so you want to read war and peace

let's do this thing

It took Tolstoy six years to finish War & Peace but that doesn’t mean it will take you six years to read. Clocking in at an unabridged average of 1300 pages with over 500 characters (about half of them real), this doorstopper is renowned for its length as much as its probing insights into the human condition. Spanning 15 years from battlefields to ballrooms, Tolstoy’s great novel of the Napoleonic War And Other Stuff is worth the time it takes to read.

Or so I’ve been told. I haven’t actually read it; which is why I started this newsletter. Inspired by Dracula Daily and my own deranged desire to read this beast despite not enjoying Anna Karenina (I gave it 2.75 stars and called it “a biblical test of endurance”), war and peace (& emails) is an online book club with the goal of making this titan of classic literature fun and accessible to people who would otherwise be too scared to read it.

Paul Dano as Pierre, Lily James as Natasha, and James Norton as Andrey in the 2016 BBC adaption

Let’s break down some numbers:

War and Peace is divided into 4 books + a 2-part epilogue. These books are further divided into parts—between 3 and 5. In total, there are 361 chapters, approximately one for every day of the year. If you read one chapter a day, starting on January 1, you’ll be finished by December 27th. And then you are awarded the privilege of bragging that you read War and Peace for the rest of your life. Win-win scenario.

I’ve chosen to use the 1922-3 translation by Aylmer & Louise Maude because a) it is public domain and 2) the Maudes knew Tolstoy personally, and this translation was given his seal of approval. Also, it translates most of the French into English. The French is something of a contentious issue among translators and academics, of which I am neither. Older translators such as the Maudes and Constance Garnett removed most, if not all of the French to make it smoother reading for English speakers. Tolstoy himself removed the French in 1873 only to put it back later. Some modern translations, such as the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation (2007) keep the French intact and provide English translations in the footnotes; the Briggs translation (2005) translates them directly into English¹. According to Wikipedia, the French is important as it shows the artifice of Russian high society when contrasted with Russian as the language of honesty and sincerity; and the gradual decrease in French as the book progresses represents Russia’s freedom from the domination of foreign cultures.

(A brief history sidebar: Catherine II [r. 1762-1796], who you may know better as Catherine the Great, was deeply influenced by the Englightenment. She herself had grown up with French tutors in Germany and by the time she ascended the throne, French was the lingua franca of the cultural elite for the rest of Europe. And so French became the language of the Russian aristocracy, not only the language itself, but a thorough knowledge of the country’s history, philosophy, art, and literature were social requirements for the next hundred years. French lessons were taught alongside Greek and Latin in schools modelled after the French system; children were brought up ‘properly’ by French governesses; a year abroad in Paris was an essential part of a young aristocrat’s university experience². TL;DR, fancy Russians spoke French)

One downside of the Maude translation is that it does translate some of the names into their better-known English equivalents i.e. Nikolai = Nicholas, Andrei = Andrew, Marya = Mary. For my part, I will be referring to the characters by their Russian names.

In 2010, Oxford World Classics released an updated version of the Maude translation revised by Amy Mandelker. This translation retains the French, puts the names back to normal, and includes a wonderful selection of maps, notes, and chronology. It is the version I currently own and is widely available in bookstores. Any footnotes I source beyond the included and minimal French will be from that edition.

Still apprehensive about starting? Lucky for you I have a whole post of resources and tips to make this reading experience as easy as possible. Please read War & Peace with me so I can make more people listen to the 2016 electropop opera Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 which is based on 70 pages of Book 2, was absolutely robbed at the Tonys, and is my favourite musical of all time. You want to listen to Great Comet so badly.

see you jan 1st!
love from kit (and tolstoy’s ghost)

1. For a more in-depth comparison of War and Peace in translation, the folks over at We Love Translations did a great breakdown of the epic highs and lows of translating Tolstoy (I’ve used them in the past to choose translations for Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment. Great site!)

2. Gorbatov, Inna. “French Influence on Russia: From Peter I to Catherine II.” Essay. In Catherine the Great and the French Philosophers of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Grimm. Bethesda: Academica Press, 2006. Read here.