War and Peace and Me
KITMAN, MARVIN
Off Television War and Peace and Me By Marvin Kitman Book One ONE OF the by-products of my years as a TV critic, a profession I began here in 1967, was my becoming functionally...
...As early as the 17th century, when Bialystok was still part of Russia, Kitmans were slow readers...
...The strange aspect of all this is that we are not talking about some dope...
...It didn’t matter to me...
...And I howled at Leo’s withering sarcasm in dealing with his other favorite targets, the French and Russian historians, who got it all wrong from Austerlitz to Borodino...
...In addition, I still remembered the episode of Cheers where Sam Malone, trying to show Diane he was not as stupid as he seemed, attempted to read all of War and Peace in a single night...
...As a young person, in the Evelyn Wood high-tech period of literacy, I was ashamed of not being a fast reader...
...The country never would have gotten involved in Vietnam, for example, if President John F. Kennedy, a fast reader, did not miss the import of the pages in his briefings about the French at Dienbienphu...
...Its goal is to bring others out of the closet...
...Book Two THREE MONTHS LATER I was able to start fulfilling my lifelong ambition to read War and Peace...
...This essay is already long enough in length, if not psychological insights, understanding of humanity, telling it like it is, and whatever else Tolstoi had going for him...
...One week everything that happened in Iraq reminded me of Napoleon’s long goodbye from Moscow...
...Tolstoi wrists are the literary equivalent of tennis elbow...
...Most of the key characters in War and Peace have at least three names: patronymics, detailing family lineages, plus a nickname...
...I used to brag in my column that I only read books during the commercials...
...But few know how Russia’s premier railroad was built...
...Never mind that besides being readingchallenged, I am a slow reader...
...But you can’t just jump into the deep end of the pool if you’re not sure you can swim...
...He staggered around the Cheers bar the next day, his head filled with the names of dead Russians...
...Back in my early career as a speculator, following Charles H. Dow’s theory of how to get rich (“buy low and sell high”), I shrewdly bought worthless Tsarist railroad bonds against the day when capitalism would triumph over Communism, and the government’s obligations would finally be honored...
...Not so, says Professor Stephen F. Cohen of New York University’s Russian and Slavic Studies Department...
...We are the people authors write books for...
...I found myself marveling at how long reading has been going on...
...And who could fail to recall the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry tells Elaine that War and Peace was originally titled War, What Is It Good For...
...Petersburg’s Moskovsky Station...
...Petersburg-Moscow express, the famed Red Arrow...
...So approaching the end—as I thought of the last 250 pages—I began to get depressed...
...I didn’t even have the usual unread copy in the house...
...I enjoyed reading about the stupidity of the Russian general staff, the nine egomaniacal field marshals who fought each other more effectively than the French in the smoke-filled back rooms of the palace...
...Wrong...
...My conversation, having similarly become based on what page I was up to, was also affected...
...As evidence, I cited the fact that I had been reading War and Peace since 1969...
...But I didn’t really believe it...
...In To lstoi’s mind the decapitation occurred as the train was pulling out of the Nizhni Novgorod Station, the stop near the Count’s family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula guberniya of Central Russia...
...It was a genetic thing...
...What a concept, as they used to say in my old profession...
...I picked Russian literature...
...I exaggerate a little...
...I guess people were afraid I might ask what they thought of Count Bezuhov, or Piotr Kirillovich, or Pierre, or all three of them, since they are the same person...
...War and Peace changed my life...
...Alyosha) and Countess Vronsky, Alyosha’s mom, on my trains...
...It was the greatest comedic moment in Ted Danson’s career...
...For instance, I discovered what the Freemasons do in their temples—a secret more closely guarded to this day than the recipe for making atom bombs...
...For each section of the main line (ultimately the Trans-Siberian Railway), the Tsar’s finance minister would float a new bond issue...
...The society does such things as blame political ills on fast readers...
...That prompted me to form a support group called the Society for Slo Readers of America (SSRA), a kind of slow readers anonymous...
...My early plan: Read every book in my local library...
...It is not as if I didn’t know anything about War and Peace...
...You need an area of specialization...
...Number one on my reading list was the aforementioned War and Peace...
...each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way...
...But I digress, like Tolstoi...
...No longer would I come down to breakfast worried about the Tsar prematurely disbanding the Semeonovsk regiment, or about the fate of Arakcheyev or the Bible Society...
...I couldn’t wait to get to the “War” chapters about another of Tsar Alexander’s noble legions being cut to pieces by Napoleon’s military machine...
...As I tried to read the Epilogue I found myself saying, “Enough already, Lev Nikolaevich...
...Every night around nine or 10, while others were watching the exciting new TV shows, I would curl up in bed with my Penguin edition and my Lindt & Sprüngli milk chocolate and learn more than I ever dreamed possible about Count Ilya Rostov, Prince Vasili Kuragin, Prince Nikolai Andreyevich Bolkonsky, and their happy and unhappy families...
