How to Read War and Peace: Tips and Insights

War and Peace is one of the most rewarding rich and insightful works of literature of all time we continue to read and re-read told stories Masterpiece over a century and a half since it was first published because it is an endless work a work that we can return to and in a sense never really leave and continue to draw nourishment from over the course of our lives but it is certainly no secret that many readers find the prospect of tackling this masterpiece to be daunting and for good reason the reputation of War and Peace certainly precedes it but there really is nothing to fear when it comes to this great story and you have so many joys in store for you so let's talk about how to access this work and overcome some of its main difficulties and I believe that difficulties and obstacles are really gifts in Disguise for example one obstacle that many readers encounter when it comes to War and Peace is the huge cast of characters the gift in Disguise is many new friends and many opportunities to interact with manifestations of yourself what's another obstacle well it's length that's certainly an obstacle it's a long book but the counter to that the gift is more time spent immersed in a vivid World another potential obstacle that readers point out is tolstoy's extensive meditations on history and the extraordinary amount of historical detail the gift there of course is gaining an understanding of entire nations epochs and ultimately enduring truths that transcend specific Nations and times so let's talk about how to set yourself up to not only enjoy told stories War and Peace but to fall deeply in love with it okay let's start by talking about pacing because it is a very big book it's over a thousand pages long but I truly believe that if you can dedicate just 10 to 15 minutes per day you can have War and Peace read over the course of just one season and despite its intimidating length War and Peace is one of those books like George eliot's Middle March like ceraventes is Don Quixote that many readers wish had gone on longer Henry James famously launched a Barb at books like middlemarch and War and Peace calling them loose baggy monsters which is rather unfair because despite their size I really believe that there are no Superfluous details everything is there for a reason and the power is partly due to the size well law and peace is a sweeping operatic Saga it is an epic and it is Sublime Sublimity arises from the grand when you go out into nature and you look up at the stars or you look at a mountain or you contemplate the ocean and the crashing waves or if you hear a roaring storm all of these things Inspire in US feelings of the sublime they ore us into silence they ground Us in the present moment and they take us up out of ourselves they induce in US Peak experiences and there are moments in War and Peace many moments that have the power to induce Peak experiences in you too and the sublime the grand the sweeping is something that we have lost touch with in the modern day world we are inundated with the short form and yet collectively we are starting to yearn for the long form again we are starting to yearn for epics and sagas and we are insatiable creatures we love to binge our content we want to have consumed everything all at once and so the prospect of a sweeping Saga like War and Peace that can be rather daunting because we look at the size of it and we think oh that might take a while but I would encourage you if you feel that way to embrace this psychotherapeutic technique from Holocaust Survivor founder of logotherapy and writer of man's search for meaning Victor Frankel there's this idea of paradoxical intention where you embrace the thing you fear you do not flee from it you do not hide it or deny it and so with a work of literature that is as sweeping as War and Peace you tell yourself this may take a while and that is okay in fact that is optimal and length of work truly is one of the easiest obstacles to overcome because it's like with anything in life whether you want to establish a new athletic regime or maybe you have some huge life events on the horizon that's keeping you up at night stressing you out like with anything Grand it comes down to breaking it into manageable chunks it comes down to our habits in my first year of University we had to Read Moby Dick and we were all intimidated by its size and our first year tutor says you can read this in under a year it's a chapter a day and the chapters are very short that's how you get through it everyone can do a chapter a day and the chapters in War and Peace are very short too it's manageable the key with tolstoy's Masterpiece is really just breaking into it and getting your grounding because once you do the challenge isn't getting through it it's actually slowing down once you've met the characters once you've taken their concerns on as your own once you are firmly rooted in tolstoy's World your going to want to read it quickly you're going to be hooked until story is going to drag you along so when it comes to achieving big things and reading big books it really just comes down to Habit creation and how do we establish a habit well we make it easy we make it automatic and we make it fun introduce some social accountability in there and very soon you'll have that habit established and though I do like to be prescriptive with my recommendations when it comes to pacing I really do implore you to follow your own Rhythm and embrace your own self Pace I personally don't think there is such a thing as reading a book too slowly but there is such a thing as reading a book too quickly if quantity is our metric of success then sure we're going to want to gobble up our books untasted and note them down and then forget about them as we move on to the next one and shovel that one down untasted too but I would rather have half a dozen well-selected curated life-changing books read over the course of a year not just red but lived than a hundred plus that I cannot remember now in our reading of War and Peace with the hardcore literature book club the lectures are going to follow a reliable and steady Rhythm if you set yourself the goal to keep up with the lectures as they come out you'll have this book read in under three months which to me is a very quick Pace we will be breaking our guided reading content our discussions our lectures down according to volumes and parts which makes it very easy there are four volumes to War and Peace and an epilogue split into two parts and each volume is split into multiple Parts two so volume one is split into three parts which gives us three milestones and three discussions three lectures and our first deep dive discussion will cover volume 1 part 1 which in the Anthony Briggs translation is 115 pages so you can see that if you give yourself the assignment of a couple of chapters a day if you give yourself the assignment to sit down for 10 or 15 minutes then you can most certainly comfortably have read that part in a little over a week and keep in mind that the chapters are small and digestible and so having a milestone to look forward to and I'm a huge believer in having things to look forward to when it comes to difficult projects having that discussion with the group to look forward to will be really rewarding and it will give you an aim something to shoot for if you are a very fast reader then I would urge you to bake your re-reading in I personally like to do this by virtue of returning to those passages that I have marked and underlined and twinning my rereading with some journaling with each discussion in the hardcore literature book club we will have some guiding questions to prompt discussion but you will also be encouraged to bring your favorite passages and ideas and insights like you would a dish to a dinner party so that we can enjoy this book together other things you can do to make your reading more rewarding is to not only bake in rereading but follow rabbit holes go down different Avenues take extracurriculars that means read biographies watch historical documentaries look things up and of course discuss the work with other readers now we've given an option for a relatively quick reading Pace but what about an ultra slow option well there are 361 chapters in War and Peace you could do a chapter a day if you are interested in reading this one over the course of a year this is an approach that many readers embraced when we read Victor who goes Les Miserables in the book club now what are the benefits of such a slow reading Pace well one of the benefits is firstly it's very achievable it gives you something to look forward to every single day and your reading becomes rather scriptural another benefit to such an ultra slow reading is you will truly possess the work by the end of it if you speak to readers who read George eliot's middlemarch over the course of a year we did that we followed the original serialized publication schedule and we read it over the course of a year if you speak to those readers you'll know that the town of middlemarch became a real place and the people who populate it became real people the ultra slow approach will also give you an opportunity to layer in other stories and so you can enjoy short stories poems plays even other novels whilst reading this story at the same time ultimately go with your guts go with your inclination and follow the Rhythm that best suits you that best allows you to break into the world work with Great Gusto now let's talk about what I see as being the second major obstacle which is translation how do you choose the right translation of War and Peace now we had an in-depth video in the hardcore literature book club talking about the philosophy of translation and we did a taste test comparison of the many great translations of War and Peace available to you so if you've seen that video already feel free to utilize the timestamps below to skip on to the next point But ultimately when it comes to translation I am not a purist I think the best translation is the one that gets you into the work indeed I think of James Joyce and how he recommended his family members pick up a children's Illustrated version of Homer's Odyssey so that they could understand and appreciate Ulysses and Joyce himself would have drawn on his own childhood memories of such books the most important thing is that you set yourself up to fall in love with the work and then if you fall in love with it you can structure your rereads every year every few years with a new translation and you can compare them over the course of your life once again you have more things to look forward to but that first reading that initial breaking into a work should be the translation that poses no obstacle or doesn't hinder you significantly the translation I will be referencing in the hardcore literature book club lecture series is the 2006 Anthony Briggs translation available in penguin paperback despite its size it is very portable it has ample space for marginalia and it also doesn't have extensive blocks of French with many translations of War and Peace readers will crack it open and be confronted not with English but with a big block of French and indeed in many versions around two percent of the book involves long stretches of French and you'll see the translation in in the footnotes so what happens is you end up being pulled out of the story because you are looking up and down from the blocks of French to the footnotes now there is a there's