by James Wood
“Alive, and very much so,” Tolstoy’s diary entry for November 19, 1889, begins. That is how it feels to be caught up in the bright sweep of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”: alive, and very much so. It is to succumb to the contagion of vitality. As his characters infect each other with the high temperature of their existence, so they infect us. Count Rostov dances the Daniel Cooper at a ball, and “all who were in the ballroom looked with smiles of joy at the merry old man.” His son Nikolai has “that merry brotherly tenderness with which all fine young men treat everyone when they are happy.” The Rostov girls are “always smiling at something (probably their own happiness)”; one of them, Natasha, loves to order the servants around, but they “liked carrying out Natasha’s orders as they did no one else’s.” The fat, naïve, bumbling hero of the novel, Pierre Bezukhov, is so infectious that footmen “joyfully rushed to help him off with his cloak and take his stick and hat.” We cannot resist these people, and they cannot resist themselves: Nikolai goes to war “because he could not resist the wish to go galloping across a level field,” and when the French start running toward him he is amazed that anyone would want to kill him: “To kill me? Me, whom everybody loves so?” Likewise, when Pierre is captured by the French he has a revelation of infinity that is also a revelation of his own infinity. Looking up at the numberless stars, he thinks, “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me! . . . And all this they’ve caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!”
Because this immense sense of self hums its own intoxicating music, these characters cannot play in the milder orchestras of give-and-take, and are often poor at crediting the discrete existence of others. But how vividly Tolstoy communicates their vitality to us! A major new translation of “War and Peace,” by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf; $37), brings us their palpability as perhaps never before. There is the “little princess,” Prince Andrei’s wife, with her short upper lip and faint mustache; and the soldier Denisov, with his “short fingers covered with hair”; and a shirtless Napoleon grunting, “Do it hard, keep going,” to the valet who is vigorously brushing his fat back and fat hairy chest; and the wise old Russian general Kutuzov, tired and sagging, who is always yawning through war councils (but who has a swivel eye for the girls); and the smooth Russian diplomat Bilibin, with his pompous habit of gathering the skin over his eyebrows when he is about to produce a bon mot.
Tolstoy is the great novelist of physical involuntariness. The body helplessly confesses itself, and the novelist seems merely to run and catch its spilled emotion. A friend of the novelist’s, the critic Aleksandr Druzhinin, ribbed him about it in a letter: “You are sometimes on the point of saying that so-and-so’s thighs showed that he wanted to travel in India!” The old patriarch Prince Bolkonsky, for instance, loves his son, Andrei, and his daughter, Marya, so fiercely that he cannot express that love in any form except spiteful bullying, yelling in the presence of his spinsterish daughter, “If only some fool would marry her!” His hands register “the still persistent and much-enduring strength of fresh old age,” but his face occasionally betrays suppressed tenderness. As he says farewell to his son, who is going to war, he is his usual self, gruffly shouting “Off with you!” Yet “something twitched in the lower part of the old prince’s face.” …
