Everything is war and peace. What "peace" is referred to in "war and peace"? What does the title of the novel "War and Peace" mean?

17.12.2013

145 years ago, a major literary event took place in Russia - the first edition of Leo Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace" was published. Separate chapters of the novel were published earlier - Tolstoy began publishing the first two parts in Katkov's Russkiy Vestnik a few years earlier, but the "canonical", complete and revised version of the novel came out only a few years later. Over a century and a half of its existence, this world masterpiece and bestseller has acquired both a mass of scientific research and reader legends. Here are some interesting facts about the novel that you may not have known.

How did Tolstoy himself evaluate War and Peace?

Leo Tolstoy was very skeptical about his "main works" - the novels "War and Peace" and Anna Karenina. So, in January 1871, he sent Fet a letter in which he wrote: “How happy I am ... that I will never write verbose rubbish like War.” Nearly 40 years later, he has not changed his mind. On December 6, 1908, an entry appeared in the writer's diary: "People love me for those trifles - War and Peace, etc., which seem very important to them." There is even more recent evidence. In the summer of 1909, one of the visitors to Yasnaya Polyana expressed his admiration and gratitude to the by then universally recognized classic for the creation of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's answer was: "It's like someone came to Edison and said:" I respect you very much because you dance the mazurka well. I attribute meaning to very different books of mine."

Was Tolstoy sincere? Perhaps there was a share of the author's coquetry, although the whole image of Tolstoy the thinker strongly contradicts this conjecture - he was too serious and unfeigned person.

"War and Peace" or "War and Peace"?

The name "War of the World" is so familiar that it has already eaten into the subcortex. If you ask any more or less educated person what is the main work of Russian literature of all time, a good half will say without hesitation: "War and Peace." Meanwhile, the novel had different versions of the title: “1805” (even an excerpt from the novel was published under this title), “All's well that ends well” and “Three pores”.

A well-known legend is associated with the name of Tolstoy's masterpiece. Often they try to beat the title of the novel. Claiming that the author himself put some ambiguity into it: either Tolstoy had in mind the opposition of war and peace as an antonym of war, that is, tranquility, or he used the word “peace” in the meaning of community, community, land ...

But the fact is that at the time when the novel saw the light of day, such ambiguity could not exist: two words, although they were pronounced the same, were written differently. Before the spelling reform of 1918, in the first case it was written "mir" (peace), and in the second - "mir" (Universe, society).

There is a legend that Tolstoy allegedly used the word “mir” in the title, but all this is the result of a simple misunderstanding. All lifetime editions of Tolstoy's novel were published under the title "War and Peace", and he himself wrote the title of the novel in French as "La guerre et la paix". How could the word “world” sneak into the name? This is where the story splits. According to one version, this is the name that was written in his own hand on the document filed by Leo Tolstoy with M.N. Lavrov, an employee of the Katkov printing house, at the first full publication of the novel. It is quite possible that there really was a mistake by the author. And so the legend was born.

According to another version, the legend could have appeared later as a result of a misprint made during the publication of the novel edited by P. I. Biryukov. In the 1913 edition, the title of the novel is reproduced eight times: on the title page and on the first page of each volume. Seven times "peace" is printed and only once - "peace", but on the first page of the first volume.
About the sources of "War and Peace"

When working on the novel, Leo Tolstoy approached his sources very seriously. He read a lot of historical and memoir literature. In Tolstoy's "list of used literature" there were, for example, such academic publications as: the multi-volume "Description of the Patriotic War in 1812", the history of M. I. Bogdanovich, "The Life of Count Speransky" by M. Korf, "Biography of Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov" M P. Shcherbinina. The writer and materials of the French historians Thiers, A. Dumas Sr., Georges Chambray, Maximilien Foix, Pierre Lanfre used. There are studies on Freemasonry and, of course, the memoirs of the direct participants in the events - Sergei Glinka, Denis Davydov, Alexei Yermolov and many others, there was also a solid list of French memoirists, starting with Napoleon himself.

559 characters

The researchers calculated the exact number of heroes of "War and Peace" - there are exactly 559 of them in the book, and 200 of them are quite historical figures. Many of the rest have real prototypes.

In general, when working on the surnames of fictional characters (coming up with names and surnames for half a thousand people is already a lot of work), Tolstoy used the following three main ways: he used real surnames; modified real surnames; created completely new surnames, but based on real models.

