I’m amused that on a blog devoted to the arcana of academe the least popular post is that containing musings on Tolstoy and his political orientation.
To celebrate this unpopularity, here is a sequence of brief excerpts from Tolstoy’s masterful riff on beehives:
In the hot rays of the noonday sun, the bees hover just as merrily around a queenless hive as around the other living hives; from afar it has the same smell of honey; bees fly in and out of it in the same way. But we need only take a closer look at it to realize that there is no longer any life in this hive. The bees do not fly in the same way as in a living hive, the smell is not the same, it is not the same sound that strikes the beekeeper’s ear. To the beekeeper’s tapping on the wall of an ailing hive, instead of the former instantaneous, concerted response, the hissing of tens of thousands of bees, menacingly tucking their behinds under and producing this vital, airy sound by the rapid beating of their wings, there comes in response a scattered buzzing that resonates at various points of the empty hive. [. . .]
The beekeeper opens the upper chamber and examines the superhive. Instead of solid rows of bees covering all the spaces between the combs and warming the brood, he sees the artful, complex workmanship of the combs, but no longer in the virginal form they used to have. Everything is neglected and dirty. [. . .]
So Moscow was empty when Napoleon, weary, restless, and scowling, paced back and forth the Kamerkollezhsky rampart, awaiting what to his mind was a necessary, though external, observance of propriety—a deputation. (874-5.)
If that doesn’t make you want to set aside April and May to read this thing, nothing will.
A quick bee-related update: In the course of Googling around last night I stumbled on a blog kept by students in the Big Book class at Head-Royce in Oakland who are spending the first part of this semester working their way through W&P. (RSmith has crafted a particularly thoughtful post reading the beehive simile as a Virgilian allusion.)
I was once told that the best time to read War and Peace is winter. The longer and colder, the better.
That’s completely true, but considering the weather here in Madison that probably gives you until June.