Everybody tells you that War and Peace is one of the easier 'big reads.' Don't believe them.
It totally is, but go straight to Book 4 and skip the first 300 pages, and don't read the second epilogue. What's leftover is still roughly 850 pages long, and it's incredible. But few 1200 page books need every page, and like any binge-watched TV serial, part of reading the whole thing is 'enduring' them. You get through the boring parts and for large stretches, the show slows to a crawl before the momentum hurtles you through a half day at a time. No book over 350 pages can be flawless (give or take a few), and any writer who 'writes long' is trying to say something too messy and elusive to be neat.
No writer 'writes bigger' than Tolstoy. He writes the reader into panoramic vistas of battle scenes, into the minds of the dying, into the personalities of the most consequential figures in history and speculates through his characters how a leader's temperament might result in the arbitrary deaths of millions.
But what makes War and Peace interesting is that he 'writes small' at least as well as he writes big, and writes into the minds of dozens of personalities in their most intimate thoughts, and then 'writes middle' and shows how the presence of each character affects one another. He might view women too sentimentally, but he certainly writes perceptively about the encyclopedia of subtle ways men are allowed to oppress them.
War and Peace may or may not be the greatest novel ever written, but it is, almost by default, the 'Greatest' novel ever written, in which we get a view of world large, the world small, how the large affects the small, and how the small affects the large.
The problem? Well, Tolstoy was a Count and one of the richest men in Russia. He knew everything there was to know about the life of aristocrats and bourgeois gentry, but the life of the millions of serfs who followed their orders in both war and peace? Hardly even a mention. War and Peace is society large and small, it is not, however, society top and bottom. For that, you either have to go backward to Gogol, or forward to Chekhov.
So no, I can't truly read War and Peace in book form front to back, and I've tried at least half a dozen times. I can, however, listen to the audiobook, and Thandiwe Newton, amid her recent controversial and weird apology for playing an African-American (she's a Zona princess by birth), released an audiobook of War and Peace which is one of the most stunning bits of acting I've ever heard. She doesn't just create a distinct character out of every voice, she seems to mine the book for every bit of hidden comedy, every subtle implication and innuendo, every bit of snark, every pomposity and every bit of vulgarity. It's more than a tour-de-force, it's an internalization of an entire epic. It's a shame she can't get an Oscar or Emmy for this because what she does is more impressive than she can on any show.
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Whether Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, the world of Russia is not the world of America, and while the kind of American who'd read a whole Russian novel is self-selecting to people who'd like it, I think most Americans are conditioned to find certain elements of its world repulsive.
Russia and America are so completely different as only two countries can be who grew to the world stage on exactly the same same day. They're almost mirror images of each other - and not just in the way they embraced exact opposite political systems. One month after Russia left World War I, America came in. In the same year America went to civil war to free the slaves, Russia liberated its serfs by a simple decree of a Czar. Both Petersburg and Washington were artificially designed to be capital cities apart from the pressures of the mob, to which the rest of the country looked forever after with incredible suspicion.
After World War I, the USA and USSR took over the world from Old Europe - existing as the much larger countries on either side of Europe whose mass spans whole continents - both countries containing vast reservoirs of unexplored territories, full of untapped resources and possibilities.
While European fascism looked back to the medieval world of myth and race, both America and Russia took their cues from the 18th century Enlightenment, and interpreted it in exact opposite ways. 20th century Russia took its cue from the idea that an all-knowing genius of a leader can give the people everything they need as a gift and change the world overnight. 20th century America took its cue from the idea that through carefully prepared institutions and no one person accumulating too much power, the necessary change can be affected by people working together of completely different backgrounds, to whom their leaders must answer like servants. In practice, neither worked that way. The Russian leaders murdered rather than gifted, and American leaders stayed American leaders and kept millions from rising, but there's no serious question which worked better and worse.
For the moment, it still seems as though America's vision was much more perceptive, even if false in all kinds of ways. But... if the internet makes every opinion seem as valid as facts, there is no democracy to be had, and if that's the case, the authoritarian model becomes all that prevents the world from perpetual civil insurrection.
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If human beings cannot affect the necessary changes together, the only option left is to put your trust in one guy being the smartest around, and that guy makes the decisions for everybody else. That's obviously a hugely dangerous bet, and hasn't really worked since a couple of monarchs did it in the 18th century, when modernization was affected single-handedly by 'Great Kings,' like Peter the Great in Russia, Frederick the Great in Prussia, Joseph II of Austria, Charles III in Spain, Sultan Selim in Turkey, and Gustav III of Sweden.
