Pining for the West

War and Peace has been eyeing me up and shouting READ ME from different bookcases in many different homes of ours over the past 30 odd years. At last I’ve got around to it and I feel really chuffed with myself for being able to tick it off my mental ‘must read ‘ list.

I really enjoyed War and Peace, I thought it would be really heavy going but it is actually quite a page turner. It might not be so smooth if you don’t have much of an interest in Napoleon and what was going on between 1805 and 1820 in Europe.

As you would expect from the title the storyline is split up between battles and the general chaos that ensued, and civilian life in the high society of Moscow and Petersburg and how they were all affected by the war.

There were only three parts of the book which I felt dragged a bit. I didn’t like the bits about Freemasonry in book V. It didn’t seem to add anything to the book but apart from that I’ve always disliked the Freemasons because to me it is just another word for corruption. It can’t be right that people get jobs and advancement because of a society that they’re a member of rather than the qualifications that they have. It was news to me too that the Freemasons originated in Scotland and Tolstoy sometimes called it the Scottish society. I’m mortified but according to the introduction in this edition Tolstoy saw it as a way of combating the corruption which already existed at court.

In book VII Nicholas Rostov has a wolf hunt on his estate and it seemed really out of place and distasteful to me but it made sense later on when Rostov compared his first experience of a battle with the hunt.

Almost at the end of the book, The Second Epilogue seemed never ending: The Forces That Move Nations – didn’t move me.

But that’s me nit-picking again and I would encourage any War and Peace dodgers (as I used to be) to have a go at reading it because I think most people will be pleasantly surprised.

As you can see the edition which I read is from 1943. It still has the original bookmark it was sold with and has very thin, smooth paper, the pages were very difficult to turn which was a bit annoying. I actually had to cut some of the pages so I must have been the first person to get to the end of it. This must have been a special wartime paper but it has aged really well, in fact it’s like new. We also have a paperback Pan edition from 1972 and the paper hasn’t aged at all well. Also it has no maps and no footnotes whatsoever, the 1943 book has very interesting comments.

I know that elsewhere in the blogosphere people are reading a new translation but I would be really surprised if anything could better this translation which was done by Louise and Aylmer Maude.