Tolstoy, Garnett and My Tryst with ‘War and Peace’

Many years ago, I left a bag full of books at Dubai International Airport - a book-lover’s nightmare. Among the casualties were two prized possessions: a Modern Library Classics edition of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ (1867) and Edmund Wilson’s ‘To the Finland Station’ (1940). It had taken me months of steady commitment to get through Tolstoy’s leviathan, possible only because of Constance Garnett’s fluid, welcoming translation.

So imagine my astonishment when days later, I received a call from Mumbai International Airport. My bag had surfaced. With the zeal of a pilgrim retrieving a lost relic, I caught the first bus to Mumbai, my mind singularly fixed on my impending reunion with Tolstoy - and Miss Garnett.

There is a particular joy in reading the great Russian classics through the lens of one’s first translator. For all the technical perfections of the more recent Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation, which has been lauded for its scrupulous fidelity to the Russian text, I still prefer Garnett’s version of ‘War and Peace.’ The redoubtable Miss Garnett, whose early 20th-century translations introduced English readers to the Russian masters, has long divided opinion. Critics like Joseph Brodsky dismissed her work as stilted and error-ridden, while admirers hailed her ability to capture the spirit of the Russian novel in an English that felt natural.

‘War and Peace’ in Garnett’s rendering is absorbing, and crucially, for those daunted by Tolstoy’s linguistic gymnastics, free of the excessive French passages that bog down many translations. Hemingway, it is said, only managed to get through Tolstoy by reading Garnett.

But what is ‘War and Peace’ really? The major novelists of the past two centuries - from Ivan Turgenev to Virginia Woolf - have hailed it as the greatest novel ever written. Tolstoy himself, ever the contrarian, resisted this classification. “It is not a novel,” he wrote, “even less is it an epic poem, and still less an historical chronicle.” Instead, he insisted that ‘War and Peace’ was simply what he “wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.”

Tolstoy began his project with trepidation, embarking on what was initially conceived as a novel about the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Yet the more he wrote, the further he strayed from his original plan. The narrative ballooned in scope, drawing in history, philosophy, war and human folly. His wife, Sophia Tolstaya, famously transcribed his nearly illegible drafts into fair copies, seven times over. Without her tireless work, War and Peace might well have remained a chaotic mass of notes.

Despite earlier literary successes like ‘Sevastopol Sketches,’ Tolstoy initially struggled with the sheer immensity of his undertaking as his early drafts, under the working title ‘The Year 1812,’ reveal. The Napoleonic wars had already acquired mythopoetic grandeur in European literature, from Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma to Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Hugo’s Les Misérables. Yet War and Peace remains sui generis, defying conventional categories. With a cast exceeding 600 characters - 160 of whom are historical figures - it is as much a philosophical treatise as it is a sweeping historical narrative. Early readers were often baffled whether they were reading a novel, a work of history, or something else entirely.

The battle scenes at Austerlitz and Borodino are as immersive as any war reportage, yet the novel’s true power lies in the way Tolstoy filters history through the lens of individual lives. Pierre Bezukhov’s existential wanderings, Prince Andrei’s disillusionment, Natasha Rostova’s exuberance - these characters breathe, suffer and evolve in ways that make the grand historical forces at play feel immediate and intimate.

The novel’s philosophy, its deep skepticism of great men and historical determinism, that sets it apart. Napoleon is not the omnipotent genius of legend but a man at the mercy of forces larger than himself. History, Tolstoy suggests, is not made by singular figures but by the sum of human actions, often irrational.

This is what makes the experience of reading ‘War and Peace’ feel so immersive. It is not simply a novel to be read but a world to be lived in. For this, I shall forever remain indebted to Miss Garnett.

Which is why, when I arrived in Mumbai, I clutched my retrieved copy with the possessiveness of someone who had dodged fate. I had lost it once. I wasn’t about to lose it again.