some Nuance here because of course there are many readers who can speak French it's either their first language or they can read it fluently but for those readers who don't have fluent French or only have halting half-remembered Schoolboy French like my own this can pose a real challenge to immersing yourself in the story now why is there so much French in the book it's about two percent which is a lot when the book is over a thousand pages and it is noticeable it's there because that's how Tolstoy originally wrote it and he was remaining faithful to the aristocratic High Society of Russia at the time who would have been using French extensively in their discourse we'll go into the details of why exactly Tolstoy does this in our lecture series but for now it's very much worth addressing as an obstacle because this is one of the main things I've heard from readers who had to put War and Peace down who didn't manage to get more than a few chapters through it now tolstoya actually rewrote War and Peace and he excised he removed much of the French and writing to Nikolai strakov he said I think it's better without it and then he revised it again and put a little bit more in so if you opt for a translation that doesn't have huge blocks of French you're not necessarily going for a translation that isn't faithful and the whole is it faithful or not debate is very nuanced and layered but the Anthony Briggs translation is great for English readers who have no French because when you open it you are confronted not with French but with English and Briggs Ops to Simply say the character at this time was speaking in French and this can really make a huge difference for many readers when it comes to accessing the work now here's where the Nuance comes in because there are plenty of really great translations there's the pnv we use the pavir and volikonski translation for our lecture series on Anna Karenina and we will use the pnv for our reading of the brothers karamazov by Dostoevsky I absolutely adore pavir and volikonski I think they do a tremendous job and Russian speakers tell me that they really do nail the nuances and they manage to convey the tolstoyak prose Style in English very very well now they use extensive French and utilize footnotes if that will pose no obstacle to you then I would encourage you to give that one a try like I said we have a taste test comparing the mole in the hardcore literature book club another really popular one is the mode translation from Alma and Louise Maude who actually got the go-ahead from Tolstoy himself and there are many revisions of the influential mod you'll see the Oxford World Classics which looks like this is revised by Amy mandelker which is a very nice choice to go for too they put a lot of the French back in where the mods to get out of course there's the Constance Garnet I have so much admiration and respect for Constance Garnet she was a bridge from Russia to the West with her translations yes they all sound rather the same she doesn't convey the distinct individual voices of The Writer's she is translating but they're reliable and they're very readable so check out that taste test at the hardcore literature book club if you're still undecided but if you would like the decision to be made for you then I would say pick yourself up the Anthony Briggs translation in penguin paperback now my next tip is to make concerted efforts to befriend the characters War and Peace has an enormous cast of Almost 600 characters a lot of these characters are mentioned only once so you definitely don't need to keep track of absolutely everybody and yes it's so okay to forget some people you will not however forget the important characters if you treat them as real people and very soon once you're hooked and immersed they will become like real people to you this is why I return to War and Peace So endlessly it's to spend time in the company of people who have become my friends and I wouldn't be the first one and I certainly won't be the last one to say that tolstoy's characters like the characters of Shakespeare very much do feel as real if not more real than the people in our actual lives when we discussed Anna Karenina in the book club we spoke of Anna and Levin and Steve and Dolly and Kitty as though they were real people and when we recall them after reading Anna Karenina they feel like memories of people that were once part of our lives and the same is most certainly true of War and Peace for me when I think about War and Peace I think about Pierre Andre Natasha Maria and so many more now I think the comparison with Shakespeare is a very good one because tolstoy's characters like Shakespeare's characters self over here they catch themselves in the act of speaking and thinking they overhear themselves this is what Harold Bloom teaches us about the inexhaustible characters of Hamlet Cleopatra full staff and Iago and they're catching themselves in the act of thinking is rather different from say cervantes's characters his Knight Aaron and lovable Squire who change by virtue of hearing each other rather than themselves full stories characters are solipsistic narcissistic egotistical and imperfect and yet we love them anyway they can do everything wrong and we still love them we still cherish them we still relate to them Father story is a master of painting the good and the bad of domestic life we recognize these characters and these situations he paints people masterfully and his single Strokes contain so much so much hangs off of a single description quite simply he Nails human nature we love his characters because they are us and that's a nice reminder that love is ultimately rather narcissistic we see a reflection of ourselves in another experiencing the arcs the trajectories of tolstoy's characters puts us in mind of our own character arcs our own Journeys and we spend time with these characters and they go up and down and up and down and we think Ah that's me the individual is a disguise for the universal and we find the universal in the individual indeed Tolstoy immersed himself off in the writing of War and Peace and he drew from his own personal experience there are manifestations of not only Tolstoy himself but the people he knew and loved in many of these characters one of the things that I love about tolstoy's universe is one moment a character is happy yeah they're happier than they will ever be in their life I'll never be happier than I am right now and they have it all figured out they know the meaning of life and meanwhile another character who we have also become intimately acquainted with they are despairing they think life is meaningless they are in the absolute pits of bleakest darkest depression and then they flip they swap places the one who was in the grips of Despair is now on and up and the one who had it all figured out now realizes that quite simply they didn't and that is life whether our trajectories are ultimately upwards trending or downwards trending it is not a straight line in either direction it's shaky we go through periods of ups and downs we are cyclical with our opinions our moods are our outlook on the world and that's normal and spending time in the company of characters like this certainly extends a comfort to us now another thing that's great about tolstoy's characters is that they seem inevitable and that's the mark of great poetry when you read a line and you think it couldn't have been any other way yeah it's inevitable and told stories characters his protagonists are inevitable too they are real and they believe so thoroughly in their own existence they take it so thoroughly for granted that we do not even question it ourselves and I love what James Wood said about Paul stories characters the difficulty for these people is being anything other than themselves how relatable is that now one of the main questions that readers ask coming to War and Peace for the first time after which translation is best is how do I keep track of all of the characters how do I remember their names heck how do I even pronounce their names now when it comes to remembering their names I put this to you do you struggle to remember the names of your family do you struggle to remember the names of characters of a long-running soap opera that you are emotionally invested in the answer of course is no now the Russian names for one who doesn't speak Russian definitely does present something of a difficulty but I say give yourself license to mangle them and anglicize them if that helps you get into the story you may also wish to treat yourself to an audiobook reading look up the pronunciations listen to how the names are said but a great technique for remembering characters is to discuss them and take their concerns on as though they were your own become emotionally invested in their lives now that initial meeting of the characters is where the difficulty is so when you meet a character for the first time you might find it useful to put a box around their name this is a technique that I employ myself put a box around their name and underline the descriptions that come affixed to them if you notice that Tolstoy is describing a character in a certain way and repeating it then it is important and it is a mnemonic device if you attach a character with a certain physical representation and be aware that we enter tolstoy's characters through the body and then we get into the spirit so put a box around say Pierre's name we meet Pierre very early on put a box around his name and then underline the descriptions of this marvelous character and also flex your imaginative powers and really see in your mind's eye really see Pierre really see Natasha really see Andre do this for all of the characters yes it's a little bit of work it's a little bit of effort but it's also a bit of play too and you mustn't feel silly about this because no one can see what you're doing in your mind imagination is a skill it's a muscle and maturation involves it a trophying so we have to make a conscious effort to build it back up and it's important that we do so because imagination is inextricably linked to morality and empathy two things that are very important to Tolstoy so make a strong effort to convert the ink on the page or the words of a narrator in your ear into definite images in your mind's eye another thing that many readers find useful is to have the names printed out and to have family trees so you can see the the connections between the different characters many volumes will have such lists presented to you in the appendices and it is a valuable use of your time to flip backwards and forwards and consult those lists to ensure that you keep your bearings and very soon you won't need them now here's another tip look things up look up words if an item of clothing is described and you don't recognize it you don't know what it is if a piece of food is described if a location is described and you don't know what it is rather than just Glide over it remember we are living these books we are aiming for total immersion it's the easiest time in history to be a self scholar we have a wealth of information at our fingertips and indeed if something baffles you you can even ask it in the hardcore literature book club in the discussion threads we have so many knowledgeable readers from all over the world lovers of literature from all backgrounds all Industries all ages professionals all over the world world who are eager to share their knowledge and impart their wisdom so if you have a question