The Shelter Series: Adrienne Celt on Tolstoy
As a college student, I was introduced to the idea that one can either be a “Dostoevsky reader” or a “Tolstoy reader”—never both. Always a fan of team sports, I immediately picked a side, throwing my lot in with Dostoevsky’s frantic intelligence and sense of transcendence.
I didn’t understand Tolstoy, at the time—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I wasn’t touched by him. I was a Philosophy and Russian Language major, and reading Dostoevsky made me feel I was doing the work of both disciplines at once, while also maybe running sprints and jumping hurdles. Once, my junior year, a friend ran into my living room and pulled me to my feet and said, “It’s time to do, Adrienne! It’s time to do!” Meaning, it was time to live. This was extremely Dostoevsky energy.
Recently, however, I began reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace for the first time in many years, following along with Yiyun Li and A Public Space’s #TolstoyTogether initiative. I figured it was only 12 pages a day, and I could drop out quietly if I didn’t enjoy it. But a funny thing happened: at last, I started to feel Tolstoy’s rhythms.
A page or two in, my blood pressure dropped, and I began to calm: not in the false way I can Force-Quit my anxiety while watching a scary movie, but in a deeper, limbic manner, cool blood rushing through my veins. Tolstoy, I’ve realized, is a master of the slow moment. Sometimes, as I begin a chapter, I am uncertain who is on stage, what their relationship is to one another: at nineteen, this frustrated me, and made me feel stupid. Now I know to simply wait. Tolstoy allows scenes to play out patiently, does not require each of them to unravel a plot so much as it excavates a bit of humanity.
His voice is also singular. Tolstoy writes with omniscience, but not distance: his narrator speaks from outside his characters, but with such precision that he seems to speak from within, substituting humanity for irony, observation for judgement (at least most of the time). Tolstoy was not always right for me: I was not ready for him. But now his moment has arrived.
We are all together in a place of waiting and noticing—often, noticing a bit too much, as numbers and theories unspool in the news, and hysteria floods every social media platform. Reading War and Peace allows me to close the door on all that noise, just for a while. And it opens a new door, onto a longer view of history. Onto the quiet space that exists between human beings who are willing to listen to one another, and onto the immanence of the natural world, which continues its discourse, despite our chatter.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace (Inner Sanctum Edition). Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. New York, Simon and Schuster, Inc, 1942. https://apublicspace.org/news/detail/tolstoy-together
