Lost in Russia 4-9-2015 (Part One)

 [ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 10/18/2025] 

I started reading Tolstoy's War and Peace (Rosemary Edmond, translator; Penguin Classics, 1998) on March 26, and have made 864 pages out of 1,444. Like Napoleon drawn into Moscow, I cannot stop reading. Part of me wishes I had the hardbound edition Aunt Mary Ellen gave us over forty years ago (where did that book go to, Mom? Almost 30 years too late to be asking that question.) Part of me wishes I had made more of an effort with the paperback that was in my office. (And where did that copy go to? Who cleaned out my office, my ex-wife or Yelton? Questions too late to be asked in 2022.) But reflection has me thinking only during this federally funded retirement could I ever have given Tolstoy sufficient attention.

What am I learning from reading Tolstoy? That “good literature” can be fun — that literature requires a good story about interesting people. (I am also nibbling at E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel.) I'm learning the Great American Novel lies in the future — or will never exist. War and Peace concerns itself with narrow social groups covering a wide geographic area — something wholly lacking over here. (How do the top families of New York relate to those of Texas and all those to Chicago and all of those to Silicon Valley and all of them to the powers of Washington, D.C.?) America still lacks any history, creating a national identity. (For all those nationalists who have perverted the federal government into a national, central government, there remains a difference of character still between Virginia and Texas and Indiana and Massachusetts and California.)

I've also come to the conclusion Virginia Woolf undersold herself — the writer obviously needs experience and then a large estate with a bunch of serfs to create the all-encompassing Great Novel! Otherwise, all I think Tolstoy Teaches me is the value of a simple style employed in conveying the truth of events and character.

And just for the record, I've taken to calling it War and Peace and Marriage for Money and Looking for True Love. You'd think old Leo would be as melodramatically sentimental as Charles Dickens, or as gothic as a Bronte, where he is neither.

Russianness — what would be a similar Americanness?

Where, how and when could this young countess, who had had a French émigré for governess, have imbibed the Russian air she breathed the spirit of that dance? Where had she picked up the manner which the pas de chale, one might have supposed, would have effaced long ago? But the spirit and the movements were the very one — inimitable, unteachable Russian—which “Uncle” had expected of her….

Book Two, Part 4: 1810-11: War and Peace (Penguin Classics, 1988)

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[Continued in Lost in Russia 4-9-2015 (Part Two). sch 10/19/2025.]