Month #1 of 'War and Peace'
Notes and observations from a slow-reading, communal experience, conducted superbly by Simon Haisell
Simon Haisell at
is hosting two readalongs for 2024: one for Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace and the other for Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. I’m participating in both. This post, first of twelve, is a monthly recap of my notes and observations (and fancies) as I read Tolstoy’s bulky1 novel.How I Arrived At War and Peace?
“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”2
So begins Orhan Pamuk’s novel The New Life in Güneli Gün’s translation.
I use this line often for any book that leaves me altered. The properties—frequency, magnitude, longevity—of these alterations have changed over the years. Perhaps inflation is the right word for what has happened to them. I read quite a bit; the books have been getting smaller on average; perhaps there is too much contemporary fiction. It is possible that my whole life isn’t changing anymore with every new read. It is possible that it will now take a lot for a book to change my whole life. It is possible that I’ve been using the Pamuk line casually for some time, without really meaning it, or without really bothering with the full weight of its meaning. With these possibilities in mind, I have for some time wanted to immerse myself in a reading experience that might demand, a priori, a significant change from my set reading patterns. Taking on a 'loose baggy monster’3 seemed to me the best way to do this. I picked up Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 for a reread, read its second part, The Part About Amalfitano, took copious notes, and even began to write an essay about it4. But then I let it go: the book, the essay, everything. That I’d started 2666 from Part 2 and not Part 1 should have been the hint; it should have told me that I was seeking something that the novel5 didn’t have: largeness with unity. I didn’t want a post-modern aggregation, fragments collected to resemble a loose baggy monster. I wanted the ‘real’ thing. I wanted to be guided in and through a LARGE story, one with a promise of comprehensiveness that would resist, if it needed resisting, a conception of realism as fragmentary. I believe there must be a word or phrase for this: the jaded 21st-century novelist, confronted every day with the practical powerlessness of Literature6, wanting to go back to a time when Literature did what it did with moral ambition7, with no sense of defeat, or at least not an overpowering sense of it, and with no weakness for the trappings of intense and self-reflexive irony. Simon’s readalong for War and Peace came at the perfect time for me. It brought to my attention perhaps the best example ever of what I was seeking. And it gave me a way to deploy a kind of bonhomous discipline to keep private pragmatism—the kind of inner monologue that says ‘Oh, you’ve no use for cannon bluster and rouged cheeks and powdered hairdos,’ or, ‘Oh, what will learning the tricks of an omniscient narrator8 do for you as a writer in the 21st century?’, or, ‘Oh, are you really going to be able to say something about the novel that hasn’t been said before?’—at bay.
So, yes, I’m reading War and Peace. War cannot end in one day; peace cannot be gained in one day; War and Peace cannot be read in one day. Its promise of alteration is a promise to be fulfilled over months. And I have, per Simon’s schedule, taken a particularly slow path. Today, I have finished my first month of reading the book at the rate of one chapter a day. By my estimate, I’m only about a tenth of the way in. The first cannonball (on the page) was fired today by the advancing French army as the retreating Russian army was crossing the Danube in Austria. The Russian rearguard fired a shot in response.
These war actions in Austria were only garnishing on the beautiful reading month that was January, a month that had us start in St. Petersburg with a soirée and then a frat party, both gloriously decadent in different ways. We then moved to Moscow, and I learnt about a couple of types of dances. While the dances were going on, a rich man died on his bed, and there were some tragi-comic actions related to the matter of inheritance (what’s a 19th-century novel sans tricky testaments and choleric contenders?). Then we moved to Bald Hills9, a countryside estate, where we had a pernickety father making his young daughter’s life difficult over geometry lessons, of all things. All this while war loomed, of course.10 And then the canvas of the war, opening at Branau11.
I’m excited for February. And I’m already certain that Pamuk’s line is going to come true in an inflation-proof way for me. With just a minor change, perhaps:
“I read a book one year and my whole life was changed.”
On Social Capital, and the Multilinguality of War and Peace
The novel opens in St. Petersburg, July 1805, at a soirée hosted by a woman named Anna Pavlovna, who is ‘maid of honour and favourite of the Empress Marya Fyodorovna.’12
Several members of what is to be the cast of the novel (one presumes) are introduced in this high-society setting. Notable from a modern novelist’s perspective was the opening in a multi-character set-up, the kind one doesn’t encounter very frequently in the contemporary novel, where a single person’s thoughtsteam is more often than not the site of beginnings (which explains the obsession with that thing called voice). The implicit theatricality of the multi-character set-up was surely common for the 19th-century novel; said theatre could be situated at a salon or a ballroom or a public square or around a meagre hearth. A soirée is, come to think of it, a perfect arrangement to zoom in on conversations in pairs or groups; an omniscient narrator can choose where to go when. This is precisely what happens in War and Peace’s opening chapters.
