrying that massive doorstopper of a book around (I am usually an absolute fetishist for paper books, but in this specific case, a Kindle copy is the only sane way to travel around with it). It turned out to be so damn good that I plowed through it much faster than anticipated (less than a month!). However it is too epic and intricate for a traditional summary: there are simply too many characters and too much stuff going on in there. So I will do what I did with my review of “Les Misérables” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1361175662) and give you my likes and dislikes about this beautiful, sacred monster of a novel.
I liked:
-Pierre Bezukhov. Because I just love bespectacled, awkward people out of solidarity, but also because he is a man who decides to work on himself following a series of particularly dumb situations (am I the only one who feels bad for the bear?!). There is not a mean bone in this man’s body, which is truly remarkable, but since he naively assumes other people are as honest as he is, that gets him stuck in quite a few pickles. He takes a good, hard look at his life and begins to evolve in an unexpected way. He peels the layers of shenanigans away, and realizes that he is full of kindness and honesty, and tries to do the best he can for the people he cares about. Sometimes, he is very clumsy about it and it can get frustrating to watch him bumble around, but it comes together in the end.
-Andrei Bolkonsky. I didn't like him at first, because he's kind of a dick to his wife, but as soon as he started talking about how sick he was of the superficial high society the silly woman loved so much, and of how he couldn't stand being around dumb and vacuous people, I just nodded and said: "I hear you, dude." Of course, it's a bit extreme to prefer facing the French guns rather than endure more stupid salons, but I sympathized nonetheless. His blend of honor, philosophy and cynicism eventually melted by literary panties, and his epiphany about the senselessness of war after a close brush with death fully redeemed him. Natasha has a bit of a manic-pixie-dream-girl effect on him, where he is shaken out of his funk by her perkiness; that trope usually annoys me, but by that point, I was madly in love with him and just wanted him to get a little bit of happiness (he has officially joined the pantheon of fictional characters I would run away with in a pinch, along with Newland Archer, George Emerson and Gabriel Oak). His ultimate forgiveness towards Natasha and Anatole is deeply moving (though I would have cheered just as much if he had punched the depraved pervert in the ‘nads); I want an alternate ending where the battle of Borodino goes differently for him…
-The struggle those two guys go through to try and apply the philosophy they love so much to the way they live their lives. Sounds weird, huh? But as someone who practices a form of Buddhism that can be defined as a “philosophy of action”, I have a great appreciation for how tricky it can be to take lofty principles and try to act on them in a reality that is very often ethically imperfect. When Pierre joins the Freemasons, he is called upon to live in the service of others, to forgive those who have wronged him and to strive for what can be best be called “enlightenment”. There’s quite a few false starts to his efforts, the world being a complicated mess of a place, but he never gives up, even when if stumbles quite a bit on his way there (after all the masonic stuff, how, exactly, did you think assassination would work out, Pierre?). Similarly, after both of the major battles he gets caught in, Andrei gains a deep understanding of the beauty of the world, of the importance of loving everyone, but in a very different way from Pierre: he first begins by isolating himself to protect the world from what he might do to it (as a result of guilt), he opens up again when he meets Natasha, and eventually buries his pride by forgiving her and Anatole. I am not exaggerating when I say that the image of a forgiving hand extended towards the person who has hurt you the most in the middle of their own suffering is something I might never stop thinking about…
-The fact that the story is set over the better part of a decade allows the main characters to truly grow, evolve and reflect on their lives in ways few characters can in more modern literature. Silly Natasha, for instance, starts out just turning thirteen and by the epilogue, she’s a twenty-eight years-old married woman and mother. Her silly brother Nikolai also changes his views and ways as experiences leave their marks on him. Which brings me to the mastery of characterization I had already admired so much in “Anna Karenina” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/226428270): Tolstoy wrote deeply flawed characters who wrestle with their nature to try and do the right thing for themselves and the people they love. None of them are perfect, and each and every one of them are so real they might as well crawl out of the book, sit down next to you and tell you their stories – and that is just amazing.
