When the reading group began in mid-March, 3,000 people on six continents signed up
past 15 years Yiyun Li, a Chinese-American author, has read “War and Peace” at least a dozen times. Her hardback copy of Leo Tolstoy’s 1,200-page saga bristles with coloured notes, like some exotic lizard’s spine. The novel is not just a masterclass in fiction, Ms Li believes, but a remedy for distress. At the most difficult times in her life, she says, she has turned to it again and again, reassured by its “solidity” in the face of uncertainty.
So large is Tolstoy’s world, Ms Li reckoned, that there could be no better companion for people trapped in isolation. She conceived of a virtual book club to sustain readers through the lockdown. Participants around the globe would plough through this doorstopper together and share their thoughts on social media. With Brigid Hughes of “A Public Space”, a literary review based in Brooklyn, she christened the project #TolstoyTogether. It would be an anchor in unsettling times.
Parallels with today’s crisis are inescapable. On the very first page, Anna Pavlovna, a St Petersburg hostess, comes down with “la grippe”—a flu—but holds her soirée nonetheless. Amid talk of Napoleon and war, she exclaims: “Can one be calm in times like these if one has any feeling?” Pauline Holdsworth, a reader in Toronto, shared the quote on Twitter, noting drily that it cut “a bit close to the bone”.
Most strikingly, readers have instantly recognised themselves in the seesawing emotions that course through all Tolstoy’s characters. None is ever really stable: Prince Andrei Bolkonsky swings abruptly between arrogance and euphoria; Pierre Bezukhov is forever thinking one thing and saying another; young Nikolai Rostov, enamoured of the tsar, is eager to die, then bolts away like a terrified hare.
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Facebook Goes To War With Zoom, Introduces 50-Person Chat FeatureI’m a San Francisco-based reporter covering breaking news at Forbes. I’ve previously reported for USA Today, Business Insider, The San Francisco Business Times and San Jose Inside. I studied journalism at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and was an editor at The Daily Orange, the university’s independent student newspaper. Follow me on Twitter rachsandl or shoot me an email rsandlerforbes.com.
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