Tag Archives: War and Peace

 The Weight and Balance of “War and Peace” 

“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”

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?

Mr. Featherstone’s Will, Pierre’s Inheritance, and the Case of Jarndyce & Jarndyce

 

For several years, I practiced a form of passive resistance while my dad’s so-called estate was settled. If a riding lawn mower was mentioned, I’d say, “Just give away the lawn mower!” Ditto for the shed. “Give away the shed!”

What a tangled web Dad wove!  Like the suit of Jarndyce & Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House, there was cunctation and confusion; there were mysterious lost deeds and a shed with a rusting lawn mower. At one point, if I weren’t hallucinating, and I sincerely hope I was, there was talk of turning a “meadow” into an Amish farm.  The meadow was hardly bigger than a back yard, but perhaps the Amish could harvest the dandelions.

“Just give away the meadow!”

Despite suspicions that the executors were not entirely honest, that they might have visited Vegas in their leisure hours, I wanted the whole thing settled, period, the end.  My favorite mathematical conundrum was:  How long does it take to give away a shed?  At one point I contemplated giving everything to a party who was suing, but friends pointed out that generosity might spur more lawsuits.  

Wills, unsettled estates, and endless lawsuits are a central theme in 19th-century literature.   In Dickens’s Bleak House, the eccentric Mr. Jarndyce refuses involvement in a tangled lawsuit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has troubled his wretched family for generations. Many of the characters in Bleak House are peripherally involved in the suit.  Some have grown old waiting for the settlement. Mr. Jarndyce warns his gullible ward, Richard Carstone, to avoid the perils of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has led many to financial and spiritual ruin. Alas, Richard ignores Mr. Jarndyce’s advice, with grim results.

In the beginning of the novel, Dickens describes the fog overhanging Chancery, the glum courts where judges preside over murky cases. 

Dickens explains Jarndyce and Jarndyc eloquently.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

In 19th-century literature, the wills of wealthy men have a major impact.  In Middlemarch, Fred Vincy squanders money on horses and frivolous pursuits, in the confidence that he will inherit the estate of his dying uncle, Mr. Featherstone. 

But Mr. Featherstone is shrewd. “So, Sir, you’ve been paying ten percent. for money which you’ve promised to pay off for mortgaging my land when I’m dead and gone, eh?  You put my life at a twelvemonth, say.  But I can alter my will yet.” 

Mr. Featherstone alters his will in favor of a distant relation, but repents on his deathbed.   He asks Mary Garth, his attendant, to burn it in order to reinstate the will that leaves everything to Fred.  But Mary has a strict moral philosophy, and refuses to touch the will while Mr. Featherstone is ill, possibly not in his right mind.  It is the morally correct thing to do, but it does affect Fred, Mary’s boyfriend.   Eventually the right thing turns out to be right for Fred and for Mary, too, but the reader must think hard about it.  Obviously, principles are laxer in the twenty-first century. What does one make of Mary Garth? Are there Mary Garths in the twenty-first century?

In War and Peace, there is more fiddling with wills. Countess Drubetskaya is ambitious for her son, Boris. She realizes that Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of the dying Count Bezukhov, may inherit his father’s estate.  And so she does a very odd thing, on the chance that it may help her son someday. She hustles Pierre out of a party and into a carriage, and accompanies him to his father’s house. While the Count is on his deathbed, she wrestles with the eldest princess for a copy of the will that leaves everything to Pierre.  How she manages to win this wrestling match is beyond my powers of explication, but it changes Pierre’s life, not necessarily for the better.  People pretend to like him, but cheat him and take advantage of him. But, yes, he can and does help Boris. Eventually he finds his way to contentment, but riches have deprived him of joy.

Nineteenth-century writers often wrote about the perils and the power of money. The title of one of Zola’s novels is Money.  We might all be better off if we regularly read the 19th-century literature of inheritance, wills, and money.  I’m not saying we would be smarter, but we might think more about moral philosophy.

