In light of what's going on in the world right now I've tried to find out more about "the Russian soul". Since Putin displays none of it, I thought I read "War and Peace" again which I'd tried many times before but never making it past the garden gate. I took it off the shelf again and it's sitting beside my computer as I write these lines - accusatory as some attention-starved pet.
"War and Peace" is in fact thirteen hundred (long) pages long and weighs the same as a dead cat. Each of its thirty-four principal characters goes by three or four different (Russian) names. The aristocrats portrayed often prefer to speak in French, which is odd considering they spend much of their time at war with Napoleon. The hundreds of endnotes which are necessary to decode obscure sayings and jokes tempt me to go straight to YouTube and watch the epic 431-minute-all-night-long Russian version which is all in Russian - and more than twice as long as the one in which Audrey Hepburn acts as Countess Natalya "Natasha" Ilyinichna Rostova - but, hey, I can always read the subtitles.
If "War and Peace" and history and my own opinion is anything to go by, Putin will be waiting for winter to set in, which defeated both Napoleon and Hitler, after which he'll reissue "War and Peace" under a new title.
