Tag Archives: Tolstoy

 The Weight and Balance of “War and Peace” 

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“War and Peace is a hymn to life. It is the Iliad and the Odyssey of Russia.” – Rosemary Edmonds, Introduction to War and Peace (Penguin,1978)

Leo Tolstoy is my favorite writer.  Well, that’s not quite true: I’m not the kind of gal who takes one book to a desert island. I have many favorite writers, including Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, and Doris Lessing. 

Yet I always come back to War and Peace.  I have read this immense, breathtaking novel – 1,444 pages in Rosemary Edmonds’ translation (Penguin) – twelve times.  Each time I marvel at the dramatic scenes of love and domesticity contrasted with the excitement and horrors of war. 

Some year ago, there was a three-day public reading of War and Peace in a university town. I wasn’t quite fanatical enough to make the journey, but I loved the idea. The characters are so vivid that when I read I become Natalia Rostov, a young fashionista who fusses over what her mother and cousin will wear to the ball; or her brother. Nikolai, who, wounded on the battlefield, realizes that the French might kill him – he, whom everyone loves! I am also fond of Marya Bolkonsky, an awkward heiress who devotes herself to religion.  And my favorite hussar officer is Denisov, who has an endearing lisp.

This month I have dipped into my favorite parts of W&P, but having sprained my wrist on Middlemarch, it has been an awkward experience. Ouch!  What I need is a six-volume set. Lots of slim volumes, if they weren’t so ancient, beat-up, and expensive!   Or I  need to rip my paperback into two parts, but I don’t have the strength.

And so I have a paperback-on-a- pillow system, combined with yoga exercises, too complicated to explain without diagrams, maps, and the Grateful Dead playing in the background. Since I don’t feel up to diagramming today, I will comment on the advantages and disadvantages of three paperback editions of War and Peace.

I’m an old-fashioned reader, and my favorite translators are, alas, dead: Aylmer and Louise Maude were friends of Tolstoy, who recommended their translation; Rosemary Edmonds was famous for her translations of Tolstoy; and Constance Garnett was the first translator of many 19th-century Russian writers.  Edmonds is my favorite but unfortunately her translation is out-of-print. 

The Oxford Maude translation is the best buy,  This wins the three-way contest in terms of background material.  The Maudes’ translation is elegant, and I’m also impressed by their scholarly introduction, lists of Dates of Principal Events, Principal Characters, footnotes, and maps. All the background you want and need.

The Penguin paperback Rosemary Edmonds translation (1978) is out-of-print but you can find used copies.   Penguin now publishes Anthony Briggs’ excellent 2005 translation, which comes with all the s fixin’s: maps, lists, and historical material.

translated by Rosemary Edmonds

It’s not that I don’t recommend Briggs – I do – but Edmonds happens to be my favorite Russian translator.  I highly recommend this if you can find it. It has a good introduction by Edmonds but no notes. There were fewer notes in 20th-century Penguins, I think.

 The Modern Library Constance Garnett translation is available in paperback or a a used hardcover. Garnett is a graceful writer, and I have loved her translations of other Russian writers as weel. Some people rant about Garnett’s mistakes, but if there are mistakes, only the most learned readers will know.  I love this edition, but again, no background material other than the introduction.  Double-check on that:  it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at this edition.

If you want a modern translation, I highly recommend Briggs’ in the 2005 Penguin. 

LET ME KNOW YOUR FAVORITE TRANSLATIONS!

Tolstoy on New Year’s Day: “War and Peace”

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Rosemary Edmonds’ translation


Traditionally, I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace on New Year’s Day. I always look forward to attending Princess Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s glittering reception, where she and her aristocratic friends discuss their enemy Bonaparte (“the anti-Christ’) and the greatness of their own Prince Alexander.