One understands, from the very beginning, that Anna Pavlovna’s soirée is an elite party taking place as the shadow of war looms on the continent. One of my co-readers extrapolated from Anna’s soirée to Instagram, asking us to see Anna as equivalent to the social network’s algorithm. The idea carried well, I thought: Anna surely displayed a similar commitment to superficiality during crises, while working hard to control who participates in which conversation, who listens to what, and so on. Anna understands, of course, the true function of elite parties, which is to gain, or gain from, social capital. Alliance-building, favour-seeking, information-sharing (gossiping): these are the aims of the gathering, aims attained profitably by a few while the rest drown in easy distraction. Those who have a surfeit of social capital must learn to be skimpy with it in these circumstances. Tolstoy gives us here an adage about the value of economizing said capital (by not exercising influence at every opportunity or every ask) that will do well in our time:
Influence in society […] is capital which has to be economized if it has to last.
A significant marker of the elite nature of Anna Pavlovna’s soirée was the use of French in speech. 18th-century Russian rulers, especially Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, brought Russia closer to Europe and its ideas, and in doing so created an aristocratic class that could not speak Russian very well. They spoke French, instead. To not be able to speak in French would, in fact, be a demerit.
Tolstoy’s use of French (and, occasionally, German) isn’t limited to the odd word or the odd sentence. We encounter entire passages in French. I was struck by the boldness of this, and wondered if it had been an easy or natural thing for Tolstoy to do.
This bilingualism must be of particular interest to an Indian writer in English, for whom bilingualism is the primary condition. The funny thing is that in India you don’t see many bilingual or multilingual books. No Hindi novel will start with dialogue in English (like how War and Peace started with French13); conversely, no Indian novel in English will include entire letters in Hindi (like how War and Peace did with letters in French and German). This seems to be the result of a certain kind of puritanism and/or sandboxing that operates only on the page. On the streets, in the markets, inside offices, dominant Indian languages tend to feed off each other. The power and class tussles between languages and accents are their own source of drama, something that should provoke Indian novelists to be as multilingual as their characters are in life. We must learn from Tolstoy.
Tolstoy is very interested in drama sourced from the play of languages and accents. He betrays, however, a critical attitude about the Russian aristocracy’s adoption of the French language and French salon manners. The idea one gains in these early chapters is that the Russian aristocracy is mentally colonised and therefore in contradiction with the geopolitical reality facing them. To this milieu and its constant exercise of affectation, Tolstoy offers one character as an exception: a bulky, awkward man named Pierre. Pierre is big and unrefined; another character (Pierre’s host in St. Petersburg) calls him a ‘bear’. At Anna Pavlovna’s soirée, it becomes clear that Pierre doesn’t know how to behave in high society. He is an oddity: negligent, if not disdainful, of most of that which is French in Russian culture and manner, and at the same time full of admiration for Napoleon, whom he considers ‘the greatest man of our time.’14 In sum, though, in his ignorance as much as in his passions, in his efforts to belong as much as his inclination to seek some as yet inarticulable ideal, Pierre seems curiously free of the pretensions and corruptions of Russian aristocracy. In later chapters, he becomes legitimised (he was a bastard) and gains riches through inheritance from his father, whose name, Count Bezukhov, now becomes his. Pierre’s coming-of-age is most definitely one of the main concerns of the novel.
On Dances
… and a lament about the erasure of dancing in the contemporary novel
In a celebration in Moscow, a character named Count Rostov performs a version of the Daniel Cooper—a tough, all-too-aerobic dance. Tolstoy’s description of his dance was the highlight of my reading month:
… the jovial old gentleman, who standing beside his tall and stout partner, Marya Dmitrievna, curved his arms, beat time, straightened his shoulders, turned out his toes, tapped gently with his foot, and by a smile that broadened his round face more and more, prepared the onlookers for what was to follow. As soon as the provocatively gay strains of Daniel Cooper (somewhat resembling those of a merry folk dance) began to sound, all the doorways of the ballroom were suddenly filled by the domestic serfs—the men on one side and the women on the other—who with beaming faces had come to see their master making merry.
‘Just look at the master! A regular eagle he is!’ loudly remarked the nanny, as she stood in one of the doorways.
