Before the holidays, a friend mentioned that she’d been thinking about reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace in 2024. As often happens, the moment something is mentioned, you start noticing it everywhere.
Well, maybe not everywhere. Maybe just here, on Substack, where I stumbled on a post days later about this year-long slow-read of War and Peace, organized by
of Footnotes & Tangents. The serendipity!I sent the link to my friend, which explained the simple approach: the book has 361 short chapters, which amounts to one chapter a day for the whole year, minus a small handful of days off. Most chapters are only three to seven pages long, an extremely manageable amount of daily reading. Seductive, isn’t it? And Simon makes it remarkably easy, with daily chats, character lists, and a lot more.
I decided to take the plunge. It’s now January 16th, and I’m 16 chapters in. There have been parties, flirtations, disagreements. Politics, love, drunken mayhem. War looms, but inside the parlours of Petersburg and Moscow, life goes on. I’m really enjoying it.
In my European childhood, I was influenced to read a lot of Russian lit, but somehow I never got around to Tolstoy. Yes, yes, I am a bad Slav and it’s been my secret shame for years. In my defence, his books are very long.
What did I imagine the experience of reading War and Peace would be? It’s a 1400-page book about the Napoleonic Wars, so … boring, probably? Something to be endured, like Napoleon’s march across Russia1? I don’t tend to enjoy historical epics, and the only war movie I like is White Christmas2.
I figured reading the book would make me feel more virtuous than entertained. Like exercising, or eating more fibre. I’m happy to admit I was wrong. Tolstoy is funny, sharp, and his story moves at a fast clip. There are more characters than I feel capable of remembering, but they’re all interesting, equal parts sympathetic and utterly unlikable. And, it feels surprisingly relevant.
“Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in times like these if one has any feeling?”
Party hostess Anna Pavlovna asks this in the book’s opening chapter. She’s talking about Napoleon, but could she not be speaking in the present day? Have we all not asked ourselves this question recently?
I didn’t realize until quite recently that Ridley Scott had made a film about Napoleon. I guess I’m not the target market for it, so when I saw the poster at our local cinema, I scoffed (literally, I made a harrumphing cough-laugh sound of disbelief and incredulity). “Who wants that?” I asked Colin. Surely, no one.
The joke, it turns out, was on me, because now I’m reading a 1400-page book about the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps I want it?
I went to see Napoleon last night in order to enrich my War and Peace reading experience by providing myself with more historical context.
I will admit to a small frisson of excitement when the film, after a long first hour, finally caught up to 1805, the year in which War and Peace opens. But it was all downhill from there. In spite of a couple of laugh-out-loud lines (like when Napoleon shouts “you think you’re so great because you have boats!” at a British emissary, or when he shouts “destiny has brought me this lamb chop” in a fit of anger at Josephine during a dinner party), I was mostly exhausted by the film’s endless muddy, rainy, dusty, smokey, battle scenes. Yes, they’re beautifully choreographed and shot. The Battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon (outnumbered but never out-manoeuvred) drives the Russian and Austrian soldiers onto a frozen lake, then shoots the ice with cannons, is especially stunning and gruesome. But, enough. There were so goddamn many horse deaths. Not to mention the human ones.
Three little asides:
Though he’s only in the film for a blip of its nearly three-hour running time, Rupert Everett’s smirk absolutely deserves an Oscar. He plays the Duke of Wellington, who finally defeats Napoleon at Waterloo, seemingly just by holding steady and looking superior, which does seem very British indeed.
Doesn’t Joaquin Phoenix seem like a guy who’s so committed to his craft that it makes him a drag to be around? His performances are so meticulous.
A quibble I have with nearly every casting choice Hollywood makes, but why was Josephine played by an actress 15 years Joaquin Phoenix’s junior, when in real life she was six years older than Napoleon? Go to hell, Hollywood (Vanessa Kirby was good, though).
The facts I knew about Napoleon before going to see the film were few: that he was from Corsica (so was my paternal grandfather); that he was in love with a woman named Josephine; that he won a bunch of battles, but was bested by the Russians because he wasn’t prepared for their harsh winter; that he was exiled for a time to the island of Elba, which I am not sure I could place on a map; and that he lost to Wellington at Waterloo, which ended his reign.
The film neither endeared me to Napoleon nor taught me anything new about him, other than the staggering number of deaths he was responsible for. The tally that preceded the film’s end credits puts the total death toll of his wars at around three million lives (on all sides), which was about half a percent of the total world population, at the time. Yikes.
I listened to a review in which critic Amy Nicholson said “I felt like Ridley Scott and Joaquin Phoenix dislike Napoleon too much to even make a movie about Napoleon,” and that sounds about right. Napoleon was a successful leader in part because he was charismatic and beloved, which the film told me a few times, but Phoenix’s mostly-joyless performance never showed.
Napoleon did at least put War and Peace into a richer historical context, which was the goal. I am now afraid for all the characters I’m already starting to like, because many of them are likely to perish before the year is out.
Next week, as a palate cleanser, I’m going to see Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown at the Paradise. It might be the anti-Napoleon.
Look at this infographic (a figurative map of French deaths during Napoleon’s march through Russia in 1812, which he started with over 400,000 men and ended with 10,000).
Kidding! I mean, White Christmas is war-adjacent, and I do love it. But actually, the only war movies I like are of the “ragtag group of misfits on an impossible mission” variety - like The Dirty Dozen, or The Great Escape.
I should warn you that there are a lot of dead horses (and men) ahead of us. But I guess you are ready for that now!
I love this whole piece. And you’ve kind of maybe inspired me to read Anna Karenina which I bought a few years ago and stares at me every day, causing deep shame.
Xoxox