Many episodic heroes of the novel have completely historical surnames - the book mentions the Razumovskys, Meshcherskys, Gruzinskys, Lopukhins, Arkharovs, etc. But the main characters, as a rule, have quite recognizable, but still fake, encrypted surnames. The reason for this is usually cited as the writer's unwillingness to show the connection of the character with any specific prototype, from which Tolstoy took only some features. Such, for example, are Bolkonsky (Volkonsky), Drubetskoy (Trubetskoy), Kuragin (Kurakin), Dolokhov (Dorokhov) and others. But, of course, Tolstoy could not completely abandon fiction - for example, on the pages of the novel there are names that sound quite noble, but still not related to a particular family - Peronskaya, Chatrov, Telyanin, Desal, etc.

Real prototypes of many heroes of the novel are also known. So, Vasily Dmitrievich Denisov is a friend of Nikolai Rostov, the famous hussar and partisan Denis Davydov became his prototype.
An acquaintance of the Rostov family, Maria Dmitrievna Akhrosimova, was written off from the widow of Major General Nastasya Dmitrievna Ofrosimova. By the way, she was so colorful that she appeared in another famous work - Alexander Griboyedov almost portrayed her in his comedy Woe from Wit.

Her son, breter and reveler Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov, and later one of the leaders of the partisan movement, embodied the features of several prototypes at once - the war heroes of the partisans Alexander Figner and Ivan Dorokhov, as well as the famous duelist Fyodor Tolstoy-American.

The old prince Nikolai Andreevich Bolkonsky, an elderly nobleman of Catherine, was inspired by the image of the writer's maternal grandfather, a representative of the Volkonsky family.
But Princess Maria Nikolaevna, the daughter of the old man Bolkonsky and the sister of Prince Andrei, Tolstoy saw in Maria Nikolaevna Volkonskaya (in the marriage of Tolstoy), his mother.

Screen adaptations

We all know and appreciate the famous Soviet adaptation of "War and Peace" by Sergei Bondarchuk, which was released in 1965. The production of War and Peace by King Vidor in 1956 is also known, the music for which was written by Nino Rota, and the main roles were played by Hollywood stars of the first magnitude Audrey Hepburn (Natasha Rostova) and Henry Fonda (Pierre Bezukhov).

And the first adaptation of the novel appeared just a few years after the death of Leo Tolstoy. The silent picture of Pyotr Chardynin was published in 1913, one of the main roles (Andrey Bolkonsky) in the film was played by the famous actor Ivan Mozzhukhin.

Some figures

Tolstoy wrote and rewrote the novel for 6 years, from 1863 to 1869. According to the researchers of his work, the author manually rewrote the text of the novel 8 times, and rewrote individual episodes more than 26 times.

The first edition of the novel: twice as short and five times as interesting?

Not everyone knows that in addition to the generally accepted one, there is another version of the novel. This is the very first edition that Leo Tolstoy brought to Moscow in 1866 to the publisher Mikhail Katkov for publication. But this time Tolstoy could not publish the novel.

Katkov was interested in continuing to print it in pieces in his Russian Bulletin. Other publishers did not see any commercial potential in the book at all - the novel seemed too long and "irrelevant" to them, so they offered the author to publish it at his own expense. There were other reasons: Sofya Andreevna demanded that her husband return to Yasnaya Polyana, who could not cope alone with running a large household and looking after children. In addition, in the Chertkovo library that had just opened for public use, Tolstoy found a lot of materials that he certainly wanted to use in his book. And therefore, postponing the publication of the novel, he worked on it for another two years. However, the first version of the book did not disappear - it was preserved in the writer's archive, was reconstructed and published in 1983 in the 94th volume of the Literary Heritage by the Nauka publishing house.

Here is what the head of a well-known publishing house, Igor Zakharov, who published it in 2007, wrote about this version of the novel:

"1. Twice as short and five times more interesting.
2. Almost no philosophical digressions.
3. A hundred times easier to read: the entire French text is replaced by Russian in the translation of Tolstoy himself.
4. Much more peace and less war.
5. Happy ending...».

Well, it's our right to choose...

Elena Veshkina

War, peace... and some details. On the eve of the start of online readings of the great novel by Leo Tolstoy, we decided to recall some details

Text: Mikhail Wiesel/Year of Literature.RF
Collage: watercolor by N. N. Karazin; portrait of Leo Tolstoy. 1873, I. N. Kramskoy (State Tretyakov Gallery)

1. The volume of the novel "War and Peace" is 1300 pages of the usual book format. This is not the largest novel in world literature, but one of the largest included in the canon of European literature of the 19th century. Initially, in the first two publications, it was divided not into four parts, as we are used to, but into six. Only in 1873, when the novel was being prepared for publication for the third time as part of the Works of L. N. Tolstoy, did the author change the distribution of the text by volume and allot him exactly half of the 8-volume collection.

