cism. He declares, against all odds, the goodness of living.
War and Peace was written during one of the few periods in Leo Tolstoy's life when he had a sense of tranquillity and purpose. Superlatives are needed to describe him: a big, strong man with a formidable intellect, powerful emotions, and extraordinary qualities and defects that ran to extremes. He lived a long life, and left behind work that fills ninety large printed volumes, the biggest and richest individual contribution to the treasure-house of nineteenth-century Russian culture.
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 into the Russian aristocracy, at Yasnaya Polyana, 130 miles south-west of Moscow. His parents died when he was young, but he and his siblings grew up happily, cocooned by female relatives. At the age of sixteen, he entered the university at Kazan but failed his courses and returned to Yasnaya, which he had just inherited. By then, age 19, he had contracted his first dose of venereal disease, a continuing risk during the following years of debauchery and gambling in Moscow and Petersburg.
Tolstoy's largely autobiographical Childhood was accepted by the Contemporary in 1852, the first writing he had submitted for publication. Despite its modest aims and rather dry realism, it was popular and was followed by Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1857). Even greater success attended the three-part Sevastopol in December, May and August (1855 - 6) - which presented his experiences and observations as an artillery officer while leading men under fire during the Crimean War (1854--6) and undermined the false glamour of warfare. He soon became well known in Petersburg literary circles, though he found celebrity uncongenial and hurried back to Yasnaya.
Tolstoy began War and Peace in 1863, just as his first son was born. His wife Sonya (short form of Sofya Andreyevna) was only eighteen, and she bore him another twelve children. He devoted the 1870s to Anna Karenina, and, despite his artistic and commerical success, he became obsessed by thoughts of his own mortality and tormented by a religious yearning that could not be reconciled with the activities of the Church, and he thought constantly about suicide; this crisis is minutely described in A Confession (1878 - 9).
Eventually he came through it but it had changed his life radically: he eschewed society, living and working at Yasnaya Polyana, wearing a peasant's shirt and doing much manual work; renounced writing, violence, stimulants of all kinds, including meat-eating; and required impeccable moral standards of all. This was his new religion: the best of Jesus, without his church. His moral stance - especially his pacifism - attracted interest from all over the world, and Tolstoyan communities were formed in several countries by disciples. But he was impossible to live with. His lack of love and charity towards those closest to him, especially his wife, remains as a blot on his reputation. He did continue to write, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Resurrection (1899) and Hadji Murat (1911), and a moving five-act tragedy of gruesome subject matter, The Power of Darkness (1890).
But at the age of eighty-two Tolstoy, estranged from all his family except for one daughter, Alexandra, fled with her, for a monastery. He fell ill at the railway junction, where he died. His body was interred at the top of a small ravine at Yasnaya, where as a small boy he had searched for a little green stick on which was supposedly inscribed a secret formula guaranteeing continuing happiness and brotherly love.
However, newly married and fully occupied in his mid thirties, Tolstoy had looked for the rewards of family happiness (the title of a story written in 1859), and for a few years he found them. Sonya devoted herself to him and to their children, ran the home and the business side of the estate, and found time to help him with his work. A woman of striking intelligence, she had a good education at home and at university, where she had obtained a teaching diploma. She had also tried writing, and a short novel which she destroyed was said by her sister Tanya to have contained the germ of the relationship between Natasha Rostov and her mother.5 Now Sonya would transcribe what Tolstoy had written during the day, and once claimed to have written out much of War and Peace no fewer than seven times. She discussed the story with her husband, decoded his difficult handwriting and corrected minor errors of spelling and grammar. Her hand in the shaping of his work was strong and decisive; it may have been more influential than has ever been fully acknowledged.
