Book Review || War and Peace (1867)
"As Napoleon’s army invades Russia, peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers, struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture."
: 🌕 : SPOILER ALERT : 🌕 :
Fondled as the fiddler perched sublimely on the roof, the assailant of victories bound & bloody teeters like clipped toes. Tolstoy’s grandiosity—the likes of which many name the gruesome beast of the literary world—has been vanquished & mauled by my tiny teeth, left as shards in my mind that I attempt to puzzle into riddles for my future self, one who might view my feat as worthy of a toothy grin.
Over the two weeks it took me to work through my personal & professional responsibilities, I galavanted over wind-strewn snow mounds & slushy sidewalks, always carrying the baby of this book nestled snugly in my arms. Our shared experience bound us to one another. Therefore, a word of welcome to Tolstoy’s ghost; I cannot say we would have loved each other, neither would your opinion of me be favourable, but I write to you here where, together, our thoughts & determinations collide.
“This was so much what he wanted to have done, and so much regretted not doing, that he seemed to think it had really happened like that. Well, maybe it had. Who could tell in all that confusion what had happened and what hadn’t?”
Through a fervour that raptures the skies as the distant god wanders in onyx shadows, critics & casual readers have flocked to Tolstoy’s behemoth since its early days among mortals. One notes the autoerotic asphyxiation that readers impose by selecting to boast of their awareness of the title.
The length alone appears to tempt & toy with readers who at once deem themselves in need of preparation while acknowledging their worry at being able to accomplish the feat of reading this tome. I find myself wading through the verbosely erotic & vapidly nauseating praise. In all my meandering, I have yet to meet a reader whose declaration of grandiosity can be quantified with critical & virtuous insight.
Calming the mind with a lens lit by lightning, it seems that readers have grown fond of acclaim. Relegating prose as though letters alone make words worthy of speech. It remains true that in the folds of humanity, few amongst us have the brainiac gift of insight or the villainous ability to wander the world among kin with clarity that does not beseech them their will to live.
Tolstoy’s list of characters applauds this reader, they long for the eyes who will grift the print & peer no further than the dance of the Festival of Fools. I wonder if perhaps Tolstoy spent enough time alone to meet himself on the page in a gag of salivary coils or whether he wrote these characters to chance insult upon those he knew in real life.
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In essence, this book is about failure to insight depth from one’s own person. As a consequence of what bestows itself onto the characters between the years 1805 to 1813, Russian citizens befell the brutal cruelty experienced by those who view war as a beautiful behaviour adopted by the supremely capable rather than a barbaric dashing of fermenting life.
The plot follows these characters as they become horny with sexual envy & yearning, opting to wed one another for the chance to fornicate & crashing into a hellscape when their virginal need is fulfilled. The philosophical ramblings of their abstractly sheltered lives bemuse the troll as giggles of gallantly lit ballrooms & brilliant frilly dress loop in infinity circuits as the sexually desperate, fraudulent intellectuals account for the movement of their State.
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Surrounded by the grovelling plea for Tolstoy to write something with more fondness & profundity than he was capable of doing, I endeavoured to read this book. I salivate at the thought of a book larger than life; I gnaw at the glass enclosure of the perfect little bookstore where my rubies can be bought for so few coins. Yet, meeting Tolstoy twice in this make-believe world, I have come to regard him as a scalped porpoise fool, one that cannot see insight if it smashed him in the skull like the shrapnel the eviscerated Prince Andrei.
So few pages in “Anna Karenina” (1879) & “War and Peace” (1869) rivet the learned mind. This statement is harsh & I admit it to be so because I intended it. I find myself frustrated beyond reason that I spent two weeks of my time reading this book; a book so revered as to make the ignorant mind acknowledge greatness, yet within its very bind, none was to be found.
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Tolstoy began his beast with strong footing, acting like a marksman in the woods he knew as well as his own heart. His pacing was flawless & his writing spoke of an ease at describing the world as he saw it alive in his mind—a world that existed so few years before his birth. For this, I readily admit praise & welcome readers to adore the river’s flow through sequences that present the early years of Napoleon’s travels through vitriol & violence.
Tolstoy found a way to include enough background about the wars to induce a reader to deepen their knowledge. Welcoming every reader, the author seemed to long for the formidable scallywag of war to be brought to the layman’s door via simplicity in the written word.
Soon, the story meandered & I found myself discussing with others the very nature of the book I had innocently come to read. Indeed, the causal nature of this story seems to have come out of left field. Was this not the very serious & very difficult literary Classic? Was this not meant to be the book to eviscerate all other books?
The material, as noted by the author, was meant to be more than the casual romances of yore within which the reader would find nothing to flourish fire into their souls & torment their minds with philosophical inquiries. Yet, in truth, this book was not much of anything serious at all, in fact, none of the characters exuded any depth which the modern reader may appreciate save had they too spent their lives sheltered under boulders in Siberia.