2. We confidently call "War and Peace" a "novel", but the author himself categorically objected to such a genre definition. In an article dedicated to the release of the first separate edition, he wrote: This is not a novel, even less a poem, even less a historical chronicle. "War and Peace" is what the author wanted and could express in the form in which it was expressed. … History since time not only presents many examples of such a departure from the European form, but does not even give a single example of the contrary. Starting from Gogol's "Dead Souls" and up to Dostoevsky's "Dead House", in the new period of Russian literature there is not a single artistic prose work that is a little out of mediocrity, which would fit perfectly into the form of a novel, poem or short story.". Nevertheless, now "War and Peace" is certainly considered one of the pinnacles of world romance.

3.
Initially, in 1856, Tolstoy was going to write a novel not about the Napoleonic wars, but about the old one, which finally, thirty years later, is allowed to return from Siberia. But he quickly realized that he would not be able to reveal the motives for the hero’s participation in the December uprising if he did not describe his youthful participation in the Napoleonic wars. In addition, he could not help but take into account that when describing the events of December 14, 1825, he would begin to have problems with censorship. In the 1890s, Tolstoy would not have paid any attention to this, but in the 1860s, for an author who was not yet forty years old, it mattered. So the idea of ​​"the story of the Decembrist" was transformed into "an epic novel about the Napoleonic wars in Russia."

4.
For censorship reasons, as well as at the insistent request of his wife, Tolstoy cut out fairly frank descriptions of Pierre and Helen's wedding night. Sofya Andreevna managed to convince her husband that the church censorship department would not let them through. With Helen Bezukhova, who, obviously, acted for Tolstoy as the bearer of the "dark sexual beginning", the most scandalous plot twist is also connected. Helen, a flourishing young woman, suddenly dies just in 1812, untying Pierre's hands to marry Natasha Rostova. Russian schoolchildren, studying the novel at the age of 15, perceive this unexpected death as a convention necessary for the development of the plot. And only those of them who reread the novel as adults understand, to their embarrassment, from Tolstoy's dull hints that Helen is dying ... from the consequences of an unsuccessful pharmacological abortion, which she went for, entangled between two supposed husbands, a Russian nobleman and a foreign prince - she intended to marry one of them, having received a divorce from Pierre.

5. The Russian word "mir" means "absence of war" and "society". Until the reform of Russian spelling in 1918, this difference was also fixed graphically: “lack of war” was written “mir”, and “society” - “mir”. Tolstoy, of course, implied this ambiguity when he gave the name of the novel, but, contrary to the well-established misconception, he called the novel precisely "War and Peace" - which is clearly visible on the covers of all lifetime editions. On the other hand, Mayakovsky called his 1916 poem "War and Peace", in defiance of Lev Nikolaevich, and this difference has now become invisible.

6. The novel was written in 1863–69. Tolstoy himself acknowledged that

« an essay on which I have assigned five years of unceasing and exceptional labor, under the best conditions of life».

A year before the start of this work, the 34-year-old Tolstoy married, and his wife, 18-year-old Sonya Bers, took over, in particular, the duties of a secretary. In the course of working on the novel, Sofya Andreevna rewrote the text completely from beginning to end at least eight times. Individual episodes were rewritten up to 26 times. During this time, she gave birth to the first four children (out of thirteen).

7. In the same article, Tolstoy assured that the names of the characters - Drubetskoy, Kuragin - resemble real Russian aristocratic surnames - Volkonsky, Trubetskoy, Kurakin - only because it was more convenient for him to enter his characters in the historical context and "allow" them to talk with real Rostopchin and Kutuzov. In reality, this is not entirely true: describing the Rostov and Bolkonsky families, Tolstoy described his own ancestors quite closely. In particular, Nikolai Rostov is to a large extent his own father, Nikolai Tolstoy (1794–1837), hero of the war of 1812 and lieutenant colonel of the Pavlograd (!) Regiment, and Marya Bolkonskaya is his mother, Marya Nikolaevna, nee Princess Volkonskaya (1790– 1830). The circumstances of their wedding are described quite closely, and Bald Mountains are similar to Yasnaya Polyana. Immediately after the release of the novel, in the absence of the Internet and the "gossip column" in the modern sense, this, of course, could only be guessed by people close to Tolstoy. But everyone immediately recognized three characters: Vaska Denisov, Marya Dmitrievna Akhrosimova and Ivan Dolokhov. Under these transparent pseudonyms, famous people were designated then: the poet and hussar Denis Vasilyevich Davydov, the eccentric Moscow lady Nastasya Dmitrievna Ofrosimova. As for Dolokhov, it turned out to be more difficult with him: it seems that General Ivan Dorokhov (1762–1815), the hero of the Napoleonic wars, is meant, but in fact Tolstoy quite accurately described his son with the strange name Rufin (1801–1852), a hussar and a breter, repeatedly demoted to the soldiers for riot and again, with courage, he sought the officer's epaulettes. Tolstoy met Rufin Dorokhov in his youth in the Caucasus.