-Tolstoy’s praise of intelligent women: he clearly thinks the ditsy ones are uninteresting, and his leading men always go for the clever ones (with the caveat that they seem to accidentally lose their intellect after marriage...). Even Marya, who does not give herself much credit, is smart enough to know when she’s being played for a fool, and how to deal with rather dire situations. In fact, the further I go into the story, the more I grew to appreciate Marya, whom I had originally dismissed as a religious nutcase. She isn’t: she just needed to get out of under her father’s thumb.
-Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky. I have always had a soft spot for crotchety old misanthropes, and this one uses gruffness to hide a tender father’s heart, and I often found him appalling and hilarious simultaneously. Besides, stuck in the middle of nowhere with Lise and mademoiselle Bourienne, wouldn’t you also get cranky? I know I would!
I disliked:
-Hélène Kuragina. Obviously. What a piece of work. She is ultimately the architect of her own downfall, and I felt sad for her near the end, but she is so selfish, manipulative and vicious. I don’t care who she sleeps with, I care about how miserable she makes everyone! Of course, she is using her sexuality, one of the very few powers women had back then, but her deliberate attempt to corrupt Natasha, out of spite towards her husband who admires the young girl so much, is simply egregious. She eventually forgets that despite being married to the richest man in Russia, some mistakes are just not easily forgiven. I mostly felt bad for Pierre, whose feelings for her were genuine at the beginning (yet even he knew something was not quite right with her), and who realized too late that he basically married a viper. Tolstoy is rather coy about her various escapades, which I confess I was slightly disappointed by: I would have enjoyed more sordid details about this notoriously depraved character.
-Natasha Rostova. What can I say, her irreducible bubbliness eventually got grating. I don’t tend to warm up to teenage girl characters, even in classics like this one. And what she did to Andrei, in my humble opinion, is unforgivable. I get it, girl: hormones are a thing, and Anatole is a hot scoundrel, but Jesus! Go sit in a snowbank or something, and calm down! It does get better after the burning of Moscow, when Marya’s calming influence finally gets her to simmer down a bit, but her sixteen-year-old delirium drove me insane. I think what I mostly hated about Natasha is that marriage turns her from a spontaneous and lively creature into a bossy matron almost overnight. This may be simply due to weird societal expectations of women at the time, but it’s no less annoying. Her personality simply vanishes! And you based that character on your wife, Leo? Safe to say her and I would not have been good friends.
-Nikolai Rostov. I know he’s young, ambitious and spoiled, but he could have definitely used a good throttling. If you are going to gamble your family fortune away with a psychopath, don’t complain when your parents pester you about making a marriage of interest! It’s called being a responsible adult, Nikki! Marya and Sonya are too good for you.
-Boris Drubetskoy. Slimy little social climbing creep, you gross me out.
-Amélie Bourienne: why is she there?! To save Marya from making a really bad decision, I know; I still wanted to chuck the book out the window every time she talked – but that might have knocked out an innocent pedestrian. She’s a composite of all the worse stereotypes about French women, and they should have left her behind to deal with Napoleon’s army at the Bolkonsky estate.
-Speaking of stereotypes, Tolstoy’s occasional bouts of patriotism get weird: the French are all petty snobs with inflated egos, he describes the Germans as a bunch of disorganized “sausage makers”… Jeez.
-Battle scenes and rambling passages about military strategy that last too long. Though to be fair, Tolstoy isn’t as long-winded as Hugo when it came to these (short chapters really help with that). I get why these events are part of the story, and I understand that my modern reader’s sensibility simply isn’t used to this. But gawd, I was happy when the fighting was over and done with and we could get back to talking about people! Tolstoy, who was a humanist and a pacifist, wanted to convey to his readers the barbaric and senseless nature of war, and that fighting for glory is an imbecilic notion: no one can say he didn’t reach his goal, but I guess there is no shortcut to make that point!
-Speaking of shortcuts, you can stop reading at Part 2 of the epilogue, because the rest is a long essay about the nature of history and how it was recorded, and how it should be recorded. It can be interesting, but by then, the actual story is over...
