Don't be put off 'War and Peace' because it is a Great Book

How many times I’ve pulled my huge Folio edition of ‘War and Peace’ from the shelf (two hefty volumes) , begun at the beginning and then laid it aside. I’m full of the feeling that every civilised person should have read Tolstoy’s masterpiece, yet held back because I have no real idea if the translation before me bears much resemblance to what Tolstoy himself intended. And so I have been sadly confessing, when challenged, that I have not read it.

 

This has given me genuine shame. I am not very worried about never having read ‘Pride and Prejudice’. I have tried to do so in the most ideal conditions and found it close to physically impossible, preferring to stare at the wall or read the labels on jam jars than to cope with Miss Austen’s unalluring prose. Threats of violence or enormous bribes might get me to carry on, but otherwise, I can’t see the point. I’m about due for my next dutiful assault on ‘Middlemarch’ (I have never yet got beyond the foothills, though, oddly enough I greatly appreciated ‘Silas Marner’). I once plodded my way through ‘The Red and the Black’, though I can now remember nothing about it at all, as if I were just reading one word after the other without actually putting them together, and also ‘Vanity Fair’, which didn’t even begin to compare with anything by Dickens.

 

So a few months ago, when I saw, on sale in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford, a boxed set of a 1972 BBC2 dramatisation of ‘War and Peace’ I thought ‘I’m obviously never going to read it now. So I’ll do the next best thing. The BBC in 1972 was still a serious cultural organisation , and this will at least give me an idea of what the book is actually about.’

 

I was right about the BBC in 1972. It was quite startling, watching this measured, thoughtful production (starring, of all people, Anthony Hopkins as Pierre Bezukhov), made and transmitted (and entirely missed by me) when I was a student revolutionary. If only I’d realised, at the time, that I was still living in a cultural paradise compared with what was to follow. In fact, I increasingly feel this not about the 1950s, which always seem largely dark, damp and chilly, and tainted with the stink of tobacco smoke, in my memory, but about the early 1970s,  when we had only just joined the Common Market, when there were still hundreds of grammar schools – from which many of my fellow-students came - when marriage was still strong and most people had jobs if they wanted them.

 

Perhaps I then regarded Tolstoy (rightly) as too counter-revolutionary.  I do recall BBC2’s versions , at the same time, of Sartre’s ‘Roads to Freedom’ and Hardy’s ‘Jude the Obscure’, both of which I watched assiduously, having found an obscure senior common room on the York campus, which I wasn’t really entitled to use but which contained a rare (for those days) colour TV, and which few people knew about, so it wasn’t invariably tuned to sports or ‘Monty Python or guarded by crowds who would watch nothing else.

 

There is no incidental music, just dialogue, carefully and clearly spoken by good, Shakespearean-trained actors with the sort of basic education that such people then had. I know now that the director used some clever devices (particularly by making Bonaparte himself a major character) to advance and compress the story (I’ve heard it said that turning a  book into a film is much like turning a large stone building into an aeroplane). But I also know now that he managed to convey the books pretty faithfully, because the adaptation was so good that I now actively wanted to read the book.

 

And I did so, getting hold of an American paperback translation by the American actress Ann Dunnigan which several people say is the most faithful and fluent version in English (even though it is into American, rather than British, English) .

 

What can I now say? I sat next to someone at a dinner recently who told me that finishing War and Peace had left him bereft, like someone who had lost a limb. I wouldn’t go that far. As with all translations, I don’t just think, but know, that I am seeing the author’s work through  a glass, darkly (or, as the modern Bibles would have it ‘in a dim reflecting mirror’).

 

But I did come to value several of the characters very highly for their real virtues. It is, I think, a very conservative book, in which family and marriage and the military virtues are respected  - though the military virtues are also quite shockingly doubted, in the amazing passage in which Bolkonsky reflects on the way in which all rulers wear military uniform, and war is assumed to be the normal occupation of man despite its horrors. These are intensely and painfully described, without unnecessary detail or gloating,  but quite clearly enough to strike hard at the imagination. Countess Rostova’s collapse into grief and old age after the foolish, selfish death in battle of her beloved youngest son Petya is also unstintingly recounted. All impetuous young men should read it, and be told by someone they trust that this truth applies to them, too.

The book is also deeply Christian though not Orthodox in either sense of the word, and I did wonder at one point if the most important single person in the  narrative might not be Pierre Bezukhov, nor even Prince Bolkonsky or the dangerously passionate Natasha Rostova, but the peasant Platon Karatayev, who sings not like a modern man but naturally, as if he were a bird,  and is wholly at one with nature, who ‘lies down in the evening like a stone, and rises in the morning like new bread’ who stoically accepts all that happens to him, who is naturally generous, never idle, bears no resentments and does not at all fear death, and whose last communication to Pierre is never made, because Pierre is scared to be too near an obviously dying man and so fails to heed his gentle plea to come and listen. What would this final message have been?  Was this a real event in the author’s life which haunted him ever afterwards?Perhaps. Tolstoy experienced war in the Crimea among other places

 

I was reminded of Platon Karatayev by a distressing passage from Ronald Blythe’s marvellous book on English village life,  ‘Akenfield’, recently reprinted in the ‘Independent on Sunday’ . It describes the experiences at the Dardanelles of a Suffolk farm-labourer, Leonard Thompson, full of corpses, flies, filth, dysentery and sudden death, recounted in his own diary . In the midst of all the horrors,  which you must remember are being described by a tough countryman used to privation and pain, there is this : ‘But when we got to the communication trench we found it so full of dead men that we could hardly move. Their faces were quite black and you couldn't tell Turk from English. There was the most terrible stink and for a while there was nothing but the living being sick on to the dead.  I did sentry again that night. It was one-two-sentry, one-two-sentry all along the trench, as before. I knew the next sentry up quite well. I remembered him in Suffolk singing to his horses as he ploughed.

‘Now he fell back with a great scream and a look of surprise - dead. It is quick, anyway, I thought.’

 

It was that part of about ‘singing to his horses as he ploughed’ that made me think of Karatayev.

 

Perhaps his own direct experience of battle explains Tolstoy’s scorn for conventional historical accounts of wars and battles, as if they were ordered, controlled and directed  events rather than the wild surging chaos which experienced soldiers know them to be, and of the whole historical theory he sets out in the book.  Don’t hesitate to read it if you haven’t. You will not regret the time. It is not written in an elevated or inaccessible, or pseudo-intellectual way. Its characters are people that you know.

 

Oh, and there is the sadness of seeing all these people, kind and cultured by their own lights, happy in their homes and families, and knowing (as they do not) that their entire way of life will, in little more than a century, be swept away in a wave of blood, bones and hatred. Don’t bother telling me they were exploiters, and the rest of the Bolshevik defamation of the past. They were kinder by far than the supposedly just men who succeeded them, whose cruelty still marks Russia with deep furrows.