The novel grew and grew. In 1856 Tolstoy drafted several chapters about a man who had returned from exile in Siberia, for his involvement in the abortive Decemberist uprising of 1825. Then Tolstoy pushed back in history to 1812, and finally to 1805: he would start when Napoleon, a self-appointed emperor, moved against the Austrian-Russian coalition. Tolstoy planned that events in 1825 and 1856 would form later volumes of a trilogy. But his main interest was in writing about the joys and misfortunes of aristocratic family life. Plans and drafts were adopted, revised, abandoned and replaced in profusion.6 In 1865 thirty-eight chapters were published in the Russian Messenger and came out in book form the following year, under the title 1805; still at this stage only a relatively short work was envisaged. Later Tolstoy decided on a new title, All's Well That Ends Well, but as the historical and military interest developed this was reflected in the final title, adopted in March 1867. Sonya insisted on abandoning serial publication, for good financial reasons - there was more money to be made from publishing (and republishing) in book form than from a journal - and the novel came out in six volumes in 1868 and 1869.
Tolstoy drew heavily on real-life sources. For military scenes, his extensive research, including memoirs, and his own first-hand experience guaranteed the sureness of his grip on the details of battle. For characters, his family contributed: his maternal grandfather, Nikolay Volkonsky, monster that he must have been, provided a prototype for Andrey's father; his own father for Nikolay Rostov; and his wife's sister, the impish Tanya. The dualism in Tolstoy's own personality is reflected in Andrey and Pierre - intellect versus spirit, discipline versus laxity, pride versus spontaneity and generosity. As the Russian novelist and critic Dmitri Merezhovsky said: 'The artistic work of Leo Tolstoy is at bottom nothing less than one tremendous diary, kept for fifty years, one endless, explicit confession.'7
There had been much discussion of the novel in Russia as it had emerged, and not all of it was complimentary. But by 1870 the first edition had sold out and the author was basking in national acclaim - and we know from her diaries that his wife was well satisfied with her supportive role. Both were pleased with the money that rolled in from royalties, though Tolstoy soon came to regard such earnings as immoral.
The inclusion of Tolstoy's reflections on the workings of history and the methods used by historians has always been controversial. But these passages often punctuate events rather adroitly, serving, for instance, to introduce new sections in a measured and thoughtful manner that seems unobjectionable. (See the opening chapters of all three parts of Volume III.) The rest of Tolstoy's arguments were brought together in a second epilogue, which is repetitive and may seem too long or unnecessarily complex, but adds to the scope of the 'novel'.
His views on warfare, history and historians are serious and original, and they can also be rather amusing. His general purpose is to debunk. Most of all, he wants to cut Napoleon down to size, not only because he was a hated enemy of Russia, but because he was also a ludicrous figure of overweening, pompous pride. At the same time Tolstoy is keen to take issue with the traditional writers of history, who distort the truth by their narrow-minded attitudes and over-simplification. As Henry Gifford wrote: 'War and Peace has its pages of pamphleteering. But they cannot be torn out, because the argument is continuous. On every page lies the imprint of the same evolving experience.'8
The 1860s were a golden decade in Russian literature. In 1862 Ivan Turgenev published Fathers and Children, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky was at his most prolific, issuing Notes from Underground in 1864, Crime and Punishment in 1866, The Idiot in 1867--8, and starting work on Devils in 1869. A measure of the achievement of War and Peace is that it transcends even these masterpieces. Virginia Woolf made the point succinctly: 'There remains the greatest of all novelists - for what else can we call the author of War and Peace?'9
On Translating War and Peace
This novel has been well served by its several translators into English. Only the very first attempt suffers from serious shortcomings, but it was a brave undertaking by Clara Bell, less than twenty years after publication (1885--6). She worked from a French text created by a woman identified only as 'Une Russe', and her version is surprisingly effective, though much of the original has been omitted and what survives is nearer to paraphrase than translation. The early translations by N. H. Dole (1889) and Leo Wiener (1904) were more accurate, though they still contain plenty of small slips and their American phrasing now has an archaic ring. Constance Garnett, the admirable early doyen of Russian literature in English translation, produced a sensitive version in 1904; she had a delicate feel for language, though there are some errors. Then, in 1923, came the masters, Louise and Aylmer Maude, who lived in Russia and had the advantage of being able to consult Tolstoy himself. He gave their work his personal endorsement, even claiming that 'better translators . . . could not be invented'.10 Their version of War and Peace, now fast approaching its centenary, is still read as a classic in its own right, and the errors that it contains are so few as to be negligible. It has been succeeded by Rosemary Edmonds's equally reliable (at times derivative) translation (1957), which Penguin has used for nearly half a century (updated in 1978), and then by a sound American version, by Ann Dunnigan, in 1968.