I was hoping that keeping the enormous book at home and reading it relatively slowly would mean “War & Peace” wouldn’t take over my life, but it kind of did anyway. I talked about it constantly as I was reading it, to my husband and to anyone who was silly enough to ask me what I was reading these days. I am not sure why Russian literature does this to me, but the exact same thing happened when I read “Doctor Zhivago” earlier this year (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1417971994); I just became completely obsessed. I read up on Tolstoy, on the French Invasion, on the various adaptations of the book that have been brought to the screen (this article especially drew my attention: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/2/15/18223285/war-and-peace-sergei-bondarchuk-adaptation-1966?fbclid=IwAR0daPt0ae5L_b174e0mxtVrt24LPQqBtVlMPHw8c9NNkJ0GPv53dIIGaeY ); it truly became an experience. I knew I would enjoy “War & Peace” when I picked it up, but I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did. It really got under my skin like few books have done before.
To Tolstoy, writing about the generation who fought off Napoleon is a bit like someone my age writing about their grandfather who fought in WWII, there is certainly a certain amount of idealization injected in the story that one needs to be aware of as you travel through this book, as these people were to Tolstoy what the so-called Greatest Generation is to us: we tend to overlook their less honorable moments and focus on their awesomeness. It certainly makes for more exciting storytelling! He also wanted to convey the idea that history is something that is both influenced and felt by everyone, not just the big names: his slightly outdated theories of historiography aside (feel free to skim his appendix on the subject), the idea of showing the impact of major social and political upheaval on the everyday life of a select group of people does shine a light on the fact that we are all affected by what goes on in the world, in small and big ways. In many instances, his musings about events having not one single cause but a multitude of small ones brought to mind teachings about co-dependent arising, which surprised and fascinated me.
As usual with massive classics like this one, they get a bad rep about being too long and dense, the language being too flowery and ornate. That doesn’t usually stop me, but I must say that the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of “War & Peace” I read was neither ponderously written or excessively florid: they seem to have worked very hard to keep Tolstoy’s style alive in their translation, with his use of repetition and rhythm, French passages embedded in the text (in context, this makes total sense), etc., and it was a genuine pleasure to read. This edition also included a helpful list of characters with full Russian names (including patronymics), nicknames and common French versions, so you can untangle who is who as you go through the story if you are not familiar with it. I still think a book this massive requires a good dose of patience, but dismissing its quality based on its age or page count would be a terrible mistake. It is not a perfect book, but it is nevertheless magnificent, very entertaining and important. I know this might sound difficult to believe, but I had a hard time putting it down, as my sore wrists can attest to. Everyone should read this at least once; I know I’ll be re-reading it, and that it has established a new benchmark as to what “amazing literature” means to me.
Too lazy to plow through over a thousand pages of epic Russian storytelling? The 6-part BBC series is very well acted, beautifully shot (with some amazing images having been conjured for some key parts of the story), and my darling James Norton’s glass-cutting jawline is quite lovely to look at (and will definitely put you on #teamAndrei). It’s no substitute for the book, if we’re honest (lack of inner monologue makes some events seem a little bit random at times), but it’s fun, pretty and covers all the important bits very faithfully. And yes, I know the 1956 film with Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrer and Audrey Hepburn is a classic, but may the divine Miss Hepburn forgive me, I found it dated and too clean… It was clearly tailored for its audience, and tiptoed around the more debauched and sordid details – which I happen to enjoy.
The "Abridged Classics for Lazy People" comic summarizes "War & Peace" as follows: "Everyone is sad. It snows." Hmmm. Accurate, but I have a bit more to say about it than they do. This book has left me full of thoughts and words the way few books have done before.
