photo by: Creators Syndicate

Keith Raffel

It usually takes me a day to tap out a rough draft of this column, and I spend the next morning wrestling it into publishable form. The other five days of the week I devote to novel-writing. Stephen King says we writers need to read to learn their craft: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

Despite that admonition, for years I’d refused to spend the time reading Leo Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace,” published in 1869. A century ago, Nobel Prize winner John Galsworthy, author of “The Forsyte Saga,” called it “the best novel that had ever been written.” Five years ago, the Economist reported it still “is widely considered the world’s greatest novel.”

So why hadn’t I ever read it? Because it’s so daunting, 1,224 pages long in the version I own, almost 600,000 words in English translated from the original Russian. That’s about a dozen times longer than “The Great Gatsby.”

But in the end, Fate intervened. Casually leafing through the spring course catalog at Harvard where I’m a resident scholar, I came across professor Julie Buckler’s course titled simply “Reading Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace.'” I checked the student ratings from the last time she’d taught the course — 4.92 out of 5, perhaps the highest score I’d ever seen. I knew it was time. Spread over a semester, I’d only be reading 100 pages a week. No more excuses.

I emailed the professor, who told me I could audit the course — take it but not for a grade — as long as I sat in the back of the classroom. I accepted her terms. (Later I asked if I could move up front to hear student comments better. She acceded to my plea.)

When I turned to page 1, I felt like a marathoner who’d just taken a first step on what was bound to be a grueling challenge.

On the opening day of class, I found myself seated with about 50 students ready to accept the challenge along with me. That in itself restored some of my faith in this generation of undergraduates. These were my people, people who shared my belief in the potential of a college education. Of course, it should teach you how to make a living. But college should also teach you something about how to lead a meaningful life and to make the world a better place. Studying a great novel will not get you a lucrative Wall Street job like an A in econometrics might, but it will teach you about empathy, the human condition, personal relationships and life’s purpose. My classmates seemed to understand that.

I don’t know about those students, but I doubt I would have had the willpower to read the book on my own. It was professor Buckler’s enthusiasm and love for the novel that propelled the ship that carried me through the sea of sentences. Reading the book could be a slog at times, but it was always a fare worth paying to hear the professor’s compelling insights delivered with verve and intelligence.

And holy mackerel, the students! So bright, so interested, so engaged, so eager to understand life itself. One student told the class she’d been so focused on her college studies that she hadn’t read a novel since high school. The class showed her what she’d missed. She would return to reading fiction, a lost, and now rediscovered, love.

One reason I love to read fiction is to escape from the world we live in, filled as it is with violence, untruths, poverty, racism, inequality, lack of empathy and megalomania. And yet, this book set in Russia during the first two decades of the 19th century echoed present-day events. Russians faced the French emperor Napoleon whose appetite for power was insatiable. Some were ready to accede to it; others were determined to resist. Sound familiar? On the night before battle, the Russian Prince Andrei is willing to trade the love of “my father, my sister, my wife… for a moment of glory… for love from people I don’t know.” Is that what soldiers and politicians do today? Where does that impulse come from?

Listening to students grapple with Tolstoy’s implicit questions gave me renewed hope for the future. For three years, I co-taught a course on technology and ethics. One student majoring in engineering criticized my teaching by saying, “He asks questions. I want answers.” But what is life but questions? There’s no one right answer to how to find the right spouse, whether there is a higher power, what is worth dying for and what a person owes their parents and children. Tolstoy gives us insights to help us grapple with these questions ourselves, for what is a great novel but a crash course on life’s meaning? In a world where artificial intelligence abounds, what makes us human is all the more important.

Clara Shapiro, a sophomore whose comments in class managed to be simultaneously original, thoughtful, passionate and entertaining, told me, “Reading this book with professor Buckler and the rest of the class helped me feel not just the miracle of reading, but of living even one day on Earth.”

What’s next? I’m checking the catalog for a course on Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” a seven-volume novel even longer than Tolstoy’s masterpiece. The renowned English author E.M. Forster called it, “Our second greatest novel after ‘War and Peace.'” I’m inspired and ready.

— Keith Raffel is a syndicated columnist with Creators.