Introduction...................................................................................................................1Author Biography.........................................................................................................2Plot Summary................................................................................................................4Book I...................................................................................................................4Book II..................................................................................................................5Book III.................................................................................................................6Book IV................................................................................................................7First Epilogue........................................................................................................7Second Epilogue...................................................................................................8Characters......................................................................................................................9Prince Andrew Bolkonsky....................................................................................9Elizabeth Bolkonskaya.........................................................................................9Mary Bolkonskaya................................................................................................9Napoleon Bonaparte...........................................................................................10Pierre Buzekhov..................................................................................................10Vasili Dmitrich Denisov.....................................................................................11Fedya Dolokhov..................................................................................................11Boris Drubetskoy................................................................................................12Platon Karataev...................................................................................................12Anatole Kuragin..................................................................................................12Helene Kuragin...................................................................................................12Kutuzov...............................................................................................................13Natasha Rostov...................................................................................................13NatalyRostov......................................................................................................14Nicholas Rostov..................................................................................................14Peter Rostov........................................................................................................14i
Table of Contents
CharactersSonya..................................................................................................................14Themes.........................................................................................................................15Class Conflict......................................................................................................15Duty and Responsibility.....................................................................................15Art and Experience.............................................................................................16Success and Failure.............................................................................................17Style..............................................................................................................................18Structure..............................................................................................................18Setting.................................................................................................................18Hero....................................................................................................................19Narrator...............................................................................................................19Historical Context.......................................................................................................20The Napoleonic Wars.........................................................................................20Emancipation of the Serfs...................................................................................21Critical Overview........................................................................................................23Criticism.......................................................................................................................25Critical Essay #1..........................................................................................................26Critical Essay #2..........................................................................................................31ii
Table of Contents
Critical Essay #3..........................................................................................................33Critical Essay #4..........................................................................................................50Critical Essay #5..........................................................................................................63Critical Essay #6..........................................................................................................67Topics for Further Study............................................................................................77Compare & Contrast..................................................................................................78What Do I Read Next?................................................................................................80For Further Study.......................................................................................................81Sources.........................................................................................................................84Copyright Information...............................................................................................85iii
Introduction
War and Peace is a historical novel that chronicles the tumultuous events
inRussiaduring the Napoleonic war in the early nineteenth century. Focusing on anaristocratic way of life that had al−ready started to fade at the time that Leo Tolstoywrote the book in the 1860s, it covers a comparatively short span of time—fifteenyears—but it renders the lives of disparate characters from all segments of societywith vivid, well−realized details. The story captures a generation on the brink ofchange, with some defending the existing class structure with their lives while othersrealize that the old way of life is disappearing. Part history lesson, part grand romance,part battlefield revisionism, and part philosophy lecture, War and Peace has
captivated generations of readers with its gripping narrative and its clear, intelligibleunderstanding of the human soul.
Introduction1
Author Biography
Leo Tolstoy was born to an upper−class Russian family on September 9, 1928, at thefamily's estate inTula province,Russia. His father was Count Nikolay Tolstoy, anobleman and prestigious landowner Tolstoy's mother died when he was two yearsold. Tragically, his father died when Leo was nine, leaving the young boy to be raisedin the home of his aunts. He went to theUniversity of Kazan when he was sixteen,studying Oriental languages and then law, but he left in 1847 without completing hisdegree.
In 1851 he went to theCaucasus to live with his brother, and began writing his firstnovel Childhood. Published in 1852, it was followed by Boyhood (\\8) and Youth(1856). During this time he served in the army atSevastopol, fighting the CrimeanWar. His experience as a soldier in that war provided much of the experience that hedrew upon in writing War and Peace.
After the war, Tolstoy returned to his family estate. In 1859 he started a school on hisestate for peasant children. In 1861, after the emancipation of the serfs. Tolstoy servedas Arbiter of the Peace, a temporary local judiciary position. The following year, afterthe deaths of two his brothers, he married Sophia Behrs, the daughter of aMoscowphysician, and began an educational magazine, Yasnaya Polyana, which I. S. Aksakovcalled a \"remarkable literary phenomenon\" and an \"an extraordinarily important
phenomenon in our social life.\" Tolstoy edited the journal for a little more than a year.After that, a second phase of his literary career began, the phase that produced his twogreatest masterpieces. War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He retired to his estatewith his new wife, wrote, hunted, farmed and socialized with his country neighbors.At the end of the 1960s, though, he found himself at a spiritual crisis, brought aboutby the deaths of several of his children and other relatives. He questioned the meaningof life and was not sure about whether he could or should go on. He drifted away fromthe Russian Orthodox Christianity he had been raised in and focused on a more
Author Biography
2
rational world view that eliminated the need for church intervention between humanityand God. This religious conversion left him at odds with many members of his family,especially his wife.
Impacted by his evolving philosophical outlook, his later works of fiction were lessornamental and more direct. They include the novellas The Death of Ivan Ilych,Master and Man, and Memoirs of a Madman. Tolstoy also produced many
philosophical works and religious tracts. His 1888 religious essay \"What Is Art?\" isstill considered an important treatise on art and morality. Tolstoy died on November20, 1910 of pneumonia.
Author Biography3
Plot Summary
Book I
War and Peace is a massive, sprawling novel that chronicles events in Russiaduringthe Napoleonic Wars, when the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte conquered muchofEurope during the first few years of the nineteenth century. Bonaparte
unsuccessfully tried to expand his dominion intoRussia, only to be turned back in1812. The novel opens in July of 1805, with Russiaallied with England, Austria,andSwedento stave off Bonaparte's aggressive expansion.
A member of a dissolute, upper−class crowd, Pierre Bezukhov is a troublemaker whocriticizes governmental policies. At night he frequents drunken card parties with a fastcrowd, including Anatole Kurgagin and Fedya Dolokhov, whom Tolstoy describes as\"an officer and a desperado.\" Another member of the group, Prince Andrew, is a
patriot who is determined to defend his country and aristocratic way of life. The novelsoon introduces theRostov family as they prepare a celebration for their youngestdaughter Natasha.
The illegitimate son of a well−known, wealthy aristocrat,Pierre's life changes when hisfather dies and recognizes him as his son. ThereforePierre is heir to his large fortune.Prince Andrew leaves to fight in the war against the French, leaving his pregnant wifewith his father and sister Mary. Natasha's brother, Nicholas, gets into trouble in thearmy for threatening a superior officer whom he has caught cheating; later, in battle,Nicholas runs away from the enemy and realizes that he is the coward and cheat.Suddenly popular,Pierre marries Helene Kuragin. Her brother, Anatole, proposes toMary, but her father will not allow her marriage. Prince Andrew is wounded in battleand left for dead at the end of Book I.
Plot Summary4
Book II
Nicholas Rostov is in love with his cousin Sonya, and she loves him; unfortunately,the family needs him to marry somebody with money because their wealth is
dwindling.Pierre, reacting to rumors about an affair between his wife and Dolokhov,challenges him to a duel. WhenPierre wounds Dolokhov he runs away, questioning hisown morals, and in an inn he meets an old acquaintance who introduces him to theFreemasons, a secret society that does good deeds.Pierre becomes an enthusiasticmember, separating from Helene and arranging to give away his belongings to helphumanity.
Prince Andrew returns from the war on the same day that his wife dies giving birth totheir son. Nicholas encourages Sonya to accept Dolokhov's marriage proposal, but sherefuses. Soon after his father puts him on a budget of two thousand rubles, Nicholasgambles with Dolokhov and loses forty−three thousand rubles, which the family has tosell more property to pay. WhilePierre is busy freeing his serfs from their commitmentto him, in accordance with his new Masonic beliefs, Prince Andrew is setting up neweconomic policies that will allow them to be self−sustaining after they earn theirfreedom.
In 1808 a truce is called in the Napoleonic War. Prince Andrew becomes disheartenedwith the difficulties of dealing with the army bureaucracy andPierre becomes
disenchanted with being a Mason. In 1809, when Natasha is sixteen,Pierre falls in lovewith her. So does Andrew, and he proposes to the young lady. However, Andrew'sfather will not give his consent and tells him to wait a year before marrying. Andrewreturns to the army Meanwhile, Nicholas' mother convinces him that he cannot marrySonya—he must marry someone rich.
Impatiently waiting for Andrew to return, Natasha lets Anatole court her, secretlygiving in to his charm. He makes plans to run away with her, but fails to tell her thathe is already married in secret to a girl inPoland. The elopement is broken off when he
Book II
5
comes to fetch her and is met by a huge doorman; like a coward, he runs away. Wordof this gets back to Andrew, and he breaks the engagement Natasha tries poisonherself but is unsuccessful.Pierre visits her and confesses his love.
Book III
The war begins again in 1812, when the French army moves intoRussiaThe novelnarrates Napoleon's thoughts and impressions of the campaign, and then switches toTsar Alexander, going back and forth between them. During the fighting, Nicholascomes to realize that his earlier cowardice was just a normal reaction to war and heforgives himself. Recovering from her suicide attempt, Natasha starts to attendmorning mass and gains peace and serenity. Her younger brother, Petya, joins thearmy, but cannot find a way to tell his family.
As the French army advances toward their estate in the country, Mary's father has astroke. After he dies, Mary rides into the town nearby to prepare to evacuate herhousehold servants. When she sees the peasants starving she offers them all of thegrain stored on the family estate, but they become suspicious and think it is some sortof trick to get them to leave their land. They are on the verge of rioting against herwhen Nicholas rides up, saves her, and falls in love with her.
People fleeMoscow to avoid the oncoming French army. Pierre travels out to
Borondino, which is the last place where the French can be stopped Much of Part III isconcerned with different views of the Battle of Borqndino—from Napoleon, Andrew,Pierre, and Kutuzov.
After the Russian defeat,Moscow has to be evacuated. Natasha insists that the wagonstaking her family's belongings need to be emptied in order to bring some injuredsoldiers too. One of the injured soldiers turns out to be Andrew, who, seeing Natashafor the first time since their engagement was broken off, forgives her.
Book III6
In desertedMoscow,Pierre comes up with a crazed scheme of assassinating Napoleon.Taken into custody by a French captain, he saves the man's life whenPierre's servant isgoing to shoot him, and, after being given the comforts of good food and drink heforgets his assassination attempt. He races mto a burning building to save a peasant'schild, then assaults a French soldier who is molesting a woman, for which he isarrested.
Book IV
Pierre's wife dies while he is a prisoner of the French army. During a longmarch,Pierre becomes
even more at peace with himself. He meets Platon Karataev, a peasant who ownsnothing but has a joyful outlook, and decides to be more like him.
Mary finds out that her brother, Andrew, is still alive. She travels to where Natashaand her family are caring for him, and the two women take turns nursing him until hedies.
Kutuzov, the Russian general, is pressured to overtake the fleeing French and killthem, but he knows his army does not have the energy. Petya Rostov admiresDolokhov's daring when he accompanies him on a scouting party into the Frenchcamp. The next day, they attack the French:Pierre is freed when the French soldiersflee, but Petya is killed. As the French menace fades,Pierre rejoins theRostov familyand he and Natasha console each other over their grief: she has lost her brother, Petya,and her lover Andrew; he has lost many friends in the fighting. They fall in love.
First Epilogue
Nicholas and Mary marry, as do Pierre and Natasha. They all live at Bald Hills, theestate left to Mary by her father. On December 6,1820,Pierre arrives home from a trip
Book IV
7
toMoscow, where he has been meeting with a secret organization. Pierre and Nicholasdisagree about a citizen's responsibility to the state, but everyone is happy livingtogether— especially Andrew's son Nicholas, who idolizesPierre.
Second Epilogue
Tolstoy discusses his view of history and how the weaknesses of the historian'smethods fail to distinguish between those actions undertaken by free will and thosewhich are caused by circumstance.
Second Epilogue8
Characters
Prince Andrew Bolkonsky
Prince Andrew is a dashing, romantic figure. For much of the book, he and Natashaare in love but are separated by the war. In the beginning he is married to the pregnantAnna Pavlovna, \"the little princess,\" and is active in the army. At the Battle of
Austerlitz, he is wounded and listed as dead for a while, but he shows up alive just ashis wife dies while giving birth to their son, Nicholas. When he falls in love withNatasha Rostov, he asks her to marry him right away, but his domineering father tellshim to wait for a year to see if their love will endure. He is wounded at the Battle ofBorodino and again news comes that he is dead, but while Moscow is being evacuatedwounded soldiers are brought to the Rostov house and Andrew is one of them.
Nastasha stays with him through the evacuation, but he eventually dies. In the end, hereaches a new level of spiritual enlightenment.
Elizabeth Bolkonskaya
Elizabeth is Prince Andrew's wife. She dies while giving birth to their son, Nicholas.
Mary Bolkonskaya
Mary is the sister of Prince Andrew. She is a devoutly religious woman who staysdevoted to her father even though her devotion nearly ruins her life. Early in the bookshe is engaged to Anatole Kuragin, but her father objects, and she finds that she
cannot ignore his objection. While Andrew goes off to war, Mary stays on the familyestate, watching after her father and Andrew's son, Nicholas Bolkonsky. Her father,Prince Nicholas Bolkonsky, becomes more and more verbally abusive in his old age,and Mary becomes more involved with the religious pilgrims who stop at their estate.When Nicholas Rostov stops at Bolkonsky, he protects her from the peasants and they
Characters
9
fall in love. After her father's death she is immersed in guilt, feeling that he was not sobad after all and that it was awful of her to not be with him in his last moments. Sheends up marrying Nicholas.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napolean is the Emperor of France. Napoleon mistakenly thinks that his army's
progress is due to his own skill, not taking into account the role of fate. On the eve ofthe great Battle of Borodino, for instance, he is more concerned with a painting of hisinfant son than with devising an effective battle plan for his troops.
Pierre Buzekhov
Pierre is the central character of this novel and its moral conscience. When he firstappears, he is a loud, obnoxious man only interested in himself and the next
party.Pierre is forced to change when his father dies: after some uncertainty over thewill, it is determined that the old Count did recognizePierre as his son. Suddenly richand titled as Count Buzekhov,Pierre finds himself very popular. He marries PrincessHelene Kuragin.
After hearing rumors of an affair between Helene and Dolokhov,Pierre challenges himto a duel. After wounding him,Pierre escapes, and while he is traveling across thecountry he is invited by an old acquaintance to join the Freemasons, a secret society.As a Mason,Pierre releases his servants and spends millions on charitable endeavors,often without knowing that he is being swindled. He is still married to Helene, butthey lead different lives, and he finds himself attracted to Natasha Rostov. As thebattle is waged against the French outside ofMoscow,Pierre hangs around curiouslyasking questions of the officers; after his return toMoscow, he plans to Ml Napoleon.He is captured after saving a child from a burning building, and is taken as a prisonerwhen the French march back to Paris .
Napoleon Bonaparte10
After the war, when he is freed,Pierre marries Natasha. They have children, and at theend of the novel he is involved in a secret society that gathers against the government'sknowledge to overthrow the social structure that kept men as serfs. The societydescribed resembles the one that led the Decembrist uprising that was to take placeinRussiafive years later.
Vasili Dmitrich Denisov
Denisov is the model of a professional military man. Angered at the inept bureaucracythat is not getting provisions to his troops, Denisov rides off to the divisionheadquarters and threatens a commander, which gets his troops food but makes
Denisov subject to court martial. Returning from the division headquarters, Denisov isshot by a French sharpshooter. When Nicholas Rostov tries to visit him at the hospitalthe place quarantined with typhus, with only one doctor for four hundred patients.Eventually, the court martial is averted, but Denisov retires from the service
disillusioned. At the end of the book he is staying with the family of Count Nicholas attheir estate.
Fedya Dolokhov
Dolokhov comes off as a rogue, a man of small means who manages to impresssociety's elite and get ahead by using his social position. As a gambler, he winsthousands off of Nicholas Rostov. As a lover, he fights a duel with Pierre Bezukhovover rumors about Dolokhov andPierre's wife. He is wounded in the duel, but thatmakes him even more of a romantic figure. He proposes to Sonya, but she rejects him.While the Russian forces are chasing the French army out of the country, Dolokhovmakes the bold move of riding into the enemy camp in disguise on a scouting mission;young Petya Rostov idolizes him for his courage.
Vasili Dmitrich Denisov11
Boris Drubetskoy
Drubetskoy's rise in the military is due to the social machinations of his mother, whois a wealthy society widow and not afraid to ask, or even peg, highly−placed officersto give her son a good position in the army
Platon Karataev
Platon is a Russian soldier who gives spiritual comfort to Nicholas.
