Voulez-vous to read "War and Peace"?

Welcome to the blog for IU's Themester War and Peace book club! You probably already know that Leo Tolstoy's great book is a sweeping account of Russia during the Napoleonic invasion. It is part novel, part history, and part philosophical meditation about historical events and the place of human beings in those events. In addition to leading this book group, this semester I am also team-teaching a course at IU on War and Peace with another faculty member from the History Department. It seemed extremely fitting to combine the two disciplines, seeing as how Tolstoy's book fundamentally questions both how novels should be written and how history should be written (but more on that in later posts).

On the first day of class, I showed my students a word cloud that I found online. In case you're unfamiliar with word clouds, they're fascinating visual snapshot representations of texts. Someone scans a novel, a poem, or another text into a program, which then creates a mosaic of words. The more often a word appears in the text, the larger the font size accorded to it, so in many ways you can have a visual representation of key ideas and their predominance in a given work. The first thing my students noticed when I showed them this particular word cloud was that the word "French" is larger than the word "Russian." (It's only been two days, but I can already tell how extremely smart my students are and how much fun it's going to be to work with them this semester.)

At first, it might seem strange that in many ways Tolstoy's book is more concerned, or at least as concerned, with French than with Russian. After all, this is a novel based on Russia's historic defeat of Napoleon - not only did the Russians successfully fend off Napoleon's invasion in 1812, they also drove Napoleon's famous grand army all the way back to Paris and in many ways contributed to Napoleon's downfall. Moreover, with the defeat of Napoleon, Russia formally emerged at the beginning of the 19th century as a force to be reckoned with in Europe. At the same time, however, for decades the top layer of Russian society had worshipped French culture. In the first years of the 18th century, Peter the Great established the city of St. Petersburg, famously known as his "window to the west." In the second half of the 18th century, Catherine the Great consciously imported French language, culture, and manners into her court. She corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, and she proudly modelled herself as an enlightened ruler along the lines of Montesquieu. (Well, until the French Revolution, which half scared her to death.) The result was that the upper classes imbibed French language and culture to such an extent that they became almost completely alienated from their native roots. In his book Natasha's Dance, Orlando Figes describes how children from noble families were beaten and otherwise punished if they were caught speaking in Russian. They were only allowed to speak French - the Russian was literally beaten out of them. Any Russian they learned came not from their parents, teachers, or French governesses, but from their serf nannies - peasants unaffected by these upper-crust changes and holding onto their native language, roots, and customs.

So as you start to read, keep in mind that from the very beginning Tolstoy confronts his readers with the following questions: what happens when one nation goes to war with another nation, one that it has for decades worshipped, mimicked, and put on a pedestal as the pinnacle of social and cultural achievement? And if the Russian upper classes are now so brutally reminded that they are not, after all, French, then who are they? Where does their identity come from, now that they have spent so many years becoming alienated from their native traditions, even their native language?

The issue of language is key for Tolstoy, especially considering that he was a writer and writers are naturally obsessed with language and the way it works. But Tolstoy was always a contradictory figure, and so he often didn't trust language (which is ironic, considering that WP is almost 1,400 pages long!). He knew that language does not, in fact, always communicate. Or it communicates the wrong things. It can be twisted, bent, used to lie and deceive or conceal the truth. He confronts his readers with this from the book's first words. And here is where we also get into the issue of translation. How does one translate this book into English? Here is what I mean:

First lines from the translation by Anthony Briggs:

"Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now nothing more than estates taken over
by the Buonaparte family. No, I give you fair warning. If you won't say this
means war, if you will allow yourself to condone all the ghastly atrocities
perpetrated by that Antichrist - yes, that's what I think he is - I shall
disown you."
These words were spoken (in French) one evening in July 1805 by the
well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer...

First lines from the translation by Ann Dunnigan:

"Eh bien, mon prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now no more than family
estates of the Bonapartes. No, I warn you, if you don't say that this means war,
if you still permit yourself to condone all the infamies, all the atrocities, of
this Antichrist - and that's what I really believe he is - I will have nothing
more to do with you, you are no longer my friend, my faithful slave, as you
say."

First lines from the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky:

"Eh bien, mon prince, Genes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des
estates, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous previens, que si vous ne me
dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier
toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocites de cet Antichrist ..."

And so on. This Russian novel about the defeat of Napoleon and the attempt to discover Russian national identity begins mainly in French, with a few Russian words tossed in here and there. The supreme irony of this opening section is that even as Anna Pavlovna Scherer, noted Petersburg high society figure and maid of honor of the Empress herself, condemns Napoleon as the Antichrist, she does so in French. War and Peace has been called a "bilingual" book. This is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but it does contain individual words, phrases, and even entire long passages in French (and a few in German). The first task, then, that confronts anyone who decides to undertake translating this novel is, what to do with all that French?? As you can see, almost all translators ignore the problem entirely. Everything is translated into English, with perhaps a few words in French as a sort of tip of the hat to Tolstoy's original, or they translate everything and just indicate (in English) that the words were spoken in French.