you'll get an answer now I love talking about the characters but another thing that I love talking about when it comes to War and Peace is the history and this needn't be an obstacle use War and Peace as an Avenue into history give yourself the gift of History moralists like polstoy Victor hugoj George Elliot utilize history very well and your reading of War and Peace affords you the opportunity to learn about one of the most fascinating periods around the time of tolstoy's writing we see Tsar Alexander II emancipation or freeing of the serfs Russia was built on serfdom and serfdum refers to the peasants who worked the lands of the nobility and their indentured servitude meant that they were essentially property that could be bought and sold in order to understand a country undergoing reform Tolstoy had to look back towards the beginning of the 19th century and he had to look to Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars knowing just a little bit of Russian history goes a long way towards understanding why the 19th century Russian Classics are so masterful in their exploration of The Human Condition and learning about Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars unlocks a huge amount of understanding of Europe the history of Europe as a whole as the title of the work indicates the novel is split between political strife and warfare and domestic life there are two battles that really impress us we have the Battle of austerlitz of 1805 and we have the Battle of borodino in 1812 the battleground of which Tolstoy inspected and he spent a lot of time pouring over military history pouring over Maps reading accounts of these battles if you could time travel back to specific battles the one at ousterlitz and borodino would be two that you would choose although what would confront you particularly at the Battle of borodino would be an awe-inspiring and incomprehensible amount of Bloodshed and suffering and misery the battle at borodino was the single bloodiest day in military history not to be surpassed until 1914. now in lieu of a time machine paintings and film adaptations certainly help us appreciate just how Grand and traumatic these battles were and of course in lieu of a time machine we also have told stories epic those two battles are really awe-inspiring to contemplate austellites showed Napoleon's prowess as a tactician borodino was just a brutal brutal bloodbath the Russian army going on to lose approximately 44 000 men and the French army going on to lose around 58 000. the Russians despite their heavy losses simply refused to be defeated at the Battle of borodino the Russians were fighting to the death and this was something that finally rocked the French morale there are some truly Sublime meditations on war in tolstoy's Masterpiece that send a chill through me these meditations from a Tolstoy who saw action himself who served himself in Crimea in fact some of these meditations moved me to tears here's Andre balkanski meditating upon War not being a plaything this speech comes in the third volume of War and Peace So if you don't want to hear speeches from later in the book then feel free to skip this song Andre says one thing I would do if I was in power stop taking prisoners what's the sense in taking prisoners it's just medieval chivalry the French have destroyed my home and they're on their way to destroy Moscow they've injured me and they're still doing doing it with every second that passes they're my enemies they're all criminals taking no prisoners that alone would transform the whole war and would make it less cruel but playing at War that's what's so vile if we didn't have all this business of magnanimity in Warfare we would only ever go to war when there was something worth facing certain death for as there is now war is not being nice to each other it's the vilest thing in human life and we ought to understand that and not play our war it's a terrible necessity and we should be strict about it and take it seriously it comes down to this no more lying War means war and it's not a play thing now told story like Hugo before him did extraordinary amounts of historical research and poured over Maps but like Victor Hugo he also believed that at a certain point history must become fictional in order to convey enduring truths so what we get in War and Peace is a blending of the two a marvelous blending of the two yes we have the fictional and we also get depictions of these extraordinary historical figures Napoleon of course being the big one and Napoleon truly is one of the most fascinating individuals of all time but I find katusov fascinating as well I love how we get a chance to access a really broad sweep of geopolitical understanding and why different countries have developed the way they have I love leveraging a reading of War and Peace into reading about military history and tactics and strategy and warfare and whilst you can go into War and Peace without prior reading it's worth saying that a little bit of homework a little bit of historical research will most certainly pay pay off dividends to your appreciation and understanding of the work now some recommendations of good places to start just to get you up to speed with some of the history I'm a real big fan of Lucy Worsley she's a BBC presenter and she has many great historical documentaries she has a really great one on the history of Russia my advice would be learn a little bit about Peter the Great and Catherine the Great learn about the establishment of Saint Petersburg learn about the split down the country the two rushes old Russia and the Russia that was becoming increasingly westernized or in the process of becoming more European and so it's fascinating to learn that there is this sort of identity crisis at the time a cultural identity crisis if you like that ran not only through the country but through individuals too there's this question lingering across the 19th century of what does it mean to be Russian and in addition to Lucy worsley's documentary there's a great book that came out very recently that will fill you in swiftly on what you need to know about Russian history it's called the story of Russia by Orlando figs for a quick focused reading I would particularly recommend the fifth and sixth chapters Russia faces West and the shadow of Napoleon but if you find it interesting and it really is Russian history is incredibly interesting then you can go further back or you can come a little bit closer to the modern day and as you're learning about history you will be prompted by Tolstoy to really examine what history means he has these extraordinary interpolated essays the philosophical episodes of War and Peace there are 26 chapters that essentially involve Tolstoy stepping back a little bit and talking to us or we might say preaching to us in a rather didactic moralizing tone but of course Tolstoy along with Elliot is one of those writers who's moralizing we very swiftly forgive he steps back from the narrative a little bit and he gives us these extraordinary essays on history and historians who he doesn't seem to like very much and the fallacy of single cause and effect in which we are forced to end up ultimately examining how much free will we really have and whilst Napoleon said that there is a moment in battle where the slightest movement is decisive and that slight movement starts the Overflow there's this sense and to tell story this is an erroneous sense that history is made by great individuals single individuals who impose their will on reality but to tell story these great individuals actually have less Free Will than anybody else here's Tolstoy talking about history at the beginning of the third volume of War and Peace on the 12th of June the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian Frontier and War began in other words an event took place which defied human reason and all human nature millions of men set out to inflict on one another Untold evils deception treachery robbery forgery counterfeiting theft arson and murder on a scale unheard of in the annals of Law Courts down the centuries and all over the world though at the time the men responsible did not think of these Deeds as crimes what led to this extraordinary occurrence what causes lay behind it the story tells us that the events of which we read had no single cause being bound to happen simply because they were bound to happen millions of men abandoning all human feelings and Common Sense were bound to march from west to east and slay their fellows just as a few centuries ago hordes of men had marched from east to west slaying their fellows historical fatalism is the only possible explanation of irrational phenomena like these the more we try to explain away such phenomena in rational terms the more irrational and incomprehensible they become for us each man lives for himself using his freedom to get what he wants and he feels with every fiber of his being that's at any particular time he is free to perform an action or refrain from doing so but the moment any action is taken it becomes an irrevocable piece of history with is a significance which has more to do with predetermination than Freedom there are two sides to life for every individual a personal life in which his freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of his interests and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity in which a man inevitably follows the laws laid down for him he tells us that kings are the slaves of history history the amorphous unconscious life within the swarm of humanity exploits every minute in the lives of Kings as an instrument for the attainment of its own ends according to Tolstoy every action that so-called Great Men perform which they take to be self-determined and independent is in a historical sense quite the opposite it is interconnected with the whole course of history and pre redetermined from eternity now another tip to ensuring your appreciation of War and Peace is more profound is to understand tolstoy's art style his aesthetic philosophy and how he approaches crafting his narrative pavir and volikonsky in their translators preface I love reading the prefaces of translators when it comes to a work I don't read introductions because they can be rather spoiler heavy but reading about the ration now for how a translator approached a certain writer that's fascinating Richard pavir writing in the preface to the Vintage paperback edition of War and Peace points out that whole story was not a stylist in fact Tolstoy himself referred to such writers as hairdressers perhaps we can see why Ernest Hemingway admired Tolstoy so much admired him to the point of entertaining a fantasy in which he had a boxing match with the great influence upon him we think of Tolstoy more as a realist than a stylist though as James Wood points out there is something that flows from tolstoy's details Vivid and dynamic as they are that makes him feel very different from other realists here's wood Tolstoy is not interested in telling us what things look like to him and he's not interested in telling us what they resemble tolstoy's similes are often of the blandly universal kind he felt like a man does when he enters a shop and sees things that are too expensive for him and so on Nabokov rightly noticed that at this kind of metaphor Tolstoy is not very good when Flo bear writes of the long tail of steam flowing from a train's funnel as the train makes its Passage through the countryside and Likens it to