Tolstoy On War

This book brings together a distinguished group of scholars in essays that focus on the wartime sections of War and Peace. Approaching the novel from different disciplines, they wrestle with the book's great themes.

Rick McPeak is Professor and Head of the Department of Foreign Languages at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Donna Tussing Orwin is Professor of Russian Literature and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880.

McPeak and Orwin bring together twelve essays on Tolstoy's War and Peace to mark the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the Battle of Borodino. Each chapter in some way touches on at least one the novel's most prevalent contradictions (e.g., war and peace; freedom and determinism; fiction and nonfiction), spanning the disciplines of literary criticism, history, and philosophy.... The volume has thematic consistency and a wide disciplinary appeal, bringing history and literary criticism together in a study of a classic of world literature.

Kathleen Parthé:

Tolstoy on War offers readers the results of an international conference held in April 2010 at the United States Military Academy at West Point.. The audience consisted primarily of cadets who had studied the novel and who had already 'wrestled with [Tolstoi's] take on their deadly, idealistic profession' (2)..In all, the editors have done an excellent job, providing introductory and concluding comments that frame the dozen essays, while contributing their own original research.