'War and Peace' is Published

Writing War and Peace in the aftermath of the Crimean War, when Russian national feeling was pronounced, Tolstoy was interested most of all in the inner life of Russian society during the Napoleonic Wars. He presents the war of 1812 as a crucial watershed in the culture of his class, the aristocracy, a moment when nobles like the Rostovs and Bolkonskys struggle to break free from the foreign and artificial conventions of their society and begin to live more truly to themselves, on Russian principles. War and Peace is a “national epic” in this sense—the gradual revelation of a “Russian consciousness” (a “Russian Truth” as nationalist critics such as Strakhov would have it) in the life of its characters. Tolstoy shows the aristocracy switching from the French language to Russian, renouncing haute cuisine for Spartan lunches of rye bread and cabbage soup, adopting national dress, settling as farmers on the land, and rediscovering their country’s native culture, as in the immortal scene when Natasha, a French-educated young countess, dances to a folk song in the Russian style.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/n...