War and Peace

• 1. Introduction

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  War and Peace is the epic novel that its own author refused to call a novel. Leo Tolstoy wrote that it was "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle". An anonymous reviewer in the liberal newspaper Golos asked the same bewildered question in 1865: "What could this possibly be? What kind of genre are we supposed to file it to?... Where is fiction in it, and where is real history?" Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the work follows five interlocking aristocratic families through the French invasion of Russia and its aftermath. Tolstoy began writing it in 1863, the year he married and settled at his country estate. He would not consider it finished until 1869. How did a book that defied every category become, in the words of John Galsworthy, "the best novel that had ever been written"? Why did Tolstoy pour philosophy into the gaps of his story, and why did he later restore French dialogue he had once removed? The answers run through war, marriage, money, faith, and Tolstoy's quarrel with how history itself is told.

• 2. Seven Manuscripts

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  In September 1863, Tolstoy wrote to Elizabeth Bers, his sister-in-law, asking whether she could find any chronicles, diaries, or records from the Napoleonic period in Russia. He was dismayed to discover how few written records of Russian domestic life from that time survived, and he tried to repair those gaps in his early drafts. The first half of the book carried the working name 1805. While writing the second half, he read widely and named Schopenhauer among his main inspirations. In a letter to Afanasy Fet, Tolstoy wrote that what he had put into the book was also said by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation, though he approached "it from the other side." The periodical Russkiy Vestnik, The Russian Messenger, published the first part of an early draft under the title 1805 in 1865, with more the following year. Tolstoy was dissatisfied. He allowed several parts to appear with a different ending in 1867, then heavily rewrote the entire novel between 1866 and 1869. His wife, Sophia Tolstaya, copied as many as seven separate complete manuscripts before he judged it ready. Russians who had read the serialized version were eager for the whole book, and it sold out almost immediately.

• 3. A Title's Mystery

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  It is unknown why Tolstoy changed the name of his work to War and Peace. He may have borrowed it from the 1861 book by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, La Guerre et la Paix. The title may also nod to the Roman Emperor Titus, who reigned from 79 to 81 AD and was described as a master of "war and peace" in The Twelve Caesars, written by Suetonius in 119. The early 1805 manuscript itself had an afterlife: it was re-edited and annotated in Russia in 1983, then translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Albanian, Korean, and Czech. The version that ran in Russkiy Vestnik ended very differently from the one that finally appeared under the title War and Peace in 1869.

• 4. Five Families

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  The novel tells the story of five families: the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Kuragins, and the Drubetskoys. At its center stands Pierre Bezukhov, the socially awkward illegitimate son of a wealthy count who has fathered dozens of illegitimate sons. Educated abroad, Pierre returns to Russia a misfit, until an unexpected inheritance makes him suddenly desirable. Pierre often serves as a voice for Tolstoy's own beliefs and struggles. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, a skeptical and philosophical aide-de-camp, is Pierre's friend and his contrast, disillusioned with Petersburg society and with married life. Natasha Rostova arrives "not pretty but full of life", romantic, impulsive, an accomplished singer and dancer. Her family, headed by the generous and financially hopeless Count Ilya Rostov, never has enough cash despite owning many estates. The Kuragins are predators: Prince Vasily is determined to marry his children into wealth at any cost, his daughter Hélène is beautiful and immoral, his son Anatole a handsome and amoral pleasure seeker. Around them move figures like Fyodor Dolokhov, a cold, almost psychopathic officer, and Platon Karataev, the archetypal good Russian peasant whom Pierre meets in a prisoner-of-war camp. Many of these characters were drawn from life. Tolstoy's grandparents and their friends were the models for many of the leads.

