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A Tale of Two Cities

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A Tale of Two Cities
Tales serial.jpg
Cover of serial Vol. V, 1859
 
Author
Charles Dickens
Illustrator
Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz)
Cover artist
Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz)
Country
United Kingdom
Language
English
Genre
Historical novel
Published
1859[1]
Publisher
London: Chapman & Hall
Preceded by
Little Dorrit (1855–7)
Followed by
Great Expectations (1860-1)
A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralised by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same period. It follows the lives of several characters through these events. A Tale of Two Cities was published in weekly installments from April 1859 to November 1859 in Dickens's new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. All but three of Dickens's previous novels had appeared only as monthly installments. With sales of about 200 million copies, A Tale of Two Cities is the biggest selling novel in history.[2]


Contents  [hide]
1 Synopsis 1.1 Book the First: Recalled to Life
1.2 Book the Second: The Golden Thread
1.3 Book the Third: The Track of a Storm
2 Analysis 2.1 Language
2.2 Humour
3 Themes 3.1 Resurrection
3.2 Water
3.3 Darkness and light
3.4 Social justice
4 Relation to Dickens's personal life
5 Setting
6 Characters
7 Sources
8 Adaptations 8.1 Films
8.2 Radio
8.3 Television
8.4 Stage productions
8.5 Stage musicals
8.6 Opera
9 Notes
10 Works cited
11 Further reading
12 External links

Synopsis[edit]
Book the First: Recalled to Life[edit]

 

 Dickens' Book the First makes an early reference to the 1766 torture and execution of the Chevalier François-Jean Lefebvre de La Barre in Abbeville, France.
Dickens's famous opening sentence introduces the universal approach of the book, the French Revolution, and the drama depicted within:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.[3]
In 1775, a man flags down the nightly mail-coach on its route from London to Dover. The man is Jerry Cruncher, an employee of Tellson's Bank in London; he carries a message for Jarvis Lorry, a passenger and one of the bank's managers. Mr. Lorry sends Jerry back to deliver a cryptic response to the bank: "Recalled to Life." The message refers to Alexandre Manette, a French physician who has been released from the Bastille after an 18-year imprisonment. Once Mr. Lorry arrives in Dover, he meets with Dr. Manette's daughter Lucie and her governess, Miss Pross. Lucie has believed her father to be dead, and faints at the news that he is alive; Mr. Lorry takes her to France to reunite with him.
In the Paris neighbourhood of Saint Antoine, Dr. Manette has been given lodgings by Ernest and Therese Defarge, owners of a wine shop. Mr. Lorry and Lucie find him in a small garret, where he spends much of his time making shoes - a skill he learned in prison, which he uses to distract himself from his thoughts, and which has become an obsession for him. He does not recognise Lucie at first, but does eventually see the resemblance to her mother through her blue eyes and long golden hair, a strand of which he found on his sleeve when he was imprisoned. Mr. Lorry and Lucie take him back to England.
Book the Second: The Golden Thread[edit]
"The Golden Thread" redirects here. For the legal judgement, see Golden thread (law).
In 1780, French émigré Charles Darnay is on trial for treason against the British Crown. The key witnesses against him are two British spies, John Barsad and Roger Cly, who claim that Darnay gave information about British troops in North America to the French. Barsad states that he would recognize Darnay anywhere, at which point Darnay's defence counsel, Stryver, directs attention to Sydney Carton, a barrister present in the courtroom who looks almost identical to him. With Barsad's eyewitness testimony now discredited, Darnay is acquitted.
In Paris, the despised Marquis St. Evrémonde orders his carriage driven recklessly fast through the crowded streets, hitting and killing the child of a peasant, Gaspard. The Marquis throws a coin to Gaspard to compensate him for his loss, and Defarge comforts him, having observed the incident. As the Marquis's coach drives off, the coin is flung back into his coach by an unknown hand, enraging the Marquis.
Arriving at his château, the Marquis meets with his nephew and heir, Darnay. (Out of disgust with his family, Darnay shed his real surname and adopted an Anglicised version of his mother's maiden name, D'Aulnais.[4]) The following scene demonstrates the Marquis' thoughts:

"Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend," observed the Marquis, "will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof," looking up to it, "shuts out the sky."[5]
That night, Gaspard, who followed the Marquis to his château by riding on the underside of the carriage, stabs and kills the Marquis in his sleep. He leaves a note on the knife saying, "Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from JACQUES."[6] After nearly a year on the run, he is caught and hanged above the village fountain.
In London, Darnay gets Dr. Manette's permission to wed Lucie; but Carton confesses his love to Lucie as well. Knowing she will not love him in return, Carton promises to "embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you".[7] Stryver, the barrister who defended Darnay and with whom Carton has a working relationship, considers proposing marriage to Lucie, but Mr. Lorry talks him out of the idea.
On the morning of the marriage, Darnay reveals his real name and family lineage to Dr. Manette, a detail he had been asked to withhold until that day. In consequence, Dr. Manette reverts to his obsessive shoemaking after the couple leave for their honeymoon. He returns to sanity before their return, and the whole incident is kept secret from Lucie. Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross destroy the shoemaking bench and tools, which Dr. Manette had brought with him from Paris.
As time passes in England, Lucie and Charles begin to raise a family, a son (who dies in childhood) and a daughter, little Lucie. Mr. Lorry finds a second home and a sort of family with the Darnays. Stryver marries a rich widow with three children and becomes even more insufferable as his ambitions begin to be realised. Carton, even though he seldom visits, is accepted as a close friend of the family and becomes a special favourite of little Lucie.
In July 1789, the Defarges help to lead the storming of the Bastille, a symbol of royal tyranny. Defarge enters Dr. Manette's former cell, "One Hundred and Five, North Tower,",[8] and searches it thoroughly. Representatives of the aristocracy are dragged from their homes and publicly executed, and the St. Evrémonde château is burned to the ground.
In 1792, Mr. Lorry decides to travel to Paris to collect important documents from the Tellson's branch in that city and bring them to London for safekeeping against the chaos of the French Revolution. Darnay intercepts a letter written by Gabelle, one of his uncle's servants who has been imprisoned by the revolutionaries, pleading for the Marquis to help secure his release. Without telling his family or revealing his position as the new Marquis, Darnay sets out for Paris.
Book the Third: The Track of a Storm[edit]

