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War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy.

By Clark Nida

I stand aghast at myself in attempting a brief book review of this massive opus. At around 560,000 words, it is roughly 7 times the length of a typical piece of commercial fiction (80,000 words, say). Attempting to read it is the literary equivalent of the Lyke Wake walk: an endurance test rather than an enjoyable experience. But to get the most out of it you really have to read it a second time.

It’s on my to-do list.

Fortunately Count Tolstoy’s monumental work is available from audible.co.uk as an audiobook – or rather as two audio books with a total playing time of 60 hours. It is sold as two separate titles (Vols I and II of the original work), so you don’t have to buy the whole lot in one go if you don’t fancy your chances of getting through it. However its availability in audiobook format makes it feasible to listen to the whole work in the space of a fortnight or two, if you are prepared to eat, sleep and drink it. Not to say taking long walks, oblivious of where you’re going.

The novel gets off to a slow start. This is inevitable given the fact that it concerns Russian high society of 200 years ago, during a time of peace – or more precisely, a time when Napoleon was a Western European phenomenon and didn’t impinge much on the life of Moscow and St Petersburg, except to offer a welcome topic for some hot gossip. But although the characters, whether prince or serf, are remote from us in culture, place and time, we blush at their mistakes and embarrassments, and feel deeply for them when their luck turns sour.

Much of the novel’s undeserved reputation for turgidity arises from Russian personal naming conventions: people are called on different occasions by their first names, surnames, diminutives, by the polite form of name and patronymic, or by their courtly titles. The reader is well advised to keep a running table of equivalences ready to hand, in order to ascertain at a glance just who is being referred to. This is especially important for the minor characters.

See here for a downloadable table of names I’ve put together.

For example, one of the heroes, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, can be referred to as Prince Andrei, Prince Bolkonsky (though that normally means his cantankerous old father), Bolkonsky, Andrei Nikolayevich, Andrushka, or just plain Andrei —sometimes differently in the same paragraph. Added to that, whilst everybody’s name has a unique spelling in present-day Russian, this is far from being the case when it comes to transliterating it from Cyrillic into English. So across different reviews and translations even a simple name like Andrei gets variously transliterated as Andrej, Andrey, Andre or André – it’s that final й in Андрей that’s the mischief. In the Project Gutenberg version he even becomes Prince Andrew!

Moreover, since Russian declines somewhat like Latin, Andrei’s sister Maria is named, with perfect Russian logic: Princess Maria Nikolayevna Bolkonskaya (“Mary daughter-of-Nikolai Bolkonsky”). And as for Nikolayevich (“son-of-Nikolai”) – the variations are endless! But in the words of Rudyard Kipling “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays – and every single one of them is right!”

The other hero, Pierre (Count Pyotr Kirillovich) Bezukhov, is mostly referred to as Pierre, which is just as well for the reader’s sake.

All this is far from being Tolstoy’s fault. It has to be the chief reason why, apart from classics such as One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, Dr Zhivago, Cancer Ward... we don’t see too many novels in the shops translated from Russian.

(More to follow.)