War and Peace (Oxford World's Classics)
by Leo Tolstoy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Leo TolstoyEditor: Henry Gifford
Translator: Louise and Aylmer Maude
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-06-15
ISBN: 0199536058
Number of pages: 1392
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of War and Peace (Oxford World's Classics)
Book Review: Not nearly as well-written as his later work, and the ideas are almost as bad
Summary: 2 Stars
War and Peace is basically a soap opera set in the backdrop of a historical war epic. Sounds like almost escapist romanticism, like Gone With the Wind or something, right?
Wrong. To begin with, as Tolstoy himself said and much of his contemporary audience agreed, it isn't even a novel. It's part, as Tolstoy put it, an "epic in prose," (back then, when novels were relatively, well, novel, the distinction between them and epics was much more widely understood) and part lengthy non-fictional rant. Mixed in with the story are a great many chapters with titles like "The method of history," "The cause of historical events," "The forces that move nations," "Rulers and Generals are history's slaves," and finally, "The problem of free will and necessity." (I don't think these are actually Tolstoy's titles, and were probably just inserted in my edition, but they are accurate summaries of the contents.) There's nothing wrong with addressing such abstract themes, of course, but in a novel they should be presented through the characters and story, not in a separate essay as an aside which, while it may be thematically related to the story, adds little or nothing to the literary merit of the work. I think it actually detracts from it, as Tolstoy's views and his arguments for them are almost ridiculously bad. If he stuck to presenting them through the story, one could at least appreciate it as a work of art, though not as a work of philosophy---as one can, for instance, with Anna Karenina, even though its themes are even more monstrous (as it is perhaps the most misanthropic, and especially misogynistic, novel ever written, yet it is "flawless as a work of art," as Dostoevsky said---and Dostoevsky is more humanistic and liberal by comparison, though actually his own views are also pretty medieval). In War and Peace, Tolstoy harps on these issues repetitively and seemingly endlessly.
So what are the themes of War and Peace? Well, first of all, there's the senselessness and inhumanity of war. While that may in fact very often be the case, it's not like he's saying something new here, and other writers have presented superior artistic visions on this theme. Next, he insists that free will is an illusion caused only by our ignorance of the relevant causal factors, that men such as Napoleon do not move history (nor do even the masses, though Tolstoy believes they actually have much more to do with it than their leaders) but rather are puppets of History with a capital "H", which basically amounts to God's grand design. Now, it's actually a bit refreshing to see a Christian acknowledge that the existence of an omnipotent God who controls everything is incompatible with the existence of free will instead of trying to make pathetically tortuous arguments attempting to reconcile the two, so at least on this point Tolstoy is consistent. However, if you combine the idea that it is not man but God who is in control of man's actions with his first premise about the senseless brutality and inhumanity of war, the only conclusion one can draw is that God is a senseless, inhumane brute. And I don't think that's the view Tolstoy wishes to communicate. Finally, War and Peace is virulently anti-reason and anti-science; as Tolstoy writes, "If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed." In a passage on the various kinds of self-assurance expressed by various nationalities, he writes, "A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known." (This is said approvingly, as opposed to the German's self-assurance, which is "worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth---science---which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth." The only problem with the Russians, apparently, is that they should take a more humble attitude instead of being so damned self-assured in their lack of intellectual ambition.) This is especially amusing, however, since Tolstoy tries extremely hard (though he does so extremely poorly) to use reason and science and prove his positions.
Leaving aside the quality of his ideas, and skipping the non-fiction chapters (as you will probably want to do the further you get into the book and the more of them you encounter), what about the writing? There are hints of the literary genius (despite their even more hideous thematic content) of later works such as "Father Sergius," "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," and "The Kreutzer Sonata," but not very consistently---though it is still far more well-written than most of the trash that is published these days. There are a few, but not a great many (considering the length of the work), nice stylistic flourishes, such as this metaphor: "No matter what [Pierre] thought about, he always returned to these same questions which he could not solve and yet could not cease to ask himself. It was as if the thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in the same place." The story is decent, but it would be easier to get involved in it if any of the characters were actually interesting or sympathetic, but they usually aren't.
In short, I'm not sure why this is considered such a great classic, aside from the fact that it is by the author of other, better, works, and that it is so long...which in my view actually isn't a point in its favor, since it could and should have been shorter, which one can not say about other epics such as The Iliad or novels such as The Brothers Karamazov.
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