Letter 16: On My Year of War and Peace (Part I)
Reader! Happy New Year! It feels good to be back, stretching the old writing muscles, creaky as they may be, as we enter into 2023. So many fresh pages awaiting their spill of ink.
While the title of this letter would serve well as a metaphor for the triumphs and tribulations of 2022, the subject of today’s reflection is much more literal: that great novel of Tolstoy’s.
At the beginning of 2022, I signed up for The Big Read Substack, an online reading group with the intention of tackling War and Peace1 over the course of the entire year. We would read a chapter a day, receive a weekly newsletter that summarized and reflected upon the week’s readings, and commune digitally with fellow readers for a discussion in the comments section.
It was a delight! To stretch out the consumption of a novel over the course of a year, having the luxury of dipping in and out of the text, inevitably produces sparks of friction as particular passages butt up against moments in your day, perhaps because there is a fleck of similarity between the two, and suddenly those months become an extended conversation between your life and the text.
This is not to say it was painless. As with most Russian novels, there are many characters, each with a myriad of names and a propensity to begin speaking in French at any given moment.
But soon, the frustration of confusing your Denisov’s and your Dolokhov’s abates, you’re able to process the ten thousand diminutive names each character has been bestowed by their doting mothers, and what at the beginning seemed like a cast of silhouettes soon begin to fill out with flesh.
When life soured in April, I took a break from reading, which soon turned into a sabbatical (to put it generously), and then…
Reader, I failed.
It was mid-autumn when I finally found the will to pick War and Peace back up, which had spent the interim months on its perch on my nightstand, ever in my peripheral vision as I spent my evenings with snacks and Netflix instead of tucked within its pages, simmering with what I’m sure was contempt at my neglectfulness.
Queasy at the thought of the months of work I had to catch up on, I returned to it like a high schooler on the night before a final exam. The cadence that had marked the first few months of the year, in which the course of my life and that of the novel flowed in tandem like twin streams, was now severed.
Unread pages stretched out before me like an endless table laden with food as I stuffed myself full and tried to keep everything down. What I was once able to savour, ingesting a bit at a time, now felt like a punishment.
As I neared the halfway mark of the novel, I had to stop and ask myself, why was I doing this? To feel accomplished? (Yes). To distract myself from gnawing existential angst? (Yes.) To have something to brag about on Substack? (No). (Well, maybe.) (Ok, of course it was.)
This is not to say there were no more of those serendipitous moments in which text and life aligned. What a tonic it is to be feeling sorry for yourself, only to be nudged by an author long dead from a land far away who lays bare the human condition and its universality, holding up a mirror to the reader.
It is thus with a sense of disappointment that I pin the addendum Part I to this letter’s title. But the cycle of the year now starts anew, and I hope to return to this project in 2023, and to return here with Part II, a reflection on my second year of War and Peace, in 12 months’ time. Hope to see you there.
P.S. It is a resolution of mine to post regularly this year, see you in two weeks.
P.P.S. If you’re new here, feel free to check out last year’s post about the dreadfulness of the New Year.
I read the Maude translation, which is highly regarded and did not disappoint. The prose is beautiful.