Have you read this one? It’s really long. | Courtesy of Penguin Random House

Leo Tolstoy’s epic might be the best book ever written, and — hot take here — you should read it.

One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend.

It’s 1812 in Moscow. Napoleon has invaded Russia, and he gets nearer to the city every day. Emperor Alexander I has left the city behind, and its inhabitants aren’t certain of what to do next. So instead of taking precautions, in the absence of what feels like an authority figure who knows what he is doing, the people of Moscow instead decide to just have a good time.

This moment is depicted by Leo Tolstoy in his sprawling, intimidating novel War and Peace, where he writes (translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude):

With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Moscovites’ view of their situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger approaching. At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second. So it was now with the inhabitants of Moscow. It was long since people had been as gay in Moscow as that year.

I read that passage in mid-July, and it stopped me dead in my tracks. I went back to read it again, then again — it felt so specific to the world of Tolstoy’s creation, but also to right now. What is living in the United States in 2020 but a society of people trying to disregard what is painful until it comes, in favor of thinking about what is pleasant?

All of the excuses people give for why they don’t want to read War and Peace — it’s crushingly long, it has 5 billion characters, it features long digressions about the nature of history (including a 35-page subtweet of the historians of Tolstoy’s day that ends the novel) — are fair. It is a long book, and it does have lots of characters. It takes a long time to read.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation, which my friend read, but I had a fine old time with the Constance Garnett translation, which has fallen out of favor. In any translation, it is a good book!

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