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For other uses, see War and Peace (disambiguation).
| War and Peace | |
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| Author | Leo Tolstoy |
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| Original title | Война и мир (Voyna i mir) |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre(s) | Historical, Romance, War novel |
| Publisher | Russkii Vestnik (series) |
| Publication date | 1865 to 1869 (series) |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) & Audio book |
| Pages | 1000-1500 |
| ISBN | NA |
War and Peace (Russian: Война и мир, Voyna i mir) is a novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russkii Vestnik (Russian: Русский Вестник, "Russian Messenger"), which tells the story of Russian society during the Napoleonic Era. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy\'s two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world\'s greatest novels.
War and Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth, marriage, age, and death. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics of Tolstoy\'s time did not consider it as such. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense.
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The Russian words for "peace" (pre-1918: "миръ") and "world" (pre-1918: "мiръ", including "world" in the sense of "secular society"; see mir (social)) are homophones and since the 1918 reforms have been spelled identically, which led to the conception in the Soviet Union that the original manuscript was called "Война и міръ" (so the novel\'s title would be correctly translated as "War and the World" or "War and Society")."Which \'mir\' is in \'Voina i Mir\'?", Nauka i Zhizn 2002, no. 6 (Russian) Tolstoy himself translated the title into French as "La guerre et la paix" ("War and Peace"), possibly inspired by the contemporary work of Proudhon which bore the same name in both Russian and French.A Tolstoy Timeline. Masterpiece Theatre: Anna Karenina. Public Broadcasting Service. Retrieved on 2008-01-03. The confusion has been promoted by the popular Soviet TV quiz show Что? Где? Когда? (Chto? Gde? Kogda? - What? Where? When?), which in 1982 presented as a correct answer the "society" variant, based on a 1913 edition of "War and Peace" with a misprint in a single page. This episode was repeated in 2000, which refuelled the legend. There is also an (unrelated) poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky called "Война и міръ" (i.e. "міръ" as "society"), written in 1916.
Tolstoy initially intended to write a novel about the Decembrist revolt.Farrow, Simon (2005-01-18). Leo Tolstoy: Sinner, Novelist, Prophet. Proceedings of the BRLSI Volume 9. Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution. Retrieved on 2008-01-03. His investigation of the causes of this revolt led him all the way back to Napoleon\'s invasion of Russia in 1812, and ultimately the history of that war. All that remains of that intention is a foreshadowing in the first epilogue that Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky\'s son are going to be members of the Decembrists.
The first draft of War and Peace was written in 1863, and completed within 24 hours. At the time the published version was finished, about a third of the whole work had been published in a literary magazine under the title 1805. Tolstoy was not happy with the ending, and rewrote the novel in its entirety between 1866 and 1869. This version was afterwards published as the completed novel under the title War and Peace. He did not, however, destroy the original manuscript, which was edited in Russia in 1983 and since has been translated separately from the "known" version, to English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish and Korean. The first version is different from the later one in many aspects, especially with its strikingly happy ending.
It might be objected that Tolstoy himself never intended to publish the original version; on the other hand, he later revealed that he was disappointed with the "known" version of War and Peace as well, describing it as "loathsome".Private letter, 1873.
Although Tolstoy wrote the bulk of the book, including all the narration, in Russian, significant pockets of dialogue throughout the book (including its opening sentence) are written in French. This merely reflected reality, as the Russian aristocracy in the nineteenth century all knew French and often spoke it among themselves rather than Russian. Indeed, Tolstoy makes one reference to an adult Russian aristocrat who has to take Russian lessons to try to master the national language. Less realistically, the Frenchmen portrayed in the novel, including Napoleon himself, sometimes speak in French, sometimes in Russian.
The novel tells the story of five aristocratic families, particularly the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, and the Rostovs, and the entanglements of their personal lives with the history of 1805–1813, principally Napoleon\'s invasion of Russia in 1812. As events proceed, Tolstoy systematically denies his subjects any significant free choice: the onward roll of history determines happiness and tragedy alike.
The standard Russian text is divided into four books (fifteen parts) and two epilogues – one mainly narrative, the other wholly thematic. While roughly the first half of the novel is concerned strictly with the fictional characters, the later parts, as well as one of the work\'s two epilogues, increasingly consist of (nonfictional) essays about the nature of war, political power, history, and historiography. Tolstoy interspersed these essays into the story in a way that defies fictional convention. Certain abridged versions removed these essays entirely, while others, published even during Tolstoy\'s life, simply moved these essays into an appendix.