• 5. The Sky Above Austerlitz

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  At the Battle of Austerlitz, Prince Andrei carries a Russian standard and thinks the approaching "day will be his Toulon, or his Arcola", echoing Napoleon's early victories. He is badly wounded, falls into enemy hands, and even meets his hero. But the meeting empties him. Napoleon now seems "so petty did his hero with his paltry vanity and delight in victory appear, compared to that lofty, righteous and kindly sky which he had seen and comprehended". Tolstoy stages Austerlitz as an early test that Russia failed, because soldiers fought for glory and renown rather than the higher virtues he believed would later win Borodino. The book carries roughly 160 real persons named or referred to, and weaves in the Ulm Campaign, the Treaties of Tilsit, the Congress of Erfurt, and the Great Comet of 1811. Pierre watches the Battle of Borodino from beside a Russian artillery crew, then begins carrying ammunition as Marshals Ney and Davout set up a crossfire from the Semyonovskaya heights. The slaughter ends in a standoff, but the Russians claim a moral victory by standing up to an army reputed to be invincible.

• 6. Two Languages

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  Although the book is mainly in Russian, large stretches of its dialogue are in French. One reading holds that the French is a deliberate device, marking artifice, while Russian becomes the language of sincerity and seriousness. Another reading is simpler: French was the common tongue of the Russian aristocracy, so its presence is realism. The era of Catherine the Great had made French the language of her court, and for the next 100 years speaking French was a social requirement for the Russian nobility. Some nobles knew only enough Russian to command their servants. Julie Karagina, a character in the novel, is so unfamiliar with her native language that she has to take Russian lessons. As the book progresses, the French diminishes, suggested to show Russia freeing itself from foreign cultural domination as a once-friendly nation turns into an enemy. By midway, several aristocrats are eager to hire Russian tutors for themselves. The translators wrestled with this choice too. Only about two percent of the novel is in French, and Tolstoy removed it in a revised 1873 edition, only to restore it later.

• 7. The Argument With History

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  The second part of the epilogue abandons the story entirely and becomes Tolstoy's critique of how history is written. He attacks the 19th-century Great Man Theory, the claim that historical events flow from the actions of heroes and great individuals. He argues this is impossible, since such actions so rarely produce great events. Instead, great events are the sum of many smaller events driven by thousands of ordinary people, a summation he compared to calculus and the sum of infinitesimals. He sets necessity, based on reason and explicable through analysis, against free will, based on consciousness and inherently unpredictable. Just as astronomy had to adopt the Copernican hypothesis of the earth's movement to avoid absurdities, Tolstoy argues, historical science must accept some conception of necessary laws of human action. He ridicules emerging Darwinism as overly simplistic, comparing it to plasterers covering windows, icons, and scaffolding with plaster and admiring the smooth result. The full work runs 361 chapters, of which 24 are philosophical chapters of comment rather than narrative. Of particular focus is his claim that Napoleon's actions show no tactical genius but rather luck and the composite actions of the French army at large.

• 8. Lion Of Russian Literature

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  Ivan Goncharov called Tolstoy "the true lion of the Russian literature", and in an 1878 letter named War and Peace "a Russian Iliad" and "one of the most, if not the most profound literary work ever". The professional critics were slower. The literary left received the book coldly, faulting its lack of social critique and its silence on a new revolutionary intelligentsia, as critic Varfolomey Zaytsev put it. Conservative authors such as A. S. Norov and P. A. Vyazemsky accused Tolstoy of distorting the history of 1812. Yet Russia's major writers backed it wholeheartedly. Fyodor Dostoevsky called it "the last word of the landlord's literature and the brilliant one at that." Nikolai Leskov named it "the best ever Russian historical novel". The army general and military writer Mikhail Dragomirov advised every Russian officer to use it as a desk book, calling its battle scenes "incomparable". The praise crossed borders once Turgenev championed it and the first French edition appeared in 1879. Gustave Flaubert wrote that he "used to utter shrieks of delight while reading". Thomas Mann judged it "the greatest ever war novel in the history of literature." Ernest Hemingway said he learned from Tolstoy how to write about war honestly, adding, "I don't know anybody who could write about war better than Tolstoy did". Isaac Babel put it most simply: "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy." That afterlife continues on stage, where Dave Malloy's electropop opera Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 drew twelve Tony Award nominations, building an entire musical from a single book of the novel.