At last - at last!
I have finished reading W & P, realizing rather too late that the version I have, the Constant Garnett translation from 1904, is the clunkiest, most turgid version available - for all that it was a magnificient achievement at the time, completed when Garnett's eyesight was fading.
He was a cruel devil though, was Tolstoy: you plough through nearly 1300 pages of novel to be confronted with another 40 pages of Part II, his epilogues, which don't bear on the characters in his novel other than Bonaparte and Tsar Alexander, and they're completely unnecessary - he's implied every point already in the novel itself, but garlands the ending of it with almost endless repetitions, parables, analogies, analyses, presumably just in case you'd missed the point.
Particularly galling, when you discover that in later life he changed his point of view on many of the positions he advanced. It's called "the greatest novel ever written". Perhaps it is - but that doesn't make it a novel which is any great pleasure to read, and over the last 20 years I've broken off from it and come back to it as time permitted; I say 20 years - I see now that my copy was published in 1972.
I began to enjoy it when I'd reach the quarter way in mark - I understood what he was saying, why he felt he had to say it, I grasped the politics, social and military; and I'm glad I stuck with it (to the extent I did - at least I kept coming back to it). I'm told that people who have read it once tend to come back and read it again: well, 73 now, I doubt I have another 20 years left to me; so I suspect I won't - but if I do, it won't be in this translation.
It would have been much quicker to have learned Russian, and read the original.
