Yesterday’s post was well-received, I’m a little between ideas otherwise, and I figure a 1450ish-page book probably has a few more than five points of inspiration. I’ll keep spoilers light and won’t tell you which character amused me the most and which one I spent hundreds of pages wishing death upon (I got my wish, hooray!).
Of course, I can’t experience War and Peace in its original 19th-century Russian. The translation I read was done by Ann Dunnigan in 1968, and it has a few peculiarities. One wrinkle that stands out is that it uses quotation marks rather than italics to show characters’ thoughts. This can be a bit confusing when you think characters are speaking aloud things that they really shouldn’t speak aloud, but they turn out to be a bit more sensible than they looked at first. I don’t know if that’s the case in other translations. (This customer review from Amazon is an interesting comparison of the translations available.
Pyotr Bagration was a real person prominent in the Napoleonic Wars, and he gets his share of pages in the book. But even after hundreds of pages with him, my mind still stuttered a bit to parse his name. It’s the English speaker’s bias that any unfamiliar word ending with “-tion” must be some kind of activity. What is bagration? Who’s doing the bagrating? I’ve never bagrated, have I?
I was not expecting the lisp of Denisov and a few other characters. Dunnigan renders that speech as halfway to an Elmer Fudd accent, turning most r’s into w sounds (but leaving the l’s alone). Couldn’t stop hearing Elmer whenever it came up, though the priest from The Princess Bride might’ve been a better comparison.
My high school French has stayed fresh thanks to my work with Canadians, and it helped me out here. Tolstoy’s aristocratic Russians season their speech with a lot of French as the novel begins; they consider it the mark of high-class breeding. Later on, they try to speak somewhat less for patriotic reasons. This reminded me of that ridiculous movement in America to start calling French fries “freedom fries,” though the Russia of the 1810s had a lot more legitimate reason to disdain French things than the America of the 2000s.
One of Tolstoy’s great strengths is his understanding of just how much lying there is in war—lying to one’s enemies, lying to one’s own side, lying to oneself. At times, the Russians wildly underestimate Napoleon and overestimate their own military skill; at other times, they’re ready to give up and declare Napoleon completely invincible. There’s a bit where a character is fleeing Moscow even as she claims Moscow will never be invaded, and when called on this, she stammers, “Well, I’m just leaving because everyone else is leaving!”