8.
The protagonist of "War and Peace" - - has no exact prototype. At the same time, it is not difficult to point out the prototype of his father, Catherine's nobleman, who recognized his illegitimate son only before his death - this is one of the richest and most influential people in Russia in the 18th century, Chancellor Alexander Bezborodko. But in the character of Pierre, the youthful features of Tolstoy himself and the collective "thinking young man" from the nobles of the early 19th century are combined - in particular, Prince Peter Vyazemsky, the future poet and closest friend

9.
Georges Nivat, the greatest contemporary French Slavist, who speaks fluent Russian, confirms that the French language of War and Peace is not a conditional “international French”, like modern “international English”, but a real aristocratic French language of the 19th century. True, still closer to the middle of the century, when the novel was written, and not the beginning, when the action takes place. Tolstoy himself compares French blotches with "shadows in the picture", giving sharpness and bulge to faces. It's easier to say this: refined French allows you to convey the flavor of an era when all of Europe spoke French. It is better to read these phrases out loud, even if you do not quite understand their meaning, and not to read the translation. The narrative is constructed in such a way that at its key moments all the characters, even the French, switch to Russian.

10. To date, "War and Peace" has served as the basis for ten cinematographic and television films, including the grandiose four-part epic by Sergei Bondarchuk (1965), for the filming of which a special cavalry regiment was created in the Soviet army. However, before the end of the year, the 11th project will be added to this list - an 8-episode television series BBC one. And, probably, it will not spoil the reputation of the "historical British series", which has now become a global brand.

Once, at a literature lesson, the teacher told us that in the old spelling, when the Russian alphabet had 35 letters (see V. I. Dal, “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language”), some words that were pronounced the same had different spellings, and that changed the meaning. So, the word "peace", written as it is written now, really meant a time of peace, without war. And written through "and with a dot" ("i") - the world in the sense of the universe and human society.

At that time, we were studying L. N. Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace", and, continuing to discuss "and" with a dot, the teacher told us that Lev Nikolaevich called his novel like this: "War and Peace", since he contrasted war and society, war and people.

This story so struck my imagination that I remembered it, and all my life I was sure that it was so. And just recently, wanting to get involved in a dispute to defend my point of view, I began to look for supporting facts on the Internet.

What was found there? A lot of essays that rewrite the above from each other (of course, great, but unreliable), chatter in the forums (the opinion of the laity against the peaceful in relation to 10: 1), a certificate on gramota.ru that changes its mind, and - no facts! Well, purely opinions, and that's it!

On one forum they wrote that, it turns out, this novel is a study of the influence of war on human actions and destinies. On the other hand, they were indignant that the "world" is not a human society, but a rural community, and Tolstoy could not name his novel "War and Peace", since he wrote not about the rural community, but about the high society.

The only reliable message on this topic I found from Artemy Lebedev with the image of the first page of the 1874 edition, commented with the words: “Well, what could be easier than just take it and see how it was?”

Let's follow this advice.

Firstly, let's look in the "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" by V.I. Dahl: what do the words "mir" and "mir" really mean?

WORLD (written with i) (m.) universe; substance in space and force in time (Khomyakov). || One of the lands of the universe; esp. || our earth, globe, light; || all people, all the world, the human race; || community, society of peasants; || gathering. In the last value the world is rural and volost. Lay on the world, give a verdict at a gathering; in the rural world there is a peasant from the smoke, in the volost world or a circle, two masters out of a hundred. Worlds, lands, planets. In the old days, they counted the years from the creation of the world, our earth. Go to the world or in the world, with a bag. On the world and death is red, on people. To live in the world, in worldly cares, in vanity; in general in the light; prvop. spiritual, monastic life. Peace, God help! hail haulers, Volga, at the meeting of the courts; Answer: God bless you! World wave. The world is a golden mountain. In the world that is in the sea. In a world that is in a whirlpool (no bottom, no tire). The world is in evil (in a lie). Whatever the world dies, it dies, oh envy. Stupid mind lets the world. Rich in a feast, poor in the world (in the world). We do not go around the world, and we do not give to the poor. She attached children: she let one around the world, gave the other to a swineherd in science. Go to the world (around the world), and take the test. The world is baptized, but a canvas bag: beg under one window, eat under another. The world is thin, but long. The world has bellies and thin, but debts. What the world does not lay down, the world will not lift. You can't bake a pie about the world; you can't get enough of the world of wine. You can't please the whole world (everyone). In a world that is at a drunken feast. with the world on a thread, a naked shirt. One world will not eat. In the world, as in a feast: there is a lot of everything (both good and bad). And to the feast, and to the world, all in one (about clothes). Not to a feast, not to the world, not to good people. To live in the world - to live in the world. (full text of the article, image 1.2 Mb.)