Through the refined, if witty, conversations at this salon, Tolstoy introduces many of the main characters. Anna Pavlovna welcomes the first guest, Prince Vasili, who speaks French “with the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance” and worries desperately about marrying off his three decadent children. His exquisite daughter, Helene, is stupid but at least wants to marry a rich man. His oldest son, Hippolyte, is, truly, an idiot. Anna Pavolvna has a suggestion: perhaps his rakish younger son Anatole, a gambler often in trouble with the police, could marry Marya Bolkonsky, the spinster daughter of rich Prince Nicholas Bolkonsky. Thus are deals brokered, though they often fall through.

As light relief, we meet gauche young Pierre, the “natural son” of Count Bezukhov. Anna Pavlovna despairs of Pierre’s social skills: he talks too much and too earnestly about politics, so Pavlovna gently detaches him from the Abbe, one of the guests of honor. Once Pierre inherits money, though, Anna Pavlovna changes her tune. Everything Pierre says is suddenly brilliant and charming.

From beginning to end, this is a delightful, intriguing novel, with much charm and fun along with the drama and tragedy of war. Tolstoy’s multi-layered story is so splendid and brilliantly plotted that you find yourself racing through it. You think, Is this a family saga? Is this a historical novel blockbuster? Well, perhaps both. You feel the crunch of snow and see the moon as the young Rostovs, Natasha, Nicholas, Sonya, and Petya, dress up as mummers and ride sledges through the snow on the third day of Christmas.

Reading at Starbucks: Mass market edition, trans. by Ann Dunnigan

This is one of my favorite snowy passages in literature:

Nicholas set off following the first sledge: behind him the others moved noisily, their runners squeaking. At first they drove at a steady trot along the narrow road. While they drove past the garden, the shadows of the bare trees fell across the road and hid the brilliant moonlight as soon as they were past the fence, the snowy plain, bathed in moonlight and motionless, spread out before them glittering like diamonds and dappled with bluish shadows. Bang, bang! went the first sledge over a cradle-hole in the snow of the road, and each o f the other sledges jolted in the same way, and rudely breaking the frost-bound stillness the troykas began to speed along the road one after the other.

Some complain that Tolstoy’s prose is rough and repetitive in Russian, but this is not reflected in the smooth older translations by the Maudes, Constance Garnett, and Rosemary Edmonds. I do notice both repetition and alliteration in the passage above: “ “hid the brilliant moonlight” and “bathed in moonlight and motionless.” There is also a parallel construction of initial letters of the parallel phrases: “brilliant moonlight” and “bathed in moonlight.” If this is the repetition Russian readers complain about, I gently insist that it enhances our sense of a cold winter’s night.

Tolstoy moves skillfully from scenes of balls and parties to the field of war. In one memorable scene, Nicholas gets lost on the battlefield and suddenly realizes that the French are chasing him. He has a moment of derealization: Can they really be after him? Do they want to kill him? This seems unbelievable. Nicholas loves the life of the soldier, being outdoors, hanging out with friends and officers, and talking around the fire. But the realization that he could die – that is the last thing on the minds of Nicholas and his lisping, fearless hussar friend, Denisov.


There is something unique about the so-called Russian giants of the 19th century. Perhaps it is because they were constantly being banished and exiled, and that they were, in a way, writers on the run.

But Tolstoy was never banished. There goes my theory.

Is War and Peace the greatest novel of all time?

The Fate of a Charming Woman: Love, Sex, and Drugs in “Anna Karenina”

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All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. – “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy

 
Russian novelists of the nineteenth century are obsessed with love affairs and unhappy marriages.  Having just reread Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s masterpiece, I am left, as always, with compassion for Anna.  She is the charming, lovely wife of an important but charmless government official, Karenin, and the mother of a beloved son.  But Anna loses her position in society after she leaves Karenin for her lover, Vronsky. 


