War and Peace, Entry No. 1

This is going to take a while.

After I picked War and Peace up from the library, I let it sit on my shelf for a few days, just staring at me. It's an intimidating book - 1200 pages, one of the greatest books of all time, written by one of the greatest authors of all time (inspiring a philosopher no less than Isaiah Berlin to ponder his motivations,). It was precisely for these reasons that we included it in the beginning year of The List, rather than later on with his contemporaries - as Sean insisted, what better way to start off an exploration of human thought, history and literature than by reading W&P. So here we are. And this is going to take a while.

I'm intentionally taking my time with it, spreading it throughout the first year of this gedankenexperiment. Actually, as of this writing, I'm already off target, since my goal is to read 100 pages a month, and I'm only just now hitting that mark in February. It didn't help that it took me 60 (large, dense) pages to get into the story. Any book of this length, (including The Discoverers, which I love) is bound to be intimidating. But when it appears that the book will be nothing but reading reports of conversations (half in French, which, while I can read it without the translation, I'm still unsure of the point) between over-privileged Russian elites in their over-stuffed salons, even my interest flags (not that I would ever not finish the book - I am a completionist, and besides, this is The List, and War and freaking Peace!).

After the 60th page or so, something changed. I'm not sure if it was me, if it was Tolstoy, or what, but it captured me. Most of the *action* still takes place in drawing rooms and hallways, but each of the characters, however briefly noted, are complex actors. Each is fully human - not simply a caricature or type inserted for fill. Tolstoy is evidently fascinated by these individuals and their lives, the choices they make, the actions they take, the circumstances that shape them. After a while, it's infectious.

Some of that credit must be placed with the translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Being desperately out of practice with my own Russian language skills (and never having reached Tolstoy's level anyway), I really can't know for certain how true they are to the original text. The reader has to place tremendous faith in the work of the translators, the best of which rise to the level of interpreters - not merely transposing the original words, but actively reimagining the work - writing as the author would have, if s/he had written in the second language. While not a substitute for a reading in the native tongue, the best translations capture the spirit and render the thinking of the original. Given what I've heard about W&P from those who read it in Russian, Pevear and Volokhonsky have done a worthy job

So, this is going to take a while, but I'm looking forward to it. I'm also hoping that by writing every 100 pages or so, and interspersing my reading of this with other selections from The List, I will be able to observe my own thinking grow and evolve over the course of the year. I'm also looking forward to the inevitable debates with Sean about these books (since we rarely agree on any interpretation). All in all, it should be a very interesting year.

- M