A grandiose novel of the war and peace type. War and Peace

Genre of the novel "War and Peace"

Tolstoy himself did not give a specific definition of the genre of the work. And he was completely right in this, because the traditional genres that existed before the writing of War and Peace could not fully reflect the artistic structure of the novel. The work combines elements of family life, socio-psychological, philosophical, historical, battle novels, as well as documentary chronicles, memoirs, etc. This allows us to characterize it as an epic novel. It was Tolstoy who first discovered this genre form in Russia.
"War and Peace" as an epic novel has the following characteristics:

Combining a story about national events with a story about the destinies of individual people.

Description of the life of Russian and European society of the nineteenth century.

There are images of various types of characters of all social strata of society in all manifestations.

The novel is based on grandiose events, thanks to which the author depicted the main trends of the historical process of that time.

A combination of realistic pictures of life in the 19th century, with the author’s philosophical reasoning about freedom and necessity, the role of the individual in history, chance and regularity, etc.

Tolstoy clearly depicted the features of folk psychology in the novel, which he combined with the depiction of the personal characteristics of individual characters; this gave a special polyphony to the work, which is a reflection of a complex and contradictory era.

In addition to the analysis of the War and Peace genre, the following is also available:

• The image of Marya Bolkonskaya in the novel “War and Peace”, essay
• The image of Napoleon in the novel "War and Peace"
• The image of Kutuzov in the novel “War and Peace”
• Comparative characteristics of the Rostovs and Bolkonskys - essay
• Life quests of Natasha Rostova - essay
• Life quests of Pierre Bezukhov - essay
• The life quest of Andrei Bolkonsky - essay

Unprecedented in the history of world literature is Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s classic novel “War and Peace,” which tells about the life of Russian society during the era of the Napoleonic wars. For many years, this grandiose work has enjoyed constant success among readers and literary researchers around the world. We offer you an analysis of the novel according to a plan that will be useful for 10th grade students when writing an essay on a given topic, preparing for a literature lesson and the upcoming Unified State Exam.

Brief Analysis

Year of writing– 1863-1869.

History of creation– Initially, Tolstoy planned to write a story about a Decembrist who returned home with his family from many years of exile. However, in the course of the work, the writer’s plan expanded significantly: new characters appeared, the time frame moved back. As a result, an epic novel was written, work on which took Tolstoy almost 7 years.

Subject– The central theme of the work is the historical fate of the Russian people in the Patriotic War of 1812. The author also raised themes of love, family, life and death, debt, war.

Composition- The novel consists of 4 volumes and an epilogue, each volume corresponds to a certain time period. The composition of the novel is extremely complex and multi-layered.

Genre- An epic novel.

Direction– Realism.

History of creation

In the 50s of the 19th century, Lev Nikolaevich had the idea to write a story about the Decembrist who returned with his family from Siberia. This idea captivated the writer so much that he began to penetrate deeper and deeper into the inner world of his hero, look for the motives of certain of his actions, and get to the bottom of the truth. As a result, it became necessary to describe the hero’s entire life, starting from early youth. So the time frame of the work was shifted almost half a century ago, and the storyline took its report from 1805.

It is not surprising that such a deep dive into the life of the main character required expansion and a significant increase in the main and secondary characters.

“Three Pores” was the working title of the work. According to Tolstoy's plan, the first part or time described the life of the young Decembrists, the second - the Decembrist uprising, and the third - their amnesty and return home from many years of exile. Ultimately, Lev Nikolaevich decided to direct all his efforts to describe the first time, since even this time period required enormous effort and time from him. So, instead of an ordinary story, the writer created a monumental work, a real epic, which had no analogues in all world literature.

The history of the creation of “War and Peace,” which took Tolstoy almost 7 years, was an example of not only painstaking work on the characters’ characters and their relationships, but also complete immersion in the history of Russia. Tolstoy most carefully studied the memoirs of participants and witnesses of the Napoleonic wars, and to describe the scene of the Battle of Borodino, he spent some time in Borodino, where he personally collected reliable information.

Throughout the work on the novel, Lev Nikolaevich treated the work done with a great deal of criticism. So, in an effort to create a work worthy of attention, he wrote 15 different variations of the beginning of the novel.

Before publication, the author renamed his work. Meaning of the name“War and Peace” lies in the fact that the author, using the example of not only different characters, but also different social strata of society, wanted to show the contrast between peaceful life and how it changed during the war.

