About the only thing I can say is that I finished it after it sitting on my To-Read list for about 40 years. For the first 400 or so pages all I could think was that it was JAFLRN--Just Another Fucking Long Russian Novel. Then I began hitting some poignant and descriptive passages--Nickolai Rostov's first battle, Pierre's stumbling around on the Battle of Borodino, Alexandrei's gazing at the sky after his first injury as Austerlitz, and wondering what the hell it was all about. Some of the episodes have a charm of their own, as with Nickolai's hunting party and his driving the sleigh through the winter night, caught up in the joy of the action and movement. Tolstoy also has some good moments in dissecting different character's motives and thoughts. Especially after the Battle of Borodino and the destruction of Moscow, as Alexandrei prepares for death and Pierre is forced to march in captivity away from Moscow and reexamine his purposes for living, then the novel begins to justify some of the claims made upon. But then it goes on and on forever, especially with the two epilogues, which seem pretty pointless, and I just kind of lost interest, again.
The book abounds in irony and savage criticism. Obviously War and Peace is a devastating critique of Russian society, as the characters are all wrapped up in themselves and the rather pointless lives that they are leading. That's really driven home in Pierre's and Natasha's later lives after they have passed through the sorrows of the forced march and of her care of Alexandrei and then the Countess. And it is certainly a polemic against the great man conception of history with it's withering critique of Napolean. Tolstoy tries to make the reader doubt that Napolean had any competence or credibility at all, and he certainly takes historians to task in a phillipic that makes much of the book almost unbearable.
I won't say that War and Peace was a waste of my time--I spent far too much time on it to allow that judgement, but I don't see myself as coming away from this experience with any kind of enriched consciousness or conception of life.
Author: Tolstoy, Leo
Date Published: 1869
Length: 1351 pp & 61 hr 32 min
electronic print and audio
Narrator: Davidson, Frederick
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