War and Peace: Original Version. Лев Толстой

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Ben Jonson is said to have criticized Shakespeare when told that ‘hee never blotted out line’, and Sir Walter Scott was similarly an author who wrote with extraordinary rapidity and accuracy. Leo Tolstoy, in contrast, regularly rewrote and restructured much of his work, on occasion spending years immersed in elaborate correction. It is not surprising, therefore, that War and Peace, the longest major Russian novel ever written, occupied the greater part of the decade 1863 to 1873. He had been mulling over the potential of an historical novel some years before that, but his earliest drafts for the book dating from 1863 show that it was then that he decided to write a work whose setting would be the dramatic events associated with Russia’s wars against Napoleon. Two years later he published the first section in the literary journal Russkii Vestnik under the title 1805, and the second entitled War appeared a year later in 1866.

      Although Tolstoy’s prime concern lay with exploration of human character, he was fascinated by the grand drama of historical events. He had experienced war in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Crimea, and from a cheerfully unreflecting Russian patriot he became increasingly concerned to discover the underlying rationale of a phenomenon which perversely legitimated lying, spying, murder, cruelty, and rapine on a grand scale – vices which civil society is at pains to suppress. Conventional historians of the day recounted events in terms of grand strategy carried out by commanders executing complex manoeuvres, which proved successful or unsuccessful according to their talents and those of their adversaries. Tolstoy – who had known at first hand the smoke, din, fire, terror, and heady intoxication of battle – saw in contrast only the interplay of confusion, chance, and a multitude of disparate factors far beyond the capacity of individuals to control or even understand.

      All this is well known: what is less so is the extent to which Tolstoy pursued painstaking researches as an historical novelist. His best biographer, the Englishman Aylmer Maude, suggested that War and Peace was not an historical novel in the true sense, since the age in which his story is set remained within the memory of his parents’ generation. But this is to do Tolstoy an injustice. His notes and correspondence illustrate the remarkable extent to which he sought to reconstruct the past, whether pacing the battlefield at Borodino or investigating СКАЧАТЬ