 

 "The Sea Rises", an illustration for Book 2, Chapter 21 by "Phiz"
Shortly after Darnay arrives in Paris, he is denounced for being an emigrated aristocrat from France and jailed in La Force Prison.[9] Dr. Manette, Lucie, little Lucie, Jerry, and Miss Pross travel to Paris and meet Mr. Lorry to try to free Darnay. A year and three months pass, and Darnay is finally tried.
Dr. Manette, viewed as a hero for his imprisonment in the Bastille, testifies on Darnay's behalf at his trial. Darnay is released, only to be arrested again later that day. A new trial begins on the following day, under new charges brought by the Defarges and a third individual who is soon revealed as Dr. Manette. He had written an account of his imprisonment at the hands of Darnay's father and hidden it in his cell; Defarge found it while searching the cell during the storming of the Bastille.
While running errands with Jerry, Miss Pross is amazed to see her long-lost brother Solomon, but he does not want to be recognised in public. Carton suddenly steps forward from the shadows and identifies Solomon as Barsad, one of the spies who tried to frame Darnay for treason at his trial in 1780. Jerry remembers that he has seen Solomon with Cly, the other key witness at the trial, and that Cly had faked his death to escape England. By threatening to denounce Solomon to the revolutionary tribunal as a Briton, Carton blackmails him into helping with a plan.
At the tribunal, Defarge identifies Darnay as the nephew of the dead Marquis St. Evrémonde and reads Dr. Manette's letter. Defarge had learned Darnay's lineage from Solomon during the latter's visit to the wine shop several years earlier. The letter describes Dr. Manette's imprisonment at the hands of Darnay's father and uncle for trying to report their crimes against a peasant family. Darnay's uncle had become infatuated with a girl, whom he had kidnapped and raped; despite Dr. Manette's attempt to save her, she died. The uncle killed her husband by working him to death, and her father died from a heart attack on being informed of what had happened. Before he died defending the family honour, the brother of the raped peasant had hidden the last member of the family, his younger sister. The Evrémonde brothers imprisoned Dr. Manette after he refused their offer of a bribe to keep quiet. He concludes his letter by condemning the Evrémondes, "them and their descendants, to the last of their race."[10] Dr. Manette is horrified, but he is not allowed to retract his statement. Darnay is sent to the Conciergerie and sentenced to be guillotined the next day.
Carton wanders into the Defarges' wine shop, where he overhears Madame Defarge talking about her plans to have both Lucie and little Lucie condemned. Carton discovers that Madame Defarge was the surviving sister of the peasant family savaged by the Evrémondes.[11] At night, when Dr. Manette returns, shattered after spending the day in many failed attempts to save Darnay's life, he falls into an obsessive search for his shoemaking implements. Carton urges Lorry to flee Paris with Lucie, her father, and Little Lucie, asking them to leave as soon as he joins them in the coach.
Shortly before the executions are to begin, Solomon sneaks Carton into the prison for a visit with Darnay. The two men trade clothes, and Carton drugs Darnay and has Solomon carry him out. Carton has decided to be executed in his place, and has given his own identification papers to Mr. Lorry to present on Darnay's behalf. Following Carton's earlier instructions, the family and Mr. Lorry flee to England with the unconscious Darnay.
Meanwhile, Madame Defarge, armed with a dagger and pistol, goes to the Manette residence, hoping to apprehend Lucie and little Lucie and bring them in for execution. However, the family is already gone and Miss Pross stays behind to confront and delay Madame Defarge. As the two women struggle, Madame Defarge's pistol discharges, killing her and causing Miss Pross to go permanently deaf from noise and shock.

 

 The seamstress and Carton, an illustration for Book 3, Chapter 15 by John McLenan (1859)
The novel concludes with the guillotining of Carton. As he is waiting to board the tumbril, he is approached by a seamstress, also condemned to death, who mistakes him for Darnay (with whom she had been imprisoned earlier) but realises the truth once she sees him at close range. Awed by his unselfish courage and sacrifice, she asks to stay close to him and he agrees. Upon their arrival at the guillotine, Carton comforts her, telling her that their ends will be quick but that there is no Time or Trouble "in the better land where ... [they] will be mercifully sheltered", and she is able to meet her death in peace. Carton's unspoken last thoughts are prophetic:[12]
I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance [a lieutenant of Madame Defarge], the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man [Mr. Lorry], so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward.I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both.I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
Analysis[edit]