Though to be fair, how exactly is one supposed to review this? This book might be titled “War & Peace”, but it’s also about the human experience as a whole: the high, the lows, the beauties, the agonies and pretty much everything in between. There are schemes, passionate encounters, fancy soirées, massacres, religious conversions, suicide attempts, duels! The title, in hindsight, is actually a bit reductionist… Everyone knows that the story focuses on four families living in Russia on the eve of the French Invasion led by Napoleon, and how this conflict impacts and changes them - directly or indirectly. This format enabled Tolstoy to create a detailed, layered tapestry of a country and culture – while keeping his readers entertained with what is basically a HUGE soap opera! Albeit, a very well written, very engaging one, with deep philosophical mussing interjected throughout. But let’s be honest here: this is Russia, so melodrama is as inevitable as snow.
I had planned to read “War & Peace” in small increments, spread over a few months, so it wouldn’t feel too imposing – and so I wouldn’t give myself carpal tunnel syndrome carrying that massive doorstopper of a book around (I am usually an absolute fetishist for paper books, but in this specific case, a Kindle copy is the only sane way to travel around with it). It turned out to be so damn good that I plowed through it much faster than anticipated (less than a month!). However it is too epic and intricate for a traditional summary: there are simply too many characters and too much stuff going on in there. So I will do what I did with my review of “Les Misérables” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1361175662) and give you my likes and dislikes about this beautiful, sacred monster of a novel.
I liked:
-Pierre Bezukhov. Because I just love bespectacled, awkward people out of solidarity, but also because he is a man who decides to work on himself following a series of particularly dumb situations (am I the only one who feels bad for the bear?!). There is not a mean bone in this man’s body, which is truly remarkable, but since he naively assumes other people are as honest as he is, that gets him stuck in quite a few pickles. He takes a good, hard look at his life and begins to evolve in an unexpected way. He peels the layers of shenanigans away, and realizes that he is full of kindness and honesty, and tries to do the best he can for the people he cares about. Sometimes, he is very clumsy about it and it can get frustrating to watch him bumble around, but it comes together in the end.
-Andrei Bolkonsky. I didn't like him at first, because he's kind of a dick to his wife, but as soon as he started talking about how sick he was of the superficial high society the silly woman loved so much, and of how he couldn't stand being around dumb and vacuous people, I just nodded and said: "I hear you, dude." Of course, it's a bit extreme to prefer facing the French guns rather than endure more stupid salons, but I sympathized nonetheless. His blend of honor, philosophy and cynicism eventually melted by literary panties, and his epiphany about the senselessness of war after a close brush with death fully redeemed him. Natasha has a bit of a manic-pixie-dream-girl effect on him, where he is shaken out of his funk by her perkiness; that trope usually annoys me, but by that point, I was madly in love with him and just wanted him to get a little bit of happiness (he has officially joined the pantheon of fictional characters I would run away with in a pinch, along with Newland Archer, George Emerson and Gabriel Oak). His ultimate forgiveness towards Natasha and Anatole is deeply moving (though I would have cheered just as much if he had punched the depraved pervert in the ‘nads); I want an alternate ending where the battle of Borodino goes differently for him…
-The struggle those two guys go through to try and apply the philosophy they love so much to the way they live their lives. Sounds weird, huh? But as someone who practices a form of Buddhism that can be defined as a “philosophy of action”, I have a great appreciation for how tricky it can be to take lofty principles and try to act on them in a reality that is very often ethically imperfect. When Pierre joins the Freemasons, he is called upon to live in the service of others, to forgive those who have wronged him and to strive for what can be best be called “enlightenment”. There’s quite a few false starts to his efforts, the world being a complicated mess of a place, but he never gives up, even when if stumbles quite a bit on his way there (after all the masonic stuff, how, exactly, did you think assassination would work out, Pierre?). Similarly, after both of the major battles he gets caught in, Andrei gains a deep understanding of the beauty of the world, of the importance of loving everyone, but in a very different way from Pierre: he first begins by isolating himself to protect the world from what he might do to it (as a result of guilt), he opens up again when he meets Natasha, and eventually buries his pride by forgiving her and Anatole. I am not exaggerating when I say that the image of a forgiving hand extended towards the person who has hurt you the most in the middle of their own suffering is something I might never stop thinking about…
-The fact that the story is set over the better part of a decade allows the main characters to truly grow, evolve and reflect on their lives in ways few characters can in more modern literature. Silly Natasha, for instance, starts out just turning thirteen and by the epilogue, she’s a twenty-eight years-old married woman and mother. Her silly brother Nikolai also changes his views and ways as experiences leave their marks on him. Which brings me to the mastery of characterization I had already admired so much in “Anna Karenina” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/226428270): Tolstoy wrote deeply flawed characters who wrestle with their nature to try and do the right thing for themselves and the people they love. None of them are perfect, and each and every one of them are so real they might as well crawl out of the book, sit down next to you and tell you their stories – and that is just amazing.
