“Tolstoy was so much better than any other writer who ever lived that you couldn’t even remotely compare anyone to him.”
I first read
War and Peace in the eighth grade in
a paperback abridgement. I remember reading it in science class, half-heartedly
hiding the book behind the girl who sat in front of me. The teacher, a
basketball coach and thus not much of a teacher, got angry and loudly told me
to put it away. I was reading it like a thriller, strictly for plot, so I resented
the interruption. Like generations of previous male readers I had fallen in
love with Natalya Ilyinichna Rostova -- Natasha. War and Peace had the intimidating reputation for being that big book, which was part of the
reason I was reading it, as I would Ulysses
a few years later. My late brother on his Blogger profile said of his favorite
books: “I
like ’em big.”
I was falling for Russian literature – again, like generations of earlier
readers. The swoon remains in effect. A part of me still thinks that every other
literature – even Shakespeare and his contemporaries -- are secondary to the
Russians, somehow not quite serious. Who can rival them for gravitas of
sensibility? Shakespeare? Proust? No American, not even Melville or Henry
James, comes close. Even as I name them, they seem somehow inadequate. Clarence Brown, translator and advocate for the Mandelstams in the West, edited The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian
Reader (1985), a selection ranging from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Voinovich
and Sokolov. In his introduction he says provocatively and correctly:
“I now look
back on this banquet of words with much pleasure, which I hope nothing will
prevent your sharing. These writers, after all, continue in our time the
tradition that has made Russian, along with English and classical Greek, one of
the three supreme literatures of the world.”
In college I
read the Aylmer and Louise Maude translation of War and Peace, unabridged. Later came the Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky version. It’s a novel that lastingly populates your imagination.
A reader has written to ask if he should read War and Peace. Is it as good as its forbidding reputation suggests?
The sentence quoted at the top is from an interview with Gary Saul Morson. Don’t
be intimidated, I’ve told my reader. Morson is a thoughtful, prudent man, not
given to hyperbole. See his discussion of War
and Peace in his most recent book, Wonder
Confronts Certainty: Russians on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers
Matter (Belknap Press, 2023). Tolstoy’s people are Ur-humans; in short, us.
Clive James writes in his review of the BBC’s film version of War and Peace:
“Tolstoy’s
greatest book is the way it is because he thought he was everybody. He had
pretensions to philosophy – screen versions sensibly leave all that out – but
his universality was not just intellectual, it was instinctive. No human
feeling was unknown to him, but looking at the pictures can give you only some
of that: you have to read the words.”
3 comments:
For people who want to read War and Peace, I would recommend the translation by Aylmer and Louise Maude, revised by Amy Mandelker.
Language not modernised: ✔ (unlike Anthony Briggs)
French passages retained (with notes): ✔ (unlike some other translations)
Feminine endings of names retained: ✔ (unlike Anthony Briggs, who turned Natasha Rostova into Natasha Rostov)
Names not Anglocised: ✔ (unlike the unrevised version)
Good prose, not clunky: ✔ (unlike Pevear and Volokhonsky)
I've read War and Peace in the P&V translation and Anna Karenina twice, in the P&V and then in the Constance Garnett, and the only thing that keeps me from saying that the latter is the greatest novel I've ever read is the fact that I can only read it in translation and therefore feel that I haven't "really" read it. I can only imagine what it must be like for someone who reads Russian - it must be like looking directly at the sun.
Tolstoy had the immense and mysterious power of making you instantly and completely believe in the reality of his people, and because of that you willingly follow him wherever he wants to go.
Some years ago, in a local bookstore, I overheard a young woman, a senior in high school, saying something about War and Peace to her friends. I remarked to her that I had found that the problem was not in reading Tolstoy, it was doing anything else once one had started. She agreed.
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