Leo Tolstoy War and Peace

An Evaluation of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy



Some tasks are necessary and must be done immediately, some are easily knocked off the to-do list, but other weightier ones must be postponed until the time is right. I recently completed reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy because my children are grown and I’m divorced—footloose and fancy free. The “novel” is a wonderful piece of literature and the translation is excellent, but I cannot recommend it to everyone because it is very long (the reader must have time) and is divided among the romantic lives of the main characters, the war experiences of these characters, and the author’s philosophy regarding the causes and effects of historical movements.

I had tried to read War and Peace at earlier times in my life. I found those early versions uninteresting because they had been shorter by several hundred pages and read like romantic historical novels. I wound up picking through them rather than being absorbed by them. This lack of attraction annoyed me because I had read other stories by Tolstoy that I had both enjoyed and admired (“How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Resurrection). When the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky came out, I was intrigued and read some excerpts. The writing excited me as I had not been excited before by this book. I bought a copy and began reading.

I began reading at the beginning of Christmas vacation in 2007. I read 300 pages during those two weeks and became enchanted with the characters. However, I had a heavy schedule of classes the next semester and was not able to read so rapidly; I covered about twenty-five pages a week, so by the end of the sixteen-week term, I had progressed to approximately page 700. During the summer, I had a light schedule and made it to page 1100 by the end of August when classes began for the fall of 2008. I completed the book in September: 1215 pages of text and 68 pages of notes and appendices.

Anyone can see what a task completing the book was. In our modern busyness with the distractions of multimedia communications—television, Internet, radio, magazines, cell phone (especially in the middle of a hotly contested presidential race)—staying on task for a long project for which one receives no monetary reward is difficult. During that time, I was also writing a science-fiction novel. Yet, I persisted, for the writing in War and Peace is lovely, the characters enthralling and the circumstances true to life and history. Aleksandr Genis agrees, “No one will say that Tolstoy was a writer of few words, but it is hard to call him longwinded. Reading War and Peace is like going on vacation: you’re sorry when it’s over” (winter 2006-7).

The most tedious part of the book is the chapters devoted to Tolstoy’s ruminations on the historical inevitability of social movements. His evidence revolves around Napoleon’s attempts to conquer Europe, so his evidence is limited in scope. Indeed, once I got the gist of his thesis, I found his reiterations extremely taxing, boring and almost impassable; for instance, look at the following passage which occurs on page 987, so the reader knows it is at least the tenth time the idea has been put forth:

"The totality of causes of phenomena is inaccessible to the human mind. But the need to seek causes has been put into the soul of man. And the human mind, without grasping in their countlessness and complexity the conditions of phenomena, of which each separately may appear as a cause, takes hold of the first, most comprehensible approximation and says: here is the cause."

It is well written and well translated—“The English-speaking world is indebted to these two magnificent translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, for revealing more of its hidden riches than any who have tried to translate the book before” (Figes 2007)—but mind-numbing after the tenth repetition. In short, Tolstoy’s idea is that great men do not make history, but are pulled by historical and social forces into doing what they do along with all the others high to low of the same culture. Tolstoy’s return to this message again and again both irritated and annoyed me. Although I agree with his general thesis, I wanted to get on with the story. Again Genis concurs, “Philosophy is, after all, never definitive. The last word always belongs to life and death—or, in other words, to war and peace.”

Nevertheless, the war sections are wonderfully drawn and excitingly portrayed. The long days of boredom of troops relieved by frantic, death-dealing battle ring true. One can envision the uniforms and horses and cannon and feel the clash of lines of battle, the exploding shells, the screaming bullets, the cries of agony of the wounded, the confusion of the officers and men. Regard this passage of a coming battle:

"The fog was so thick that, though day was breaking, one could not see ten paces ahead. Bushes looked like enormous trees, level places like cliffs and slopes. Everywhere, on all sides, one might run into an enemy invisible ten paces away. But the columns marched for a long time through the same fog, going down and up hills, past gardens and fences, over new, incomprehensible terrain, without coming across the enemy anywhere" (270).

Prince Andrei, one of the main characters, is so taken up by battle lust that he longs to be part of a great charge, but is disappointed afterward by the chaos and confusion.

The best parts of the book are the human stories of Prince Andrei, Natasha, Pierre and Marya, on whom the book is centered (Nemser 2008). Prince Andrei’s first wife dies in childbirth, but the baby boy lives. Marya is Andrei’s very religious sister, who thinks she will never marry and serves to help Andrei with the child and their aged father. Prince Andrei meets and falls in love with the beautiful, elegant Natasha when she is only sixteen and she returns his love, but the parents will not allow her to marry without a year of engagement. Meanwhile, he goes off to serve his country. Natasha is unfaithful (she’s only a teenager) and the engagement is broken and the two do not see each other again until near the end of the novel after the war. Natasha regrets her silly romance that hurt Andrei while Marya has met someone else who wants to marry, so the two reverse positions. Natasha becomes dedicated to serving others while Marya marries. Tall, overweight Pierre has been a good friend to all of them while having his own fortunate inheritance, but unfortunate marriage. When Natasha and Andrei meet again, he is dying of his wounds, but when he realizes who is nursing him, the dialogue is revealing and true to their emotions:

“You?” he said. “What happiness!”

With a quick but careful movement, Natasha moved closer to him on her knees and, carefully taking his hand, bent her head over it and began to kiss it, barely touching it with her lips.

“Forgive me!” she said in a whisper, raising her head and glancing at him, “Forgive me!”

“I love you,” said Prince Andrei.

“Forgive . . .”

“Forgive what?” asked Prince Andrei.

“Forgive me for what I di . . . did,” Natasha said in a barely, audible, faltering whisper, and she began to kiss his hand more quickly, barely touching it with her lips.

“I love you more, better than before,” said Prince Andrei, raising her face with his hands so that he could see her eyes.” (922)

The Prince dies, but later Natasha and Pierre, both made wiser by their experiences with love and death, marry and create a warm, loving family.

War and Peace is a great novel with interesting characters for whom the reader wishes the best and suffers with their human struggles with romance and conflict. Despite its length and tedious philosophizing, the adventure with the characters is well worth the time and persistence. Best of all, the translation is the best ever and, I believe, renders the original Russian into an English that is both true to its source but literarily worthy. Alexander Nemser compares it to another translation published the same year, and Pevear and Volokhonsky, the American husband and Russian wife team, win the comparison by a large margin (2008).


Works Cited

Figes, Orlando. "Tolstoy's Real Hero." New York Review of Books 54.18 (2007).

Genis, Aleksandr. "War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century." winter 2006-7. LINCC. 12 November 2008 .

Nemser, Alexander. "The World Writing." 10 January 2008. The New Republic online. 12 November 2008 .

Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokohnsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.




I think this essay is self-explanatory.  Follow these links to translations by Pevear and Volokohnsky:

The Brothers Karamasov ; War and Peace (Vintage Classics)

I also subsequently read Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation of The Brothers Karamasov by Feodor Dostoevsky;  once again the husband-wife team of translators made this very difficult story of four brothers (one of whom has killed their father) accessible to the English reader while preserving its Russianness.