At the time, only monarchs had the means to get updates on all the latest information from advisors. Sometimes these advisors were powerful enough to run kingdoms for the king, but most of those politicians would quickly fall from favor if they ever accumulated enough power to contradict a King's degrees. Ministers who stayed in favor were content to remain specialists in particular subjects, and had no ambitions for country-wide rule; so therefore in the 1700s, the monarch was, almost by definition, the most enlightened citizen of his country.
But by increasing the opportunities of their subjects, these kings allowed their subjects the means to far outstrip them in skills and knowledge. And we have been dealing with the problem ever since of how best to establish enlightened rule. Half the world thinks enlightened rule can only be provided by a ruler who guarantees it, half the world thinks only democracy can provide it. Perhaps surprisingly, in the 19th century it seemed relatively clear that well-maintained autocracies did better than the republics. England and France had imperial outposts around the globe, and America had slaves at home. Meanwhile, Bismark's Germany established the first successful welfare state, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire under Franz Josef allowed rights for each of its 24 nationalities that even America today doesn't allow.
In the 20th century, it became abundantly clear that democracy was a better way forward, but we're only 21ish% of the way through the 21st century, and if the world's major democracies collapse into failed states, autocracies are virtually all that's left of human civilization.
Most humans don't naturally cooperate with each other - they always think they do, but put them in a situation where they have to compromise their most fundamental beliefs, and most humans get too mad to believe anybody can disagree with them in good faith; and rather than work together, they fight each other until one side clearly wins and the other loses, at which point the other side feels humiliated and tries to take revenge, and eventually they succeed. That's how most history works.
That doesn't mean humans are bad, but it does mean the bad side of humans comes out much more easily than people suppose, and there are only two real solutions:
1. Pacify our anger, which results in no progress being made.
2. Enact the obvious practical measures to progress society, which inevitably results in people rebelling against progress.
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People say that there is no reward for dictatorship. For better or worse, that's not at all true. The reward, however, is one Americans really don't like...
For better or worse... occasionally, a human being comes along who really is that much of a genius: a Tolstoy, a Shostakovich, a Kasparov, and their achievements can change the world forever. These sorts of geniuses are not just talented people who can write songs or scripts and collaborate with other talented people. These geniuses create whole cathedrals of meaning. You can spend your whole life studying Tolstoy every day for eight hours and never arrive at the bottom of what he lets you perceive. Sure, artists like Shostakovich depended on their teachers for their training, but their achievements are their own, and they worked like slaves at these achievements to a capacity which only a slave could understand.
In America, culture happens bit by bit. Thousands of talented artists get fifteen minutes on the world stage to show the world the glories of what they can do, America uses them up and tosses them aside at the first failure. In Russia, culture happens overnight by spontaneous explosion, and once a thinker is proven a genius, they get infinite chances to get it right again, and this explosion can last a lifetime. If their talent is noticed early, its nurtured from the earliest age, until you're an unquestionable world authority on what you do. America hates geniuses so much that we do everything we can to ignore them. Russia loves geniuses so much that their heads of state have geniuses assassinated because their effect on the population is too strong.
Americas don't believe in geniuses for the same reason we don't believe in dictators - we believe no person has the right to control our minds and tell us what to believe. We are a nation of rebels and skeptics. Our rebellions brought us our country and all the rights it provides us, it brought us a popular culture with appreciation in reach of anyone in the world; rebellion also brought us the Civil War and a century of segregation. Russia believes in dictators for the same reason it believes in genius. Russian history is a history of submission to autocrats - autocrats brought them genocide after democide, poverty after famine -but it also brought them modernization and the most gloriously ornate religion on earth (go to any Orthodox cathedral, they're stunning), and from that ornate religion came the most glorious culture of fine arts the world has ever seen in its entire history.
You know what's coming next, and I know nobody wants to hear it...
The truth is, yeah... American popular culture is great. It's fun, it's empowering, its history tells a story of how American liberated themselves demographic by demographic. But any insights you find into the human condition are the exception. Mass culture, now more than ever, is designed to be trivial and appeal to the basest parts of human beings.
What we call 'high culture' is not the dictation of powerful people's aesthetic tastes. From the Iliad to the cutouts of Kara Walker, culture tells the story of how the world is shaped by tragedy after tragedy; the illusions of every era dispelled without mercy or justice.
