War and Peace: SPRING, SUMMER, FALL 2026
Seminar Leaders: Linda McConnell & Eric Stull
Meeting Dates, Day, Time: 36 weeks, April 10 – December 18, Friday, 3-4:30 PM ET
Text: any good translation (e.g., Dunnigan, Maude & Maude, Briggs, Pevear & Volokhonsky)
We have a Russian novel that begins in French and is about a war against the French. We have a novel that the author claimed wasn’t a novel at all. We have a 1460-page book with two nouns of seemingly equal weight in the title, to the first of which are devoted 1400 of its pages and to the other of which 60. We have a prose work filled with epic-style similes. What sort of book IS Tolstoy’s War and Peace? Presumably the sort that one has to read to find out. If such an answer is unsatisfactory, the manner of finding out may not be. One might suppose that the only way to get through a very long book is to read it as quickly as possible, especially if it is of the sort that can be read swiftly, as this incomparable novel can, written as it is by the hand of one whose storytelling even in translation is so limpid as to make us forget that we ourselves are not in the book. But what would be the point of just getting through the battle of Borodino, the burning of Moscow, the scenes of conversation, the swirl of dancing, the lives of Natasha, Prince Andrei, and the seemingly numberless others? If life is for the living, then a book is for the reading, which we will do at the slow-and-savor rate of about 40 pages a week.
Reading Schedule (War and Peace is divided into four Books and an Epilogue, each of these into Parts, each of these into Chapters. Each reading from Books 1-4 is roughly 40 pages. The three readings from the Epilogue are a bit shorter.)
April 10:1.1.1-8 (i.e., Book 1, Part 1, chapters 1-8)
April 17: 1.1.9-18
April 24: 1.19-25
May 1: 1.2.1-8
May 8: 1.2.9-18
May 15: 1.2.19-1.3.3
May 22: 1.3.4-10
*May 29: 1.3.11-19
June 5: 2.1.1-10
June 12: 2.1.11-2.2.6
June 19: 2.2.7-16
June 26: 2.2.17-2.3.7
July 3: 2.3.8-21
*July 10: 2.3.22-2.4.6
July 17: 2.4.7-2.5.2
*July 24: 2.5.3-14
July 31: 2.5.15-3.1.2
August 7: 3.1.3-11
August 14: 3.1.12-21
August 21: 3.1.22-3.2.7
August 28: 3.2.8-16
September 4: 3.2.17-26
*September 11: 3.2.27-37
September 18: 3.2.38-3.3.11
September 25: 3.3.12-23
October 2: 3.3.24-31
October 9: 3.3.32-4.1.7
October 16: 4.1.8-4.2.2
October 23: 4.2.3-16
October 30: 4.2.17-4.3.11
November 6: 4.3.12-4.4.7
November 13: 4.4.8-20
November 20: Epilogue.1.1-10
*November 27: THANKSGIVING (No Meeting)
December 4: Epi.1.11-Epi.2.2
December 11: Epi. 2.3-12
December 18: whole book