To reconcile whom, with whom, to reconcile, to agree, to eliminate a quarrel, to settle disagreement, enmity, forcing to become amicable. Why put up with those who do not know how to swear! Going to put up with yourself is not good; and send an ambassador - people will know. The mare put up with the wolf but did not return home.<…>The world is the absence of quarrel, enmity, disagreement, war; harmony, harmony, unanimity, affection, friendship, goodwill; silence, peace, tranquility. Peace is concluded and signed. They have peace and grace in their home. Accept someone in peace, spend with the world. Peace to you! From the greeting of the poor: peace to this house. Peace to you, and I to you! Good people scold the world. On the day of the feast, and at night with walls and thresholds of the world. The neighbor does not want to, and there will be no peace. Peace to the deceased, and feast to the healer. Chernyshevsky (violent) peace (among the people of Kaluga, whose strife was stopped by Chernyshev, under Peter I). (full text of the article, image 0.6 Mb.)

Secondly- encyclopedias, as well as references and lists of works by L. N. Tolstoy, compiled by pre-revolutionary researchers of his work.

1. Encyclopedic Dictionary, Volume XXXIII, publishers F. A. Brockhaus and I. A. Efron, St. Petersburg, 1901

The article about Count L. N. Tolstoy begins on page 448, and the only time there is the title “War and Peace”, written with an “i”:

Brockhaus and Efron. L.N. Tolstoy, "War and Peace"

Note that the second mention of the novel that occurs at the end of the quote is typed with the letter "and".

2. Bodnarsky B. S. "Bibliography of the works of L.N. Tolstoy", 1912, Moscow, p. 11:

3. ibid., p. 18:

4. Bibliographic index of the works of L. N. Tolstoy, compiled by A. L. Bem, 1926 (started with typesetting in 1913 - finished printing in September 1926), p. 13:

5. Count LN Tolstoy in literature and art. Compiled by Yuri Bitovt. Moscow, 1903:

note on page 120:

Compared to other references (full text pp. 116-125, image 0.8Mb), this looks like a typo.

Third, title pages of pre-revolutionary editions of the novel:

I First edition: printing house T. Rees, at the Butcher's Gate, Voeikov's house, Moscow, 1869:

II Edition for the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino: I. D. Sytin's edition, Moscow, 1912:

III Publishing house of I. P. Ladyzhnikov, Berlin, 1920:

IV Edition of Vinnitsky, Odessa, 1915:

V PETROGRAD. Type. Peter. T-va Pech. and Ed. case "Trud", Kavalergardskaya, 40. 1915:

It is easy to notice the difference in the spelling of the novel's title on the cover and on the first page.

And in conclusion, a quote from “Description of Manuscripts of L. N. Tolstoy’s Artistic Works”, Moscow, 1955, (compiled by V. A. Zhdanov, E. E. Zaidenshnur, E. S. Serebrovskaya):

“The idea of ​​“War and Peace” is connected with the story about the Decembrist begun in 1860. In a draft of the preface to the journal publication of the first part of the future novel War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote that when he began the story of the Decembrist, he needed to “transport” to his youth in order to understand his hero, and “his youth coincided with the glorious for Russia, the era of 1812. Starting to create a novel from the era of 1812, Tolstoy once again pushed back the action of his novel, starting it from 1805.”

Summarizing

L. N. Tolstoy called the novel "War and Peace", while the other version is beautiful, but - alas! - a legend generated by an unfortunate typo.

Other Internet sources:

My comment.

I would not be so categorical in declaring that Leo Tolstoy, a Jew, did not know his own Hebrew language in order to make a mistake with the title of his book. We were told at school that a publisher's mistake crept into modern publications. Because the original version was called: "War and Peace". War and Society. That is: Mir.

Because I saw living books on the Internet, where the title of the novel was written: "War and Peace."

In another Jewish book, I read a phrase from a Jew to his fellow villagers:

Where are you taking me, World?

That is, the later modified spelling of “Mir”, as “Society”, began to be spelled with an error, as “Mir”. The followers and publishers of Leo Tolstoy, but not Tolstoy himself, were mistaken with the spelling of the second word in the title of the novel: "War and Peace" - "War and Society" (State).