When I read AK at 20, I viewed Anna as a romantic figure who was crushed by society for illicit love.  I no longer regard Anna as a romantic figure, but she is indeed crushed by society.  The double standard is brutal:  no one blames Vronsky for a sexual liaison, and he goes about in society as before, but Anna is shunned by friends.  When she goes to the opera, she is harassed – by a woman who makes a scene and leaves because of Anna. By default, love of Vronsky becomes Anna’s sole pursuit. 


Tolstoy did not at first view Anna as a sympathetic character.  He intended to write a novel in which he moralized about her as a fallen woman.  But he began to see Anna differently as he wrote this tragic novel.  

And yet he also shows Anna as a destructive force.  In the beginning of the novel, Anna travels to Moscow to make peace between her brother, Stiva, and his wife, Dolly, who has learned that he is having an affair with their former governess.  Ironically, after she persuades Dolly to stay, Anna cruelly destroys the mental health of Dolly’s younger sister, Kitty, by dancing all night with Kitty’s suitor, the handsome Vronsky.  She is guiltily aware that she ruined the night for Kitty.  Vronsky pursues Anna to Petersburg, without even saying good-bye to Kitty, who is so shattered she has a nervous breakdown.  It’s all for the best – Kitty ends up marrying my favorite character, Levin, a much better man – but we see that Anna, like Stiva, is impulsive, with a strong sex drive.

Perhaps you’re wondering:  where do the drugs come in?  Anna begins to take opium to sleep at night.  And we see, horrified, how the opium skews her judgment.  Vronsky is faithful to her, as he tells her over and over, but she does not believe him.  She is left alone too much at home, and has extreme mood swings.  Finally, her thought processes become so  disorganized that she enters a frenzied,  psychotic state.  And when she throws herself on the railroad tracks in front of a train, she is confused – doesn’t quite know how she got there – and regrets the impulse to commit suicide. Too late. Poor Anna!  What a terrible end to love!

But perhaps Vronsky is the true destructive force.  There is a grim scene where he kills his beautiful mare by incompetent riding in a race.  He is careless – careless of the mare, careless of Kitty’s feelings, careless of Anna’s feelings.  He can be noble at times, but how could he expect Anna to be happy as a pariah?  

Anna is a  central character, but in this magnificent novel Tolstoy also delineates the marriages of Levin and Kitty, Dolly and Stiva, and the sad deterioration of Karenin after Anna leaves him.  A brilliant, entertaining page-turner.  This was, I think, my fifth reading. 

Oh, Dear, I’m a Bibliomane!

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It is possible to have too many books.  Sometimes we idly chat about opening a bookstore. 


 While light-heartedly organizing a bookcase the other day, I discovered we had two, sometimes three, even four, copies of each of Thomas Hardy’s novels.  It seems excessive – but if you read and reread a dingy, dusty, coffee-stained library discard of Two on a Tower, you might replace it when it gently disintegrates.   You might- but I might replace it with two Penguins with different covers! And why do I have two copies of The Well-Beloved, surely Hardy’s worst novel?  Well, one of them is used to prop open a window.  But why the other copy?

Oh, dear, I really am a bibliomane! 

 And after reading Marius Kociejowski’s  charming, poignant memoir, A Factotum in the Book Trade, I had a wake-up call – not the point of the book, by the way.  Kociejowski differentiates between bibliophiles – book lovers who buy books in moderation – and bibliomanes – book lovers who manically can’t stop buying.


Some of the collectors he describes really are mad – misers who have no furniture, just boxes of books, and dress in rags so they can spend all their money on first editions.  They are obsessed with chasing down a book they really must have.  

Am I so different?  I fear not!  I have a mad number of books.   I wasn’t consciously collecting, but isn’t that collecting if you unwittingly collect multiple copies of Hardy’s books – I’ve even got The Dynasts!  


I don’t buy rare books – I am a common reader – but  I love 19th-century novels, and I do have multiple paperbacks of some of my favorite authors. I have at least six copies of War and Peace in different translations.  Now I will hang onto these copies -Tolstoy is one of my favorite writers – and my husband pretends not to see the different editions, because he knows I’m obsessed with that book.  One  day when I put it in my bike pannier, he said I didn’t need to carry such a big book..  I pointed out that I was reading it and needed it for our coffee break.  