-Tolstoy’s praise of intelligent women: he clearly thinks the ditsy ones are uninteresting, and his leading men always go for the clever ones (with the caveat that they seem to accidentally lose their intellect after marriage...). Even Marya, who does not give herself much credit, is smart enough to know when she’s being played for a fool, and how to deal with rather dire situations. In fact, the further I go into the story, the more I grew to appreciate Marya, whom I had originally dismissed as a religious nutcase. She isn’t: she just needed to get out of under her father’s thumb.
-Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky. I have always had a soft spot for crotchety old misanthropes, and this one uses gruffness to hide a tender father’s heart, and I often found him appalling and hilarious simultaneously. Besides, stuck in the middle of nowhere with Lise and mademoiselle Bourienne, wouldn’t you also get cranky? I know I would!
I disliked:
-Hélène Kuragina. Obviously. What a piece of work. She is ultimately the architect of her own downfall, and I felt sad for her near the end, but she is so selfish, manipulative and vicious. I don’t care who she sleeps with, I care about how miserable she makes everyone! Of course, she is using her sexuality, one of the very few powers women had back then, but her deliberate attempt to corrupt Natasha, out of spite towards her husband who admires the young girl so much, is simply egregious. She eventually forgets that despite being married to the richest man in Russia, some mistakes are just not easily forgiven. I mostly felt bad for Pierre, whose feelings for her were genuine at the beginning (yet even he knew something was not quite right with her), and who realized too late that he basically married a viper. Tolstoy is rather coy about her various escapades, which I confess I was slightly disappointed by: I would have enjoyed more sordid details about this notoriously depraved character.
-Natasha Rostova. What can I say, her irreducible bubbliness eventually got grating. I don’t tend to warm up to teenage girl characters, even in classics like this one. And what she did to Andrei, in my humble opinion, is unforgivable. I get it, girl: hormones are a thing, and Anatole is a hot scoundrel, but Jesus! Go sit in a snowbank or something, and calm down! It does get better after the burning of Moscow, when Marya’s calming influence finally gets her to simmer down a bit, but her sixteen-year-old delirium drove me insane. I think what I mostly hated about Natasha is that marriage turns her from a spontaneous and lively creature into a bossy matron almost overnight. This may be simply due to weird societal expectations of women at the time, but it’s no less annoying. Her personality simply vanishes! And you based that character on your wife, Leo? Safe to say her and I would not have been good friends.
-Nikolai Rostov. I know he’s young, ambitious and spoiled, but he could have definitely used a good throttling. If you are going to gamble your family fortune away with a psychopath, don’t complain when your parents pester you about making a marriage of interest! It’s called being a responsible adult, Nikki! Marya and Sonya are too good for you.
-Boris Drubetskoy. Slimy little social climbing creep, you gross me out.
-Amélie Bourienne: why is she there?! To save Marya from making a really bad decision, I know; I still wanted to chuck the book out the window every time she talked – but that might have knocked out an innocent pedestrian. She’s a composite of all the worse stereotypes about French women, and they should have left her behind to deal with Napoleon’s army at the Bolkonsky estate.
-Speaking of stereotypes, Tolstoy’s occasional bouts of patriotism get weird: the French are all petty snobs with inflated egos, he describes the Germans as a bunch of disorganized “sausage makers”… Jeez.
