Just as I was about to sit down at my computer to begin this week’s posting, my phone lit up with the announcement that “We have a Pope.” I’m not really part of that We, but it was a historic moment, worth a detour to CNN, where I learned that the new Pope was an American, an outcome that few had predicted. To add a personal note, it turns out that he studied at The Catholic Theological Union, right across the street from us. “You live on a real celebrity block,” my daughter texted. “Yeah, us and him,” I replied. More seriously, I take heart in the fact that the Cardinals chose someone who is likely to move forward, rather than retreat from the reforms of Pope Francis. I wish we could say the same for our secular government and the governments of so many other countries under Pope Leo’s spiritual guidance.
Now to return to more familiar religious turf: the practice in Ashkenazi synagogues is to read a portion weekly from the five books of Moses (the Torah). When each book is completed, the congregation celebrates that milestone by reciting the following: Chazak, Chazak, V’nitchazek! Be strong, Be strong, and let us be strengthened! Those words are variously interpreted, but the basic point is a declaration that we have been strengthened by studying and reading together these sacred words.
It may be sacrilege to apply these words to a secular text, but today I am proclaiming Chazak Chazak, V’nitchazek! on completing my reading of War and Peace, all 1350 pages of it. I wish I had recorded the date I started, but it’s been months. Although I’ve alluded a number of times to the fact that I’m a slow reader, that only partly explains how much time has passed between start and finish. There were trips (“You’re not going to take that monster book in your backpack, are you?), many time-sensitive obligations (e.g. reviewing asylum applications) and the start of gardening season, which draws me away from my desk like a powerful magnet.
Along the way, I had to resist the temptation of other books whose reviews and recommendations threatened to lure me away. As in a good marriage, I stayed faithful, and I was rewarded. I looked forward to the interludes, sometimes all too brief, when I could leave our current dystopian reality and enter the Russia of more than two centuries ago. When I assigned a book to my students, which presented more of a challenge than a YA first person novel or a graphic novel, I often had to resort to the old chestnut, “It’s a classic for a reason.” I enjoyed every minute of it – almost.
When I told friends what I was about to embark on, some of those who have read War and Peace (most confessed they hadn’t) suggested I skip the war parts and focus on the “domestic” sections. That was not good advice. The two are intertwined in significant ways and neither can be fully appreciated without the other. I hope you’re not expecting a full-blown literary analysis here. So many critics better qualified than I have mined that territory already. What you can expect is some random idiosyncratic observations from a reader with only limited interest in critical analysis.
The “domestic.” – I was struck by how much these sections, once you subtracted the war, were similar to 19th century British novels – the Brontes, George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The major preoccupations are marriage, wealth, inheritance and social status, although the gaps between the classes are much more extreme – the upper classes and the serfs, who rarely appear in any fleshed-out form. The gaps in British society are large as well but tempered by the presence of clergy and merchants. If Tolstoy’s characters were not as memorably drawn, their stories might read as classy soap opera, such are the couplings and uncouplings.
My vote for one of the greatest scenes in literature is the death of Prince Alexei from wounds incurred at the Battle of Borodino. Few authors have even dared to tackle portraying the final moments in a character’s life, both from within and without. Tolstoy’s long short story The Death of Ivan Ilyich also demonstrates his courage in portraying the unportrayable.
The war – Tolstoy is on a noble mission to debunk almost all accounts of war and of classic battles. War is chaos. Participants and onlookers fabricate narratives that redound to their benefit, primarily to portray themselves as heroes or prophets. Two recent movies, Saving Private Ryan and Warfare, attempt to convey the same message visually. As an extension of his mission, Tolstoy strips both Napoleon and Czar Alexander of any heroic aura around their personas.
The Epilogue – Usually, when one arrives at a book’s epilogue, one feels like you’re home free. Not so with W&P. There’s still 100+ pages to the finish line. Some of those pages are devoted to an updating ten years after the war of the domestic lives of the two central couples in the book – Natasha and Pierre and Marya and Nikolai. Tolstoy proves himself as adept at portraying the intricacies of marriage and parenting as he is at narrating complex battle scenes. However, these final pages also contain his musings on free will and the biases of historians and other scholars. I am a self-confessed concrete thinker, so these are the book’s only pages that made me hungry to be done. Of course, I was probably also reacting out of plain old fatigue.
This is surely the most idiosyncratic set of notes on this great novel that you’re likely to encounter. I don’t want my random comments to obscure the fact that I’m awed by the grand sweep of this epic. Although I’m eager to move on to other reading, I savored almost every minute of this long trek. Chazak!