But ... the Hebrew word: "Mir" - has a different interpretation, which does not fit in any way with the history of the Army (Mir) rewritten by the Cossacks (intelligentsia). It does not fit into the picture of the World (Army) that writers have created for us with their literary hoaxes. By the way, Leo Tolstoy was one of these hoax writers.

As I have already proved that in order to describe the stay of Russian (Jewish) Cossacks in Paris with Alexander I Baron von Holstein, Leo Tolstoy had to write his novel after 1896, when the Jews (London) group seized power in Germany and the protege of this the London (Coburg) group, in St. Petersburg captured by the Cossacks, Nikolai Golstein (Kolya Pitersky) first appeared.

Yes, Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya rewrote the novel “War and Peace” eight (!) times. Of the eight versions of the novel “War and Peace”, the author of which is considered to be Leo Tolstoy, there was not a single page written by Tolstoy himself. All eight variants are handwritten by Sofia Andreevna.

Further, in the novel, the dates are given according to three different Chronologies. According to the Army (Kondrusskaya), in which the war was in 512 AD. According to the Elston (Cossack) in which the war was in 812 and according to the Jewish (Coburg) Chronology, when the war of 512 moved to 1812. Although Tolstoy says that he is writing about the war of 1864-1869. That is, the war of 512 years.

And the Cossacks captured Paris from Kondrus only during the next Kondrus-Cossack war of 1870-1871.

That is, we see reprints of books, where the publication dates are indicated retroactively. Books were published after 1896, and the dates were given as if they were published in 1808, 1848, 1868, and so on.

You should not blindly trust our fellow Slavs, Jewish Christians, the Soviet old Red (Prussian) guards of the Hohenzollerns, Holstein, Bronstein and Blank, lads, when they compose new and latest stories for us about the St. Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad (Holstein) captured by them. Is it possible that our Red Army soldiers are zealously criminally interested in ensuring that no one in occupied Russia finds out the truth about what happened throughout occupied Russia until 1922 inclusive?

We do not even know the truth about what happened under the living Stalin. And you are talking about the 19th century, which, after the Bolsheviks, was completely closed, like a state secret.

Acclaimed as the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is a perennial best-seller with regular reprints, almost a century and a half after it was first published. Here are just a few reasons why Tolstoy's epic still attracts, enlightens, and inspires readers of all ages and backgrounds, and why you might want to put it at the top of your reading list too.

1. This novel is a mirror of our time.

At its core, War and Peace is a book about people trying to find their footing in a world turned upside down by war, social and political change, and mental turmoil. The existential anguish of Tolstoy and his heroes is familiar to us, living at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and his novel can tell us something that is important for us right now. This book shows how moments of crisis can either "catch" us or help us discover deep sources of strength and creativity within ourselves.

2. This novel is a fascinating historical lesson.

If you like history, you will love War and Peace for its striking and instructive depiction of a time of great change. Tolstoy brings the past to life by immersing you in long-forgotten minutiae of everyday life, things that historians usually overlook. And he does it so well that even Soviet soldiers who were given chapters from War and Peace to read during World War II claimed that Tolstoy's description of the war captivated them more than the actual battles that took place before their eyes. Thanks to War and Peace, most Russians regard the War of 1812 and the famous bloody battle of Borodino as their unique victory. Tens of thousands of their compatriots were killed on the Borodino field, but this battle turned out to be a foretaste of Napoleon's fatal retreat from Moscow - a turning point that forever changed the course of European history, and described by Tolstoy as powerfully as no historian could ever succeed.

Photo: Dennis Jarvis / CC 2.0

3. This novel helps to understand today's Russia.

If you want to understand why Russians today have such a difficult relationship with the West, read War and Peace. Tolstoy's interpretation of Napoleon's failed attempt to conquer Russia in 1812 is so deeply ingrained in the Russian cultural code that subsequent Russian leaders used it more than once to illustrate both the greatness of their country and its vulnerability to external threats ... But in War and Peace there is and something else: the preaching of an all-encompassing philanthropy that goes far beyond the framework of any politics. Tolstoy offers a model of patriotism free from nationalism that would be worth listening to.

4. This is one of the wisest self-improvement books you will ever read.

War and Peace is not only a great novel. It is also a guide to life. What Tolstoy offers is not so much a set of answers to various life tasks, but rather a worldview. He encourages us not to be satisfied with other people's advice and recipes, but to join him and his heroes in search of deeper meanings, continue to ask ourselves important questions and find our own, reliable experience in everything. “History,” Tolstoy seems to be telling us, “is what happens to us. And our destiny is what we ourselves do with all this.”