The emphasis is mine. Count Rostov’s Daniel Cooper follows a performance of the ecosaisse (a couples’ dance, French in origin) by the younger people at the party. It is possible that in Tolstoy’s conception, Count Rostov’s dance is a movement towards greater physicality and relative freedom from form and formality. The animation it causes among the serfs surely signifies that the dance is closer to ‘popular culture’ than the ecosaisses (both are happy dances, mind). I suspect Tolstoy wanted us to make note of Count Rostov’s dance for specific reasons—for the contrast it promises with the events to follow, as the acme of peace and merry-making in a country on the cusp of war; and for the contrast it offers from the general conduct of Russian aristocracy, which Tolstoy wants us to see as out of touch with folksy ‘Russianness’. Count Rostov’s partner in the dance, Marya Dmitrievna, offers the second contrast in person all the time: she speaks only in Russian. Tolstoy wants us to see her as formidable and to like her.
Dancing seems essential to the times and milieu of War and Peace. I’m sure there will be many more meaningful dances in the novel. Which made me think: do people not dance today? Why, then, is a dancing scene so rare in contemporary novels? Apart from Sharanya Manivannan’s 2018 novel The Queen of Jasmine Country, I cannot recall a single Indian novel in English in which a dance was described or a dance sequence played a significant role. This is odd in a country where dance—from distinguished forms performed on stage to formless street-side frolics during processions of any kind—is very much an alive part of culture. In Indian film, eg., dancing is crucial. A dance can be a standout sequence in a film, even a plot hinge. It’s odd, then, for the novel to completely forget about this part of existence for so long.
I hereby declare that I’ll include a dance in my next novel.
Jolly Good Generals
A writer of a historical novel will do well to place one of their characters close to a historical figure. Tolstoy does just that one of his main young characters, who is made aide-de-camp to General Mikhail Kutuzov, commander-in-chief of the Russian army. Kutuzov is, perhaps, the greatest real-life figure in the book after Napoleon Bonaparte. Of his defeats and victories, we are definitely going to see a lot of in War and Peace.
But Russia’s military conflicts with France, or, indeed, with other empires, are a thing of continuity. Before the novel moves war-side, there is passionate talk about Kutuzov’s predecessor, General Suvorov, at two different parties. The characters remember him because in 1799, just six years before the page opens in the book, General Suvorov had fought the French with mixed results. He beat them in Italy, but couldn’t consolidate his gains there, for he was asked, instead, to fight the enemy in Switzerland. The Swiss operation didn’t prove to be successful. Eventually, the French regained territories in Italy too.
Suvorov died in 1802, out of favour from the then emperor. Defining his legacy was presumably an important thing among Russians of the time.
This is how he’s first mentioned in the novel
‘Suvorov now—he knew what he was about; yet they beat him à plate couture (to pulp), and where are we to find Suvorovs now?’
Elsewhere, a dinner-time conversation between father and son turns into a little argument about Suvorov’s legacy. The son tells the father that the past always seems good, and reminds him of how Suvorov fell into the trap of the French general Moreau in Switzerland, ‘a trap from which he did not know how to escape.’ The father gets into a huff hearing that:
‘Who told you that? Who?’ cried the prince. ‘Suvorov!’ And he jerked away his plate, which Tikhon briskly caught. ‘Suvorov! . . . Consider, Prince Andrei! Two . . . Frederick and Suvorov; Moreau! . . . Moreau would have been a prisoner if Suvorov had had a free hand; but he had the Hofs-kriegs-wurst-schnapps-Rath on his hands. It would have puzzled the devil himself! When you get there you’ll find out what those Hofs-kriegs-wurst-Raths are! Suvorov couldn’t manage them so what chance has Mikhail Kutuzov? […]
The father effectively blames Suvorov’s defeat on the Austrians—more specifically, the Austrian military administrative authority of Hofkriegsrat—who, being Russian allies, must have had considerable say in Suvorov’s actions.
For me, these two drawing-room conversations were a way for Tolstoy to convey to us 1805 Russia’s main feeling regarding its military leadership: Our last great general—and even he couldn’t win against the French—is dead.
This arguably makes it a great time to find the next great general. But history tells us who won at Austerlitz rather clearly.15 From Tolstoy’s depictions of peace-time Russia, success at war would anyway seem impossible. There is too much conniving and scheming, too much conspicuous consumption, too much ennui and aimlessness. Something needs to change in the very fabric of Russian society. Less French at soirées might be a good start.
Around mid-January, I shared with Nikita, my wife, my excitement after joining the readalongs and declared that this was the best way to finish a really big book like W&P. Nikita agreed. The conversation veered into how big W&P was in comparison to other big books we’d read or wanted to read. Nikita, who’s read Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, casually remarked that the Seth novel was bigger than Tolstoy’s. I thought it wasn’t; in fact, I felt convinced (for perhaps the simple reason that I was reading one and had not yet read the other) that ASB was shorter by a good hundred thousand words if not more. A quick Google search disabused me of my notion. ASB beats W&P by a small margin of about 4,000 words.
