War and Peace Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  VOLUME I

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  VOLUME II

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  PART V

  VOLUME III

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  VOLUME IV

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  EPILOGUE

  PART I

  PART II

  Appendix 1: - Summary by Chapters

  Appendix 2: - The Three Battles

  Notes

  The Characters

  On War and Peace

  Afterword

  WAR AND PEACE

  COUNT LEO TOLSTOY was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana in the Tula province. He studied Oriental languages and law at the University of Kazan but left before completing a degree. In 1851 he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defense of Sevastopol wrote The Sevastopol Sketches (1955), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856, Tolstoy spent time in St. Petersburg and abroad before settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. In 1862 he married Sofya Andreevna Behrs; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy wrote two great novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), as well as many short stories and essays. He died in 1910.

  ANTHONY BRIGGS has written, translated, or edited twenty books in the fields of Russian and English literature, including volumes on Tolstoy and Pushkin. A former professor of Russian at the University of Birmingham, he lives in England.

  ORLANDO FIGES is the author of A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (recipient of the Wolfson Prize for History and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and a professor of history at the University of London.

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

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  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  Translation, "On War and Peace," and notes copyright (c) Anthony Briggs, 2005

  Introduction copyright (c) Orlando Figes, 2005

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828 - 1910.

  [Voina I mir. English]

  War and peace / Leo Tolstoy ; a new translation by Anthony Briggs ;

  with an introduction by Orlando Figes.

  p. cm.--(Penguin classics deluxe edition) eISBN : 978-1-10100383-1

  1. Russia--History--Alexander I, 1801 - 1825--Fiction. 2. Napoleonic Wars,

  1800 - 1815--Campaigns--Russia--Fiction. I. Briggs, Anthony. II. Title.

  PG3366.V6 2006b

  891.73'3--dc22 2006050335

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  Introduction

  by Orlando Figes

  In 1951, after reading War and Peace for the twelfth time, the Russian writer Mikhail Prishvin (1873--1954) noted in his diary that he felt, at last, that he understood his life. Like all great works of art, Tolstoy's masterpiece has the capacity, on each successive reading, to transform our understanding of the world.

  On any first reading, War and Peace is bound to dazzle with its immense panorama of humanity. The whole of life appears to be contained in its pages. Tolstoy presents us with a cast of several hundred characters. Yet to each one he brings such profound understanding of the human condition, with all its frailties and contradictions, that we recognize and love these characters as reflections of our own identity.

  Tolstoy has an extraordinary clarity of expression - a quality which Anthony Briggs has happily maintained in this superb translation. Tolstoy might write longer novels than anybody else, but no other writer can recreate emotion and experience with such precision and economy. There are scenes in War and Peace - the unforgettable depiction of the Battle of Austerlitz, for example, or the ball where Natasha Rostov meets Prince Andrey - in which Tolstoy manages in a few words to sketch the mental images which allow us to picture ourselves at the scene and seemingly to feel the emotions of the protagonists. There are passages, like the death-scene of Prince Andrey, in which Tolstoy may give to his readers the extraordinary sensation that they too have felt the experience of death; and moments, like the wonderful description of the hunt, when Tolstoy lets them imagine what it is like to be a dog.

  Tolstoy once said famously that War and Peace was not meant to be a novel at all. Like all great works of art, it certainly defies all conventions. Set against the historical events of the Napoleonic Wars, its complex narrative development is a long way from the tidy plot structure of the European novel in its nineteenth-century form. Tolstoy's novel does not even have a clear beginning, middle and end, though it does, in one sense, turn on a moment of epiphany, the year of 1812, when Russia's liberation from Napoleon is made to coincide with the personal liberation of the novel's central characters.

  While clearly still a novel, War and Peace can be understood, at another level, as a novelist's attempt to engage with the truth of history. Tolstoy's interest in history developed long before his career as a novelist. But history-writing disappointed him. It seemed to reduce the richness of real life. For whereas the 'real' history of lived experience was made up of an infinite number of factors and contingencies, historians selected just a few (for example, the political or the economic) to develop their theories and explanations. Tolstoy concluded that the histories of his day represented 'perhaps only 0.001 per cent of the elements which actually constitute the real history of peoples'. 1 He was particularly frustrated by the failure of historians to illuminate the 'inner' life of a society - the private thoughts and relationships that make up the most real and immediate experience of human beings. Hence he turned to literature.