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A Tale of Two Cities is one of only two works of historical fiction by Charles Dickens (the second being Barnaby Rudge ).[13] It has fewer characters and sub-plots than a typical Dickens novel.[citation needed] Dickens relies much on The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle as a historical source.[14] Dickens wrote in his Preface to Tale that "no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book".[citation needed]
The 45-chapter novel was published in 31 weekly instalments in Dickens's new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. From April 1859 to November 1859, Dickens also republished the chapters as eight monthly sections in green covers. All but three of Dickens's previous novels had appeared only as monthly instalments. The first weekly instalment of A Tale of Two Cities ran in the first issue of All the Year Round on 30 April 1859. The last ran thirty weeks later, on 26 November.[1]
Language[edit]
Dickens uses literal translations of French idioms for characters who cannot speak English, such as "What the devil do you do in that galley there?!!" and "Where is my wife? ---Here you see me."[citation needed] The Penguin Classics edition of the novel notes that "Not all readers have regarded the experiment as a success."[citation needed]
Humour[edit]
A Tale of Two Cities stands out from most of Dickens's other novels as the one containing the least humour.[citation needed] That is not surprising, as the historical context and focus of the novel, the French Reign of Terror, might be too bleak to allow for the more humorous characters Dickens is often known for.[citation needed] Still, Dickens, in his usual manner, manages to find the opportunity to make a number of wry comments about various aspects of the era and of the bleaker side of people's behaviour. If a humorous character is to be found anywhere in the novel, it would likely be Jerry Cruncher; however, his occupation as a "resurrectionist" (grave-robber) and his abuse of his wife casts a more sinister light on his character.[citation needed]
Themes[edit]
Resurrection[edit]
In Dickens's England, resurrection always sat firmly in a Christian context.[citation needed] Most broadly, Sydney Carton is resurrected in spirit at the novel's close (even as he, paradoxically, gives up his physical life to save Darnay's—just as Christ died for the sins of the world.) More concretely, "Book the First" deals with the rebirth of Dr. Manette from the living death of his incarceration.
Resurrection appears for the first time when Mr. Lorry replies to the message carried by Jerry Cruncher with the words "Recalled to Life". Resurrection also appears during Mr. Lorry's coach ride to Dover, as he constantly ponders a hypothetical conversation with Dr. Manette: ("Buried how long?" "Almost eighteen years." ... "You know that you are recalled to life?" "They tell me so.") He believes he is helping with Dr. Manette's revival and imagines himself "digging" up Dr. Manette from his grave.
Resurrection is a major theme in the novel.[citation needed] In Jarvis Lorry's thoughts of Dr. Manette, resurrection is first spotted as a theme. It is also the last theme: Carton's sacrifice. Dickens originally wanted to call the entire novel Recalled to Life. (This instead became the title of the first of the novel's three "books".)[citation needed]
Jerry is also part of the recurring theme: he himself is involved in death and resurrection in ways the reader does not yet know. The first piece of foreshadowing comes in his remark to himself: "You'd be in a blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!" The black humour of this statement becomes obvious only much later on. Five years later, one cloudy and very dark night (in June 1780[15]), Mr. Lorry reawakens the reader's interest in the mystery by telling Jerry it is "Almost a night ... to bring the dead out of their graves". Jerry responds firmly that he has never seen the night do that.[16]
It turns out that Jerry Cruncher's involvement with the theme of resurrection is that he is what the Victorians called a "Resurrection Man", one who (illegally) digs up dead bodies to sell to medical men (there was no legal way to procure cadavers for study at that time).[citation needed]
The opposite of resurrection is of course death.[citation needed] Death and resurrection appear often in the novel. Dickens is angered that in France and England, courts hand out death sentences for insignificant crimes.[citation needed] In France, peasants are even put to death without any trial, at the whim of a noble.[citation needed] The Marquis tells Darnay with pleasure that "[I]n the next room (my bedroom), one fellow ... was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—his daughter!"[17]
Interestingly, the demolition of Dr. Manette's shoe-making workbench by Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry is described as "the burning of the body".[18] It seems clear that this is a rare case where death or destruction (the opposite of resurrection) has a positive connotation, since the "burning" helps liberate the doctor from the memory of his long imprisonment.[citation needed] But Dickens's description of this kind and healing act is strikingly odd:

 

