On a recent trip back east I discovered my beat-up copy of Anna Karenina wedged in the K section of my friends’ book shelves, having forgotten I abandoned it there several winters ago while taking shelter during severe heartbreak. The exact page where I stopped reading was still marked, approximately one-third of the way through, at a scene that I remembered finally giving up at: an illicit, pastoral moment between Anna and Vronsky, complete with borrowed horses, sobbed confessions, and a sense of all hope lost. This discovery reminded me of the way certain novels function within our life phases as sense-memory, providing a tonal undertone to the days, along with, say, an odor of white flowers folded over a fence, or a tea’s particular bitterness. Such details infuse our pasts to varying degrees, and it happens that Tolstoy, his persona and work, is richly woven into two distinct phases of mine: one of the heartbreak previously mentioned, and another of my more distant heart. What follows is a lightning tracing of that history, not quite linear, told in two parts (the second of which will follow in my next post).
My introduction to Tolstoy came in early childhood. When I was six I watched a Peanuts special called “Happy New Year, Charlie Brown!” in which Charlie Brown must write a book report on War and Peace over winter break; naturally, this wildly conflicts with his sense of freedom, and more importantly, with his invitation to Peppermint Patty’s New Year’s Eve party, where his crush, the “Little Red-Haired Girl,” will be. I had no real concept of who Tolstoy was, only that the sketched cover of War and Peace looked boring, plain maroon with a big, vague title. Nonetheless, from this deceptively lighthearted cartoon I learned early that stories told in books don’t always help us with our own. Rather, and how often, love and literature can be completely separate, warring entities in the emotional life of a person–or maybe it’s that one is not always salve for the other. Regardless, as Charlie Brown sees it, Tolstoy causes him to suffer doubly, love and intellect equally poised to lose since both require his full attention, and his attention is divided. The story culminates in Charlie struggling to write his book report on the front porch of the party when he glimpses Linus, of all Peanuts, winning a dance with the Little Red-Haired Girl. As he watches this scene unfold through the lit window, War and Peace weighs a huge, dumb brick in his hands. Charlie is trapped between his heart and his head; he makes no progress with either his love object or his assignment. Fittingly, back at school, he receives a “D” for his essay that was written with an elsewhere heart.
Believe it or not, this scenario made me terrified of Tolstoy for all of my growing up years as I waited with dread for the book that, despite my obsessive reading nature, I assumed I would fail. I could only surmise that War and Peace was going to keep me from love and freedom and parties, and further, it posed an insurmountable challenge in my academic career. This sense of doom lasted until my freshman year at Bard college where, reluctantly, I took a three-day a week, 7:00 a.m. class on War and Peace only. The class, as you can imagine, was typically peopled by about two students out of five on any given morning, but surprisingly, I was always one of the two. I loved the multiple story lines, the density of description, the truth and accuracy in such small moments as the poor cousin, Natasha, finally being loved, only after she ruffles proper decorum, staging a permissible boldness from her crush by wearing a burnt-cork mustache to a costume party. I loved Prince Andrew looking at the sky, unable to look anywhere but the sky, as he died. These are the moments recalled, correctly or not, that are among my favorite in all of literature.
So it was that my first real life experience of Tolstoy was the complete opposite of the cartoon boy’s: I fell in love with War and Peace and I was overwhelmingly undistracted by love at the time. My nights as a shy, transfer student at a middle-of-nowhere winter college were devoid of romance and excitement and I threw myself into the course’s demanding pace, falling asleep every night in my awful dorm bed, in an overflow trailer on the edge of the Tivoli Bays, after completing a section of the 1000+ tissue thin pages. I wrote my response essays with fiery affection for the story, pre-companion, pre-cell phone, pre-Facebook, even pre-in-room internet, to distract me. In this love-void way, I conquered my Tolstoyan fear. I devoured that book, or, looking to be overcome, I let that book devour me.
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Watch for my next post on reading (failing to read) Tolstoy, part two!