So why do we need another translation?
It is not unusual for the great classics to be retranslated every couple of generations. Language changes and, without worshiping modernity for its own sake, publishers recognize the need to accommodate new readers by using phrasing more closely attuned to their way of speaking. Infelicities will be edited out, such as 'Andrey spent the evening with a few gay friends', 'Natasha went about the house flushing', 'he exposed himself on the parade ground' or 'he ejaculated with a grimace'; we cannot read these without raising an inappropriate smile. On the other hand, it is most important not to over-modernize. Tempting though it may be, I cannot use popularized phrases like 'buzzword', 'oddball' or 'hooliganism'.
Secondly, a translator hopes to squeeze out one or two errors or ambiguities that still linger. Previous translators have missed that an object referred to in a famous Tolstoyan metaphor about things colliding and recoiling is not a ball in flight but a billiard ball on the table; and they all translated the phrase 'smotret' ispodlob'ya' as 'to look at from under the brows' when it means to look sullenly or furtively.
But these reasons are hardly enough to justify a new translation. There is one way in which all the existing versions fall short: from Constance Garnett onwards they have been produced by women of a particular social and cultural background (Louise having contributed more than Aylmer to the Maudes' version), with some resulting flatness and implausibility in the dialogue, especially that between soldiers, peasants and all the lower orders. For example, Pierre, watching as a cannonball crashes down into the Rayevsky redoubt and takes a man's leg off, hears another soldier call out in response: 'Ekh! Neskladnaya!' (III, II, 31). The English versions of this are: 'Ekh! You beastly thing!' (Dole); 'Oh, awkward one!' (Weiner); 'Hey, awkward hussy!' (Garnett); 'Awkward baggage!' (Maude); 'Oh you hussy!' (Edmonds); 'Ah, you're a bungler!' (Dunnigan). Curiously enough the best is Clara Bell's: 'Ah, you brute!' The original, with connotations of both awkwardness and femininity, is rather difficult to translate, but one thing is certain: no soldier in the heat of battle ever said anything like most of the phrases we have been offered so far.
The previous translations also have an excess of niceness and exactitude that can sound jarring to today's readers. Natasha looks in the mirror and says: 'Can this be I?' Lavrushka is sent off 'in quest of fowls'. More than once we hear that 'Pierre fell to musing'. Elsewhere someone says: 'Ay, listen what folks are prating of'. Similarly, there must be better ways of saying: 'The crushing weight of his arm fell impotent as though spellbound', or 'the resolutive moment of battle had come'. Non-existent English exclamations like 'Ay!', 'Ey!', 'Ekh!' or the misused 'Eh!' still abound. In such old-fashioned phrasing I have tried to make improvements.
This is not to denigrate the translations that have been enjoyed by millions; it is merely to indicate I follow a general philosophy of translation that is slightly different from what has gone before.
In the introduction to his Don Quixote, John Rutherford divides translators into cavaliers and puritans. The cavalier takes some liberties; the puritan is a stickler for exactitude. Rutherford's intention was to combine the virtues of both and avoid their vices, a sensible if difficult plan. The previous translations of War and Peace have erred slightly too much on the puritan side, literal fidelity being set at a higher premium than writing naturally in English. It is now time to move somewhat in the other direction.
Let me give a couple of small examples. If a Russian asks, 'Did you study in Kiev?', another Russian will respond by saying, 'In Kiev'. The puritan will use that repetition, while the cavalier would give the normal English speaker's response, 'Yes' or 'Yes, I did.' Similarly, when a Russian mother says to her child, 'Ne nado!', the puritan will be tempted to render this literally as 'That's not necessary!', whereas the cavalier will go for 'Don't!'
