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Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
Introduction by Nikolai Tolstoy
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
A Note on the Translation
Table of Russian Weights and Measures
List of Illustrations
Part I
I
“Eh bien, mon prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now…
II
Anna Pavlovna’s drawing room began filling up little by little.
III
Anna Pavlovna’s soirée was in full swing. On various sides…
IV
This new person was the young Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, husband…
V
Anna Pavlovna requested the vicomte to wait while she showed…
VI
The end of the vicomte’s story went as follows:
VII
“The entire nation will die for its Emperor, for the…
VIII
Having thanked Anna Pavlovna for her charming soirée, the guests…
IX
Reaching the house first, Pierre, as if he lived there,…
X
A woman’s dress rustled in the next room. As if…
XI
The friends were silent. Neither said a word. Pierre kept…
XII
It was after one in the morning when Pierre left…
XIII
Prince Vasily kept the promise that he had made to…
XIV
Silence fell. The countess looked at her guest with a…
XV
Of the young people, aside from the countess’s elder daughter,…
XVI
When Natasha came out of the drawing room and started…
XVII
The countess felt so tired after the visits that she…
XVIII
In the drawing room the conversation was continuing.
XIX
“My dear Boris,” Princess Anna Mikhailovna said to her son…
XX
Boris, thanks to his placid and reserved character, was never…
XXI
When Anna Mikhailovna and her son left to go to…
XXII
Countess Rostova and her daughter and an already large number…
XXIII
It was that moment before a formal dinner when the…
XXIV
Natasha was clearly unable to sit still. She pinched her…
XXV
The card tables had all been set up, parties sat…
XXVI
Meanwhile Natasha, running first into Sonya’s room and not finding…
XXVII
Natasha whispered to Nikolai that Vera had just upset Sonya…
XXVIII
While at the Rostovs’ house they were dancing the sixth…
XXIX
While these conversations were taking place in the reception room…
XXX
Pierre knew this large room, divided by columns and an…
XXXI
There was no longer anyone in the reception room apart…
XXXII
At Bleak Hills, the estate of Prince Nikolai Andreevich Bolkonsky,…
XXXIII
Princess Marya went back to her room with the sad,…
XXXIV
The grey-haired valet was dozing in his chair, listening to…
XXXV
When the twenty minutes remaining until the time for the…
XXXVI
“Well now, Mikhail Ivanovich, our Buonaparte is having a hard…
XXXVII
Prince Andrei was leaving in the evening of the next…
Part II
I
In October 1805, Russian forces were occupying the villages and…
II
“He’s coming!” a signalman shouted at just that moment.
III
The regiment broke up into companies and set out for…
IV
On returning from the review, Kutuzov went through into his…
V
The Pavlograd Hussars Regiment was stationed two miles from Braunau.
VI
Kutuzov withdrew towards Vienna, destroying the bridges on the rivers…
VII
Two enemy shots had already flown over the bridge, and…
VIII
The remaining infantry hurriedly crossed the bridge, funnelling in tightly…
IX
After crossing the bridge, one after another the two squadrons…
X
Pursued by a French army of a hundred thousand men…
XI
Prince Andrei went on to the house of the Russian…
XII
The following morning he woke late. Reviewing his impression of…
XIII
The Emperor Franz approached Prince Andrei, who was standing in…
XIV
That same night, having taken his leave of the war…
XV
On the 1st of November Kutuzov had received, via one…
XVI
Between three and four in the afternoon Prince Andrei, having…
XVII
“Eh bien,” Prince Andrei said to himself, “the Army of…
XVIII
Prince Andrei halted his horse at the battery, surveying the…
XIX
Prince Bagration, having ridden up to the very highest point…
XX
The attack by the Sixth Chasseurs made it possible for…
XXI
The infantry regiments, caught by surprise in the forest, were…
XXII
Tushin’s battery had been forgotten, and it was only at…
XXIII
The wind died down and black clouds hung low over…
XXIV
“Who are they? Why are they here? What do they…
Part III
I
Prince Vasily did not brood over his plans, any more…
II
After Pierre and Hélène’s wedding, the old prince Nikolai Andreevich…
III
