Leo Tolstoy Book Review

When my parents asked me what I wanted from home in Korea I answered without hesitation: books. English language books can be ordered from What the Book in Seoul (they even do free shipping to anywhere in the country), but Daejeon only had small and expensive selections. Among the authors I requested was Tolstoy since I'd never read any, and my mom sent all three of his massive novels (he wrote some other stuff too, but nothing remotely on the same scale). I just finished the last one, so here's my thoughts:

War and Peace:
This is one of those books that I assumed was read just because it was a classic without regard to quality, but it really is fantastic and absolutely worth slogging through the hundreds of long Russian names. I actually didn't like or relate to a single one of those hundreds of characters, but it was a very readable and entertaining look into the life of the Russian upper crust during the Napoleonic wars. The one character I did like and always found fascinating was Tolstoy himself as the narrator, who really was a character in his own right (though I don't think Tolstoy really intended it that way) and he has wonderfully amusing analogies and intriguing analysis and theories about those wars and war and the human condition in general. My favorite chapters were the ones with only the narrator laying out the current situation as he saw it. I don't know enough about the history of the time to say if it is accurate, but his analysis certainly was plausible and thought provoking.

On an amusing note, Tolstoy gives a description of one of the characters at the end, who at no point resembles me or my mindset, that describes me perfectly (with the aid of a couple of strategic ellipses to take the quote out of context):

He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to see into a great distance, finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes... In everything near and comprehensible he had seen only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space, where that petty worldliness, hiding itself in misty distance, had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen... but even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated to those distances and he had there seen the same pettiness, worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he had learnt to see the great, eternal and infinite in everything, and therefore--to see it and enjoy its contemplation--he naturally threw away the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men's heads, and gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil and happy he became. That dreadful question, What for? which had formerly destroyed all his mental edifices, not longer existed for him.

Anna Karenina:
This book continues the record of Tolstoy as a superb writer but with unlikable characters. I should clarify what I mean by superb writer: He doesn't write prettily or artfully. It isn't poetry. What he does is write descriptions that really give you the sense of a person and place, pointing out the little quirks and details of a person that fully fleshes them out. His writing fully engages the reader. The experience is like watching a high quality but not artsy film: it pulls you in so that you just experience the story without really noticing the medium though which you are perceiving it. As to the story and characters, the situation is rather foreign to us (or at least me). I kept thinking You have money and power. If your current lives are intolerable then leave and start a new life that isn't being strangled by weird upper class Russian social etiquette.' Actually, the main characters do leave for a while, but end up hanging out with other Russians and generally not escaping the suffocating social structure like they really easily could have. Some of the side stories are quite interesting, and Tolstoy uses one of them to discuss the nature of peasants and landowners of the time in a rather interesting way.

Resurrection:
Twenty years passed from the completion of Anna Karenina and Tolstoy's next full length novel. In the meanwhile he lost none of his talent but added a painful dose of moralizing to his writing. He became obsessed with his own brand of Christianity (which got him excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox church) and this work is full of 'lessons' that he wants people to draw. In previous works characters had certain moral and religious beliefs but the omniscient narrator stayed neutral as to their accuracy. Not so here. Every description is infused with moral judgment, making it rather difficult for me to read despite Tolstoy's powerful leading narrative voice. Tolstoy was very sympathetic to early revolutionaries and mentions Marx. He also passingly has a very minor character say that marriage between men is perfectly acceptable (though Tolstoy and his mouthpiece of a protagonist viscerally disagree). Even Nietzsche gets mentioned, though Tolstoy thinks he is quoting Nietzsche when he is actually quoting Nietzsche quoting the original Assassins (nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted), and of course totally misunderstanding the philosopher by taking his statements out of context (as the vast majority of Nietzsche's readers always have). Anyway, if you can get past the narrator's constant moralizing, Resurrection is a decent read.

Overall, I would highly recommend War and Peace if you have even a passing interest in warfare, history, Russia, or amusing analogies. Anna Karenina is pretty good, and Resurrection is very readable but not all that enjoyable.