Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'

With typically disarming modesty, the author, Professor Reginald Christian, writes in his preface, 'This is a book about a book, and as such it is doubtful it would meet with Tolstoy's approval if he were alive today. He goes on to say however, 'And yet people will continue to write about Tolstoy, as they continue to write about Shakespeare. The purpose of this book is in the first place to acquaint the English reader with material which will facilitate an understanding of the process of writing War and Peace - material which for the most part has not been translated into English, and which is not always obtainable in Russian: draft version of the novel, Tolstoy's diaries, notebooks and letters, the historical and biographical sources he used, and the secondary critical literature about the novel. In the second place I have attempted to consider certain aspects of the finished work - structural, linguistic, and ideological - and to offer very briefly some possible lines of approach to Tolstoy's art as a novelist.'

There are six chapters: The Evolution of the Novel, Use of Sources, Idea and Genre, Structure and Composition, Language, Characterization.

War and Peace is arguably the greatest novel ever written. If any novel deserves this sort of critical anatomy it is War and Peace especially when written by one of the greatest Tolstoy scholars of the last one hundred years.

Professor R. F. Christian is one of the major scholars of Russian literature of the last one hundred years. Most especially he is associated with Tolstoy being accorded the highest praise from authors and critics like A. N. Wilson, Jay Parini and George Steiner. Among his publications are Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace': A Study and his definitive editions of Tolstoy's Letters and Diaries (both in two volumes). The Letters and Diaries as well as his 'War and Peace' book have been reissued in Faber Finds. Professor Christian was born in Liverpool, graduated from Oxford University with a first-class honours degree in Russian, joined the Foreign Office and was Attache at the British Embassy in Moscow. His academic career began at the University of Liverpool. At the University of Birmingham he became Chair of Russian Language and Literature. He moved to the University of St. Andrews from where he retired as Head of the Russian Department. A man of many interests beyond the academic, it has been said of him that 'he has always welcomed change if it led to improvements in standards of teaching and research, but one who has always resisted the idea of change for change's sake.'