The Rostovs had had no news about Nikolai for a…
IV
On the 12th of November Kutuzov’s active army, camped near…
V
The day after Boris’s meeting with Rostov, there was a…
VI
The day after the review Boris, dressed up in his…
VII
That very day there had been a council of war…
VIII
On the 15th of November the allied army advanced from…
IX
Before dawn the next day, Denisov’s squadron, in which Nikolai…
X
The following day the sovereign remained at Wischau. His physician-in-ordinary…
XI
After nine in the evening Weierother moved on with his…
XII
It was after one in the morning when Rostov, sent…
XIII
It was nine o’clock in the morning. The fog extended…
XIV
The plan for the Battle of Austerlitz had been drawn…
XV
At the beginning of the battle Prince Bagration, reluctant to…
XVI
By five o’clock in the evening the battle had been…
XVII
Prince Andrei was lying on Pratzen Hill, still at the…
XVIII
At the beginning of 1806, Nikolai Rostov went home on…
XIX
The following day, the 3rd of March, after one o’clock…
XX
The following day at Sokolniki Pierre, as absent-minded as ever,…
XXI
Recently Pierre had only seen his wife at night or…
XXII
Two months had passed since Bleak Hills received news of…
XXIII
“Ma bonne amie,” the little princess said after breakfast on…
XXIV
The impression of the first war with Napoleon was still…
XXV
Despite the sovereign’s strict attitude to duellists at that time,…
XXVI
Two days after clarifying things with his wife, Pierre went…
XXVII
The matter between Pierre and Dolokhov was hushed up and,…
XXVIII
In 1807 Pierre finally set off on a tour of…
XXIX
After his three-week sojourn in the country, concerning which he…
XXX
In 1807 life at Bleak Hills had changed little, except…
XXXI
Although the final debt of forty-two thousand, taken on to…
XXXII
The sovereign was in residence at Bartenstein. The army was…
XXXIII
Boris had found himself a position with the Emperor’s staff…
XXXXIV
After the Friedland disaster, Nikolai Rostov had been left as…
Part IV
I
No one mentioned “Buonaparte”, the Corsican upstart and Antichrist, any…
II
With the exception of a short visit to St. Petersburg,…
III
On arriving in St. Petersburg in 1809, Prince Andrei ordered…
IV
Prince Andrei was a novelty in St. Petersburg. His claim…
V
In the evening, after leaving the countess’s drawing room, Pierre…
VI
The Rostovs’ financial affairs had not been restored during the…
VII
Natasha, having lived in solitude in the country for the…
VIII
Prince Andrei arrived in St. Peterburg in August 1809. At…
IX
The day after his visit to Count Arakcheev, Prince Andrei…
X
There were many reasons that had led Pierre to this…
XI
On the 31st of December, the eve of the New…
XII
The following day Prince Andrei woke up and smiled, without…
XIII
For four days Prince Andrei did not go to the…
XIV
The morning after her bed-time discussion with her mother, when…
XV
Prince Nikolai Andreevich Bolkonsky and his daughter spent that winter…
Part V
I
The Biblical tradition has it that the absence of labour…
II
It was the 12th of September. There were already early…
III
About five male house serfs, both big and little, came…
IV
In the late autumn another letter was received from Prince…
V
The Yuletide season arrived. Besides the festive liturgy, at which…
VI
Natasha was the first to set the tone of Yuletide…
VII
The love between Prince Andrei and Natasha and their happiness…
VIII
At the beginning of winter, Prince Nikolai Andreevich Bolkonsky and…
IX
In 1811 a French doctor acquired rapid fashionability in Moscow.
X
Pierre’s suppositions concerning Boris were correct. Boris could not make…
XI
The Rostovs arrived in early February. Natasha had never been…
XII
That evening the Rostovs went to the theatre. Natasha had…
XIII
In the year of 1811, life in Moscow was very…
XIV
The brightly lit drawing room at the Bezukhovs’ house was…
XV
After his first meeting with Natasha in Moscow, Pierre had…
Part VI
I
In the spring of 1812, Prince Andrei was in Turkey,…
II
The count was in despair. He wrote to send for…
III
“My brother sovereign!” Napoleon wrote in the spring of 1812…
IV
On the 11th of June at eleven o’clock in the…
V
The Russian Emperor and his court had already been living…
VI
As he despatched Balashov, the sovereign repeated yet again his…
VII
The gloomy soldier Davout was the complete opposite of Murat.
