Kathryn B. Feuer offers remarkable insights into Leo Tolstoy's creative process while he wrote War and Peace. She follows the novel through countless drafts and notes, illuminating its connection to earlier, unpublished, novels and to crucial new sources, both European and Russian. A novelist herself, Feuer explores the problems of character development, narrative voice, genre, and structure that Tolstoy ultimately resolved so brilliantly.
What were the consequences of Tolstoy’s unusual reliance on members of his family as source material for War and Peace? Did affection for close relatives influence depictions of these real prototypes in his fictional characters? Tolstoy used these models to consider his origins, to ponder alternative family histories, and to critique himself. Comparison of the novel and its fascinating drafts with the writer’s family history reveals increasing preferential treatment of those with greater relatedness to him: kin altruism, i.e., nepotism. This pattern helps explain many of Tolstoy’s choices amongst plot variants he considered, as well as some of the curious devices he utilizes to get readers to share his biases, such as coincidences, notions of “fate,” and aversion to incest.
Consequences of Consciousness shows how great Russian authors conversed with each other through their fictions as they explored both the limits and the autonomy of subjective consciousness.
Kathryn B. Feuer offers remarkable insights into Leo Tolstoy's creative process while he wrote War and Peace. She follows the novel through countless drafts and notes, and illuminates its connection to earlier, unpublished novels and to crucial new sources, both European and Russian. Additionally, Feuer locates Tolstoy within the intellectual debates of his time.
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 McPeak 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.
“This lively appreciation of one of the most intimidating and massive novels ever written should persuade many hesitant readers to try scaling the heights of War and Peace sooner rather than later” (Publishers Weekly). Considered by many critics the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is also one of the most feared. And at 1,500 pages, it’s no wonder why. Still, in July 2009 Newsweek put War and Peace at the top of its list of 100 great novels and a 2007 edition of the AARP Bulletin included the novel in their list of the top four books everybody should read by the age of fifty. A New York Times survey from 2009 identified War and Peace as the world classic you’re most likely to find people reading on their subway commute to work. What might all those Newsweek devotees, senior citizens, and harried commuters see in a book about the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s? War and Peace is many things. It is a love story, a family saga, a war novel. But at its core it’s a novel about human beings attempting to create a meaningful life for themselves in a country torn apart by war, social change, political intrigue, and spiritual confusion. It is a mirror of our times. Give War and Peace a Chance takes readers on a journey through War and Peace that reframes their very understanding of what it means to live through troubled times and survive them. Touching on a broad range of topics, from courage to romance, parenting to death, Kaufman demonstrates how Tolstoy’s wisdom can help us live fuller, more meaningful lives. The ideal companion to War and Peace, this book “makes Tolstoy’s characters lively and palpable…and may well persuade readers to finally dive into one of the world’s most acclaimed—and daunting—novels” (Kirkus Reviews).
"[A] brilliant new book . . . Humane provides a powerful intellectual history of the American way of war. It is a bold departure from decades of historiography dominated by interventionist bromides." —Jackson Lears, The New York Review of Books A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humane In the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war. With little debate or discussion, the United States carries out military operations around the globe. It hardly matters who’s president or whether liberals or conservatives operate the levers of power. The United States exercises dominion everywhere. In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed—and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences. The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. By that time, the US military had embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but its foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Even as the two administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the “forever” war. Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.
The Overcoming of History in "War and Peace" marks a radical departure from the critical tradition dominated by Sir Isaiah Berlin's view that the novel is deeply divided against itself, a majestically flawed contest of brilliant art and clumsy thought. To the contrary, Jeff Love argues that the apparently divided nature of the text, its multi-leveled negotiation between different kinds of representation, expresses the rich variety of the novel's very deliberate striving to capture the fluidity of change and becoming in the fixed forms of language. The inevitable failure of this striving, revealing the irreducible conflict between infinite desire and finite capacity, is at once the source of new beginnings and the repetition of old ones, a wellspring of continually renewed promises to achieve a synoptic vision of the whole that the novel cannot fulfill. This repetitive struggle between essentially comic and tragic conceptions of human action, far from being a pervasive flaw in the texture of the novel, in fact constitutes its dynamic center and principal trope as well as the productive origin of the unusual features that distinguish it as an uncommonly bold narrative experiment.
Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, one of the world’s greatest film epics, originated as a consequence of the Cold War. Conceived as a response to King Vidor’s War and Peace, Bondarchuk’s surpassed that film in every way, giving the USSR one small victory in the cultural Cold War for hearts and minds. This book, taking up Bondarchuk’s masterpiece as a Cold War film, an epic, a literary adaptation, a historical drama, and a rival to Vidor’s Hollywood version, recovers—and expands—a lost chapter in the cultural and political history of the twentieth century. Like many great works of literature, Tolstoy’s epic tale proved a major challenge to filmmakers. After several early efforts to capture the story’s grandeur, it was not until 1956 that King Vidor dared to bring War and Peace to the big screen. American critics were lukewarm about the film, but it was shown in the Soviet Union to popular acclaim. This book tells the story of how the Soviet government, military, and culture ministry—all eager to reclaim this Russian masterpiece from their Cold War enemies—pulled together to make Bondarchuk’s War and Peace possible. Bondarchuk, an actor who had directed only one film, was an unlikely choice for director, and yet he produced one of the great works of Soviet cinema, a worthy homage to Tolstoy’s masterpiece—an achievement only sweetened when Russia’s Cold War adversary recognized it with the Academy Award’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of 1968. Denise Youngblood examines the film as an epic (and at seven hours long, released in four parts, at a cost of nearly $700,000,000 in today’s dollars, it was certainly that), a literary adaptation, a complex reflection on history, and a significant artifact of the cultural Cold War between the US and the USSR. From its various angles, the book shows us Bondarchuk’s extraordinary film in its many dimensions—aesthetic, political, and historical—even as it reveals what the film tells us about how Soviet patriotism and historical memory were constructed during the Cold War.
The Stone Roses captures the magic—and chaos—behind the UK band's rise, fall, and recent resurrection. The iconic Brit pop band The Stone Roses became an overnight sensation when their 1989 eponymous album went double platinum. It was a recording that is still often listed as one of the best albums ever made. Its chiming guitar riffs, anthemic melodies, and Smiths-like pop sensibility elevated The Stone Roses to a cult-like status in the UK and put them on the map in the U.S. But theirs is a story of unfulfilled success: their star imploded as their sophomore effort took years to complete and the band broke up acrimoniously in 1996. Sixteen years later, they reunited and have been playing sold out gigs, thrilling fans around the globe, and working on new material. In 2013, they nabbed the coveted headline spot at the Coachella Festival. With one hundred interviews of key figures, forty rare photographs, and exclusive insider material including how they created their music, The Stone Roses charts the band's rise from the backwaters of Manchester to becoming the stars of the "Madchester" scene to their successful comeback years later. Going beyond the myths to depict a band that defined Brit pop, Simon Spence illustrates their incandescent talent and jaw-dropping success while contextualizing them in the 90s music scene. This is the definitive story of The Stone Roses.