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There are many examples of this cruel reality. Although Tolstoy seems to have wanted to present a profound tale, the characters that he chose to include contradict his efforts & leave the realm of their lives & experiences to revel in trite basic baboonish giggles where others might nestle the theology of belief.
Looking at Pierre as an example, one notes the great potential that his character held in the early portion of the novel. Empathy is gradually developed in the heart of the reader for this young man as his father dies following several strokes; as those who surround him take advantage of his new-found royalties & wealth; as he roams as a vagabond without purpose or drive; it is easy to regard him as any of us would our friends.
Pierre’s growth takes place in the blink of an eye & yet it accounts for naught. Having married a woman who possessed physical beauty & nothing of brains, Pierre goes forward & allows himself to be married because he wants to have physical intercourse with this woman, whom he admits is not a good match for him. Here lies the main issue that many of the characters face, which I note is a fault of the century rather than the fiction.
Surpassing all rationale, the characters in nineteenth-century Russian literature seem hellbent on marrying anyone they deem physically sexy the very moment they lay eyes on them. Let not the reader be fooled, these characters will growl & grumble about the profound love they feel, leaving the reader to question the point of such tiresome grovelling.
Certainly, the constriction of Russian society during this time & the religious beliefs influencing social perception allow one to understand why these horny mad hatters would toss their loins into the ring of betrothal rather than flounder five minutes getting to know an individual to capture the essence of their personality.
Yet, read on one does & here we welcome the tale of romance that Tolstoy seems to have been trying to shed. Pierre falls in love with Natasha, a girl of merely sixteen, pretending to the reader that she is the angel of God’s bounty incarnate. Natasha, for her part, admits to falling in love with any man who will pay her any mind & therefore spends each of her dedicated sections roaming like a common mongrel through her house, wetting the bed about adult men who peer in her window at night.
I cannot fault her for her young dream state, yet I find it cruel that Tolstoy would not befit her any character growth. Her marriage to Pierre accomplishes nothing but to note that she has become dishevelled & gruel as soggy oats after having birthed four children & developed a paranoia that her husband might have an affair with another woman.
Her personality undergoes no forward movement, she remains the ignorant frogfish idiot as we met her when she was twelve. This is horrible because she deserved more. Although I did not like her character & never found myself much caring whether she lived or died, following her bout with arsenic, the reader is meant to become attached & invested in her life.
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My rampaging frustration grew as Pierre became the character on whose shoulders the book’s premise would bloom. Having spent his adult life aimlessly wandering, boozing his life & fortune away, & avoiding confronting himself & his social issues, he decides that wandering on the frontlines of combat is where his life’s answers will be found.
He is taken care of by men who perish in these malevolent battles & never does Pierre learn to appreciate this. Rather than take a moment to forget about blowing out Natasha’s back who is worried about sucking the life out of Prince Andrei & then Anatole because of his sexual prowess, Pierre rambles on to a peasant—Platon—about how once upon a time he was worried but now that he’s a prisoner of war, things are way less complicated than being a married man.
You will forgive my grievances, I cannot pretend that what Pierre posits makes any semblance of sense. All the more moronic is his philosophy towards others, which he uses to reinforce his poor life choices. I wonder whether Tolstoy wanted readers to feel pained by this imbecilic sequence.
Would the author want his characters to come across as trite & bulbously ignorant? There is much that I could forgive in Prince Andrei, with his dedication to the war, & young Rostov, with his devious desire to fight for the Tsar with whom he develops an infatuation. It is rather the nature of Tolstoy’s philosophies, which tie in at the end of the novel, that render every partition of this book utterly wasted.
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Much of what Tolstoy shares with the reader in the Epilogue consists of the philosophy that might make clear action & reaction. Throughout the novel, Tolstoy brings forward slivers of his qualms & worries, asking the reader to remember that historians cannot have known everything. One notes that neither would the author & it seems he admits this too.
Here, the flaw might lie on my shoulders, for my frustration with the characters is one thing, a thing that one can forgive when reading the great work of an author’s decade. The opposite is true for his philosophies, a particular subject on which I have two feet firmly planted. As I felt my brain slither out of my ears, gasping for freedom from Tolstoy’s corpse of an Epilogue, I felt that I was at fault.
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I was born into a family where books were valued & where literature was vital in one’s life. I was born to a family who wanted my brain to be as fine-tuned as it could be. I was born in a small town where I knew the layout of the library like my own home. As I grew up, this vial of effervescence was kept close & you find me here now, the very same young girl I once was, whose surroundings, via the faces of adults & tomes of literature captured on their shelves, turned to me willing my young mind to answer the age-old question: Why?
I note this here because my circumstances are particular to every factor of my existence. Tolstoy wanders around the very same question I was posed & one I offered in return. His curiosity to understand the circumstances that would leave a community of people to murder & bloodshed felt naive in a way that I cannot quantify in words.