-Battle scenes and rambling passages about military strategy that last too long. Though to be fair, Tolstoy isn’t as long-winded as Hugo when it came to these (short chapters really help with that). I get why these events are part of the story, and I understand that my modern reader’s sensibility simply isn’t used to this. But gawd, I was happy when the fighting was over and done with and we could get back to talking about people! Tolstoy, who was a humanist and a pacifist, wanted to convey to his readers the barbaric and senseless nature of war, and that fighting for glory is an imbecilic notion: no one can say he didn’t reach his goal, but I guess there is no shortcut to make that point!
-Speaking of shortcuts, you can stop reading at Part 2 of the epilogue, because the rest is a long essay about the nature of history and how it was recorded, and how it should be recorded. It can be interesting, but by then, the actual story is over...
I was hoping that keeping the enormous book at home and reading it relatively slowly would mean “War & Peace” wouldn’t take over my life, but it kind of did anyway. I talked about it constantly as I was reading it, to my husband and to anyone who was silly enough to ask me what I was reading these days. I am not sure why Russian literature does this to me, but the exact same thing happened when I read “Doctor Zhivago” earlier this year (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1417971994); I just became completely obsessed. I read up on Tolstoy, on the French Invasion, on the various adaptations of the book that have been brought to the screen (this article especially drew my attention: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/2/15/18223285/war-and-peace-sergei-bondarchuk-adaptation-1966?fbclid=IwAR0daPt0ae5L_b174e0mxtVrt24LPQqBtVlMPHw8c9NNkJ0GPv53dIIGaeY ); it truly became an experience. I knew I would enjoy “War & Peace” when I picked it up, but I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did. It really got under my skin like few books have done before.
To Tolstoy, writing about the generation who fought off Napoleon is a bit like someone my age writing about their grandfather who fought in WWII, there is certainly a certain amount of idealization injected in the story that one needs to be aware of as you travel through this book, as these people were to Tolstoy what the so-called Greatest Generation is to us: we tend to overlook their less honorable moments and focus on their awesomeness. It certainly makes for more exciting storytelling! He also wanted to convey the idea that history is something that is both influenced and felt by everyone, not just the big names: his slightly outdated theories of historiography aside (feel free to skim his appendix on the subject), the idea of showing the impact of major social and political upheaval on the everyday life of a select group of people does shine a light on the fact that we are all affected by what goes on in the world, in small and big ways. In many instances, his musings about events having not one single cause but a multitude of small ones brought to mind teachings about co-dependent arising, which surprised and fascinated me.
As usual with massive classics like this one, they get a bad rep about being too long and dense, the language being too flowery and ornate. That doesn’t usually stop me, but I must say that the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of “War & Peace” I read was neither ponderously written or excessively florid: they seem to have worked very hard to keep Tolstoy’s style alive in their translation, with his use of repetition and rhythm, French passages embedded in the text (in context, this makes total sense), etc., and it was a genuine pleasure to read. This edition also included a helpful list of characters with full Russian names (including patronymics), nicknames and common French versions, so you can untangle who is who as you go through the story if you are not familiar with it. I still think a book this massive requires a good dose of patience, but dismissing its quality based on its age or page count would be a terrible mistake. It is not a perfect book, but it is nevertheless magnificent, very entertaining and important. I know this might sound difficult to believe, but I had a hard time putting it down, as my sore wrists can attest to. Everyone should read this at least once; I know I’ll be re-reading it, and that it has established a new benchmark as to what “amazing literature” means to me.
Too lazy to plow through over a thousand pages of epic Russian storytelling? The 6-part BBC series is very well acted, beautifully shot (with some amazing images having been conjured for some key parts of the story), and my darling James Norton’s glass-cutting jawline is quite lovely to look at (and will definitely put you on #teamAndrei). It’s no substitute for the book, if we’re honest (lack of inner monologue makes some events seem a little bit random at times), but it’s fun, pretty and covers all the important bits very faithfully. And yes, I know the 1956 film with Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrer and Audrey Hepburn is a classic, but may the divine Miss Hepburn forgive me, I found it dated and too clean… It was clearly tailored for its audience, and tiptoed around the more debauched and sordid details – which I happen to enjoy.