Which makes me throw this wish out in the air. Next year, let there be an ASB read-along. Or perhaps Midnight’s Children?
Apparently, when Yeni Hayat (The New Life) came out in Turkey, the publisher put up hoardings carrying this sentence in large font all around Istanbul. Imagine a whole city saying ‘I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.’ How lovely!
This is Henry James’s term for 19th-century novels like War & Peace and Moby Dick. An apt term. Infinitely superior to doorstopper, which I find to be needlessly utilitarian in ambition, and therefore a tad vulgar.
Titled The Geometry of Amalfitano’s Insanity. The essay, had it been completed, would have covered many things, including the ending of the section, wherein Boris Yeltsin appears in Amalfitano’s dream (there is no escape from famous Russians even in inner life). However, the key argument of the essay would be expressed through the diagram of an equilateral triangle with Politics, Personal Life, and Philosophy as its three corners, and a slanted line labelled Poetry intersecting the lines between (1) Philosophy and Personal Life, and (2) Politics and Personal Life. Only the line between Philosophy and Politics remains untouched by Poetry. Those who’ve read this part of 2666 will remember how arbitrarily important (the modifier is crucial) geometry is here. To those who haven’t understood a word of what I’ve said in this footnote: Sorry. I blame Bolaño!
I am not too sure of calling 2666 a novel. Interestingly, Tolstoy didn’t think of War & Peace as a novel ‘in the European sense.’ Not-being-a-novel is perhaps the one thing apart from their size that the two books share. There is, however, a sentence in 2666 where Tolstoy is mentioned thrice. A bit incomprehensibly. The paragraph teeters, in fact, on the brink of incomprehensibility. I think Bolaño is commenting on how bad writers, unable to go into the depth of things, are caught amidst semblances of ‘the good’, confusing imitations of said semblances with true worth or value. Emphasis on the Tolstoy bits is mine:
As if the paradise of good writers, according to bad writers, were inhabited by semblances. As if the worth (or excellence) of a work were based on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and even the gesture muddled by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of Tolstoy and the versts traveled on horseback by Tolstoy and the women deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry burned by the fire of seeming.
A concept articulated in many ways by Bolaño
In the 1898 aesthetic tract titled What is Art? Tolstoy claims that there is an infection in society and proposes the moral values of the author as a cure. It’s not possible to take this theory seriously today. But quite an idea, isn’t it? Tolstoy the novelist, thankfully, works under the glow of only the good wavelengths—and not the icky radioactive spectrum—of this idea.
The kind of know all, see all, choose well camera-mike-microchip mechanism Tolstoy employs. Commonly called ‘the God voice’.
A map in the book shows Bald Hills at about two hundred miles to the east of Moscow, close to Smolensk, and on the path of Napoleon’s advance to, and retreat from, Moscow in 1812. That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence about the fate of the Bolkonskys, frankly.
Actually, this is just figure of speech. European empires of this time were constantly at war. But the specific context here is… well… Napoleon. He’s taken Genoa and Lucca and threatens (again) the Austrian empire, an ally of the Russian empire.
Where, decades later, a monster names Hitler was born.
The Tsar’s mum. Dowager Queen. Catherine-II’s daughter-in-law.
I’m glad that the Maude & Maude translation I’m reading has kept the text in the other languages as is and used footnotes to provide the English translation. It’s particularly interesting to know just what was said in French, as Tolstoy would have wanted all readers to know.
A consideration whose capacity for causing offense may be understood through observing the contrast with Anna Pavlovna’s epithet for the same man at the same party: ‘the Antichrist.’
I guess Ridley Scott’s Napoleon shows it from the French viewpoint.
Omg, thank you for reminding me to keep at WAR AND PEACE. I loved the first few chapters, in fact, and bought my copy at a writer friend’s suggestion. I loved your post
and the ref to ASB which, of course, I read fifty pages of before life got in the way. Thank you also for quoting Pamuk whose work I love so much (a revelation that got me in trouble with our guide in Istanbul where he is loved and hated in equal measure). All the reading I’m doing for LETTERS FROM EVERYWHERE is adding another shade to me, I think. A book doesn’t have to change your life but if it adds another dimension, great. I read that a diamond can have any number of sides and angles, as the cutter determines... Thanks for this!
Really enjoyed your observations. Thanks, T.