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The chapter begins with a chronicle of the breakup of Prokofiev's marriage to Lina Codina, his estrangement from his children, and his affair with the literary student and translator Mira Mendelson. The core of the chapter concerns Prokofiev's wartime evacuation from Moscow to the Northern Caucuses (Nalchik and Tbilisi), the conception of the first version of the opera War and Peace, and Prokofiev's arch-propagandistic work for Soviet cinema. The chapter describes the composer's earnest efforts to support his wife and children, who remained in Moscow during the war, as well as his relationship with Mikhaíl Khrapchenko, the Chairman of the Committee on Arts Affairs from 1939-48. Khrapchenko ordered the rewriting of War and Peace in an effort to make it more relevant to the Soviet struggle against Hitler.

This chapter revisits the historical basis of War and Peace and outlines the scope of Leo Tolstoy's sources, his treatment of historical material, and its implications for the overall artistic system of the novel. It also examines the arguments of skeptics who question Tolstoy's historical accuracy. Most critics who address the problem of historical sources in War and Peace fall into two opposing camps: the skeptics who question almost every historical aspect of War and Peace, exposing what they see as Tolstoy's meager preparation and considerable license in his handling of sources; and those who, taking Tolstoy's assurances at face value, speak of the novel's colossal factual foundation owing to which the words and deeds of historical characters are rendered in complete accordance with the truth of history.

This introductory chapter provides a reading of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace from different perspectives. It first views the novel as “literature”, describing War and Peace as both the quintessential Russian novel and perhaps its greatest example. In “A Few Words about the Book War and Peace” (1868) Tolstoy attributes to the “author” the determining role in War and Peace. He tells readers that it can be understood only as “that which the author wanted to and could express in the form in which it is expressed.” The chapter then reads the novel as “history,” focusing on how Tolstoy sought to be true to the historical record available to him. It ends by viewing War and Peace in Tolstoy's own worldview along with a brief discussion of the different theories of war and history in the novel.

This chapter argues that Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is a “disobedient” book. It compares the novel to The Four Feathers (1939), a film which offers a version of cause and effect that is similar to that presented in Tolstoy's novel: one in which accident often triumphs over human design, in which invisible patterns of action and consequence refute a heroic narrative dramatizing events as authored by great men, and in which the only obedience can be the perforce surrendered to chance. In his chief example of the illusory agency of individuals, Tolstoy calls it a mistake to imagine that Napoleon actually superintended the retreat from Moscow. Examining Tolstoy's novel by considering obedience—understood as compliance with, or submission to, customs, norms, rules, laws, or another's will—exposes not only the degree of the novel's nonconformity but also Tolstoy's expression of what could be called a doctrine of disobedience.

This chapter explores the influences of Futurist aesthetics and music, Aristophanes's comedy “Peace,” and Beethoven's “Ode to Joy” in Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson's unpublished 1914 play “War and Peace,” the prologue of which was performed at the Omega Club using Winifred Gill's puppets in spring 1917 as a benefit for Belgian refugees.

This chapter examines how Leo Tolstoy shapes the world of War and Peace subjectively and on his own terms by excluding points with which he is not sympathetic. The fictional world of War and Peace does not correspond to the historical realities of the 1812 campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte. Tolstoy mainly portrays the occupation and burning of Moscow from the point of view of the gentry, and not the townspeople who recalled events differently from those depicted in the book. The towns people blamed the aristocrats for deserting them and the peasants for sacking the city rather than, as War and Peace would have it, rebuilding it. They left behind vivid descriptions of disorder, filth, and violence that Tolstoy would have had to take into account to do full justice to the situation.

This chapter explores how Leo Tolstoy described the French troops of Napoleon Bonaparte in War and Peace. It analyzes the memoirs he used to portray the French and discusses their reliability. These memoirs—written years later by veterans of the conflict—have transformed into narratives with plotlines that require that some things be emphasized and others left out. In this respect, the memoirs are closer to fiction than to “scientific” history. Tolstoy knew many of the Russian memoirs first hand, as well as some of the French, and he valued the opinions of those who had experienced action in the campaign. What is interesting is how international these experiences often were. Many of the views and values that Tolstoy ascribes to his Russian heroes were also expressed by their French opponents.

This chapter evaluates the reactions of military personnel towards War and Peace on its publication in the nineteenth-century. While praising Leo Tolstoy's unrivaled understanding of the psychology of the Russian army and his portrait of Russian everyday life, critics attacked his theory of history and especially his military theory. General Mikhail Dragomirov, the author of the most extensive review of War and Peace, castigated Tolstoy's take on strategy, tactics, and logistics. In different ways, Tolstoy's military readers objected to his historical determinism and especially to his denial of the possibility of control of the battlefield. The chapter also explores an important limitation in the perspective of the military readers and defends an aspect of Tolstoy's psychology that they rejected as harmful to their task as soldiers.

This chapter focuses on the play by Cambridge historian and Apostle Goldsworthy (Goldie) Lowes Dickinson entitled “War and Peace: A Dramatic Fantasia” (staged 1917). Serving as Goldie's riposte to war-extolling Italian Futurist and protofascist F. T. Marinetti, the play co-opts the Futurist to stage in the public art of theater the international contest between war and peace that preceded the Great War and roiled on through the interwar period to the Second World War and beyond. The play presages not only Dickinson's indefatigable labors on behalf of international peace after 1914 but a pervasive sense, in and beyond Bloomsbury, that the Great War marked less a “break” than “an intensification of many old struggles,” as Virginia Woolf later described it: interlocking conflicts at home and abroad that the Great War could not and did not resolve. Goldie's panoply of John Bull's clashes at home and abroad not only foregrounds world-shattering technologies from the aeroplane to nuclear energy and the atomic bomb but also stages intra-national, nationalist, international, and transnational rivalries for global resources and power that burst the conventional historiographic bounds both of the 1914–1918 war and, no less, of concerted work toward peace.

