- Hey Princess, for the next It's Lit episode, what do you wanna do for the next topic?

- Something snappy, we're thinking fun.

- Something short.

- You know, something quick and digestible.

- Yeah, I mean, it's not like the script needs to be "War and Peace" or something.

(gentle playful music) So it's finally come to this.

It is finally time for us to talk about the big book, the long boy, that novel you negatively compare everything and anything to when things start to get long and unwieldy.

- Yeah, that er example of books that are almost too long to be allowed, that only nerds and pedants read so that they can say that they have, the GOAT of literary humble bragging in whom's shadow Joyce's "Ulysses" and Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" quake.

- [Both] "War and Peace".

- So you have read it, right?

- I thought you had.

(light upbeat music) According to Tolstoy himself, "War and Peace" was not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle.

And in this day and age of publishing, where word count, readability, and topical relevance are the lifeline of getting a novel to print, we look at books like "War and Peace" as something of a relic.

(upbeat orchestral music) While most publishers today would advise that general adult fiction hover around 120,000 words, Tolstoy was perfectly comfortable clocking in at a cool 587,000 words with "War and Peace", which, while we're here, let's dispel a couple of notions real quick about it being the longest book.

Other popular books of similar or greater length include "Lord of the Rings" at 570,000; "Les Miserables" at 655,000; and "Atlas Shrugged" at 645,000.

Yikes.

But these other books, despite their length, have embedded themselves in the public consciousness, more than "War and Peace".

And yet "War and Peace" floats on our periphery, mostly code for being long and Russian.

So how does one even begin to describe "War and Peace"?

In the words of Northwestern, professor and literary critic Gary Saul Morson: With it's endless plot lines that go nowhere, its innumerable characters who appear only to disappear, its endless mass of disconnected and contingent events, the book seems a fabric of lost threads, a work without structure and backbone, it ought to be a failure.

And yet it is plainly the greatest novel ever written.

Will that (sighs) simplify things?

It's hard to condense "War and Peace"'s plot down to something easily digestible.

This is why every adaptation of it tends to be 300 hours long, like the BBC miniseries; or focused on only short sections, like the musical, "Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812"; or just bad like Audrey Hepburn's version from 1956.

We love you Audrey, but that did not slay.

But at its heart, "War and Peace" concerns itself with the lives of three young nobles throughout the beginning, height, and post-war years of Russia's foray into the Napoleanic Wars.

There's Pierre, a nerd of inhuman strength who comes into wealth and nobility by circumstance, and naturally angst about how to use these resources ethically and find personal happiness.

Super Byronic (laughs).

There's Natasha, the saucy ingenue, who feels pressured to marry well because of her family's financial carelessness, and her disquiet at not being able to follow her heart.

And then there's Andre, sweet Andre, the jaw prince from old money who finds his life so deeply unfulfilling to the point of nihilism, where he's like (gasps), "Die in war for glory?

Sounds cool, pencil me in."

He just needs therapy.

While the book follows their lives over the span of 15 years, Tolstoy also manages to weave in and out of the lives of hundreds of other characters, including real historical figures like Napoleon Bonaparte.

Even from its first publication, readers were hard-pressed to be able to classify it with its operatic scale and large, tangental essays insert into the narrative, you know, for flava.

So what about this makes "War and Peace" inherently memorable, besides being something literary size queens could rejoice over?

"War and Peace" was first published as a magazine serial between 1865 and 1867 under the title "The Year 1805", And subsequently published in its entirety as "War and Peace" in 1869.

Tolstoy originally intended it to be about the life of a Decembrist aristocrat returning from exile in Siberia in the 1850s.

But then he decided he couldn't just write about that, so he also needed to give context and write about the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, when a section of aristocrats slash military officers politely rebelled against the new czar of Russia, Nicholas I.

But Tolstoy, who's a lore fanboy, decides one also cannot talk about the Decembrist Revolution without talking about the War of 1812 and the Napoleanic invasion of Russia.

So he writes himself into a 600,000 word corner about that instead.

Relatable author content, honestly.

But more importantly, fiction writing du jour was in a strange spot in the 1860s.

