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Overview
War and Peace is Leo Tolstoy's vast novel of Russian society before, during and after Napoleon's invasion of 1812. It follows several aristocratic families, chiefly the Rostovs, Bolkonskys and Pierre Bezukhov, through love, war, loss and moral search, while Tolstoy also argues that history is the result of countless small human acts and not the will of great men. It joins private life and national event on a scale few books attempt.
Context
Tolstoy wrote the novel in the 1860s, about fifty years after the events, and it appeared in parts from 1865, with the complete book in 1869. Russia in 1805 to 1812 was a society of serfdom, a French-speaking nobility and a powerful tsar. The invasion of 1812 became a national memory, and Tolstoy drew on memoirs and interviews as well as imagination.
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Curator's notes
- Why it matters
- A successful, conventional man realises on his deathbed he lived wrongly.
- Use in training and coaching
- The best single text on a life of empty success; values clarification
- Connects to
- Gospels; Gandhi; Heidegger
- What to read
- Ivan Ilyich whole (short)
- Text (date)
- Tolstoy, War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1869–1886)
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