As part of my ongoing efforts to read more fiction and to read more classics I decided to tackle this tome.
Some Handy Numbers
- 1356 pages. This is the Anthony Briggs translation.
- 360 chapters, excluding the epilogue.
- The novel is organized into 4 Books, each about 1/4 the total. Each book is organized into Volumes, and each Volume is further organized into chapters.
- I checked my reading speed a few times and I averaged about 90 seconds/page, so my reading time was approximately 34 hours
- The time period covered is essentially 1805 through 1812, as Napoleon is advancing to the east through Europe and into Russia.
- I started the book in early February, and finished on April 22.
An Overview
I won’t summarize the plot here–I’m certain that there are many plot summaries online. Instead, what I found most fascinating is that there are two parallel story arcs throughout the book. There is a War story arc, which largely focuses on some of the major battles of the Napoleon campaign: Austerlitz, Borodino, and advancing into Moscow. There is also a Peace story arc, which largely focuses on the lives of several prominent Russian aristocrat families as they socialize, fall into and out of love, and deal with various tragedies. Some characters travel back and forth between the story arcs.
My Thoughts and Impressions
I don’t know if Tolstoy planned it this way, but if someone wanted a year long reading project that they could easily work on daily, the novel is conveniently broken into 360 chapters of just a few pages.
Story is driven by character. Each of the main characters in War and Peace drives the story forward in their own way. Said differently, characters drive the plot. The plot does NOT drive the characters, instead it is a consequence of the character’s actions.
I’ve learned more than I had previously known about the Napoleonic campaigns of 1805-1812.
Although the author, Leo Tolstoy, wasn’t scientifically trained, he sometimes uses the languages of physics and mathematics to describe some of ideas. Here is an example from page 1111 where he is describing military maneuvers “if there are many forces acting simultaneously and from different directions on a given body, the direction of its motion can never correspond with any of the forces; it will always turn out to be the middle way, the shortest route, the line defined in mechanics by the diagonal of a parallelogram of the forces involved.”
Early in the book we learn that most members of Russian High Society spoke French as their preferred language. This was surprising to me. According to a brief bit of internet research that I did, French was a preferred language for many and Russian was only spoken by lower classes of society.
As the French approach Moscow, we see significant distortions in economic value of various goods. Gold is prized because of its intrinsic value and it is relatively easy to carry. Artwork, clothing, paper money and costly dinnerware becomes worthless. Weapons, carts, carriages and horses increase in value as a way for families to escape out of harm’s way.
Some Important Aphorisms and Quotes
(17) “There’s nothing more important for a young man than the company of intelligent women.”
(71) “the only thing that did any dancing was her face, a nice mixture of grimness and beauty.”
(92). “He used to claim that there were only two sources of human deparavity-idleness and superstition, and only two virtues-hard work and intelligence.”
(93) “…the princess felt herself completely swamped by her father and his familiar acrid odor of tobacco and old age.”
(102) “sleep after dinner is silver, sleep before dinner is gold”
(104) “we love people not so much for the good they have done to us as for the good we have done to them”
(235) “Anyone who finds silence embarrassing can always start talking”
(337) “you know, Count, it is far nobler to acknowledge a mistake than to push things beyond redemption.”
(355) “…Sonya, a sixteen-year-old girl with all the charm of an unfolding flower”
(413) “I only know two really harmful things in life-remorse and illness. There is never any good unless these two things are absent.”
(562) “in any song the words are the only thing that matters, the tune follows on, a tune on its own is nothing.”
(592-3) “He had begun to show clear signs of senility: nodding off without any warning, forgetting very recent events while clearly remembering incidents from long ago.”
(669). “It follows therefore that all of these causes, billions of them, come to bring about subsequent events, and these events had no single cause, being bound to happen simply because they were bound to happen.”
(762) “…the unhappy widows of living husbands.”
(889) “because on the field of war what is at stake is the thing that matters most to any man, the saving of his own skin.”
(914). “In order to study the laws of history we must change the subject completely, forget all about kings, ministers, and generals, and turn to the homogenous infinitesimal elements that move the masses to action.”
(930) “So, I hear it’s in order now for women to go from one living husband to another. I suppose you think it’s something new. But they’ve beaten you to it, madam. It’s a very old idea. It’s done in every brothel.”
(936) “A man can be master of nothing while he fears death. And the man that fears not death possesses everything.”
(1097) “…it requires little mental effort to work out that the best position for an army not under attack is where its supplies are most readily available.”
(1139) “They’ve got to understand we only lose by going on the offensive. Patience and time, these are my heroes of the battlefield.”
(1286). “We’re not loved because we look good-we look good because we are loved”
What’s In The Epilogue?
The Epilogue consists of two parts. One part follows some key figures from the novel, focusing on their lives from 1813 to 1820. The other part is a dense philosophical treatise on how masses of people are motivated to sometimes do horrible things. Tolstoy quickly denounces a spiritual motivation, but instead advances several alternative theories without concluding which he endorses.