On Wellness, High-Tech Thermometers, & “War and Peace”

I went to the clinic to get a prescription renewed. In the lobby, I filled out a form attesting to the absence of cornonavirus symptoms. “Have you had contact with anyone with Covid in the last two weeks?” No. Then the tech tried to get a temperature reading on me. I did not respond to the thermometer gun aimed at my head. She tried three different thermometers. BLAP! BLAP! BLAP!

From CBNC

“Perhaps I do not exist,” I said brightly. A scowl in return. She did not know I was joking. You can’t get past the foyer unless you have a normal temperature. They waved me in with no temperature, though. I thought of Twilight and Interview with a Vampire.

Anyway, I got in. Fabulous! What fun. ALL the blood work is bad. Thank you, pandemic, for keeping me inside for most of seven months so I don’t get Covid but get generally run-down. All the numbers went up, even my blood pressure, which used to be low, and now is normal. That can’t be good! I faithfully promised to exercise…long Emily Bronte-style walk on the moors–and took an exhausting bike ride with my husband the same day to get all the numbers down, down, down. If I biked like that very day, I would be healthy…but asleep by 8 o’clock.

AND NOW FOR A WAR AND PEACE QUIZ.

War and Peace is my favorite novel, even more brilliant than Villette, my other favorite. But the other day I came across a W&P character list and name pronunciation guide, and learned, by God, that I have mispronounced the names of my two favorite 19th-century Russian families for years.

Who wouldn’t love to live with the charming Rostovs? I especially like the company of Nicholas and Natasha. Rostov is pronounced Ros-TOV, not ROS-tov, which sounds better to me. And I adore Pierre Bezhukov, but it is Bezh-U-kov, not BEZH-u-kov.

The Maudes (my favorite translators of Tolstoy) would be disappointed in me. Louise and Aylmer Maude were meticulous translators, knew Tolstoy, and it is their character and pronunciation list. But I’ll always call these characters the ROS-tovs and the BEZH-u-kovs. We have our linguistic biases. I once knew a Spanish family who called their cat Gatsby “Gots-by.” The same thing.

And now…

Stay well!

Namaste!

A Return to “War and Peace”

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?

Mimi on Tolstoy in Maureen Howard’s “The Rags of Time”

 Today, when I told my husband I was finishing up two books this month, he asked, “Is one of them War and Peace?”

I love Tolstoy so much that it is a family joke.  But, no, I haven’t been reading it.

I just finished Maureen Howard’s The Rags of Time, a kind of woman’s Ulysses, and the last in Howard’s quartet of novels on the seasons.  And there are a few references to War and Peace.

Howard’s double, Mimi, an 80-year-old writer who reflects on American history, personal history, and  the design of Central Park, recalls reading War and Peace as a girl one summer in her parents’ bedroom in Bridgeport, Connecticut. ( N.B.  This episode is also in Howard’s memoir, Facts of Life.)   And near the end of Rags, her husband picks up Mimi’s copy of War and Peace and reads the notes on her rereading . 

“She had read to page 733 in War and Peace, marking the confrontation between Napoleon and the Russian emissary as they moved ahead to their bloody war.  Girlish!!! in the margin next to the description of the emperor. . . a white waistcoat so long that it covered his round stomach, white doeskin breeches fitting tightly over the fat thighs of his stumpy legs, and Hessian boots.  His snuff box, his cologne!  Her notes, trailing down the side of the page, remarked upon the brilliant maneuvers of the scene, the slippery give-take of diplomacy, the rough talk of plain take.  He presumed she’d read the love story, though this time round, her second chance, notes in the margin revealed how closely she observed the lush setting of the Tsar’s palace, the slippery make-nice that preceded war.  Revise, reread, work ahead right up to the end.  He must tell her brother, who maintained that when she took up her post with the fat library book each long Summer day, then slept on a cot in his room–that she snored.”

The Rags of Time is a twenty-first century classic, in my view, but it is generally underappreciated (especially at Goodreads).  I wonder if women’s experimentations with literary form are still less acceptable than men’s.