This Book Will Change Your Life

Or Why Reading War and Peace Is Better Than Sex

By Sarah Labrie

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Illustration by Sharon Song
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Love happened to me this semester like it always does. Just when I least expected it, at a moment when I wasn't even looking, suddenly, there it was: a quickening of the heart and a shortness of breath, the nervous smiles, the tears, and an overwhelming feeling of serenity, that finally, things were the way they were supposed to be.

I should mention that I was vulnerable at the time. The start of this semester found me in a very bad place, coming off a hedonistic, lazy summer spent in Providence doing. not much at all. Classes caught me unawares. I wasn't sure where I was going, why I was at Brown, or whether I even wanted to be here. Shopping period left me in a state of perpetual self-doubt. Just when I was considering jumping ship and starting over somewhere else, one of my professors mentioned offhand something that changed everything. She repeated for me part of a speech given by a university president to students during commencement. The goal of a liberal education, he said, is for students to graduate with the ability to:

a.) Decipher James Joyce's Ulysses

b.) Understand the effect the slave trade had on the development of the United States

c.) Hold his or her own in a discussion of the human genome.

Given the state I was in (impulsive, irrational, borderline depressed) I was in prime position to accept advice indiscriminately from anyone with half a clue. Thus, the following Monday found me begging the professor of CO142: Gigantic Fictions to let me into her class on the last day of shopping period, because Joyce was on the syllabus. I'd gotten it fixed in my head that I could worry about slavery and the science bits later, but reading Ulysses was something I had to do, and I had to do it now.

Drowning In Logorrhea

Before we got to Joyce though, I had to read a couple of other books first. Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji ran to just under 1100 pages, but the language was so beautiful that reading it felt almost like a dream. Then, we started War and Peace. I approached the book the same way I would approach a first date, awkward, difficult and in my view, wholly unnecessary. I would have much rather stayed at home to hang out with old friends who knew me well, and who didn't challenge my sense of self-worth. It wasn't Tolstoy who intimidated me. I would have reread Anna Karenina any day, but War and Peace was a different story. The book's aura was off-putting. It was the type of work that, as Mark Twain famously said, "Everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read." Even Henry James called it "a big, baggy monster." If Henry James was threatened by it, who was I to even try?

I got through the first 100 pages in fits and starts, reluctant to devote any significant amount of time to deciphering Tolstoy's words. In my view, all I had to do was read the book, memorize the general sequence of events, and do well on whatever paper or final I was expected to write afterwards. As I got deeper and deeper into the novel, though, that all began to change. I stopped doing homework for other classes. Eventually, I stopped going out at all, to stay home Friday night plowing my way through another 50 or 100 pages. My entire life became secondary to this singular obsession, the unraveling of War and Peace's immensely complex plot.

To call War and Peace a novel is like calling the Sphinx a statue. The Sphinx isn't a statue, it's a monument, and War and Peace isn't a novel, it's something else. In fact, when James labeled it a monster, it may have been for lack of any other English word to describe it. The work defies classification. Its wide-ranging subject matter encompasses philosophy, metaphysics, history, psychology, religion and politics. It's not even entirely fictional, as many of the characters and much of the dialogue were taken directly from primary historical sources. There is no way to describe what Tolstoy's novel is about, because, simply put, it's about everything: change, aging, disillusionment, the meaning of life and the meaning of death, true love and falsity, history and the present. Sure, the book's principle characters are members of the Russian aristocracy, but there is no one to whose existence Tolstoy's words will not apply.

Trying to describe War and Peace's plot is equivalent to describing Dali's painting Paranoiaque; one hasn't a clue where to even begin. This book boasts 500 different characters, ranging from historical giants (Napoleon, Alexander I) to Russian socialites to the lowliest invented peasant. Tolstoy enters these strangers' minds with perfect ease. He also includes members of his own family, under assumed names. The author even throws himself into the mix, basing many of the principle character's experiences and revelations on his own. Broadly, the plot examines the War of 1812 from the perspective of the soldiers who fought in it and the Russian citizens whose lives it immeasurably changed. Tolstoy presents the experience of war so truthfully that it becomes impossible not to get sucked into it. At the end of Aylmer and Louise Maude's 1074 page translation, I was drained, perplexed and mentally exhausted. I finished the book with a vague new awareness of the mysterious forces of fate and intelligence that inhabit a realm just outside mortal comprehension.