a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away I really love that that's quite a beautiful image isn't it it is very beautiful but nevertheless it is a stylist being a stylist is how Flo bear sees the world yet in Todd's story as in Chekhov reality appears in his novels as it might appear not to a writer but to the characters wood goes on to say that the writer who uses metaphor is always describing the world hypothetically as it might be Tolstoy is simply describing the world as it necessarily is so it's reality as it appears to the characters and the characters believe in their own existence so fully that we do not question it and it all flows from there it's all stories individual distinctly voiced characters comprise a compelling heterogosm just like Shakespeare's characters we're convinced that they all live in a very real universe and who else does this yes Shakespeare does this yes Dickens does this but God does this too and that is why so many readers refer to tell story as their secular scripture despite being intensely realistic I also see something of the Romantic Intel stories prose too despite many critics pointing out that Tolstoy is not particularly Adept when it comes to metaphors something that we could most certainly argue is part of tolstoy's overall design and the tolstoic prose quality it most certainly is some incredible symbolism in his work and many of the books core themes hang off of beautifully wrought images pregnant with meaning and potential meaning the lofty Sky the gnarled oak tree the brilliant Comet of 1812. tell stories prose maybe earthy and Hardy me either good nor bad but imminently tostoic as Richard pavir lovingly points out but Tolstoy is very much a poet in spirit and this sprawling thing a work that Tolstoy pointed out was not a novel he considered Anna Karenina to be his first proper novel in the true sense of the word with War and Peace Tolstoy said that he strove only to ensure that each independent section had its own interest and when we think about that isn't this simply brilliant realism it resists the structure of the novel The novelistic whilst writing War and Peace told story said that the Epic was the only genre that came naturally to him in fact dealing with the question of what War and Peace is told story wrote what is War and Peace it is not a novel even less an epic or a narrative poem and even less an historical Chronicle War and Peace is what the author wanted to and could express in the form in which it was expressed essentially in War and Peace we have tolstoys poetic output and spiritual outpouring and that sense of spiritual outpouring is important to bear in mind because Tolstoy is not the kind of writer who buys into this idea of Art For Art's Sake he is a moral writer and we have his aesthetic philosophy laid down in his what his art and we have a podcast on this little aesthetic tract which goes in depth breaking this work down what is our is brilliant supplementary reading for your journey through War and Peace now it's worth keeping in mind that what is art was published three decades after War and Peace and War and Peace was written according to Tolstoy during the happiest and most productive period of his life he was working alongside his wife Sophia who would go on to Bear him 13 children seven of which would survive and she would help her husband by tirelessly copying out or in piece by hand but then after the period of years Tolstoy spent writing War and Peace he then moves on to Anna Karenina and enters a very Bleak dark phase of his life a time in which he had to hide ropes and guns from himself for fear of killing himself so by the time he gets to what is art he had been through a lot but the ideas in what his art had been gestating for a very long time he'd been musing upon Aesthetics for many years and his time spent writing works like War and Peace most certainly would have informed his later views as it so happens Tolstoy didn't regard his works from This brilliant middle period in his career as being particularly good but then again he professed not to like Shakespeare and Wagner and said that Beethoven lacked Talent the mark of a really great writer is when they become an influence upon themselves and in tolstoy's resistance to his own work perhaps that's what we're seeing regardless of what Tolstoy professed about his own work idealistic as he was we think he was most certainly way too hard on himself and we remain in awe of War and Peace now tell stories thoughts about what art is are quite interesting he thought that great art successfully transmitted or infected that was the word he used infected us with sincere religious experience or religious feeling now of course that wouldn't be everybody's definition of great art but there's certainly something to be said for this idea that art or great art takes us to a higher plane of Consciousness by that metric War and Peace certainly in my opinion meets tolsto his own definition of art now let's talk about another tip for breaking into War and Peace and that is to appreciate filmic adaptations film adaptations and television adaptations again to reiterate I am not a purist and I believe that an entrance is an entrance there are many great adaptations of this work and the wonderful thing about this story is once you're into it every year or every few years you can treat yourself to a rereading of a new translation you can treat yourself to a new film adaptation you can watch a new television series in order to complement your lifelong reading of this work having said that Tolstoy is such a master of his craft that he can suffer in much the same way that Shakespeare suffers when it comes to adaptations I've said before that I think the best interpretations or adaptations of Shakespeare's work end up being musical ones for example Mendelson's A Midsummer Night's Dream and that's because the condition of music is beyond words even when it util lies his words and Shakespeare despite being a word Smith is incredibly auricular and comes very close to approaching that condition of music and so what do we want from a good adaptation we want a meeting of two masters we want the director to honor the spirit of the writer but also bring something of their own divine inspiration to the work too my recommendation for a masterpiece when it comes to adaptations of War and Peace is Sergey bunderchaks Soviet film version released from 1966 to 1967.chuk directed and also starred as Pierre bazookov and perhaps he was a little bit on the older side for the role as many critics have pointed out but to me he is Pierre and he played him perfectly I also think that Ludmila savalieva played Natasha brilliantly she really was perfect for the role of Natasha rustova and I also thought that the actor playing Andre bogonski was brilliant though indeed everyone played their parts beautifully the cinematography in this adaptation is breathtaking it's worth watching for how the battles are presented to us alone but indeed everything about this version is breathtaking the battles and the ballrooms the costumes and the Beautiful attention to detail it's a brilliant experience and highly recommended now another recommendation for getting the most out of War and Peace is to journal and do marginalia and follow rabbit holes as part of your reading project treat yourself to a nice notebook I personally really love the like term 1917 variety of bullet journal with graph paper for pens I like a Japanese pen that's cheap and readily available on Amazon cool called Muji these little ballpoint pens and set yourself the task of journaling when you come to the end of a part so volume one part one have a little Journal volume one part two do the same sit down and tell yourself that you're going to write longhand free association style one to three pages and by the end of the book your Journal will be a treasure that you cherish and return to along with the book itself and this will Mark a very specific moment in your life and you'll be able to use this as a yardstick for your own personal growth over the years use your journaling as an opportunity to build in your re-reading so when you sit down to the book maybe you Journal once a week I typically only Journal once a week at the moment sometimes a little less than that but when you sit down to journal give yourself half an hour and return to those passages where you have underlined those resonant lines scribbled in the margins and you might want to put the date at the top up you might want to copy out the quote that has resonated with you and then just start writing what you need to do is silence the inner editor your inner sensor yeah out of frivolity comes Insight so give yourself license to write silly things give yourself license to write anything that comes into your mind remove that filter and just write and indeed treat your journaling and your marginalia like a conversation a conversation with the author because literature ultimately is conversational yes we enjoy reading in solitude but that Solitude is an opportunity to commune across time across boundaries and also with ourself literature is conversational and that is what the Canon is the Canon is a conversation across time and talking about conversations let's end on this final tip which is to discuss the work discuss War and Peace read it with someone close to you as spouse a partner a friend a sibling read it with the hardcore literature book club and as I said reading at a certain point has to be solitary we have to go into Solitude and enjoy it by ourselves but for me the ultimate Joy about reading is how it connects us to other people and when we have a great group like we do at the hardcore literature book club what we are doing is crowdsourcing meaning there is so much value in Reading what other people have to say about the work that you're falling in love with you get to see all these different angles that you may have not even contemplated before and so being able to tap into the power of readers from different backgrounds from different parts of the world really is such a rewarding thing to do and is one of the best ways to take our appreciation of great literature to the next level and indeed that is how the book was originally designed to be read what were those first readers doing in between installments they were discussing it they were thinking about it they were rereading the installment they had just enjoyed they were participating in a great conversation so there we have it those are some tips that will help any Intrepid Explorer of tolstoy's War and Peace and I really hope you enjoy this story I think you will it is a tremendous story a sweeping Saga with vividly raw characters who you will fall in love with I wish you all the very best on your journey through War and Peace let us know what is your experience with tolstoy's Masterpiece what are you thinking and feeling at the beginning of this journey what are you looking forward to and what would you like to get out of this book thank you very much for watching thank you for reading along and happy reading everybody bye bye for now

