In 1812, Napoleon launched his fateful invasion of Russia. Five decades later, Leo Tolstoy published War and Peace, a fictional representation of the era that is one of the most celebrated novels in world literature. The novel contains a coherent (though much disputed) philosophy of history and portrays the history and military strategy of its time in a manner that offers lessons for the soldiers of today. To mark the two hundredth anniversary of the French invasion of Russia and acknowledge the importance of Tolstoy’s novel for our historical memory of its central events, Rick Mc Peak and Donna Tussing Orwin have assembled a distinguished group of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds—literary criticism, history, social science, and philosophy—to provide fresh readings of the novel.
The essays in Tolstoy On War focus primarily on the novel’s depictions of war and history, and the range of responses suggests that these remain inexhaustible topics of debate. The result is a volume that opens fruitful new avenues of understanding War and Peace while providing a range of perspectives and interpretations without parallel in the vast literature on the novel.
Table of Content
Introduction
by Donna Tussing OrwinChapter 1. Tolstoy on War, Russia, and Empire
by Dominic LievenChapter 2. The Use of Historical Sources in War and Peace
by Dan UngurianuChapter 3. Moscow in 1812: Myths and Realities
by Alexander M. MartinChapter 4. The French at War: Representations of the Enemy in ‘War and Peace’
by Alan ForrestChapter 5. Symposium of Quotations: Wit and Other Short Genres in ‘War and Peace’
by Gary Saul MorsonChapter 6. The Great Man in ‘War and Peace’
by Jeff LoveChapter 7. ‘War and Peace’ from the Military Point of View
by Donna Tussing OrwinChapter 8. Tolstoy and Clausewitz: The Duel as a Microcosm of War
by Rick Mc PeakChapter 9 The Awful Poetry of War: Tolstoy’s Borodino
by Donna Tussing OrwinChapter 10. Tolstoy and Clausewitz: The Dialectics of War
by Andreas Herberg-RotheChapter 11. The Disobediences of War and Peace
by Elizabeth D. SametChapter 12. Tolstoy the International Relations Theorist
by David A. WelchWar and Peace at West Point
by Rick Mc Peak
Notes
Works Cited
List of Contributors
Index
About the author
Rick Mc Peak is Professor and Head of the Department of Foreign Languages at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Donna Tussing Orwin is Professor of Russian Literature and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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