I felt particularly at odds with the fact that I knew I had more opportunity than Tolstoy to answer these questions & yet I also found myself frustrated that he would spend 200 pages asking, in circles, losing his train of thought & redundantly categorizing the lore of his people, attempting to trick me into forgetting that I already knew these things; we had just spent over a thousand pages together.
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To quantify the difference between what takes place that is misunderstood (chance) & what one does that is misunderstood (genius), alongside what is done for the greater good (necessity) & what is done by singular need (free will), one finds that by this stage the major philosophical works had answered these questions.
Tolstoy’s profuse pedantry around the nature of this wheel of behaviour was strange in that it seems he intentionally forgot himself & the reader upon coming to terms with his lack of knowledge. It is not so much that Tolstoy appears to be a man who longed to be looked upon with praise, but rather that his entire tome consisted of making clear the very nature of existence in simple terms & coming up short.
It is funny in a non-hilarity-ridden way that he should have doubted himself so staunchly. His search for answers was not to be found in his lifetime as made evident by his comparisons & near erotic obsession with Napoleon. By the twenty-first century, one has noted many a Dictator who has come to power with words of sour lard which are believed by those of lesser means, those who did not have the advantage of a working brain or those whose insecurity towards great matter shelters them from blossoming in the world of which they are apart.
Tolstoy asks the reader to make clear why this would happen. The simple answer is that it can. One does many things because it is in their ability to do so. Driven by the unspoken need of their dynamic monkey spirit, the human being is capable of rationalizing anything beyond the pure acknowledgement of a want.
I wonder, therefore, why this was not understood by Tolstoy. How could he have spent 1400 pages with characters who never proved themselves to him? Why would he believe that Prince Andrei’s plight was of lesser value to the page than Pierre’s, who compared marriage to being a prisoner of war? Why was the mandate of the Freemason mentioned in such feeble conjecture with Christianity?
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Perhaps these questions are worthless. In my century, all the answers to every question I might ever have can be found should I endeavour to look. I cannot fault Tolstoy for working through his curiosity toward consciousness & comparing humanity’s ability to weave the intellectually illuminated world to the rabbit or the frog, neither of whom we can communicate with but whom we treat as lesser because we assume them to be sheltered from the torment we experience in our souls.
Utter ignorance on humanity’s part drives us in circles, back to the beginning whereupon Tolstoy shakes hands with the reader whom he believes capable of understanding the turmoils of the Russian people. By the end, our love affair has caught flames with Tolstoy holding the wood & I the match.
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Ultimately, I find this book to be a mystery to me. Due to the time of my birth, the very house I lived in & the complexly human parents I had who introduced me to the world as they lived it & the society that circumvented the hourglass of mortality, Tolstoy’s book does not appear to me appropriate reading material for the learned mind.
For 1400 pages, we grew close & I believed him when he longed for the world of war to be put to an end, revealing the destruction that he was born into, & the remnants of a frustration that would last a lifetime. Yet, through his lack of awareness, the world was much larger than what he could fathom. I cannot blaspheme him for this, it would be entirely uncouth of me to write ad nauseam about Tolstoy’s ignorance. In my heart, I feel he knew this too & yet by penning his ink to the tree’s skin, he hoped for the whisper of revelation to be shared with him when the time came.
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The majority of this book can be held to an esteem that is neither high nor worthy of the succulent oozing that readers attribute to it. The fiction is casual & well-known to veteran readers & will not offer them anything outstanding to digest. Rather, the enjoyment of reading such a masterpiece is found in petting the grooves where the author’s temptation grew too desirous & profuse.
The knowledge that this book was written by a human man grants it the power that it holds. To be in possession of the patience & willpower to sit when necessary & pen the chance of genius that struck his index as the sky looked upon him, as though his free will was an intimidating match for the days that slipped by. Suffice it to say that one may endeavour to believe in God after reading this book. For how could anyone but the Almighty provide support for the soul destined to die, who is faced with the gargantuan urge to write?
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In all the wavering phrases where systems of beliefs are questioned & doom despair the hopeful, the books that exist in this life with us remind the shadows of monsoon darkness of the benevolence of the stars.
Through Tolstoy’s efforts, I have found peace that the war of discontent I felt with his shy & bemused inquiries was cruel, as cruel as the brandishing of the sword that struck men who burnt their houses so that their children might be raised in loving homes. As cruel as Tolstoy’s baboonish need to cosplay as a serf in an attempt to behoove his life with necessary triumph & magistral edges that, otherwise, he was too spoilt to recognize existed as punishment from the religious figurehead he profited by.
I hope Tolstoy finds it in his ghostly form to forgive me for my vulgar anger as he broke down his torment. I hope Tolstoy might also forgive me for the modern erogenous egotism I fester like the dark side of the moon as he struggled for words that might set him free. I hope the reader will forgive me for my catastrophic prose, the length of which has fluttered too long, therefore burn its bones I must.
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C. 💌