Popular fiction wavered between quickly published topical stories that Tolstoy despised, thinking of them as literary clickbait that did nothing to advance the craft, and a love of longer historical fiction like Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe", which Tolstoy found overly romantic and solipsistic, only celebrating important men, when Tolstoy believed that the day-to-day lives of average people were what really mattered.

Tolstoy's frustration with writing that pertained to real life could be best summed up in his own words: When an officer fell on the field of Borodino, do not imagine that he rejoiced about saving his fatherland.

On the contrary, he thought about his mother, the woman he had loved, the joys and smallness of life, and Napoleon, Kutuzov, the Grand Army, all seemed to him pitiful and insignificant by comparison.

With that in mind, "War and Peace" becomes a Las Vegas buffet of questions regarding ethics.

What does it mean to love one's country when its actions sow discord?

What obligations do we have to our fellow humans when wealth has placed us in a position of comfort?

Is the glory of the self greater than the love of another?

And should you really, truly be allowed to wrestle a bear after drinking enough vodka to kill a horse?

And yes, this does actually happen in this massive book.

Even though it was immediately popular upon publication, "War and Peace" was criticized on both sides of the political aisle.

It focused too much on the nobility and Russia's serfdom imperialist past to progressives.

And to conservatives, it dragged notable figures of the country's past through the mud and was generally unpatriotic.

And perhaps that's "War and Peace"'s most enduring quality, that while Tolstoy understood capturing objective truth was impossible, it was important to look at the interior lives of the common man to get to the heart of truth, that literature is not just about heroes and villains, but as Henry James once described "War and Peace", the wonderful mass of life.

There's a relative lack of English language scholarship devoted specifically to "War and Peace".

In his essay for "The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy", our old friend Gary Saul Morson has this to say: Tolstoy explains that he has deliberately avoided structure and closure, because those usual literary devices violate presentness.

Where there is structure there is no contingency, and each present moment is already weighed by the advance plan into which it must fit.

But life is not like that.

It's rife with contingency and loose ends are never all resolved.

An author who truly inspires to realism must find an alternative to structure.

Life for Tolstoy was not categorized by the binaries of good or bad, hero or villain, great or small, comedic or tragic, but by where people's actions fell on the constantly changing gradient between.

He understood that characters feel more real to readers in their small triumphs, comforting a friend, picking away at a balalaika, and failures.

He understood that nuance is a feature, not a bug.

He had clearly never been on Twitter.

- "War and Peace"'s legacy to the literary world is not so much its length, but its contribution to realism and the idea that everyone, from kings to sled drivers, has a vast interiority within them.

- Pair this with Tolstoy's own words on art: If art is an important matter, a spiritual blessing, essential for all men, then it should be accessible to everyone.

And if, as in our day, it is not accessible to all men, then one of two things: either art is not the vital matter it is represented to be or that art which we call art is not the real thing.

- Though we take it for granted in general fiction today, Tolstoy helps to upend the idea that literature should only concern itself and be written for the feelings of larger-than-life characters and heroes.

Midway through the novel, after our heroine Natasha has disgraced herself and has been shunned by Moscow society, Pierre goes to visit her to rebuke her as everyone else has.

But when he sees her complete despair, he is inevitably compelled to comfort Natasha as a friend would, and quietly realizes his love for her.

Tolstoy describes this small and intimate revelation as Pierre leaves her house as follows: An immense expanse of dark starry sky presented itself to Pierre's eyes.

Surrounded and sprinkled on all sides by stars, shone by the enormous and brilliant comet of 1812, which was said to portend all kinds of woes and end of the world.

In Pierre, however, that comet aroused no feeling of fear.

On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with tears at this bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly like an arrow piercing the earth, to remain fixed in a chosen spot, shining and displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars.

It seemed to appear that this comet fully responded to what was passing in his own softened and uplifted soul, now blossoming into a new life.

- In "War and Peace", Tolstoy gave us a defining viewpoint of hope, that in a wary world of global upheaval, war, death, and political machinations, the goodness of everyday people all feels minute and fleeting, but that the goodness is what survives.

- But remember, don't wrestle any bears, we beg you.