I bought War and Peace in an airport bookstore. This was an incredibly impractical decision, though it was a very nice copy. The pages were smooth and thin and the spine had a softness that allowed the book to splay apart so I was free to hold a mug of tea with both hands or eat an overly-large bowl of cereal.  It was a big copy, but not as big as an art history book—you could still measure your progress in inches read and not feel depressed. But I was carrying a laptop as well, and later, as I ran from the Alaska terminal to the American terminal, I admitted to myself that the decision was pretty silly. I felt macho, paying for that book, I won’t lie—I was definitely thinking that the salesperson would be pretty impressed, not to mention my fellow passengers.  Every aching, arm-straining step felt like karmic retribution for my pretentiousness. In penance, I promised myself that I would not read a word of any other book before I finished.

The book had a tempo, steady and slow, as if set to a metronome. Characters were hit by catastrophe, recovered, fell in and out of love, had children, died. The war, alternatively in the background and foreground, seemed interminable.  Even the most shocking developments were tempered by the thickness of the remaining pages. The story marched on regardless of major deaths or scandal, impartial in a way that put my own life in perspective. It is much easier to forgive a car that cuts you off on the freeway when you are thinking philosophically about the scope of the universe. I started to think of the book’s immensity as more of a comfort than a burden. The foreign universe was not oppressive as much as reassuring, operating with a deep structural logic astounding in a work of fiction.

As I read, I completely ignored themes, social commentary, anything that could be a possible essay topic. On a very basic level, to analyze is to be removed from the world of the book, to look at the characters with eyes always rooted in our world. As one Comparative Literature concentrator laments, “I can’t even read Harry Potter anymore without analyzing the racial analogies in the Mudblood/pureblood conflict.” There is something terrible in being so conscious while you are reading that you know exactly how many pages you have read and, more importantly, how many pages you have left to read. Every underline is a physical reminder that books are not little portals into other imaginary worlds but physical objects, ink on paper. The greatest obstacle to my non-academic approach to reading W & P was a complete ignorance of Russian culture, but as I read, it became like learning a new language. I am sure that I mistranslated elements, and in all likelihood I missed what makes the book a Great Book. But it was wonderful to read a Great Book as just a very good story and nothing more.

Tolstoy’s world was glued to my world for those months that I waded through it, its atmosphere permeating my life, providing a backdrop to everything I did. Yet only a few months after I finished the book, the details of the plot had already blurred together. Still, I vividly remembered that feeling of submersion. Without analyzing the plot or memorizing quotes, the experience of reading the book became more memorable than its actual substance. Rereading the first chapters now is like smelling sawdust or hearing the song my alarm clock played during high school. My experience with War and Peace transformed it from a book to a depository of memories, perpetually preserving that summer when I lived halfway between Seattle and Tolstoy’s Russia.