This chapter discusses the enormous influence of War and Peace, which is attributed to its intrinsic virtues—especially its psychological portrait of Russian soldiers—as well as to its myth-making power. As national myth, the novel told Russian readers what they were already primed to hear and still hear now in the present day. The chapter argues that the novel presents a distorted history that makes subsequent history by contributing to the self-understanding of future generations of Russians through Leo Tolstoy's exaggeration of some parts of events due to his Russian patriotic spirit and populist bias. Viewing these myths and memories in a comparative perspective not only illustrates the uniqueness of some aspects of how Russia remembered the Napoleonic era but also sheds light on Russian views about war, nation, and empire.

This chapter examines literary expressions of the kind of intelligence that were valued and scorned in War and Peace. These “wise sayings” and different exercises of the mind are encapsulated in various small genres represented liberally in the book. As a realist, Leo Tolstoy's genre focuses on the citizens, whose sacrifice is demanded, and on the values for which that sacrifice is made. The speaker summons each person to rise above personal needs and think of the people as a whole. He does so himself, and so he must avoid above all vain displays of his own cleverness or rhetorical skill. The chapter's discussion allows us to see why, on philosophical grounds, a writer might be drawn to one genre rather than another and why, in the course of their history, genres may develop arguments with each other.

The chapter is an account of Mandela’s character, political imagination, and development which looks at his appropriation of Gandhi, his use of the arts, his transformation on Robben Island, and the various attempts which have been made in recent years to define and dismantle his legacy. The chapter is centred on Mandela’s understanding of political violence and his attempt to see through the fantasy of violence to its real purposes and uses, a project in which he was assisted by a reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It explores the connection between violence and non-violence as Mandela conceived it in connection with Gandhi and Tolstoy. The material covers the defiance campaigns of the 1950s, Mandela’s cultural life in prison, and the tenor of his presidential term.

This chapter analyzes the philosophical hierarchy of the characters in War and Peace. It associates Napoleon Bonaparte with the modern philosophical project of the conquest of nature through science. Napoleon practices military theory based on scientific principles and on “modern mathematical theories”. He epitomizes “the modern will to mastery over all impediments to human power, the impetus of the finite being to overcome finitude, to wrestle with fate and win.” An admirer of the French Emperor, the character Andrei Bolkonsky starts his quest for military glory with such ambitions. The chapter then turns to the character of Platon Karataev, who figures as an unrealistic ideal, and in a different reading, his narrative illustrates the failure of human beings to achieve what Tolstoy regards as philosophical perfection.

This chapter demonstrates how parallels between the military theories of Leo Tolstoy and Carl von Clausewitz play out in the fictional narrative of War and Peace. Both Tolstoy and Clausewitz attempted to explain war to their uninitiated readers by employing the metaphor of the duel, a violent tradition connected to chivalry. Clausewitz and Tolstoy, whose readers were familiar with the conventions of dueling, described war as an extension of the duel. In his seminal treatise, On War, Clausewitz depicts war as a “duel on a larger scale.” The principles of war as enunciated by Andrei Bolkonsky and Tolstoy's narrator govern Pierre's duel with Dolokhov, which takes on a dynamic of its own that Pierre cannot resist even as he repudiates it.

This concluding chapter examines the response of the students of the United States Military Academy at West Point to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. It draws mainly from an event in April 2010 when the Academy hosted the conference “War and Peace at West Point.” During the conference, academics from various disciplines gave presentations on issues such as an individual's potential to make history. From their unique disciplinary perspectives, the presenters analyzed various aspects of war and peace as depicted in the novel. The cadets were most interested about Tolstoy's views on leadership—a trait that the cadets focus on inside the classroom and practice everywhere.

This chapter analyzes the Clausewitzian concept of war as reflected in Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, which first appeared in five installments from 1865 to 1869. It is universally considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, not only because Tolstoy used elements from Clausewitz in preparation for writing the novel, but more specifically because the narrative echoes one of Clausewitz's most famous theses: that which concerns the “strategic superiority of defense over offense.” Tolstoy's new interpretation of this thesis goes back, in a certain sense, to the “source” of its elaboration in order to draw new philosophical consequences from it.

Prokofiev was both a voracious reader and a compulsive writer—of letters, diaries, an extensive autobiography, and even of poems and short stories. His interest in text, and in particular in its dramatic impact, determined that, for almost all his operas, he was his own librettist. This allowed him not only control of all compositional elements but also realized his preference for setting passages of non-rhyming prose in a declamatory style, which he believed to be more realistic and dramatically effective. Nevertheless, upon his return to the Soviet Union, Prokofiev found that this approach to text sources was seldom compatible with the demands of Socialist Realism. The chapter explores his reliance on collaborators more familiar than he was with Soviet aesthetics, and it focuses, in particular, on his collaboration with his second wife, Mira Mendelson on the opera War and Peace, with reference to their manuscript notebooks.

This chapter describes how Tolstoyan war psychology blends with his theories of war in ways that make it difficult to separate them. It also analyzes how Leo Tolstoy mythologizes the physical setting of battle and its terrible dynamics. The account of the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace is Tolstoy's most extensive treatment of a single day's action. However, he included very few of the actual events in the battle. In War and Peace the mapping of the fictional narrative of war onto real space seems to ground it in history and in a specific geographical place, while discrete recourse to epic metaphor poeticizes history and the places where it occurred. The poetic devices that Tolstoy employs have their own extension in time if not in space; he draws on genres and metaphors that are part of the Russian cultural imagination and of Western art in general.