On an unusual reading of Tolstoy novel 'War and Peace'

Abstract

The paper investigates Tolstoy's War and Peace in the context of the author's statement that he was going to write a novel about a great people's war. As a novel of space and time, War and Peace is also a 'modern times epic', and as such, it requires a host of actors. Their number of characters is unusually large in Tolstoy's work, but, on balance, does not suit his original idea to deal with a 'people's war'. Namely, in his novel, the war is actually waged by the members of his own social stratum. When characters in the novel are displayed by social classes, their numeral distribution points to the fact that common people are poorly represented. The distribution of characters was also investigated according to the model presented in Barthes' An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.

Keywords

• Tolstoy
• War and Peace
• character
• numeral distribution
• social class
• social stratum