“No wonder you have a bad back!” He offered to carry it in his pannier, but I refused.

I’m like my mother, who used to collect knick-knacks.  She collected so many that she had to store boxes and boxes and boxes of them in the basement.  And from time to time she would bring up favorites from the boxes and box up those she tired of.


Perhaps it is a genetic trait.

Musing on the Classics & the Mystery of the Lapsed Subscription

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My collection of copies of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

I love rereading the classics. Not occasionally, but constantly.  My shabby copies of nineteenth-century novels fall open to favorite scenes. What ho!  Is it War and Peace time? (That’s on New Year’s Day.)  And I am once again spellbound by the kindness and simplicity of my favorite character,  Marya Bolokonsky, when she forgives Mademoiselle Bourienne, her  shallow French companion, “with her ribbons and pretty face,” for making out with Marya’s imbecilic suitor.   

Every year I reread four of my best-loved books, War and Peace,  Daniel Deronda, Villette, and Bleak House.  They are brilliant, witty, intense,  and gorgeously-written.   These are the most perfect books I have ever read.

Occasionally, when I feel almost too well-acquainted with one of them,  I read another by the same author.  For example, Anna Karenina is my Tolstoy alternate.  Yet I also know this book extremely well.  Oh, yes, I love this scene, I thought, smiling, during a recent rereading of Anna Karenina.

And who could not be charmed by Levin’s comic perturbation when he is late for his wedding because of a wardrobe mix-up?  His servant forgot to provide a fresh shirt, and he can’t wear yesterday’s crumpled shirt with his new stylish waist-coat and coat.  Levin’s other shirts are packed in a trunk at his fiancee’s house.

The dialogue charms and perfectly depicts the personalities of Levin and his friend Oblonsky.

‘Was ever a man in such a terribly idiotic position?’ he demanded.

‘Yes, it is stupid,’ Oblonsky concurred with a soothing smile. ‘But don’t worry, it will be here in a minute.’

‘Oh, how can I help it?’ said Levin with suppressed fury. ‘And these idiotic open waistcoats—it’s impossible!’ He glanced at his crumpled shirt-front. ‘And suppose the things have already gone to the station!’ he exclaimed in despair. ‘

‘Then you’ll have to wear mine.’

Tolstoy weaves a web of happy and unhappy families.  The wedding of Levin and Kitty occurs in the middle of this masterpiece, which centers on three marriages, two disrupted by adultery. Anna Karenina leaves her husband Karenin for Vronsky, and virtually ruins Karenin’s career as well as her reputation;  her brother Stiva Oblonsky cheats on his wife Dolly, but Dolly forgives him, ironically because of Anna’s intervention. (Does Tolstoy think adultery runs in families?)

Tolstoy descrbes the marriage of the innocents Levin and Kitty optimistically, though no marriage is romantic or ideal.   

Tolstoy’s books are nimble, well-plotted, fast-paced, vibrant, and the characters jump off the page.  As for translations, my favorite is the Maude.

THE MYSTERY OF THE LAPSED SUBSCRIPTION.  I do not read enough of the TLS to justify a subscription, but I enjoy the N.B. column, and you can’t go wrong with Mary Beard as classics editor. Over the years I have bought way, way too many books because of the fascinating reviews.  (That aspect of a subscripiton is not good.)

A few days ago, when I was mysteriously “shut out” of the website, I wondered, What the hell…?   So I wrote to the helpline, in India or China or wherever, and was told that my subscription was canceled last March.  I know I resubscribed later;  how otherwise could I have accessed all the articles until this January?  But they say they have no record…

I’ll resubscribe after I’ve read all the books I’ve bought!

