Reading War and Peace can be compared to moving to a new town or a new job where you know no one. At first all is confusion; you cannot connect names and faces; you do not know who will be important to you and who will not. Often your first acquaintances turn out to be unimportant, while you only meet the really important people in your new life later on—or realize only later on that they are important.
So it is with War and Peace. As you read on, the various groups of characters sort themselves out. The families become meaningful as families, the lovers as lovers, the friends as friends. You cannot know Pierre or Andrew well the first time you meet them, and an introductory note stating that they are the two most important male characters will not tell you anything you will not learn yourself and in a better way. To be told in advance that Natasha Rostov is the heroine of the book is not much help either. If you do not come to see that as the book progresses, you are blind.
It is, I think, exactly as easy, or as hard, to discern characters and character relationships in War and Peace as it is in real life. I would not welcome information from a demiurge to the effect that such and such a woman was destined to loom large in my life, or that such and such a man, after years of nodding acquaintance, would become my good friend. I prefer to find out those things as I go along. So it is with War and Peace. Let the book happen to you; do not try to control it. It was written by a master of fiction; by the master. If you are confused at the beginning, you can feel confident that you won’t end up confused. You will know all that anyone can know.
Which, of course, is not everything, about anything or anyone. One of the secrets of Tolstoy’s power as a novelist is that he allows his characters to surprise you. If they were cut and dried, molded after a formula, they would not surprise, they would simply obey the rules of their construction. But Tolstoy’s characters seem no less alive, no less predictable, than you or I. Like you and me, they surprise even themselves.
Tolstoy, in short, does not know everything about Pierre, Andrew, Natasha, Princess Mary, Nicholas, old Prince Bolkonski, Count Rostov, Platon Karateev, and the host of men and women and children who fill the pages of this book. And all the thousands of soldiers. And among the soldiers, particularly Kutuzov, the general of the Russian armies.
Kutuzov was a real man (I knew his great granddaughter), but he was—or perhaps because of that he was—an enigma. Kutuzov is extremely lethargic, old, often ill, rather doddering. He doesn’t give many orders, nor does he seem to read or listen to the reports of enemy movements that are given to him. Nevertheless, he alone knows that Napoleon will be beaten and that he—and the ordinary Russian soldiers—will beat him. He knows this intuitively; no book learning or military training could teach it to him. He alone knows that the great battle at Borodino, which everyone else (including Napoleon) believes is another French triumph, is instead a French defeat, because every man, horse, gun, or box of food that the French have lost cannot be replaced—they are too far from home—whereas the Russians are fighting for and in their homeland. Kutuzov knows, or intuits, that time is inexorably on his side, but he cannot tell anyone this; they are too impatient or too frightened to listen to him. Besides, what does it matter whether they heed it or not? Time is still on his side. Kutuzov is one of Tolstoy’s greatest creations, but he is not entirely intelligible, although he is certainly credible. Any more than a real, living person is entirely intelligible—no matter how well you may know him or her—although certainly credible.
I don’t want to say any more about how to read War and Peace for fear of saying too much about the book. To tell you the truth, I am very envious of you if you have never read it. I would give a good deal to be in your shoes, with a week of uninterrupted time stretching before me, a comfortable chair, a good light, and the book in my lap, open to page one.
When Tolstoy published the second of his two great novels, Anna Karenina, in 1877, he was nearly fifty. He was already recognized as one of the greatest novelists in the world, but he did not go on writing novels. Instead, he devoted himself to writing philosophical treatises, and stories and tales.
Just as War and Peace is almost by unanimous consent the best of all novels, so is “The Death of Ivan Ilych” close to being considered the best of all short stories. It is in fact a very simple story. Ivan Ilych, an ordinary Russian official with an ordinary job and an ordinary family, becomes ill. He visits a doctor, but the doctor doesn’t say what is the matter with him. Perhaps he doesn’t know, thinks Ivan Ilych, and he begins to be worried. He is right to worry; he is really ill. He slowly realizes this, and then comes to realize, slowly again, that he may die. Finally he knows that he will die, and he does so. That is the story of Ivan Ilych.
Death, “The undiscover’d country from whose bourn/No traveller returns,” is the most difficult of human conditions to depict in fiction. Rather, it is not hard to describe the death of someone, for this is something we are likely to have seen. But how to describe death from within? From the point of view of the dying man or woman? That is not something that any writer has experienced before writing about it!
Tolstoy, because he was a kind of magician, did not have to experience death to understand it. He knew what Ivan Ilych felt, even up to the very end. (He also knew what Prince Andrew feels when, in War and Peace, he dies in the field hospital—this is another deservedly famous death scene in Tolstoy’s works.)
How did Tolstoy know this? I can’t say. How do I know that what he says Ivan Ilych feels is what people do feel when they die, what I will feel when I die? I can’t say that, either, except that I’m certain of it. “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is indisputable. This is the way it is; this is the way it will be.
Later still, Tolstoy stopped writing even short stories about upper-class Russians and instead concentrated on the simple folk tales of peasants that he had heard all of his life and now, as an old man, wanted to reinterpret for a world audience. The best of these tales are collected in a small volume translated and edited by Aylmer Maude and called Twenty-Three Tales. Few books of its size contain such wisdom and beauty.
Some of the tales in the volume are well known in other versions—for example, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” A peasant is given the chance to possess all of the land he can walk around in a day. He has never owned any land; he sets out at break of day and walks rapidly in a great arc—he will carve out for himself an estate, he will never again be poor, his children will be landowners. He doesn’t stop to eat; there will be time for that later. But he walks too far and he realizes as the sun nears the horizon that he is still far from his starting point. He begins to run up the hill in order to complete the circle. He doesn’t make it, of course, and so he loses everything.
Many other stories in this little book are just as wonderful. My favorite is called “The Three Hermits.” A bishop visits a small desert island in the Black Sea. It is inhabited by three old men who are reputed to be very holy. The bishop hopes to learn from them, but when he discovers that they do not know how to pray—do not even know the Lord’s Prayer—he is dismayed and decides he must teach them instead. He spends all day, and finally, after many hours of effort, they are letter perfect: Each of them can repeat the Lord’s Prayer by himself, and they can repeat it together in a kind of singsong unison. The bishop departs, feeling very satisfied with himself. Then something happens. I will not tell you what; I do not want to spoil it for you. It is a miracle, and I think the only completely believable miracle in fiction.