Rest in Peace, War and Peace

When I took on Amy's challenge to 'Read a Russian' I didn't know that I was signing myself up for a 4 month project. "Sure, it's a thick book, but I'm a fast reader," I thought to myself. Ha!

I had a hard time getting into it, as you can see from the lack of dog ears in the first several hundred pages. I spent three months on the first 500 pages and one month on the last 900 pages. Part of my problem at the beginning was just keeping the characters straight! The book is a bit of a soap opera with parties and travel and relationships being made and broken. Originally War and Peace was written in both French and Russian, and when it was translated into English the names were left as originally written. So for instance Marie is also called Marya and Masha. Anna is also called Annette, at least one of the Anna's is. After I conquered the more than one name for a single character issue, I then spent quite a lot of my reading waiting to figure out which characters were the main characters. Eventually I decided this was an ensemble cast with no main characters - but I was wrong on that one. At the very end the story the cast narrows down to four main characters, which almost makes me want to go back and read it again to relearn what these four characters were like at the beginning of the book. I mean, if I weren't so exhausted from reading in general right now. (See the new read on my sidebar?)

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Now for a few quotes:

The war Princess Marya looked on as women do look on war. She was apprehensive for her brother who was at the front, and was horrified, without understanding it, at the cruelty of men, that led them to kill one another.

I didn't like Tolstoy's generalization about women in the first sentence, but actually, he pretty much summed up my feelings towards war in general with the last part there.

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"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Pierre. And he talked aloud to himself. "The soldier did not let me pass. They have taken me - shut me up. They keep me prisoner. Who is 'me'? Me? Me - my immortal soul! ha, ha, ha! . . . Ha, ha, ha! . . . And all this they caught and shut up in a shed closed in with boards!"

O.K. so Pierre is having a bit of an existential moment or a break down, but it does seem absurd that we can contain immortal souls with prisons. Actually it seems absurd that we can and do limit other people's as well as our own immortal souls in any way.

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He felt like a man who finds what he has sought at his feet, when he has been straining his eyes to seek it in the distance. All his life he had been looking far away over the heads of all around him, while he need not have strained his eyes, but had only to look in front of him.

This thought is a classic theme in literature, but I don't say that to trivialize it. It seems to be a lesson that isn't quickly learned, and therefore is a lesson worth repeating in book after book.

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So how do I feel now that I'm done? Well, I'm very proud of myself for sticking with it and finishing. I'm also having moments where I feel like I can hear Tolstoy narrating my actions, commenting on my motives, and exposing my thoughts. He has an interesting take on people and why they behave the way they do. I'll look at the world through Tolstoy's lenses for a little longer yet, I think.