  During the 18
50s Tolstoy was obsessed with the idea of writing a historical novel which would contrast the real texture of historical experience, as lived by individuals and communities, with the distorted image of the past presented by historians. This is what he set out to achieve in War and Peace.

  Through the novel's central characters Tolstoy juxtaposes the immediate human experience of historical events with the historical memory of them. For example, when Pierre Bezukhov wanders as a spectator on to the battlefield of Borodino he expects to find the sort of neatly arranged battle scene that he has seen in paintings and read about in history books. Instead, he finds himself in the chaos of an actual battlefield: $ Everything Pierre saw on either hand looked so indistinct that, glancing left or right over the landscape, he could find nothing that quite lived up to his expectations. Nowhere was there a field of battle as such, the kind of thing he had expected; there was nothing but ordinary fields, clearings, troops, woods, smoking camp-fires, villages, mounds and little streams. Here was a living landscape, and try as he might he could not make out any military positioning. He could not even tell our troops from theirs. (Vol. III, Book II, ch. 21)

  Having served as an officer in the Crimean War (1854--6), Tolstoy drew from his own experience to recreate the human truth of this celebrated battle, and to examine how its public memory could become distorted by the medium of written history. As Tolstoy shows, in the confusion of the battle nobody can understand or control what occurs. In such a situation, chance events, individual acts of bravery or calm thinking by the officers can influence the morale of the troops en masse and thus change the course of the battle; and this in turn creates the illusion that what is happening is somehow the result of human agency. So when the military dispatches are later written up, they invariably ascribe the outcome of the battle to the commanders, although in reality they had less influence than the random actions of the rank and file. By using these dispatches, historians are able to impose a rational pattern and 'historical meaning' on the battle, although neither was apparent at the time of fighting.

  As a novelist, Tolstoy was interested most of all in the inner life of Russian society during the Napeolonic Wars. In War and Peace he presents this period of history as a crucial watershed in the culture of the Russian aristocracy. The war of 1812 is portrayed as a national liberation from the cultural domination of the French - a moment when Russian noblemen like the Rostovs and Bolkonskys struggled to break free from the foreign conventions of their society and began new lives on Russian principles. Tolstoy plots this transformation in a series of motifs. In Tolstoy's text the novel opens, for example, in the French language of the Petersburg salon - a language that Tolstoy gradually reveals to be false and artificial (the novel's most idealized characters, such as Princess Marya and the peasant Karatayev, speak exclusively in Russian, or, like Natasha, speak French only with mistakes). Tolstoy shows the aristocracy renouncing haute cuisine for Spartan lunches of rye bread and cabbage soup, adopting national dress, settling as farmers on the land and rediscovering their country's native culture, as in the immortal scene when Natasha, a French-educated young countess, dances to a folk song in the Russian style.

  On this reading, War and Peace appears as a national epic - the revelation of a 'Russian consciousness' in the inner life of its characters. In narrating this drama, however, Tolstoy steps out of historical time and enters the time-space of cultural myth. He allows himself considerable artistic licence. For example, the aristocracy's return to native forms of dress and recreations actually took place over several decades in the early nineteenth century, whereas Tolstoy has it happen almost overnight in 1812. But the literary creation of this mythical time-space was central to the role which War and Peace was set to play in the formation of the national consciousness.

  When the first part of the novel appeared, in 1865-6, educated Russia was engaged in a profound cultural and political quest to define the country's national identity. The emancipation of the serfs, in 1861, had forced society to confront the humble peasant as a fellow-citizen and to seek new answers to the old accursed questions about Russia's destiny in what one poet (Nikolay Nekrasov) called the 'rural depths where eternal silence reigns'.2 The liberal reforms of Tsar Alexander II (Emperor of Russia 1855-81), which included the introduction of jury trials and elected institutions of local government, gave rise to hopes that Russia, as a nation, would emerge and join the family of modern European states. Writing from this perspective, Tolstoy saw a parallel between the Russia of the 1860s and the Russia that had arisen in the wars against Napoleon.