Pevear and Volokhonsky are the only translators to keep all of Tolstoy's use of various foreign languages, and they provide footnotes translating the French into English for their readers, just as Tolstoy provided footnotes translating the French into Russian for his readers. I greatly appreciate that they do this. In many ways, it gives readers more of the "flavor" of reading Tolstoy in the original. An English reader of War and Peace is assaulted (I use this word with all its military connotations very deliberately) by French just as a Russian reader would be. The constant switching back and forth between languages is deliberately and consciously disorienting on Tolstoy's part and forces his reader to be conscious of language. How outrageous is it to read a book about your native country, in your native language, and not be able to understand portions of it? That's precisely Tolstoy's point. The book is historically accurate for the period in which it was set - Russian high society would have spoken almost exclusively in French at that time - but grating for contemporary readers during the period in which it was published. Tolstoy set the novel in 1805-1815, but he wrote it in 1863-1868. He was therefore dealing with two different worldviews. I mentioned that he provided footnotes translating the French into Russian - by 1869, society had changed to such an extent that Tolstoy could no longer count on readers knowing French as well as their great-grandfathers had. But even in the 1860s (maybe even especially in the 1860s), Russians were still trying to figure out their place vis-a-vis the West, so Tolstoy's point is made and perhaps even more relevant for his contemporary audience.

So while I appreciate Pevear and Volokhonsky's use of French, I unfortunately have serious issues with much of their translation. In their introduction, they state that they have been "more faithful" to Tolstoy's linguistic idiosyncrasies than previous translators. Tolstoy's Russian is not difficult to read, but it is highly idiosyncratic. This is mainly because he combines words in unfamiliar, unpredictable ways in order to deform language and, again, make us pay attention to it, and he will often repeat words in ways that seem redundant, but really are not. When Tolstoy repeats something, it's because it's important. Other translators smooth over those idiosyncrasies and redundancies, while Pevear and Volokhonsky claim not to. But occasionally they translate things a bit too literally - often, what sounds odd in Russian but is still comprehensible becomes completely incomprehensible in English - and at other times not literally enough. I mentioned that Tolstoy provided footnotes for his readers giving Russian translations of the French. He did those translations himself, and although the editor of my particular Russian version of the book claims that there are no differences between the Russian and the French, I read both languages, so I know that occasionally there are differences. In some cases, Tolstoy's Russian translation of the French is really a "translation," with his Russian translation having a shade of meaning that is different from his French original. I have to believe that this was deliberate, considering his proficiency in both languages. But in their footnotes, Pevear and Volokhonsky translate Tolstoy's French and not his Russian translations. (And all of this leads to the question, how does one translate this novel into French, but I'm not qualified to write about that.)

One other curious point about the different translations that are available is the one by Louise and Aylmer Maude. This is one of the first (I believe even the first) translation of WP into English. The Maudes did two things that I find odd: the first is that they didn't observe Tolstoy's original textual divisions. War and Peace is divided into four Volumes (or Books), and then each of these into further divided into Parts. The Maudes divided the book into fifteen Books. The urban legend that I have heard is that they did this in order to make the book feel more like Homer's Iliad or Odyssey, and there is a decided Greek epic flavor to the novel. In the massive battles scenes, one can almost taste ancient Troy - the only thing missing is a big wooden horse, and perhaps Hera or Apollo for good measure. But while many have seen the Greek epic as a subtext, the Maudes brought it front and center. The other odd thing they did is to put summaries at the beginning of every chapter of its contents. Talk about a spoiler! Because often in Tolstoy's novel, even when you can see something is coming, you can see its inevitability, you still hold out hope until the last moment that it won't happen. And yet, this very quality gets at another aspect of the novel - Tolstoy's constant ruminations about free will versus predetermination. But more of that later as well.

So as you settle in to begin this remarkable, epic book, keep in mind the opening lines and how Tolstoy sets us up from the very beginning. How is language used and misused? What is the tension between Russian and French? Or, for that matter, if French is marked right away as being connected with the high-society Petersburg salon of Anna Pavlovna Scherer, what is the tension within Russian culture between the highest society and the rungs a little bit lower down the ladder (and even a lot lower)? How is Petersburg, that "window to the west," depicted versus Moscow? How are these various worlds depicted in the first sections, and what emerges when we compare them to each other?

Happy reading!