How many pages is war and peace

We are all caught in the wave of history. I read this book together with a friend, who remarked during our last discussion of it that right now, when she looks at the world around us, she feels a bitter pessimism mixed with tremendous optimism. History is written by no one, because history is written by everyone. Every action we take makes some small mark upon it, even if that mark is eventually inevitably erased. Nothing is certain, until it is. And that is when things change, for better or for worse.

War and Peace is available everywhere books are sold. Most people swear by the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation , which my friend read, but I had a fine old time with the Constance Garnett translation , which has fallen out of favor. In any translation, it is a good book! Will you become our 20,th supporter? The reason is both lovely and surprising: Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it, too.

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Have you read this one? Leo Tolstoy lived into the 20th century, one of those things I always forget. He died in Next Up In Culture. Prince Andrei goes to war. Nikolai goes to war. They fight. Everyone else talks.

An enjoyably characterized Napoleon flits briefly across this crowded stage, tugging on people's ears. The Rostov's have financial difficulties.

Nikolai can't decide who to marry. Pierre has several dozen crises of conscience. At one point he becomes a Mason; at another, he tries to assassinate Napoleon. At all times he is thinking, always thinking; there are approximately pages devoted to Pierre's existential duress. How I wished for Pierre to throw himself beneath a train! It has a canvas as big as Russia, and within its pages are dizzying high and nauseating lows and bland, lukewarm middles. The bottom line before I go on, Tolstoy-style, is that I was disappointed.

My main criticism is the unfortunate mishmash of fictional narrative with historical essay. You're reading the book, right? Or maybe listening to it on a long commute.

But that's okay, you've moved past that. Suddenly, you're coasting along. The story is moving forward. Napoleon has crossed the Danube. There is drama. Finally, people are going to stop with the internal monologues and start shooting each other! I might actually like this! And then, with an almost audible screech, like the brakes a train, Tolstoy brings the whole thing to a shuddering halt with a pedantic digression on the topic of History with a capital H and free will and military tactics and Napoleon's intelligence.

These digressions do several things. First, and most importantly, they seriously disrupt the narrative. All rhythm and timing is thrown off, which is exactly what happened to all my school concerts when I used to play the snare drum. I knew enough to quit the snare drum to focus on the recorder. Tolstoy, though, plunges on obliviously, casting all notions of structure aside.

You lose sight of the characters for hundreds of pages. Instead of wondering what happens next, you start to wonder things like where am I? It tells you something when you actually start to miss Pierre's endless internal psychobabbling. Second, the essays are Tolstoy at his stupidest at least in my opinion; this is more a philosophical gripe. He believes that people have no control; that History is a force all its own, and that we act according to History's push and pull.

Tolstoy says, in effect, that Napoleon is stupid, but that his enemies were stupider, but that doesn't matter, because they were all doing what they had to do, because History made them.

This is all very Tolstoy goes to far as to attempt to prove this argument algebraically. Yeah, that's just what I wanted: Math! Tolstoy's argument breaks down like this: 1. Someone does something. Someone else reacts in a way that makes no sense. Therefore, History is controlling things.

The fundamental flaw, of course, is that Tolstoy's argument really boils down to nothing more than hindsight. Sitting in his armchair, decades after the fact, having never been on those battlefields, Tolstoy decides that the players on the scene acted dumbly, and he attributes that to cosmic events. A battle isn't lost because of bad roads, or obscured vision, or a shortage of ammunition which are realities in all warfare, but even more prevalent in the 19th century.

I suppose Tolstoy can be forgiven for hating Napoleon, but still, the book is 1, pages long. His analysis of the Corsican corporal is reductive and unenlightening. Napoleon was a lot of things short, funny looking, brilliant, cruel, petty, brilliant, ambitious, oddly-shaped but "stupid" was not among them.

Yet, there were moments when I loved this novel. There is the battle of Austerlitz, which is impeccably researched so much so that a narrative history I read on the subject actually cites to Tolstoy and thrillingly told, especially the fight of Captain Tushin's battery. There is Prince Andrei, wounded on the field of Austerlitz, staring up at "the infinite sky," realizing that he's never really looked at it before.

There is Pierre, realizing he is in love with Natasha as he gazes at the stars and glimpses the comet of There is Napoleon suffering a cold on the eve of Borodino. There is Andrei watching a cannon ball land at his feet, its fuse hissing There is Petya, the young adjutant, who rides to his doom chasing the French during their retreat.

Every once in awhile, there will also be something clever, showing you that Tolstoy isn't just wordy, but also inventive. For instance, there's a scene in which Tolstoy describes the thoughts of an old oak tree. Among the hundreds of characters, there's even a tree.

I was also fond of a passage in which General Kutuzov, the Russian commander, holds a meeting in a peasant's house to discuss abandoning Moscow. Tolstoy tells this story from the point of view of a little peasant girl who, in her mind, calls Kutuzov "grandfather.

