external text
War and Peace
also: Война и мир
Leo Tolstoy's novel (serialized/published 1865-1869), which Chekhov reports rereading every night with undiminished curiosity; he praises the naturalness of its ordinary characters -- Pierre, Prince Andrei, Nikolai Rostov -- while objecting that the scenes involving Napoleon are strained and rigged to make him seem stupider than he was, and separately faults the novel's account of Prince Andrei's gangrenous wound as a symptom of the era's "wretched medicine."
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 26 October 1891. Moscow. §7 "War and Peace"
Tolstoy's novel, which Chekhov reports rereading every night "with such curiosity and such naive astonishment, as if you'd never read it before" -- one of his clearest and most quoted statements on Tolstoy, praising the novel's ordinary characters while objecting specifically to its handling of Napoleon as tendentious and unnatural.