The New War and Peace: A Postscript

OK, here’s the deal: you must never, ever turn your back on the conventional media. Though not all journalists will spin a story to give them the best hook, a lot of them will. And, to make matters worse -- though different -- some reporters don’t ever go back to source, just taking erroneous material someone else has written, and then layering their own stuff over the top.

Case in point: not an hour ago, I reported in this space that Leo Tolstoy’s classic War and Peace was being happied up by HarperCollins. OK, I’ll admit it: that’s what everyone was saying, and I said it too.

Then, after the piece was posted, I got to thinking: I mean, this is War and Peace, right? One of the most significant pieces of literature, evah. Who would mess with that?

So -- basic, basic -- I hit the HarperCollins Web site.

This new version is sure to provoke controversy. A “first draft” of the epic version known to all, it was completed in 1866 but never published. A closely guarded secret for a century and a half, the unveiling of the original version of War and Peace, with an ending different to that we all know, is of huge significance.

OK, so check it: that’s pretty much a different story, right? They’re not happying up a really long (and arguably occasionally tedious) book, they’re publishing a previously unpublished earlier draft.

That moves the whole project to a different intellectual place. HarperCollins isn’t cheapening up a classic, but offering us a new view of the workings of genius.

Pimp My Book

A story that author Margaret George shared with me years ago has always stuck in my mind.

George reported that, when production was about to start on a television miniseries based on her book, The Memoirs of Cleopatra, the producer lamented the fact that the ending was too downbeat. “Does Cleopatra really have to die in the end?” he said to George, though I paraphrase. “And what’s all the stuff with the snakes? Snakes don’t make good TV. Couldn’t she could just go off with that Mark dude?”

In the years since, I’ve retold the story often as a “isn’t Hollywood goofy” cautionary tale. Because all of that, after all, is a very Hollywood kind of thing to do: changing a classic in order to play to the lowest common denominator. Altering physics and history when necessary. That’s what the film industry does. Not publishing. Until now.

According to Australia’s The Age, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is currently undergoing a bit of a renovation:

Since its publication in 1869, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace has presented the reader with the duel [sic] challenge of an eye-straining 1500 pages and an unerringly gloomy ending.

That, however, is now to change with the emergence of a slimmed down version of the literary classic with a happier conclusion.

The new, happier version of War and Peace, is -- according to the book’s Russian PR -- “half as long and twice as interesting” and at least two characters who died in the original story, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Petya Rostov, manage to make it right through the new version.

The new and improved War and Peace (shall we call it W&P Lite?) will be available internationally from HarperCollins in April.