Anatole Kuragin
Anatole is a scoundrel. His role in the book is to break up the engagement of Natashaand Prince Andrew. He starts paying attention to her out of a sense of adventure,considering her as another in his string of conquests. When he proposes to her andarranges to elope with her, even his friend and companion Dolokhov finds the schemeridiculous. Anatole is already married inPoland, and the priest and witnesses that hearranges for the wedding are gambling friends willing to go along with a hoax. Thewedding plans fail to transpire when, approaching the house, Anatole is asked in by ahuge doorman, and he runs away instead. Later, at a field hospital with an injury,Prince Andrew is put on a stretcher next to Anatole, the man who ruined his weddingplans, who is having his leg amputated. Anatole later dies of complication from thatoperation.
Helene Kuragin
Helen is Anatole's sister, and she is every bit as devious as he is. WhenPierre inheritshis father's fortune, she marries him. After he fights a duel with Dolokhov over herhonor, they lead separate lives. Helene is known inPetersburg polite society. Sheconverts to Roman Catholicism, and, under the pretense that to the church her
Boris Drubetskoy
12
marriage toPierre is invalid, plans to marry one of her two suitors. When she dies, it isfrom a botched operation to cure an illness that is not clearly described in the book,indicating that it might be an abortion: 'They all knew very well that the enchantingcountess' illness arose from an inconvenience resulting from marrying two husbands atthe same time, and that the Italian's cure consisted in removing such inconvenience.\"
Kutuzov
The commander of the Russian Army, the novel follows Kutuzov through some of hisdecision−making process, especially focusing on his wisdom in ignoring the populardecision that he should attack the French army as it was fleeing back home.
Natasha Rostov
In the course of the story, Natasha (also known as Nataly) grows from a petulant childto a mature woman who knows the sorrows of war. Natasha is pretty and flirtatious,and the young soldiers are smitten with her. When she and Andrew are engaged, she isdelighted to feel like a grown−up, but as time goes by she grows impatient. Kuragin,convincing her that she is in love with him, arranges to elope with her, even though heis already secretly married. When Andrew learns about it, he breaks up with her. Shetries to poison herself, in shame.
Later, whenMoscow is being evacuated, Natasha is the one who convinces her parentsto leave some of their fine possessions behind so that they can take some woundedsoldiers. When she finds out that Prince Andrew is one of the wounded, she writes tohis sister Mary and together they nurse her until his death. Natasha marriesPierre afterhe is the only person who she can talk to about Andrew's death.
Kutuzov13
NatalyRostov
See Natasha Rostov
Nicholas Rostov
Presented as a typical example of a nobleman,Rostov lived a wasteful life with littleintellectual or spiritual depth. Early on he joins the army because he needs the money.He loses great sums of money gambling. Passing by the town near the Bolkonskyestate, he finds the peasants accusing Mary of trying to steal their land by makingthem evacuate. His aristocratic sensibilities are offended; unarmed, he makes the mobrulers quiet down and turn away. At the end of the book he is a retired gentleman,arguing with his brother−in−law Pierre that he should leave the government alone tohandle the situation of the serfs properly.
Peter Rostov
The youngest member of theRostov family, Peter is mostly forgotten in the
background, playing childish games, until, at age sixteen, he enlists in the army. He iskilled in the same attack that freesPierre from the retreating French forces.
Sonya
Sonya is a pathetic figure, always in love but too meek to do anything about it. She isa cousin of and lives with theRostov family, and early in the book she and NicholasRostov pronounce their love for one another. His family, in bad financial shape, objectand hope that he will find a woman with a better dowry to offer. Sonya is Natasha'sconfidante, and stands by her during her various disastrous love affairs.
NatalyRostov14
Themes
Class Conflict
Although there is not much open conflict between members of the different classes ofthis novel, there is an underlying tension between them.
Members of the older generation, such as Countess Rostova and Prince NicholasBolkonsky, verbally abuse the peasants who are under their command. In a
patronizing manner, they openly discuss how lost the peasants would be without theirguidance. At the same time, there are characters like Platon Karataev, a poor man wholeads a simple and happy life.
The closest the novel comes to an open−class conflict is when Mary is confronted bypeasants at Bogucharovo, near her family's estate, as she is planning to evacuatebefore the French arrive. Tolstoy is clear about the fact that they act, not out of
resentment for the social privilege Mary has enjoyed at their expense, but because oftheir fear that they have no leader. They are starving, but will not accept the grain thatMary offers them because they fear angering the French. The greatest danger that theypose to her is blocking her horse when she plans to leave. When Nicholas arrives theyautomatically fall under his spell and comply with his demands without hesitation,apparently in recognition of his superior breeding and intelligence. He orders theleaders of the insurrection bound, and several men in the crowd offer their belts forthat purpose. \"How can one talk to the masters like that?\" says a drunken peasant tohis former leader as he is being led away. \"What were you thinking of, you fool?\"
Duty and Responsibility
The greatest motivation for the noble families in this novel is their duty to the serfs intheir care. In other words, the upper classes believe that they have the responsibility to
Themes
15
care for their serfs, looking after them as one would look after children. Thisassumption stems from the common perception that the serfs were not intelligentenough to survive without their help. To do this is an important part of the code ofhonor; any nobleman that violates this trust is recognized and punished by his peers.In fact, this code of conduct controls almost every aspect of upper−class life. It
dictates how a gentleman should act in any given situation; to deviate from it invitedthe censure of one's peers. After the drunken revelers at a poker party throw apoliceman in the canal, the act is derided as improper for well−bred gentlemen:And to think it is Count Vladomirovich Bezukhov's son who amuses himself in thissensible manner 1 And he was said to be so educated and clever That is all that hisforeign education has done for him 1
Later, Bezukhov, undergoes a series of transformations that raise his sense of socialresponsibility. He joins the Freemasons with the idea of working among society's eliteto help the poor. He visits the army at the Battle of Borondino and tours the field;half−crazed, he decides he should get a gun and shoot Napoleon. In peacetime, heworks with a secret organization to rearrange the social order and free the serfs fromtheir oppression.
Art and Experience
Any historical novel such as War and Peace raises questions about the interplaybetween fiction and reality. The battle scenes in this novel are commended for theirrealism, but Tolstoy did not actually experience these battles; instead, they are drawnfrom his exhaustive research of the war against France and his own experiences in theCrimean War At the end of the novel, Tolstoy dispenses of the fictional story
altogether and talks directly to the reader about how historians impact history. Realityis too large and complex for humans to comprehend, Tolstoy contends, and sohistorians cannot cover all of the diverse aspects of historical events.
Art and Experience
16
Success and Failure
A large part of what drives Tolstoy in the novel is his rejection of conventional
historical perceptions of the war: Napoleon, who eventually lost inRussia, is viewed asa shrewd commander today, while the Russian commander, Kutuzov, is dismissed as ablunderer. As Tolstoy perceived the situation, those detractors who considered theRussians as failures because they did not destroy Napoleon's army were notaccounting for the army's weakened condition. Moreover, those who credited
Napoleon with brilliant strategy were not taking into consideration his good luck. Inthe end, Tolstoy reminds readers of the role of chance involved in life, and thesometimes small difference between success and failure.
Success and Failure17
Style
Structure
Since War and Peace was first published, critics have discussed the ambiguousstructure of the novel. Some contend that Tolstoy raced through the book, puttingdown ideas as they came to him; therefore, any structure in the story is accidental. Asevidence of this, they point to the final chapters, which seem if the author's attentionwas distracted and he followed his interests rather than doing what the novel wouldrequire for completion. Some critics consider the free−floating structure to the
appropriate device for the ideas that Tolstoy was trying to convey about free will, andthey credit him with utilizing a structure that permitted him to balance necessity withchance.
Some critics perceive a clear pattern to the overall book: the alternation of chaptersabout war with chapters about peace; the symmetry and repetition in the amount oftime spent on the march to Moscow and the march from it; in the scenes of blithesociety and the scenes of existential angst; and in the scenes about love and the scenesabout death. The question of whether Tolstoy planned the patterns that can be found inhis book or whether they were coincidences is an issue that will be debated throughouthistory.
Setting
In the early nineteenth century,Russiawas going through a tumultuous and transitionaltime. The old feudal system was disappearing. Conventional ideas of honor were
losing ground to pragmatic ideas from the Enlightenment. Military victories were seenas a result of luck. Tolstoy took advantage of these unique circumstances to set hissprawling tale of love, war, and changing political and social ideas. It took genius torecognize the potential of this setting and exploit it, but his philosophical case was
Style
18
helped greatly by the fact that this was a situation rich in possibility.
Hero
Prince Andrew is a hero in a conventional sense: he overcomes initial fear in battle toride bravely against the enemy, and he has a beautiful woman waiting for him athome, dreaming of his return. He has qualities, though, that are less than heroic, suchas a fear of commitment. He is all too willing to accept his father's demand that he putoff his marriage for a year. During that time, Natasha is drawn to another man,
Anatole, who almost ruins her socially. In the end, Andrew remains an idealized heroby dying a soldier's death after he has been reunited with his beloved.
On the other handPierre is more of a modern hero. He is not a warrior, but a thinker:the struggle he fights is with his conscience, after he is made rich with an unexpectedinheritance. He is not a dashing figure, and he bears his love for Natasha silentlyinstead of declaring it. Yet in the end, he is the one who wins her hand.
Narrator
Toward the end of the story, Tolstoy increasingly addresses the reader directly,stepping out from behind the persona of the third−person narrator who has told thestories of the characters. Throughout the novel, there are breaks from the action wherethe theoretical aspects of war are discussed. Sometimes these are written like
textbooks, describing troop movements; sometimes the important figures of the warare discussed as characters, describing their specific movements and thoughts. At theend, the narration directly addresses the reader, referring to thoughts presented ashaving come from \"I,\" apparently abandoning the structure of the story to talk aboutphilosophy. The narrator becomes a character who hijacks the novel by the second andlast epilogue, lecturing his audience about his theories of historical truth.
Hero19
Historical Context
The Napoleonic Wars
In 17, the French Revolution swept throughFrance, marking one of the true turningpoints in Western civilization. In part, this revolt was inspired by the success of theAmerican Revolution, which had rejected the old English monarchy and established anew country based on democratic principles. Mostly, though, the French Revolutionwas a protest against the widespread abuses of the French aristocracy, who lived indecadence while the lower classes had to endure higher taxes and economic
restrictions. When the peasants realized that the French government was going to useforce against protesters, they became violent. The violence escalated as the peoplesystematically began to eliminate anyone of aristocratic lineage. After a long fight,King Louis IX was beheaded inParis in 1793. There followed a two−year period calledthe Reign of Terror, during which the revolutionary leaders executed more than17,000 people.
During this time, France's enemies tried to take advantage of the situation As a
result,Francewas constantly at war. Out of all of this confusion, conservative elementsin the government supported the rise of military commander Napoleon Bonaparte,whose solution to the government's instability was to take control. He was appointedFirst Consul by the constitution of 1799, and in 1802 he appointed himself that
position for life In 1804, a new constitution appointed him Emperor, a title which wasto pass down to his heirs.
Napoleon's influence was seen in almost all aspects of French social life However, histrue interest was in waging war. As Englandand Francehad always been enemies, heaimed to conquer England; but since Englandwas the most powerful and importantcountry in the world at that time, his plans were foiled. He turned his attention toRussia. The Treaty of Tilsit, which he signed with Russia's emperor Alexander I in1807, divided Europe into half: the French controlledHolland, Westphalia, Spam, and
Historical Context
20
Italy. By 1809 Napoleon was the ruler of most Europe, except for Russian andEngland In 1812 he invadedRussiawith 500,000 troops, a situation depicted in Warand Peace.
Emancipation of the Serfs
From the 1600s until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russian economy hadbeen based upon an economic principle of serfdom. Serfs were agricultural laborers,legally bound to work on large estates and farms. Moreover, serfs were owned by thepeople who owned the land they worked on. The serf could buy his freedom or work itoff, but this happened rarely (serfs were always males, female peasants were attachedto spouses or parents and, likewise, the property of the landowners). Landowners hada responsibility to take care of their serfs, and in hard times they might have to incurlosses to make sure that their serfs were all adequately fed.
This social system was always fraught with tension. As in War and Peace, when thewar broke up society and forced landlords to flee their land, open rebellion was onlyavoided by those serfs who felt loyalty to the tradition. In America, the slave systemthat was in place at the same time was justified by theories of one race being inferiorto another, but the Russian system had even less justification for saying why one
human had a right to rule over another Many members of the aristocracy realized this,and in the years after the Napoleonic Wars they banded together to form the secretsocieties that would lead the Decembrist uprising.
The Decembrist uprising was the first real revolution of modernRussia. In 1817
landowners started forming secret societies, patterned on societies such as the MasonicOrder. These societies, such as the Society of Russian Knights and the Union ofWelfare, started as gentlemen's clubs; but as they grew in number their rhetoric
became more revolutionary. When Tsar Alexander I died unexpectedly in Decemberof 1825, there was confusion about who was to assume power,−and in the temporaryconfusion about who was to be the next ruler the members of the uprising were able to
Emancipation of the Serfs
21
gather three thousand soldiers to their cause. Alexander's successor, Tsar Nicholas,gathered fifteen thousand soldiers; the result was a massacre in Senate Square.
Members of the secret societies were gathered up and jailed. After trials, the leaderswere executed and over a hundred received jail sentences, but revolutionariesinRussiasince then have acted in the names of the Decembrists.
Not surprisingly, Nicholas' reign was conservative in its nature and intolerant of
dissent, but even he realized that the days of the old aristocracy were disappearing. Heappointed commissions to study the question of serfdom In 1855, when his son
Alexander II became took power, it was clear that the country was headed for chaos,that the serf system would not survive. He had a committee work for four years on theright way for Russiato evolve beyond the serf structure with the least change.The system that Alexander announced with his Imperial Manifesto Emancipating theSerfs arranged for land to be divided: landlords were to keep half of their land, andcommunes, or mirs, were to distribute the other half equally between the serfs. Thepeasants had a forty−nine year period to pay back the cost of their land. This
proclamation was read at churches throughout Russiain February of 1861, two yearsbefore Tolstoy began writing War and Peace. These reforms still left the former serfs,now peasants, under the control of a government ruled by an aristocracy. The issues offreedom and of class continued to boil inRussia, and eventually led to the RussianRevolution in 1917.
Emancipation of the Serfs22
Critical Overview
Much of the earliest critical reaction to War and Peace focused on how well Tolstoyhad accurately portrayed historical events in Russia. Although Tolstoy took great
pains to research the historical documents, he did not feel obliged to stick firmly to thecommon historical interpretations. Still, since many critics had lived through the
events described, while many others had grown up hearing about them, it was difficultfor critics to not talk about how Tolstoy's version related to their own. In general, theyfound the novel to be quite accurate.
Some critics took exception with the way that Tolstoy had presented the military
commanders as less instrumental in the outcome of the war. At the other extreme werethose critics who faulted Tolstoy for failing to improve the social consciousness of thetime. Edward Wasiolek explains that radical critic Dmitry Pisarev commented that thefirst half of the book, which was all that was published before his death, was \"anostalgic tribute to the gentry.\"
Wasiolek also relates the comments of N. K. Strakhov, whose criticism of the novel hedescribes as \"the best criticism on War and Peace at the time, and possibly the best inRussian since.\" He credits Strakhov for his appreciation of the psychology of thenovel and for recognizing the fact, which is commonly accepted today, that Tolstoy'sgreatness was in being able to render a full character in just a few words. Strakhovappreciated the novel, but he could not fully account for its greatness: as he noted,\"among all the various characters and events, we feel the presence of some kind offirm and unshakable principle on which the world of the novel maintains itself.\"The ambiguity of that \"firm and unshakable principle\" was what earned the book alukewarm reception when it was translated into English. Matthew Arnold, in hisreview for Fortnightly Review, noted that Tolstoy wrote about \"life\" but not \"an.\"Perhaps the most lasting criticism by an English−speaking author was that of novelistHenry James. In his introduction to the book The Tragic Muse, as in the introductions
Critical Overview
23
to most of his works. James considered philosophical matters of art. ConsideringTolstoy and Alexandre Dumas, the French author of The Three Musketeers and TheCount of Maine Cristo, James wondered, \"What do such large loose baggy monsters,with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?\" Hewent on to assort that \"there is life and life, and as waste is only life sacrificed andthereby prevented from 'counting,' I delight in a deep−breathing economy and organicform.\"
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Tolstoy fell into favor with new Communistgovernment.