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War and Peace depicts a huge cast of characters, both historical and fictional, Russians and non-Russians, the majority of whom are introduced in the first book. The scope of the novel is extremely vast, but the narration focuses mainly on five or six characters whose differing personalities and experiences provide the impetus to the story, with their mutual interactions leading up to, around and following the Napoleonic war.
The novel begins in the Russian city of St Petersburg, at a soirée given in July 1805 by Anna Pavlovna Scherer - the maid-of-honor and confidante to the queen mother Empress Maria Fyodorovna. The main players and aristocratic families of the novel are made known here. Pierre Bezukhov is the illegitimate son of a wealthy count who is dying of a stroke, and becomes unexpectedly embroiled in a tussle for his inheritance. Educated abroad in France, with his mother dead, Pierre is essentially kindhearted, but is socially awkward owing to his goodhearted, open nature, and finds it difficult to integrate with the Petersburg society.
Pierre\'s friend, the intelligent and sardonic Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, the husband of a charming wife Lise, also visits the soiree. Finding Petersburg society unctuous and starting to find married life little comfort as well, he chooses to be an aide-de-camp to Prince Mikhail Kutuzov in their coming war against Napoleon.
Tolstoy then switches to Moscow, Russia\'s ancient city, as a contrast to St Petersburg. The Rostov family would become one of the main narrative players of the novel. The Moscow Count Ilya Rostov family has four adolescent children, including the vivacious younger daughter Natalya Rostova ("Natasha") and impetuous older Nikolai Rostov. Young Natasha is at the threshold of her youth; she is supposedly in love with Boris, a disciplined boyish officer and a relative. Nikolai is pledging his teenage love to Sonya, his younger cousin. The eldest child of the Rostov family, Vera, is cold and somewhat haughty but has a good prospective marriage in a German officer Berg. Petya is the youngest of the Rostov family; like his brother, he is impetuous and eager to join the army when of age. The heads of the family, Count Ilya Rostov and Countess Natalya Rostova, are an affectionate couple but forever worrisome over their neglectful financial management.
At Bald Hills, the Bolkonskys\' country estate, Prince Andrei leaves his pregnant wife to his eccentric father Prince Nikolai Andreivitch Bolkonsky and devoutly religious sister Maria Bolkonskaya and leaves for war.
The second part opens with descriptions of the impending Russian-French war preparations. At the Schöngrabern engagement, Nikolai Rostov, who is now conscripted as ensign in a squadron of hussars, has his first baptism of fire upfront in battle. He meets Prince Andrei whom he does not really have a liking for. Like all young soldiers he is attracted by Tsar Alexandr\'s charisma. However Nikolai gambles recklessly and socialises with the lisping Denisov and the diastrous rake, Dolokhov.
Book Two begins with Nikolai Rostov briefly returning home to Moscow on home leave in early 1806. Nikolai finds the Rostov family facing financial ruin due to poor estate management. With Denisov he spends an eventful winter home. Natasha has blossomed into a beautiful young girl. Denisov proposes to her but is rejected. Although his mother pleads with Nikolai to find himself a good financial prospect in marriage, he refuses to accede to his mother\'s request to find a rich heiress for wife. He promises to marry his childhood sweetheart, the orphaned and self-effacing cousin Sonya.
If there is a central character to War and Peace it is Pierre Bezukhov, who, upon receiving an unexpected inheritance, is suddenly burdened with the responsibilities and conflicts of a Russian nobleman. Much of Book Two concerns his struggles with his passions and his spiritual conflicts to be a better man. Now a rich aristocrat, his former carefree behavior vanishes and he enters upon a philosophical quest particular to Tolstoy: how should one live a moral life in an ethically imperfect world? The question constantly baffles and confuses Pierre. He attempts to free his peasants, but ultimately achieves nothing of note. He then enters into marriage with Prince Kuragin\'s beautiful and immoral daughter Hélène (Ëlena), against his own better judgement. He later joins the Freemasons but becomes embroiled in some of the Freemasonry\'s politicking. He is continually helpless in the face of his wife\'s numerous affairs, has a duel with one of her lovers, and is faced with anguish as all this happens.
Pierre is vividly contrasted with the intelligent and ambitious Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. At the Battle of Austerlitz, Andrei is inspired by a vision of glory to lead a charge of a straggling army, but he suffers a near fatal artillery wound which renders him unconscious. At the face of death he realizes all his former ambitions are pointless and his former hero, Napoleon (who rescues him in a horseback excursion to the battlefield), is apparently as vain as himself.
Prince Andrei recovers from his injuries in a military hospital, and returns home only to find his wife Lise dying during childbirth. He is struck by his guilty conscience for not treating Lise better when she was alive.
