"War and Peace" and Mobile Phones

Heavy snow is blowing and swirling past my window this morning and I’m musing about why I consider “War and Peace” to be such a great novel.  It’s prompted, not just by the weather but also the BBC’s new television mini-series.

I’ve never read any formal literary criticism of the novel; I’ve never wanted to because the book speaks so directly to me. Here’s a famous passage, the conclusion of Prince Andrei’s experience of the Battle of Austerlitz.  Andrei has picked up a fallen Russian standard, rallied the retreating soldiers around him and is running, leading an improvised charge against the French line on foot:

            ‘What are they doing?’ thought Prince Andrei as he gazed at them. ‘Why doesn’t the red-haired gunner run away since he is unarmed? Why doesn’t the Frenchman stab him? He won’t get away before the Frenchman remembers his bayonet and stabs him…’

            And in fact another French soldier, trailing his musket, ran up to the struggling men and the fate of the red-haired gunner who had triumphantly secured the mop and still did not realize what awaited him, was about to be decided.  But Prince Andrei did not see how it ended.  It seemed to him as though one of the soldiers near him hit him on the head with the full swing of a bludgeon. It hurt a little, but the worst of it was that the pain distracted him and prevented his seeing what he had been looking at.

            ‘What’s this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way,’ thought he, and fell on his back.  He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner had been killed or not, and whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky—the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds gliding slowly across it. ‘How quiet, peaceful, and solemn, not at all as I ran,’ thought Prince Andrei ‘—not as we ran, shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces struggled for the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!...’

In this single passage, you see the elemental, precision of the Iliad with the genius to make it subjective and so personal.  Then, without warning, the focus, the drama of the soldiers attempting to take the gun emplacement is ironically disrupted by the wound that crumples Andrei onto his back.  We and Andrei see the sky, remote, objective, implicitly beautiful with a single, perfect adjective, “lofty,” and yet we’ve moved more deeply into Andrei’s subjective experience with absolutely credible thoughts that are the heart of so much philosophy with echoes back to Ecclesiastes.  Yet it is still told with the same concrete, direct language.  It is as surprising and breath-stealing as the best turn in a Sherlock Holmes story and absolutely believable.  There are so many surprises: plain observation leading to subjective speculation spiraling into objectivity which is actually a deeper subjectivity of philosophical speculation. 

When I think of novelists, short story writers, poets and even historians who have written with terrible, fierce insight about war, Bierce, Remarque, Owen, T. E. Lawrence, Hemingway, Powers, Klay, and so many others, I see Tolstoy in them.

But this is only one passage:  Tolstoy writes with equal insight about family life, society, the equally fierce and complex struggles that women face.  These days, we applaud novelists for their world building, and rightly, too.  But sometimes we fail to recognize the same accomplishments in older works.  Tolstoy was writing fifty years after the events he chronicles.  Russian and French society had changed and were still changing, dramatically.  Yet, he succeeds in making his world detailed and complex as Tolkien’s and as visceral as Hemingway’s.

The new BBC series appears to have little time for philosophy and rumination.  It’s main characters simply don’t appear to think as much as their counterparts in the novel. Even though the production design feels absolutely authentic, I half expect all the young people at a ball to be surreptitiously texting on their mobile phones.

(The illustration is “The Battle of Borodino” by Leonid Pasternak, the original illustrator.)

The Library of Babel and the Hawaii Project

Lately, I’m surprised at how prescient and pertinent the stories of Jorge Louis Borges have become.  “The Library of Babel,” published over sixty years ago envisions a kind of infinite library filled with not only the greatest books ever written but assemblages of total random characters and everything between.  One of the most interesting aspects of the story is its foresight of humanity’s response to the existence of an apparently infinite library.  Librarians are understandably suicidal, cults arise, some seeking to purify the collection others to search for the perfect, all-knowing critic, “the Man of the Book.”

Internet access and the vast collection of books accessible through online book sellers as well as more particular sites mean that we live day to day with an approximation of Borges’ abstraction.  Crushing, international price and margin competition exacts not just a financial toll from the traditional book publishing industry as it struggles to adapt and reinvent itself.  New strategies for manipulating, even corrupting the book reviewing  process emerge constantly.  One of the most important innovations in retail, democratic starred reviewing is actively and fiercely gamed.  In 2013, Forbes reported the existence of companies specializing in elevating  books to the New York Times Best Seller’s List.  At the same time, the Humanities have become balkanized.  The question of what one should read has probably never been more fraught with controversy.

I worry the most for difficult books, books which are not pleasant or compelling at first, books that are a struggle, that nevertheless are sometimes the most important ones we ever read.  If there’s no one you respect telling you it’s worth the effort, why try?

Sadly, there are very few reviewers I trust these days, among them are George Packer, Nick Paumgarten and Adam Gopnik.  Whilst they’ve pointed to some very important books, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, for example, their purview doesn’t completely intersect with my own.  Finding and identifying not just pretty good books, but extraordinary ones remains incredibly difficult.

A good friend and former colleague, Mark Watkins, shares my concern.  He’s passionate about it.  For years he’s imagined solving it with an online system built to serve the reader and the reader only.  And not just a generic reader, but each, necessarily unique reader with her or his particular interests, requirements and aspirations.  And now he’s building it.  I have had the privilege of beta testing it for the last several months:  each morning I have an email with a selection of new books and stories about books which his system has created by crawling the web for the previous 24 hours and matching them to my particular interests.

And it works.  It finds extraordinary books, books I feel I have to read.  And, by the way, it is way more fun, first thing in the morning, to look through a small collection of new good books instead of mostly tired, often horrific news.  That can come later in the day, don’t you think?

Mark has just launched a Kickstarter project to support the project.  Why Kickstarter?  Remember, I said it serves the reader and the reader only.  It serves you.  Go take a look at the Hawaii Project.

It’s one of those “things to come” that was never more needed.  (Apologies H. G. Wells.)

 

Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time"

As a consequence of my sui generous undergraduate education centered on Mathematics and English Literature the only novel I’ve ever read in the original Russian is Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time.  Though last week was a traveling weekend I managed to finish reading it again, this time in translation.

My sense is that most people in the west, if they know Russian literature at all, know Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekov or Pasternak but at best may have heard of Lermontov which is a great shame.  A Hero of Our Time, his only novel, is at once a complex psychological portrait of an appealing, and disturbing character, a brilliant picaresque and a visceral travel novel.  Pechorin, the protagonist, is more complicated, self-aware and interesting than Pushkin’s Onegin.  He poses much more interesting questions about psychology, friendship and societal structure.  And he travels through finely rendered extraordinary landscapes.

He is also much more relevant today.  Pechorin is a 19^th century Russian officer in the Caucasus, a region now bearing the weight of international strategy and politics once again.  More importantly, he is part of an imperial occupying force and experiences the ambivalence, ironies and danger that necessarily follow.  I found myself thinking about Phil Klay’s characters from Redeployment and how much they shared.  Lermontov’s expressive, clear and physical language foreshadowed Hemingway and they have much in common technically and aesthetically.

A big surprise for me was to discover how Lermontov had affected my own fiction.  As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields has merited some praise for how the character’s introspection is integrated with the action.  That came from Lermontov.

A Russian mini-series was made of the novel in 2006 and a central episode, Pechorin’s duel, is available on Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Raf8_VJX0 .  It’s definitely worth a look.

Lermontov, a Russian military officer who had much in common with his protagonist, died in a duel when he was in his twenties, as did Évariste Galois.  A quote (my translation):

"Passions are just ideas at the moment of their birth."  - Lermontov