Why did tolstoy write war and peace

I was sure this was going to end like The Great Gatsby still working on that one, I promise. I mean, any millennial can identify with that. What War and Peace has going for it is philosophy and world-building. Tolstoy had a philosophy of the world and he wanted you to know about it.

World-building is a strange thing to bring up about a novel that was roughly contemporary with the times it portrayed. War and Peace does the opposite and goes into great detail about clothing and manners and attitudes.

The novel describes in detail the different kinds of warfare from the Calvary to guerrilla tactics. The way Tolstoy describes the horror of war and the illusions of glory feels real and raw. His forthcoming companion to War and Peace aims to make the novel more accessible for modern audiences. He shared some of the reasons behind this campaign with Courtney C. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed.

The great twentieth-century Russian author Isaac Babel said that when he read Tolstoy, he felt as if the world was writing itself. Because it asks big questions in little ways. His novel is built on the same principles, attacking big ideas with new strategies, broaching philosophical questions in boudoirs and social crises in salons.

It opens as a confrontation with France approaches but delves into battles on the home front—arguments at a soiree, competition among young men, a struggle over a will—each reflecting elements that have led to the impending war with Napoleon.

Readers began to view writers as spiritual fathers and authors of national narratives, and believed that literature could, and would, change the world. The total length would not have had such an impact on its first readers, who would have waited for the next instalment as eagerly as we wait today for TV serials or for the next book in the Game of Thrones series.

Tolstoy was also a perfectionist. His financial security gave him the luxury to take his time over his writing, and to draft and redraft until he was satisfied. His long-suffering wife, Sofia, copied out at least seven drafts of the novel, and after his death all the manuscripts she had preserved relating to War and Peace filled 12 wooden crates. Actually, Tolstoy began intending to write about a later period: the Decembrist Uprising of The Decembrists were noblemen who led a revolt during a short interregnum following the death of Tsar Alexander I in December In order to understand what would prompt a nobleman to join such a movement, Tolstoy felt compelled to go further back in time.

The defeat of Napoleon, which had incurred the temporary sacrifice of Moscow, had been a formative moment in the emerging Russian national identity. Tolstoy had seen active service in the Crimean War and was interested in what courage means for different people, how people express their love for their country and the moral implications of warfare.

Thus began his project to explore the period from a human perspective. And there is no better example of that challenge than the way in which Tolstoy's project kept growing.

He wrote War and Peace between and , and intended, at first, to write a domestic chronicle in the manner of Trollope whom Tolstoy, with a few qualifications, admired.

The novel would be set in , and concern an aristocratic revolutionary and his return from exile in Siberia. But in order to explain the atmosphere of Russia just after the Crimean war, Tolstoy felt he had to go back to , when the Decembrists, a group of largely upper-class rebels, were arrested, and either executed or exiled. And , he later said, could not be described without going back to the momentous year of , when Napoleon invaded Russia and occupied Moscow for a month.

Yet obviously needed as a proper prelude — which is where War and Peace begins. Inexorably, what began as Russianised Trollope widened and deepened, until it became nothing less than the attempt to write the history of Russia during the Napoleonic campaign — in fact, it became the quarry that Tolstoy had identified as a young man, in his journal: "To write the genuine history of present-day Europe: there is an aim for the whole of one's life.

Tolstoy claimed that it was "not a novel", at least in the familiar, European sense. We Russians, he said, produce strange misfits, awkward black sheep, like Gogol's unfinished picaresque, Dead Souls , and Dostoevsky's semi-fictionalised account of his time in a Siberian prison camp, The House of the Dead.

Gustave Flaubert seemed to agree. Admiring and horrified, he complained that Tolstoy "repeats himself, and he philosophises": sins good formalist novelists should not commit. Impatient with both traditional history-writing and traditional novel-writing, Tolstoy breaks into his fictional narrative with essays and lectures about free will, determinism, history and power. A superb fictional account of the battle of Borodino is followed by a slightly grumpy military history of the battle and a map of the battlefield.

Throughout the novel there is authorial argument, admonishment, preaching — a clear desire to correct the "official" record and write the proper history of the Napoleonic invasion; truth, you feel, is being battled for, with whatever literary weapons come to hand.

Many readers tend to agree with Flaubert, and either skip or speed read the essayistic passages about historiography. There is a tradition, particularly in English letters, of separating "Tolstoy the artist" from "Tolstoy the preacher"; the long chapters about European history, it is sometimes thought, are prolix leavings, while the rich stories of Natasha and Pierre, Prince Andrei and Nikolai Rostov, are precious loans.

Keep the great realist novelist, jettison the great irritable arguer.