Subject

Among the many topics covered by the author in the novel, one of the most important is the historical fate of the entire Russian people during the hard times of war. Lev Nikolaevich always criticized any wars, since in the future they became the cause of serious problems in society.

People, cut off from their usual activities and forced to kill their own kind, forever changed their worldview. As a result, the entire nation suffered enormous, irreparable moral damage.

Military operations became an excellent backdrop for the development of such a vital Topics like true and false patriotism. The War of 1812 was of great importance in uniting the entire nation in a common patriotic impulse - to expel the enemy from their land. Many representatives of the nobility and ordinary people agreed in this. All the heroes of the novel, one way or another, passed the test of 1812 and received a moral assessment of their actions.

Lev Nikolaevich put all his aspirations and hopes into the main idea of ​​the work - every person should live in the interests of his people, strive for true harmony, forgetting about the thirst for profit or career ambitions. Love for the homeland, good thoughts, unity with the people - this is what the work teaches.

The meaning of the novel lies in “nationality”, since it is the people who are the driving force and greatness of the nation.

Composition

When analyzing the work in the novel “War and Peace,” it is necessary to note the complexity and multi-stage nature of its compositional structure. Not only the novel, but even each volume and each chapter has its own climax and denouement. The book closely intertwines the main storylines, many characters and episodes are contrasted with each other.

The work consists of 4 volumes and an epilogue, and each part of the book corresponds to a certain time period.

• Volume 1(1805) - a description of the war and the main characters, filled with ambitious dreams.
• Volume 2(1806-1811) - displays the problems and difficult life situations in which each of the heroes of the novel found themselves.
• Volume 3(1812) - entirely dedicated to the War of 1812.
• Volume 4(1812-1813) - the onset of the long-awaited peace, with the arrival of which the main characters have an epiphany.
• Epilogue(18120) - a story about the further fate of the central characters.

Main characters

Genre

Defining the genre of “War and Peace” is quite simple - it is epic novel. Its main differences from other literary genres are the large volume of the work, the scale of the events depicted and the issues considered.

In terms of genre, “War and Peace” is a very complex work, since it contains the characteristic features of historical, social, everyday, philosophical, battle novels, as well as memoirs and chronicles.

Since the novel involves many historical figures and describes real historical events, the novel is usually classified as a literary movement of realism.

The novel as a literary genre is the creation of modern literature.

Distinctive features of the novel:

• depiction of a person in complex life processes,
• multi-linearity of the plot, covering the fate of a number of characters,
• greater volume compared to other epic forms.

In the foreground are images of ordinary people, their personal fate, events of private life and reflection in them of the events of the era, the holistic social world that gave birth to them. Typically, works in the novel genre take place in the writer’s contemporary reality (with the exception of historical and fantasy texts) or events of the recent past.

Genres in Tolstoy's novel

The novel "War and Peace" is a work that is extremely complex in terms of genre.

Like a historical novel

On the one hand, the writer talks about historical events of the past (the wars of 1805-1807 and 1812).

From this point of view, War and Peace could be called .

Specific historical figures act in it (Alexander 1, Napoleon, Kutuzov, Speransky), but history for Tolstoy is not an end in itself. When starting to write a work about the Decembrists, the writer, as he himself said, could not help but turn to the Patriotic War of 1812, and then to the war of 1805-1807 (“the era of our shame”). History in “War and Peace” is the basis that allows us to reveal the characters of people in an era of great national upheaval, to convey the philosophical reflections of the author himself about global issues of humanity - issues of war and peace, the role of the individual in history, the laws of the historical process, etc. .

Therefore, in terms of genre, “War and Peace” goes beyond just a historical novel.

Like a family novel

On the other hand, one can include "War and Peace" to a family novel: Tolstoy traces the fates of several generations of noble families (Rostov, Bolkonsky, Bezukhov, Kuragin). But the fates of these people are inextricably linked with large-scale historical events in Russia. In addition to these heroes, there are a huge number of characters in War and Peace who are not directly related to the fate of the heroes.

Appearance of images on the pages of the novel:

• merchant Ferapontov, a Moscow lady who left Moscow “with a vague consciousness that she was not Bonaparte’s servant,”
• militias who put on clean shirts in front of Borodin,
• soldier of the Raevsky battery,
• partisans Denisov and many others

takes the novel beyond the family genre.

