Crabby, Prickly, Bitter, Harsh 
Michael Wood
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Buy this book
‘If the world could write by itself,’ Isaac Babel said, ‘it would write like Tolstoy.’ The remark is quoted at the head of Richard Pevear’s introduction to this handsome new translation of War and Peace. I should like to think Babel meant that if the world was given to intricate thematic contrasts and parallels among its materials, to careful cross-cutting between city and country, high society and hunting, the salon and the racetrack, home and abroad, it would have written War and Peace and Anna Karenina. But I’m afraid he meant something simpler and more familiar: he was making the old, strange claim that Tolstoy, more than any other writer of fiction, reproduces the world just as it really, unarguably is. He is the world’s best secretary, this argument goes, better at the task than Balzac and Zola, also supposedly eager contestants, and certainly better at it than Dostoevsky and Dickens, who never applied for the job at all.
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Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. His most recent book is Literature and the Taste of Knowledge.
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Don’t you care? · Richard Powers
At the Movies · The Lives of Others
At the Movies · Scorsese
At the Movies · Michael Wood slums it with Miami Vice
There is no cure · Freud’s Guesswork
Jasmines in the Hallway · García Márquez tells his story
A Kind of Slither · Woody Allen
At the Movies · the gangster movie
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