As any introduction to War and Peace will tell you (to the point that it has become an unbearably cliche starting sentence), Henry James famously referred to Leo Tolstoy's novel, as well as others from the time period, such as the half novel, half expository essay on whaling that is Moby Dick, as a "loose baggy monster," and besides being a phrase from a time when authors were still comfortable making up phrases on the fly, speaks to the massiveness ("monster") and overflowing nature ("loose baggy") of one of the longest novels in the world. To open with this and to tell the average person with a job, kids, or other time-consuming responsibilities is not likely to be met with warm responses. And what I am doing here, with this site and this opening essay is not to convince people through rational argument to read War and Peace. Rather, I would like to talk a little about why War and Peace, the monster it is, is interesting to me, why I have spent so much time with it, and why I think sharing thoughts on the novel and the issues surrounding it can be, perhaps, a rewarding experience. I didn't try to read War and Peace until early on in college and quickly found that the scan and skip method that I used for the mostly non-fiction work I was reading at that time (I was attracted to Tolstoy because of some of his non-fiction latter work that I had read) didn't work for War and Peace and I got lost and confused in the characters (one of the big reasons for concentrating so much on characters and character indexes here). I didn't pick the book up again until a few (I believe three) years ago, when I made a plan to read (the same Ann Dunnigan translation that I had bought a few years before) in a month with a couple of students and a fellow teacher. I knew the basic plot (at least the overarching war plot) and some of Tolstoy's ideas, but I found the novel to be fascinating and became mildly obsessed with it.
However, that doesn't mean that it is a perfect novel, my favorite novel, or even a novel that I don't vehemently disagree with at times. The comparison I will make with it is with an author that a late Tolstoy despised, Shakespeare. I'm fascinated by Shakespeare's work. Almost all of his plays are interesting, cover a wide variety of subjects, including religious, political, and philosophical ones, have characters that are both creations and based on other works or even real life, and at the same time, often demonstrate absolutely reprehensible viewpoints (to bring up the Moby Dick example from earlier, who can forget the chapter where he argues that whales can never become endangered because they always find new places to hide?), ones that Tolstoy himself occasionally demonstrates in War and Peace such as Anti-Semitism, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, classism, misogyny, stereotypes, and religious propaganda. Parsing out the viewpoints of Tolstoy and Shakespeare versus our own cultural and personal conclusions reveals a lot about them and it reveals a lot about ourselves. Much like when approaching a philosophical, political, or religious text we don't agree with, we have to define our own views more definitely, or with more clarity, sharpening our intellect in response to our knee-jerk emotional interaction with the text. And Shakespeare and Tolstoy are philosophical, religious, and political texts. Even in sections when the texts aren't explicitly about those ideas, they in fact are because events and characters are approached through those lens, for Tolstoy in War and Peace, the lens are two-fold religiously, the Russian Orthodox Church and the enlightenment skepticism of religion that many of the characters display, Tolstoy at this time oscillating between the two, along with an almost crippling cynical skepticism of all political action and the Schopenhauer-like determinism of all human behavior. These ideas are all different from the average 21st century Westerner (the fact that this is, after all, a Russian novel shouldn't be underplayed either, as not only are we interacting with a different culture in time in War and Peace, something Tolstoy himself wrestles with in his historical novel, but we are also interacting with a geographic difference) and expanding the outlet of our cultural conclusions is something that can be readily seen as an asset that every person needs to possess and a skill they need to hone.
But why War and Peace? Why not Moby Dick? Why not one of Tolstoy's favorite novels Uncle Tom's Cabin? Why not any of a thousand novels? Why not the more popular Tolstoy novel of Anna Karenina? The answer is two-fold, the first being subject matter and scope. There are certainly other novels who develop their own fictional characters alongside non-fictional characters that they also develop, just as there are plenty of war novels, plenty of patriotic epics, and plenty of political or philosophical treatises masquerading as novels. Perhaps none have been quite meshed together in a way like Tolstoy mashes War and Peace together, but perhaps, and this is the second and most compelling, because it is the most honest, reason: personal preference.
According to Tolstoy, for a piece of work to be considered art, the author must "infect" the reader with the emotion that they want the reader to have. There is no need to share Tolstoy's quest for objectivity or universality that lead him to repudidate his own work. Instead, we can modify his definition of "art" by removing authorial intention qualifier and eliminating the word "art". A work is interesting and worth discussing when it has "infected" another person. And when it has done that, it will continue to be redefined, rediscovered, and reinterpreted. This reinventing is what keeps Shakespeare alive. Shakespeare is interesting because he is still performed and read. The words in Shakespeare are less important than the cultural reaction, the critical commentaries, and the continued performances. War and Peace, a favorite of television and the big screen, is no different. It has the meaning that Tolstoy put into it, the meaning that is in the text itself, and the meaning that others give it. Approaching War and Peace from these three perspectives: Author, Text, and Reader, is important because it gives a fuller view of a large text that continues to grow. On this little site, I want to not only take the text and what is inside the book itself seriously, but I want to look at Leo Tolstoy himself and how that affects the way we look at War and Peace (untangling the mass of contradictory, especially over the time of his life, ideas that he held), but the way others look at the novel as well. I also hope for other people to contribute their knowledge and opinions of the book, Tolstoy, and any other relevant or semi-relevant information and make this more of an open-source site than just my own point of view. For example, there is quite a bit of writing about the customs and clothing of Russian society at this time and how Tolstoy's portrayals may differ. This is something that I have almost no interest in, but would contribute to a "fuller view" of War and Peace. The same goes for regiments and troop movement, which I have little interest in. Personally, I am most interested in characters, how "real-life" characters mesh with War and Peace, and the ideas and philosophy of the novel. These are what give me excitement when reading War and Peace. Others may find literary theory, the structure of the novel, the plot, or any other aspect of the novel more "significant" or meaningful to them.
Lastly, reading War and Peace and blogging about it online isn't exactly an original idea, as other blogs have done very similar things and there are other reading plans out there. The only real differentiations I can bring to it is more of an interest in the philosophical aspects of the novel (online blogs that I have seen express nothing but contempt for the second epilogue), a more comprehensive comparison of the translations, the in depth character lists/indexes and chapter breakdowns, and a focus on the historical and scholarly aspects on the novel. Actual scholars and experts will find the site woefully inadequate and unoriginal, but perhaps some people will find the site helpful in giving a fuller picture of the novel beyond just personal observations.
So, since this is the Internet, comments, especially constructive ones, are welcome. Please feel free to chime in with your own ideas, information, and corrections.
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