My great memory of this summer is reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” In all these years I never had. In college I majored in British and American literature, so didn’t have to. I expected I’d catch up with it along the way, but I didn’t. For one thing it was huge, more than 1,000 pages, a real commitment, and one that involved patronyms, lineages and Russian existential gloom. Also, at some point in my 40s I pretty much stopped reading fiction and was drawn almost exclusively to nonfiction—histories and biographies. From youth I had read novels hoping to find out what life is, what grown-ups do, how others experience life. Now I wanted only what happened, what did we learn, how did it all turn out.
But something got in my brain the past few months, that there were great books I hadn’t read and ought to. My mind went back to something George Will wrote about William F. Buckley, that later in life he’d finally read “Moby-Dick” and told friends: To think I might have died without having read it.
And so in late July I picked up the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation, which I gathered isn’t considered the greatest but was approved by Tolstoy himself, and finished it this week. And, well, to think I might have died without having read it.
It was stupendous. At some point I understood I hadn’t made a commitment of time but entered a world. It is about life—parties and gossip and thwarted elopements in the night, religious faith and class differences and society, men and women and personal dreams and private shames. It is about military strategy, politics and the nature of court life, a world that exists whether the court is that of Czar Alexander in 1812, or the White House or a governor’s office today. And of course it is about the Napoleonic wars, and Russia’s triumph after Napoleon’s invasion.
It begins with a whoosh: “Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.” This is Anna Pavlovna Scherer, the Perle Mesta of St. Petersburg and a favorite of the empress, at one of her grand receptions. It will be seven years before Napoleon invades her country but she had her eye on him and clocked him early: “I really believe he is Antichrist.” The prince to whom she’s speaking shrinks back, suggests she’s excitable. “Can one be calm in times like these if one has any feeling?” she asks. “You are staying the whole evening I hope!” In the end, what she cares about is the party. So does most everyone else.
I didn’t understand what good company Tolstoy is. The Russian general Pfuel, an ethnic German, is “self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth.” A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally as irresistibly attractive. “An Englishman is self-assured, as being of the best organized state of the world.” “A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known.”
One of Napoleon’s commanders rejects better quarters and sets himself up in a peasant’s hut on the field. “Marshal Davout was one of those men who purposely put themselves in most depressing conditions to have a justification for being gloomy. For the same reason they are always hard at work and in a hurry.”
“Anatole, with the partiality dull-witted people have for any conclusion they have reached by their own reasoning, repeated the argument.”
Tolstoy’s Napoleon is a puffed up poseur, not so much confident and bold as “intoxicated by the crimes he has committed so successfully.” “His whole short corpulent figure with broad thick shoulders, and chest and stomach involuntarily protruding, had that imposing and stately appearance one sees in men of forty who live in comfort.” “Only what took place within his own mind interested him. Nothing outside himself had any significance for him, because everything in the world, it seemed to him, depended entirely on his will.”
A small tragedy of humanity is that “man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul.” And so man, in the form of historians, makes up stories. Napoleon, at the battle of Borodino, did all he’d done in previous battles, but this time he didn’t triumph. Why? Because, researchers say, he had a cold. No, Tolstoy says, that isn’t it! Some historians say Moscow burned because Napoleon set it on fire for revenge. Others say the Russians lit the blaze rather than let him rule there. Nonsense, Tolstoy says: Moscow burned down because it was a city made of wood. The French soldiers who occupied it cooked and lit candles and fell asleep and stumbled about. Moscow’s inhabitants had fled; there was no one to watch things and no fire department.
There are beautiful set pieces. Count Pierre, sick, starving, a prisoner of Napoleon’s army, on a constant forced march without shoes, sets his entire intellect to understanding the truth of life. All he has experienced tells him “that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.” An epiphany follows: “That nothing in this world is terrible.” “Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. . . . To love life is to love God.”
His character is transformed. Once he waited to discover good qualities in people before caring for them. Now he loved them first, “and by loving people without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving them.”
I read this in a hotel in Ireland after visiting the site of a 19th-century Marian apparition in the town of Knock. It was a peaceful place and felt holy. Pierre would have been comfortable there.
And so the lessons of my War and Peace summer.
Feeling such love for a great work did something important to me. For the first time in some years I felt freed for long periods of an affliction common to many, certainly journalists, the compulsion to reach for a device to find out what’s happening, what’s new. But I already knew the news. Pierre was in love with Natasha. Prince Andrei was wounded at Borodino. Princess Mary was saved by Nicholas’s intervention with the serfs. That was all I had to know and it was enough, it was the real news.
Don’t be afraid to visit old worlds. Man is man, wherever he is you can follow.
Sometimes a thing is called a masterpiece because it is a masterpiece.
When you allow a past work of art to enter your mind and imagination you are embarked on a kind of reclamation project, a rescue mission. As you read, Nicholas and Sonya are alive, but Tolstoy himself is still alive. He isn’t gone, his mind is still producing, he continues in human consciousness. You are continuing something. You should feel satisfaction in this.