...Petersburg-Moscow connection...
...My attention span was shot...
...It was a political statement, I was told...
...My Leo Baby would have been proud...
...You are a disgrace to slow readers everywhere...
...And I make no apology...
...Her qualifications included studying Russian, French, Italian, and Old Church Slavonic at universities in England, France and Italy...
...Before I go on, I should explain that I had a second reason for choosing to read Anna Karenina first...
...That’s my area of expertise...
...Not all of them either, only Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, or as I now spell it, Tolstoi...
...one was deleted from Edmonds’ translation...
...Unhappy families are reduced to a basic level of psychic connections and are in the end all alike...
...Sweeping all the maps off the Imperial Desk, His Excellency told Count Goforonsky, keeper of the royal maps, to bring a fresh map and a ruler...
...No wonder Alexander I was hailed as a supertsar...
...So I decided to start small with a shorter work by the same author, the 2001 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Anna Karenina...
...He then drew a straight line on the new map from St...
...Out of the clear blue, I would say—echoing some historians—if only Napoleon didn’t have a head cold at Borodino that damaged his judgment, we children of the Russian Diaspora might well be French...
...Elaine, taking this as gospel, tells it to a Russian writer, who then throws her organizer out the limo window...
...My hostess, a retired Queens College anthropology professor, shouted: “Wrong...
...I soon realized the fastest way to end a conversation was simply to mention my reading War and Peace...
...I knew all about Boris and Natasha from Bullwinkle, a formative influence in my early years...
...Leo’s account of the personal entanglements of five aristocratic families with the history of 1805-13, and his profound psychological observations, recorded in a six-year period (1863-69), is an awesome achievement...
...I loved Tolstoi’s debunking of Napoleon’s genius in battles often won by luck or chance, and the blunder of choosing the wrong road back from Moscow, through Smolensk, which took him over the previously scorched earth on the way into town...
...Instead of suing The New Leader and Newsday—my employers during 37 years of watching TV—for loss of faculties under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, I decided to embark on a selfimprovement project...
...I would need a book to tell you all the fascinating things, and dark secrets, I stumbled upon as a dedicated SSRA founder...
...Nevertheless, I recommended War and Peace as the next selection for the SSRA’s Book of the Month or Year or However Long It Takes Club, with the one cavil about the Epilogue...
...Every eight minutes or so with a printed page, my mind wandered...
...Our slogan: “No slo reader left behind...
...All the best people, happy and unhappy alike, rode the Red Arrow line...
...Though my mother’s side was from Vilna, the Boston of the Baltic, where even the waiters read books, the Kaufmans did not read at all...
...Tsar Alexander ignored them all, choosing instead a general (Kutuzov) who let the French knot their own noose...
...But a strange thing began to happen...
...Not all of it, only mid- to late-19th-century authors...
...Yet it is a schizoid reading experience...
...In time, I learned I wasn’t the only slow reader...
...Nevertheless, I got off to a rocky start with Anna Karenina...
...There were many conflicting plans for the line’s route...
...As construction company barons, engineers and surveyors crowded Tsar Nicholas’ office in 1851, His Supreme Eminence became restless...
...Happy families are all wacky in their own way...
...My own father refused to tell me the details of the Masons’ induction rites...
...He is called Leo in my house, or as I came to think of him, Leo Baby...
...Why anyone should need an epilogue after doing four books— “Book One,” “Book Two,” etc.—is a my s tery, unless the supposition is that Leo was looking for a place to park his theories about the philosophy of history...
...More important was my learning that the wheels of the second carriage did in Anna K. I found 27 other pages where Leo, as I began to think of him the more I read, dealt with the passenger flow, number of seats in the compartments, catering, helpfulness of porters, and other favorable conditions on my railroad...
...Off Television War and Peace and Me By Marvin Kitman Book One ONE OF the by-products of my years as a TV critic, a profession I began here in 1967, was my becoming functionally illiterate...
...I am probably the only person in northern New Jersey, if not the entire Northeast Corridor, who in the winter of 2006 was reading Anna Karenina to study Tolstoi’s take on the trains of Tsarist Russia...
...A surprising number of famous people, upon hearing of my socalled disability, confessed they were also slow readers...
...I would need to get up and go to the kitchen, to the bathroom, or out to buy something...
...Book Three WHAT I had known of War and Peace came from Woody Allen’s synopsis in the New Yor ker, “It’s a book about Russia...
...The reaction to my personal improvement project was fine with me...
...But not even Colonel Steve Austin, the Bionic Man, could do that...
...Oh, I could read the listings in TV Guide...
...New Jersey Standard Time), I finished reading War and Peace—only five months, three weeks, four days, and three hours after I started the book...
...My primary focus was Tolstoi’s predigital camera descriptions of the road, the ballast, the rolling stock, the windows, smoking and dining car facilities, samovars, and other amenities of interest to bondholders...
...But I mean books...
...It was very expensive to go straight ahead, but the Tsar didn’t care...