Like a social novel

"War and Peace" can be called social novel. Tolstoy is concerned with issues related to the structure of society.

The writer shows his ambiguous attitude towards the nobility in the description of the St. Petersburg and Moscow nobility, their attitude, for example, to the War of 1812. No less important for the author are the relations between nobles and serfs. These relationships are ambiguous, and Tolstoy cannot help but talk about this (peasant partisan detachments and the behavior of Bogucharov’s peasants). In this regard, we can say that the writer’s novel does not fit into this genre framework.

Like a philosophical novel

Leo Tolstoy is known not only as a writer, but also as a philosopher. Many pages of the work are devoted to universal philosophical problems. Tolstoy consciously introduces his philosophical reflections into the novel; they are important to him in connection with the historical events that he describes. First of all, these are the writer’s arguments about the role of the individual in history and the patterns of historical events. The writer's views can be called fatalistic: he argues that it is not the behavior and will of historical figures that determine the course of historical events. Historical events are made up of the actions and wills of many people. For a writer, Napoleon seems funny,

“like a child riding in a carriage, pulling the fringe and thinking that he is driving the carriage.”

And great is Kutuzov, who understands the spirit of the events taking place and does what needs to be done in a specific situation.

Tolstoy's thoughts on war are noteworthy. As a humanist, he rejects war as a way to resolve conflicts, war is disgusting, it is similar to hunting (no wonder Nikolai Rostov, running away from the French, feels like a hare being hunted by hunters), Andrei Bolkonsky speaks to Pierre about the anti-human essence of war before the Battle of Borodino. The writer sees the reasons for the Russian victory over the French in the spirit of patriotism, which gripped the entire nation and helped stop the invasion.

Like a psychological novel

Tolstoy is a master and psychological prose. In-depth psychologism and mastery of the subtlest movements of the human soul are an undoubted quality of a writer.

From this point of view, “War and Peace” can be classified as a psychological novel. It is not enough for Tolstoy to show the characters of people in action; he needs to explain the psychology of their behavior, to reveal the internal reasons for their actions. This is the psychologism of Tolstoy's prose.

All of these features allow scientists to define the genre of “War and Peace” like an epic novel.

The large-scale nature of the events described, the global nature of the problems, the huge number of characters, the social, philosophical, and moral aspects make this novel a unique work in terms of genre.

War and Peace. Genre features, history of creation

In 1862, Tolstoy married and took his wife from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana, where the order of his life was established for decades.

Tolstoy began writing “War and Peace” directly at the end of 1863, having completed work on the story “Cossacks”. In 1869 the novel was written; published in the thick magazine M.N. Katkov "Russian Bulletin". The basis of the novel is historical military events, artistically translated by the writer. Historians argue that the novel War and Peace is not only historically plausible, but also historically valid.

Genre features

“War and Peace” is a unique genre phenomenon (the work contains more than 600 characters, of which 200 are historical figures, countless everyday scenes, 20 battles). Tolstoy understood perfectly well that his work did not fit into any of the genre canons. In the article “A few words about the book “War and Peace”” (1868), Tolstoy wrote: “This is not a novel, still less a poem, even less a historical chronicle.” He immediately added: “Starting from Gogol’s “Dead Souls” to Dostoevsky’s “House of the Dead,” in the new period of Russian literature there is not a single outstanding prose work of art that would fully fit into the form of a novel, poem or story.” Tolstoy is right in that Russian literature boldly experimented with genre form.

“War and Peace” has been assigned the genre definition of an epic novel, which reflects the combination of the characteristics of a novel and an epic in the work. Romannoe the beginning is associated with the depiction of the family life and private destinies of the heroes, their spiritual quest. But, according to Tolstoy, individual self-affirmation is disastrous for him. Only in unity with others, in interaction with “common life,” can one develop and improve. The main features of the epic: a large volume of work that creates a picture of the life of the nation at a historically turning point for it (1812), as well as its comprehensiveness. But if the essence of the ancient epic, Homer’s Iliad, for example, is the primacy of the general over the individual, then in Tolstoy’s epic “common life” does not suppress the individual principle, but is in organic interaction with it.

