“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”

December 8, 2015 8:45 AM

Four-day marathon public reading of War and Peace begins in Russia. [The Guardian]

A marathon four-day Russian public reading of Leo Tolstoy’s vast classic novel War and Peace kicked off on Tuesday morning, with more than 1,300 people in more than 30 cities preparing to make their contributions to the record-breaking project. Coordinated by Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter Fekla Tolstaya, and featuring a number of cultural luminaries including the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda, the readings are being streamed by Russian state television channel Kultura. One volume of Tolstoy’s fictionalised history of Russia during the Napoleonic campaign will be read each day.

posted by Fizz (17 comments total)

I have just cancelled my planned trip to Russia
posted by Postroad at 9:39 AM on December 8, 2015

War & Peace is a genuinely fantastic, engaging book that I think gets dragged down by its reputation as Important Literature. I was only inspired to read it after seeing the musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, based on one plot line [and starring Philippa Soo of later Hamilton fame.] The book is so charming and deeply moving. I read it a few years ago and scenes from it still spring to mind randomly. I think I haven't cared that much about fictional characters since Harry Potter. (Team Sonya forever, guys.)
posted by Solon and Thanks at 10:21 AM on December 8, 2015 [5 favorites]

Man, Andy Kaufman's jokes get weirder the longer he's "dead."
posted by Smedleyman at 10:24 AM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

War & Peace is a genuinely fantastic, engaging book that I think gets dragged down by its reputation as Important Literature.

I agree and I think there should be a moratorium on reading it in schools. It's a wonderful literary work but one that I think should be read for pure enjoyment or not at all.
posted by selfnoise at 10:36 AM on December 8, 2015

I agree and I think there should be a moratorium on reading it in schools.

Aside from a course that focuses specifically on Russian Literature, where would this be read? I grew up in a North American educational system and I cannot recall knowing anyone reading this outside of a class specifically on the subject. Is this regularly taught in other locations around the world, Europe, Russia, France?
posted by Fizz at 10:51 AM on December 8, 2015

Speaking as someone who has done this outside the public eye, I applaud this, more so if they fill in the "missing footnote". Hearing many of these passages aloud will knock you off your feet, they're so powerful.
posted by the letter at 10:53 AM on December 8, 2015 [7 favorites]

Read along. (not that I understand Russian, or much French, ether)

I listened to War and Peace on cassette (50-some of them) many years ago. It was a great listen- I'm not sure I could have read it. My library now has it on CD and I had been thinking about giving it another try.
posted by MtDewd at 10:56 AM on December 8, 2015

I listened to the audio book a few years ago. I was late for work a few times as I sat in my car to hear the end of a chapter. It's totally worth the effort.
posted by night_train at 11:01 AM on December 8, 2015

One of the most important books in my life.
I read it at age 15, because a teacher told me I couldn't. (I don't think she was secretly goading me; she seemed honestly appalled at the idea.) I understood maybe 1/2 of it, and had my mind expanded like nothing else then, except for _Dune_.
I've reread parts and the whole of it every few years.

As a college student and Soviet studies major I did the bad drinking game from early in the novel, involving brandy, a crowded room, and an open window (also appears in Niven and Pournelle's _Inferno_, I think). I don't remember how it went, except that I lived, and observers regaled me with second-person stories afterwards.

So many powerful scenes in that book. Some are cliches, and lose none of their force and beauty in reading, like the blue sky of Austerlitz.

I'm going to dive into it again now. Thanks, Fizz.
posted by doctornemo at 11:18 AM on December 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

After being totally awed by the Bonderchuk seven hour film of the book when I was young, I finally read the book many years later. Yes. It was worth it. A whole world to experience. It was the Rosemary Edmunds translation. I guess I should now read the Pevear and Volokhonsky one.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:17 PM on December 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Don't know why I find this so moving, only knowing a few words of Russian. Thanks, Fizz, Fekla Tolstaya, Kultura, and readers, for sharing this with the world.