...It was amazing how Leo could keep track of them without a computer flow chart...
...The first person I mentioned it to at a cocktail party, an academic, whistled and said, “No shit...
...Epilogue WHILE DOING a victory turn, celebrating completion of the first part of my Five-Year Reading Plan, and carefully weighing my options in choosing my next book, a major commitment, I received an e-mail from the SSRA’s Board of Trustees...
...We just think while we read...
...Tolstoi describes the actual event with the same attention to detail I was to encounter in all his work...
...It is a remarkable experience: exhilarating, involving, consuming...
...In my desire to make an honest man of myself, I found the book was still available in the single volume Penguin Classics edition of 1982, all 1,444 pages, not including 25 pages occupied by the Introduction, Translator’s Notes, and scorecard of key players compiled by the translator herself, Rosemary Edmonds...
...We are talking about one of the finest minds in Western civilization—before I was talked into being a TV critic...
...In truth, I stopped slow reading on page 1,402, and skimmed the last 42 pages...
...One of my hobbies, you will notice from my listing in Who’s Who in America, is riding trains...
...I better stop here...
...An hour with Uncle Vanya, as it has been said, is like a month in the country...
...It would take a real slow reader years to cover the ground you whizzed by...
...Initially, I couldn’t wait to tell everyone I was reading this great new book...
...Some of you may even be reading it for several days...
...The first step was learning how to read again...
...We met in secret and voted to remove you...
...There are no slow readers, the SSRA argues...
...It is widely known that Anna K. had that unfortunate incident in her life when she threw herself under the wheels of the St...
...Book Four On October 1, 2007, at 10:47 P.M...
...It gave me the feeling he had lost a page or two out of the window in the buggy on his way to Nizhni Novgorod station...
...I wasn’t reading Karenina as a social workers’ handbook...
...I gradually shunted my train studies onto a siding and became deeply involved in the triangular relationship of Anna, her husband (Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin) and her lover (Alyosha the Count...
...You are now a former member of the Society of Slo Readers of America Board of Trustees...
...There’s your route,” the Tsar said...
...Still, it could be seen as the War and Peace of literary criticism...
...I felt I was an eyewitness to the slaughter of 100,000 French and Russian troops for no apparent strategic reason...
...Bondholders, like my shrewd investor ancestors, would be paying...
...Actually, the original had two epilogues...
...He was really impressed...
...It was too heavy for me while lying in the prone position...
...Leo can be sneaky, dropping in characters—580 of them, according to one Wikipedia count—without introduction...
...During a conversation one weekend in the Berkshires, I quoted Tolstoi’s famous opening sentence: “All happy families are alike...
...You need strong wrists to hold up a book of this size, I found...
...On the other hand, the many “Peace” chapters reminded me of watching a Chekhov play...
...I got to page 26 before I lost my way in the plot...
...But there is more to it than that...
...I became a major bondholder in the startup company that built the St...
...Congratulations...
...The translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, won the PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize...
...Anna K. met Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky (a.k.a...
...Petersburg to Moscow line is one of the straightest in the world...
...Everybody assumes the incident took place in either Moscow’s Leningradsky Station in or St...
...The fact that you spent a lot of time with the book in front of you, and would have made less progress if more of that time you were awake, is a lame excuse...
...It is a mere 838 pages, including the Notes, but not counting another 20 pages consisting of the Introduction, Translators’ Note, Further Reading, and List of Principal Characters...
...Petersburg to Moscow...
...Tolstoi’s description of Pierre bumbling his way into the Battle of Borodino as an embedded correspondent with a Russian artillery crew is a brilliant piece of journalism...
...I would have given him a parking ticket...
...As a result, the 404mile St...
...If only there was a Russian who could car ry on Leo’s work— somebody who, as in the case of Robert Ludlum, would be writing under an exhumed name...
...I have evolved to a level beyond literacy...
...Will these people fade out of my life, like good friends who move away and vow to stay in touch...
...I was hopelessly caught up in a great soap opera, caring about happy and unhappy families alike...
...That was not exactly the truth either...
...There are no commercial interruptions every few pages, no phony PBS corporate underwriters doing me a service, no Ken Burns telling me his latest never-ending series of stories defines America, whether the subject was the Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, the Women’s Suffrage Movement, Lewis & Clark, or Thomas Jefferson...
...It’s okay, I argued with myself (for I couldn’t share my insights with simply anyone...
...I am a truly audiovisual person, an incredible achievement in such a short time, I told myself...
...After taking speed-reading courses and doing eye exercises to no avail, I began to realize I had a natural tendency toward slowness...
...But others would shy away from me...
...Those last pages were what Leo titled the “Epilogue...
...READING A BOOK, I discovered, is something you do not forget how to do—like riding a bike, falling off a log, or turning on a TV set...
...Nonetheless, I could relate to Tolstoi’s accounts of the lifestyles of the rich and infamous, even though my great grandfather and his grandfather were serfs...
Vol. 90 • November 2007 • No. 6