 "The Accomplices", an illustration for Book 2, Chapter 19 by "Phiz"
So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.[19]
Sydney Carton's martyrdom atones for all his past wrongdoings. He even finds God during the last few days of his life, repeating Christ's soothing words, "I am the resurrection and the life".[20] Resurrection is the dominant theme of the last part of the novel.[citation needed] Darnay is rescued at the last moment and recalled to life; Carton chooses death and resurrection to a life better than that which he has ever known: "it was the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there ... he looked sublime and prophetic".
In the broadest sense, at the end of the novel Dickens foresees a resurrected social order in France, rising from the ashes of the old one.[citation needed]
Water[edit]
Hans Biedermann writes that water "is the fundamental symbol of all the energy of the unconscious—an energy that can be dangerous when it overflows its proper limits (a frequent dream sequence)."[21] This symbolism suits Dickens's novel; in A Tale of Two Cities, the frequent images of water stand for the building anger of the peasant mob, an anger that Dickens sympathises with to a point, but ultimately finds irrational and even animalistic.[citation needed]
Early in the book, Dickens suggests this when he writes, "[T]he sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction."[22] The sea here represents the coming mob of revolutionaries. After Gaspard murders the Marquis, he is "hanged there forty feet high—and is left hanging, poisoning the water."[23] The poisoning of the well represents the bitter impact of Gaspard's execution on the collective feeling of the peasants.
After Gaspard's death, the storming of the Bastille is led (from the St. Antoine neighbourhood, at least) by the Defarges; "As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled around Defarge's wine shop, and every human drop in the cauldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex..."[24] The crowd is envisioned as a sea. "With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into a detested word [the word Bastille], the living sea rose, wave upon wave, depth upon depth, and overflowed the city..."[24]
Darnay's jailer is described as "unwholesomely bloated in both face and person, as to look like a man who had been drowned and filled with water." Later, during the Reign of Terror, the revolution had grown "so much more wicked and distracted ... that the rivers of the South were encumbered with bodies of the violently drowned by night..." Later a crowd is "swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets ... the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled them away."
During the fight with Miss Pross, Madame Defarge clings to her with "more than the hold of a drowning woman". Commentators on the novel have noted the irony that Madame Defarge is killed by her own gun, and perhaps Dickens means by the above quote to suggest that such vicious vengefulness as Madame Defarge's will eventually destroy even its perpetrators.
So many read the novel in a Freudian light, as exalting the (British) superego over the (French) id.[citation needed] Yet in Carton's last walk, he watches an eddy that "turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it onto the sea"—his fulfilment, while masochistic and superego-driven, is nonetheless an ecstatic union with the subconscious.
Darkness and light[edit]
As is common in English literature,[citation needed] good and evil are symbolised by light and darkness. Lucie Manette is the light, as represented literally by her name; and Madame Defarge is darkness. Darkness represents uncertainty, fear and peril. It is dark when Mr. Lorry rides to Dover; it is dark in the prisons; dark shadows follow Madame Defarge; dark, gloomy doldrums disturb Dr. Manette; his capture and captivity are shrouded in darkness; the Marquis's estate is burned in the dark of night; Jerry Cruncher raids graves in the darkness; Charles's second arrest also occurs at night. Both Lucie and Mr. Lorry feel the dark threat that is Madame Defarge. "That dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me," remarks Lucie. Although Mr. Lorry tries to comfort her, "the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself". Madame Defarge is "like a shadow over the white road", the snow symbolising purity and Madame Defarge's darkness corruption. Dickens also compares the dark colour of blood to the pure white snow: the blood takes on the shade of the crimes of its shedders.
Social justice[edit]
Charles Dickens was a champion of the maltreated poor because of his terrible experience when he was forced to work in a factory as a child.[citation needed] (His father, John Dickens, continually lived beyond his means and eventually went to debtors' prison. Charles was forced to leave school and began working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, earning six shillings a week.)[citation needed] His sympathies, however, lie with the revolutionaries only up to a point; he condemns the mob madness which soon sets in. When mad men and women massacre eleven hundred detainees in one night and hustle back to sharpen their weapons on the grindstone, they display "eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun".[citation needed]
The reader is shown that the poor are brutalised in France and England alike.[citation needed] As crime proliferates, the executioner in England is "stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now hanging housebreaker ... now burning people in the hand" or hanging a broke man for stealing sixpence. In France, a boy is sentenced to have his hands removed and be burned alive, only because he did not kneel down in the rain before a parade of monks passing some fifty yards away. At the lavish residence of Monseigneur, we find "brazen ecclesiastics of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives ... Military officers destitute of military knowledge ... [and] Doctors who made great fortunes ... for imaginary disorders".[25] (This incident is fictional, but is based on a true story related by Voltaire in a famous pamphlet, An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de la Barre.)[26]
So riled is Dickens at the brutality of English law that he depicts some of its punishments with sarcasm: "the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action". He faults the law for not seeking reform: "Whatever is, is right" is the dictum of the Old Bailey.[27] The gruesome portrayal of quartering highlights its atrocity.
Dickens wants his readers to be careful that the same revolution that so damaged France will not happen in Britain, which (at least at the beginning of the book)[28] is shown to be nearly as unjust as France. But his warning is addressed not to the British lower classes, but to the aristocracy. He repeatedly uses the metaphor of sowing and reaping; if the aristocracy continues to plant the seeds of a revolution through behaving unjustly, they can be certain of harvesting that revolution in time. The lower classes do not have any agency in this metaphor: they simply react to the behaviour of the aristocracy. In this sense it can be said that while Dickens sympathises with the poor, he identifies with the rich: they are the book's audience, its "us" and not its "them". "Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind".[29]
With the people starving and begging the Marquis for food, his uncharitable response is to let the people eat grass; the people are left with nothing but onions to eat and are forced to starve while the nobles are living lavishly upon the people's backs. Every time the nobles refer to the life of the peasants it is only to destroy or humiliate the poor.[citation needed]
Relation to Dickens's personal life[edit]
Some have argued that in A Tale of Two Cities Dickens reflects on his recently begun affair with eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan, which was possibly platonic but certainly romantic. Lucie Manette has been noted as resembling Ternan physically.[30]
After starring in a play by Wilkie Collins titled The Frozen Deep, Dickens was first inspired to write Tale. In the play, Dickens played the part of a man who sacrifices his own life so that his rival may have the woman they both love; the love triangle in the play became the basis for the relationships between Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, and Sydney Carton in Tale.[31]
Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay may also bear importantly on Dickens's personal life. The plot hinges on the near-perfect resemblance between Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay; the two look so alike that Carton twice saves Darnay through the inability of others to tell them apart. Carton is Darnay made bad. Carton suggests as much:

