Ok, so before any hardcore book snobs attack me, I love many of the classics. My favorite authors are Hemingway and McCarthy. I enjoy any author who writes good, compelling and entertaining stories but holy shit. How is this trash considered a “classic”? I’m 400-something pages into this 1300 page monstrosity and there is nothing I find even remotely interesting/entertaining about this.
The characters are dull. The napoleonic war stuff is dull.. maybe if you’re into Russian history you might enjoy it? I’m really not sure.
I literally just read a chapter where Natasha (one of the 50 different main characters) is literally just getting dressed for a ball.. for like 4 pages.. Tolstoy badly needed an editor. Badly.
Oh and despite there being 50 main characters, everyone had 4 different names by the way. So you never know who’s talking about who. Which is a Russian thing I get it. But I’ve read Dostoevsky (crime and punishment top 10 favorite books for me) and he made it work
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
Edit: I knew the book snobs would get me. Enjoy your Tolstoy boys and girls.
by onemm
7 Comments
The context of War and Peace matters, basically.
The Napoleonic Wars and the Revolution was a cataclysmic event that upended the entire world. This is especially true in Russia obviously.
And the entire point of War and Peace is a thinly veiled polemic and treatise on Tolstoy’s conception of historical forces cast against the idealistic great man of history framework that was ubiquitous in art both at the time and for decades before Tolstoy.
It’s not really a novel and shouldn’t be read as such, imo. This leads to a lot of people being confused by the very long digressions and tangents Tolstoy goes on
Tolstoy can be very boring but it’s worth it for the times he writes better than anyone else.
You think Hemingway and McCarthy are going to save you? Oh you sweet summer child.
Jokes aside, don’t think too much about it. Everyone has different tastes, everyone likes different things. The world would be quite boring otherwise. Personally, I love WAP (get it?), but yeah, it’s not for everyone.
You out of luck. Tolstoy and his editor are dead.
I personally don’t like Dostoevsky writing style. And I did read his books in Russian.
“Compared to Tolstoy’s rich and flamboyant prose, some of Dostoevsky’s works really do look weak stylistically. Sometimes his novels even contained sloppy mistakes. For instance, in Crime and Punishment he once mentioned “a round table of oval shape.”
May be you just need to watch a movie. I recommend 1966 Soviet version.
Enjoy your brazen youth while it lasts, grasshopper.
It’s okay to not like it. I don’t know how exactly translation handles it, but I quite like how this novel illustrates the separation of “high society” from commoners, the way under-carpet scheming is described. And not to mention how Andrey matures over the course of the story, from his somewhat petty demeanor to this understanding and attentive guy. And so many, many fleeting moments of hidden importance and sincerity.
Never read war and peace, but to compare it to an author you like, I felt the same way about Blood Meridian. Nothing interesting and extremely repetitive and boring.
It’s just personal taste