Friday Reads: War and Peace

Happy Friday! Let's all help Adam celebrate a significant undertaking -- the reading of a classic that everyone has heard of and most of us have not read (at least not entirely). This week, he tells us about Leo Tolstoy's opus, War and Peace. 

It's hard to remember a time before I started reading this book.

Just kidding! War and Peace has a reputation as one of the longest novels ever written, and it turns out that reputation is well deserved. The edition I'm reading is 1,215 pages, plus an introduction (which I did read) and other supplementary material (which I won't read). I'm pleased to say, though, that despite its length, War and Peace is a fantastic read, and far more accessible than other Russian fiction that I've read, such as The Brothers Karamazov. Grand in its storytelling ambitions, and truly sweeping in scope, War and Peace focuses primarily on the lives of members of two noble Russian families, the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, during the Napoleonic Wars. The extensive cast of characters even includes Napoleon himself. It's an interesting historical novel in that, while most of the chapters are written from a standard third-person point of view, Tolstoy will sometimes interrupt this flow with commentary about how later historians incorrectly described or misinterpreted a certain event or military decision.

One of the things that I appreciate about this particular edition, which is a more recent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, is that it includes a wonderful introduction by Pevear. Not only does it provide background about Tolstoy and the novel, but it also includes some comments about the translation itself. Pevear and Volokhonsky made it their mission not just to provide a translation in terms of the meanings of individual words and phrases, but also to try and preserve Tolstoy's writing style as much as possible. I feel like they were successful. I get a real sense of the author's style and voice in reading this novel, and it's given me a deep appreciation for the skills that a talented translator can bring to the table.

It makes me glad that I opted for this newer edition. In retrospect, though, an ebook may have been a wiser choice. This thing weighs a ton.