Up until then, his literary reputation was maintained by people who had known him(he died in 1910) and a few stalwart fans. In a 1924 article, the author Maxim Gorkyrelates Lenin talking about War and Peace in the Kremlin in 1918: '\"He, brother, is anartist! ... Whom could one put next to him inEurope\"?' Then [Lenin] answered himself'No one.'\" It was not long before Tolstoy studies went beyond personal reminiscencesto intellectual scholarship in Russia. At a time when many other significant Russianauthors were banned because of their views, Tolstoy was embraced as a fore−sightednobleman who wrote about the value of common people and the arbitrary nature ofclass distinctions.
Today, Tolstoy's career is divided into two eras: the spiritualism of the later novellasand the sweeping romances of the earlier novels, such as War and Peace and AnnaKarenina. Critics perceive within War and Peace one phase of his life leading into theother: how the prodigious novelist of the 1860s and 1870s evolved into the thoughtfulspiritual man he was by the turn of the century. There is no question of Tolstoy'sgreatness today.
Critical Overview24
Criticism
• Critical Essay #1• Critical Essay #2• Critical Essay #3• Critical Essay #4• Critical Essay #5• Critical Essay #6Criticism25
Critical Essay #1
David Kelly is an instructor of Creative Writing and Literature at College of LakeCounty jznd Oakton Community College inIllinois. In the following essay, Kelly
discusses why the people most likely to avoid reading War and Peace are the ones whowould probably enjoy and benefit from it most.
It would be difficult to question the quality of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Althoughmost critics would not go as far as E. M. Forster did in Aspects of the Novel,
proclaiming this to be the greatest novel ever written, all would swear to its overallexcellence. As with any work, critics consider different ideas about its relative meritsand weaknesses, no matter how revered.
Still, with such universal acclaim, no one ever feels the need to ask why War andPeace isn't read more often—anyone who has ever looked at it on a bookshelf, takingup the space of four or five average novels, knows at a glance the secret of itsunpopularity. It's huge. All across the world War and Peace is mentioned in popculture, but usually it is discussed in terms of how difficult the speaker's educationwas, or would have been, if they had actually gone ahead with things like reading bignovels.
Literary critics tend to skip quickly past this issue of the book's enormous size,
although the general public can never get past it. In the literary world, bringing up abook's length is as tasteless as mentioning its price—both being worldly concerns, notartistic considerations. Unfortunately, the result is a huge gap between the values ofcritics and the values of readers, especially students. Many students find the pagecount intimidating, and would be just as happy reading three hundred pages ofnonsense as a thousand worthwhile pages. This is where the jokes about War andPeace come in, reinforcing the idea that it is not only unimportant, but is ridiculous.Students end up making their decision about whether or not to read it without everlooking at a page, judging the book by the distance between its covers. To students
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who do not care for literature this book seems the most dreaded of all possibilities.Actually, this is the book that students who do not like literature have been asking for.It is not too clever, too wound up in an artistic style, to be appealing to the generalreader. We all feel life's pace—its mix of chance and fate—and some people find
themselves particularly irritated by the way that life is compressed to fit into a book ofa few hundred pages. They sorely miss the rich incidental details that are trimmed offon the edges of the writer's frame. Young readers, who are dissatisfied with books thatdon't represent life, need a book like this: one that can take bends, back up, or plowstraight ahead, according to what happens in the world we know—not according tosome literary theory. Ernest J Simons' classic examination of War and Peace quotedan anonymous reader saying it best: \"if life could write it would write just as Tolstoydid.\"
Of course, all writers write about life in their own way, but what makes this casedifferent is that War and Peace is successful at reflecting a true pace of life withouthaving to dwell upon how poignant it is or oversell its own sensitivity. It is not
difficult to understand. The book has something in it to remind readers of all of then:own experiences. Working with such a long form gives Tolstoy freedom to follow thelives of his characters as they zig and zag, as they live out their intentions or fall tofate's control.
Freedom is what War and Peace is about, although Tolstoy does not formally declarethis intention until nearly twelve hundred pages are done.
By that time, after we have felt the looseness of his style, the emphasis on freedom ofthe mind is no surprise. The feeling of freedom takes time to establish. A novel that istightly plotted can get to its point in a few sentences, but these are the books that raisethe suspicions of those wary readers who hate the artificiality of art. For an author likeTolstoy to follow the rhythms of life, especially the easygoing lives of the leisuredclass, means taking time.
Critical Essay #127
The idea of freedom, which Tolstoy talks about in the Second Epilogue, is evident inthe way that this book came to be, having ended up a far, far different thing than it waswhen he first thought of it. It originally spanned over fifty years—at the pace War andPeace as we know it unravels, that would come out to nearly five thousand pages.When the idea first came to Tolstoy, the character Pierre Bezukhov was to be aveteran of the Decembrist uprising, returning toMoscow in 1856 after being exiledinSiberia for thirty years for his part in the uprising. That led the story back to 1825,but writing about the upnsing raised the broader question: Who were theserevolutionaries 9 They were Russian noblemen who had tried to overthrow the
government to gain freedom for the country's peasants. What gave them the idea to actagainst their own self−interests? Searching for the answer to that question tookTolstoy even deeper into the past.
Eventually, the sections taking place in 1856 and 1825 were dropped from the novel.Instead, the action begins in 1805, when the major characters are young adults and theRussian aristocracy is first being politicized by the threat of Napoleon, and concludesin 1820, when Pierre is just starting to discuss the ideas that later led to the Decembristuprising. This flexibility led the book in directions that could not have been
anticipated when Tolstoy started it—directions that the readers do not see coming.Reluctant readers might not buy the idea that the book is a \"thrill−ride,\" but it certainlyplays out unlike any other novel, which in itself should cut short most objections toreading it
To get the full effect readers need to take their time unraveling this book, which is notthe same thing as saying that it is difficult to understand. The language is not difficult,and the situations are clear enough, but the wealth of details just will not be
understood as quickly as busy people want Of course, there will always be readerswho think that any novel that does not happen in their own towns within their ownlifetimes is irrelevant to their life.
They foolishly think that human nature has somehow become different as the timeshave changed, or that it is significantly different from one place to another. There isn't
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much that will change these people's minds, because they will always find excuses tohate reading.
It is one of the great ironies of literature that many people will not touch War andPeace because they do not consider themselves to be fans of history. They feel thathistory is not real or relevant. These people could have sat down with Leo Tolstoyand, language problems aside, gotten along just fine. He disliked history, too—at least,the way that historians present it. The novel's long, winding road leads to its SecondEpilogue, where Tolstoy addresses the problems with historical interpretation of thepast and how he thinks events should be recorded as time passes. It is almost beyondworth mentioning to say that anyone who feels that she or he cannot understand
history has not had it presented to them in the right way before. They might have beentold about \"heroic\" deeds that were obviously done out of desperation, not goodcharacter, or heroic figures with despicable personal lives, or \"common\" people whoare more interesting than the focal subjects of history. Overgeneralization makes
historians liars, a fact that bothered Tolstoy as much as it bothers people who feel thatreading stories based in the past are not worth the effort.
Sometimes people feel that they are not qualified to read War and Peace because theydo not know enough about its time and setting. The book certainly mentions a lot ofhistorical detail, but it also explains the significance of the details. If it did not explainthe references within the novel, it would not have to be so frighteningly long—that iswhat all of those hundreds of pages are for All one should do before starting is to takeout a map, find France, find Moscow, and know that in 1812 the French army marchedacross Europe and Russia to Moscow, then quickly turned around and marched backto France. Any further knowledge of the events of the time—why they advanced, whythey retreated, who the principle actors were—would be nice, but it is not necessary.There will always be people who do not want to read—whatever their reasons, andthere are millions of them, they feel that reading is not worth their time, and, if youhaven't heard it all your life, War and Peace takes time to read. But it is not muchmore reader−friendly than books a fraction of its size. It is not much more difficult to
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figure out what is going on than it is to catch up with the characters on a soap opera,and it is, in the end, a better experience: soap operas do not consider the questions ofreality and freedom that make non−readers shun novels in the first place.Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Novels for Students. Gale, 2000.
Critical Essay #130
Critical Essay #2
In the following excerpt. Maude praises Tolstoy for his artistry, for \"clearness of formand vividness of colour,\" for showing things as his characters saw them, and forpresenting the soul of man \"with unparalleled reality.\"
Nothing can be simpler than most of the occurrences of War and Peace. Everydayevents of family life: conversations between brother and sister, or mother and
daughter, separations and reunions, hunting, holiday festivities, dances, card−playing,and so forth, are all as lovingly shaped into artistic gems as is the battle of Borodinoitself. Whatever the purpose of the book may be, its success depends not on thatpurpose but on what Tolstoy did under its influence, that is to say it depends on ahighly artistic execution.
If Tolstoy succeeds in fixing our gaze on what occupied his soul it is because he hadfull command of his instrument—which was art. Not many readers probably areconcerned about the thoughts that directed and animated the author, but all areimpressed by his creation. Men of all camps—those who like as well as those whodislike his later works—unite in tribute to the extraordinary mastery shown in thisremarkable production. It is a notable example of the irresistible and all−conqueringpower of art.
But such art does not arise of itself, nor can it exist apart from deep thought and deepfeeling. What is it that strikes everyone in War and Peace? It is its clearness of formand vividness of colour. It is as though one saw what is described and heard the
sounds that are uttered. The author hardly speaks in his own person; he brings forwardthe characters and then allows them to speak, feel, and act; and they do it so that everymovement is true and amazingly exact, in full accord with the character of thoseportrayed. It is as if we had to do with real people, and saw them more clearly thanone can in real life ...
Critical Essay #231
Similarly Tolstoy usually describes scenes or scenery only as reflected in the mind ofone of his characters. He does not describe the oak that stood beside the road or themoonlight night when neither Natasha nor Prince Andrew could sleep, but he
describes the impressions the oak and the night made on Prince Andrew The battlesand historic events are usually described not by informing us of the author'sconception of them, but by the impression they produce on the characters in the
story.... Tolstoy nowhere appears behind the actors or draws events in the abstract; heshows them in the flesh and blood of those who supplied the material for the events.In this respect the work is an artistic marvel. Tolstoy has seized not some separatetraits but a whole living atmosphere, which vanes around different individuals anddifferent classes of society....
The soul of man is depicted in War and Peace with unparalleled reality. It is not life inthe abstract that is shown, but creatures fully defined with all their limitations of place,time, and circumstance. For instance, we see how individuals grow. Natasha runninginto the drawing−room with her doll, in Book I, and Natasha entering the church, inBook IX, are really one and the same person at two different ages, and not merely twodifferent ages attributed to a single person, such as one often encounters in fiction. Theauthor has also shown us the intermediate stages of this development. In the same wayNicholas Rostov develops;Pierre from being a young man becomes aMoscowmagnate; old Bolkonsky grows senile, and so forth....
In judging such a work one should tread with caution, but we think a Russian criticjudged well when he said that the meaning of the book is best summed up in Tolstoy'sown words: \"There is no greatness without simplicity, goodness and truth.\"
Source: Aylmer Maude, \"Life of Tolstoy,\" reprinted in Tolstoy The Critical Heritage,Edited by A V Knowles, Rout−ledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, pp. 225−32
Critical Essay #232
Critical Essay #3
An English poet and novelist, Bayley is best known for his critical studies of Tolstoy,Alexander Pushkin, and Thomas Hardy. In the following excerpt from his Tolstoy andthe Novel, Bayley discusses the depiction of characters and historical events and thethemes of life and death in War and Peace.
Pushkin's tale, The Captain's Daughter, which describes the great rebellion of
Pugachev in 1773, during Catherine's reign, is the first imagined relation of an episodefrom Russian history, but it is no more a historical novel than is War and Peace. Itstrikes us at first as a rather baffling work, with nothing very memorable about it.Tolstoy himself commented, as if uneasily, on its bareness, and observes that writerscannot be so straightforward and simple any more. Certainly Pushkin's way of
imagining the past is the very opposite of Tolstoy's. War and Peace has a remarkableappearance of simplicity, but this simplicity is the result of an emphasis so uniformand so multitudinous that we sometimes feel that there is nothing left for us to think orto say, and that we cannot notice anything that Tolstoy has not. The simplicity ofTolstoy is overpowering that of Pushkin is neither enigmatic nor evasive, but rapidand light. He writes about the past as if he were writing a letter home about his recentexperiences. The horrors of the rebellion cause him neither to heighten, nor
deliberately to lower, his style. And he is just as prepared to \"comment\" as Tolstoyhimself, though he does it through the narrator, who composes the book as a memoir.The Captain, Commandant of a fortress in the rebel country, is interrogating a Bashkir.The Bashkir crossed the threshold with difficulty (he was wearing fetters) and, takingoff his tall cap, stood by the door I glanced at him and shuddered I shall never forgetthat man He seemed to be over seventy. He had neither nose nor ears His head wasshaven, instead of a beard, a few grey hairs stuck out, he was small, thin and bent, buthis narrow eyes still had a gleam in them
\"Aha,\" said the Commandant, recognising by the terrible marks one of the rebels
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punished in 1741. \"I see you are an old wolf and have been in our snares. Rebellingmust be an old game to you, to judge by the look of your head. Come nearer; tell me,who sent you?\"
The old Bashkir was silent and gazed at the Commandant with an utterly senselessexpression.
\"Why don't you speak 9 \" Ivan Kuzmich went on \"Don't you understand Russian?Yulay, ask him in your language who sent him to our fortress.\"
Yulay repeated Ivan Kuzmich's question in Tartar But the Bashkir looked at him withthe same expression and did not answer a word.
\"Very well,\" the Commandant said. \"I will make you speak 1 Lads, take off his stupidstriped gown and streak his back. Mmd you do it thoroughly, Yulay'\"
Two soldiers began undressing the Bashkir. The unfortunate man's face expressedanxiety. He looked about him like some wild creature caught by children But when theold man was made to put his hands round the soldier's neck and was lifted off theground and Yulay brandished the whip, the Bashkir groaned in a weak, imploringvoice, and, nodding his head, opened his mouth in which a short stump could be seeninstead of a tongue
When I recall that this happened in my lifetime, and that now I have lived to see thegentle reign of the Emperor Alexander, I cannot but marvel at the rapid progress ofenlightenment and the diffusion of humane principles Young man! If ever my notesfall into your hands, remember that the best and most permanent changes are thosedue to the softening of manners and morals, and not to any violent upheavals.It was a shock to all of us.
Critical Essay #334
The tone of the commentary, and the lack of exaggerated horror, are exactly right. Inhis late story, Hadji Murad, Tolstoy has the same unobtrusive brilliance of
description, but—too intent on the art that conceals art—he is careful to avoid thecommentary, and so he does not achieve the historical naturalness and anonymity ofthis narrative. He is too careful in a literary way—almost a Western way—to avoidbeing shocked....
[The] passage gives us an insight, too, into the reason why all the great
nineteenth−century Russians are so good on their history. They feel continuingly intouch with it—horrors and all—in a direct and homely way. They neither romanticiseit nor cut themselves off from it, but are soberly thankful (as Shakespeare and theElizabethans were thankful) if they are spared a repetition in their own time of thesame sort of events. Scott subtitled his account of the '45 '\"Tis Sixty Years Since,\" andPushkin was almost exactly the same distance in time from Pugachev, but theirattitudes to the rebellion they describe could hardly be more different. Pushkin
borrows greatly from Scott... But he does not borrow Scott's presentation of rebellionas Romance, safely situated in the past and hence to be seen—in contrast to the
prosaic present—as something delightful and picturesque. Nor does he see the past assomething over and done with, and thus the novelist's preserve. Unemphatically
placed as it is, the comment of the narrator in the penultimate chapter—\"God save usfrom seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless 1 \"—strikes like a
hammer−blow. It is a comment out of Shakespeare's histories, not Scott's novels.Tolstoy also borrows from Scott, in particular from the device of coincidence as usedin historical romance (\"Great God! Can it really be Sir Hubert, my own father?\")without which the enormous wheels of War and Peace could hardly continue torevolve. Tolstoy avails himself of coincidence without drawing attention to it. It is aconvenience, and not, as it has become in that distinguished descendant of Tolstoy'snovel—Dr Zhivago—a quasi−symbolic method. Princess Mary's rescue by NicholasRostov, and Pierre's by Dolokhov, are obvious instances, and Tolstoy's easy andnatural use of the device makes a satisfying contrast to the expanse of the book, theversts that stretch away from us in every direction. It also shows us that the obverse of
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this boundless geographical space is the narrow dimension of a self−contained class;the rulers of War and Peace, its deux cents families [\"two hundred families\"], are infact all known to one another (we are told halfway through that Pierre \"knew everyonein Moscow and St Petersburg\") and meet all over Russia as if at a soiree or a club.Kutuzov and Andrew's father are old comrades in arms; Kutuzov is an admirerofPierre's wife; and hence Andrew gets the entrie to Auster−litz andPierretoBorodino~and we with them.
