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Comment by billfruit | Hacker News Reader

I do think though Russians do get a bit too much press for their novels, in a way that isn't, I think accorded to the French. For example dealing with events from the same period of time is Hugo's "Les Miserables" (it has a description of the battle of Waterloo lasting around 12 chapters), perhaps captures more of the variety of human experience.

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Actually the battle scenes in War and Peace were written under significant influence of Stendahl's in la Chartreuse de Parme. I don't know, how the French treat their novelists, but from a Russian perspective, Stendahl's a big literature, and Hugo more of a teenage reading. I'm pretty sure Tolstoy shared this view.

Stendhal also has a description of Waterloo in his Charterhouse of Parma, but I think Hugo did a better description, besides it appears Stendhal wrote Charterhouse in a great hurry, as I recollect, he finished the whole novel in 52 days, I do find it not as finely turned out as Les Miserables.

The problem with Les Miserables is that of wide circulation of translations which are actually abridgements, I fear many readers would have missed the grandeur of the whole unabridged novel. Same seems to be the case with Count of Montecristo.

I haven’t read Les Miserables. I’m sure its great. But depicting battles scenes is not what makes W&P, W&P.

12 chapters of Waterloo for waterloo’s sake is meaningless.

Victor Hugo was born to make Tolstoy seem laconic. Tolstoy can be prolix, but Austerlitz and Borodino are critical to the action of the novel. Waterloo has a minor plot justification inn Les Miserable, but most of the twelve chapters on Waterloo are just Hugo's excuse for spinning his theories.

I'm pretty sure Hugo being a fan of Napoleon helped.

Quite. But somebody commenting mentioned Stendhal, who greatly admired Napoleon, and who managed to keep his account of Waterloo far shorter.

Good point. I don't know very well Stendhal, thank you.

Great as it is, Les Miserables is a telenovela compared to War and Peace.

> Russians do get a bit too much press for their novels

Russians get a bit too much press for most everything, from nukes to unstoppable social progress to foreign election meddling.

Curiously, but possibly related, not for https://www.google.com/search?q=largest+country+on+earth

could you please tell a bit more about social progress? I'd appreciate it.

I think it's a reference to the early days of USSR, when many in the West were gushing about the "new and better" society that it was supposedly building.

Right, unfortunately the 'novus homo sovieticus' was mostly Mrs. Busybody snitching on the neighbors. Drats.

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