The Unexpected Peril of Rereading Great Books

One of the many pleasure of teaching a tutorial is the ability to read Great Books and discuss them with really smart students.  This semester, my tutorial read War and Peace.  (It was written by Tolstoy—I wasn’t going to mention that fact because it is hard to imagine that anyone reading a blog post here would be unaware of that particular bit of common knowledge, but then it felt so weird not listing the author that I felt compelled to include the Present, Entirely Pointless Aside to assuage my misbegotten feelings of guilt for not mentioning the author.)

The quick summary:  War and Peace is a Great Book.

But, you already knew that.  Nonetheless, the preceding paragraph is not without some interest.  If you had asked me back in January to name The Greatest Novel Ever Written, I would have said War and Peace.  The astute reader will notice a not-so–subtle difference between what I would have said in January and what I said in the preceding paragraph.  And therein lies a tale.  (Not a terribly interesting tale to anyone but the author of the tale, but a tale nonetheless.)

I first read War and Peace when I was in graduate school—so it must have been around 1990.  (For reasons I cannot explain, I am pretty certain I read it in February—why I would have a distinct impression of the month in which I read War and Peace, but no certainly at all about the year, and similarly, why I remember the month in which I read this book, but couldn’t even guess in which month I read any other book I read, is a genuine puzzle.)  When I first read it, I was stunned; I was so amazed by the book, I didn’t want it to end; even though it is rather long, I wished it was even longer.  I loved everything about it.  Everything.  And for the last two decades I have told everyone it was the best novel ever written.

So, I reread it with anticipation.  I had the new translation by the indefatigable Pevear and Volokhonsky, so I was anticipating an experience like nothing else.  And, I thought the book was Great.  Really Great.  But, not the best novel ever.

This leaves me in an odd position; I just read an utterly amazing novel, truly an exceptionally great book, but my dominant impression is…disappointment.  That’s depressing in a way.

So, why the change in opinion?  I think my earlier enthusiasm came from the fact that when I read it in grad school, it was shortly after I decided that after 16 years of schooling, I had absolutely no education, and that I should probably remedy that fact by reading all the books I should have been assigned in high school and college, but since high schools and colleges don’t actually assign Great Books, I never read them.  One of the first books I decided I needed to read was War and Peace.  So, my enthusiasm was undoubtedly a combination of a thoroughly proper appreciation of the fact that it is a Great Book and a lack of many books with which to compare it.  Comparing Tolstoy to Robert Ludlum will naturally make Tolstoy seem pretty good.

Between the time I first read the book two decades ago and now, I have read a lot of other Great Books.  A lot of other Great Books.  So, this time, in reading it, I seemed hyper-aware of all the weak parts in the book.  And in a book this long, there are bound to be weak points.  It is a bit repetitive; the digressions on Tolstoy’s theories of history are fantastically interesting, but he says he same thing too many times.  Nikolai’s relationship with Marya is a bit forced at the end.  The first epilogue is terribly weak.  (The second epilogue?  Does anyone actually ever mange to read the second epilogue with any measure of attention?)  A few plot twists seemed a bit too cute—the death of Helene, for example, was far too convenient.  And so on.  Nothing, in other words, stands out as actually seriously lowering the quality of the book, but the collection of lots of little things just made the book seem something less than perfect.  I am, in other words, no longer twitterpated with War and Peace.  And it is a little sad.  Everyone should read it still, but I can no longer recommend it as the Best Novel Ever Written.  It is a Great Book.  That is really high praise, but not quit the same.

Anyway, in my new rankings, The Brothers Karamazov has moved to Best Russian Novel.

And the Greatest Novel Ever Written:  Pride and Prejudice.