'Do you particularly like the man [Darnay]?' he muttered, at his own image [which he is regarding in a mirror]; 'why should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have made in yourself! A good reason for talking to a man, that he shows you what you have fallen away from and what you might have been! Change places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes [belonging to Lucie Manette] as he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.'[32]
Many have felt that Carton and Darnay are doppelgängers, which Eric Rabkin defines as a pair "of characters that together, represent one psychological persona in the narrative".[33] If so, they would prefigure such works as Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Darnay is worthy and respectable but dull (at least to most modern readers), Carton disreputable but magnetic.[citation needed]
One can only suspect whose psychological persona it is that Carton and Darnay together embody (if they do), but it is often thought to be the psyche of Dickens himself. Dickens might have been quite aware that between them, Carton and Darnay shared his own initials.[34] However, he denied it when asked.
Setting[edit]
It is widely believed that the house at 1 Greek Street, now The House of St Barnabas, forms the basis for Dr Manette and Lucie's London house.[citation needed]
"In a building at the back, attainable by a courtyard where a plane tree rustled its green leaves, church organs claimed to be made, and likewise gold to be beaten by some mysterious giant who had a golden arm starting out of the wall... as if he had beaten himself precious."[35]
The 'golden arm' now resides at The Dickens House Museum but you can see a modern replica sticking out of the wall near the Pillars of Hercules pub at the western end of Manette Street (formerly Rose Street).[citation needed]
Characters[edit]

 

 Illustration from a serialised edition of the story, showing three tricoteuses knitting, with the Vengeance standing in the center.
Many of Dickens's characters are "flat", not "round", in the novelist E. M. Forster's famous terms, meaning roughly that they have only one mood.[36] For example, the Marquis is unremittingly wicked and relishes being so; Lucie is perfectly loving and supportive. (As a corollary, Dickens often gives these characters verbal tics or visual quirks that he mentions over and over, such as the dints in the nose of the Marquis.) Forster believed that Dickens never truly created rounded characters.
Sydney Carton – A quick-minded but depressed English barrister. Though he is portrayed in the beginning as a cynical alcoholic, he ultimately becomes a selfless hero.
Lucie Manette – An ideal pre-Victorian lady, perfect in every way. She is loved by both Carton and Charles Darnay (whom she marries), and is the daughter of Dr. Manette. She is the "golden thread" after whom Book the Second is named, so called because she holds her father's and her family's lives together (and because of her blond hair like her mother's). She also ties nearly every character in the book together.[37]
Charles Darnay – A young French noble of the Evrémonde family. In disgust at the cruelty of his family to the French peasantry, he took on the name "Darnay" (after his mother's maiden name, D'Aulnais) and left France for England.[38] He exhibits an admirable honesty in his decision to reveal to Doctor Manette his true identity as a member of the infamous Evrémonde family. So, too, does he prove his courage in his decision to return to Paris at great personal risk to save the imprisoned Gabelle.
Dr. Alexandre Manette – Lucie's father, kept as a prisoner in the Bastille for eighteen years. Dr. Manette dies 12 years after Sydney Carton.
Monsieur Ernest Defarge – The owner of a French wine shop and leader of the Jacquerie; husband of Madame Defarge; servant to Dr. Manette as a youth. One of the key revolutionary leaders, he embraces the revolution as a noble cause, unlike many other revolutionaries.
Madame Therese Defarge – A vengeful female revolutionary, arguably the novel's antagonist.
Jacques One, Two, and Three – Revolutionary compatriots of Ernest Defarge. Jacques Three is especially bloodthirsty and serves as a juryman on the Revolutionary Tribunals.
The Vengeance – A companion of Madame Defarge referred to as her "shadow" and lieutenant, a member of the sisterhood of women revolutionaries in Saint Antoine, and revolutionary zealot. (Many Frenchmen and women did change their names to show their enthusiasm for the Revolution[39])
The Mender of Roads – A peasant who later works as a woodsawyer and assists the Defarges.
Jarvis Lorry – An elderly manager at Tellson's Bank and a dear friend of Dr. Manette. He serves as a sort of trustee and guardian of the Manette family.
Miss Pross – Lucie Manette's governess since Lucie was ten years old. She is fiercely loyal to Lucie and to England.
Marquis St. Evrémonde[40] – The cruel uncle of Charles Darnay. Also called "The Younger." He inherited the title at "the Elder"'s death.
The Elder and his wife – The twin brother of the Marquis St. Evrémonde, referred to as "the Elder" (he held the title of Marquis St. Evrémonde at the time of Dr. Manette's arrest), and his wife, who fears him. They are the parents of Charles Darnay.
John Barsad (real name Solomon Pross) – An informer for Britain, and later employee of the Marquis St. Evremonde. He later becomes a spy for revolutionary France (at which point he must hide his British identity). He is the long-lost brother of Miss Pross.
Roger Cly – Another spy, Barsad's collaborator.
Jerry Cruncher – Porter and messenger for Tellson's Bank and secret "Resurrection Man" (body-snatcher). His first name is short for either Jeremiah or Gerald; the latter name shares a meaning with the name of Jarvis Lorry.
Young Jerry Cruncher – Son of Jerry and Mrs. Cruncher. Young Jerry often follows his father around to his father's odd jobs, and at one point in the story, follows his father at night and discovers that his father is a resurrection man. Young Jerry looks up to his father as a role model, and aspires to become a resurrection man himself when he grows up.
Mrs. Cruncher – Wife of Jerry Cruncher. She is a very religious woman, but her husband, somewhat paranoid, claims she is praying against him, and that is why he does not often succeed at work. She is often abused verbally, and, almost as often, physically, by Jerry, but at the end of the story, he appears to feel a bit guilty about this.
Mr. Stryver – An arrogant and ambitious barrister, senior to Sydney Carton.[41] There is a frequent misperception that Stryver's full name is "C. J. Stryver", but this is very unlikely. The mistake comes from a line in Book 2, Chapter 12: "After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer case could be."[42] The initials C. J. almost certainly refer to a legal title (probably "chief justice"); Stryver is imagining that he is playing every role in a trial in which he attempts to browbeat Lucie Manette into marrying him.
The Seamstress – A young woman caught up in The Terror. She precedes Sydney Carton, who comforts her, to the guillotine. She and Barsad are the only people in Paris who know Carton has taken Darnay's place.
Théophile Gabelle – Gabelle is "the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary, united"[43] for the tenants of the Marquis St. Evrémonde. Gabelle is imprisoned by the revolutionaries, and his beseeching letter brings Darnay to France. Gabelle is "named after the hated salt tax".[44]
Gaspard – Gaspard is the man whose son is run over by the Marquis. He then kills the Marquis and goes into hiding for a year. He eventually is found, arrested, and executed.
"Monseigneur" – The appellation "Monseigneur" is used to refer to both a specific aristocrat in the novel, and the general class of displaced aristocrats in England.
A peasant boy and his sister – Victims of the Marquis St. Evrémonde and his brother. They are revealed to be Madame Defarge's brother and sister.
Sources[edit]
While performing in The Frozen Deep, Dickens was given a play to read called The Dead Heart by Watts Phillips which had the historical setting, the basic storyline, and the climax that Dickens used in A Tale of Two Cities.[45] The play was produced while A Tale of Two Cities was being serialised in All the Year Round and led to talk of plagiarism.[46]
Other sources are History of the French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle;[14] Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton; The Castle Spector by Matthew Lewis; Travels in France by Arthur Young; and Tableau de Paris by Louis-Sébastien Mercier. Dickens also used material from an account of imprisonment during the Terror by Beaumarchais, and records of the trial of a French spy published in The Annual Register.[47]
Adaptations[edit]

