Why War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

Este video (en un inglés bastante claro) nos da algunas pistas sobre el por qué leer Guerra y paz, de León Tolstoi. En vocabulario: hapless y conniving y para saber: Decembrist. Al final un link sobre donde leer War and Peace en Internet

… Guerra y Paz es largo pero también tiene un repaso brillante de la historia con los personajes más reales que se puedan encontrar…

… cinco años después había producido un trabajo épico de 1.200 páginas que mostraba historias de amor, campos de batalla, quiebras de bancos, pelotones de fusilamiento, visiones religiosas, la quema de Moscú…

Why you should read War and Peace

Ted-Ed

The narrator here tries to explain what is this long and complex book called War and Peace. It mixes history and imagination, war and love conflict in an aristocratic setting.

War and Peace, is the sort of book you shouldn´t read in bed because if you fall asleep it could give you a concussion, right?

War and Peace is a long book, sure, but it´s also a thrilling examination of history populated with some of the deepest, most realistic characters you´ll find anywhere. And if its length intimidates you, just imagine how poor Tolstoy felt.

In 1863 he set out to write a short novel about a political dissident returning from exile in Siberia. Five years later, he had produced a 1.200 page epic featuring love stories, battle fields, bankruptcies, firing squads, religion visions, the burning of Moscow and a semi-domesticated bear; but no exile and no political dissidents. Here´s how it happened.

Tolstoy, a volcanic soul, was born to a famously eccentric aristocratic family in 1828. By the time he was 30 he had already dropped out of Kazan University, gambled away the family fortune, joined the army, written memoirs and rejected the literary establishment to travel Europe. He then settled in Yasnaya Poliana, his ancestral mansion, to write about the return of the Decembrists, a band of well-known revolutionaries pardoned in 1836, after 30 years in exile. But, Tolstoy thought, how could he tell the story of the Decembrists return from exile without telling the story of 1825, when they revolted against the conservatist Tsar Nicholas I? And how could he do that without telling the story of 1812 as well, when Napoleon´s disastrous invasion of Russia helped trigger the authoritarianism the Decembrists were rebelling against? And how could he tell the story of 1812 without talking about 1805, when the Russians first learned of the threat Napoleon posed after their defeat at the battle of Austerlitz?

So Tolstoy began writing, both about the big events of history and the small lives that inhabit those events. He focused on the aristocrats, the class he knew best. The book only occasionally touches on the lives of the vast majority of the Russian population, who were peasants or even serfs, farmers bound to serve the owners of the land on which they lived.

War and Peace opens on the eve of war between France and Russia. Aristocrats at a cocktail party fret about the looming violence but then change the topic to those things aristocrats always seem to care about: money, sex and death. This first scene is indicative of the way the book bounces between the political and personal, over an ever widening canvas.

There are no main characters in War and Peace. Instead, readers enter a vast interlocking web of relationships and questions. Will the hapless and illegitimate son of a count marry a beautiful but conniving princess? Will his only friend survive the battlefields of Austria? And what about that nice young girl falling in love with both men at once?

Real historical figures mix and mingle with all these fictional folks. Napoleon appears several times and even one of Tolstoy´s ancestors plays a background part.

But while the characters and their psychologies are gripping Tolstoy is not afraid to interrupt the narrative to pose insightful questions about history. Why do wars start? What are good battlefield tactics? Do nations rise and fall on the actions of so-called great men like Napoleon or are there larger cultural and economic forces at play?

These extended digressions are part of what make War and Peace so panoramic in scope.

But for some 19th century critics, this meant War and Peace barely felt like a novel at all. It was a large, loose, baggy monster in the words of Henry James. Tolstoy, in fact, agreed. To him, novels were a Western European form. Russian writers had to write differently because Russian people lived differently. What is War and Peace? He asked. It is not a novel, still less an epic poem. Still less a historical chronicle.

War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it was expressed. It is, in other words, the sum total of Tolstoy´s imaginative powers and nothing less…

Vocabulario

Hapless: (especially of a person) unfortunate.

"The hapless victims of the disaster"

Conniving: given to or involved in conspiring to do something immoral, illegal, or harmful.

"A heartless and conniving person"

Para saber

The Decembrist revolt took place in Imperial Russia on 26 December 1825. Russian army officers led about 3,000 soldiers in a protest against Tsar Nicholas I's assumption of the throne the day before, as his elder brother Constantine had removed himself from the line of succession.

Decembrists, 1885

También

How and why to read War and Peace

Brian Denton explains his reasons and probably encourages you to read Tolstoy´s novel

Para leerlo

War and Peace

At The Project Gutenberg

“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist—I really believe he is Antichrist—I will have nothing more to do with you…”

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