Tolstoy On War

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.

Tolstoy on War offers readers the results of an international conference held in April 2010 at the United States Military Academy at West Point.. The audience consisted primarily of cadets who had studied the novel and who had already 'wrestled with [Tolstoi's] take on their deadly, idealistic profession' (2)..In all, the editors have done an excellent job, providing introductory and concluding comments that frame the dozen essays, while contributing their own original research., McPeak and Orwin bring together twelve essays on Tolstoy's War and Peace to mark the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the Battle of Borodino. Each chapter in some way touches on at least one the novel's most prevalent contradictions (e.g., war and peace; freedom and determinism; fiction and nonfiction), spanning the disciplines of literary criticism, history, and philosophy.... The volume has thematic consistency and a wide disciplinary appeal, bringing history and literary criticism together in a study of a classic of world literature.

Rick McPeak 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.