Hi everyone, I’m Sean. Just as a brief introduction, I’m in China. So if I seem out of touch with reality, it’s because my reality is invariably different from yours!
The Awesomeosity Project, hereafter abbreviated TAP, was birthed in a fit of hilariousness in front of the National Archives in Februaryish of 2007 by my then-new-friend-now-close-friend Brandon (the Originator) and since then, with the nurturing of myself (the Catalyst) and Mariel (who doesn’t have a nickname yet but will before long, I’m sure) it has developed into a full-blown philosophy about art, life, but especially yourself.
We’ll discuss this more as time goes on, but for now I want to kick this thing off with an appreciative note to the Classics of literature. Most people write these books off as longwinded and boring. We’ve all had our bad experiences with Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Mill on the Floss, and so many others, yes?
Well, it’s time we stopped razzing them, in my opinion. We’re all grown up now. Let’s give them another shot. As part of my work on the other half of TAP, The List, I have been reading War & Peace. Now, my love of classic literature is not terribly old, but is not terribly recent either. My three favorite authors are Twain, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare, who will be counted as a writer rather than a playwright here, at least. As you may know, a new edition of War & Peace was just released by the two people considered to be the best Russian-English translators of our time, the married couple Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. In the introduction, Pevear quotes with:
In 1954, Bertolt Brecht wrote a note on “Classical Status as an Inhibiting Factor” that puts the question nicely, “What gets lost,” he says of the bestowing of classical status on a work (he is speaking of works for the theater), “is the classic’s original freshness, the element of surprise…of newness, of productive stimulus that is the hallmark of such works. The passionate quality of a great masterpiece is replaced by stage temperament, and where the classics are full of fighting spirit, here the lessons taught the audience are tame and cozy and fail to grip.” --p. x
And yet, we have to remember that War & Peace WAS once new. Pevear later says “War and Peace is a work of art, and if it succeeds, it cannot be in spite of its formal deficiencies, but only because Tolstoy created a new form that was adequate to his vision” (p. xi). We must remember in taking on War & [frickin’] Peace that what we are reading was shocking and revolutionary, or at least interesting to those that came before us. We have to read it with fresh eyes that do not see the thickness of the binding but the writings of the author (or at least translations of them), the machinations of the plot, and the strengths/failures/plights/desires of the characters. This is why we read ANY book.
I’ve found it to be true so far about several books, including Following the Equator by Mark Twain, Demons and The Idiot by Dostoevsky, and I’m very quickly finding it to be true about War & Peace. I simply CANNOT put it down. This is a terrible problem to have with a 1300 page novel because when you can’t put down a typical 2-300 page novel, at least you finish it eventually and can go to sleep or do something else constructive. War & Peace simply DOESN’T END. I have broken my New Year’s resolution to go to bed before 12 almost every night since I started reading it because when 12am roles around, and I’m deep into hating Nikolai Rostov or falling in love with Prince Andrei or laughing merrily at the exploits of the rascally loveable Denisov, it’s like a ball and chain tied to my arm (it’s about as heavy as one too), and I can’t put it down. In fact, at page 410 right now, I want to finish it as quickly as possible because I think I might just plow right through it a second time. I’m in LOVE with this book!
Read it! You will be WELL-rewarded. 15 pages a day easily puts you through the whole thing, introduction to endnotes in three months, and before long, you’ll find yourself reading far more than 15 pages a day. It’s simply engaging—and a perfect example if how a classic novel can still be fresh and relevant over 100 years after it was first-written.
There is a short article in Newsweek about the new translation here, and you can also go to a suite of stories on NPR, including an interview with the translators and a story comparing their translation to another translation that has come out quite recently. I encourage you to check it out. War & Peace always seems like a task not worth attacking to anyone who has glanced at the three-inch binding. But it reads lightly, beautifully, and gracefully, and I think you’ll find it much more refreshing than you expected.
-Sean
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