Yet Tolstoy's domestication by coincidence gives us an indication why we have fromThe Captain's Daughter a more authentic feel of history than from War and PeacePushkin respects history, and is content to study it and to exercise his intelligenceupon it: to Tolstoy it represents a kind of personal challenge—it must be attacked,absorbed, taken over. And in \"Some Words about War and Peace\" [see excerpt dated1868] Tolstoy reveals the two ways in which this takeover of history is to be achieved.First, human characteristics are invariable, and \"in those days also people loved,
envied, sought truth and virtue, and were earned away by passion\"—i.e. all the thingsI feel were felt by people in the past, and consequently they are all really me. Second,\"There was the same complex mental and moral life among the upper classes, whowere in some instances even more refined than now\"—i e. my own class (whichchiefly interests me) and which was even more important then, enjoyed collectivelythe conviction that I myself do now: that everything stems from and depends upon ourown existence To paraphrase in this way is, of course, unfair, but I am not reallymisrepresenting Tolstoy. All his historical theories, with their extraordinary interest,authority and illumination, do depend upon these two swift annexatory steps, afterwhich his historical period is at his feet, asEurope was at Napoleon's.
Let us return for a moment to the extract from The Captain's Daughter quoted above.The day after the events described, the fortress is taken by Pugachev, and the oldBashkir sits astride the gallows and handles the rope while the Commandant and hislieutenant are hanged Nothing is said about the Bashkir's sentiments, or whether thiswas his revenge on the Russian colonial methods the Commandant stood for, andwhether it pleased him. The hero, Ensign Grinyov, is himself about to be hanged, but
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is saved by the intervention of his old servant; he sees the Commandant's wife killed,and finally \"having eaten my supper with great relish, went to sleep on a bare floor,exhausted both in mind and body.\" Next day he observes in passing some rebelspulling off and appropriating the boots of the hanged men.
I have unavoidably given these details more emphasis than they have in the text: thepoint is that this conveys exactly what the hero's reaction to such events would havebeen at that time. It is not necessarily Pushkin's reaction, but he has imagined—solightly and completely that it hardly looks like imagination at all: it is more like Defoeand Richardson than Scott—the reactions of a young man of Grinyov's upbringing,right down to the fervent plea that manners and methods may continue to soften andimprove. Now let us take a comparable episode in War and Peace, the shooting of thealleged nicendiarists by the French inMoscow. Pierre, like Grinyov, is waiting—as hethinks—for execution; and his eye registers with nightmare vividness the appearanceand behaviour of the people round him He ceases to be any sort of character at all, butis merely a vehicle for the overpowering precision of Tolstoyan detail, and Tolstoyconcedes this by saying \"he lost the power of thinking and understanding. He couldonly hear and see.\" But here Tolstoy is not being quite truthful.Pierre is also to feel animmense and generalized incredulity and horror, which his creator compels the otherparticipants to share. \"On the faces of all the Russians, and of the French soldiers andofficers without exception, he read the same dismay, horror, and conflict that were inhis own heart.\" Even the fact that he has himself been saved means nothing to him.The fifth prisoner, the one next toPierre, was led away—alone,Pierre did notunderstand that he was saved, that he and the rest had been brought there only towitness the execution. With ever−growing horror, and no sense of joy or relief, hegazed at what was taking place. The fifth man was the factory lad in the loose cloakThe moment they laid hands on him, he sprang aside in terror and clutched atPierre.(Pierre shuddered and shook himself free.) The lad was unable to walk. They draggedhim along holding him up under the arms, and he screamed. When they got him to thepost he grew quiet, as if he had suddenly understood something Whether he
understood that screaming was useless, or whether he thought it incredible that men
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should kill him, at any rate he took his stand at the post, waiting to be blindfolded likethe others, and like a wounded animal looked around him with glittering eyes Pierrewas no longer able to turn away and close his eyes His curiosity and agitation, likethat of the whole crowd, reached the highest pitch at this fifth murder. Like the othersthis fifth man seemed calm; he wrapped his loose cloak closer and rubbed one barefoot with the other.
When they began to blindfold him he himself adjusted the knot which hurt the back ofhis head; then when they propped him against the bloodstained post, he leaned backand, not being comfortable in that position, straightened himself, adjusted his feet, andleaned back again more comfortably.Pierre did not take his eyes from him and did notmiss his slightest movement
Probably a word of command was given and was followed by the reports of eightmuskets; but try as he would Pierre could not afterwards remember having heard theslightest sound of the shots He only saw how the workman suddenly sank down on thecords that held him, how blood showed itself in two places, how the ropes slackenedunder the weight of the hanging body, and how the workman sat down, his headhanging unnaturally and one leg bent under him Pierre ran up to the post No one
hindered him Pale frightened people were doing something around the workman. Thelower jaw of an old Frenchman with a thick moustache trembled as he untied the ropesThe body collapsed. The soldiers dragged it awkwardly from the post and beganpushing it into the pit.
They all plainly and certainly knew that they were criminals who must hide the tracesof their guilt as quickly as possible
The concluding comment is not that of a man of the age, but that of Tolstoy himself (itshows, incidentally, how impossible it is to separate Tolstoy the moralist from Tolstoythe novelist at any stage of life) and though the description is one of almost mesmerichorror, yet it is surely somehow not completely moving, or satisfactory. This has
nothing to do with the moral comment however. I think the explanation is that it is not
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seen by a real character, or rather by a character who retains his reality at this moment.It is at such moments that we are aware ofPierre's lack of a body, and of a past—thetwo things are connected—and we are also aware of Tolstoy's need for such a person,with these assets, at these moments. If any member of theRostov or Bolkonskyfamilies had been the spectator, the scene would have been very different. It wouldhave been anchored firmly to the whole selfhood of such a spectator, as are the deedsof the guerrillas which Petya hears about in their camp....
The point is that a character like this makes us aware of the necessary multiplicity ofhuman response, of the fact that even at such a scene some of the soldiers and
spectators must in the nature of things have been bored, phlegmatic, or actively andenjoyingly curious. But Tolstoy wants to achieve a dramatic and metaphonc unity ofresponse, as if we were all absorbed in a tragic spectacle; to reduce the multiplicity ofreaction to one sensation—the sensation that he had himself felt on witnessing apublic execution inParis For this purposePierre is his chosen instrument. He neverbecomes Tolstoy, but at these moments his carefully constructed physical self—hiscorpulence, spectacles, good−natured hang−dog look, etc.—become as it were thephysical equivalent of Tolstoy's powerful abstract singlemindedness, they are there notto give Pierre a true self, but to persuade us that the truths we are being told are assolid as the flesh, and are identified with it. We find the same sort of physical
counterpart of an insistent Tolstoyan point in Karataev's roundness. It is one of thestrange artificialities of this seemingly so natural book that Tolstoy can juggle with theflesh as with truth and reason, forcing it to conform to the same kind of willedsimplicity.
ForPierre's size and corpulence, Karataev's roundness, are not true characteristics ofthe flesh, the flesh that dominates the life of Tolstoy's novels. The process makes usrealise how little a sense of the flesh has to do with description of physical appearance.It is more a question of intuitive and involuntary sympathy. Theoretically, we knowmuch more about the appearance of Pierre and Karataev than about, say, that of
Nicholas Rostov and Anatole Kuragm. But it is the latter whom we know in the flesh.And bad characters, like Napoleon and Anatole, retain the sympathy of the flesh.
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Napoleon, snorting and grunting with pleasure as he is massaged with a brash by hisvalet; unable to taste the punch on the evening before Borodino because of his cold,above all, at Austerlitz, when \"his face wore that special look of confident,
self−complacent happiness that one sees on the face of a boy happily in love\"—thetone is overtly objective, satirical, even disgusted, but in fact Tolstoy cannot withholdhis intuitive sympathy with, and understanding of, the body Physically we feel asconvinced by, and as comfortable with, these two, as we feel physically uncommittedwith Pierre and Karataev.
Anatole was not quick−witted, nor ready or eloquent in conversation, but he had thefaculty, so invaluable in society, of composure and imperturbable self possession If aman lacking m self−confidence remains dumb on a first introduction and betrays aconsciousness of the impropriety of such silence and an anxiety to find something tosay, the effect is bad. But Anatole was dumb, swung his foot, and smilingly examinedthe Princess's hair. It was evident that he could be silent in this way for a very longtime \"If anyone finds this silence inconvenient, let him talk, but I don't want to,\" heseemed to say
Inside Anatole, as it were, we \"sit with arms akimbo before a table on the corner ofwhich he smilingly and absentmindedly fixed his large and handsome eye\"; we feelhis sensations at the sight of the pretty Mile Bourrienne; and when his \"large whiteplump leg\" is cut off in the operating tent after Borodino, we seem to feel the pang inour own bodies.
But with Prince Andrew, who is lying wounded in the same tent, we have no bodilycommunication.
After the sufferings he had been enduring Prince Andrew enjoyed a blissful feelingsuch as he had not experienced for a long time All the best and happiest moments ofhis life—especially his earliest childhood, when he used to be undressed and put tobed, and when leaning over him his nurse sang him to sleep and he, burying his headin the pillow, felt happy in the mere consciousness of life—returned to his memory,
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not merely as something past but as something present
We assent completely, but it is from our own experience, not from our knowledge ofPrince Andrew Like Pierre, he does not have a true body:
there is this difference between both of them and the other characters, and it is not adifference we can simply put down to their being aspects of Tolstoy himself. Thedifference is not total... but it is significant, for no other novel can show such differentand apparently incompatible kinds of character living together It is as if Becky Sharpand David Copperfield, Waverley and Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy, together withOnegm and Julien Sorel, Rousseau's Emile and Voltaire's Candide and Goethe'sWilhelm Meister and many more, were all meeting in the same book, taking part inthe same plot, communicating freely with one another. For in addition to drawing onhis own unparalleled resources of family and class experience, Tolstoy has borrowedevery type of character from every kind of novel: not only does he know a lot ofpeople at first−hand—he has absorbed all the artificial ways of describing them.Moreover, his genius insensibly persuades us that we do actually in life apprehendpeople in all these different ways, the ways imagined by each kind of novel, so that wefeel that Pierre and Andrew are bound to be seekers and questioners because the onehas no past and the other no roots in life, forgetting that Tolstoy has deprived them ofthese things precisely in order that they should conform to the fictional,
Btldungsroman, type of the seeker. Andrew is a son from &Bildungsroman with afather from a historical novel, from Scott or The Captain's Daughter, Old Bolkonsky(who was closely modelled on Tolstoy's own grandfather, together with recollectionshe had heard about Field−Marshal Kamensky) is entirely accessible to us, as much inwhat we imagine of his old military days, \"in the hot nights of the Crimea,\" as in whatwe see of his patriarchal life at Bald Hills But his son, as does happen in life, is distantWe receive vivid perceptions through him (see the childhood passage) but they remaingeneralized Tolstoy: they are not connected specifically with him. What was he like asa child at Bald Hills? When did he meet the Little Princess, and how did his courtshipof her proceed?
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We share this uncertainty about Andrew with Natasha, and—more significantly—withher mother Embedded in life, the Rostovs cannot really believe that the marriage willtake place, any more than they can believe they will die. When Natasha sings, hermother remembers her own youth and reflects that \"there was something unnaturaland dreadful in this impending marriage of Natasha and Prince Andrew.\" It is like amarriage of life with death.
Like Death, Andrew remains a stranger to the Rostovs. They cannot see him as acomplete being any more than we can—any more than his own son can on the lastpage of the novel. He has become a symbolic figure, by insensible stages and withoutany apparent intention on Tolstoy's part. Natasha fights for his life, as life strugglesagainst death, and when he dies old Count Rostov—that champion of the flesh—has torealise death too, and is never the same again. Not only death is symbolised in him,but dissatisfaction, aspiration, change, all the cravings of the spirit, all the changes thatundermine the solid kingdom of the flesh, the ball, the supper, the bedroom. Tolstoy'sdistrust of the spirit, and of the changes it makes, appears in how he handles Andrew,and how he confines him with the greatest skill and naturalness to a particular enclave.This naturalness conceals Tolstoy's laborious and uncertain construction of Andrew,which is intimately connected with the construction of the whole plot. First he was tohave died at Austerlitz Tolstoy decided to keep him alive, but that it was a risk to doso is shown by the uncertainty and hesitations of the ensuing drafts. His attitude ofcontrolled exasperation towards the Little Princess was originally one of settled
rudeness, culminating in a burst of fury when she receives a billet from Ana−tole. Hisrudeness is that of Lermontov's Pechorin and Pushkin's Onegin; it must have beendifficult to head him off from being a figure of that kind. When he first sees Natashahe is bewitched because she is in fancy dress as a boy (an incident later transferred toNicholas and Sonya) but in another version he takes no notice of her at all. Tolstoy'sbother is to avoid nailing down Andrew with the kinds of apergu he is so good at: hemust not be open to the usual Tolstoyan \"discoveries.\" (It would be out of the
question, for instance, forPierre to perceive that Andrew doesn't really care about thebeauties of nature, as the \"I\" of Boyhood and Youth suddenly realises about his great
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friend and hero Nekhludyov who is something of a Prince Andrew figure.) Suchstages of illumination would be all wrong, as would be any particular aspect of
Natasha (fancy dress, etc.) which would reveal something further about him by theirattraction for him. Her attraction must be symbolic of life itself.
At last Tolstoy—remembering an experience of his own—hit on the way to conveythis. Andrew hears Natasha and Sonya talking together at night as they lean out of thewindow below his, and in this way her reality—her sense of her family and her happysense of herself that make up this reality—comes before him in the right abstract andideal way, in a way that could not have been conveyed by Natasha herself in a directconfrontation with him. Natasha's own reactions presented an equal difficulty. In oneversion she is made to tell Sonya that Prince Andrew was such a charming creaturethat she has never seen and could never imagine anyone comparable! This clearly willnot do, and neither will another version in which she says she doesn't like him, that\"there is something proud, something dry about him.\" In the final version the magicalball takes over, and removes the need for any coherent comment from her. Indeed,Tolstoy ingeniously increases her reality by this method, implying her readiness forlife that can take even the shadowy Prince Andrew in its stride; that is then dashed bythe prospect of a year's delay; and finally pours itself helplessly into an infatuationwith a \"real man\" (real both for us and for her)—Anatole Kuragin.
Natasha's mode of love presents a marked contrast with that of Pushkin's Tatiana, sooften compared with her as the same type of vital Russian heroine Natasha's love isgeneralised, founded on her own sense of herself and—less consciously— on her
almost explosive expectancy, her need not to be wasted. Onegin, whom Tatiana loves,is like Andrew an unintimate figure, but for quite different reasons. He gets whatreality he has from the delighted scrutiny of Pushkin, and the devoted scrutiny ofTatiana. His own consciousness is nothing. As Nabokov observes, \"Onegin growsfluid and flaccid as soon as he starts to feel, as soon as he departs from the existencehe had acquired from his maker in terms of colourful parody.\" Significantly, Natasha'slove is solipsistic, in herself, typical of Tolstoyan samodovolnost [\"self−satisfaction\"],it does not need to know its object, and its object is correspondingly unknowable in
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terms of objective scrutiny. But when Tatiana sees the marks that Onegin's fingernailhas scratched in the margins of his books and realises that he is nothing but a parody, acreature of intellectual and social fashion—it does not destroy her love for him, itactually increases it! Finding the loved person's un−derlinings in a book is almost asintimate as watching them asleep. The two heroines are alike in the vigour of theiraffections, but it is a very different kind of affection for all that In Onegin, Pushkinpresents an object for us to enjoy, and for his heroine to love. In Andrew, Tolstoycreates the symbolic figure of a spectator of life, in the presence of whom Natasha canshow what life there is in herself.