Photo: Dennis' Photography / CC 2.0

5. It's an engaging read.

"War and Peace" is a novel filled with a volume of human experience that no other work of modern fiction even dreamed of. Over the course of three hundred and sixty-one chapters, written with cinematic imagery, Tolstoy moves smoothly from the ballroom to the battlefield, from the wedding to the place of the deadly battle, from private life to crowd scenes. In Tolstoy's world, you see, hear, and feel everything: the sunrise is on fire, the cannonball is whizzing by, the horse team is gallantly racing, this is someone's miraculous birth, this is someone's cruel death, but this is everything that happened between them. Everything that a human being can experience can be described by Tolstoy in War and Peace.

6. You will get to know a lot of interesting people.

More precisely, almost 600. How often do we manage to meet so many people from various spheres of life in a short time? And each of these people, even the most insignificant of them, is absolutely alive and recognizable. There is not a single unambiguously bad or flawlessly good character in War and Peace, which is what makes them so real and human. Even Napoleon - a character almost villainous - is described at least interestingly. At some moments, Tolstoy invites us to look into his soul and feel his pain, as near Borodino, where Napoleon, examining the field strewn with corpses, is fully aware of both his own cruelty and his own impotence. As a writer, Tolstoy strictly follows his vow: “to tell, to show, but not to judge,” which is why the characters he created are so “breathing,” so alive.

Photo: wackystuff / CC 2.0

7. This novel will make you enjoy life.

This book contains, on the one hand, descriptions of human cruelty and blood-drenched battlefields, and on the other hand, examples of the most powerful moments of extraordinary bliss that can only be found in world literature. Here is Prince Andrei, prostrate on the battlefield, for the first time in his life looks into the sky and sees in it the amazing immensity of the Universe; here is Natasha - she dances and sings as if no one sees her; or here Nikolai Rostov, in the heat of hunting for wolves, feels himself a predatory beast. “People are like rivers,” Tolstoy once wrote. - The water is the same in all and everywhere the same, but each river is sometimes narrow, sometimes fast, sometimes wide, sometimes quiet. So are people. Each person carries in himself the rudiments of all human properties and sometimes manifests one, sometimes another, and is often completely unlike himself, remaining one and himself. The world depicted by Tolstoy in his greatest novel is a place full of secrets, where things are not always what they seem, and today's tragedy only paves the way for tomorrow's triumph. This thought inspired the conclusion of Nelson Mandela, who called War and Peace his favorite novel. She comforts and inspires us - already in our own troubled times.

During his last visit to China in September of this year, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev puzzled a student at the Institute of Foreign Languages ​​in Dalian, immersed in Leo Tolstoy's epic novel War and Peace. “He is very interesting, but voluminous. There are four volumes,” warned her Russian leader.

Without a doubt, almost 1900 pages of "War and Peace" are somewhat straining in their volume, like a security guard at the entrance to a disco.

If in Russia this work is mandatory for studying in high school, then in Spain it is read at best to the middle. And yet, perhaps this is one of the best novels of all time. “When you read Tolstoy, you read it because you can’t leave the book,” said Vladimir Nabokov, convinced that the volume of a work should by no means conflict with its attractiveness.

In connection with the centenary of the death of Leo Tolstoy celebrated this year in Spain, his immortal novel (El Aleph publishing house, translated by Lydia Cooper), which many rightly consider the Bible of literature, has been republished. This is a real encyclopedia of Russian life of the nineteenth century, where the innermost depths of the human soul are explored.

"War and Peace" captivates us because it explores the age-old philosophical problems that worry people: what love means and what evil is. These questions arise before Bezukhov when he thinks about why evil people unite so quickly, but good people do not, ”said a specialist in Tolstoy’s work, professor of literature at Moscow State University. Lomonosov Irina Petrovitskaya.

Ten years ago, Petrovitskaya was in Barcelona, ​​where she had an allergy attack, as a result of which she experienced a state of clinical death and ended up in one of the hospitals in Tarragona. “When I was there, I was amazed by the Spanish doctors. When they found out that I was a teacher at Moscow University, they, fighting for my life, said: “Tolstoy, War and Peace, Dostoevsky… It was very touching,” she recalls.

Being in a hospital bed, she experienced the same thing that Prince Andrei Bolkonsky experienced when he lay wounded on the battlefield after the battle of Austerlitz, look up at the sky and Napoleon approaching him. Then he suddenly realized the secret of height, the infinite height of the sky and the short stature of the French emperor (“Bonaparte seemed to him a small and insignificant creature compared to what was happening in his soul and the high and endless sky, over which clouds floated”).

