Base Camp

In this recent Prep News article about our project, I compared reading War and Peace to climbing Mount Everest. Part of my motivation for getting our reading group together was to have companions on this long, potentially arduous journey—fellow readers to make the journey easier and more fun as well.

Some of us, anticipating busy summers, have already started on the journey. As one of the ringleaders of the expedition, I felt a certain responsibility to stay near the head of the pack. I also wanted to be able to participate in some of the early scouting forays and conversations. So I pressed ahead and have now finished Part One of Volume One of the novel (to page 112).

From where I stand, I think this is a good place to set up a kind of "base camp" for the climb—and, if I may, to give some encouragement and advice on how to make it this far.

I felt pretty good for about the first thirty-five pages. The terrain could be rocky—lots of characters, lots of French, lots of references to political, social, and military matters that I didn't know much about—but I felt that I was on more or less steady footing.

After that, though, I hit fog and snow.

In Chapter VII the action switches to Moscow, and a whole new group of characters comes into play with little introduction. I started to feel lost; I sometimes fell asleep while reading. I was getting scared that I wasn't going to like this book. I pressed on, though, trying for the sake of navigation to hold on to certain characters from the opening Petersburg section: Count Vassily, Anna Mikhailovna, and Pierre. I tried my best to keep up with all the new characters, but I missed a lot of nuances and I didn't really enjoy what I was reading.

In Chapter XVIII (page 70), suddenly the plot heated up and got me interested again for about seventeen pages. Things were making sense once more, and pretty dramatic stuff was occurring. I was still a little shaky on some of the characters' motivations, but I was understanding enough to regain some of my confidence.

There was one more rather treacherous crossing at the beginning of Chapter XXII. The action shifts location again, this time to Bald Hills, an estate 100 miles outside of Moscow. We have to adjust to yet another set of characters (some of whom we've already seen or heard of at the beginning of the novel), and a pair of long letters in French.

The Bald Hills section is interesting but a little puzzling UNTIL you get to Chapter XXV, the final chapter of Part One. For me, that was where everything began to snap into place. It's a neat chapter, full of everything I love about Tolstoy—complex psychological insights, wonderfully drawn characters with complicated relationships to each other, and, basically, the drama of human existence.

From my vantage point at this base camp, I could now look back over the ground I'd covered and see it much more clearly. After finishing Part One, I went back and reviewed what I'd read so far, and I started noticing all kinds of things that made much more sense now.

I dipped into Richard Pevear's introduction and came across, in the first paragraph, a simple description of the novel that I found very helpful.

Pevear says the book is about "the interweaving of historical events with the private lives of two very different families of the Russian nobility—the severe Bolkonskys and the easygoing Rostovs—and of a singular man, reminiscent of the author himself—Count Pierre Bezukhov."

This focus is not at all clear as you're struggling through Part One of Volume One. (At least it wasn't clear to me.) But if you can keep your eye on these families and Pierre and think of them as the ones to watch most closely, it helps quite a bit, I think.

Happy climbing! Feel free to chime in with your own observations, links, or questions in the comments section of this blog, or in your own posts. If you want to do a full post, let me know and I can add you as an author to the blog.

Our Project

St. Louis native Jonathan Franzen’s recent novel Freedom ignited something of a national conversation about the role of reading in our contemporary world. Do Americans still read novels? Do novels still matter? Do they still address issues of burning importance—personal, political, cultural? Or has the culture of Twitter and Facebook and text messaging taken us to a place of shorter attention spans and shallow immediacy?

Franzen’s novel explicitly invites comparisons between itself and Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace—a gargantuan tome that explores big questions of the sort that Franzen would like to imagine that his novel also engages. Among the so-called “classics” of literature, War and Peace stands as the iconic long novel. It’s the novel that Charlie Brown labors to complete for a book report over Christmas break in Happy New Year, Charlie Brown! Unfortunately for him, he falls asleep on New Years Eve while struggling with the book and thereby misses his chance to kiss the Little Red-Haired Girl.

War and Peace presents challenges on a number of levels, challenges that some of us among the SLUH faculty—along with some of our friends and spouses and JSEA colleagues from De Smet Jesuit High School—are interested in taking on. In a sense, we would like to commit ourselves to an activity that may soon or already be passe—the long solitary journey through a thick and difficult book. Committed to helping our students develop habits of intellectual patience and openness to new ideas, we see this project as a way to model and practice what we teach. In a sense, the project is an affirmation of the value of reading, put into practice with a novel that many of us have desired to read for years but have never been able to find the time to complete.

We also see the project as a way of connecting with each other and nurturing an intellectual community within and beyond our school. We hope that our discussions of Tolstoy’s novel will enrich our understanding of the book, offer us opportunities to enjoy each other’s company and delight in each other’s responses to art, and ultimately enrich our shared vocation as teachers.

At a group meeting on February 3, we decided on the following specific details about the War and Peace reading project:

• We will read Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's translation of War and Peace over the summer of 2011, finishing it by Labor Day weekend.

• We will meet three times to discuss the novel, on the following dates: June 18, July 16, and the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. (These may be subject to change.)

• For the first meeting, we will have read to page 418; for the second, to 820; for the third, to the end of the novel (page 1215).

• We will establish a blog for the project to gather helpful articles, continue the conversation between meetings, orient group members who missed a meeting, etc.

• We will look into the possibility of offering graduate credit for this project through Webster University for those who want it.

Currently we have around 25 faculty members who have expressed a desire to be a part of the project. The group includes members from various departments: English, Theology, Foreign Language, Social Studies, Fine Arts, Mathematics, and SLUH Security. Four De Smet teachers are included. In addition, several friends and spouses of group members have expressed an interest in participating.