War and Peace is one of the most rewarding rich and insightful works of literature of all time we continue to read and re-read told stories Masterpiece over a century and a half since it was first published because it is an endless work a work that we can return to and in a sense never really leave and continue to draw nourishment from over the course of our lives but it is certainly no secret that many readers find the prospect of tackling this masterpiece to be daunting and for good reason the reputation of War and Peace certainly precedes it but there really is nothing to fear when it comes to this great story and you have so many joys in store for you so let&#39;s talk about how to access this work and overcome some of its main difficulties and I believe that difficulties and obstacles are really gifts in Disguise for example one obstacle that many readers encounter when it comes to War and Peace is the huge cast of characters the gift in Disguise is many new friends and many opportunities to interact with manifestations of yourself what&#39;s another obstacle well it&#39;s length that&#39;s certainly an obstacle it&#39;s a long book but the counter to that the gift is more time spent immersed in a vivid World another potential obstacle that readers point out is tolstoy&#39;s extensive meditations on history and the extraordinary amount of historical detail the gift there of course is gaining an understanding of entire nations epochs and ultimately enduring truths that transcend specific Nations and times so let&#39;s talk about how to set yourself up to not only enjoy told stories War and Peace but to fall deeply in love with it okay let&#39;s start by talking about pacing because it is a very big book it&#39;s over a thousand pages long but I truly believe that if you can dedicate just 10 to 15 minutes per day you can have War and Peace read over the course of just one season and despite its intimidating length War and Peace is one of those books like George eliot&#39;s Middle March like ceraventes is Don Quixote that many readers wish had gone on longer Henry James famously launched a Barb at books like middlemarch and War and Peace calling them loose baggy monsters which is rather unfair because despite their size I really believe that there are no Superfluous details everything is there for a reason and the power is partly due to the size well law and peace is a sweeping operatic Saga it is an epic and it is Sublime Sublimity arises from the grand when you go out into nature and you look up at the stars or you look at a mountain or you contemplate the ocean and the crashing waves or if you hear a roaring storm all of these things Inspire in US feelings of the sublime they ore us into silence they ground Us in the present moment and they take us up out of ourselves they induce in US Peak experiences and there are moments in War and Peace many moments that have the power to induce Peak experiences in you too and the sublime the grand the sweeping is something that we have lost touch with in the modern day world we are inundated with the short form and yet collectively we are starting to yearn for the long form again we are starting to yearn for epics and sagas and we are insatiable creatures we love to binge our content we want to have consumed everything all at once and so the prospect of a sweeping Saga like War and Peace that can be rather daunting because we look at the size of it and we think oh that might take a while but I would encourage you if you feel that way to embrace this psychotherapeutic technique from Holocaust Survivor founder of logotherapy and writer of man&#39;s search for meaning Victor Frankel there&#39;s this idea of paradoxical intention where you embrace the thing you fear you do not flee from it you do not hide it or deny it and so with a work of literature that is as sweeping as War and Peace you tell yourself this may take a while and that is okay in fact that is optimal and length of work truly is one of the easiest obstacles to overcome because it&#39;s like with anything in life whether you want to establish a new athletic regime or maybe you have some huge life events on the horizon that&#39;s keeping you up at night stressing you out like with anything Grand it comes down to breaking it into manageable chunks it comes down to our habits in my first year of University we had to Read Moby Dick and we were all intimidated by its size and our first year tutor says you can read this in under a year it&#39;s a chapter a day and the chapters are very short that&#39;s how you get through it everyone can do a chapter a day and the chapters in War and Peace are very short too it&#39;s manageable the key with tolstoy&#39;s Masterpiece is really just breaking into it and getting your grounding because once you do the challenge isn&#39;t getting through it it&#39;s actually slowing down once you&#39;ve met the characters once you&#39;ve taken their concerns on as your own once you are firmly rooted in tolstoy&#39;s World your going to want to read it quickly you&#39;re going to be hooked until story is going to drag you along so when it comes to achieving big things and reading big books it really just comes down to Habit creation and how do we establish a habit well we make it easy we make it automatic and we make it fun introduce some social accountability in there and very soon you&#39;ll have that habit established and though I do like to be prescriptive with my recommendations when it comes to pacing I really do implore you to follow your own Rhythm and embrace your own self Pace I personally don&#39;t think there is such a thing as reading a book too slowly but there is such a thing as reading a book too quickly if quantity is our metric of success then sure we&#39;re going to want to gobble up our books untasted and note them down and then forget about them as we move on to the next one and shovel that one down untasted too but I would rather have half a dozen well-selected curated life-changing books read over the course of a year not just red but lived than a hundred plus that I cannot remember now in our reading of War and Peace with the hardcore literature book club the lectures are going to follow a reliable and steady Rhythm if you set yourself the goal to keep up with the lectures as they come out you&#39;ll have this book read in under three months which to me is a very quick Pace we will be breaking our guided reading content our discussions our lectures down according to volumes and parts which makes it very easy there are four volumes to War and Peace and an epilogue split into two parts and each volume is split into multiple Parts two so volume one is split into three parts which gives us three milestones and three discussions three lectures and our first deep dive discussion will cover volume 1 part 1 which in the Anthony Briggs translation is 115 pages so you can see that if you give yourself the assignment of a couple of chapters a day if you give yourself the assignment to sit down for 10 or 15 minutes then you can most certainly comfortably have read that part in a little over a week and keep in mind that the chapters are small and digestible and so having a milestone to look forward to and I&#39;m a huge believer in having things to look forward to when it comes to difficult projects having that discussion with the group to look forward to will be really rewarding and it will give you an aim something to shoot for if you are a very fast reader then I would urge you to bake your re-reading in I personally like to do this by virtue of returning to those passages that I have marked and underlined and twinning my rereading with some journaling with each discussion in the hardcore literature book club we will have some guiding questions to prompt discussion but you will also be encouraged to bring your favorite passages and ideas and insights like you would a dish to a dinner party so that we can enjoy this book together other things you can do to make your reading more rewarding is to not only bake in rereading but follow rabbit holes go down different Avenues take extracurriculars that means read biographies watch historical documentaries look things up and of course discuss the work with other readers now we&#39;ve given an option for a relatively quick reading Pace but what about an ultra slow option well there are 361 chapters in War and Peace you could do a chapter a day if you are interested in reading this one over the course of a year this is an approach that many readers embraced when we read Victor who goes Les Miserables in the book club now what are the benefits of such a slow reading Pace well one of the benefits is firstly it&#39;s very achievable it gives you something to look forward to every single day and your reading becomes rather scriptural another benefit to such an ultra slow reading is you will truly possess the work by the end of it if you speak to readers who read George eliot&#39;s middlemarch over the course of a year we did that we followed the original serialized publication schedule and we read it over the course of a year if you speak to those readers you&#39;ll know that the town of middlemarch became a real place and the people who populate it became real people the ultra slow approach will also give you an opportunity to layer in other stories and so you can enjoy short stories poems plays even other novels whilst reading this story at the same time ultimately go with your guts go with your inclination and follow the Rhythm that best suits you that best allows you to break into the world work with Great Gusto now let&#39;s talk about what I see as being the second major obstacle which is translation how do you choose the right translation of War and Peace now we had an in-depth video in the hardcore literature book club talking about the philosophy of translation and we did a taste test comparison of the many great translations of War and Peace available to you so if you&#39;ve seen that video already feel free to utilize the timestamps below to skip on to the next point But ultimately when it comes to translation I am not a purist I think the best translation is the one that gets you into the work indeed I think of James Joyce and how he recommended his family members pick up a children&#39;s Illustrated version of Homer&#39;s Odyssey so that they could understand and appreciate Ulysses and Joyce himself would have drawn on his own childhood memories of such books the most important thing is that you set yourself up to fall in love with the work and then if you fall in love with it you can structure your rereads every year every few years with a new translation and you can compare them over the course of your life once again you have more things to look forward to but that first reading that initial breaking into a work should be the translation that poses no obstacle or doesn&#39;t hinder you significantly the translation I will be referencing in the hardcore literature book club lecture series is the 2006 Anthony Briggs translation available in penguin paperback despite its size it is very portable it has ample space for marginalia and it also doesn&#39;t have extensive blocks of French with many translations of War and Peace readers will crack it open and be confronted not with English but with a big block of French and indeed in many versions around two percent of the book involves long stretches of French and you&#39;ll see the translation in in the footnotes so what happens is you end up being pulled out of the story because you are looking up and down from the blocks of French to the footnotes now there is a there&#39;s some Nuance here because of course there are many readers who can speak French it&#39;s either their first language or they can read it fluently but for those readers who don&#39;t have fluent French or only have halting half-remembered Schoolboy French like my own this can pose a