And in that sense, Russia has so much more accurate a view of what life is than we do, and is so much more prepared for whatever comes next. What comes next for us, whether now or in fifty years, will be the great shock of our entire history - the moment when America's forced out of its perpetual adolescence into maturity, and realizes that era after era shapes the world by mass death.
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So all those long tomes which Russians famously read in their sleep... they're what prepare you best for moments like these. It may not be fair that only Counts get the funding to write to the full extent of their genius, but part of what we're fighting for - a larger part than you think, is that when the next female Tolstoy arrives, the next black Tolstoy, the next poor Tolstoy, the next trans Tolstoy, they have as much a chance to spread their wisdom as 3000 years of rich white male geniuses did. It's not fair, but extraordinary people do exist, and regardless of whether the law protects them from their misdeeds, their insights do more to heal people and make them whole than ours. That, for better or worse, is the great insight of autocracy.
Russia's culture is barely older than America's, but in the 200 years between Peter the Great and Stalin, it grew the greatest culture in the world. Period. It took them 200 years to do what Italy did over 2000. It marries everything that's great from Europe, Byzantium, the Middle East, Moorish Islam, Ancient Greece and Rome, India, Mongolia, China, and Japan. From the incalculable insights of literature, to the infinite spirituality of its cathedrals, to the gorgeous refinement of its ballet, to the reverberent passion of its music, etc. etc., etc., etc., the culture of the world's most depressing country makes suffering lives more worth living than any force on earth. And in the moments of greatest suffering yet to come for Americans, American culture doesn't yet have enough great achievements to prepare us for the enormity of what may soon come.
So if War and Peace is too big for you, start with Chekhov; watch his lives of suffering mediocrity, feel compassion for these characters the world treats with contempt. Then move to Turgenev and feel the pure lyrical beauty of youthful hopes disappointed. Then move to Gogol and see what real absurdity is. Then go on to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin - if it's too hard, listen to Stephen Fry narrate it, and listen to a poem-novel as insightful and quotable as Hamlet (and as funny). Then, when you're really ready for it, go to Tolstoy. If War and Peace is too tough, listen to Thandiwe Newton narrate it; if Anna Karenina is too tough, listen to Maggie Gyllenhall (they're both on youtube), and see how humans evolve together as a whole societal organism. It will give you insights into everything from how history shapes our lives to how we're all influenced by friendships, friends, and frenemies.
And then when you're really for a plunge, go for Dostoevsky. Tolstoy's pomposity can be hard to take, but Dostoevsky is everything Americans hate. He's a totalitarian, pure and simple. He believes humans are evil, sinful, dirty, and can only be saved by God and all-powerful sovereigns - most particularly the Russian Orthodox God and his Czar. The key to appreciating Dostoevsky is understanding that even if he's maliciously wrong about a lot, there's a lot about which he's right. You may be bored at the time, god knows I was when I read Notes from the Underground, and yet quotes from that book surface in my head again and again - they explain everything from situations in my personal life to the behavior of the entire world and history itself.
It honestly took me years of trying to climb this pyramid. In a few crucial cases I still haven't reached the top. I love Chekhov and Pushkin like I love Coppola and Scorsese, but very few Americans have the attention span for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It's not necessarily tough to understand intellectually, this isn't German philosophy; it's tough to understand emotionally. It's nearly impossible for an American to get into a headspace that believes freedom is a curse or that our choices are completely predetermined by a historical logic we're incapable of understanding. But we clearly ignore those worldviews at our peril.
After centuries of slavish subordination, Russians so tired of authoritarian rule that they overthrew it for a Soviet republic in which all men would be equal, but having lived under a thousand years of Czars, they did not understand the first thing about how to treat each other with equality. After two-and-a-half centuries of republican governance, Americans have so tired of our country's liberal hypocrisies that a large part of this country is willing to cast the whole thing aside in favor of an anti-liberal republic that deliberately favors one kind of person over another in its most blatantly stated aims. There's little reason to think America would do any more competently under that kind of government than Russia did under the Soviets.
You learn the future by studying the past. You won't learn the exact details, but existence never changes and humans have as much capacity for destruction as creation. You learn human beings by studying their greatest art. Art is no substitute for socialization and practical experience, but an extraordinary creator will understand what motivates the average human much better than you can if you try to understand them without their help.
America and Russia will always misunderstand each other, but Russia has given us, again and again, ways to understand what makes them tick, and most of us just ignore it. Believe it or not, our survival may depend on reading their books; their big, dull, glorious books.
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