Are You a Russian Lit Geek? Rereading Goncharov’s “Oblomov” and Tolstoy’s “The Cossacks”

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Are you a Russian lit geek?  I love Russian classics.  I even saved my adorable notes from a long-ago Russian Literature in Translation class.  And I  recently reread two 19th-century Russian novels, Ivan Goncharov’s comic masterpiece, Oblomov, and Tolstoy’s short novel, The Cossacks.

I have never read a funnier novel than  Oblomov. The enchantingly slothful hero, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, prefers sleep to action.  He naps and lazes all day in his dusty apartment, where his servant Zakhar does as little as possible.  In the opening chapter, the two quarrel about the housekeeping.  Zakhar claims he can’t dust or sweep the cobwebs unless Oblomov goes out for a day.  The prospect horrifies Oblomov. “Good lord! what next?  Go out indeed!  You’d better go back to your room.”

Nothing can wake up Oblomov:  neither his bailiff’s cheating him of money,  nor  the landlord’s eviction notice.    But when his energetic half-German friend Stolz shows up, Oblomov reluctantly make the rounds of social visits. But he doesn’t truly wake up tills he falls in love with  Olga, a young woman determined to direct his life:  she  insists that he read books and  take long walks.  The romance  can’t last, of course.  Oblomov becomes sluggish in the fall.  And he  suffers from what he calls “Oblomovism.”

One of the most famous chapters is “Oblomov’s Dream,” the longest single scene in Russian literature, according to critic Richard Freeborn.  Oblomov dreams of his  idyllic childhood  and future with a wife and children on his beautiful country estate.  The power of Oblomov’s imagination radically changes our attitude toward his sleepy mode of living.  Critics in the 19th century interpreted “Oblomovism” as an illustration of the  Russian character flaw that prevented reform and revolution.  Stolz is successful only because he is half German.  But Goncharov also believed the artist must be a passive vehicle, “an artist of the eye” who relies on his subconscious. And Oblomov fits that description, I think on a third reading.  Yet such an interpretation is out of context.

I have read and loved David Magarshack’s translation of Oblomov (Penguin) and Natalie Duddington”s (Everyman’s Library).

Tolstoy wrote The Cossacks, a partly autobiographical novel, over 10 years.  He  traveled to the Caucasus in 1851 and in 1852 joined the army as a cadet.  Writing The Cossacks was Tolstoy’s attempt to deflate the romantic view of the Caucasus. It was published in 1863.

The Cossacks begins as the story of  Olenin, an upper-class young man who wonders “how to live.”  He leaves Moscow for the Caucasus, because he seeks a new kind of life.  In the Caucasus he is overwhelmed by the beauty of the mountains.  And he becomes infatuated with the simplicity and naturalness of the Cossacks.

The most interesting part of the book is a series of sketches of Cossack characters. The women farm and do the work; the men hunt, drink, and fight.   Tolstoy focuses on three characters:  Lukashka, a fearless Cossack soldier who does exactly what he wants, Maryanka, a gorgeous young woman who is understood to be engaged to Lukashka, and “Uncle” Yokashka, an old man who tells stories and drinks to excess.  Olenin falls in love with Maryanka. He wants to be a Cossack, but in the end realizes he will never fit in.

It is not my favorite Tolstoy, but he could not have written War and Peace if he had not written stories about the Caucasus and Crimea.

I have two good translations of this:  David McDuff’s (Penguin) and Aylmer and Louise Maude’s in Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy. As so often, I preferred the Maude.

A Return to “War and Peace”

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My “War and Peace” collection

I am rereading War and Peace, my favorite novel. (Well, it is tied with my other favorite, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette).  I have read Tolstoy’s classic 12 times since I was 18, when it changed my concept of the novel, and I’ve written  about it eight times at my old blog Mirabile Dictu.

