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Sounds like it is worth revisiting.

 

Intense, observant Tolstoy at his best
By A.N. Wilson
(Filed: 29/05/2006)

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Great books await their moment. You can’t just pick them up and expect them to work their magic. Many people feel bad about never having read War and Peace, but it is a long haul, not only because it is more than 1,000 pages long but also because, in its latter stages, it is deeply argumentative.

Tolstoy himself protested that it was not a novel at all. And in his description of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, he aims to demolish the theory that history is governed by great men and their acts of will. He insists there are mysterious forces at work that make huge military campaigns as inevitable as the movement of ants.

The “genius” Napoleon is seen as an arrogant fool, overtaken by the combined will of the Russian people, by the weather, ultimately by that mysterious force which moves events.

Fat, old, choleric General Kutuzov, who technically loses the key battle of Borodino, which allows Napoleon into Moscow, is wiser than Bonaparte. He sees that Borodino has weakened Napoleon and his forces. So – they enter Moscow, they pillage the towns along their way.

But their retreat has a sort of inevitability about it and, once it has happened, hindsight lets you see that after Borodino, the supposed Napoleonic victory, his weakening and that of France, has become inevitable.

This is stuff to ponder, not to rush. Therefore, wait until the moment seems right to open War and Peace. But, against the moment when you want to read it, or to reread it, buy the new Penguin translation by Anthony Briggs. I have just finished reading it.

Because I once wrote a biography of Tolstoy, several people were kind enough to ask me to review this new version of the masterpiece. But it came out last summer and I was full of other concerns. I now feel glad I did not skip through. There are so many moments to savour.

One that will stay in my mind a long time is when the heroine, Natasha Rostova, is staying on her family estates in the middle of nowhere. After a day’s hunting, they go to spend the evening at Mikhaylovna with their uncle, an aristocrat who has “gone native” and taken a peasant mistress, Anisya, with whom he lives happily.

Anisya brings in a tray of foods – home-made wine, rye-cakes made with buttermilk, oozing honeycombs, apples and nuts. “Every smell, taste, and flavour seemed redolent of Anisya, redolent of her plumpness, cleanliness, whiteness and her broad welcoming smile.”

They sing songs together, they eat some superbly cooked chicken, they dance. “Uncle” sings like a peasant. Natasha herself begins to dance.

“Here was a young countess, educated by a French emigrée governess – where and when and how had she imbibed the spirit of that peasant dance along with the Russian air she breathed, and these movements which the pas de châle ought to have squeezed out of her long ago? But her movements and the spirit of them were truly Russian…”

No writer has, to so intense and observant a degree, Tolstoy’s capacity to recreate the feel, taste, sound of life itself, the feeling of place, of texture, of mood.

This is one such extraordinary moment when, even without his long sermons about the folly of Napoleon’s invasion, we know that Russia’s strength derives from its people and traditions that are embodied in its upper class as well as in its peasantry.

I think that to go back to Aylmer Maude’s dear old translation now, with all the French conversation still in French, and Kutuzov’s bad language euphemised, would seem a bit odd. We have here the New English Tolstoy. So buy it, even if you do not have a fortnight spare in which to do nothing but read it.

And one way of reading it, remember, is to treat it a bit like the Bible and read a few pages every day. I have a number of friends who did that with the old Aylmer Maude version during the Second World War.

One soldier told me that though he was in the Eighth Army and fought in Africa and Italy, the vividness of Tolstoy’s Austerlitz and Borodino seemed more vivid to him, even at the time.

But, of course, what holds the book together is not just panoramic or specific observation, it is the depth and liveliness with which the inner lives of all the characters, even the dogs, are conjured.