War and Peace

A novel that begins in French

The Russian original of War and Peace opens in French: Eh bien, mon prince. Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des поместья, de la famille Buonaparte. The one Russian word in the middle, поместья, means estates. Anna Pavlovna Scherer, a lady at the Empress's court, is greeting her first guest, and her speech slides between French and Russian. Her invitations went out in French. Prince Vasili answers, the narrator says, in the refined French in which Russian grandfathers not only spoke but thought. For long stretches of the opening chapters the Russian aristocracy speaks the language of the country it is about to fight.

Aylmer Maude explained why this matters for translators. In Tolstoy's novels, he wrote, there are two sets of people. One is a court set who keep speaking French. The other is a plain Russian set who do not. An English translation can keep that contrast, while a French one loses it, because everybody has to speak French. Natasha is the novel's best example of the second set. She was brought up by a French émigrée governess, yet at her uncle's house in the country she dances a Russian peasant dance nobody taught her.

What the book says about history

Tolstoy stops the story many times to argue with historians. His case is that the so-called great men of history count for very little. Napoleon in 1812 believes his will decides the fate of empires, and the book shows him wrong again and again. Kutuzov, the old Russian commander, does better because he knows he cannot control events and does not pretend to. The second epilogue drops the characters entirely and sets out the argument as an essay on freedom and necessity.

Tolstoy himself defended the book's odd shape. In an article of 1868, Some Words about War and Peace, he asked why millions of people had killed one another when everyone knew killing was wrong. His answer then was that it was inevitable, like bees killing one another in autumn. Aylmer Maude pointed out that Tolstoy believed war was inevitable when he wrote the novel. The idea that people should refuse to fight came to him later.

Paris in the novel, and the novel in Paris

Paris is where Pierre was educated, and the novel returns to that more than once. Andrew's wife, Lise, teases Anatole Kuragin that she has heard about his doings in Paris. In occupied Moscow in 1812, Pierre stops a half-mad man from shooting a French officer, Captain Ramballe. Over dinner the grateful captain says he would have taken Pierre for a Parisian. Pierre answers that he spent years in Paris. In the first epilogue, Nicholas Rostov is with the Russian army in Paris in 1814 when he hears that his father has died.

The first French translation came out in Paris from Hachette in 1879, in three volumes. The title page named the translator only as une Russe, a Russian woman. The novelist Ivan Turgenev sent a set to Gustave Flaubert around New Year 1880. Flaubert wrote back that it was first-rate. What a painter, he exclaimed, and what a psychologist. He thought the first two volumes sublime. The third, he said, collapsed, because Tolstoy repeated himself and started philosophising.

Flaubert kept recommending it anyway. On 25 January 1880 he told his friend Madame Roger des Genettes to read the novel, three enormous volumes from Hachette. He called it a novel of the first order, even though the last volume failed. Turgenev copied Flaubert's first reaction into a letter to Tolstoy.