It is no coincidence that the water globe-globe that Pierre Bezukhov sees in a dream is called an analogue model of the genre and the artistic world of the epic novel as a whole. A living globe consisting of individual drops flowing into each other. Pierre Bezukhov is the first Tolstoy hero who embodied in its entirety that idea of ​​​​Man, which was formulated by Tolstoy only in the last years of his life, but which was formed in him starting from his first literary experiments: “Man is Everything” and “part of Everything.”

The same images are repeated in Petya Rostov’s dream, when he, falling asleep, hears a “harmonious choir of music”: “Each instrument, sometimes similar to a violin, sometimes like trumpets - but better and cleaner than violins and trumpets - each instrument played its own and , not yet finishing the tune, merged with another, which began almost the same way, and with a third, and with a fourth, and they all merged into one and scattered again, and again merged, now into the solemn church, now into the brightly brilliant and victorious.

Unlike the ancient epic, Tolstoy's epic novel depicts not only the spiritual movement of the heroes, but also their involvement in the continuous and endless stream of life. In "War and Peace" there are no beginnings and endings of action in the usual sense. The scene that opens the novel in Anna Scherer’s salon, strictly speaking, does not “ties up” anything in the action, but immediately introduces the heroes and readers into the movement of history - from the Great French Revolution to the “immediate”. The entire aesthetics of the book is subject to one law: “True life is always only in the present.”

In the second part of the epilogue, Tolstoy sets out his concept of the philosophy of history:

1. history is made by the masses themselves;

2. people make history individually, not together;

3. people make history unconsciously.

In the novel there is an antithesis between Napoleon and Kutuzov. Tolstoy draws a portrait of Napoleon somewhat reduced. Napoleon plays in everything; he is an actor.

Kutuzov does not consider himself the demiurge of history. It's simple everywhere. Tolstoy reduces his external greatness, but emphasizes his internal activity. Kutuzov is the external embodiment of popular thought.

“War and Peace” is the legendary epic novel by L.N. Tolstoy, who laid the foundation for a new genre of prose in world literature. The lines of the great work were created under the influence of history, philosophy and social disciplines, which the great writer thoroughly studied, since historical works require the most accurate information. Having studied many documents, Tolstoy covered historical events with maximum accuracy, confirming the information with memoirs of eyewitnesses of the great era.

Prerequisites for writing the novel War and Peace

The idea of ​​writing a novel arose as a result of impressions from a meeting with the Decembrist S. Volkonsky, who told Tolstoy about life in exile in the Siberian expanses. It was 1856. A separate chapter called “Decembrists” fully conveyed the spirit of the hero, his principles and political beliefs.

After some time, the author decides to return to the depths of history and highlight the events not only of 1825, but also the beginning of the formation of the Decembrist movement and their ideology. Covering the events of 1812, Tolstoy studies a lot of historical materials of that era - the records of V.A. Perovsky, S. Zhikharev, A.P. Ermolov, letters from General F.P. Uvarova, maids of honor M.A. Volkova, as well as a number of materials from Russian and French historians. An equally important role in the creation of the novel was played by the authentic battle plans, orders and instructions of the high ranks of the imperial palace during the War of 1812.

But the writer does not stop there either, returning to the historical events of the early 19th century. The novel features historical figures Napoleon and Alexander I, thereby complicating the structure and genre of the great work.

The main theme of the epic War and Peace

This ingenious historical work, which took about 6 years to write, represents the incredibly truthful mood of the Russian people, their psychology and worldview during the time of the imperial battles. The lines of the novel are imbued with the morality and individuality of each of the characters, of which there are more than 500 in the novel. The whole picture of the work lies in the ingenious reproduction of artistic images of representatives of all walks of life, from the emperor to the ordinary soldier. An incredible impression is made by the scenes where the author conveys both the high motives of the heroes and the base ones, thereby pointing to the life of a Russian person in its various manifestations.

Over the years, under the influence of literary critics, Tolstoy made some changes to some parts of the work - he reduced the number of volumes to 4, transferred some of the thoughts to the epilogue, and made some stylistic changes. In 1868, a work appeared in which the author sets out some of the details of writing the novel, sheds light on some details of the style and genre of writing, as well as the characteristics of the main characters.

Thanks to the restless and talented personality that was Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, the world saw a great book about self-improvement, which was, is and will be relevant among a huge number of readers of all times and peoples. Here anyone will find answers to life’s most difficult questions, drawing on wisdom, philosophy and the brilliant historical experience of the Russian people.