Andrew is created for death. He looks towards death as something true and real at last;and after all the false starts, alterations and reprieves, he achieves his right end. Ofcourse this is something of a Tolstoyan post hoc ergo propter hoc [\"faulty reasoning\"],but it is a fact that all the characters in War and Peace—from the greatest to theleast— get exactly what their natures require. The book is a massive feat of
arbitration, arrived at after countless checks and deliberations: though its huge scalegives an effect of all the random inevitability of life, it also satisfies an ideal. It is animmensely audacious and successful attempt to compel the whole area of living toacknowledge the rule of art, proportion, of what is \"right.\" What Henry James
deprecatingly called \"a wonderful mass of life\" is in fact a highly complex patterningof human fulfilment, an allotment of fates on earth as authoritative as Dante's in theworld to come. It is significant that the first drafts of the novel earned the title \"All'swell that ends well.\"
In his old age Tolstoy said, \"when the characters in novels and stories do what fromtheir spiritual nature they are unable to do, it is a terrible thing.\" To live, as the novelunderstands and conveys life, is what Prince Andrew would not have been able to do.It is impossible to imagine him developing a relation with Natasha, or communicatingwith her as Pierre and Natasha communicate in the last pages of the novel. For himNatasha represents life. It is his destiny as a character to conceptualise what othersembody. He perceives through metaphor and symbol, as he sees the great oak−tree,apparently bare and dead, coming again into leaf. A much more moving instance of
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this, to my mind, than the rather grandiloquent image of the oaktree, is his glimpse ofthe two little girls as he visits the abandoned house at Bald Hills on his retreat with hisregiment.
. two little girls, running out from the hot−house carrying in their skirts plums theyhad plucked from the trees there, came upon Prince Andrew On seeing the youngmaster, the elder one, with frightened look, clutched her younger companion by thehand and hid with her behind a birch tree, not stopping to pick up some green plumsthey had dropped
Prince Andrew turned away with startled haste, unwilling to let them see that they hadbeen observed He was sorry for the pretty frightened little gift, was afraid of lookingat her, and yet felt an irresistible desire to do so. A new sensation of comfort and reliefcame over him when, seeing these girls, he realized the existence of other humaninterests entirely aloof from his own and just as legitimate as those that occupied himEvidently these girls passionately desired one thing—to carry away and eat thosegreen plums without being caught—and Pnnce Andrew shared their wish for thesuccess of their enterprise. He could not resist looking at them once more. Believingtheir danger past, they sprang from their ambush, and chirruping something in theirshrill little voices and holding up their skirts, their bare little sunburnt feet scamperedmerrily and quickly across the meadow grass.
We can see from this passage exactly why Andrew \"loved\" Natasha—it resembles thescene where he hears the two of them talking by the window—and why the word\"love\" in the novel has no meaning of its own apart from the continuous demands andrights of life. He loves the idea of life more than the actuality. When he rejoins hissoldiers he finds them splashing about naked in a pond, and he is revolted at the sightof \"all that healthy white flesh,\" doomed to the chances of war. Nor do we ever have agreater sense, by contrast, of what life means, than when Andrew, after all his
intimations of death, \"the presence of which he had felt continually all his life\"—in theclouds above the battlefield of Austerlitz and in the birchtree field beforeBorodino—confronts Natasha and the Princess Mary on his deathbed.
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In one thin, translucently white hand he held a handkerchief, while with the other hestroked the delicate moustache he had grown, moving his fingers slowly His eyesgazed at them as they entered
On seeing his face and meeting his eyes Princess Mary's pace suddenly slackened, shefelt her tears dry up and her sobs ceased She suddenly felt guilty and grew timid oncatching the expression of his face and eyes.
\"But in what am I to blame'\" she asked herself. \"Because you are alive and thinking ofthe living, while I \" his cold stem look replied
In the deep gaze that seemed to look not outwards but inwards there was an almosthostile expression as he slowly regarded his sister and Natasha
I have suggested that Andrew is not subject to \"discoveries,\" and to Tolstoy's intimatekinds of examination, but this is not entirely true. Tolstoy's genius for character, ascomprehensive and apparently involuntary as Shakespeare's, and with far more
opportunity for detailed development than Shakespeare has within the limits of a play,could not avoid Andrew's becoming more than a centre of reflection and of symbol.The sheer worldliness of Tolstoy's observation keeps breaking in. We learn, forexample, that Andrew befriends Boris, whom he does not much care for, because itgives him an apparently disinterested motive for remaining in touch with the innerring where preferment is organised and high−level gossip exchanged. And Tolstoynotes that his exasperated criticism of the Russian military leadership both masks andgives an outlet to the tormenting jealousy that he feels about Natasha and Kuragin. Butthese are perceptions that could relate to someone else: they are not wholly him. Whatis? I observed that the scene with the two little girls reveals his attitude to life, and soit does; but the deeper and less demonstrated veracity in it is Andrew's niceness, abasic quality that we recognise and respond to here, though we have hardly met itbefore at first−hand. In the same way the deathbed quotation above shows somethingelse about him that we recognise—in spite of the change in him he is still the sameman who used to treat the Little Princess with such cold sarcasm: The life he disliked
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in her he is fond of in his sister and adores in Natasha, but now that it is time to leaveit his manner is much the same as of old. Though he has only grown a moustache onhis deathbed we seem to recognise that coldly fastidious gesture of stroking it.\"There, you see how strangely fate has brought us together,\" said he, breaking thesilence and pointing to Natasha \"She looks after me all the time \"
Princess Mary heard him and did not understand how he could say such a thing. He,the sensitive, tender Prince Andrew, how could he say that, before her whom he lovedand who loved him 1 ' Had he expected to live he could not have said those words inthat offensively cold tone. If he had not known that he was dying, how could he havefailed to pity her and how could he speak like that in her presence' The onlyexplanation was that he was indifferent, because something else, much moreimportant, had been revealed to him.
The conversation was cold and disconnected, and continually broke off\"Mary came by way ofRyazan,\" said Natasha
Prince Andrew did not notice that she called his sister Mary, and only after calling herso in his presence did Natasha notice it herself\"Really\"\" he asked.
\"They told her that allMoscow has been burnt down, and that. .\"
Natasha stopped It was impossible to talk It was plain he was making an effort tolisten, but could not do so.
\"Yes, they say it's burnt,\" he said. \"It's a great pity,\" and he gazed straight before himabsently stroking his moustache with his fingers.
Critical Essay #347
\"And so you have met Count Nicholas, Mary?\" Prince Andrew suddenly said,evidently wishing to speak pleasantly to them. \"He wrote here that he took a greatliking to you,\" he went on simply and calmly, evidently unable to understand all thecomplex significance his words had for living people.
Apart from the theme of death, the passage is full of the multitudinous meaning—likethe significance of Natasha's use of the name Mary—which has been building upthroughout the book. It is checked once by Tolstoy's remark—\"he was indifferentbecause something else, much more important, had been revealed to him \" CertainlyAndrew may think so, but Tolstoy announces the fact with just a shade too muchdetermination: the surface of almost helpless mastery is disturbed. For where death isconcerned, Tolstoy in War and Peace was under the spell of Schopenhauer. Life is asleep and death an awakening. \"An awakening from life came to Prince Andrewtogether with his awakening from sleep. And compared to the duration of life it didnot seem to him slower than an awakening from sleep compared to the duration of adream.\" As Shestov points out, the second sentence comes almost verbatim from TheWorld as Will and Idea. In Andrew, Tolstoy has deliberately created the man who fitsthis conception of death. With his usual confidence Tolstoy annexes death throughAndrew, to show that it must be something because life is so much something. Yet lifeand death cannot understand one another.—\"Shall I live? What do you think?\"
\"I am sure of it!—sure 1 \" Natasha almost shouted, taking hold of both his hands in apassionate movement.
Natasha \"almost shouts\" her belief because she can do nothing else—she cannot
believe in anything but life. Even when after the last change in Andrew she sees he isdying, she goes about \"with a buoyant step\"—a phrase twice repeated. This has a deeptragic propriety, for the two are fulfilling their whole natures. Only old Count Rostovis touching. He cries for himself at Andrew's death, because he \"knows he must
shortly take the same terrible step\
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samodovolnost—has gone.
He had been a brisk, cheerful, self−assured old man, now he seemed a pitiful,bewildered person .. he continually looked round as if asking everybody if he wasdoing the right thing. After the destruction ofMoscow and of his property, thrown outof his accustomed groove, he seemed to have lost the sense of his own significanceand to feel there was no longer a place for him in life
As Isaiah Berlin points out, Tolstoy's conception of history resembles in many waysthat of Marx, whom he had never heard of at the time he was writing War and Peace,and this applies to his sense of personal history as well as the history of nations. Hisimaginative grasp of the individual life is such that freedom does indeed become therecognition of one's personal necessity, and \"to each according to his needs\" is notonly the ideal of society but seems in War and Peace the law of life and death...Source: John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel, Viking Press, 1967, pp 66−68,68−72,73−82.
Critical Essay #349
Critical Essay #4
Christian is an English educator, translator, and critic specializing in Russian
literature. He wrote Tolstoy's \"War and Peace,\" which is a book−length study of thework. In the following excerpt from that book, Christian analyzes characterization inWar and Peace.
The subject [of characterization in War and Peace] is complicated by the sheer
number and variety of the dramatis personae, but we can narrow it down from the verystart by drawing a general distinction between the treatment of historical and
non−historical characters in the novel. It is a fact that the generals and statesmen, thegreat historical names of the period of the Napoleonic wars, are almost without
exception flat and static figures. Little or nothing is revealed of their private lives Wedo not see them in intimate relationships with other people. Their loves, their hobbies,their personal dramas are a closed book to us. This is not accidental. As Prince Andreireflects at Drissa in 1812 1
Not only does a good commander not need genius or any special qualities, on thecontrary, he needs the absence of the highest and best human qualities— love, poetry,tenderness, and philosophic, inquiring doubt He must be limited God forbid that heshould be humane, love anyone, pity anyone, or think about what is right and what isnot
Their thoughts are rarely scrutinized either through interior monologue or by extendeddescription from the author. Some characters, such as Arakcheev, for example, useonly direct speech. Nothing is conveyed of their thought processes or the motivesbehind the words they utter. Nor do they develop with the action of the story Thestatesmen and the generals in War and Peace are either bearers of a message orbureaucratic Aunt−Sallies for Tolstoy to knock down. This fact illustrates the unitywhich exists between Tolstoy's ideas and their expression through his characters.Static characters generally speaking deserve static treatment Theme and style are as
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one.
An exception to the rule that generals are flat characters might be made in the case ofKutuzov.
Although he is a general, he is not, as Tolstoy understands him, arrogant orself−satisfied. The Kutuzov of War and Peace has some claim to be
three−dimensional. It is not that he is shown by Tolstoy to have grown sufficiently instature with the course of events to justify the remark—true though it may well havebeen in real life—that \"In 1805 Kutuzov is still only a general of the Suvorov school;in 1812 he is the father of the Russian people \" But his little acts of kindness, hisfriendly words to the soldiers who fought with him in his earlier campaigns, his
unaffected behavior in the company of his inferiors, his present of some sugar lumpsto the little girl at Fill, his request to have some poems read to him—all these smallthings reveal positive and humane qualities which more than balance his lethargy andlechery. Again it is in keeping with Tolstoy's purpose that a general who is not
uposeur or an egoist or a careerist should emerge as a more rounded personality thanany of his professional colleagues....
[Our] remarks will be confined to the fictitious or, rather, non−historical characters.Here again the range is enormous, and in order to restrict it as much as possible weshall concentrate mainly on the men and women who figure most prominently in Warand Peace.... Tolstoy's first step as a novelist was to draw thumbnail sketches of hisfuture heroes and group their main characteristics together under such headings aswealth, social attributes, mental faculties, artistic sensibilities and attitudes to love. Inthis respect, incidentally, his rough notes and plans are very different from those leftby Dostoevsky, and illustrate an important difference of approach. Dostoevsky in thepreliminary stages of his work is concerned with how to formulate his ideas (a
generation earlier, Pushkin had tended to jot down first of all the details of his plots).But Tolstoy was interested primarily in the personalities of his characters—in the fact,for example, that Nikolai \"is very good at saying the obvious\"; that Natasha is
\"suddenly sad, suddenly terribly happy\"; or that Berg has no poetical qualities \"except
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the poetry of accuracy and order.\"
The problem of actually bringing his major characters on to the stage was one to
which Tolstoy attached the greatest importance, and one which, as we have seen, gavehim a great deal of difficulty. Broadly speaking, the problem was tackled in a fairlyuniform manner, and the technique employed is clearly recognizable, though not ofcourse invariable. All the main characters are introduced very early on. They areintroduced with a minimum of biography and with a minimum of external detail (butsuch as there is typical and important, and likely to recur). Attention is drawn to theirfeatures, the expression on their faces, the expression in their eyes and in their smile,their way of looking or not looking at a person. This is a fact which has attracted thenotice of most critics of Tolstoy's novels, and inspired Merezhkovsky to make hismuch−quoted mot \"with Tolstoy we hear because we see\" (and its corollary \"withDostoevsky we see because we heat\"). From the very beginning, the fundamentalcharacteristics of the men and women as they then are enunciated. There is little or nonarration to elaborate these characteristics. Almost at once the men and women saysomething or make an impression on somebody, so that the need for any further directdescription from the author disappears.Pierre, for example, is introduced with onesentence about his appearance (stout, heavily built, close cropped hair, spectacles);one sentence about his social status, and one sentence about his life to date. He is thenportrayed through the impression he makes on other people present He is summed upby four epithets which all refer to his expression (yzglyad)—clever, shy, observant,natural—and which at the same time distinguish him from the rest of the company andreveal the essence of his character as it then is. Similarly Prince Andrei is given asentence or two of \"author's description\"—handsome, clear−cut, dry features,measured step, bored expression (vzglyad)—while the impression he makes on thecompany and his reaction to them is at once sharply contrasted with the mutualresponse of Prince Andrei and Pierre to one another. Virtually nothing is said aboutthe earlier lives of these two men. What didPierre do inParis' Why did Prince Andreimarry Lisa? We are not told. Both men immediately catch the eye, for both are boredand ill at ease. They are introduced in fact into an environment which is essentiallyforeign to their real natures, although their way of life requires that they should move
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in this environment. Despite the fact that the manner of their first appearances attractsattention, there is nothing to suggest that they will be the main heroes of the novel, inthe sense that no extra length or detail goes into their description.
By contrast, Natasha and Nikolai are both introduced in their own domestic
environment— home−loving creatures on their home ground—integrated in the familyand, as it were, part of the furniture. But again they are presented with a minimum ofexternal description (in which facial expressions are conspicuous); again their salientcharacteristics—Natasha's charm and vivacity, Nikolai's frankness, enthusiasm andimpetuosity— are conveyed from the very start; and again we are told nothing abouttheir earlier lives (for example, Nikolai's student days). This lack of biographicalinformation is important in the sense that it enables us to be introduced to the
characters as we usually meet people in real life—that is to say, as they now are, andwithout any knowledge of the forces which shaped them before we met them andmade them what they are. It could even be argued that a novelist who introduces hisheroes by reconstructing their past when that past plays no direct part in the novel,actually risks sacrificing, by the accumulation of historical detail such as we do nothave about people whom we are meeting for the first time, that immediate lifelikenesswhich, in the case of Tolstoy's greatest characters, is so strikingly impressive.Once the men and women have made then− entrances the author has to face anotherproblem. Are they to remain substantially as they are, with the reader's interestdiverted towards the details of the plot? Or are they to grow and change as the plotprogresses? If they are to develop, must they do so because the passage of time andthe inner logic of their own personalities dictate it? Or because of the pressure of theevents which form the plot? Or because the author wishes to express an idea of hisown through their medium? In War and Peace the main characters do grow and
change, and they do so for all these reasons. In the course of the time span of the novelthe adolescents grow to maturity and the mature men reach early middle age.War and marriage make their impact on men and women alike, and experience teachesthem what they failed to understand before The Pierre of the opening chapter of the
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novel, with his self−indulgence, Ms agnosticism and his admiration for Napoleon, isvery different from the spiritually rejuvenated middle−aged man who has discovered afocus for his restless and dissipated energies, and who no longer has any illusionsabout the grandeur of power. The course of events brings Prince Andrei round from acynical disillusionment in life, through a feeling of personal embitterment, to a beliefin the reality of happiness and love, in the face of death his vanity and ambition arehumbled by the realization of the insignificance of this world, and he acquires ahitherto unknown peace of mind. Natasha acquires an unsuspected strength of
character after her younger brother's death, and an unaccustomed staidness as the wifeofPierre—to some readers an astonishing violation of her nature, but to others achange which is fully comprehensible in the transition from adolescence to
motherhood. Even Nikolai's impetuosity is curbed and experience gives him greatersolidity and stability. These changes do not result from the fact that our knowledge ofthe main heroes gradually increases throughout the novel, as it inevitably does, and thepicture of them grows fuller and fuller with each successive episode. They are changesof substance, qualitative rather than quantitative changes. Tolstoy's achievement incontriving the development of his main characters lies in the fact that all the reasonsmentioned above for their development are so carefully interwoven that the reader isnot conscious of many strands but only one. The characters change because they growolder and wiser. But the events which form the plot, and in particular the Napoleonicinvasion, give them greater wisdom and experience, for characters and events areorganically connected. And the state to which the main heroes come at the end of thenovel—marriage, and the simple round of family life—the state which is the ultimateexpression of Tolstoy's basic idea—is the natural outcome of the impact on them ofthe events they have experienced as they have grown older and their realization of theshallow−ness of society and the vainglory of war. The profoundly subjective basis ofTolstoy's art may be seen in the fact that Pierre and Natasha, Nikolai and PrincessMarya all achieve the state which he himself had achieved, however imperfectly, andwhich he sincerely believed to be the most desirable of all states. But this does notmean that their characters are distorted in order to force them into the channels whichfor him were the right ones.
