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74 Books & arts
The solace of Tolstoy
Unhappy in the same way
SAN FRANCISCO AND TWITTER
Readers across the world are seeking comfort in “War and Peace”
ver the past 15 years Yiyun Li, a Chi-
Onese-American author, has read “War
and Peace” at least a dozen times. Her hard-
back copy of Leo Tolstoy’s 1,200-page saga
bristles with coloured notes, like some ex-
otic lizard’s spine. The novel is not just a
masterclass in fiction, Ms Li believes, but a
remedy for distress. At the most difficult
times in her life, she says, she has turned to review based in Brooklyn, she christened
it again and again, reassured by its “solidi- the project #TolstoyTogether. It would be
ty” in the face of uncertainty.
“War and Peace”—originally titled “The
Year 1805”—is widely considered the
world’s greatest novel. It is also among the
most daunting, acknowledged Richard Pe-
vear, one of its translators, “as vast as Rus- Some are reading Boccaccio’s “Decame-
sia itself”. Its huge canvas encompasses not
just Napoleon’s wars against the Russian
and Austro-Hungarian empires from 1805
to 1812, but a cast whose actions and emo-
tions span the breadth of human con-
sciousness. As James Wood, a literary crit-
ic, has noted, Tolstoy is the supreme
novelist of human contradiction. His epic
is an unparalleled examination of how
people respond to the pressures of both
war and ordinary life.
So large is Tolstoy’s world, Ms Li reck-
The Economist April 25th 2020
Also in this section
75 Putin, the KGB and Russia
76 Coffee and capitalism
76 A haunting Dutch novel
Home Entertainment:
A choice of classics and pastimes
to enjoy in isolation
77 “The Shining” at 40
77 Watercolour painting
78 Perspectives: Cities and disease
they seize the foreground, the main and
awful action which, like the news from
Wuhan, Bergamo and New York, overshad-
ows the drawing-room intrigues.
Parallels with today’s crisis are inescap-
able. On the very first page, Anna Pavlovna,
a St Petersburg hostess, comes down with
“la grippe”—a flu—but holds her soirée
nonetheless. Amid talk of Napoleon and
war, she exclaims: “Can one be calm in
oned, that there could be no better com- times like these if one has any feeling?”
panion for people trapped in isolation. She Pauline Holdsworth, a reader in Toronto,
conceived of a virtual book club to sustain shared the quote on Twitter, noting drily
readers through the lockdown. Partici- that it cut “a bit close to the bone”.
pants around the globe would plough The rhythm of the readathon, too, is
through this doorstopper together and analogous to the woozy movement of epi-
share their thoughts on social media. With demic time. At a prescribed 30 minutes a
Brigid Hughes of “A Public Space”, a literary day (some 12 to 15 pages), readers move at a
peculiar, slowed pace through battles and
duels, deaths and marriage proposals and
an anchor in unsettling times. To their balls. If, as Ms Li claims, the book “contains
amazement, when it began in mid-March everything about life”, it also mimics the
3,000 people on six continents signed up. temporal experience of real lives. There are
Other book clubs have sprung up to dis- none of the leaps and flashbacks that many
cuss great literature during the pandemic. modern novelists go in for. “Everything
just goes on,” she explains, “time just goes
ron”, a story cycle set amid the Black Death; on, exactly like how we live.” She has
others, “The Plague”, an allegorical tale by planned the readings to last for three
Albert Camus. But Tolstoy’s novel reflects months. And though the endpoint of the
the atmosphere of life in quarantine better, fictional action may be distant, it is still
if more obliquely. Its alternating structure, somehow plausible, like the eventual lift-
toggling between battlefields and the sa- ing of the lockdown.
lons of Russian high society, mirrors the Most strikingly, readers have instantly
disorienting split in readers’ own atten- recognised themselves in the seesawing
tion—between their own personal, stilled emotions that course through all Tolstoy’s
states and the calamity unfolding outside. characters. None is ever really stable:
Those who have begun the book before Prince Andrei Bolkonsky swings abruptly
might have skimmed the war sections; now between arrogance and euphoria; Pierre 1