Philosophical Show And Tell

With Tolstoy, the reader takes on the role of the voyeur who, besides sitting in on debates between officers and generals, enters the foyer of the Rostov's, a noble Russian family whose world is torn asunder by the French invasion. The book's heroine, Natasha Rostov, has a life essence so strong that the reader almost expects her to spring forth from the pages by the sheer force of her will. War and Peace traces the thread of her life, as well as that of her brother, Nicholas Rostov, a soldier, and her lovers, first the noble Prince Andrew Bolkonski, then the bumbling but good-hearted and pure Pierre Bezhukov. Bezhukov's first wife, Helene, wicked, beautiful, manipulative and soulless, does her best to bring the people around her to ruin. Love stories as raw and forthright as this one don't exist anywhere in contemporary literature. We root for Natasha and for love, even while Tolstoy does his best to show that there are no happy endings. There aren't even any endings, since every resolution is the start of something new.

Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which he outlines repeatedly and exhaustively over the course of the novel, is that humans themselves are incapable of determining why things happen. Historians are only fooling themselves. The fact that we live in this world naturally precludes any objective understanding of the historical and political events that shape it. A battle on which a war, and thus the fate of an entire people, depends can be lost simply because a certain general happened to have a cold on the exact wrong day. In short, nothing happens for the reasons we think, and any attempt to decipher the course of events is doomed to futility.

And yet, the essential paradox is that Tolstoy himself is writing a work of historical fiction. In an effort to circumvent this problem, he seems to examine even the least significant event of this period in the most minute detail. Nothing is too small to be included, thus the book's status as a "Gigantic Fiction." Tolstoy writes in circles, he repeats himself, he replays events multiple times from the perspective of different characters until the reader can scarcely hold the narrative together in her head. He does this on purpose, of course. There is no understanding, he seems to be saying. Try as you might, you'll never force anything to fit a simple explanation. There are no patterns. We don't control anything, least of all the course of our own lives. Least of all history.

A friend, describing Tolstoy, said to me "It's like this: Here's a man who's figured out all these secrets, and he just.tells them to you." He's right, sort of. It's not the universal answers Tolstoy has figured out, but the questions. When, in the novel's second epilogue he asks, "What is the power that moves peoples?" he never gives us an answer, just articulates an age-old riddle that no one will ever solve. Yet, in Prince Andrew Bolkonski's suffering, in Pierre's constant epiphanies, in the young Natasha Rostov's insatiable hunger for life, Tolstoy also depicts the agony and the rapture of everyday existence, because of and in spite of these eternal, unanswerable conundrums.

I saw myself in the world Tolstoy created, and even though I didn't find any solutions, I realized that my problems themselves aren't all that dire, or even unique, in the first place. They are simply and essentially a core part of what it means to live, and for some reason, realizing that made me feel a little bit less alone. Now that I'm finished with the novel, sadly, pieces of it have already begun to fade from my memory. In his book, Tolstoy offers what seems like an endless parade of questions and ideas, images and thoughts on what it means to be human in this world. It is impossible to grasp the book's storyline in its entirety, especially on a first reading, and, on the whole, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that you as the reader come away with a changed overall perspective, and an understanding of the power of literature to interpret this life and reveal some small part of its overall significance.

And Tolstoy Also Invented Penicillin

War and Peace changed my life, in a way. Encountering a passion and a joie de vivre as enormous as that which lies behind Tolstoy's words couldn't do otherwise. I still face the same annoying insecurities that plague every college student. But, after reading about Pierre who simply "by loving people without cause discovered indubitable causes for loving them," its easier to shrug off the jadedness and the cynicism that characterize this age, and see the world the way Tolstoy did, as an endless, unpredictable mystery that it is our duty to spend our lives trying to untangle.

If you do decide to read War and Peace over Christmas break, here's some advice. First of all, keep reading. Don't put the book down, and don't skip over the bits about the war. They are long and repetitive, sometimes torturously so, but in the end you'll be glad you didn't. Why run a marathon if you're not going to go the full distance?

Leo Tolstoy is Sarah LaBrie '07's friend with benefits.

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