Shorthand

It's funny how "reading War and Peace" has become a kind of shorthand phrase that means "spending one's time in a worthwhile fashion" or "doing something challenging and meaningful." For example, the following passage from this blog post about a government study of how Americans spend their time:

The findings are unsurprising at first glance: time spent on the job is down from previous years (thanks to the recession), women continue to spend more time housekeeping and caring for children than men, television-watching continues to be our favorite leisure activity, and time spent reading for pleasure remains abysmal (about seventeen minutes a day on average, though the numbers vary largely by age)....

The Journal also notes that the increase in leisure time brought on by the recession hasn’t resulted, as one might think, in Americans finally getting around to all the productive things (like tackling “War and Peace”) they hadn’t had time for before, but in more television-viewing: an average of two hours and thirty-one minutes per weekday.

Why is this the case? Is it the length of the novel? The sheer investment of time and attention it requires? Or does it have something more to do with the ambitions of the novel—the way that it packs so much of life and human experience between its covers?

In some ways, it seems strange that a novel written by a Russian aristocrat almost 150 years ago should occupy this rhetorical position in our culture. Why not the complete works of Shakespeare? Or the Odyssey or the Iliad? Or Moby-Dick?

Our First Meeting

We had our first discussion this past Saturday at the Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood. We had a great time talking about the first 417 pages while drinking beer and eating elk chili. No photos were taken (an oversight on my part), and we didn't appoint anyone to take minutes. But I did want to record some impressions of the conversation. This post is by no means a transcript, but instead a riff on our discussion and two essays on Tolstoy by Isaiah Berlin that I read in the days following the discussion.

Early on, Jim R. made reference to the distinction between foxes and hedgehogs, a dichotomy that has been associated with Tolstoy ever since the publication in 1953 of Isaiah Berlin's celebrated essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (which you can read here, and which is also available in book form and in this volume).

Berlin begins by quoting from the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Berlin uses this fragment to classify writers. The foxes pursue many interests and present a multifarious world without needing to bend their observations to a single unitary vision. The hedgehogs, on the other hand, do seek that type of unitary vision, at times even fanatically. Berlin offers Dante, Plato, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky as examples of hedgehogs; and Shakespeare, Montaigne, Balzac, and Joyce as examples of foxes.

Berlin offers the hypothesis that "Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog."

Our group marveled at Tolstoy's foxlike ability to go seemingly anywhere—from the battlefield to the drawing room to the highest realms of political and court life, as well as the most domestic scenes of family life. Despite his panoramic view of the world and the wide-angle scenes of battle he's able to provide, he is also able to zoom in on the most microscopic detail. For example, Chuck H. pointed out a great detail on page 121, when Zherkov prepares to leave on his horse and "it shifted its footing three times excitedly, not knowing which leg to start with, worked it out, and galloped off."

Details like that one that must have led Berlin to describe Tolstoy as "a creator of a world more real than life itself":

The celebrated life-likeness of every object and every person in his world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every ingredient of it in its fullest essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were ... always as a solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space—an event fully present to the senses or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and firmly articulated.

Yet Tolstoy the fox, Berlin argues, wanted to be a hedgehog. He "longed for a universal explanatory principle," and in some sense disdained his own writerly gifts which others so admired (as did Flaubert and Turgenev, for instance, both of whom disdained Tolstoy's flights into philosophical abstraction).

One feels Tolstoy's attraction to this universal, profound explanation in Andrei's near-death experience on the battlefield at Austerlitz (see the final chapter of Volume I), which, as Barbara O. noted, constitutes a remarkable epiphany. It's Andrei's abandonment of his previous search for personal glory in battle; his acceptance of his insignificance (as well as that of even the "great" Napoleon) before the infinity of the sky; his admission that "I knew nothing, nothing till now." And yet, in the end, what does he know now? Barbara wondered.

