War and Peace

graf Leo Tolstoy

Penguin Books, Aug 1, 1968 - Fiction - 1456 pages

Eschewing the "great man" theory of history, Tolstoy shows how events are determined by large numbers of people whose actions coalesce at any moment in history to determine the course of events. Arguing that the closer people are to a situation the more they believe they have exercised free will, and the farther away people are from that situation the more they realize that their actions were already determined by past events, Tolstoy demonstrates the theory by means of the characters and actions. There is single protagonist. Rather, from among the more than five hundred and fifty characters, both real and imagined, several major families interact with one another: the Rostovs, the Bolkonskys, the Kuragins, the Drubetskoys, and Pierre Bezuhov, the natural son of a Russian nobleman. From among these families, a few male and female characters emerge who become focal points for the narrative: the men--Nikolay Rostov, Andrey Bolkonsky, Boris Drubetskoy, Anatole Kuragin--and the women--Natasha Rostova, Marya Bolkonskaya, and Helene Kuragin. If the reader must narrow the cast of characters even further, the two who stand at the very center from the beginning of the novel to its end are Pierre and Natasha, who after many tribulations are finally married at the novel's conclusion. Other important characters are Kutuzov, the great Russian general who drives Napoleon (the French) out of Russia by understanding that he must allow events to happen as they will, and the Russian peasant, Platon Karatayev, who teaches Pierre much the same lesson. As the title suggests, the novel is built upon a series of contrasts. Tolstoy balances nonmilitary actions with military actions even to the point of interweaving peaceful interludes during the time that all Russia is at war. Balanced also are alternations in mood: Rapture is balanced with despair, joy with care and trouble, and death with birth.

What people are saying

Review: War and Peace: Volume 1

User Review  - David White - Goodreads

Slow-moving but engrossing study of life amongst the nobility of Imperial Russia in the early nineteenth century. Tolstoy covers war, politics, freemasonry, philosophy and a host of other subjects as ...

Review: War and Peace: Volume 1

User Review  - CD - Goodreads

It doesn't really take longer to read than either War or Peace; this will take more than one or two evening to read. Russian literature is wordy when translated, but no more so than the dense ...

About the author

Tolstoy's life was defined by moral and artistic seeking and by conflict with himself and his surroundings. Of the old nobility, he began by living the usual, dissipated life of a man of his class; however, his inner compulsion for moral self-justification led him in a different direction. In 1851 he became a soldier in the Caucasus and began to publish even while stationed there (Childhood [1852] and other works). Even more significant were his experiences during the Crimean War: the siege of Sevastopol provided the background for his sketches of human behavior in battle in the Sevastopol Stories (1855--56). After the war, Tolstoy mixed for a time with St. Petersburg literary society, traveled extensively abroad, and married Sophia Bers. The couple were happy for a long time, with Countess Tolstoy participating actively in her husband's literary and other endeavors. The center of Tolstoy's life became family, which he celebrated in the final section of War and Peace (1869). In this great novel, he unfolded the stories of several families in Russia during the Napoleonic period and explored the nature of historical causation and of freedom and necessity. A different note emerged in Anna Karenina (1876). Here, too, Tolstoy focused on families but this time emphasized an individual's conflict with society's norms. A period of inner crisis, depression, and thoughts of suicide culminated in Tolstoy's 1879 conversion to a rationalistic form of Christianity in which moral behavior was supremely important. Confession (1882) describes this profound transition. Tolstoy now began to proselytize his new-found faith through fiction, essays, and personal contacts. Between 1880 and 1883, he wrote three major works on religion. A supreme polemicist, he participated in debates on a large number of political and social issues, generally at odds with the government. His advocacy of nonresistance to evil attracted many followers and later had a profound influence on Mahatma Gandhi and, through him, Martin Luther King, Jr. (see Vol. 4). Tolstoy's stature as a writer and public figure was enormous both within Russia and abroad, greater than that of any other Russian writer. When the Orthodox Church excommunicated him in 1901, a cartoon depicted him as disproportionately larger than his ecclesiastical judges. Tolstoy's final years were filled with inner torment: Living as he did on a luxurious estate, he felt himself to be a betrayer of his own teachings. He also suffered from disputes with his wife over the disposition of his property, which she wished to safeguard for their children. In 1910, desperately unhappy, the aged writer left his home at Yasnaya Polyana. He did not get far; he caught pneumonia and died of heart failure at a railway station, an event that was headline news throughout the world. In the course of Tolstoy's career, his art evolved significantly, but it possessed a certain underlying unity. From the beginning, he concentrated on the inner life of human beings, though the manner of his analysis changed. The body of his writing is enormous, encompassing both fiction and a vast amount of theoretical and polemical material. Besides his three great novels---War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection (1899)---he wrote many superb shorter works. Among these, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) stands out as a literary masterpiece and fine philosophical text, while the short novel Hadji Murat (1904), set in the Caucasus and Russia during the reign of Nicholas I, is a gem of narration and plot construction. Tolstoy has been translated extensively. The Louise and Aylmer Maude and Constance Garnett translations are institutions (for many works, the only versions available) and are used by different publishers, sometimes in modernized versions. New translations by Rosemary Edmonds, David Magarshack, and Ann Dunigan are also justifiably popular.

John Bayley is an eminent literary critic who taught at Oxford for more than 30 years, and was chairman of the Booker Prize Committee. Iris Murdoch died in February of 1999.

Bibliographic information

• Title: War and Peace; Signet Classics
• Author: graf Leo Tolstoy
• Translated by: Ann Dunnigan
• Contributor: John O. Bayley
• Edition: reissue, revised
• Publisher: Penguin Books, 1968
• ISBN: 0451523261, 9780451523266
• Length: 1456 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General