26 Comments
Feb 25Liked by Simon Haisell

So much to appreciate in this week’s summation…thank you!

- That Tolstoy quote ❤️

- Interesting tangent on the letters written home from soldiers. I never knew envelopes were a recent invention around the time of the Civil War. And how times have changed - my weight is probably the absolute LAST thing that I would write in a letter to someone but interesting that they used that to judge each other’s wellbeing in a time where food was more scarce.

- I liked your comparison on how all three of the Kuragin children were experiencing different types of love, I hadn’t thought of it like that.

When looking at the book I finally can see that we are putting a dent in it! CanNOT believe how much we have left to read though because so much has already happened. It doesn’t seem possible that the remainder of the book can continue to be as detailed as what we have read so far - what an extraordinary feat of writing 😍

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There's so much to this book! Each chapter is so rich and detailed.

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To think that I skimmed through the war chapters when I read W&P many years ago! Wnat a feast, with all the discussion to help work out the logistics. Thank you Simon.

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What a feast indeed!

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Tolstoy’s “fall in love with life” quote is beautiful. Thank you for sharing it.

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Love that quote.

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Feb 25Liked by Simon Haisell

A cache of letters from my mother's great-grandfather and his brother and father from the Union army during the American Civil War are in the Maine Hstorical Society collection, and I have a stack of typed transcripts my grandfather made of them (as well as scans of the originals, which are quite difficult to read). There are two letters from my g-g-grandfather describing the same battle (I think it was Chancellorsville), one to his mother and one to a cousin his own age. The letter to his mother is very light-hearted and sort of funny, and the one is cousin is harrowing. One wouldn't even know the same event was described without checking the dates.

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That is fascinating, thank you for sharing. It makes you think, how we only ever get one side of a story in life. The side people want to tell us or think we want to hear. That's the fabulous thing about Tolstoy, we see so many perspectives and fit it all together.

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Feb 26Liked by Simon Haisell

The most notable thing I’ve ever bought that I didn’t need was a taxidermy cinnamon bear. I bought her from an antique store for myself on my 45th birthday, just after my final chemo treatment. I named her Fur Elise.

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But oddly I feel like you did need that bear as it now plays a part in your life story. Congratulations to your 45 year old self for coming out the other side of chemo and I hope the current you is doing well.

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Feb 25Liked by Simon Haisell

“The question as whether he could ever bring himself to part from his daughter and give her to a husband. The prince never directly asked himself that question, knowing beforehand that he would have to answer it justly, and justice clashed not only with his feelings, but with the very possibility of life.” Prince Bolkonsky’s sense of duty is admirable. He could be a more gentle father, a kinder human being, but not a more just man. I think justice is the one character virtue that goes largely unseen and taken too many times for granted.

We think that loving someone is to try to keep them for ourselves, but it’s giving them up although we doubt our survival is possible without them. Justice is what makes us really listen to others’ needs, and humanizes the enemy. Justice makes us the best we can be.

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I think this struggle is common to us all. Something like the battle between id/ego and superego. Having a 1 year old and a 3 year old right now is showing me how long and hard the battle against our innate feelings is! Learning to do what is right takes a lifetime.

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Feb 25Liked by Simon Haisell

Love for your children is the ultimate “pay it forward”. Our children don’t belong to us, they belong to themselves and the world. I have a 9, 6 and 3 year olds and yes, I hear you.

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Oh they are wild things. It's a wonderful experience watching them figure it all out.

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Like Mary, I'm struck by the Tolstoy quote on the aim of the writer.

Thank you for sharing this, it seems I'm in that state we writers know as "what am I doing, and why? am I wasting mine and my family's time?"

Coming daily to classic literature like this, which follows its own rules and not the writing formulas of our modern time, is very grounding in the practice -- not the performance -- of the work.

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I feel that. It can be very frustrating trying to justify your writing to yourself and the world, when it isn't where you want it to be. There's a book somewhere that looks at the evolution of War and Peace from first draft to final version. I might try and get hold of it sometime as it would be so instructive and inspiring to see it in its imperfect form.

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Feb 26Liked by Simon Haisell

My family has some valuable letters, albeit not written from a battlefront. When my great-great grandparents headed west to Manitoba & then across the border into northwestern Minnesota in the late 1870s, they wrote letters to my great-great grandmother's parents & sister back in Ontario. The sister saved the letters and when she died in 1949, they were retrieved by a cousin of my grandfather's. They were transcribed/typed up as part of a local history project in the 1950s, and copies circulated among the family. A local history blogger discovered them about 15-20 years ago, and published them on her blog -- and because of that, we have made contact with branches of the family we had long lost touch with. The original are now preserved in the county museum. To hold them in my hands and see my great-great-grandparents' handwriting was an amazing feeling!

Re: Waterloo -- through my genealogy research, I've learned that my great x4 grandfather was there -- AND, so was his son/my great x3 grandfather, who served as a drummer boy!! He would have been about 8 years old at the time. I CANNOT IMAGINE. (It does explain the number of men in that family who had "Wellington" as part of their name...!)

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Oh interesting! Isn't it incredible that the internet has led to all kinds of discoveries and connections. And Wellington... you know in the UK we call rubber boots wellies after Wellington? Every winter, we carry the memory of Waterloo around on our feet.

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Tolstoy wrote such a clean transition from peace to war in part 3. I’m interested to see what he does with the structure of the book as we go through.

Also, this is my first time reading W&P, and I’m the same age you were when you first read it @Simon Haisell

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I was slightly older I think, more like 25. I think I've read it every five years or so since. We do have a long stretch of peace between the wars coming up and the story is kind of propped between two battles Austerlitz and Borodino. Two great tent poles.

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Mar 7Liked by Simon Haisell

Enjoyed this commentary, especially noting again all the significant nuggets that make this “chunky book” so loaded with feelings, emotions, action all played out by its complex characters- but aren’t we all complex characters?? 😁 I am finally understanding why this book can be re-read multiple times! Thank you @ Simon Haisell for always making us see people from a different angle.

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Mar 4Liked by Simon Haisell

Am so grateful for richness you bring to the experience of reading this book!

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“It’s worth taking these tender thoughts with us as we continue through the novel. We encounter characters like people, fixed in the moment. We think we know them. But we can barely conceive of all the people they’ve been. To think even Vasili Kuragin and Nikolai Bolkonsky were once defenceless little infants!“

But does it matter? Everyone starts out the same but that in no way excuses Vasili becoming a self serving schemer who manipulates people for his own advantage. Or remaining incredibly naive, youth and idiocy are often intertwined but Bolkonsky doesn’t exhibit any signs of maturity from his experiences.

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Hey Gaynol. I think it matters more than anything. It is not about making excuses but approaching each person with the same curiosity and compassion we would hope for ourselves. So we don't just see someone as they are in this moment, but instead wonder about everything we don't know about them. We can think about all the experiences that led to where they are now, as well as the better sides to their character that we may have not seen or not been able to appreciate. It's about realising how we only ever see a small part of a person but how we would like to treat others as complete beings, since this is how we see and treat ourselves.

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Am so grateful for richness you bring to the experience of reading this book!

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deletedFeb 25
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What an amazing description of him from eye witness accounts. Worth any souvenir to have that kind of detail from the past.

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