real challenge to immersing yourself in the story now why is there so much French in the book it&#39;s about two percent which is a lot when the book is over a thousand pages and it is noticeable it&#39;s there because that&#39;s how Tolstoy originally wrote it and he was remaining faithful to the aristocratic High Society of Russia at the time who would have been using French extensively in their discourse we&#39;ll go into the details of why exactly Tolstoy does this in our lecture series but for now it&#39;s very much worth addressing as an obstacle because this is one of the main things I&#39;ve heard from readers who had to put War and Peace down who didn&#39;t manage to get more than a few chapters through it now tolstoya actually rewrote War and Peace and he excised he removed much of the French and writing to Nikolai strakov he said I think it&#39;s better without it and then he revised it again and put a little bit more in so if you opt for a translation that doesn&#39;t have huge blocks of French you&#39;re not necessarily going for a translation that isn&#39;t faithful and the whole is it faithful or not debate is very nuanced and layered but the Anthony Briggs translation is great for English readers who have no French because when you open it you are confronted not with French but with English and Briggs Ops to Simply say the character at this time was speaking in French and this can really make a huge difference for many readers when it comes to accessing the work now here&#39;s where the Nuance comes in because there are plenty of really great translations there&#39;s the pnv we use the pavir and volikonski translation for our lecture series on Anna Karenina and we will use the pnv for our reading of the brothers karamazov by Dostoevsky I absolutely adore pavir and volikonski I think they do a tremendous job and Russian speakers tell me that they really do nail the nuances and they manage to convey the tolstoyak prose Style in English very very well now they use extensive French and utilize footnotes if that will pose no obstacle to you then I would encourage you to give that one a try like I said we have a taste test comparing the mole in the hardcore literature book club another really popular one is the mode translation from Alma and Louise Maude who actually got the go-ahead from Tolstoy himself and there are many revisions of the influential mod you&#39;ll see the Oxford World Classics which looks like this is revised by Amy mandelker which is a very nice choice to go for too they put a lot of the French back in where the mods to get out of course there&#39;s the Constance Garnet I have so much admiration and respect for Constance Garnet she was a bridge from Russia to the West with her translations yes they all sound rather the same she doesn&#39;t convey the distinct individual voices of The Writer&#39;s she is translating but they&#39;re reliable and they&#39;re very readable so check out that taste test at the hardcore literature book club if you&#39;re still undecided but if you would like the decision to be made for you then I would say pick yourself up the Anthony Briggs translation in penguin paperback now my next tip is to make concerted efforts to befriend the characters War and Peace has an enormous cast of Almost 600 characters a lot of these characters are mentioned only once so you definitely don&#39;t need to keep track of absolutely everybody and yes it&#39;s so okay to forget some people you will not however forget the important characters if you treat them as real people and very soon once you&#39;re hooked and immersed they will become like real people to you this is why I return to War and Peace So endlessly it&#39;s to spend time in the company of people who have become my friends and I wouldn&#39;t be the first one and I certainly won&#39;t be the last one to say that tolstoy&#39;s characters like the characters of Shakespeare very much do feel as real if not more real than the people in our actual lives when we discussed Anna Karenina in the book club we spoke of Anna and Levin and Steve and Dolly and Kitty as though they were real people and when we recall them after reading Anna Karenina they feel like memories of people that were once part of our lives and the same is most certainly true of War and Peace for me when I think about War and Peace I think about Pierre Andre Natasha Maria and so many more now I think the comparison with Shakespeare is a very good one because tolstoy&#39;s characters like Shakespeare&#39;s characters self over here they catch themselves in the act of speaking and thinking they overhear themselves this is what Harold Bloom teaches us about the inexhaustible characters of Hamlet Cleopatra full staff and Iago and they&#39;re catching themselves in the act of thinking is rather different from say cervantes&#39;s characters his Knight Aaron and lovable Squire who change by virtue of hearing each other rather than themselves full stories characters are solipsistic narcissistic egotistical and imperfect and yet we love them anyway they can do everything wrong and we still love them we still cherish them we still relate to them Father story is a master of painting the good and the bad of domestic life we recognize these characters and these situations he paints people masterfully and his single Strokes contain so much so much hangs off of a single description quite simply he Nails human nature we love his characters because they are us and that&#39;s a nice reminder that love is ultimately rather narcissistic we see a reflection of ourselves in another experiencing the arcs the trajectories of tolstoy&#39;s characters puts us in mind of our own character arcs our own Journeys and we spend time with these characters and they go up and down and up and down and we think Ah that&#39;s me the individual is a disguise for the universal and we find the universal in the individual indeed Tolstoy immersed himself off in the writing of War and Peace and he drew from his own personal experience there are manifestations of not only Tolstoy himself but the people he knew and loved in many of these characters one of the things that I love about tolstoy&#39;s universe is one moment a character is happy yeah they&#39;re happier than they will ever be in their life I&#39;ll never be happier than I am right now and they have it all figured out they know the meaning of life and meanwhile another character who we have also become intimately acquainted with they are despairing they think life is meaningless they are in the absolute pits of bleakest darkest depression and then they flip they swap places the one who was in the grips of Despair is now on and up and the one who had it all figured out now realizes that quite simply they didn&#39;t and that is life whether our trajectories are ultimately upwards trending or downwards trending it is not a straight line in either direction it&#39;s shaky we go through periods of ups and downs we are cyclical with our opinions our moods are our outlook on the world and that&#39;s normal and spending time in the company of characters like this certainly extends a comfort to us now another thing that&#39;s great about tolstoy&#39;s characters is that they seem inevitable and that&#39;s the mark of great poetry when you read a line and you think it couldn&#39;t have been any other way yeah it&#39;s inevitable and told stories characters his protagonists are inevitable too they are real and they believe so thoroughly in their own existence they take it so thoroughly for granted that we do not even question it ourselves and I love what James Wood said about Paul stories characters the difficulty for these people is being anything other than themselves how relatable is that now one of the main questions that readers ask coming to War and Peace for the first time after which translation is best is how do I keep track of all of the characters how do I remember their names heck how do I even pronounce their names now when it comes to remembering their names I put this to you do you struggle to remember the names of your family do you struggle to remember the names of characters of a long-running soap opera that you are emotionally invested in the answer of course is no now the Russian names for one who doesn&#39;t speak Russian definitely does present something of a difficulty but I say give yourself license to mangle them and anglicize them if that helps you get into the story you may also wish to treat yourself to an audiobook reading look up the pronunciations listen to how the names are said but a great technique for remembering characters is to discuss them and take their concerns on as though they were your own become emotionally invested in their lives now that initial meeting of the characters is where the difficulty is so when you meet a character for the first time you might find it useful to put a box around their name this is a technique that I employ myself put a box around their name and underline the descriptions that come affixed to them if you notice that Tolstoy is describing a character in a certain way and repeating it then it is important and it is a mnemonic device if you attach a character with a certain physical representation and be aware that we enter tolstoy&#39;s characters through the body and then we get into the spirit so put a box around say Pierre&#39;s name we meet Pierre very early on put a box around his name and then underline the descriptions of this marvelous character and also flex your imaginative powers and really see in your mind&#39;s eye really see Pierre really see Natasha really see Andre do this for all of the characters yes it&#39;s a little bit of work it&#39;s a little bit of effort but it&#39;s also a bit of play too and you mustn&#39;t feel silly about this because no one can see what you&#39;re doing in your mind imagination is a skill it&#39;s a muscle and maturation involves it a trophying so we have to make a conscious effort to build it back up and it&#39;s important that we do so because imagination is inextricably linked to morality and empathy two things that are very important to Tolstoy so make a strong effort to convert the ink on the page or the words of a narrator in your ear into definite images in your mind&#39;s eye another thing that many readers find useful is to have the names printed out and to have family trees so you can see the the connections between the different characters many volumes will have such lists presented to you in the appendices and it is a valuable use of your time to flip backwards and forwards and consult those lists to ensure that you keep your bearings and very soon you won&#39;t need them now here&#39;s another tip look things up look up words if an item of clothing is described and you don&#39;t recognize it you don&#39;t know what it is if a piece of food is described if a location is described and you don&#39;t know what it is rather than just Glide over it remember we are living these books we are aiming for total immersion it&#39;s the easiest time in history to be a self scholar we have a wealth of information at our fingertips and indeed if something baffles you you can even ask it in the hardcore literature book club in the discussion threads we have so many knowledgeable readers from all over the world lovers of literature from all backgrounds all Industries all ages professionals all over the world world who are eager to share their knowledge and impart their wisdom so if you have a question you&#39;ll get an answer