Thanks to the War and Peace Mini-Series, Now You Can FINALLY Tackle The Novel

One Hint: Try it with an audiobook, with the best narrator and translation

First aired on the BBC, now on the Lifetime and the History channels, the War and Peace min-series offers you a gateway into the novel. My suggestion: watch the first episode (using your cable account information or a friend’s log-in) to get a fix on the few main characters who really count. It’s a sprawling novel, and with the confusion of changing nicknames and women characters with slightly altered last names from their relatives, it seems almost impenetrable.

But this character guide from the BBC is especially helpful: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/pcqw2nXWtYmwZ4SL1YTDRB/characters.

It may seem like cheating, but if you want to enjoy some of the world’s greatest but longest literature, audiobooks are certainly worth a try. And that’s the case with this 600,000-word novel. I’ve used audioboooks to enjoy Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Bleak House and the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, tracing decades in the lives of a few British upper-class strivers written in an elegant, moving and witty style— and, now, at last, War and Peace. You can get a three-month free trial of Audible, which means you can download both parts of War and Peace with the best translation and narrator, and keep it permanently — then cancel if you don’t want to continue.

(For audiobook lovers, there’s an even better deal than Audible : the premium version of the Tunein app, which has 40,000 audiobooks — including recent, well-reviewed books along with such tomes as Game of Thrones and many classics. They’re available for all-you-can-read, unlimited listening, Netflix-style for about $8 a month. But its War and Peace version has a third-rate, affected narrator and a stodgy translation.)

Here’s the best translation of the book, in my view: http://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Tie-In-Edition-Dramatisation/dp/184990846X This version is now available for the Amazon Kindle for just $4.99 — a solid deal for such a long masterpiece

It is the most readable translation, with Louise and Aylmer Maude making it accessible yet true to the original language. It’s so good that it was approved by the well-educated, multi-lingual Count Tolstoy himself, now in a “tie-in” version with an introduction by BBC screenwriter Andrew Davies, who adapted it for the miniseries. It’s better one to read than the most recent version, woodenly translated, by the otherwise celebrated couple, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which forces you to read translations of passages in French — the language used by the Russian nobility at society gatherings — in tiny footnotes. You can learn more about the disputes and controversies over Russian translations in this excellent New Yorker article.

Then join Audible.com for a trial membership to get the first volume for free or both volumes in your three-month trial or get it via other websites. The key is to get it in the most accessible translation with the best narrator: Neville Jason. (As a warm-up, he did a full-length version of the first few volumes of Proust’s Rememberances of Things Past.)

With the BBC character sheet in hand if needed in emergencies, you’re ready to read or listen to one of the world’s great masterpieces, paying special attention to these three main characters:

Pierre Bezukhov:

Pierre is an outcast. The awkward, illegitimate son of a dazzlingly wealthy Count, he was educated abroad but returns to Russia now his father’s health is in decline. Polite society shuns him for his hero-worship of Napoleon and enthusiasm for the politics of revolution. But his blundering sincerity charms Andrei, his truest friend; and Natasha, who delights in his presence.

Andrei Bolkonsky:

Prince Andrei is a brilliant young man from a noble family. His beautiful wife, Lise, is pregnant with their first child. Yet he despises the silly, shallow world of St Petersburg society. When war breaks out, he enlists as an adjutant on General Kutuzov’s staff and leaves his wife at his fierce father’s remote country estate. For Andrei, it’s the chance he has been waiting for to find glory and purpose.

Natasha Rostova:

Natasha is a breath of fresh air and laughter who knows instinctively that life is for living. As the beloved only daughter of Count and Countess Rostov, she has been raised in Moscow with all the love of a close family. Now, though, she is growing into a spirited teenager.She is played in the TV mini-series by Lily James, who portrays “Rose” on Downton Abbey.

However you enter the world of War and Peace, it remains one of the great masterpieces of world literature that is well worth reading regardless of its intimidating reputation or great length. It really is extraordinary, particularly the broad scope of all aspects of life that Tolstoy covers: romance, high society, war, politics, friendship, spiritual longings, his satiric take on power-grabbing and hypocrisy, all of it embodied through compelling characters and great interior monologues and the dramatic rise and fall and unexpected detours of people’s fates in life. There are some novelists who can do some of those elements well — obviously, Jane Austen on romance and society life — but who can do all of that equally well? Even George Eliot’s Middlemarch — the book that Virgina Woolf once said is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” — doesn’t dare tackle the harsh realities of war and its aftermath as Tolstoy does. (James Woods of the New Yorker ably describes War and Peace’s appeal for generations of readers, although his essay doubtless contains several “spoilers.”)

The novel gives us the world and people of his time in a way that draws us into his characters’ lives with such power and grace that it earns its plaudits as the greatest novel eve written. As Isaac Babel put it, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”

Even Ernest Hemingway, a notorious braggart and egotist about his importance in the span of world literature, conceded defeat in his usual macho way before Tolstoy’s achievements. As he told The New Yorker’s Lillian Ross in her famed profile of him: “I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”