War and Peace

To read or not to read the timeless novel during this critical time.

A few years ago, I decided it was time to read a long, classic novel. The book of choice was Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. I had seen the musical on Broadway and the film version of it, but had never attempted to read the English translation of the original masterpiece. It took me more than a year to get through it, in part because I took breaks to read some shorter, more contemporary books, but by late 2020 I made it through. And, except for that long section set in the Paris sewer system, I loved every minute of it.

Completing that long but marvelous read naturally led to the question: “What’s next?”. The answer was Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, another of the great classics I had never read. I once tried listening to an audio version of Tolstoy’s novel, but I was turned off by the actors’ performances. Still, because War and Peace always seemed to top the lists of great literature, I decided to give the physical book a try.

I began reading it in late 2020 or early 2021 and was enjoying it almost as much as Hugo’s book. To be sure, keeping track of the many characters with their multiple Russian names and nicknames was daunting, but the indispensable list of “Principal Characters” at the beginning of the volume helped. By the end of 2021, I had made it more than halfway through (again, interrupting the endeavor by reading several shorter tomes), and promised myself that I would finish the book sometime the following year.

By February of last year, I had made it as far as page 852 (a/k/a Part 3, Section XIII, pictured above), which “Goodreads” tells me is the 60% mark. Then, on February 24th, Russia invaded Ukraine. Once that happened, I could no longer stomach reading a work of Russian literature, especially one portraying Russia as the victim of a foreign invasion by an imperialistic despot. Now, nearly a year after Putin’s despicable, brutal attack on a non-threatening, peaceful nation, I remain stuck in the middle of what is often said to be the greatest novel of all time.

As the partially read book lingers on my bookshelf, I occasionally ask myself when I will be able to tolerate reading it again. I also ask whether I’m being foolish in not tackling the remaining pages. After all, wasn’t Russia a blameless victim of Napoleon’s doomed attempt at empire? Is it fair to impute guilt for Putin’s 21^st century war crimes to the Russian people of the early 1800s? And wasn’t one of Tolstoy’s points in writing War and Peace to portray the evils of war, which is exactly the message we should be proclaiming at this crucial moment?

The February 4^th issue of “The Economist” includes a story called “Recycling Russia.” It describes the efforts of some Ukrainians at removing Russian books by recycling the paper they were written on, as well as removing busts and statues of Russian heroes. “The cover of Tolstoy’s ‘Childhood, Boyhood and Youth’, days away from being reborn as a coffee-cup sleeve or an egg carton, goes into one garbage bag,” the author writes. “The novel’s pages, destined to end up as paper for other books, in Ukrainian, or as cheap toilet paper, go into another.”

This “De-Russification,” as the article calls it, is understandable. Putin bases the invasion on his claim that Ukraine is part of Russia, not a separate country, and his assertion that Russia is justified in taking it back. It’s not the first time Russia (or the former Soviet Union) has trampled on the sovereignty of Ukraine or the lives of its people. The article mentions the Holodomor, “the famine to which the Soviets condemned Ukraine in the 1930s and which killed millions of people,” detailed six years ago in Anne Applebaum’s award-winning book, The Red Famine. Just as Ukrainians attempt to rid themselves of the symbols of Russian culture, Russian forces are working to rid the country of symbols of Ukrainian culture (including a monument to the victims of the Holodomor). But this parallel behavior is no simple tit-for-tat. It is a wholesale effort by each side to establish cultural, as well as military, dominance within Ukraine’s borders. Nothing short of Ukraine’s survival as an independent nation hangs in the balance.

Despite the existential nature of the conflict’s stakes, I remain undecided about whether I should resume my reading of Tolstoy’s greatest work or let it continue to sit idly on its shelf. Maintaining the status quo feels like an appropriate act of solidarity with the courageous Ukrainian people. But at least one of the Ukrainians interviewed by The Economist seems to think that silent protests like mine are unnecessary.

Most Ukrainians support the idea of changing Soviet or Russian place-names. Whether Russian writers buried one or two centuries ago should pay the price for today’s war crimes is a more divisive question. Like many Ukrainians traumatized by the war, Vasyl, browsing for a new novel at the Syayvo bookstore, says he and his wife, who grew up in Russia, have decided to stop speaking Russian. “It grates on my ears,” he says. But he reckons literature should be off-limits, and that turning books into pulp is a step too far. “This reminds me too much of Mussolini,” he says, unpersuaded by Mr. Dyak’s argument that recycling books is hardly the same thing as burning them. “A book is a book.”

In the end, my decision will be personal. It will depend on whether I can separate my anger at Russia’s current military action from my appreciation of a great Russian novel written by a great Russian author depicting a tragic Russian war. I’m guessing that Mr. Tolstoy included some lessons in the story that would help me make sense of the ongoing cataclysm, even if Russia, once a victim, is now the villain (as it most assuredly is!). Perhaps my one year of abstinence from all things Russian was enough, and 2023 will be the year that I fulfill my promise to myself and learn what Tolstoy has to teach me. After all, “a book is a book,” and this book is anything but a glorification of Putin’s war.

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“Recycling Russia,” The Economist, February 4th-10th, 2023, pp. 46-47.