Peace > War

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (trans. by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Volume One

I was all aflutter when this translation came out, and it took me awhile (a year or so) to actually purchase it. And then it took me even longer to read it. I've mentioned before that I read W&P right after high school and fell dramatically in love with it. But how would I feel 13 years later?

So here I am this summer, reading this translation. Marveling at all the French. (Apparently P & V's decision to leave so much of the original French, which I think it probably justified, caused some amount of controversy.) When I committed to this big book (1215 pages before the appendix and endnotes) I decided I would serialize my reading. There are four volumes and a (two-part) epilogue. Attaching the epilogue to Volume 4, it makes for about 4 chunks of 300 pages each. I'll be interspersing this with lighter - or at least other - reading. (For example, on my plate right now: essays about being a 20-something female.)

I remembered that Tolstoy cut back and forth between "peace" in Moscow & Petersburg, and "war" out in Austria or wherever. I remembered finding war significantly less interesting. This has not changed. The homefront has women! and gossip! and romance and intrigue. The soldiers on the other hand are mostly just riding around being melodramatic and daydreaming about glory. Seriously, I found myself nodding off multiple times during battle scenes.

I did not remember that the novel starts back in 1805, years before much of the main action. I forgot that we meet Natalya Rostov(a) as a coltish tween. I forgot that before I had an irrational excuse to dislike Pierre, I might have actually found him charmingly inept and adorable, the way I do now.

But of course I remembered the epic scope of Tolstoy's world. And the ways in which he was so generous with detail. No one is an afterthought.

I'm looking forward to Volume 2.