"Autumn Days (and Nights) with Tolstoy"

 I recognize my production of essays has abated of late, due to the holidays that consume so much of our attention – and I am happy they do. For the Hannukah and Christmas seasons are reminders of the good in life: the blessing that is ours to live where and when we do; the joy that comes in hearing from and being with family and friends; and the pleasure we get from greeting those who merrily serve us in stores and restaurants. 

 

Reading War and Peace was a gift, which will stay with me. It is not escapist, for it causes one to think in broader and deeper terms about our lives, and the story puts the silliness and sordidness of today’s politics in perspective. But, if 1500 pages seems a hill too high, try Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in my opinion the finest novel ever written.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Autumn Days (and Nights) with Tolstoy”

December 10, 2023

 

“An historian and an artist describing our historic epoch have two quite different tasks before them. As an 

historian would be wrong if he tried to present an historical person in his entirety, in all his relations with all sides of life, so the artist would fail to perform his task were he to represent the person always in his historical significance.”

                                                                                                                                Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

                                                                                                                                War and Peace, Appendix, 1868

 

In the Introduction to my copy of War and Peace, the late Tolstoy scholar Reginald Frank Christian of St. Andrews University wrote: “Many years later he [Tolstoy] told Gorky [Maxim Gorky] that ‘without false modesty, War and Peace is like the Iliad…” Professor Christian added that he had “deliberately refrained from calling War and Peace a novel,” and noted that Tolstoy claimed Anna Karenina, published ten years later, to be his first novel. Tolstoy wrote about what he knew. Born into the aristocracy fifteen years after Napoleon had been pushed out of Russia, he had first-hand war experience in Crimea, where he arrived in the fall of 1854 in time for the siege of Sevastopol. What Tolstoy created in War and Peace is epic – a combination of fiction, history and philosophy – and deserves its classical status.

 

In early September, I read Peggy Noonan’s column in The Wall Street Journal, “My Summer with Leo Tolstoy.” The first thing I did, after deciding to read the book, was ditch the one-volume paperback I had purchased a few years earlier and bought a more-easily-handled three-volume set translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. At story’s end, I empathized with Ms. Noonan’s quote of George Will, who on completing Moby Dick wrote: “To think I might have died without reading it!”

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Tolstoy wrote of war: “On the 12^th of June 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began…” “One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead, lies uncertainty…You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed…” He wrote of people, of four families, but especially of two individuals: Countess Natásha Rostóva, a “…strikingly poetic, charming girl, overflowing with life!” and Count Pierre Bezúkhov, a large, young, unhappily married man who searches for life’s purpose: “To that question What for? a simple answer was now always ready in his soul: ‘Because there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair falls from a man’s head.’” As well, Tolstoy pondered social, ethical, and religious concerns of the time, and he philosophized about the difficulty to understand the why of events like Napoleon’s invasion of Russia: “The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.”

 

At over 1,500 pages, War and Peace is daunting, but it is captivating in all aspects. Like Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Tolstoy’s characters have names difficult for American ears. But they are descriptive and credible. Readers will not soon forget Andrew’s death, Sónya’s unrequited love, nor Mary’s loyalty. To those interested in the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy provided a window on that era from Russia’s perspective. And for us, living in traumatic times, his questions, thoughts, and timeless wisdom on life deserve our reflection. I spent many hours with Tolstoy, and I am glad I did.