LITMIR.BIZ

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the texture itself embodies the philosophy that it expounds. Keen to free himself from novelistic constraints, Tolstoy turned his creation into what Henry James would disparage as a ‘loose baggy monster’, a vast web of the ‘accidental and the arbitrary’. But apparent inconsistencies turn out to be continuous threads that form and reform in a stream of flux and inconsequence: the lives of central figures are revealed at significant moments in sharply observed episodes; bystanders are briefly caught by the limelight, then vanish for ever in the flow of the text. Even the central characters flourish and fade as we turn the pages. The reader thus turns spectator, immersed, watching, puzzling, remembering, the process of reading akin to living itself. What strikes us as strange – some unexplained personage here, some name mentioned there – may be part of the overall design, the text consciously rendered as random and unfathomable as human existence.

      It is hard, however, to distinguish intentionality from inadvertence in an early draft such as this. While the anomalies in Zaidenshnur’s edition are usually ascribed to the misreading of manuscript, some of them might not be outright mistakes but rather the tentative signs of Tolstoy’s developing ideas. Although the more obvious anomalies have been corrected, some still remain in the Zakharov edition. Should these be conveyed into English, or seamlessly resolved, and if so, how? The loyalties of a translation are always torn between the future reader and the past source. The present translation treads a fine line between the two, sometimes offering close recreations, warts (so to speak) and all, but at other times making minor adjustments, which often means bringing the text anachronistically into line with the canonical version. The following illustrates a minor adjustment. In a sentence that occurs in both early drafts, but is cut from the canonical version, Pierre, at the English Club, drinks something called ‘Alito Margo’. This non-existent potion was clearly a misreading of Tolstoy’s Russian scrawl for ‘Château Margaux’, a French wine that was probably unknown to scholars in the Soviet period, but has been rendered thus in the English.

      In occasional places, to bridge puzzling jumps that occur in the source texts, words have been added in square brackets for the sake of continuity.

      Those familiar with the canonical War and Peace may wonder about the general absence of French from this edition, that language having constituted some 2.5 per cent of Tolstoy’s original text. Accurately depicting the period in which the book is set, Tolstoy shows the Russian upper classes complacently writing and conversing in French, but this conceals an irony, for he also shows not only how the speaking of French alienated the aristocracy from their own native people, but also how it compromised their declared allegiance when Russia was at war with France.

      Whereas Zaidenshnur (1983) faithfully reproduces all the French from Tolstoy’s original manuscripts, the Zakharov version (2000) translates every word into Russian. This is less contentious than it might seem, for Tolstoy himself, when criticised for featuring so much French in his first edition of 1868–9, translated it all into Russian for the second edition of 1873. He also employed various compensatory techniques, telling the reader, for example, that someone was speaking in French when the words themselves were Russian. Posthumous editions would in due course restore the French to the main text and relegate Tolstoy’s Russian translations to footnotes. Soviet editions with the French were called ‘classical’, while cheaper ‘popular’ editions remained all-Russian.

      But questions of readability aside, the loss of French deprives the text of a crucial subtlety, for Tolstoy constantly uses language as a gauge of sincerity and realism: French signals artificiality and remoteness, Russian signals integrity and groundedness, and folk idiom true earthy wisdom.

      English translations have seldom reproduced all, if any, of the French. The present version restores it in ‘gestural’ form only (eh bien! O dieu!), to give a flavour of its original presence and remind the reader of its impact.

      Names in Tolstoy present special problems. In the original manuscripts the names of chief protagonists are French throughout – André, Nicolas, Pierre and so on – although affectionate forms are always Russianised. The present translation uses the Russian forms Andrei and Nikolai, for example, but retains the French Hélène and Pierre, partly because of their uniqueness in the wider literary tradition. Transliteration of foreign words aims for readerly access rather than scholarly precision.

      Place names follow Tolstoy’s idiosyncratic usage and most of his odd, unexplained names of people and apparently inconsistent dates or ages have been left. At that period, Russians used the Julian calendar, which was twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar then in general use elsewhere in Europe. But historical accuracy was of little concern to Tolstoy, and he wrote: ‘An historian and an artist describing an historic epoch have two quite different tasks before them.’ And given the deliberately distorted, impressionistic quality of certain passages, such details as the age assigned to a character seem to be not so much chronologically precise as approximations in development and mentality.

      Tolstoy’s spelling is erratic but has generally been regularised. However, the alternate spellings of Bonaparte/Buonaparte follow the original draft exactly, for they subtly register the Russians’ changing view of the French leader’s repeated self-inventions, tracing the rise of this ‘upstart’ from low-born Corsican soldier (Buonaparte) to French general (Bonaparte) to Emperor (Napoleon). Russians would have perceived an audible difference between the derisively drawled vowel-sounds of Italian ‘Bu-o-na-par-te’, and the contemptuous snort of the French ‘Bonaparte’.

      Finally we come to the slightly vexed question of Tolstoy’s style. Tolstoy was an experimental writer who rejected the nineteenth century novel with its conventions and pretensions, above all to authorial invisibility. He wished to convey widely differing experiential effects, many of them rooted in the visual: his writing is often craggy and rough, yet it achieves a piercing clarity that is as merciless as it is miraculous. This relentless percipience is relieved by softer moments of impressionism, such as his famous false-naive technique of ‘ostranenie’ or ‘defamiliarisation’ (numbingly tragic on the battlefield, wryly comic in the theatre). Similarly impressionistic are the long, winding sentences with their many clauses that hasten along in the recreation of swiftly passing time. Sometimes the slipping syntax that results from this haste has been corrected in English, but sometimes it has been left, true to the original. Such slippage could well be part of Tolstoy’s deliberate deformations. His generally hurtling manner has a brusqueness and vigour that purposely fly in the face of literary forebears (especially the gentilities of Turgenev, with whom he quarrelled). His use of the same unvarying adjective throughout a single passage, in grand disregard for fine style, creates an unrepentant hammering effect in Russian but raises problems in English, which abhors repetition of this kind. Whilst the present translation introduces small variations in the name of stylistic euphony, it occasionally mimics that repetition to enable readers to feel the force and strangeness of the original. Time and again Tolstoy insisted that this work was neither a novel nor a poem nor a history, and he would have loathed the idea of its being recast in translation as the very thing, a neat and tidy story, that he so strenuously sought to avoid.

      Tolstoy’s presence in the text is felt everywhere, but especially in his use of the parenthetical aside, whereby the authorial voice suddenly and unashamedly disrupts the story to offer a comment or explanation, revealing a contempt for the very artifice of fiction with which it is beguiling us. In the Russian, this change of voice mid-dialogue carries no warning punctuation, but in the translation it is isolated by the usual marks. In this, as in so many other respects, Tolstoy’s virtuoso brilliance prefigures the modernists of the twentieth century: Vladimir Nabokov, for example, writing in English almost a hundred years later, would perfect the art of parenthesis with his famous: ‘(picnic, lightning)’, but well before that Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf were just two among the many whose admiration had taken the sincerest form it could, that of imitation. The present translation has tried to convey some of the special qualities that make this early version of War and Peace, written with the energy of an artist who was still feeling his way to greatness, so deserving of our close attention.

      Jenefer Coates

      Editor

      Andrew Bromfield

      Translator

      Table

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