Tolstoy’s masterpiece is more than a blockbuster novel:  it is a portal to 19th-century Russia, particularly to society in Moscow and Petersburg . And may I say the Rostov family and their awkward, fat friend Pierre seem as real to me as many people I know?  I am also fond of Nikolai Rostov’s military comrades in the Napoleonic Wars, especially the doppelgängers,  Denisov (lisping, comical noble, valiant ) and Dolokhov (valiant, a devoted son, but also nasty, jealous, and immoral). Both men fall in love with Rostov women, Denisov with Nikolai’s sister Natasha and  Dolokhov with Nikolai’s cousin Sonia.  (Is there a latent, transferred homosexuality here?)  When rejected, Denisov is embarrassed and knows he overstepped boundaries, but Dolokhov takes revenge by bankrupting Nikolai at cards.

My favorite character is Marya Bolokhonskaya, a plain young spinster who finds joy in doing good works, household duties, and religion.  We wonder, Will she ever escape her eccentric, often verbally abusive father?  Will any man ever see her inner beauty? But we admire her practicality in not living for silly flirtations and fashion.

I know something of the perils of translation, and so I was  fascinated by an essay I recently found by Michael R. Katz, “War and Peace in Our Time.” He muses on the coincidence of the publication of  three new translations of W&P in the first decade of this century.  In analyzing the reasons for the resurgence,  he traces the history of the English translations of W&P, beginning with the prolific  Clara Bell.  He considers the older translations by the English couple Louise and Aylmer Maude and the American translator Ann Dunnigan notable.  Of the new, he is  interested in the much-lauded translation by the famous couple Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and that of the British translator Anthony Briggs.

The word “translation” comes from the Latin translatum, a past participle of the verb transfero, “carry across.” If you have ever attempted to “carry across” the literature of a foreign language into English writing, you will understand the difficulties.  Structures of languages are sometimes incompatible: English depends on word order, while inflected languages like Greek and Latin depend on word endings. The  flexible arrangement of words in inflected languages can’t quite be “transferred” to the English structure.

Since I have not read Ann Dunnigan’s translation, recommended by Michael R. Katz,  I decided to try it.   I popped the Signet paperback of the Dunnigan translation into my bike pannier for reading on the go. But here’s what I learned when I took a break at Starbucks:  War and Peace cannot be ideally read at a coffeehouse. Who knew?  Dunnigan’s translation is accessible and affecting, but not in a crowded cafe.

HERE ARE EXCERPTS FROM A POST I WROTE AT MIRABILE DICTU IN 2015, “The War and Peace Collection: Is Rosemary Edmonds’ Translation the Best?”

I reread War and Peace every year.

I started reading it again on New Year’s Day and just finished it a few hours ago.

And now I’m ready to start again.

 War and Peace says everything, no?  Why read anything else?  The translator Rosemary Edmonds wrote,  “War and Peace is a hymn to life.  It is the Iliad and the Odyssey of Russia.  Its message is that the only fundamental obligation of man is to be in tune with life.”

Tolstoy’s brilliant, entertaining chronicle of Russia during the Napoleonic wars is a pageturner.  Tolstoy said it was not a novel.  “It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed.”

I am loving Rosemary Edmonds’s superb translation of War and Peace.  This afternoon I was particularly moved by the pages describing Denisov’s grief over the senseless death of Petya Rostov.  The bleak contrast between the reactions of the unfeeling officer Dolokhov and the brave, kind, lisping officer Denisov made me cry.

When Dolohov notes Petya is “done for” and rides away from the corpse, expecting Denisov to follow,

Denisov did not reply.  He rode up to Petya, dismounted, and with trembling hands turned Petya’s blood-stained, mud-bespattered face–which had already gone white–towards himself.

“I always like sweet things. Wonderful raisins, take them all,” he recalled Petya’s words. And the Cossacks looked round in amazement at the sound, like the howl of a dog, which broke from Denisov as he quickly turned away, walked to the wattle fence and held on to it.

Which is your favorite translation of War and Peace? Constance Garnett?  The Maudes?  Anthony Briggs?  Pevear and Volokhonsky?