YL: We’re still in the middle of the pandemic. What is your relationship with this novel? Why read it twice in two years? TM: You said you expected that the pandemic would be over by the time you and your fellow readers finished reading War and Peace at the pace of 10 to 15 pages a day? And now you’ve finished an encore read-through just as a new variant has arrived on the scene.
I said, “Let’s invite people to read War and Peace with us.” We announced it like two days later, and then we started right after that. That’s how I proposed the idea to A Public Space. And by the time we were finished reading the novel, I thought, we’ll be done with the pandemic. I thought, maybe it’s good to invite people to read War and Peace because it’s such a long novel. I love War and Peace, and I read it all the time. Everybody was going into lockdown, and one day I was thinking, I’m sure everyone is going to have a little bit of a hard time just going into this uncertain moment. Yiyun Li: I think the lockdown started on March 13, and we started on March 18. The pandemic started to really set in early in 2020, and shortly thereafter, A Public Space announced that you would be doing a collective read-through of War and Peace. The Millions: Leaving aside my vendetta against War and Peace, let’s talk about your love for War and Peace. (This interview has been edited for clarity.) And while I’m still not convinced I’ll ever read War and Peace, Li makes a compelling case for why you should do so. Li, it turned out, had read my piece, which she mentioned to me amid laughter during a phone conversation on Tolstoy’s book, her book, the read-through project, and more. (Li was awarded this year’s Deborah Pease Prize, which is given yearly at the A Public Space benefit, for “her leadership and generosity in leading us in two readings of War and Peace with Tolstoy Together.”) Perhaps I wanted to be convinced-or maybe I just wanted to hear someone who loves the book tell me all about why. But when A Public Space announced that it would be publishing a companion volume to Tolstoy’s masterpiece as a sort of capstone to Li’s project, Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li, and that Li would hold another read-through this fall, I knew I had to speak with Li. I had already fought my battles with the book and lost, which I later detailed in an essay on my complicated relationship with the book published in Literary Hub last fall. When author Yiyun Li announced last year that she would lead a collective read-through of War and Peace, called #TolstoyTogether, on behalf of the literary magazine and publisher A Public Space, my first though was: perhaps I’ll finally read War and Peace.
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