now I love talking about the characters but another thing that I love talking about when it comes to War and Peace is the history and this needn&#39;t be an obstacle use War and Peace as an Avenue into history give yourself the gift of History moralists like polstoy Victor hugoj George Elliot utilize history very well and your reading of War and Peace affords you the opportunity to learn about one of the most fascinating periods around the time of tolstoy&#39;s writing we see Tsar Alexander II emancipation or freeing of the serfs Russia was built on serfdom and serfdum refers to the peasants who worked the lands of the nobility and their indentured servitude meant that they were essentially property that could be bought and sold in order to understand a country undergoing reform Tolstoy had to look back towards the beginning of the 19th century and he had to look to Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars knowing just a little bit of Russian history goes a long way towards understanding why the 19th century Russian Classics are so masterful in their exploration of The Human Condition and learning about Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars unlocks a huge amount of understanding of Europe the history of Europe as a whole as the title of the work indicates the novel is split between political strife and warfare and domestic life there are two battles that really impress us we have the Battle of austerlitz of 1805 and we have the Battle of borodino in 1812 the battleground of which Tolstoy inspected and he spent a lot of time pouring over military history pouring over Maps reading accounts of these battles if you could time travel back to specific battles the one at ousterlitz and borodino would be two that you would choose although what would confront you particularly at the Battle of borodino would be an awe-inspiring and incomprehensible amount of Bloodshed and suffering and misery the battle at borodino was the single bloodiest day in military history not to be surpassed until 1914. now in lieu of a time machine paintings and film adaptations certainly help us appreciate just how Grand and traumatic these battles were and of course in lieu of a time machine we also have told stories epic those two battles are really awe-inspiring to contemplate austellites showed Napoleon&#39;s prowess as a tactician borodino was just a brutal brutal bloodbath the Russian army going on to lose approximately 44 000 men and the French army going on to lose around 58 000. the Russians despite their heavy losses simply refused to be defeated at the Battle of borodino the Russians were fighting to the death and this was something that finally rocked the French morale there are some truly Sublime meditations on war in tolstoy&#39;s Masterpiece that send a chill through me these meditations from a Tolstoy who saw action himself who served himself in Crimea in fact some of these meditations moved me to tears here&#39;s Andre balkanski meditating upon War not being a plaything this speech comes in the third volume of War and Peace So if you don&#39;t want to hear speeches from later in the book then feel free to skip this song Andre says one thing I would do if I was in power stop taking prisoners what&#39;s the sense in taking prisoners it&#39;s just medieval chivalry the French have destroyed my home and they&#39;re on their way to destroy Moscow they&#39;ve injured me and they&#39;re still doing doing it with every second that passes they&#39;re my enemies they&#39;re all criminals taking no prisoners that alone would transform the whole war and would make it less cruel but playing at War that&#39;s what&#39;s so vile if we didn&#39;t have all this business of magnanimity in Warfare we would only ever go to war when there was something worth facing certain death for as there is now war is not being nice to each other it&#39;s the vilest thing in human life and we ought to understand that and not play our war it&#39;s a terrible necessity and we should be strict about it and take it seriously it comes down to this no more lying War means war and it&#39;s not a play thing now told story like Hugo before him did extraordinary amounts of historical research and poured over Maps but like Victor Hugo he also believed that at a certain point history must become fictional in order to convey enduring truths so what we get in War and Peace is a blending of the two a marvelous blending of the two yes we have the fictional and we also get depictions of these extraordinary historical figures Napoleon of course being the big one and Napoleon truly is one of the most fascinating individuals of all time but I find katusov fascinating as well I love how we get a chance to access a really broad sweep of geopolitical understanding and why different countries have developed the way they have I love leveraging a reading of War and Peace into reading about military history and tactics and strategy and warfare and whilst you can go into War and Peace without prior reading it&#39;s worth saying that a little bit of homework a little bit of historical research will most certainly pay pay off dividends to your appreciation and understanding of the work now some recommendations of good places to start just to get you up to speed with some of the history I&#39;m a real big fan of Lucy Worsley she&#39;s a BBC presenter and she has many great historical documentaries she has a really great one on the history of Russia my advice would be learn a little bit about Peter the Great and Catherine the Great learn about the establishment of Saint Petersburg learn about the split down the country the two rushes old Russia and the Russia that was becoming increasingly westernized or in the process of becoming more European and so it&#39;s fascinating to learn that there is this sort of identity crisis at the time a cultural identity crisis if you like that ran not only through the country but through individuals too there&#39;s this question lingering across the 19th century of what does it mean to be Russian and in addition to Lucy worsley&#39;s documentary there&#39;s a great book that came out very recently that will fill you in swiftly on what you need to know about Russian history it&#39;s called the story of Russia by Orlando figs for a quick focused reading I would particularly recommend the fifth and sixth chapters Russia faces West and the shadow of Napoleon but if you find it interesting and it really is Russian history is incredibly interesting then you can go further back or you can come a little bit closer to the modern day and as you&#39;re learning about history you will be prompted by Tolstoy to really examine what history means he has these extraordinary interpolated essays the philosophical episodes of War and Peace there are 26 chapters that essentially involve Tolstoy stepping back a little bit and talking to us or we might say preaching to us in a rather didactic moralizing tone but of course Tolstoy along with Elliot is one of those writers who&#39;s moralizing we very swiftly forgive he steps back from the narrative a little bit and he gives us these extraordinary essays on history and historians who he doesn&#39;t seem to like very much and the fallacy of single cause and effect in which we are forced to end up ultimately examining how much free will we really have and whilst Napoleon said that there is a moment in battle where the slightest movement is decisive and that slight movement starts the Overflow there&#39;s this sense and to tell story this is an erroneous sense that history is made by great individuals single individuals who impose their will on reality but to tell story these great individuals actually have less Free Will than anybody else here&#39;s Tolstoy talking about history at the beginning of the third volume of War and Peace on the 12th of June the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian Frontier and War began in other words an event took place which defied human reason and all human nature millions of men set out to inflict on one another Untold evils deception treachery robbery forgery counterfeiting theft arson and murder on a scale unheard of in the annals of Law Courts down the centuries and all over the world though at the time the men responsible did not think of these Deeds as crimes what led to this extraordinary occurrence what causes lay behind it the story tells us that the events of which we read had no single cause being bound to happen simply because they were bound to happen millions of men abandoning all human feelings and Common Sense were bound to march from west to east and slay their fellows just as a few centuries ago hordes of men had marched from east to west slaying their fellows historical fatalism is the only possible explanation of irrational phenomena like these the more we try to explain away such phenomena in rational terms the more irrational and incomprehensible they become for us each man lives for himself using his freedom to get what he wants and he feels with every fiber of his being that&#39;s at any particular time he is free to perform an action or refrain from doing so but the moment any action is taken it becomes an irrevocable piece of history with is a significance which has more to do with predetermination than Freedom there are two sides to life for every individual a personal life in which his freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of his interests and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity in which a man inevitably follows the laws laid down for him he tells us that kings are the slaves of history history the amorphous unconscious life within the swarm of humanity exploits every minute in the lives of Kings as an instrument for the attainment of its own ends according to Tolstoy every action that so-called Great Men perform which they take to be self-determined and independent is in a historical sense quite the opposite it is interconnected with the whole course of history and pre redetermined from eternity now another tip to ensuring your appreciation of War and Peace is more profound is to understand tolstoy&#39;s art style his aesthetic philosophy and how he approaches crafting his narrative pavir and volikonsky in their translators preface I love reading the prefaces of translators when it comes to a work I don&#39;t read introductions because they can be rather spoiler heavy but reading about the ration now for how a translator approached a certain writer that&#39;s fascinating Richard pavir writing in the preface to the Vintage paperback edition of War and Peace points out that whole story was not a stylist in fact Tolstoy himself referred to such writers as hairdressers perhaps we can see why Ernest Hemingway admired Tolstoy so much admired him to the point of entertaining a fantasy in which he had a boxing match with the great influence upon him we think of Tolstoy more as a realist than a stylist though as James Wood points out there is something that flows from tolstoy&#39;s details Vivid and dynamic as they are that makes him feel very different from other realists here&#39;s wood Tolstoy is not interested in telling us what things look like to him and he&#39;s not interested in telling us what they resemble tolstoy&#39;s similes are often of the blandly universal kind he felt like a man does when he enters a shop and sees things that are too expensive for him and so on Nabokov rightly noticed that at this kind of metaphor Tolstoy is not very good when Flo bear writes