One thing seemed clear to me as a result of our discussion: that one of Tolstoy's greatest attributes as a writer is love. He loves the details of the world—for example, the horse that doesn't know in its excitement which foot it will start off with. He loves so many of the people that he's writing about, imperfect and human as they are: Pierre, Andrei, Marya, Natasha, Rostov, Denisov, and others. So I was gratified to read the following in another of Berlin's essays on Tolstoy ("Tolstoy and Enlightenment"), in which Berlin describes the "conditions of excellence in art" that Tolstoy laid out in an introduction to a Russion edition of the stories of Maupassant:

...he demanded of all writers, in the first place the possession of sufficient talent; in the second that the subject itself must be morally important; and finally that they must truly love (what was worthy of love) and hate (what was worthy of hate) in what they describe.

War and Peace, I think we all agreed after this first meeting, amply fulfills all three conditions. Tolstoy's talent seems so multifaceted and deep—and modern as well. This epic tale treats so many issues of moral importance—indeed, everything from war to peace—suggesting, for one thing, that in wartime as well as peacetime human beings do not really understand why they do what they do, cannot make sense of all the confusing and chaotic events taking place all around them, but only later fashion these experiences into narratives that, though incomplete or even false, are believed to be true. Lastly, though, I think it's Tolstoy's depth of writerly judgment that we find so enjoyable and engrossing: how much we trust that he does indeed hate what is worthy of hate and love what is worthy of love.

I'm really looking forward to the second meeting, scheduled for Saturday, July 16, at which we'll discuss pages 417-820. I hope to see you there.

Tolstoy and Contemporary American Writers

Lately I've come across a couple interesting references to Tolstoy in interviews with contemporary writers.

For example, this Lee Randall interview with Allegra Goodman:

Which leads me to comparisons drawn by Gabriel Brownstein, writing for The Millions, between yourself and Jonathan Franzen. Brownstein argued that you both wrote similar, epic novels, but that only Franzen’s was hailed as contender for the “Great American Novel” -- because he’s a man.

First of all, it’s nice to be contrasted with Jonathan Franzen. There was Jonathan Franzen’s novel and everybody else’s novel. I’m happy to be the one contrasted, if they want to pick a novel. I think his aesthetic is pretty different from mine. The [critic] made some good points about the differences.

Saying, for instance, that his prose bursts through the door while yours enters quietly.

Yes, but that is not because I am shy or female, it’s because I am interested in disappearing. Franzen [also] admires Tolstoy very much and references Tolstoy constantly throughout Freedom, but his aesthetic is very different from the disappearing negative capability of Tolstoy. His characters all sound like a very articulate Jonathan Franzen. He’s not really a disappearing sort of writer. He’s a bold brash writer. Honestly, I was very happy that a work of literary fiction was number one on the bestseller list and got that kind of attention. We’re on the same team. I applaud him.

And this, from part two of Patrick Dacey's interview with George Saunders:

I’ve started to think that this is one of the hardest and most important things a young writer can do: look at his/her heart-influences and ask, very respectfully: OK, given that this great master existed in the world, what else is there left for me to do? That is, you love (for example) Tolstoy, you give Tolstoy his due. But then you have to say: All right, given that Tolstoy has already existed, is there anything in his world-view that I might, slightly, disagree with? Is there anything that I have known and seen and felt in my life that, perhaps (sorry, maestro!) is not fully accounted for in his work? If not—well, there are other things to do in this life. If so, go for it.

For example, I remember reading Hemingway and loving his work so much—but then at some point, realizing that my then-current life (or parts of it) would not be representable via his prose style. Living in Amarillo, Texas, working as a groundsman at an apartment complex, with strippers for pals around the complex, goofball drunks recently laid off from the nuclear plant accosting me at night when I played in our comical country band, a certain quality of West Texas lunatic-speak I was hearing, full of way off-base dreams and aspirations—I just couldn’t hear that American in Hem-speak. And that kind of moment is gold for a young writer: the door starts to open, just a crack.

As a literary model and inspiration, Tolstoy, it seems, is alive and well in the imaginations of contemporary American writers. I particularly like Goodman's point about Tolstoy's negative capability—his talent, that is, for disappearing as a writer and seeming to let his characters speak for themselves and live independent of his authorial domination.