VIII
After Balashov had spent four days in solitude, boredom and…
IX
After his meeting with Pierre in Moscow, Prince Andrei went…
X
Prince Andrei reached army Central Headquarters on the 13th of…
XI
While Prince Andrei was living on the Drissa with nothing…
XII
Before the start of the campaign, when the regiment was…
XIII
More than a year had passed since Natasha had rejected…
XIV
As promised, Pierre came to dinner straight from Count Rostopchin’s…
XV
On the twelfth the sovereign arrived in Moscow and from…
Part VII
I
What had to happen was bound to happen. Just as…
II
After Prince Andrei’s departure, the old Prince Bolkonsky’s daughter observed…
III
Among the countless categories of all the phenomena of life,…
IV
While this was taking place in St. Petersburg, the French…
V
“The bird returned to its native fields” galloped to the…
VI
Between four and five in the evening that day, long…
VII
On taking command of the armies, Kutuzov remembered Prince Andrei…
VIII
On the 24th of August the French Emperor’s chamberlain, de…
IX
The Shevardino redoubt was attacked on the evening of the…
X
After the sovereign left Moscow, when that first moment of…
XI
On that clear evening of the 25th of August, Prince…
XII
At six o’clock it was light. It was a grey…
XIII
Prince Andrei was in the reserves, who had been firing…
XIV
After the Battle of Borodino, immediately after the battle, the…
XV
The following day Napoleon stood on Poklonnaya Hill and looked…
XVI
The two princesses (the third had married long ago) had…
XVII
In St. Petersburg, after the sovereign’s arrival from Moscow, many…
XVIII
On the 1st of October, on the feast of the…
XIX
In the middle of September the Rostovs and their transport…
XX
After the enemy’s entry into Moscow and the reports denouncing…
XXI
During this period, when all the French wanted was to…
XXII
Pierre was with this depot among the prisoners. On the…
XXIII
One of the first people Andrei met in the army…
About the Author and Translator
Praise
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
LEO TOLSTOY Photograph, Moscow, 1868
INTRODUCTION
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 recondite details ranging from the extent to which men still wore hair powder in 1805 to the fact that the copse in which Pierre Bezukhov and Dolokhov fought their duel was pine rather than birch.
One of Tolstoy’s major problems was that of establishing the precise nature of his genre. As he explained to Katkov, the editor of Russkii Vestnik, in January 1865: ‘the work is not a novel and is not a story, and cannot have the sort of plot whose interest ends with the dénouement.
I am writing this in order to ask you not to call my work a novel in the table of contents, or perhaps in the advertisement either. This is very important to me, and I particularly request it of you’.
Those sections which appeared in 1865 and 1866 were but the introduction to a much larger work, which by the end of 1866 he believed he had completed. Over the previous six months he had written 726 pages of manuscript, which he felt brought the work to a satisfactory conclusion. His pleasure in writing was intense, and as he explained later he ‘generally enjoyed good spirits’, and on days when his work had gone well, he would gleefully announce that he had left ‘a bit of my life in the inkstand’.
It is this version which comprises the present work, which was first made available to the Russian general reader seven years ago, and is here presented for the first time in English. The title Tolstoy proposed was All’s Well That Ends Well, from which it may be correctly inferred that it had a happy ending. There can be no doubt that he intended this version to be published, for which he engaged as illustrator a talented artist named Nikolai Sergeievich Bashilov. Tolstoy and Bashilov enjoyed a close and constructive collaboration. Thus when the author explained that he had based the character of Natasha in large part on his sister-in-law Tatiana, the artist’s task was the easier since he was her uncle. Sadly, Bashilov’s increasing illness made it ever harder for him to meet insistent deadlines imposed by the author and publisher, and at the end of 1870 he died while undergoing a health cure in the Tyrol. Consequently the early editions of the novel remain unillustrated, and it was not until 1893 that an able successor to Bashilov was found in the form of Leonid Pasternak, father of the novelist Boris.