Critical Essay #4
Pierre has so much of Tolstoy in him that he needs no forcing Natasha, we mayremember, was from the very earliest draft of War and Peace \"crying out for a
husband,\" and needing \"children, love, bed.\" Nikolai and Princess Marya, for all thedifference between their personalities, interests and intellectual attainments, neverseem likely to stray far from the family nest or to be seduced from the family estate bythe allurements of le monde [\"the world\"].
Change and development are at the centre of Tolstoy's characterization, and theprocess is a consistent and logical one. But however great the changes in his mainheroes may seem to be, it must not be forgotten that they occur within certain
well−defined bounds, and that the characters themselves remain in the camp to whichthey have always belonged and continue to be what they have always been—some ofthe finest and most sympathetic representatives of the Russian landowning aristocracy.There is no need to labour the point that Tolstoy's principal heroes change and
develop. We can turn instead to the question how he achieved the effects he desired bythe devices of characterization at his disposal. It seems to me that the essence ofTolstoy's technique is to show that at every stage in the life of his heroes the
likelihood of change is always present, so that at no time are they static, apathetic orinert, but constantly liable to respond to some new external or internal stimulus. Veryoften the stimulus is provided by a person from the opposite camp—a \"negative\"character, a selfish, complacent or static man or woman.
These people act as temptations to the heroes; they are obstacles in their path whichhave to be overcome.Pierre, for example, is momentarily blinded by the apparentgreatness of Napoleon. He is trapped into marriage with Hellene, with whom he hasnothing in common, and is in danger of being drawn into the Kuragm net. After theirseparation he is reconciled with her again, only to bemoan his fate once more as aretired gentleman−in−waiting, a member of the Moscow English Club and a universalfavourite inMoscow society. Prince Andrei, likePierre, is deceived by the symbol ofNapoleon, and likePierre he finds himself married to a woman who is as much hisintellectual inferior as Helene is morally beneathPierre. Natasha for her part is
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attracted at first by the social climber Boris Drubetskoy and later infatuated by thesame Anatole Kuragin who had actually begun to turn Princess Marya's head. JulieKaragina looms for a while on Nikolai 1 s horizon. From all these temptations andinvolvements the heroes and heroines are saved, not by their own efforts but by thetimely workings ofProvidence. Prince Andrei's wife dies.Pierre is provoked by
Dolokhov into separating from his wife, and after their reconciliation he is eventuallyreleased by Helene's death. Natasha is saved from herself by the solicitude of herfriends. By chance Princess Marya catches Anatole unawares as he flirts with MileBounenne. (Nikolai, to his credit, is never likely to obey his mother's wishes andmarry Julie.) It seems as if fate is working to rescue them from the clutches of
egocentricity. But it is not only external circumstances such as personal associationswith people of the opposite camp which are a challenge to Tolstoy's heroes and
heroines. There are internal obstacles against which they have to contend, without anyhelp fromProvidence. Tolstoy made it a main object of his characterization to show hispositive heroes at all important moments \"becoming\" and not just \"being,\" beset withdoubts, tormented by decisions, the victims of ambivalent thoughts and emotions,eternally restless. As a result, their mobility, fluidity and receptivity to change areconstantly in evidence, as they face their inner problems. Princess Marya has to
overcome her instinctive aversion to Natasha. Nikolai has to wage a struggle betweenlove and duty until he finds in the end that they can both be reconciled in one and thesame person.Pierre's inner disquiet and spiritual striving express his determination,now weak, now strong, to overcome in himself the very qualities of selfishness andlaziness which he despises in other people. Outward and inward pressures arecontinually being exerted on Pierre, Prince Andrei, Princess Marya, Natasha andNikolai, and their lives are lived in a state of flux.
And yet Tolstoy felt himself bound to try and resolve their conflicts and bring them toa state which, if not final and irreversible, is a new and higher stage in their life's
development. It is not a solution to all their problems, a guarantee that they will not betroubled in future. The peace of mind which Prince Andrei attains before his deathmight not have lasted long if he had lived.Pierre's uneasy religious equilibrium maynot be of long duration. The very fact that we can easily foresee new threats to their
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security, new stimuli and new responses, is a proof of the depth, integrity andlife−likeness of the two finest heroes of Tolstoy's novel.
But although there is not and cannot be any absolute finality about the state to whichTolstoy's men and women are brought, there is nevertheless an ultimate harmony,charity, and sense of purpose in their lives which represent the highest ideals of whichthey are capable, given the personalities with which they have been endowed and thebeliefs of the author who created them.
The novelist who wishes to create a vivid illusion of immediacy and mobility in hisheroes must avoid exhaustive character studies and biographical reconstructions
concentrated in a chapter or series of chapters in his novels, whether at the beginning,in the middle or at the end. Many novelists begin with lengthy narrative descriptionsof their main heroes.... But Tolstoy by dispensing largely with \"pre−history\" andallowing his men and women to reveal themselves little by little as the novelprogresses, avoids the necessity for set characterization pieces, static andself−contained as they often are in other writers.
Another factor which aids the illusion of reality—and movement—is the continuedinteraction of all the elements which make up Tolstoy's novel—men and women,nature, and the world of inanimate objects. Very seldom is a person seen or describedin isolation—just as in real life, human beings cannot be divorced from the infinitenumber of animate and inanimate phenomena which make them what they are anddetermine what they do. Tolstoy is at pains, therefore, in striving after truthfulness tolife in his characterization, to show the interdependence and interpenetration of manand nature. The stars, the sky, the trees, and the fields, the moonlight, the thrill of thechase, the familiar objects of the home all affect the mood and the actions of thecharacters no less than the rational processes of the mind or the persuasions of otherhuman beings. That this is so in life is a commonplace; but there have been few
authors with Tolstoy's power to show the multiplicity of interacting phenomena in thelives of fictitious men and women.
Critical Essay #457
Movement is the essence of Pierre, Prince Andrei and Natasha and this is shown bothexternally and internally. Externally their eyes, their lips, their smile are mobile andinfectious; their expressions continually alter. Internally their thoughts are in a state ofturbulence and their mood is liable to swing violently from one extreme to
another—from joy to grief, despair to elation, enthusiasm to boredom. There are timesindeed when two incompatible emotions coexist uneasily and the character does notknow whether he or she is sad or happy.
Princess Marya is not such a forceful or impulsive character as her brother or
sister−in−law Her qualities of gentleness, deep faith, long−suffering, humility andaddiction to good works are not combined with a searching mind or a vivaciouspersonality. But she is, nevertheless, a restless person, and as such is clearly afavourite of Tolstoy (she even quotes his beloved Sterne 1 ). The anxieties and
disturbances in her relations with Anatole Kuragin, Mile Bourienne and Natasha areevidence that she is a rounded and dynamic figure, and not, as it were, conceived inone piece. In the presence of Nikolai she is brought to life with all the magic of
Tolstoy's art. Nikolai too, for all his apparent complacency and limited horizons, doesnot stand still. He has his moments of doubt, uncertainty, and fear just as he has hisoutbursts of uninhibited enthusiasm and emperor worship. He is given his own innercrisis to surmount when at Tilsit \"a painful process was at work in his mind\" as hetried to reconcile the horrors of the hospital he had recently visited, the amputatedarms and legs and the stench of dead flesh, with his hero the Emperor Alexander'sevident liking and respect for the self−satisfied Napoleon. The crisis, it is true, soonpasses after a couple of bottles of wine. But it could never have been allowed to cometo a head at all by his friend Boris Drubetskoy.
By contrast, the less prominent figures in War and Peace are not shown in the criticalstages of their change and development. Even Sonya's conflict (she is described in anearly portrait sketch in typically Tolstoy fashion as \"generous and mean\")—theconflict between her loyalty to the family and her love for Nikolai—emerges ratherthrough Tolstoy's description of it than through the inner workings and suddenvacillations of her mind. Vera and Berg, Akhrosimova, Bolkonsky and many other
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minor figures, however vital and many−sided they might be as individuals, are
fundamentally static characters who are fully−grown from the beginning. The abilityto respond to change, the qualities of restlessness, curiosity, flexibility and dynamismare essentially the perquisites of the main heroes of the novel, and in particular Pierre,Prince Andrei and Natasha. And one may add that it is the growth and development ofprecisely these three people which reflects above all the changes in Tolstoy himselfand those closest to him at Yasnaya Polyana, and is a convincing proof of the personalbasis of Tolstoy's art.
In examining the characters of a novel with an historical setting, three questionsimmediately spring to mind. In the first place, do they emerge as individuals' 7
Secondly, do they unmistakably belong to the historical environment in which they aremade to move? And thirdly, do they embody universal characteristics which makethem readily comprehensible to people of a different country and a different age\"? Ifwe apply these questions to Pierre, Prince Andrei and Natasha, the answer to the firstis indisputably yes. There is nothing bookish, contrived or externally manipulatedabout their actions. They can never be confused with any other characters. They havean outward presence and an inner life which mark them off as highly individualizedpersonalities. To the second question the answer is less obvious and critical opinion isdivided. For my own part I am inclined to think that there is nothing about themspecifically representative of their own age, which is not also representative ofTolstoy's own generation.
They are the products of a class and a way of life which had not materially alteredwhen Tolstoy began to write. That they experienced the impact in their homes of agreat patriotic war is a fact which distinguishes their lives from the lives of Tolstoy'sown contemporaries, but the development of their characters cannot be explainedsolely in terms of that particular war.Pierre might ask different questions from Levinor put the same questions in a different way, but his spiritual journey is fundamentallythe same. Prince Andrei's reactions to war could have been those of one of the manyobscure defenders ofSevastopol. Natasha's progress to motherhood, while it is notidentical with Kitty's, is not peculiar to the first half rather than to the second half of
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the nineteenth century. The third question, however, like the first, is easily answered.In Tolstoy's heroes in War and Peace there is a basic denominator of human
experience which is common to all men and women regardless of class, country, ageand intellectual attainment Their mental, spiritual and emotional problems, theirpleasures and pursuits, their enthusiasms and their aversions are as relevant toEnglandtoday as they ever were to Tolstoy's Russia. And it is ultimately this factwhich ensures that War and Peace and especially the main heroes of War and Peacewill always be a part of the literary heritage of the reading public throughout theworld.
Characterization cannot be considered in isolation from the many other sides of anovelist's art.... First there are the changes which occur in Tolstoy's characters
themselves as the successive draft versions are written and discarded. Then there arethe features which they inherit from their various historical and living prototypes.There are the ideas of the novelist himself which are transmitted to his heroes andheroines, so that they in turn express his own prejudices and beliefs and inPierre'scase, the gulf between what Tolstoy was and what he wanted himself to be. There isthe question of the composition of the novel which is so designed that the characterdevelopment should proceed pari passu [\"at an equal pace\"] with the development ofthe plot, and not fortuitously or independently of the main action. Finally there are thedifferent linguistic devices at Tolstoy's disposal which play their part in
characterization—interior monologue, the contrasting use of the French and Russianlanguages, speech mannerisms, irony....
In the final analysis it is the characters which a novelist creates which are the greatestand most memorable part of his achievement. In War and Peace they range over thescale of good and evil and they are treated by the author with varying degrees of
sympathy and dislike. In later life Tolstoy wrote to the artist N. N. Gay that in order tocompose a work of art: \"It is necessary for a man to know clearly and without doubtwhat is good and evil, to see plainly the dividing line between them and consequentlyto paint not what is, but what should be. And he should paint what should be as thoughit already was, so that for him what should be might already be.\"
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This opinion was expressed some twenty years after War and Peace was written, butthe first part of it at least is applicable to that novel. Tolstoy knew, as well as any mancan, the dividing line between good and evil, although in War and Peace he devotedmuch more time to painting things as they are than as they should be. For a novelist,however, to know what is right and what is wrong is not the same thing as to
concentrate virtue in one character and vice in another, or to pass an unqualified moraljudgement on any of the people he creates. \"The Gospel words 'judge not',\" Tolstoywrote in 1857, \"are profoundly true in art− relate, portray, but do not judge.\" Tolstoy'spurpose in his first novel, as a creator of living characters, was to entertain and not tojudge. One of the most interesting pronouncements he made about the function of anartist occurs in a letter which he wrote in 1865 while actively engaged on his novel,but which he never sent.... The letter was addressed to the minor novelist Boborykinand contains some mild strictures on the latter's two latest novels. Tolstoy wrote:Problems of the Zemstvo, literature and the emancipation of women obtrude with youin a polemical manner, but these problems are not only not interesting m the world ofart; they have no place there at all. Problems of the emancipation of women and ofliterary parties inevitably appear to you important in your literaryPetersburg milieu,but all these problems splash about in a little puddle of dirty water which only seemslike an ocean to those whom fate has set down in the middle of the puddle. The aimsof an artist are incommensurate (as the mathematicians say) with social aims. The aimof an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably but to make people love life in all itscountless inexhaustible manifestations. If I were to be told that I could write a novelwhereby I might irrefutably establish what seemed to me the correct point of view onall social problems, I would not even devote two hours work to such a novel, but if Iwere to be told that what I should write would be read in about twenty years time bythose who are now children, and that they would laugh and cry over it and love life, Iwould devote all my own life and all my energies to it
To make people laugh and cry and love life is a sufficient justification for even thegreatest of novels....
Critical Essay #461
Source: R. F. Christian, Tolstoy's \"War and Peace\". A Study, Clarendon Press, 1962,pp 167−68,177−79.
Critical Essay #462
Critical Essay #5
In the following excerpt, Fadiman describes Tolstoy's writing as lacking in artisticstyle, suspense, and originality but also as clear, good, and able to express theordinary and real.
In a way writing about War and Peace is a self−defeating activity. Criticism in ourday has become largely the making of finer and finer discriminations. But War andPeace does not lend itself to such an exercise. If you say the book is about the effectof the Napoleonic Wars on a certain group of Russians, most of them aristocrats, youare not telling an untruth But you are not telling the truth either. Its subject has beenvariously described—even Tolstoy tried his hand at the job— but none of thedescriptions leaves one satisfied.
You can't even call the book a historical novel. It describes events that are part ofhistory, but to say that it is about the past is to utter a half−turth. Ivanhoe, Gone Withthe Wind—these are historical novels. Kipling (a part of him, I mean) has suddenlybecome for us a historical novelist: Gandhi made him one. But the only sections ofWar and Peace that seem historical are the battle pieces. War is now apocalyptic; itwas not so in Tolstoy's time.Austerlitz andCannae are equally historical, equallyantique, equally part of the springtime of war. Now our weapons think for us; that isthe revolutionary change that has outmoded all previous narratives of conflict.But, except for these battle pieces, War and Peace is no more a historical novel than isthe Iliad. Homer is not history, not Greek history, not Trojan history, he is—Homer.So with Tolstoy.
