War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Things on this blog have been quiet lately, which always makes my feel antsy inside - like I'm not keeping up with things I'm supposed to be keeping up with. However, I was most definitely not slacking during the past few weeks. I was reading War and Peace.

War and Peace is a novel that fit into all my reading challenges this year. I needed a Russian classic for Back to the Classics, it was on my Classics Club list, it was mentioned in The Elegance of the Hedgehog, making it fit a Popsugar bonus category, and it had been sitting on my bookshelf for years, making it fit the TBR Challenge. This was not an easy read. War and Peace is notoriously long and it is filled with detailed descriptions of battles, philosophical meanderings, and a large amount of similarly named characters. I persevered through the difficult parts and finally finished reading it this morning. I felt a deep sense of pride in my accomplishment...until I flipped to the back flap of the novel to check out the biographical information for Tolstoy and saw these heartbreaking words printed in small font halfway the flap: "Translated and abridged by Princess Alexandra Kropotkin."

Disappointed doesn't even being to cover it. I thought I had read the whole thing. In reality, somewhere between 500-700 pages of material were cut from my version. This put me in a difficult position. Should I consider this novel to be completed and checked off my lists, or should I go back and read an unabridged version?

My usual feelings about abridged versions of classics are that they aren't the "real" book and reading those are akin to taking a shameful literary shortcut. My first impulse was to declare my efforts of the past three weeks wasted and rule that the novel I read didn't count. As I seriously considered that option, however, I found myself dreading the concept of rereading this tome in an even longer format. In my opinion, a sense of dread is not what reading classics is supposed to be about. So, after checking out some online reviews to see what I had missed out on, I think I am going to cut myself a break here and consider this one to be temporarily done. I'll explain more later.

The plot of War and Peace concerns the lives of several aristocratic Russian families between 1805 and 1820. Russia moves in and out of wars against Napoleon during this time, and Tolstoy alternates chapters on how the ongoing political strife affects each of these families. With such a broad story, there are many characters to keep track of. The main protagonists include:

• Pierre Behzukov, the illegitimate son of a wealthy Count whose fortunes take a dramatic turn when his father dies and makes him his sole heir. Pierre is equal parts intellectual and bumbling. He bounces between several different modes of life, most of which leave him feeling empty and confused. He struggles to understand his purpose in life and who he ultimately wants to be.
• Andrei Bulkonsky, a moody prince who distinguishes himself through military service in the wars. He comes to prefer life in the service over dealing with his social butterfly of a wife, difficult to manage elderly father, and needy sister. He spends most of the novel away from home.
• Nikolai Rostov, a young count who takes an active role in the war. He spends much of the novel uncertain about how to manage his personal life. He faces intense pressure from his family to marry for wealth, as their personal finances are falling apart due to mismanagement. He falls in love with two different women (one rich and one poor) and must choose which of them to marry.
• Natasha Rostov, Nikolai's otherworldly, beautiful sister. Everyone instantly feels drawn to her charismatic personality and child-like joy. She becomes romantically linked with several characters throughout the book and most of her storylines concern her preoccupation with courting, romance, and heartbreak.
• Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France. Yes, he's actually a character in this novel. Russians throughout the novel regard him with either admiration or loathing, and Tolstoy focuses on his incredible power and military strategies in his sections.

Aside from these figures, there are several more characters to keep up with, many of which have similar names to each other and float between nicknames, titles, and full names without warning. One of my biggest challenges while reading was trying to keep everyone straight. I would often pause in the middle of a chapter and mentally run through who all the characters were and how they were connected to each other in my mind before proceeding. It eventually got easier to remember the names as time went on, but it was never completely easy for me.

In addition to following the large cast of characters throughout the novel, Tolstoy includes several chapters that focus on military history, battle strategies, and other philosophical musings. These were difficult to get through for me, as I'm not particularly interested in those topics. Aside from a lack of personal interest in the subject matter, these digressions stopped the action of the story and disrupted my engagement with the novel. From what I was able to gather online, it appears that much of the excised material in my abridged version of the book were chapters like this, which is most of the reason that I'm not prepared to go back and read the novel in full right now. I was honestly struggling to stay awake and focused during these sections. I was not able to find the beauty in them that other readers were.

While this was definitely a challenging read for me on many levels, I did enjoy parts of it. The chapters focusing on the characters during peace times, with their romantic entanglements and family dramas, were wonderful. I often found myself wishing for a more fair and realistic portrayal of the female characters, but I was still able to get into the story. Tolstoy, while undoubtedly a masterful writer, strictly regards women as innocent angels or immoral whores with not much in between. This is (disappointingly) normal for his time period and I moved past it. The sections focusing on the war were less enjoyable to me. I found them difficult to follow due to my lack of knowledge of military terminology. However, I was still able to appreciate the epic scale on which Tolstoy was able to craft these scenes.

With so much going on in War and Peace, one aspect of it that I'm still thinking over is what it was ultimately about. It is nearly impossible to give a concise summary of the action due to its many characters and frequent digressions, and I wasn't able to discover an overarching theme that ties it all together. It seems to be about a lot of things - patriotism, the injustices of war, abuses in the military, the fighting spirit of Russian men, the poor behavior of the wealthy, the value of romantic love, the purpose of life, the virtues of motherhood, the obligations of family vs. country, etc. I couldn't settle on one thing that this story was trying to say. A lot of the points from the list above contradict other points Tolstoy makes too. This means that either I wasn't astute enough to grasp what Tolstoy was trying to say, or that this is simply a big book about a lot of big ideas. I hope it's the latter and that I'm not just a poor reader of Russian classics.

War and Peace is certainly a literary masterpiece. I acknowledge that. At the same time, this was not my favorite classic. I enjoyed Tolstoy's Anna Karenina much more than this one. Then again, due to my mistake in reading an abridged version, I suppose I can't really make a final judgement unless I go back and read the whole novel, the way it was meant to be experienced.

I'm going to use this as a learning experience. I will check which version of a novel I'm reading much more thoroughly from now on, especially if the work is long or if it is translated. I am also going to stop purchasing Barnes and Noble editions of classics. Their abridged works are not labeled clearly enough (I accidentally bought an abridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo from them too), and they use inferior translations of non-English works (like my Barnes and Noble Jules Verne collection, which uses different character names in some stories than the originals). I don't blame them for what was my own mistake, but I do blame them for taking advantage of readers who can't spend a lot on books and assume that a Barnes and Noble version wouldn't be significantly different from any other version.

I'm also going to make a few promises. First, I will not use this novel as my Russian classic in my Back to the Classics challenge. I will read something else instead. Similarly, I will read something else for the Popsugar category "a book mentioned in another book." Second, on my Classics Club list, I will note that I read an abridged version of War and Peace. My deadline to finish that list is December 31, 2021. I will have read the complete version of the novel by that time. Maybe I won't be as confused in my second go-around.


Challenge Tally
Classics Club (#61 on my list): 15/100
TBR Challenge: (previously owned) 38/60

Total Books Read in 2017: 49