War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [0]
Title Page
Introduction
Principal Characters
VOLUME ONE
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
VOLUME TWO
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
VOLUME THREE
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
VOLUME FOUR
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
EPILOGUE
Part One
Part Two
Appendix: “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace” by Count Leo Tolstoy
Notes
Historical Index
Summary
Also Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.
—ISAAC BABEL
War and Peace is the most famous and at the same time the most daunting of Russian novels, as vast as Russia itself and as long to cross from one end to the other. Yet if one makes the journey, the sights seen and the people met on the way mark one’s life forever. The book is set in the period of the Napoleonic wars (1805–1812) and tells of the interweaving of historical events with the private lives of two very different families of the Russian nobility—the severe Bolkonskys and the easygoing Rostovs—and of a singular man, reminiscent of the author himself—Count Pierre Bezukhov. It embodies the national myth of “Russia’s glorious period,” as Tolstoy himself called it, in the confrontation of the emperor Napoleon and Field Marshal Kutuzov, and at the same time it challenges that myth and all such myths through the vivid portrayal of the fates of countless ordinary people of the period, men and women, young and old, French as well as Russian, and through the author’s own passionate questioning of the truth of history.
Tolstoy wrote that he “spent five years of ceaseless and exclusive labor, under the best conditions of life,” working on War and Peace. Those were the years from 1863 to 1868. He was thirty-five when he began. The year before, he had married Sofya Behrs, the daughter of a Moscow doctor, who was eighteen, and they had moved permanently to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, in Tula province, a hundred and twenty miles south of Moscow. She bore him four children while he worked on the book, was his first reader (or listener), and was in part the model for his heroine, Natasha Rostov.
The orderliness and routine of family life and estate management were not only the best conditions for work, they were also new conditions for Tolstoy. His mother had died when he was two. His father had moved to Moscow with the children in 1830, but died himself seven years later, and the children were eventually taken to Kazan by their aunt. Tolstoy entered Kazan University in 1844 but never graduated; his later attempts to pass examinations at Petersburg University also led to nothing. In 1851, after several years of idle and dissipated life in Moscow and Petersburg, he visited the Caucasus with his brother Nikolai, who was in the army, and there took part in a raid on a Chechen village, which he described a year later in a story entitled “The Raid,” his first attempt to capture the actuality of warfare in words. His experiences in the Caucasus were also reflected in his novel The Cossacks, which he began writing in 1853 but finished only nine years later, and in his very last piece of fiction, the superb short novel Hadji Murad, completed in 1904 but published only posthumously.
In 1852, he joined the army as a noncommissioned officer and served in Wallachia. Two years later he was promoted to ensign and was transferred at his own request to the Crimea, where he fought in the Crimean War and was present at the siege of Sevastopol. His Sevastopol Sketches, which were published in 1855, made him famous in Petersburg social and literary circles. They were a second and fuller attempt at a true depiction of war.
During his army years, Tolstoy lived like a typical young Russian officer, drinking, gambling, and womanizing. In 1854 he lost the family house in Yasnaya Polyana at cards, and it was dismantled and moved some twenty miles away, leaving only a foundation stone on which Tolstoy later had carved: HERE STOOD THE HOUSE IN WHICH L. N. TOLSTOY