Burdened with nihilistic disillusionment, Prince Andrei lives anonymously in his estate until he is led to a philosophical argument with Pierre one day when the Pierre visits his estate: where is God in this amoral world? Pierre points to panentheism and an afterlife.
Young Natasha meets Andrei during her very first ball, and briefly reinvigorates Andrei with her openness and lively vitality, but the couple\'s plan to marry has to be postponed with a year-long engagement.
When Prince Andrei leaves for his military engagements, Elena and her handsome brother Anatole conspire for Anatole to seduce and dishonor the young, still immature and now beautiful Natasha Rostova. They bait her with plans of an elopement. Thanks to Sonya and Pierre, this plan fails, yet, for Pierre, it is the cause of an important meeting with Natasha. He realizes he has now fallen in love with Natasha. During the time when the Great Comet of 1811–2 streaks the sky, life appears to begin anew for Pierre, with fresh hope of love. Natasha, shamed by her near-seduction, breaks off her engagement with Andrei.
Meanwhile Nikolai unexpectedly acts as a white knight to the beleaguered Maria Bolkonskaya, whose father\'s death has left her in the mercy of an estate of hostile, rebellious peasants. Struck by Maria, whom he is seeing for the first time, he reconsiders marriage and finds Maria\'s devotion, consideration, and inheritance extremely attractive. But he is constricted by his earlier, youthful promise to Sonya, his cousin, and hesitates to woo Maria.
As Napoleon pushes through Russia, Pierre decides to leave Moscow and to watch the Battle of Borodino from a vantage point next to a Russian artillery crew. After watching for a time, he begins to join in carrying ammunition and virtually becomes an artilleryman. There, he realizes first-hand just how terrible and fatal war can be, in wrecking and killing healthy men. The battle is a long and foul one; however, it ends in an impossible victory for the Russians, in the face of the superior numbers of the seemingly indefatigable Napoleonic army. The Russian general Kutuzov seemingly does not capitalize on this and retreats, allowing Napoleon to march on and invade the capital, Moscow.
Book Four climaxes Napoleon\'s invasion of Russia. When Napoleon\'s Grand Army occupies an abandoned and burning Moscow, Pierre takes off on a quixotic mission to assassinate Napoleon. He becomes an anonymous man in all the chaos, shedding his responsibilities by wearing peasant clothes and shunning his duties and lifestyle. The only person he sees while in this garb is Natasha, who recognizes him, and he in turn realizes the full scope of his love for her.
His plan fails, and he is captured in Napoleon\'s headquarters as a prisoner of war after saving a child from a burning building and assaulting a French legionnaire for attacking a woman. After witnessing French soldiers sacking Moscow and shooting Russian civilians arbritarily, Pierre is forced to march with the Grand Army during its disastrous retreat from Moscow owing to the harsh winter. He becomes friends with his cell-mate Platòn Karataev, a peasant with a saintly demeanor, who is incapable of malice. In Karataev Pierre finally finds what he is looking for, an honest, "rounded" person who is totally without pretence, unlike those from the Petersburg aristocratic society, and also notably a member of the working class, with whom he finds meaning in life simply by living and interacting with him. After months of trial and tribulation—during which Karataev is capriciously shot by the French—Pierre is later freed by a Russian raiding party.
Meanwhile Andrei, wounded during Napoleon\'s invasion, is taken in as a casualty cared for by the fleeing Rostovs; he is reunited with Natasha and sister Maria before the end of the war. Having lost all will to live after forgiving Natasha, he dies, much like the death scene at the end of The Death of Ivan Ilych.
As the novel draws to a close, Pierre\'s wife Elena dies (sometime during the last throes of Napoleon\'s invasion); and Pierre is reunited with Natasha, while the victorious Russians rebuild Moscow. Natasha speaks of Prince Andrei\'s death and Pierre of Karataev\'s. Both are aware of a growing bond with each other. Matchmade by Princess Marya, Pierre finds love at last and, revealing his love after being released from his former wife\'s death, marries Natasha.
The first epilogue begins with the wedding of Pierre and Natasha, in 1813. It is the last happy event for the Rostov family which is going through a transition. Count Ilya Rostov dies soon after, leaving the eldest son Nikolai to take charge of the debt-ridden estate.
Nikolai finds himself in the near-impossible task of maintaining the family tottering on bankruptcy. His pride almost gets in the way of him, but Nikolai finally accedes to his mother\'s wish and his heart\'s choice, and marries the now-rich Marya Bolkonskaya in winter 1813, both out of feeling and out of the necessity to save his family from ruin.