No, you say little when you say that War and Peace has to do with the NapoleonicWars, Borodino, the burning ofMoscow, the retreat of 1812. As a matter of fact the
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vaguer your critical vocabulary, the less precisely you describe the subject of War andPeace, the nearer you get to the truth. It is really—yes, let us use
un−twentieth−cen−tury words—about Life and People and Love− those abhorredcapital−letter abstractions that irritate our modern novelists and against which theypersistently warn us....
Tolstoy is not an artist at all, as, let us say, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Faulkner,Proust, are artists. He does not appear, at least in translation, to have any \"style.\"There is no such thing as a Tol−stoyan sentence or a Tolstoyan vocabulary. The poorchap has no technique. He knows nothing of flash−backs, streams of consciousness,symbols, objective correlatives. He introduces his people flatly and blurts out at oncetheir dominant characteristics. He has unending insight but no subtlety. Compared tosuch a great master as Henry James, or such a little master as Kafka, he seemsdeficient in sheer brain power, the power to analyze, the power to discriminate.He never surprises you. All his characters are recognizable, most of them are normalEven his villain, Anatole Kuragin, seems merely an impetuous fool compared to themonsters of labyrinthine viciousness that our Southern novelists can create with atouch of the pen.
He isn't even a good storyteller, if by a good storyteller one means a master ofsuspense. You do not read War and Peace in order to see \"how it comes out,\" anymore than you live your life m order to see how it will end. His people grow, love,suffer, die, commit wise or foolish actions, beget more people who are clearly going topass through the same universal experiences; and that's about all there is to the \"story.\"There are plenty of events, but they are not arranged or balanced or patterned. Tolstoyis not a neat writer, any more than your biography or mine is neat. He is as shapelessas the Russian land itself.
I found myself struck with the originality of War and Peace, but by a kind of reverseEnglish.
Critical Essay #5
It is original because it is unoriginal. Kafka is original. Faulkner is original. EudoraWelty is original. In fact most of our most admired modern writing is original, full ofstrange people, strange feelings, strange ideas, strange confrontations. But Tolstoyportrays pleasant, lively, ordinary girls like Natasha. His book is crowded with peoplewho are above the average in intelligence or wealth or insight—but not extraordinarilyso. He balks at portraying genius: he makes of Napoleon a fatuity, and of theslow−thinking, almost vacant−minded Kutuzov the military hero of the war. Andwhen he writes about war, he does not describe its horrors or its glories. He seizesupon the simplest of the truths about war and sticks to that truth: that war is foolish.Tolstoy has a genius for the ordinary, which does not mean the commonplace. It is thisordinariness that to us moderns, living on a literary diet of paprika, truffles, and
cantharides, makes him seem so unusual. When we read him we seem to be escapinginto that almost forgotten country, the real world.
Another odd thing—Tolstoy does not seem to have any \"personality.\" Many fine
writers are full of personality, Hemingway for instance; but the very finest write booksthat seem to conceal themselves, books like the Iliad or Don Quixote or War andPeace. I do not mean that Tolstoy writes like an impersonal god, but that he seems tointrude into his book only in the sense that he and the book are one and the same.I believe this effect of desingularization springs from his instinctive refusal to load anyscene or indeed any sentence with more meaning than it will bear. He has no \"effects.\"He is unable to call attention to his own mastery. He knows what he is doing, but hedoes not know how to make you know what he is doing. The consequence is that,despite the enormous cast of characters, everything (once you have waded through therather difficult opening chapters) is simple, understandable, recognizable, like
someone you have known a long tune. In our own day the good novelists tend to benot very clear, and the clear novelists tend to be not very good. Tolstoy is clear and heis good....
Critical Essay #565
Source: Clifton Fadiman, \"'War and Peace', Fifteen Years After,\" in Any Number CanPlay, Harper & Row, 1957, pp. 361−69.
Critical Essay #566
Critical Essay #6
Fadiman became one of the most prominent American literary critics during the 1930swith his often caustic and insightful book reviews for the Nation and the New Yorkermagazines. He also managed to reach a sizable audience through his work as a radiotalk−show host from 1938 to 1948.
I hope merely to set Tolstoy's masterpiece before the reader in such a way that he willnot be dismayed by its labyrinthine length or put off by its seeming remoteness fromour own concerns.
War and Peace has been called the greatest novel ever written. These very words havebeen used, to my knowledge, by E. M. Forster, Hugh Walpole, John Galsworthy, andCompton Mackenzie; and a similar judgment has been made by many others....Let us ... try to discover together why it is a great novel.
The first thing to do is to read it. A supreme book usually argues its own supremacyquite efficiently, and War and Peace is no exception. Still, we may be convinced of itsmagnitude and remain puzzled by certain of its aspects—for no first−rate book iscompletely explicit, either.
On finishing War and Peace what questions do we tend to ask ourselves? Here is avery simple one: What is it about? ...
[We] are forced in the end to make the apparently vapid judgment that the subject ofWar and Peace is Life itself....
We do not know what Tolstoy had in mind as the main subject of War and Peace, forhe stated its theme differently at different periods of his career. Looking back on it, asa fairly old man, he said that his only aim had been to amuse his readers ... More
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seriously, Tolstoy at times spoke of War and Peace as a picture of the wanderings of apeople.
But whatever he thought its subject was, he transcended it. In one sense he put intothis book everything that interested him, and everything interested him. That he
managed to make it more than a collection of characters and incidents is equivalent tosaying that in addition to being a man with a consuming interest in life he was also anartist who was not content until he had shaped that interest into harmonious forms.Now, there are some who would demur, who feel that it is precisely in this quality ofform that War and Peace is defective.. .
Suppose we admit at once that there is no classic unity of subject matter as there is, forinstance, in the Iliad.... This simple unity Tolstoy does not have. But a profounderunity I think he does have. When we have come to feel this unity, the philosophicaland historical disquisitions cease to seem long−winded and become both interesting inthemselves and an integral part of the Tolstoyan scheme. We are no longer disturbedas we should be if such digressions appeared in a work of narrower compass. Weaccept the fact that mountains are never pyramids.
Let us see whether we can get this clear. In the course of one of his digressionsTolstoy writes, \"Only by taking an infinitesimally small unit for observation (the
differential of history, i.e., the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art ofintegrating them (i.e., finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive atthe laws of history.\" [In] this sentence, perhaps, is concealed the theme of the book:the movement of history which Tolstoy must examine by observing \"the individualtendencies of men,\" on the one hand, and by attempting to \"integrate them,\" on theother. Putting it in another way, we may say that it is not enough for Tolstoy to
examine the individual lives of his characters as if they were separate atoms. He mustalso sweep up all these atoms into one larger experience. Now, this larger experienceis the Napoleonic campaign. But the campaign itself, which fuses or enlarges orfocuses the lives of Andrew and Natasha and Pierre and the rest, must itself be
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studied, not merely as a background—that is how an ordinary historical novelistwould study it—but as thoughtfully as Tolstoy studies each individual life. In orderfully to understand this focusing experience he is forced to elaborate a theory of
history to explain it. And so he is forced to understand the major historical characters,such as Napoleon, Kutiizov, and the others, who are the dramatic symbols of theexperience.
The result of this integration may not please everyone, but the integration is there.When one reflects upon the task, one is driven to concede, I think, that Tolstoy, in hisattempt to understand history through human beings and human beings throughhistory, is undertaking the greatest task conceivable to the creative novelist of thenineteenth century, just as Milton, attempting to justify the ways of God to man,undertook the greatest poetical theme possible to a man of his century....
War and Peace is so vast that each reader may pick out for himself its literary qualitieshe most admires. Let us select three: its inclusiveness, its naturalness, its timelessness.The first thing to strike the reader is the range of Tolstoy's interest and knowledge....At first glance the inclusiveness seems so overpowering that one inclines to agree withHugh Walpole when he says that War and Peace \"contains everything,\" or with E. M.Forster who is no less sure that \"everything is in it\" Naturally, these statements cannotbe literally true But it is true to say that when we have finished War and Peace we donot feel the lack of anything. It is only when one stops short and makes a list of thethings Tolstoy leaves out that one realizes he is a novelist and not a god. We get verylittle awareness, for example, of the Russian middle class which was just beginning toemerge at the opening of the nineteenth century. Also, while Tolstoy does describemany peasants for us, the emphasis is thrown disproportionately on the aristocraticclass with which he was most familiar. Another thing: obeying the literary
conventions of his period, Tolstoy touches upon the sex relations of his men and
women with great caution—and yet, so true and various is his presentation of love thatwe hardly seem to notice his omissions. That, after all, is the point: we do not notice
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the omissions, and we are overwhelmed by the inclusiveness... It is Tolstoy's attitudetoward his own tremendous knowledge that makes him great rather than merelyencyclopedic...
The key word here is \"love \" One of the most penetrating comments ever made aboutWar and Peace is Mark Van Doren's, \"I think he can be said to have hated nothingthat ever happened.\" This exaggeration contains a profound truth. Tolstoy's love forhis characters in War and Peace is very different from the mystic and, some wouldsay, morbid sentimentality of his later years. It is more like the enthusiasm of a youngman for everything he sees about him during the period of his greatest vigor....At his best Tolstoy seems to write as if Nature herself were guiding his pen....There is no formula to explain how Tolstoy does this. All we know is that he does it. .The constant impression of naturalness one gets from reading Tolstoy comes partlyfrom his
lack of obsessions. He does not specialize in a particular emotion, as Balzac, say,specializes in the emotions deriving from the desire for money. Perhaps we may saythat if Tolstoy has an obsession, it is a passion for showing people merely living....It is because his eye is always on the central current of life that his perceptions seemso inevitable....
Tolstoy's natural sympathy overleaps the boundary of sex; his women are as
convincing as his men. Indeed, he has a special talent for the presentation of women attheir most female ..
We think of certain Tolstoyan scenes as other men would do them and then we realizethe quality of his supremacy....
Critical Essay #670
It is normal. Tolstoy is the epic poet of the conscious and the \"normal,\" just asDostoevski, complementing him, is the dramatic poet of the subconscious and the\"abnormal.\" His instinct is always to identify the unnatural with the unpleasant....This almost abnormal normality in Tolstoy makes him able to do what would seem avery easy thing but is really very hard: describe people engaged in nothing but beinghappy....
The inclusiveness of War and Peace. Its naturalness. Finally, its timelessness. ..[Even] when his characters seem almost pure representatives of their class, they stillhave a permanent value as symbols....
Here is a book, too, that seems to deal with people caught in a particular cleft ofhistory. As that limited epoch recedes, we might suppose the people should dim
accordingly. Yet this is not the case. It is impossible to say just how Tolstoy managesto give the impression both of particularity and universality....
War and Peace may not have a classic form. But it does have a classic content. It isfull of scenes and situations which, in slightly altered forms, have recurred again andagain, and will continue to recur, in the history of civilized man....
It is as if the human race, despite its apparent complexity, were capable of but alimited set of gestures To this set of gestures only great artists have the key....Also the very looseness of the book's form, the fact that it has neither beginning norend, helps to convey the sense of enduring life....
Has War and Peace, then, no defects? It has many. It is far from being a technicallyperfect
Critical Essay #671
novel, like Madame Bovary__There are also many places in the narrative where thepace lags. Certain characters in the crowded canvas tend to get lost in the shuffle andnever become entirely clear.... At times, so complex is the panorama that the readerhas difficulty following the story, just as we have difficulty in following everythinghappening in a three−ring circus. Some of these defects seem to disappear on a secondor third or fourth reading. Some are permanent. But none of them is so great nor areall of them taken together so great as to shake War and Peace from the pinnacle itoccupies. Flaubert cannot afford to make mistakes. Tolstoy can....
The insights in Tolstoy are at their best enormously moving and exactly true. But theyrarely give us that uneasy sense of psychic discovery peculiar to Dostoevski....So far in these comments I have emphasized those qualities—inclusiveness,
naturalness, timelessness—that make War and Peace universal rather than Russian.But part of its appeal for us, I think, derives from the fact that though there is nothingin the book that is incomprehensible to the American or the Western European,everything in it, owing to its Russian character, seems to us just a trifle off−center.This gives the novel a piquancy, even a strangeness at times, that it may not possessfor the Russians....
There are certain central motives in War and Peace that are particularly (though notuniquely) Russian. The motive of moral conversion is a case in point...
In War and Peace, with varying degrees of success, the characters study themselves.All their critical experiences but lead them to further self−examination....
The purpose, if we may use so precise a word, of the regeneration experience is toenable the characters to attain toPierre's state: \"By loving people without cause, hediscovered indubitable causes for loving them.\" In this sentence, a sort of moral
equivalent of the James−Lange theory, lies the essence, the center, the inner flame, ofthe pre−revolutionary Russian novel. It is only after one has pondered its meaning thatone can understand what lies back of the sudden changes in Tolstoy's and Dostoevski's
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characters....
The conflict in the soul of the Russian aristocrat derived not only from the conflict ofcultures within him but from the moral falsity of his social position. Although
Tolstoy—and this is one of his omissions—does not lay great stress on it, the Russianupper class in varying degrees suffered from a guilt−feeling arising from theinstitution of serfdom....
Much of the soul−searching in War and Peace, though it would seem to pivot only oneach individual's personal problems, is in part a result of this vague pervasiveguilt−feeling. Perhaps, indeed, a large part of the genius of the pre−revolutionaryRussian novel comes from the conflict born of this sense of guilt.
Finally, the Russian sought spiritual regeneration because he found no outlet for hisidealistic energies in the state itself....
I have made these perhaps hackneyed comments in order to show that Tolstoy is aRussian novelist first and a universal novelist only by accident of genius.... He wroteas a Russian about Russian people—indeed about his own family, for many of thecharacters in War and Peace are transcripts from reality. But he wrote about them notonly as Russians but as people. And therein lies part of the secret of his greatness.There remains for us at least one more aspect of War and Peace to consider—that is,Tolstoy's view of men, war, history, and their interrelationships....
Tolstoy's theory of history is that there is no theory of history. Or, to put it morecautiously, if there are grand laws determining the movement and flow of historicalevents, we can, in the present state of our knowledge, only guess at them. Until ourvision and our knowledge are so extended that they reveal these underlying laws, themost intelligent thing for us to do is at least to deny validity to all superficialexplanations of historical experience. ...
Critical Essay #673
In War and Peace he attacks those theories which were popular in his own time....It is part of the purpose of War and Peace to prove that there is no such thing aschance and no such thing as genius....
For Tolstoy the fate of battles therefore is decided less by prefabricated strategies thanby the absence or presence of what he calls \"moral hesitation,\" or what we would callmorale....
Were Tolstoy alive today would he moderate his views because the character ofwarfare has changed so radically in the interim?....
Tolstoy, I think, would reply that any change is only apparent and only temporary. Hewould say that human nature is a constant, that it will rise to the surface despite all thedeformation, the drill, the conditioning, the dehumanizing to which is may besubjected.
It is a constant, then, in war. It is a constant in peace. And it is a constant in War andPeace....
Source:Clifton Fadiman, reprinted as \"War and Peace,\" in Party of One− The SelectedWritings of Clifton Fadiman, The World Publishing Company, 1955, pp 176−202\"Tolstoy's 'Peace and War
In the following review, the reviewer praises Tolstoy for his accurate presentation ofhow people act and talk and points to Tolstoy's presentation of the moral imperfectionof all and of the folly of self−will in historical events.
This book of Tolstoy's [ War and Peace] might be called with justice 'The RussianComedy,' m the sense in which Balzac employed the word. It gave me exactly thesame impression: I felt that I was thrown among new men and women, that I lived
Critical Essay #6
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with them, that I knew them, that none of them could be indifferent to me, that I couldnever forget them. I entered into their souls, and it seemed almost as if they couldenter into mine. Such a power in a writer is almost a miracle. How many novels have Inot read, and, after having read them, and admired many qualities—the beauty of thestyle, the invention, the dialogues, the dramatic situations—have still felt that myknowledge of life had not increased, that I had gained no new experience. It was notso with War and Peace...
