On Tolstoy's War and Peace

I want to start this review by making a statement addressed to those who have not yet read War and Peace: PLEASE, DO NOT LET THE SIZE OF THE WORK INTIMIDATE YOU - READ-IT WITHOUT FEAR, YOU WILL BE WONDERFULLY REWARDED. I confess that I myself have hesitated before I decided to adventure in the endlessly pages of the book, but once you're absorbed by the universe of Tolstoy, you can no longer escape: War and Peace is like a black hole, absorbing all to its abysmal stomach, even light, and the intellect of any human being, from the simplest to the most luminous, is happily doomed to be completely devoured by the work.

There is no way of summarizing the magnitude of this book, this novel of novels. You could say that is the story of the invasion of Russia by Napoleon's troops, with the exposure of both the life of the troops and the battles of the war and the painting of the everyday life of some important families of Russian nobility. But this summary is too poor, he makes no justice to the massive march of humanity that passes through the pages of War and Peace, the giant chain of events and lives that seethe and bubble in sentence after sentence of the novel. It's almost as if the book had in its pages the smell of the perfume of the ladies and the colony of the lords the sour taste of the sweat of the peasants and the stench of the wounds of the mutilated bodies in the battlefields; it's almost as one could feel (when one run the fingers through the pages ) the texture of the skin of the maidens and the tickles of the general's beards: the smell of humanity emanates from War and Peace with an odor of unprecedented power in the history of literature; never before has the nostrils of the readers imagination became so enraptured by the spiritual perfume of an work of art.

What the reader will find in the pages of War and Peace? Well, here's a sample: newborn babies covered in blood and wrapped in warm cloths and old patriarchs dying in bed after a lifetime of joys and sorrows; young society girls, flushed and pinky, beautiful and fresh in their party dresses and prostitutes in poor and humble rooms; rich guys drinking at parties and peasants in their huts, eating cabbage soup; shy and studious young teenagers and mockers and spenders playboys racing with their cars at high speed through the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg; shy little virgin girls playing in their rooms, whispering about their teenage loves and highly sexed society ladies, with necklines that attract all eyes, with curves that make all men salivate; bitter and cerebral man, wrapped in thoughts and philosophy's joyful and playful lords, always laughing and having fun; balls filled by the cream of Russian society and battlefields filled with rotting corpses that throwing up their pestilence to the heavens; gypsies and beggars; ladies and maids; beautiful women and ugly women; valiant men and selfish men; cold and drowsy meetings in the houses of old and semi-forgotten nobles and costume parties of young people in snowy Christmas nights; old bodies, dry as shriveled prunes and juvenile skin, rosy and sweaty with the dew of youth; health and disease; purity and decay; life and death; war and peace.

And how many landscapes! Fields full of rye, wheat and barley; plains of green grass; frozen pine forests; woods filled with the smell of rotting leaves, fungus and mushrooms; plains covered with glistening white snow by the moonlight; rivers and lakes; dusty roads; humble servants villages and large country houses; the countryside and the great cities.

And all things are handled with the utmost detail, so obvious and familiar features that are immediately absorbed by the reader, with such ease that he may not fully realize how difficult it is for one single mind to collect so many subtleties. At the same time, Tolstoy chronicles the lives of his characters without making judgments, without condemning or rewarding them, as if he were a benevolent God that understands and forgives everyone.

Furthermore, the production of something like War and Peace demanded the union of several factors, a union that will rarely happen in several years in the future. First, it takes a rich man - Tolstoy could live several experiences and know several people because he could afford the luxury of leading a dissolute and carefree life; second: it takes a very ambitious man - Tolstoy was arrogant and proud, and wanted always to be the best at what he did; when he decided that he would be a writer, his desire was to defeat all the other writers, to be the greatest, and that desire to win, coupled with an enormous courage and boundless ambition were the ferment required for the construction of something as big as War and Peace; third: it takes a man gifted with an extremely privileged mind, a man of great intelligence - Tolstoy was an intellectual giant, and his mental ability is proven by the huge range of activities that he dominated; fourth: once again, you need a rich man, one who doesn't need to work on anything but he's book - Tolstoy owned lands, and while his servants tilled the soil and his business manager dealt with trade and business, he could accommodate himself comfortably in his office every single day, dreaming on the fate of his characters; fifth: a large organization was needed to deal with the whole mass of leaves and material produced during the process of writing the novel - Tolstoy had in his young wife, Sophia, a great ally: she organized his papers and copied the almost illegible manuscripts of her husband, something that she would make seven times. Several universal conditions had to meet in order to War and Peace be generated.

I ask everyone to READ THIS ROMACE. War and Peace is a banquet of humanity that has never been equaled, whose only rival is the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, it seems that Shakespeare and Tolstoy share the first spot on the podium of world literature. Dostoyevsky is an author I greatly admire, I can even say that I love him. But I would be unfair to Tolstoy by saying that the author of The Brothers Karamazov is on the same level as him. No. Tolstoy is in a category by himself: his work is much more varied in characters and scenes than the works of Dostoevsky.

Again: I ask everyone, PLEASE, to read War and Peace. The world becomes a richer place each time a new mind is impregnated and fertilized by the parade of existences that Count Tolstoy created. War and Peace is one of the supreme monuments of the human imagination and creative spirit.