 

Classic Comics issue #6
Films[edit]
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1911 silent film.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1917 silent film.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1922 silent film.
The Only Way, a 1927 silent British film directed by Herbert Wilcox.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1935 black-and-white MGM film starring Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone and Edna May Oliver. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1958 version, starring Dirk Bogarde, Dorothy Tutin, Christopher Lee, Leo McKern and Donald Pleasence.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1980 version for TV, starring Chris Sarandon, Peter Cushing, Alice Krige and Billie Whitelaw.
Radio[edit]
On 25 July 1938, The Mercury Theatre on the Air produced a radio adaptation starring Orson Welles. Welles also starred in a version broadcast on Lux Radio Theater on 26 March 1945.
In 1945, a portion of the novel was adapted to the syndicated programme The Weird Circle as "Dr. Manette's Manuscript."
In 1950, The BBC broadcast a radio adaptation by Terence Rattigan and John Gielgud of their unproduced 1935 stage play.
A half-hour version titled "Sydney Carton" was broadcast on 27 March 1954, on Theatre Royal hosted by and starring Laurence Olivier
In June 1989, BBC Radio 4 produced a seven-hour drama adapted for radio by Nick McCarty and directed by Ian Cotterell. This adaptation has been occasionally repeated by BBC Radio 7 (most recently in 2009).
In December 2011, as part of its special season on Charles Dickens' Bicentenerary,[48] BBC Radio 4 produced a new five-part adaptation for radio by Mike Walker with original music by Lennert Busch and directed by Jessica Dromgoole and Jeremy Mortimer[49] which won the 2012 Bronze Sony Radio Academy Award for Best Drama.[50]
Television[edit]
ABC produced a two part mini-series in 1953.[51]
The BBC produced an eight-part mini-series in 1957 starring Peter Wyngarde as "Sydney Carton", Edward de Souza as "Charles Darnay" and Wendy Hutchinson as "Lucie Manette".
The BBC produced a ten-part mini-series in 1965.
The BBC produced another eight-part mini-series in 1980 starring Paul Shelley as "Carton/Darnay", Sally Osborne as "Lucie Manette" and Nigel Stock as "Jarvis Lorry".
ITV Granada produced a two-part mini-series in 1989 starting James Wilby as "Sydney Carton", Xavier Deluc as "Charles Darnay" and Serena Gordon as "Lucie Manette". The production also aired on Masterpiece Theatre on the PBS in the United States.
Stage productions[edit]
Royal & Derngate Theatre produced an adaptation of Tale of Two Cities by Mike Poulton with original music by Rachel Portman, directed by James Dacre
Stage musicals[edit]


