War and Peace

I have finished reading the monster tome that is War and Peace and wanted to share some thoughts on it.

It's been on my literary bucket list for years and now that I've finished the unabridged version I have a sense of satisfaction akin to the feelings I had when I finished Lord of the Rings all those years ago. Back then I took ten years of reading the novel on and off and, frankly, lost the plot a little bit. I should reread it from start to finish one day to get the full benefit of it but for now I have a few other classic to make my way through.

So with this latest voluminous epic I started in September, stopped a little in November and continued at Christmas until I finished it at the weekend so in all it took five and a half months.

The book is 975 pages long and involves very very small text, hence the length of time to complete it but I loved it. It combines the story of a number of the Russian nobility around the time of the Napoleonic Wars with historical details about the war and Russia's involvement in it. The main characters include princes, counts and other nobility and their interaction with each other, their love lives and of course their involvement in the war. The story flits from peace time activities and the battles, hence the title.

Tolstoy started writing the novel in 1862 when he returned home from the Crimean War and it was published between 1865 and 1869. Tolstoy was a Count himself and one of four sons of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoi who took part in the war against Napoleon in 1812 but died when Leo was 7.

The novel is interspersed with the author's own philosophy on the social issues of the time and of the path of history as it relates to wars. He is clearly opposed to the idea of serfdom and the horrors the practise includes and of war and tries to explain that the recording of history by historians is simply a focus on individual characters (Napoleon for example) and not a complete record of what actually happened in detail. For example, he states, that the outcome of wars and the battles in it, are rarely as a direct result of the direct orders of the military geniuses and more a result of the armies interpretation of the orders executed as best they can be. The final battle immediately prior to the French taking Moscow, the battle of Borodino, was executed after a misunderstanding of where the respective armies stood and ended with the Russian army retreating beyond Moscow to regroup. This allowed the French to enter Moscow and declare a victory when, in fact, the Russian army could have continued a bit longer and eventually taken the French by storm and driven them from Russia. However, Moscow was taken, the French troops allowed to rampage through the city and burn it down (although Tolstoy suggests this was due to disorder amongst the troop rather than a planned affair) while the Russian army regrouped beyond the city walls.

Then, instead of taking over and the rest of the country the French, led by their minute leader, decide to leave and march back to Paris with disastrous results (in the middle of Winter). But Tolstoy argues that even this action was due to a mass feeling of despair among the French troops rather than a direct order from above. Regardless, the French left the city and the country and were pursued by the well rested Russian army who themselves lost half their number in the process. Apparently the French army was leaving regardless of who was following them so the hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers who lost their lives to starvation and the cold, did so needlessly.

If you have the time and the desire to work through this one I'd recommend it.

Now that I have finished I have started to read the Great Gatsby, a tiny novel set in the 20s. Another to knock off the top 100 list. And it should only take me a week due to it's small number of pages.