  War and Peace was originally conceived and drafted as a novel about the Decembrists, a group of liberal army officers who rose up in a failed attempt to impose a constitution on the Tsar in December 1825. In this original version of the novel the Decembrist hero returns after thirty years of exile in Siberia to the intellectual ferment of the early years of Alexander II's reign. But the more Tolstoy researched into the Decembrists, the more he realized that their intellectual roots were to be found in the war of 1812. This was when these officers had first become acquainted with the patriotic virtues of the peasant soldiers in their ranks; when they had come to realize the potential of Russia's democratic nationhood. Through this literary genesis, War and Peace acquired several overlapping spheres of historical consciousness: the real-time of 1805-20 (the fictional setting of the novel); the living memory of this period (from which Tolstoy drew in the form of personal memoirs and historical accounts); and its reflection in the political consciousness of 1855-65. Thus the novel can and should be read, not just as an intimate portrait of Russian society in the age of the Napoleonic Wars, but as a broader statement about Russia, its people and its history as a whole. That is why the Russians will always turn to War and Peace, as Mikhail Prishvin did, to find in it the keys to their identity.

  English readers will learn more about the Russians by reading War and Peace than they will by reading perhaps any other book. But they will also find in it the inspiration to make them think about the world and their own place in it. For War and Peace is a universal work and, like all the great artistic prose works of the Russian tradition, it functions as a huge poetic structure for the contemplation of the fundamental questions of our existence.

  Above all, War and Peace will move readers by virtue of its beauty as a work of art. It is a triumphant affirmation of human life in all its richness and complexity. That is why one can return to it and always find new meanings and new truths in it.

  NOTES

  1 Cited in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1994), pp. 32--3.

  2 From 'Silence' (1857) in N. A. Nekrasov, Sochineniia (3 vols., Moscow, 1959), Vol. I, p. 201.

  VOLUME I

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  'Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now nothing more than estates taken over by the Buonaparte family.1 No, I give you fair warning. If you won't say this means war, if you will allow yourself to condone all the ghastly atrocities perpetrated by that Antichrist - yes, that's what I think he is - I shall disown you. You're no friend of mine - not the "faithful slave" you claim to be . . . But how are you? How are you keeping? I can see I'm intimidating you. Do sit down and talk to me.'

  These words were spoken (in French) one evening in July 1805 by the well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honour and confidante of the Empress Maria Fyodorovna, as she welcomed the first person to arrive at her soiree, Prince Vasily Kuragin, a man of high rank and influence. Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for the last few days and she called it la grippe - grippe being a new word not yet in common currency. A footman of hers in scarlet livery had gone around that morning delivering notes written in French, each saying precisely the same thing: If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor sick lady is not too unnerving, I shall be delighted to see you at my residence between seven and ten. ANNETTE SCHERER

 
'My goodness, what a violent attack!' replied the prince, who had only just come in and was not in the least put out by this welcome. Dressed in his embroidered court uniform with knee-breeches, shoes and stars across his chest, he looked at her with a flat face of undisturbed serenity. His French was the elegant tongue of our grandparents, who used it for thought as well as speech, and it carried the soft tones of condescension that come naturally to an eminent personage grown old in high society and at court. He came up to Anna Pavlovna and kissed her hand, presenting to her a perfumed and glistening bald pate, and then seated himself calmly on the sofa.

  'First things first,' he said. 'How are you, my dear friend? Put my mind at rest.' His voice remained steady, and his tone, for all its courtesy and sympathy, implied indifference and even gentle mockery.

  'How can one feel well when one is . . . suffering in a moral sense? Can any sensitive person find peace of mind nowadays?' said Anna Pavlovna. 'I do hope you're staying all evening.'

  'Well, there is that reception at the English Ambassador's. It's Wednesday. I must show my face,' said the prince. 'My daughter is coming to take me there.'

  'I thought tonight's festivities had been cancelled. I must say all these celebrations and fireworks are becoming rather tedious.'

  'If they had known you wanted the celebration cancelled, it would have been,' said the prince with the predictability of a wound-up clock. Sheer habit made him say things he didn't even mean.

  'Stop teasing me. Come on, tell me what's been decided about Novosiltsev's dispatch?2 You know everything.'

  'What is there to tell?' replied the prince in a cold, bored tone. 'What's been decided? They've decided that Bonaparte has burnt his boats, and I rather think we're getting ready to burn ours.'

  Prince Vasily always spoke languidly, like an actor declaiming a part from an old play. Anna Pavlovna Scherer was just the opposite - all verve and excitement, despite her forty years. To be an enthusiast had become her special role in society, and she would sometimes wax enthusiastic when she didn't feel like it, so as not to frustrate the expectations of those who knew her. The discreet smile that never left her face, though it clashed with her faded looks, gave her the appearance of a spoilt child with a charming defect that she was well aware of, though she neither wished nor felt able to correct it, nor even thought it necessary to do so.