Nikolai Rostov and Marya then moves to Bald Hills with his mother and Sonya, whom he supports for the rest of their life. Buoyed by his wife\'s funds, Nikolai pays off all his family\'s debts without selling his wife\'s properties. They also raise Prince Andrei\'s orphaned son, Nikolai Bolkonsky.
Like in all marriages there are minor squabbles but the couples - Pierre and Natasha, Nikolai and Marya - remain devoted to their spouses. Pierre and Natasha visit Bald Hill in 1820, to much jubilation from all concerned. There is a hint in the closing chapters that the idealistic, boyish Nikolai Bolkonsky (15-year-old in 1820) and Pierre would both become part of the Decembrist Uprising which would change Russia forever. The first epilogue concludes with Nikolai Bolkonsky promising he would do something which even his late father "would be satisfied...." (presumably as a revolutionary in the Decembrist revolt).
The second epilogue sums up Tolstoy\'s views on history, free will and in what ways the two may interact to cause major events in humankind. in a long, partially historical and partly philosophical essay, where the narrator discusses how man cannot be wholly free, or wholly determined by "necessity" and this is primarily down to God.
Tolstoy doesn\'t subscribe to the "great man" view of history: the notion that history is the story of strong personalities that move events and shape societies. He believes that events shape themselves, caused by social and other forces; and great men take advantage of them, changing them but not creating them. As an example, he compares Napoleon and Kutuzov. Napoleon, the Great Man, thought he had created the French Revolution, but actually he had simply happened along at the right time and usurped it. Kutuzov was more modest and more effective.
Napoleon believed that he could control the course of a battle through sending orders through couriers, while Kutuzov admits that all he could do was to plan the initial disposition and then let subordinates direct the field of action. Typically, Napoleon would be frantically sending out orders throughout the course of a battle, carried by dashing young lieutenants—which were often misinterpreted or made irrelevant by changing conditions—while Kutuzov would sit quietly in his tent and often sleep through the battle. Ultimately, Napoleon chooses wrongly, opting to march on to Moscow and occupy it for five fatal weeks, when he would have been better off destroying the Russian army in a decisive battle instead his numerically superior army dissipate on a huge scale, thanks to large scale looting and pillaging, and lack of direction for his force. General Kutuzov believes time to be his best ally, and refrains from engaging the French. He moves his army out of Moscow, and the residents evacuate the city: the nobles flee to their country estates, taking their treasures with them; lesser folk flee wherever they can, taking food and supplies. The French march into Moscow and disperse to find housing and supplies, then ultimately destroy themselves as they accidentally burn the city to the ground and then abandon it in late Fall, then limp back toward the French border in the teeth of a Russian Winter. They are all but destroyed by a final Cossack attack as they straggle back toward Europe. Tolstoy observes that Kutuzuv didn\'t burn Moscow as a "scorched earth policy," nor did Napoleon; but after taking the city, Napoleon moved his troops in, to find housing more or less by chance in the abandoned houses: generals appropriated the grander houses, lesser men took what was left over; units were dispersed, and the chain of command dissolved into chaos. Quickly, his tightly disciplined army dissolved into a disorganized rabble; and of course, if one leaves a wooden city in the hands of strangers who naturally use fire to warm themselves, cook food, and smoke pipes, and have not learned how particular Russian families safely used their stoves and lamps (some of which they had taken with them as they fled the city), fires will break out. In the absence of an organized fire department, the fires will spread. Tolstoy concludes that the city was destroyed by chance.
Many of Tolstoy\'s characters in War and Peace were based on real-life people known to Tolstoy himself. Nikolai Rostov and Maria Bolkonskaya were based on Tolstoy\'s own memories of his father and mother, while Natasha was modeled after Tolstoy\'s wife and sister-in-law. Pierre and Prince Andrei bear much resemblance to Tolstoy himself, and many commentators have treated them as alter egos of the author. (It is an innovation for a writer to create two alter egos of himself, and Tolstoy\'s are both compelling and complementary.)
There are numerous minor characters in War and Peace, who appear in one chapter or are mentioned occasionally in passing. A few of these, such as Platon Karataev, are not really minor: Karataev plays a major role in the maturation of Pierre Bezhukhov after he becomes a prisoner of war.
Into English:
Into Macedonian:
The Inner Sanctum Edition Simon and Schuster. 1945-1954, I (ISBN: 0679600841) Hard Cover, 2. A Reader\'s Guide and Bookmark for the Inner Sanctum Edition of War and Peace is included, containing
The book is translated, with a preface and introductory notes, by Aylmer Maude, with a foreword by Clifton Fadiman. Includes detailed Table of Contents, various famous authors\' praises of War and Peace, a list of dates of principal historical events, and 7 maps throughout text, as well as maps on the front & rear paste-down endpapers.
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