War and Peace - Tolstoy, Anne Dunnigan (trans.)

 

Influences

In the Introduction to my version of The Iliad, Tolstoy is said to have claimed it as the highest achievement of storytelling. The analogies that run rampant through The Iliad are used in Tolstoy's style too... “Like a gambler who begins to win at cards, and instead of attributing this to the luck of his hands, instead believes he has discovered a winning method...” and so on.

War and Peace is full of the Iliad.

And For Whom the Bell Tolls is full of War and Peace.

And sprigs of Vonnegut's style grow there too. Not only is Tolstoy a fan of “And so on,” he also sums up his book at the end with two pages of pure Vonnegut style: The tone is deadpan, every reason for the Napoleonic wars is a fallacy, and at the end there is a shrug about the inexplicable, arbitrary path of everything that has happened. Pierre is even a good reflection of Billy Pilgrim as he walks through battle scenes in his white suit, staring and seeming lost in thought, even developing psychosis at points very similar to Pilgrim's narcolepsy. The scene detailing Pierre's witness to the execution of his fellow prisoners reads like Vonnegut, along with some of Prince Andrei's death-bred indifference to worldly affairs.


Hank Eaton said, “Now there is a book you don't want to end.” And I admit, as soon as it was over I was tempted to begin it again.

I sat there in bed, on a rainy night, in my camphouse at Crater Lake, and thought, Damn. What the Hell will I read now? I always have to read something. But what could finish War and Peace, especially when I will be thinking about the characters and the tone of the story as I read the next book?


I do not know if I could try to take on the telling of a war story. My teenage attempt was pretty fair, only because it was lost in dreamery.


What I know now is that The Iliad, War And Peace, and 20th century works are all inextricably linked. And I will have to ride an influence very hard if I will ever make it through a plot.

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