"War and Peace" is an electric shock for the soul. The pages of this novel are replete with hundreds of advice (“rejoice in these moments of happiness, try to be loved, love others! There is no greater truth in the world than this”), reflections, reflections (“I know only two real evils in life: torment and illness ”, says Andrei), as well as live dialogues about death.

War and Peace is not only an excellent textbook on the history of the Napoleonic Wars (in 1867 Tolstoy personally visited the Borodino field to familiarize himself with the place where the battle took place), but perhaps the most useful book of advice ever written, which always ready to help you.

"Who am I? What do I live for? Why was born? These questions about the meaning of life were asked by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, explains Irina Petrovitskaya, returning to Tolstoy's thought (reflected in War and Peace) about a person's sense of responsibility for the fate of the world. This is one of the hallmarks of the Russian soul, to which many classics are dedicated, notably Anna Karenina, another of Tolstoy's masterpieces.

“They do not strive only for personal well-being in this world, but they want to understand what they can do for all of humanity, for the world,” emphasizes Petrovitskaya.

His characters

Endowing his heroes with eternal life, Tolstoy completes his miracle like the creator, "God the Creator" of literature. Since the heroes of his works leave the pages and pour into our lives with each new reading of the novel. Life energy springs from them when they love, meditate, duel, hunt hares, or dance at society balls; they radiate life when they fight to the death with the French on the Borodino field, when they look in amazement at the vision of Tsar Alexander I (“My God! How happy I would be if he ordered me right now to throw myself into the fire,” thinks Nikolai Rostov), ​​or when they think about love or glory (“I will never admit this to anyone, but, my God, what can I do if I don’t want anything but glory and love of people?” Prince Andrei asks himself a question).

“In War and Peace, Tolstoy tells us that there are two levels of existence, two levels of understanding of life: war and peace, understood not only as the absence of war, but also as mutual understanding between people. Either we are in opposition to ourselves, people and the world, or we are in reconciliation with it. And in this case, the person feels happy. It seems to me that this should attract any reader of any country,” says Irina Petrovitskaya, adding that she envies those who have not yet enjoyed this work, so Russian in spirit.

The heroes of War and Peace, who are constantly in search of themselves, always see life in their eyes (Tolstoy's favorite trick). Even when their eyelids are closed, as, for example, Field Marshal Kutuzov, who appears before us as the most ordinary person, falling asleep during the presentation of the plans for the battle of Austerlitz. However, in Tolstoy's epic novel, by no means everything boils down to questions of being and tragedy.

Humor

Humor hovers over the pages of War and Peace like smoke over a battlefield. It is impossible not to smile when we see the father of Prince Andrei, who has fallen into senile dementia and changes the position of his bed every evening, or when we read the following paragraph: “It was said that [the French] took all state institutions with them from Moscow, and [...] .] at least for this alone Moscow should be grateful to Napoleon.”

“In the 21st century, this book should be considered as a cult book, as a touching bestseller, because first of all it is a book about love, about love between such a memorable heroine as Natasha Rostova and Andrei Bolkonsky, and then Pierre Bezukhov. This woman who loves her husband, her family. These are concepts that no one can live without. The novel is filled with tenderness, love, everything earthly, love for people, for each of us,” the writer Nina Nikitina, head of the Yasnaya Polyana House-Museum, where Leo Tolstoy, who died in 1910, was born, lived, worked and was buried, enthusiastically explains. year in the house of the head of the Astapovo railway station.

According to Nikitina, all four volumes of "War and Peace" radiate optimism, because "this novel was written in Tolstoy's happy years of life, when he felt like a writer with all the strength of his soul, as he himself claimed, thanks to the help of his family, first of all his wife Sophia, who constantly copied the drafts of his works.

world work

Why is War and Peace considered such a worldwide work? How did it become possible for a handful of Russian counts, princes and princesses of the 19th century to still own the souls and hearts of the readership of the 21st century? “My 22-23-year-old students are most interested in love and family issues. Yes, in our time it is possible to create a family, and this is one of the thoughts embedded in Tolstoy's work, ”concludes Petrovitskaya.

“Don't marry never, never, my friend; I advise you. Do not marry until you can tell yourself that you have done everything to stop loving the woman you have chosen[...],” says Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, the prototype of the Russian hero, to Pierre Bezukhov, a diametrically opposite character, clumsy and melancholic ( his goggles are always going down, he constantly bumps into the dead on the battlefield). He was played by Henry Fonda in the 1956 cinematic adaptation of the novel. The conversation between them takes place in one of the Moscow secular salons shortly before the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812, but if you strain your ears, you can still hear it today on the bus on the way to work.