War And Peace

The present translation is based on the text of War and Peace prepared by E. Zaydenshnur in the 1960—65 twenty-volume Collected Works of L. N. Tolstoy, published by Goslitizdat (State Publishing House for Literature), edited by N. N. Akopova, N. K. Gudzy, N. N. Gusev and M. B. Khrapchenko.

NOTES

1 Preface to The Tragic Muse (1907—9), and letter to Hugh Walpole, 19 May 1912; see Henry Gifford (ed.), Leo Tolstoy: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971), pp. 104—5.

2 D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), p. 258.

3 Alvin Redman (ed.), The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde (London, Bracken Books, 1995), p. 86.

4 Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (London, Collins and Harvill Press, 1958).

5 See Aylmer Maude, The Life of Tolstoy: First Fifty Years (Oxford, Oxford University Press, n.d.), Vol. I, p. 286.

6 A short ‘early version’ of War and Peace was published in Moscow (2000), based on published material, odd pages and extracts from notebooks up to 1866.

7 From D. Merezhovsky, Tolstoy as Man and Artist (L. Tolstoy i Dostoyevsky) (London, Constable, 1902), cited in Gifford, Leo Tolstoy: A Critical Anthology, p. 113.

8 Henry Gifford, Tolstoy (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 30—31.

9 From Virginia Woolf, ‘The Russian Point of View’, cited in Gifford, Leo Tolstoy: A Critical Anthology, p. 188.

10 War and Peace, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford, Oxford University Press, n.d.), Vol. I, p. 442.

11 Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated by John Rutherford (London, Penguin, 2000), pp. xv and xvi.

12 For further details see R. F. Christian, Tolstoy’s War and Peace: A Study (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 148—66.

Afterword

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.