War and Peace: Day 66, Page 915

I feel like I've read an enormous amount since I last wrote at the start of my break. Luckily, I'm feeling a lot better about the novel right now. It's almost as if Tolstoy could sense that his readers would get bored in certain sections, and chose to add in bits of entertainment. Count Rostov is one character that brings a sort of comic relief, mostly because of the way that Tolstoy imitates his accent:"What if the Smolensk people have offahd to waise militia for the Empewah?" I spent way too much time reading his lines out loud, which says a lot about how interesting this section of the book was(n't).

I'm going to take a flying leap over most of part one and the beginning part two, just because I don't have anything significant to say about them. At the end of part two I finally got the war scenes that I've been waiting for. The French are starting to advance towards Moscow much too quickly for the Russians to keep up, and some of the main characters of the novel are really suffering. Napoleon has made plans to occupy Borodino, which ends up being an extremely bloody battle. Napoleon refers to the whole situation as a game, and to the Russians as chessmen, which is pretty grim. He actually has a cold for most of the battle, which is one of the reasons that historians say that the conflict didn't live up to its full potential. The story moves on faster and faster until Pierre, who is what some would call a brave civilian, gets himself into the battlefield and is face to face with a mess of corpses. This part of the war was described much too thoroughly... Tolstoy definitely had an eye for detail! 

Now fast forward to part three, where Prince Andrew is in the "hospital" with Anatole. They refused to speak to each other the whole time, which I suppose makes sense, considering they are both Natasha's ex-fiances. Prince Andrew decides that if he makes it out of the treatment alive he will try to get back into Natasha's life. I'm actually not sure if he died or not, because Tolstoy moved right on to an analysis of absolute continuity of motion, something that this novel does not have. 

There are so many things that Tolstoy could have cut down while writing. It's not that what he has to say is boring, it's how verbose he is in his descriptions; if only he had an editor to help him out. I still like to think that I'm racing to finish this book, just that now I'm running a more well-paced race. Excuse the novel-related pun, but I'm soldiering on!