When it comes to fans of the Russian classics, they say you are either a Dostoevsky person or a Tolstoy person. It's not clear why this dichotomy has been bandied about; my guess is that those are the big two and, people like to see a fight, and so you're encouraged to pick sides. You can check out a piece on this from The Millions called, "Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? 8 Experts on Who’s Greater."
Going with the flow of this idiocy, I always considered myself a Dostoevskian. My friends and I in college got a big kick out of reading Dostoevsky, acting out the characters in our Slavic Club, and even considered putting together a musical based on Crime and Punishment (still a good idea, I think). We had a band called "Slavic Kenotic", inspired by the Dostoevskian focus on purification through suffering. The themes of the band were often more ribald than kenotic, but I think we claimed to be channeling Marmeladov and Svedrigailov as an excuse for that focus.
Tolstoy was clearly the less popular in our crowd. He seemed naive and preachy, hung up on adulteresses and dying old men. The story of an aristocratic morphing into a highly spiritual mendicant didn't appeal to us. We were all so over Hesse's Siddhartha, and Leo just seemed like such a self-indulgent trust fund case. I am sure we weren't fair to him.
Now I'm an older lady and the time has come to do what I hadn't dared to do earlier: read War and Peace. In the introduction I learned that Leo wasn't really such a ridiculous fuddy-duddy. He took it upon himself to educate the local serf children, and seems to have been genuine in his intention to improve the world. I'll learn more, I'm sure.
Regarding translations, there are quite a few choices, and apparently not one canonical original. In any case, I'm using this version in Russian, and a number of translations into English. The latest one is by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and it seeks to remain as faithful to the original as possible, with the obvious drawback/advantage of including the original French as well as all manner of stilted speech and rarified vocabulary. An earlier (off copyright) translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude is available for free via Kindle and on Project Gutenberg here. It translates most of the French and is more colloquial, and much more accessible. My plan to is go back and forth between the original and the P&V, periodically checking in or Maude, and a Penguin paperback I have, translated by Rosemary Edmonds.
Getting back into the swing of social reading, I've revved up my Goodreads account, joined a group dedicated to reading War and Peace (admittedly the catalyst to this decision), and delved in headfirst, splashing around joyfully in all the history and culture of the thing. The characters? The plot? The atmosphere? I'll save that for tomorrow.
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| There's more than one such book. |
Tolstoy was clearly the less popular in our crowd. He seemed naive and preachy, hung up on adulteresses and dying old men. The story of an aristocratic morphing into a highly spiritual mendicant didn't appeal to us. We were all so over Hesse's Siddhartha, and Leo just seemed like such a self-indulgent trust fund case. I am sure we weren't fair to him.
Now I'm an older lady and the time has come to do what I hadn't dared to do earlier: read War and Peace. In the introduction I learned that Leo wasn't really such a ridiculous fuddy-duddy. He took it upon himself to educate the local serf children, and seems to have been genuine in his intention to improve the world. I'll learn more, I'm sure.
Regarding translations, there are quite a few choices, and apparently not one canonical original. In any case, I'm using this version in Russian, and a number of translations into English. The latest one is by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and it seeks to remain as faithful to the original as possible, with the obvious drawback/advantage of including the original French as well as all manner of stilted speech and rarified vocabulary. An earlier (off copyright) translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude is available for free via Kindle and on Project Gutenberg here. It translates most of the French and is more colloquial, and much more accessible. My plan to is go back and forth between the original and the P&V, periodically checking in or Maude, and a Penguin paperback I have, translated by Rosemary Edmonds.
Getting back into the swing of social reading, I've revved up my Goodreads account, joined a group dedicated to reading War and Peace (admittedly the catalyst to this decision), and delved in headfirst, splashing around joyfully in all the history and culture of the thing. The characters? The plot? The atmosphere? I'll save that for tomorrow.