It would be difficult to give a proper definition of the talent of Tolstoy. First of all, heis an homme du monde. He makes great people, emperors, generals, diplomats, fineladies, princes, talk and act as they do act and talk He is a perfect gentleman, and assuch he is thoroughly humane. He takes as much interest in the most humble of hisactors as he does in the highest He has lived in courts: the Saint−Andres, the
Saint−Vladimirs have no prestige for him—nor the gilded uniforms; he is not deceivedby appearances. His aim is so high that whatever he sees is, in one sense,
unsatisfactory. He looks for moral perfection, and there is nothing perfect. He is
always disappointed in the end. The final impression of his work is a sort of despair....[A] fundamental idea of fatalism pervades the book Fate governs empires as well asmen: it plays with a Napoleon and an Alexander as it does with a private in the ranks;it hangs over all the world like a dark cloud, rent at times by lighting. We live in thenight, like shadows; we are lost on the shore of an eternalStyx; we do not know
whence we came or whither we go. Millions of men, led by a senseless man, go fromwest to east, killing, murdering, and burning, and it is called the invasion of Russia.Two thousand years before, millions of other men came from east to west, plundering,killing, and burning, and it was called the invasion of the barbarians. What becomes ofthe human will, of the proud I, in these dreadful events? We see the folly and thevanity of self−will in these great historical events; but it is just the same in all times,and the will gets lost in peace as well as in war, for there is no real peace, and thehuman wills are constantly devouring each other.... We are made to enjoy a little; tosuffer much, and, when the end is approaching, we are all like one of Tolstoy's heroes,on the day ofBorodino .
Critical Essay #6
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[Tolstoy's book] is by far the most remarkable work of imagination that has beenlately revealed to us.
Source: \"Tolstoy's 'Peace and War,'\" in Nation, Vol. 40, No 1021, January 22, 1885,pp. 70−71
Critical Essay #676
Topics for Further Study
Compare the protests in Americaduring the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early1970s to the Decembrist uprising, whichPierre is involved with at the end of the book.What were the Decembrists protesting? Were there any similarities in the way theDecembrist andVietnamprotests were organized?
The Society of Freemasons, which is so influential inPierre's life, is still an activeorganization. Investigate the modern−day Masons. Considering the fact that it is still asecret organization, how much information can you find out about them\"? How havetheir practices and goals changed from the time of Tolstoy's novel?
DuringWorld War II, Russiawas an ally of Americaand Great Britain. Yet for most ofthe twentieth century, AmericaandRussiawere bitter rivals. Research the relationshipbetween the two countries at the time of the novel and report on it. What is America'srelationship toRussiatoday?
Topics for Further Study77
Compare & Contrast
1805: Americais still developing an identity after winning its independence fromEnglandin 1783. A second war againstEnglandwill be fought in 1812−1814.1866−1869: In the aftermath of the Civil War, Americaundergoes a period known asthe Reconstruction.
Today: Americais a stable country. It is considered the dominant economic andmilitary power in the world.
1815: News of Napoleon's defeat atWaterloo is reported four days later byLondon'sMorning Chronicle, which scooped the competing British newspapers.
1866: Telegraph communication is the most common way to communicate over longdistances. In America,Western Union controls 75,000 miles of wire, becoming thefirst great monopoly.
Today: News events are available instantly from all corners of the globe, thanks to theInternet.
1807: Former Vice President Aaron Burr is arrested for his part in a scheme to forman independent nation of Mexicoand parts of theLouisiana Territory.
1868: President Andrew Johnson faces an impeachment trial, charged with dismissingthe
Secretary of War, a violation of a year−old law prohibiting removal of certain cabinetofficers without the consent of Congress. Opposition forces end up one vote short ofthe number necessary to impeach him.
Compare & Contrast78
Today: President Bill Clinton is impeached by the Senate for crimes related to a sexscandal. After his acquittal, his approval ratings are higher than ever
1805−1815: Napoleon Bonaparte is the Emperor of France. He assumes that positionafter his rise to military power during the French Revolution.
1866−1869: Naploean HI is Emperor of France, having named himself emperor in1852. A nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, he is elected president in 1848 and thenseizes dictatorial power.
Today: Franceis a republic; the people democratically elect a president.1805: The Russian population is approximately thirty−three million people.1866: The population of Russiahas increased to approximately seventy−six millionpeople.
Today: Russiahas a population of approximately 149 million people.
Compare & Contrast79
What Do I Read Next?
Thomas Hardy was an English author who lived at approximately the same time asTolstoy One of the crowning achievements of his later life was a long poem, TheDynasts, written between 1903 and 1908. It is an epic drama with nineteen acts and135 scenes that are impossible to produce for the stage. The work focuses onEngland'srole in the Napoleonic Wars.
Tolstoy's other great masterpiece is Anna Karemna, his 1877 novel about anaristocratic woman's illicit affair with a count.
Crime and Punishment is considered to be the masterpiece of Fyodor Dostoyevsky'sliterary career. It was published in 1866, the same year as the first installment of Warand Peace.
Russian writer Ivan Turgenev was a friend of Tolstoy. Contemporary critics considerhis 1862 novel Fathers and Sons to be his greatest work.
Patient readers who can work their way through this novel's mass may be ready forMoby Dick, Herman Melville's 1851 opus about a whaling ship captain and the objectof his obsession, the great white whale of the title.
Henri Troyat's biography, Tolstoy, was published in 1967 by Doubleday and Co. Itchronicles the life and times of this intriguing author.
What Do I Read Next?80
For Further Study
Berlin, Isaiah, \"Tolstoy and Enlightenment,\" in Mightierthat the Sword, MacMillan &Co., 19.
An influential assessment of the often−repeated charge that Tolstoy was a good fictionwriter but a flawed philosopher.
Christian, R. F., Tolstoy's War and Peace− A Study, The Clarendon Press, 1962.A comprehensive and recommended study of the novel.Citati, Pietro, Tolstoy, Schocken Books, 1986.
Written by an Italian literary critic, this is a short biography that introduces students tothe key elements in Tolstoy's life and works
Crankshaw, Edward, Tolstoy: The Making of a Novelist, The Viking Press, 1974.Traces Tolstoy's development as a novelist
Crego Benson, Ruth, \"Two Natashas,\" in Women in Tolstoy: The Ideal and the Erotic,University of Illinois Press, 1973.
Examines the conflict between Tolstoy's portrayal of Natasha as a strong complexheroine and his tendency to see women only as objects of beauty
Debreczeny, Paul, \"Freedom and Necessity: A Reconsideration of War and Peace,\" inPapers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Languageand Literature, No 2, Spring, 1971.
For Further Study81
Debreczeny's understanding of Tolstoy's basic philosophy allows him to read thediverse aspects of the novel as one continuous, homogeneous narrative.Greenwood, E B , \"The Problem of Truth in War and Peace,\" in Tolstoy TheComprehensive Vision, St Martin's Press, 1975.
Explores Tolstoy's interest in the problem of historical truth.Johnson, Claudia D., To Kill a Mockingbird: ThreateningBoundaries, Twayne, 1994
A book−length analysis of the novel that provides historical and literary context aswell as discussion of key themes and issues.
Morrison, Gary Saul, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in\"War and Peace\ Stanford University Press, 1987Discusses the structure of the novel
Sampson, R. V., \"Leo Tolstoy 'God Sees the Truth, But Does Not Quickly Reveal It',\"in The Discovery of Peace, Pantheon Books, 1973.
Sampson examines several key writers who have influenced the history of the moraldebate about war.
Simmons, Ernest J, \"War and Peace,\" in Introduction toTolstoy's Writings, The University of Chicago Press, 1968.
In this chapter in a book about the Tolstoy's major works, Simmons provides astylistic and thematic analysis of the novel.
For Further Study
82
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For Further Study83
Sources
Arnold, Matthew, \"Count Leo Tolstoy,\" in Fortnightly Review, December, 1887.Christian, R. R, Tolstoy's \"War and Peace\"− A Study, Clarenden Press, 1962,Fodor, Alexander, Tolstoy and the Russians. Reflections on a Relationship, ArdisPress, 1984
James, Henry, \"Preface to The Tragic Muse,\" in The Art of the Novel, C. Scribner'sSons, 1934.
Simmons, Ernest J., Tolstoy, Routledge & Kegan Paul,Boston, 1973, p. 81.Wasiolek, Edward, Tolstoy's Major Fiction, TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 1978
Sources84
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The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Encyclopedia ofPopular Fiction: \"Social Concerns\Precedents\© 1994−2005, by Walton Beacham.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literaturefor Young Adults: \"About the Author\\"Social Sensitivity\1994−2005, by Walton Beacham.IntroductionPurpose of the Book
The purpose of Novels for Students (NfS) is to provide readers with a guide tounderstanding, enjoying, and studying novels by giving them easy access toinformation about the work. Part of Gale’s“For Students” Literature line, NfS isspecifically designed to meet the curricular needs of high school and undergraduate
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college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers andresearchers considering specific novels. While each volume contains entries on“classic” novels frequently studied in classrooms, there are also entries containinghard−to−find information on contemporary novels, including works by multicultural,international, and women novelists.
The information covered in each entry includes an introduction to the novel and thenovel’s author; a plot summary, to help readers unravel and understand the events in anovel; descriptions of important characters, including explanation of a given
character’s role in the novel as well as discussion about that character’s relationship toother characters in the novel; analysis of important themes in the novel; and an
explanation of important literary techniques and movements as they are demonstratedin the novel.
In addition to this material, which helps the readers analyze the novel itself, studentsare also provided with important information on the literary and historical backgroundinforming each work. This includes a historical context essay, a box comparing thetime or place the novel was written to modern Western culture, a critical overviewessay, and excerpts from critical essays on the novel. A unique feature of NfS is aspecially commissioned critical essay on each novel, targeted toward the studentreader.
To further aid the student in studying and enjoying each novel, information on mediaadaptations is provided, as well as reading suggestions for works of fiction andnonfiction on similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include ideas for researchpapers and lists of critical sources that provide additional material on the novel.Selection Criteria
The titles for each volume of NfS were selected by surveying numerous sources onteaching literature and analyzing course curricula for various school districts. Some ofthe sources surveyed included: literature anthologies; Reading Lists for
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College−Bound Students: The Books Most Recommended by America’s TopColleges; textbooks on teaching the novel; a College Board survey of novels
commonly studied in high schools; a National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)survey of novels commonly studied in high schools; the NCTE’s Teaching Literaturein High School: The Novel;and the Young Adult Library Services Association
(YALSA) list of best books for young adults of the past twenty−five years. Input wasalso solicited from our advisory board, as well as educators from various areas. Fromthese discussions, it was determined that each volume should have a mix of “classic”novels (those works commonly taught in literature classes) and contemporary novelsfor which information is often hard to find. Because of the interest in expanding thecanon of literature, an emphasis was also placed on including works by international,multicultural, and women authors. Our advisory board members—educational
professionals— helped pare down the list for each volume. If a work was not selectedfor the present volume, it was often noted as a possibility for a future volume. Asalways, the editor welcomes suggestions for titles to be included in future volumes.How Each Entry Is Organized
Each entry, or chapter, in NfS focuses on one novel. Each entry heading lists the fullname of the novel, the author’s name, and the date of the novel’s publication. Thefollowing elements are contained in each entry:
• Introduction: a brief overview of the novel which provides information about itsfirst appearance, its literary standing, any controversies surrounding the work,and major conflicts or themes within the work.
• Author Biography: this section includes basic facts about the author’s life, andfocuses on events and times in the author’s life that inspired the novel inquestion.
• Plot Summary: a factual description of the major events in the novel. Lengthysummaries are broken down with subheads.
• Characters: an alphabetical listing of major characters in the novel. Eachcharacter name is followed by a brief to an extensive description of the
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character’s role in the novel, as well as discussion of the character’s actions,relationships, and possible motivation. Characters are listed alphabetically bylast name. If a character is unnamed—for instance, the narrator in InvisibleMan–the character is listed as “The Narrator” and alphabetized as “Narrator.” Ifa character’s first name is the only one given, the name will appearalphabetically by that name. • Variant names are also included for each
character. Thus, the full name “Jean Louise Finch” would head the listing forthe narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird, but listed in a separate cross−referencewould be the nickname “Scout Finch.”
• Themes: a thorough overview of how the major topics, themes, and issues areaddressed within the novel. Each theme discussed appears in a separatesubhead, and is easily accessed through the boldface entries in theSubject/Theme Index.
• Style: this section addresses important style elements of the novel, such assetting, point of view, and narration; important literary devices used, such asimagery, foreshadowing, symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which thework might have belonged, such as Gothicism or Romanticism. Literary termsare explained within the entry, but can also be found in the Glossary.• Historical Context: This section outlines the social, political, and culturalclimate in which the author lived and the novel was created. This section mayinclude descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life inthe culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities of the time in which thework was written. If the novel is a historical work, information regarding thetime in which the novel is set is also included. Each section is broken downwith helpful subheads.
• Critical Overview: this section provides background on the critical reputation ofthe novel, including bannings or any other public controversies surrounding thework. For older works, this section includes a history of how the novel was firstreceived and how perceptions of it may have changed over the years; for morerecent novels, direct quotes from early reviews may also be included.
• Criticism: an essay commissioned by NfS which specifically deals with thenovel and is written specifically for the student audience, as well as excerpts
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from previously published criticism on the work (if available).
• Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material quoted in the entry, with fullbibliographical information.
• Further Reading: an alphabetical list of other critical sources which may proveuseful for the student. Includes full bibliographical information and a briefannotation.
In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, set apart from themain text as sidebars:
• Media Adaptations: a list of important film and television adaptations of thenovel, including source information. The list also includes stage adaptations,audio recordings, musical adaptations, etc.
• Topics for Further Study: a list of potential study questions or research topicsdealing with the novel. This section includes questions related to otherdisciplines the student may be studying, such as American history, worldhistory, science, math, government, business, geography, economics,psychology, etc.
• Compare and Contrast Box: an “at−a−glance” comparison of the cultural andhistorical differences between the author’s time and culture and late twentiethcentury/early twenty−first century Western culture. This box includes pertinentparallels between the major scientific, political, and cultural movements of thetime or place the novel was written, the time or place the novel was set (if ahistorical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after 1990 maynot have this box.
• What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that might complement the featurednovel or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author andothers, works of fiction and nonfiction, and works from various genres, cultures,and eras.Other Features
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NfS includes “The Informed Dialogue: Interacting with Literature,” a foreword byAnne Devereaux Jordan, Senior Editor for Teaching and Learning Literature (TALL),and a founder of the Children’s Literature Association. This essay provides an
enlightening look at how readers interact with literature and how Novels for Studentscan help teachers show students how to enrich their own reading experiences.A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume ofthe NfS series.
A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index breaks down the authors and titles coveredin each volume of the NfS series by nationality and ethnicity.
A Subject/Theme Index, specific to each volume, provides easy reference for userswho may be studying a particular subject or theme rather than a single work.
Significant subjects from events to broad themes are included, and the entries pointingto the specific theme discussions in each entry are indicated in boldface.
Each entry has several illustrations, including photos of the author, stills from filmadaptations (if available), maps, and/or photos of key historical events.Citing Novels for Students
When writing papers, students who quote directly from any volume of Novels forStudents may use the following general forms. These examples are based on MLAstyle; teachers may request that students adhere to a different style, so the followingexamples may be adapted as needed. When citing text from NfS that is not attributedto a particular author (i.e., the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.), thefollowing format should be used in the bibliography section:
“Night.” Novels for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 4.Detroit: Gale, 1998. 234–35.
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When quoting the specially commissioned essay from NfS (usually the first pieceunder the “Criticism” subhead), the following format should be used:
Miller, Tyrus. Critical Essay on “Winesburg, Ohio.” Novels for Students.Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 335–39.When quoting a journal or newspaper essay that is reprinted in a volume of NfS, thefollowing form may be used:
Malak, Amin. “Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale and the
Dystopian Tradition,” Canadian Literature No. 112 (Spring, 1987), 9–16;excerpted and reprinted in Novels for Students, Vol. 4, ed. Marie RoseNapierkowski (Detroit: Gale, 1998), pp. 133–36.
When quoting material reprinted from a book that appears in a volume of NfS, thefollowing form may be used:
Adams, Timothy Dow. “Richard Wright: “Wearing the Mask,” in TellingLies in Modern American Autobiography (University of North CarolinaPress, 1990), 69–83; excerpted and reprinted in Novels for Students, Vol.1, ed. Diane Telgen (Detroit: Gale, 1997), pp. 59–61.We Welcome Your Suggestions
The editor of Novels for Students welcomes your comments and ideas. Readers whowish to suggest novels to appear in future volumes, or who have other suggestions, arecordially invited to contact the editor. You may contact the editor via email at:ForStudentsEditors@gale.com. Or write to the editor at:Editor, Novels for StudentsGale Group
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