of the long tail of steam flowing from a train&#39;s funnel as the train makes its Passage through the countryside and Likens it to a gigantic ostrich feather whose tip kept blowing away I really love that that&#39;s quite a beautiful image isn&#39;t it it is very beautiful but nevertheless it is a stylist being a stylist is how Flo bear sees the world yet in Todd&#39;s story as in Chekhov reality appears in his novels as it might appear not to a writer but to the characters wood goes on to say that the writer who uses metaphor is always describing the world hypothetically as it might be Tolstoy is simply describing the world as it necessarily is so it&#39;s reality as it appears to the characters and the characters believe in their own existence so fully that we do not question it and it all flows from there it&#39;s all stories individual distinctly voiced characters comprise a compelling heterogosm just like Shakespeare&#39;s characters we&#39;re convinced that they all live in a very real universe and who else does this yes Shakespeare does this yes Dickens does this but God does this too and that is why so many readers refer to tell story as their secular scripture despite being intensely realistic I also see something of the Romantic Intel stories prose too despite many critics pointing out that Tolstoy is not particularly Adept when it comes to metaphors something that we could most certainly argue is part of tolstoy&#39;s overall design and the tolstoic prose quality it most certainly is some incredible symbolism in his work and many of the books core themes hang off of beautifully wrought images pregnant with meaning and potential meaning the lofty Sky the gnarled oak tree the brilliant Comet of 1812. tell stories prose maybe earthy and Hardy me either good nor bad but imminently tostoic as Richard pavir lovingly points out but Tolstoy is very much a poet in spirit and this sprawling thing a work that Tolstoy pointed out was not a novel he considered Anna Karenina to be his first proper novel in the true sense of the word with War and Peace Tolstoy said that he strove only to ensure that each independent section had its own interest and when we think about that isn&#39;t this simply brilliant realism it resists the structure of the novel The novelistic whilst writing War and Peace told story said that the Epic was the only genre that came naturally to him in fact dealing with the question of what War and Peace is told story wrote what is War and Peace it is not a novel even less an epic or a narrative poem and even less an historical Chronicle War and Peace is what the author wanted to and could express in the form in which it was expressed essentially in War and Peace we have tolstoys poetic output and spiritual outpouring and that sense of spiritual outpouring is important to bear in mind because Tolstoy is not the kind of writer who buys into this idea of Art For Art&#39;s Sake he is a moral writer and we have his aesthetic philosophy laid down in his what his art and we have a podcast on this little aesthetic tract which goes in depth breaking this work down what is our is brilliant supplementary reading for your journey through War and Peace now it&#39;s worth keeping in mind that what is art was published three decades after War and Peace and War and Peace was written according to Tolstoy during the happiest and most productive period of his life he was working alongside his wife Sophia who would go on to Bear him 13 children seven of which would survive and she would help her husband by tirelessly copying out or in piece by hand but then after the period of years Tolstoy spent writing War and Peace he then moves on to Anna Karenina and enters a very Bleak dark phase of his life a time in which he had to hide ropes and guns from himself for fear of killing himself so by the time he gets to what is art he had been through a lot but the ideas in what his art had been gestating for a very long time he&#39;d been musing upon Aesthetics for many years and his time spent writing works like War and Peace most certainly would have informed his later views as it so happens Tolstoy didn&#39;t regard his works from This brilliant middle period in his career as being particularly good but then again he professed not to like Shakespeare and Wagner and said that Beethoven lacked Talent the mark of a really great writer is when they become an influence upon themselves and in tolstoy&#39;s resistance to his own work perhaps that&#39;s what we&#39;re seeing regardless of what Tolstoy professed about his own work idealistic as he was we think he was most certainly way too hard on himself and we remain in awe of War and Peace now tell stories thoughts about what art is are quite interesting he thought that great art successfully transmitted or infected that was the word he used infected us with sincere religious experience or religious feeling now of course that wouldn&#39;t be everybody&#39;s definition of great art but there&#39;s certainly something to be said for this idea that art or great art takes us to a higher plane of Consciousness by that metric War and Peace certainly in my opinion meets tolsto his own definition of art now let&#39;s talk about another tip for breaking into War and Peace and that is to appreciate filmic adaptations film adaptations and television adaptations again to reiterate I am not a purist and I believe that an entrance is an entrance there are many great adaptations of this work and the wonderful thing about this story is once you&#39;re into it every year or every few years you can treat yourself to a rereading of a new translation you can treat yourself to a new film adaptation you can watch a new television series in order to complement your lifelong reading of this work having said that Tolstoy is such a master of his craft that he can suffer in much the same way that Shakespeare suffers when it comes to adaptations I&#39;ve said before that I think the best interpretations or adaptations of Shakespeare&#39;s work end up being musical ones for example Mendelson&#39;s A Midsummer Night&#39;s Dream and that&#39;s because the condition of music is beyond words even when it util lies his words and Shakespeare despite being a word Smith is incredibly auricular and comes very close to approaching that condition of music and so what do we want from a good adaptation we want a meeting of two masters we want the director to honor the spirit of the writer but also bring something of their own divine inspiration to the work too my recommendation for a masterpiece when it comes to adaptations of War and Peace is Sergey bunderchaks Soviet film version released from 1966 to 1967.chuk directed and also starred as Pierre bazookov and perhaps he was a little bit on the older side for the role as many critics have pointed out but to me he is Pierre and he played him perfectly I also think that Ludmila savalieva played Natasha brilliantly she really was perfect for the role of Natasha rustova and I also thought that the actor playing Andre bogonski was brilliant though indeed everyone played their parts beautifully the cinematography in this adaptation is breathtaking it&#39;s worth watching for how the battles are presented to us alone but indeed everything about this version is breathtaking the battles and the ballrooms the costumes and the Beautiful attention to detail it&#39;s a brilliant experience and highly recommended now another recommendation for getting the most out of War and Peace is to journal and do marginalia and follow rabbit holes as part of your reading project treat yourself to a nice notebook I personally really love the like term 1917 variety of bullet journal with graph paper for pens I like a Japanese pen that&#39;s cheap and readily available on Amazon cool called Muji these little ballpoint pens and set yourself the task of journaling when you come to the end of a part so volume one part one have a little Journal volume one part two do the same sit down and tell yourself that you&#39;re going to write longhand free association style one to three pages and by the end of the book your Journal will be a treasure that you cherish and return to along with the book itself and this will Mark a very specific moment in your life and you&#39;ll be able to use this as a yardstick for your own personal growth over the years use your journaling as an opportunity to build in your re-reading so when you sit down to the book maybe you Journal once a week I typically only Journal once a week at the moment sometimes a little less than that but when you sit down to journal give yourself half an hour and return to those passages where you have underlined those resonant lines scribbled in the margins and you might want to put the date at the top up you might want to copy out the quote that has resonated with you and then just start writing what you need to do is silence the inner editor your inner sensor yeah out of frivolity comes Insight so give yourself license to write silly things give yourself license to write anything that comes into your mind remove that filter and just write and indeed treat your journaling and your marginalia like a conversation a conversation with the author because literature ultimately is conversational yes we enjoy reading in solitude but that Solitude is an opportunity to commune across time across boundaries and also with ourself literature is conversational and that is what the Canon is the Canon is a conversation across time and talking about conversations let&#39;s end on this final tip which is to discuss the work discuss War and Peace read it with someone close to you as spouse a partner a friend a sibling read it with the hardcore literature book club and as I said reading at a certain point has to be solitary we have to go into Solitude and enjoy it by ourselves but for me the ultimate Joy about reading is how it connects us to other people and when we have a great group like we do at the hardcore literature book club what we are doing is crowdsourcing meaning there is so much value in Reading what other people have to say about the work that you&#39;re falling in love with you get to see all these different angles that you may have not even contemplated before and so being able to tap into the power of readers from different backgrounds from different parts of the world really is such a rewarding thing to do and is one of the best ways to take our appreciation of great literature to the next level and indeed that is how the book was originally designed to be read what were those first readers doing in between installments they were discussing it they were thinking about it they were rereading the installment they had just enjoyed they were participating in a great conversation so there we have it those are some tips that will help any Intrepid Explorer of tolstoy&#39;s War and Peace and I really hope you enjoy this story I think you will it is a tremendous story a sweeping Saga with vividly raw characters who you will fall in love with I wish you all the very best on your journey through War and Peace let us know what is your experience with tolstoy&#39;s Masterpiece what are you thinking and feeling at the beginning of this journey what are you looking forward to and what would you like to get out of this book thank you very much for watching thank you for reading along and happy reading everybody bye bye for now

Transcript for:How to Read War and Peace: Tips and Insights

Transcript for:
How to Read War and Peace: Tips and Insights