Re: audiobooks, sigh...they never tell you which translation you're getting when you download them. The one I listened to must have been the Garnett translation, which was unsatisfying compared to the Maude translation I grew up with.
posted by lagomorph at 12:47 PM on December 8, 2015

My Junior year English teacher offered 50 extra credit points (which was a huge amount) to anyone who would read the whole book and then submit to an oral examination to prove they read it. He implied he did not think any of us would actually complete it. I totally did it, mostly to spitefully prove I could. I didn't really need the points.

I still love that book and thought it was great fun to read. It was my gateway to Important Russian Literature.

Apparently the key to getting me and doctornemo to read something is to say you think we can't do it.
posted by chatongriffes at 1:04 PM on December 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

Apparently the key to getting me and doctornemo to read something is to say you think we can't do it.

I completely understand this sentiment. Someone challenged me to read Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov, predicting that I would abandon it half-way through. Not only did I finish it, but here I am three and a half years later and I have a blog that I share with my friend who lives in Calgary and we're slowly working/reading/blogging our way through his bibliography.

Something about that challenge/competitive spirit inside of us that says: "You can't tell me what NOT to read."
posted by Fizz at 1:20 PM on December 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Boy, I hated reading Crime and Punishment for a literature class in high school (which probably means I should return to it and give it another chance.) As ludicrously irrational as this may be, I was convinced for years by that experience that I wouldn't like any other Russian literature.

But I've always loved Tolstoy's short folktale-like morality fables and thought I ought to give one of his novels a try. So one February, faced with a two-week-long hiatus between jobs one winter, I took advantage of an offer from a family member to borrow their cottage in the Michigan dunes. Reading the Maude translation of War and Peace while holed up by myself in a snowbound cottage in the middle of winter will always remain one of the great literary experiences of my life.

I agree with all the others here who are recommending it as a wonderful book that doesn't at all deserve the forbidding reputation it has somehow acquired. The best I can figure is it got that reputation through length, but in a day and age when 900 page door-stopper fantasy novels are sold by the thousands there's nothing all that unusual about the length or story complexity of War and Peace. If you're not already used to it there's a rough 50-75 pages at the beginning while you're still working out the fact that everybody in the novel has multiple names depending on who's addressing them (thanks to the patronymic system Russian names follow..) but once you work out the cast of characters and start getting into the story it's a total page-turner.
posted by Nerd of the North at 5:47 PM on December 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

Tolstoy's short stories are indeed excellent.

And to repeat myself from 2011: War and Peace is not that difficult! It's equal in size and amount of characters to a modest modern-day fantasy epic. The language is not difficult to get to grips with either (provided your translation is average or better; I read the excellent modern Norwegian translation).

A page out of a small notebook and a pen will suffice if you have trouble keeping the characters apart, I think.
posted by Harald74 at 2:00 AM on December 9, 2015

Great to see all the love for War and Peace here! I've never understood why people talk as if it's Finnegans Wake or something; it's a rousing tale of love, courage, and drunken antics, for Pete's sake. Like njohnson23, I saw the Bondarchuk film at an impressionable age (I've never forgotten that scene with Pierre guzzling while leaning out the window) and was primed to love the novel; I read it about once a decade in English and was looking forward to getting good enough in Russian to read it in the original, which I did back in 2008-9 (you can read my final impressions here, and you have my permission to skip the Second Part of the Epilogue when you read the book).

> Speaking as someone who has done this outside the public eye, I applaud this, more so if they fill in the "missing footnote".

Thanks very much for that, it enabled me to erase a question mark I'd penciled in the margin of my Russian text!
posted by languagehat at 7:21 AM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

you have my permission to skip the Second Part of the Epilogue when you read the book

people need to skip all the epilogues, they are terrible, the proper novel ends on such a lovely appropriate bittersweet image and then it's like PSYCH everyone you love who didn't die young lives long enough to become absolutely terrible. I guess it's extremely realistic. But SO UPSETTING ugghhh
posted by Solon and Thanks at 8:00 AM on December 9, 2015