The reason for this puritanism is not far to seek. It lies in what Rutherford refers to as a 'mistaken attitude of reverence for the original artist beside whom it's all too easy to feel like humble artisans who can only ever aspire to produce a pale shadow of the original . . . a self-fulfilling prediction . . . Literary translators must conquer these fears.'11 This is good advice. Without ever drifting too far away from the original, it does seem reasonable to aim for the kind of English that would have occurred naturally in its context and now sounds appropriate.
Another way to look at this is to imagine how the average Russian reads War and Peace and to try to recapture something similar in the translated text. Tolstoy's literary style has its faults - such as undue repetition, grammatical inaccuracy and some sentences of excessive length12 - and many of them have to be faithfully reproduced in order to avoid falsification, but by and large he is an easy read for a Russian (and comparatively easy to translate). Stylistic angularities, shocks and surprises are infrequent, and the dialogue in particular is individualized but always natural. It seems most important to ensure in any translation the same kind of smooth reading, and varied but realistic-sounding dialogue. In rendering colloquial speech, of course, a translator has to choose a particular regional dialect and its idioms, and I have used a British English form of speech, without, I hope, making the text unnatural for non-British readers.
The first edition (1868--9) of the novel had long passages in French. But Tolstoy had second thoughts and removed most of them during a drastic revision in 1873. Previous translators cut these further and provided translations in footnotes. But few readers today have a sound knowledge of French, so I have decided to translate all of it.
Does this change matter? Sometimes it does, but it is possible to indicate that a speaker is using another language. It is not unusual for Tolstoy himself to say (in Russian), for example, 'Since Pierre was speaking French at the time he . . .' I have used this kind of formula on those few occasions when a linguistic choice or shift has real significance, e.g. in the second paragraph on the opening page. It remains true that certain characters - Bilibin, for example - lose some of their finesse because of this treatment, but there seems to be an overall gain in following the lead established by Tolstoy (and the Maudes with his blessing) by making the text more directly accessible.
A Note on the Text
For almost a century several editions of War and Peace vied for acceptance. The first book version appeared in six volumes (four in 1868 and two in 1869), but was riddled with errors, nearly 2,000 of them. Then, in 1873 Tolstoy published his revised edition. In the 1930s Russian scholars preparing the Jubilee Edition of the Complete Works of L. N. Tolstoy decided to use the fifth edition of 1886, even though Tolstoy had not been involved in its publication, but they did incorporate some of the 1873 emendations (a second edition was based on the 1873 text). When it was discovered later that numerous changes in the 1873 edition had been introduced by N. N. Strakhov, most of them without Tolstoy's approval, a team of scholars led by E. Zaydenshnur set about the formidable task of collating and comparing all versions, including the manuscripts, copies (mainly in Sonya Tolstoy's hand), annotated editions, and corrected or half-corrected proofs, with the goal of eliminating any alterations introduced by outsiders. Their work bore fruit in the early 1960s, when a truly definitive text emerged, from which all subsequent editions derive.
The present translation is based on the text of War and Peace prepared by E. Zaydenshnur in the 1960--65 twenty-volume Collected Works of L. N. Tolstoy, published by Goslitizdat (State Publishing House for Literature), edited by N. N. Akopova, N. K. Gudzy, N. N. Gusev and M. B. Khrapchenko.
NOTES
1 Preface to The Tragic Muse (1907--9), and letter to Hugh Walpole, 19 May 1912; see Henry Gifford (ed.), Leo Tolstoy: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971), pp. 104--5.
2 D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), p. 258.
3 Alvin Redman (ed.), The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde (London, Bracken Books, 1995), p. 86.
4 Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (London, Collins and Harvill Press, 1958).
5 See Aylmer Maude, The Life of Tolstoy: First Fifty Years (Oxford, Oxford University Press, n.d.), Vol. I, p. 286.
6 A short 'early version' of War and Peace was published in Moscow (2000), based on published material, odd pages and extracts from notebooks up to 18