Chapter X
Legacy
The book that swallowed the world
The Reception
When the final installment of War and Peaceappeared in 1869, it was both a sensation and a scandal. Readers were overwhelmed by its scope; critics were divided. Ivan Turgenev, Tolstoy's older rival, called it a “cycle of novels” rather than a single work. The critic Nikolai Strakhov praised its “truthfulness and depth.” Others were baffled by the historical essays, irritated by the French dialogue, and offended by Tolstoy's dismissal of great-man history.
The argument that consumed the most ink was Tolstoy's treatment of Napoleon. Many readers felt it was unpatriotic — not because Tolstoy insulted Russia, but because he insulted France. Deflating Napoleon's genius felt like diminishing the achievement of the Russian army. Tolstoy replied that he was not writing a patriotic tract but an honest account of what happened. History, he insisted, does not need heroes. It needs truth.
“The Greatest Novel Ever Written”
Over the decades, the reputation of War and Peaceonly grew. By the early twentieth century, it was widely regarded as the greatest novel ever written — a position it still holds in most informal surveys of writers and critics. Virginia Woolf called it “the greatest novel in the world.” Ernest Hemingway said, “I don't know anyone who could write about war better than Tolstoy did.” Isaac Babel, the Soviet short-story writer, famously said: “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”
The translations that brought the novel to the world deserve mention. The first English translation, by Clara Bell (1886), was poor. Aylmer and Louise Maude's translation (1922–28) was done under Tolstoy's supervision and remains a standard. More recent translations — by Anthony Briggs (2005) and Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (2007) — have brought the novel to new generations of readers. Each translation reveals a slightly different Tolstoy: the Maudes are clear and dignified; Briggs is lively and accessible; Pevear/Volokhonsky is austere and faithful to the original's rhythms.
Adaptations
Bondarchuk's Film (1966–67)
Sergei Bondarchuk's four-part, seven-hour film is the most ambitious adaptation ever attempted. It cost over $100 million (in 1960s dollars), used 120,000 soldiers as extras, and took six years to make. The Battle of Borodino sequence alone runs 45 minutes and was filmed with 12,000 cavalry and infantry. Bondarchuk himself played Pierre. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1969. It has never been surpassed as a cinematic realization of Tolstoy's vision.
BBC Adaptation (2016)
Andrew Davies's six-part adaptation for the BBC, starring Paul Dano as Pierre, James Norton as Andrei, and Lily James as Natasha. It was filmed in Russia and Lithuania with a largely British cast. Davies streamlined the novel considerably — cutting most of the philosophical essays and focusing on the love stories and battles. It was widely praised for making the novel accessible to a modern audience, though purists objected to the omissions.
Prokofiev's Opera (1946)
Sergei Prokofiev spent over a decade composing an opera based on War and Peace. It is massive — 13 acts, over four hours of music — and has never been performed in its entirety. But the score contains some of Prokofiev's finest music, and the opera is now recognized as one of the great works of twentieth-century Russian music. The 'Polonaise' from the ball scene is a concert favorite.
The Musical and Other Works
There have been multiple stage adaptations, a Broadway musical (Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 by Dave Malloy, which ran in 2016–17), radio dramas, and a graphic novel. Each adaptation reveals a different facet of the novel: the war, the peace, the philosophy, the love story. The novel is large enough to contain all of them.
Why It Still Matters
War and Peace was published over 150 years ago, about events that happened over 200 years ago. Why does anyone still read it? The answer is simple: because it is about what it feels like to be alive. Not alive in the abstract — alive in the specific, confusing, painful, beautiful way that human beings are alive. Falling in love and making a fool of yourself. Going to war and discovering you are afraid. Watching someone die and not knowing what to say. Inheriting money and not knowing what to do with it. Sitting in a field at night, looking at the stars, and wondering what any of it means.
Tolstoy's characters are not symbols or types. They are people. They change, they contradict themselves, they grow and shrink and grow again. Pierre at the end of the novel is not the Pierre of the beginning — but he is recognizably the same person, the way you are the same person you were ten years ago, even though you have changed. This is the novel's deepest achievement: it captures the texture of human experience with a fidelity that no other novelist has matched.
And the novel's central insight — that history is made not by great men but by the accumulated actions of ordinary people — has only grown more relevant. In an age of algorithms, big data, and network analysis, Tolstoy's intuition that collective behavior matters more than individual decisions looks less like philosophy and more like physics. He was, in a sense, 150 years ahead of his time.
“We can know only that we know nothing.
And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
— Pierre Bezukhov, War and Peace