Classics of Russian Literature | Tale of Two Cities and a Country Home (Lecture 17)

Lecture 17: After the young Tolstoy settled down to domestic life, at the famous estate at Iasnaia Poliana, he used his military experience, his reading of Stendhal, and his wife, Sofiia Andreevna née Bers, to great purpose. Between 1865 and 1869, he wrote and rewrote a 1,500-page novel about warfare and its effect on family life. His wife recopied the manuscript seven times! Starting out to write about the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, he pushed back to the events of 1801 and 1802, then went forward to the great Napoleonic invasion of 1812. The magnificent St. Petersburg, so elevated by Pushkin and Dostoevsky, was now presented as the cold city of bureaucrats and power-seekers, enlivened only by a young man, Pierre Bezukhov, who clashed with the norms of aristocratic society. We then see the contrasting city of Moscow, the home of the marvelously warm Rostov family, followed by the Bolkonsky estate out in the Russian countryside. The Bolkonsky family shows the order coming out of the 18th-century French Enlightenment, leavened by the true Christianity and luminous eyes of Princess Mariia Bolkonskaia.

Suggested Reading:
Gary Saul Morson, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace.”
Lev Tolstoy, War and Peace.