He was an indifferent drunk. The night before Austerlitz, he allegedly engaged in a four-some with three of the "comfort women" he brought with him on campaigns. Unfortunately, despite writing 1, pages, Tolstoy doesn't find space to devote to this occurrence.

The good, though, is surrounded by the bad or the boring. The flyleaf of the book said that Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei were three of the most dynamic characters in literature.

I don't think so. Aside from Andrei, I was mostly unimpressed with the main characters Napoleon was fun, in an over-the-top bit part. Pierre is a boob and a bore, and his sudden heroics during the burning of Moscow come from nowhere. Natasha is a flake. She's the stereotypical girl plucking the daisy: I love him; I love him not; I love him The end of the novel is like Anna Karenina a huge anti-climatic letdown. As we approach the final pages, Tolstoy gives us a description of the battle of Borodino.

It is a masterpiece of military fiction. The research and verisimilitude. The vividness. Pierre's confrontation with the Frenchman in the redoubt: Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have done, he thought, aimlessly going toward a crowd of stretcher bearers moving from the battlefield. There is no slow decline into mediocrity; no, it happens at the turn of the page. All of this occurs indirectly, through digression-filled essays on History. The characters recede into the background; all narrative vitality disappears.

There are only a couple exceptions: one scene of the city burning, followed by one admittedly powerful scene of the French executing supposed arsons. During the French retreat, there is not a single visceral moment depicting their hard, frozen march. Then come the Epilogues. When I reached them, I felt a bit like a cowboy in one of those old westerns who is riding across the desert and finds a well, except the well is dry and full of snakes and then an Indian shoots him with an arrow.

We will never know the fates of the dozens of characters we've followed for the previous thousand pages. Tolstoy leaves their destinies to the imagination so that he can rant. Except at Thanksgiving, Uncle Ed usually passes out by the fourth quarter of the Cowboys game. Not Tolstoy. Not even death can quiet him.

War and Peace was an experience. There were times I envisioned myself reaching the end, spiking the book like a football, and then doing some sort of victory dance around the splayed pages.

When I got there, though, I simply sighed, leaned back in my chair, and thought: At least this was better than Moby Dick. Author 2 books 1, followers. This is one of those books that can be life-changing. I read this as a teenager and I remember exactly where I was sitting on my bed, in my grandmother's house, in southern Germany when I finished it.

I must have spent an hour just staring out the window, in awe of the lives I'd just led, the experiences I'd just had. Tolstoy has the most amazing ability to make us feel, when he zooms out and examines historical events, that the individual is nothing--and then when he zooms in and paints intimate portraits of his characters, that the individual is everything. I'm quite picky when it comes to translations and this is one of the best I've read.

It's in the sweeping battle scenes that Tolstoy shows how insignificant the individual really is--how even generals and emperors are at the mercy of random and unpredictable events. Then when Tolstoy switches to the intimate drawing room scenes, the entire perspective shifts, and nothing matters more than the individual consciousness that he depicts. The juxtaposition of these two feelings is just, well, genius!

I'd forgotten how mystical Tolstoy gets with respect to Pierre's "conversion" or "enlightenment" or "getting religion. The contrapuntal movement of Pierre and Andrey's development is only highlighted when they're together, debating whether one ought to try to improve people's lives Pierre or just focus on one's own happiness and leave the world alone Andrey.

It's actually a profound debate, which then ends when Andrey beholds the vast sky again and something stirs inside him, something long dormant, and we as readers can't help anticipating that Andrey will be "back. Pierre and Prince Andrey are the prime examples of this. I kept thinking, as I read the sections in which they struggle earnestly with such questions, that contemporary American fiction has precious little of this. I wonder if it's because we've all drunk the kool-aid that says "show, don't tell," making contemporary novelists shy away from such material.

But this little mantra, while seemingly objective, renders entire realms of fiction off-limits. Tolstoy is constantly "telling" us what Pierre and Andrey are thinking, and the novel is so much better for it. The deftness and sheer range of human drama is staggering. And the war, when it returns, is no abstract matter. Everywhere there are people caught up in this great event, bewildered by it.

Fifteen minutes in, I am afraid to say what I am thinking, which is: I am confused. Who are these people? How are they connected? What are they talking about? I am determined not to speak first. I nod, and then I think: remember it from when? Something occurs to me. I have not read War and Peace , and I am so unacquainted with the story that I have little idea of what I am missing.

But before episode one is finished, I have decided that I am going to read War and Peace. I imagine myself sitting down to episode two armed with more background than my wife could hope to command. I have a whole week. After scanning our bookshelves in vain the next morning, I approach my wife at her desk.

It could be absolutely … Oh, there it is. I take the stack up to my office, open volume one, skip the introduction and begin reading page one. Fifteen minutes later, I am still on page one. Genoa and Lucca have become the property of the Bonapartes.

But that is about all I know. Old familiar questions surface: Who are these people? After a while I have to put the book down to get on with other things.