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Written by Leo Tolstoy - Audio book performed by Neville Jason - Unabridged Fiction - 26 COMPACT DISCS

Publisher, Naxos Audiobooks (November 2006)

Listen to an MP3 audio clip.

War and Peace is one of the greatest monuments in world literature. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, it examines the relationship between the individual and the relentless march of history. Here are the universal themes of love and hate, ambition and despair, youth and age, expressed with a swirling vitality which makes the book as accessible today as it was when it was first published in 1869.

In addition it is, famously, one of the longest books in Western literature and therefore a remarkable challenge for any reader. Neville Jason read the abridged version of War and Peace and proved his marathon powers with his outstanding performance of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. These alone make him the ideal person to essay Tolstoy's epic.

About the Author: Count Leo Nikolaievitch Tolstoy, novelist, was born on 28 August 1828, at Yasnaya Poliana in the government of Tula. He studied at Moscow and Kazan, joined the army of the Caucasus, was attached to the staff of Prince Gortschakoff in Turkey, and was at the storming of Sebastapol in 1855. He, now retired from the army, and already famous as a poet and novelist, spent a short time in the most brilliant literary and social circles of St Petersburg. Having traveled in Germany and Italy, in 1862 he married, and from that time lived on his estates near Moscow amongst his peasantry. During his residence in the Caucasus he wrote Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth; Memoirs of Prince Nekludoff: and The Cossacks. After the Crimean war he wrote three sketches of Sebastapol; during his foreign sojourn, The Snow Storm and the Two Hussars; next came Family Happiness, The Three Deaths, and Polikushka. The first of his two great works, War and Peace (1865–68), gives a vivid picture of the Napoleonic campaigns against Russia and the national defense. The other, Anna Karenina (1875–78), is a melancholy tale of an ill-fated marriage. He now resolved to devote himself to the problems of life, remedying its grievances, and becoming the ‘friend of the unfriended poor;’ and all his later books were written with didactic aim. Ivan Ilyitch, What People Live By, Where Love is there God is also, Two Pilgrims, The Dominion of Darkness, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Christianity of Christ, What I Believe and Life - all insist on an ideal of life in which revolutionary discontent and religious confidence, morbidly ascetic Puritanism, and an almost Buddhist resignation (denying the right of self-defense by force) are strangely combined. Having made over his wealth to his wife, he lived as poorly as a peasant in his wife’s house. In What is Art? (1898) he taught that only art is good which moves the masses, and to good ends; what is written for the select can only be bad art. In The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893), Master and Man (1894), Patriotism and Christianity (1896) and Resurrection (1900), his departure from orthodoxy became increasingly manifest, the Holy Synod excommunicated him, and he denounced the worship of Jesus as blasphemy and the sacraments as gross sorcery. In 1910 he suddenly left home, designing to end his days in ascetic seclusion, fell ill and died at Astapovo on 20 November.

About the Performer: Neville Jason trained at RADA where he was awarded the Diction Prize by Sir John Gielgud. He has worked with the RSC, as well as in films and musicals. In television he has appeared in popular serials such as Maigret and Dr. Who. He is frequently to be heard on radio.

An interview by Rachel Walters with Neville Jason:

How do you prepare yourself for taking on such marathon tasks as Tolstoy and Proust? How did recording these two giants compare?

The answer is that there is never enough time. The Proust I acquainted myself with over several months, as I was doing the abridgement, but the Tolstoy felt rather more rushed. Perhaps, however, this enabled my performance to retain some freshness!

How do the mentalities of Russian (Tolstoy) verses French (Proust) origins affect your performances?

Having already recorded Proust helped me to understand the passages which are actually in French in War and Peace. The aristocrats in Russia at the time spoke French. Many of the French passages were also translated in the recording, so they can be understood. In fact the national characters of the Russian and French are already in Tolstoy’s text. The shear Russianness of Tolstoy also comes through the text alone – I merely needed to take on sufficient sensitivity to convey that!

As for more mundane issues of pronunciation, Dr Mary Hobson, a Russian Scholar and friend, helped enormously with these. Some of the Russian words, however, cannot be said entirely authentically because English speaking listeners would not understand them!

Do you have very clear ideas about how each character should sound/their accents etc. just from reading? There are hundreds of characters in War and Peace!

Well of course one always has to clearly differentiate characters for the audio book to make sense, so yes a certain amount of pre-planning is necessary. There is, however, also an element of improvisation! With War and Peace, I had already recorded the abridged version for Naxos, so many of the characters crossed over, although that was quite radically abridged so there was a lot of text which I was unfamiliar with.

You completed War and Peace over about a month. Did your voice suffer from this?

We recorded over about five weeks, and had twenty-one days in the studio, so I was able to pace myself. For trained professionals, good technique is essential so the voice wearing out is never an issue. It is comparable to say a singer in one of Wagner’s operas – the soprano may finish exhausted, but never hoarse. Training takes care of this. What is much more relevant is the mental and physical fatigue. Exhaustion affects concentration and this is what suffers, rather than the voice!

How do you approach the very different styles you’ve encountered for titles as different as say Gulliver’s Travels and War and Peace? How do you decide upon the tone of the narrative voice? Is this type of decision-making even a conscious process?

The creative process is always a mystery. There are certain elements to any large-scale artistic achievement which are inexplicable. What I ensure is that I make myself as sensitive and receptive as possible to the material – this way an authentic interpretation is guaranteed. Really, in time, the material then does it for you. It’s all there, as long as you don’t try to impose. Any good actor, like any good musician I suppose, must become like a piece of sensitized photographic paper, must be humble to the material he/she is working with, then let his powers of absorption work and never impose a false style.

Out of all the books you have read for Naxos AudioBooks, who has been your favorite reading character?

This would have to be remarkable but, in Proust’s hands, very vivid Baron de Charlus from A La Recherche du Temps Perdu!