authorcagray's review against another edition
This might have been over-ambitious of me, as it's incredibly long... I started listening, realized I had no idea who was who, and then paused and read a synopsis of the plot just so I could tell who to pay attention to and who were extraneous characters that didn't really matter. But Tolstoy introduces so many people, first and last names, and gives details that lead me to believe they're ultimately going to come back into the story that I still couldn't keep track. The synopsis sounded interesting but I think I'd have to physically read it rather than listen, in order to keep everybody straight in my head.
pris_asagiri's review against another edition
3.0
Writing: 5
Story: 3.5
I'll repeat what everyone else I know has said: W&P is shockingly readable. I think "Russian Novel" and "1200+ Pages" and I think "brain hurt". But just like Anna Karenina, Tolstoy writes beautifully and timelessly. And boy, can this man write. And lets give his wife props for copying this out by hand while mothering their kids something like 7x. Seriously Hadley, Hemingway let you off easy. (Kidding)
But the story. If you like war or history or minute details of strategy (Risk fans listen up), this is your book. But I just couldn't give a fig about it. And the non-war stuff felt overly dramatic. Maybe I'm influenced by the ads for the BBC's interpretation for their mini-series, but it felt like the characters belonged in a CW series (Pretty Little Liars: St. Petersburg).
There was a LOT of drama and angst and heart flutterings. Shakespeare would be jealous. I liked the male characters. (Prince Andrei!) I liked the female characters less so. Lady moustaches aside, I just wanted them to do something other than be portrayed as trollops or saints. Natasha was the most interesting one and then went off the rails (I guess like all women?! *eye roll*). And what was up with Sonia? Next on Days of Our Russian Lives.
I gave AK 4 stars because I liked the story despite AK's overly emotional ending. And even though this was the superior written story, I just couldn't give it more. So let's call it a solid 3.5 stars.
I read the P&V translation although I have a different one too. I really preferred their translation and word choices. But because they left in all the French, I found the flipping to the footnotes enormously tedious, especially when there were endnotes as well. It really broke of the rhythm of my reading. I'd have preferred the French in the footnotes (what can I say, I took Spanish in high school).
I'm assuming this is the literary equivalent to how climbing Mt. Everest must feel like. Another monumental big book done. It feels good to have read. It feels even better now that it's behind me.
Story: 3.5
I'll repeat what everyone else I know has said: W&P is shockingly readable. I think "Russian Novel" and "1200+ Pages" and I think "brain hurt". But just like Anna Karenina, Tolstoy writes beautifully and timelessly. And boy, can this man write. And lets give his wife props for copying this out by hand while mothering their kids something like 7x. Seriously Hadley, Hemingway let you off easy. (Kidding)
But the story. If you like war or history or minute details of strategy (Risk fans listen up), this is your book. But I just couldn't give a fig about it. And the non-war stuff felt overly dramatic. Maybe I'm influenced by the ads for the BBC's interpretation for their mini-series, but it felt like the characters belonged in a CW series (Pretty Little Liars: St. Petersburg).
There was a LOT of drama and angst and heart flutterings. Shakespeare would be jealous. I liked the male characters. (Prince Andrei!) I liked the female characters less so. Lady moustaches aside, I just wanted them to do something other than be portrayed as trollops or saints. Natasha was the most interesting one and then went off the rails (I guess like all women?! *eye roll*). And what was up with Sonia?
Spoiler
Better to be near your love...and his wife and children than go find a life of your own?I gave AK 4 stars because I liked the story despite AK's overly emotional ending. And even though this was the superior written story, I just couldn't give it more. So let's call it a solid 3.5 stars.
I read the P&V translation although I have a different one too. I really preferred their translation and word choices. But because they left in all the French, I found the flipping to the footnotes enormously tedious, especially when there were endnotes as well. It really broke of the rhythm of my reading. I'd have preferred the French in the footnotes (what can I say, I took Spanish in high school).
I'm assuming this is the literary equivalent to how climbing Mt. Everest must feel like. Another monumental big book done. It feels good to have read. It feels even better now that it's behind me.