Marjorie Perloff, “Rereading War and Peace with Sergei Bondarchuk,” Raritan, Spring 2023 (XLII, 4).
When I think of Marjorie Perloff I think of one of our greatest critics of experimental and avant-garde literature. Two of her groundbreaking studies alone, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton, 1981) and Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago, 2010), provide indispensable guides to the many perplexing and beguiling works of early modernism and all the various forms of postmodernisms that followed. So I was surprised recently to come across her essay on the literary pleasures of Tolstoy’s enduring classic, War and Peace. I had associated her so firmly with the literature of the new that I never realized how immersed she was in the older classics.
And immersed as a receptive reader, not only as an astute critic. Part of my pleasure in reading her essay came from sharing the visceral—not always cognitive—delight she takes in reading Tolstoy’s monumental novel, a book she says she rereads “every five years or so.” She rereads not to deconstruct or unearth complex buried structures but, as she endearingly says about every new reading: “I always hope that this time Natasha or Andrei will get it right.”
An epigraph from Tolstoy signals her approach to the novel. “The goals of art are incommensurate…with social goals,” he wrote in an 1865 letter. “The goal of the artist is not to solve a question irrefutably, but to force people to love life in all its innumerable, inexhaustible manifestations.” As in much of her criticism, her approach is driven by aesthetics and the analysis of verbal techniques and structural design (an approach I totally agree with). But this essay reminds us that an aesthetic approach can be as much about pleasure and satisfaction as about critical judgment and evaluation. The sheer enjoyment of reading a novel, the excitement, suspense, amusement—all those pleasurable sensations that the usually loquacious Henry James simply calls “fun”—tend to go missing once the critical apparatus is applied. Perloff's essay reminds us that there’s no reason why deep pleasure and critical perception shouldn’t coalesce as we read.
As its title indicates, the essay isn’t only about Tolstoy’s masterpiece; Perloff uses as her jumping off point Sergei Bondarchuk’s restored 1966-67 adaptation of the novel that she recently watched, thanks to the Criterion Collection. When a year or so ago, I myself caught the lavish, seven-hour, four-part production (with its cast of thousands and cost of over one billion) that won an Oscar in 1968 for Best Foreign Film, I didn’t realize that what’s so remarkable about the film is that Bondarchuk remains absolutely faithful to Tolstoy’s language. Perloff considers this—given the book’s enormous size—as “an amazing feat:” “The voice of the narrator, the dialogue, and even the rendition of a given character’s unspoken thoughts—all these are entirely Tolstoy’s own.” The film (which is still available on Criterion) sends her back again to the book which in turn “rekindles” in her a basic question she feels Tolstoy scholars “sidestep”: “How does he do it? What is it that makes War and Peace so lifelike?”
To answer this question she dismisses conventional notions of Tolstoy’s “artlessness” or “formlessness” and instead takes the more difficult critical path of considering precisely what it is that makes the novel seem so close to actual life. I won’t divulge any more except to say that one of the chief reasons the novel seems so like life itself—and one that’s also reinforced by the film—is that the narrator’s notorious “omniscience” is more limited and crucial to the reader’s experience than critics seem to realize. Tolstoy is “the least psychoanalytic of novelists,” Perloff maintains, and he leaves a great deal unspoken and unknown despite his so-called “omniscience.” If the reader has difficulties understanding any of the characters fully—their behavior, motivations, inconsistencies, impulses—it’s likely because Tolstoy’s characters “don’t know themselves.” Indeterminacy remains a large feature of Perloff’s aesthetics.
An aside: Perloff frames her essay within the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, opening her analysis of War and Peace by citing the Ukrainian novelist Oksana Zabuzhko, who argued recently (“No Guilty People in the World? Reading Russian Literature After the Bucha Massacre,” The Times Literary Supplement, April 22, 2022) that the West rationalizes Putin’s evils by weighing them against the “humanism” of great Russian writers like Dostoyesky and Tolstoy. She cites a particular incident from War and Peace to illustrate her point. Perloff is astonished that someone, especially a novelist, could utter such a reductive and “cartoonist” remark about such a complex book. In other words, she reaffirms Tolstoy’s belief that the “goals of art” are not commensurate with “social goals.”
I couldn’t access Zabuzhko’s essay without a subscription, so I’m unable to summarize her entire argument. I did, however, read Elif Batuman’s recent piece in The New Yorker, “Novels of Empire” (January 30, 2023), which also cites Zabuzhko ’s essay, but favorably. Batuman, a passionate student and admirer of Russian literature, reassesses her veneration of Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky in light of the Russian invasion. Although she doesn’t appear to entirely approve of a boycott of Russian literature, she also doesn’t show much sympathy for those who say “The enemy is Putin, not Pushkin.”
Like Perloff and Batuman, I became hooked on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky very early, discovering them at the height of the Cold War largely by accident, when I was seventeen, just months after the launch of Sputnik 1. Though I disagree with a call for boycotts and censorship, I can say Oksana Zabuzhko is correct about one issue: the novels certainly made me less hostile to the Soviet Union. That didn’t mean I approved of Stalin or Khrushchev, leaders I’d learned to fear and loathe, but through these novels I also learned how much humanity I shared with the Russian people. (But this is a topic for another essay).
I’m happy I read as much Russian and post-Soviet literature as I have over the years. If we move into outright war with Russia, perhaps Zabushko will have her wish and these masterpieces will be completely censored and unavailable anywhere, print or digital. And if we do go to war—and if the thought police don't break in and destroy the works I still possess—I will take the risk and read my Tolstoy and Dostoevsky once again. Some may call that treasonous. I call it the undeterrable love of great writing.
Margorie Perloff is Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Stanford University. Her most recent books are Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics and an edition/translation of Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914-1916.
Raritan: A Quarterly Review was founded in 1981 by the late Richard Poirier, a friend and teacher, the person who more than any other taught me how to read literature.
Leo Tolstoy’s short autobiographical work, “First Recollections” appears in the New England Review, 44.2, 2023.