 This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2015)
A 1968 stage version, Two Cities, the Spectacular New Musical, with music by Jeff Wayne, lyrics by Jerry Wayne and starring Edward Woodward.
In 1997 Paul Nicholas commissioned an adaptation with music by David Pomeranz and book by Steven David Horwich and David Soames. Co-produced by Bill Kenwright, the show ran at the New Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham during their 1998 Christmas season with Paul Nicholas as Sydney Carton.
In 2008, Jill Santoriello wrote a new musical theatre adaption.
Opera[edit]
Arthur Benjamin's operatic version of the novel, subtitled Romantic Melodrama in six scenes, was premiered by the BBC on 17 April 1953, conducted by the composer; it received its stage premiere at Sadler's Wells on 22 July 1957, under the baton of Leon Lovett.[52]
Notes[edit]
1.^ Jump up to: a b "Facsimile of the original 1st publication of "A Tale of Two Cities" in All the year round". S4ulanguages.com. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
2.Jump up ^ Mitchell, David. (8 May 2010) "David Mitchell on Historical Fiction", The Telegraph: "Charles Dickens’ second stab at a historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities, has sold more than 200 million copies to date, making it the bestselling novel — in any genre — of all time...."
3.Jump up ^ Wikisource:A Tale of Two Cities/Book the First/Chapter I
4.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 191 (Book 2, Chapter 16).
5.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 128 (Book 2, Chapter 9). This statement (about the roof) is truer than the Marquis knows, and another example of foreshadowing: the Evrémonde château is burned down by revolting peasants in Book 2, Chapter 23.
6.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 134 (Book 2, Chapter 9)
7.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 159 (Book 2, Chapter 14)
8.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 330 (Book 3, Chapter 9)
9.Jump up ^ Emigration is about to be made illegal but is not yet. See Dickens 2003, p. 258 (Book 3, Chapter 1)
10.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 344 (Book 3, Chapter 10)
11.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, (Book 3, Chapter 12)
12.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 390 (Book 3, Chapter 15)
13.Jump up ^ "www.dickensfellowship.org, 'Dickens as a Fiction Writer'". Retrieved 2015-01-01.
14.^ Jump up to: a b Dickens, Charles (1970) [1859]. George Woodcock, ed. A tale of two cities. Illust. by Hablot L. Browne. Penguin Books. pp. 408, 410; Notes 30 and 41. ISBN 0140430547.
15.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. xxxix
16.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, pp. 107–108 (Book 2, Chapter 6)
17.Jump up ^ The Marquis emphasises his because Dickens is alluding to the (probably mythical) Droit du seigneur, under which any girl from the Marquis's land would belong to the Marquis rather than to her parents. Dickens 2003, p. 127 (Book 2, Chapter 9)
18.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 212 (Book 2, Chapter 19)
19.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 214 (Book 2, Chapter 19)
20.Jump up ^ John 11.25-6
21.Jump up ^ Biedermann 1994, p. 375
22.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 21 (Book 1, Chapter 4)
23.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 178 (Book 2, Chapter 15)
24.^ Jump up to: a b Dickens 2003, p. 223 (Book 2, Chapter 21)
25.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 110 (Book 2, Chapter 7)
26.Jump up ^ The Chevalier de la Barre was indeed executed for acts of impiety, including failure to pay homage to a procession of monks. These acts were attributed to him, it seems, by his mother's slighted lover. A synopsis of the story is given by Stanford University's Victorian Reading Project. See also Andrew Sanders, Companion to A Tale of Two Cities (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p.31; see also Voltaire, An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de la Barre (1766); translated by Simon Harvey, Treatise on Tolerance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
27.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 63 (Book 2, Chapter 2). Dickens is quoting Alexander Pope's Essay on Man of 1733.
28.Jump up ^ Ruth Glancy has argued that Dickens portrays France and England as nearly equivalent at the beginning of the novel, but that as the novel progresses, England comes to look better and better, climaxing in Miss Pross's pro-Britain speech at the end of the novel.
29.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 385 (Book 3, Chapter 15)
30.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. xxi
31.Jump up ^ "Context of A Tale of Two Cities". Retrieved 3 August 2009.
32.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 89 (Book 2, Chapter 4) p. 89
33.Jump up ^ Rabkin 2007, course booklet p. 48
34.Jump up ^ Schlicke 2008, p. 53
35.Jump up ^ A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
36.Jump up ^ "In their purest form [flat characters] ... are constructed round a single idea or quality. ... Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and caricatures, people whom we recognise the instant they re-enter, and yet achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow. Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad." Forster 1927, p. 67, 71–72
37.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 83 (Book 2, Chapter 4)
38.Jump up ^ After Dr. Manette's letter is read, Darnay says that "It was the always-vain endeavour to discharge my poor mother's trust, that first brought my fatal presence near you." (Dickens 2003, p. 347 [Book 3, Chapter 11].) Darnay seems to be referring to the time when his mother brought him, still a child, to her meeting with Dr. Manette in Book 3, Chapter 10. But some readers also feel that Darnay is explaining why he changed his name and travelled to England in the first place: to discharge his family's debt to Dr. Manette without fully revealing his identity. (See note to the Penguin Classics edition: Dickens 2003, p. 486.)
39.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 470
40.Jump up ^ The Marquis is sometimes referred to as "Monseigneur the Marquis St. Evrémonde." He is not so called in this article because the title "Monseigneur" applies to whoever among a group is of the highest status; thus, this title sometimes applies to the Marquis and other times does not.
41.Jump up ^ Stryver, like Carton, is a barrister and not a solicitor; Dickens 2003, p. xi
42.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 147
43.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 120 (Book 2, Chapter 8)
44.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 462
45.Jump up ^ Dickens by Peter Ackroyd; Harper Collins, 1990, p. 777
46.Jump up ^ Dickens by Peter Ackroyd; Harper Collins, 1990, p. 859
47.Jump up ^ Dickens by Peter Ackroyd; Harper Collins, 1990, p. 858-862
48.Jump up ^ "Dickens on Radio 4".
49.Jump up ^ Dromgoole, Jessica. "A Tale of Two Cities on BBC Radio 4. And a podcast too!".
50.Jump up ^ "Sony Radio Academy Award Winners". The Guardian. 15 May 2012. Retrieved 12 March 2014.
51.Jump up ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0504306/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_45
52.Jump up ^ "Benjamin, Arthur". Boosey & Hawkes. Retrieved 12 March 2014.
Works cited[edit]
A Tale of Two Cities Shmoop: Study Guides & Teacher Resources. Web. 12 Mar 2014.
Biedermann, Hans. Dictionary of Symbolism. New York: Meridian (1994) ISBN 978-0-452-01118-2
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Edited and with an introduction and notes by Richard Maxwell. London: Penguin Classics (2003) ISBN 978-0-14-143960-0
Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 5th ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press (1985) ISBN 0-19-866130-4
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel (1927). 2005 reprint: London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-144169-6
Orwell, George. "Charles Dickens". In A Collection of Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1946) ISBN 0-15-618600-4
Rabkin, Eric. Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind: Literature's Most Fantastic Works. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company (2007)
Schlicke, Paul. Coffee With Dickens. London: Duncan Baird Publishers (2008) ISBN 978-1-84483-608-6
A Tale of Two Cities: Character List SparkNotes: Today's Most Popular Study Guides. Web. 11 Apr 2011.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins (1990). ISBN 0-06-016602-9.
Further reading[edit]
Alleyn, Susanne. A Tale of Two Cities: A Reader's Companion. Albany, NY: Spyderwort Press (2014) ISBN 978-1496113672
Glancy, Ruth. Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge (2006) ISBN 978-0-415-28760-9
Sanders, Andrew. The Companion to A Tale of Two Cities. London: Unwin Hyman (1989) ISBN 978-0-04-800050-7 Out of print.
External links[edit]
 Wikisource has original text related to this article:
A Tale of Two Cities
 