War and Peace ‘as we know it’ was published in six volumes in 1868–69. By that time Tolstoy had extensively revised All’s Well That Ends Well, radically altering its conclusion and carrying the story forward in part as a reminder that life does not come to a gratifying halt with marriage. Two years later he wrote disparagingly: ‘I’ve stopped writing, and will never again write verbose nonsense like War and Peace. I’m guilty, but I swear I’ll never do it again’. However he had not reached the end of his creative activity, and in 1873 set about further extensive restructuring. ‘I’ve started to prepare a second edition of War and Peace and to strike out what is superfluous – some things need to be struck out altogether, others to be removed and printed separately’, he wrote to a literary friend in March. ‘And if you can remember, remind me of what is bad. I’m afraid to touch it, because there is so much that is bad in my eyes that I would want to write it again after refurbishing it’.
Even this was not the end of the story, for when his wife came to issue a fresh collected edition of his works in 1886 it was the 1868–69 version that she chose. Whether this was Tolstoy’s choice remains unknown, but he can scarcely have disapproved. This illustrates the extent to which he envisaged his creation as a living entity subject to continual modification, and confirms the desirability of making public the first version he completed. Whether the final ‘canonical’ edition represents an improvement must be left to readers to judge, and the present publication at last provides means of effecting the comparison.
Those who have never read War and Peace will be able to enjoy experiencing Tolstoy’s first heady production of that wonderful work, and those who have will undergo the stimulating experience of being able to compare it with its predecessor. Apart from the truncated conclusion, attentive readers will note many differences of detail and emphasis. My own interest was particularly aroused by subtle variations in the treatment of Dolokhov, the bold and on occasion cruel lover of Pierre’s faithless wife Hélène. Based on Tolstoy’s cousin, the noted duellist and adventurer Feodor Ivanovich Tolstoy, whose larger-than-life personality clearly fascinated the novelist, he erupts as another fictional counterpart into the marvellous short story ‘Two Hussars’, where in the space of twenty-four hours he turns upside down the sleepy life of a provincial town. The writer was fortunate in possessing a family and friends preeminently adaptable to the most exotic of fictive requirements.
As he wrote to his cousin Alexandra, a lady in waiting to the Empress, during the writing of All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘you possess that Tolstoyan wildness that’s common to us all. Not for nothing did Feodor Ivanovich have himself tattooed’. His words might have as aptly been applied to the larger-than-life author himself.
Nikolai Tolstoy, 2007
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
Like most literary classics, War and Peace has generated a long and distinguished tradition of English translations. But while most are based on the ‘classical’ 1500-page text, the present translation is based on an earlier, shorter text that is now being translated into English for the first time.
This shorter Russian text was brought out in 2000 by the Moscow publisher Igor Zakharov as ‘the first complete edition of the great novel War and Peace’. His edition, however, was in fact derived from an earlier edition which, although unknown to the world at large, had long been familiar to literary specialists as the first draft, recovered by the Tolstoy scholar Evelina E. Zaidenshnur. This text, together with a 60-page commentary, had been published as a scholarly monograph in 1983, in vol. 94 of the Academy of Sciences journal Literaturnoe Nasledstvo (Literary Heritage), although much of the material had appeared earlier still in the 90-volume Jubilee edition of Tolstoy’s Collected Works.
Evelina Zaidenshnur’s reconstruction was an extraordinary achievement, the fruit of fifty years’ painstaking paleographical detective work in the massive archive held by the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow. This work had culminated in the first, full working version whose last page contains the word: ‘Konets’ or ‘The End’. Known to have reached completion in December 1866, this draft had soon been dispersed in the process of rewriting that began shortly after. Zaidenshnur’s text was a mosaic of manuscripts retrieved from across the archive and reassembled through the careful matching of Tolstoy’s original handwriting, ink and paper and close examination of his numerous notebooks, diaries and letters for clues and references to the work in progress.