Have you ever read “War And Peace”?

No, neither have I – although from somewhere I do have a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s mammoth novel on my bookshelves. My copy of the book is a 1967 edition and runs to 1,344 pages. I can’t imagine ever reading the book – at my age, I’m reluctant to start a long work in case I don’t finish it.

But I did once see a  film version of “War And Peace”. It was the 1966 Russian movie directed by Sergey Bondarchuk. I viewed this eight-hour epic in a single sitting in a cinema (but thankfully it was dubbed). I remember very little except some battle scenes.

Now I will see the television version of “War And Peace” which will start being broadcast by the BBC this evening and consists of six one-hour episodes. However, I will record the series and try to watch all the episodes in a couple of sittings to help me follow the plot.

Meanwhile I’ve come across someone who has not only read “War And Peace”, but consumed it four times. In this article, Sarah Hughes explains how, each time she has read this huge novel, she has seen it in a different light with different characters coming to the fore.


6 Comments

  • Helen Milner

    I’ve read War and Peace, after University my friend Susy and I travelled around India and Nepal for four months and my Mum pressed a copy of War and Peace on me when I left. It had wafer thin pages and tiny writing so it was quite light and our young eyes coped. Susy read it all. I read it all but speed read some of the war scenes, as I was much more interested in what was happening during the peace.

  • Roger Darlington

    Very impressive, Helen.

    I suppose these days you would take the novel on an e-reader of some sort. Easier to carry but no quicker to read!

  • Alexei

    Roger,

    I read it at the age of 15 in a 96-hour marathon hardly leaving my bed at all. It’s a fairly easy to read book despite the size, but of course, it contains a lot of parallel stories and some 300+ named characters. So indeed it’s worth rereading once a decade, as you understand more and more in retrospective of your life experience. I reread it once about 5 years ago after watching the Bondarchuk’s film, which is good, but not awesome despite remaining the biggest box office and budget hit of all times.

    Bottom-line, it’s worth a read and you can sure do it 🙂

  • Roger Darlington

    So you’ve read it twice, Alexei – really impressive. And I’m assuming you’ve read it Russian too -unlike Sarah Hughes.

 




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