 Wikiquote has quotations related to: A Tale of Two Cities
 Wikimedia Commons has media related to A Tale of Two Cities.
A Tale of Two Cities at Internet Archive.
A Tale of Two Cities at Project Gutenberg
A Tale of Two Cities – The original manuscript of the novel, held by the Victoria and Albert Museum (requires Adobe Flash).
'Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities', lecture by Dr. Tony Williams on the writing of the book, at Gresham College on 3 July 2007 (with video and audio files available for download, as well as the transcript).
Speaker Icon.svg A Tale of Two Cities public domain audiobook at LibriVox
Analysis of A Tale of Two Cities on Lit React


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A Tale of Two Cities

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 This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (February 2011)
A Tale of Two Cities
Tales serial.jpg
Cover of serial Vol. V, 1859
 
Author
Charles Dickens
Illustrator
Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz)
Cover artist
Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz)
Country
United Kingdom
Language
English
Genre
Historical novel
Published
1859[1]
Publisher
London: Chapman & Hall
Preceded by
Little Dorrit (1855–7)
Followed by
Great Expectations (1860-1)
A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralised by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same period. It follows the lives of several characters through these events. A Tale of Two Cities was published in weekly installments from April 1859 to November 1859 in Dickens's new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. All but three of Dickens's previous novels had appeared only as monthly installments. With sales of about 200 million copies, A Tale of Two Cities is the biggest selling novel in history.[2]


Contents  [hide]
1 Synopsis 1.1 Book the First: Recalled to Life
1.2 Book the Second: The Golden Thread
1.3 Book the Third: The Track of a Storm
2 Analysis 2.1 Language
2.2 Humour
3 Themes 3.1 Resurrection
3.2 Water
3.3 Darkness and light
3.4 Social justice
4 Relation to Dickens's personal life
5 Setting
6 Characters
7 Sources
8 Adaptations 8.1 Films
8.2 Radio
8.3 Television
8.4 Stage productions
8.5 Stage musicals
8.6 Opera
9 Notes
10 Works cited
11 Further reading
12 External links

Synopsis[edit]
Book the First: Recalled to Life[edit]

 

 Dickens' Book the First makes an early reference to the 1766 torture and execution of the Chevalier François-Jean Lefebvre de La Barre in Abbeville, France.
Dickens's famous opening sentence introduces the universal approach of the book, the French Revolution, and the drama depicted within:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.[3]
In 1775, a man flags down the nightly mail-coach on its route from London to Dover. The man is Jerry Cruncher, an employee of Tellson's Bank in London; he carries a message for Jarvis Lorry, a passenger and one of the bank's managers. Mr. Lorry sends Jerry back to deliver a cryptic response to the bank: "Recalled to Life." The message refers to Alexandre Manette, a French physician who has been released from the Bastille after an 18-year imprisonment. Once Mr. Lorry arrives in Dover, he meets with Dr. Manette's daughter Lucie and her governess, Miss Pross. Lucie has believed her father to be dead, and faints at the news that he is alive; Mr. Lorry takes her to France to reunite with him.
In the Paris neighbourhood of Saint Antoine, Dr. Manette has been given lodgings by Ernest and Therese Defarge, owners of a wine shop. Mr. Lorry and Lucie find him in a small garret, where he spends much of his time making shoes - a skill he learned in prison, which he uses to distract himself from his thoughts, and which has become an obsession for him. He does not recognise Lucie at first, but does eventually see the resemblance to her mother through her blue eyes and long golden hair, a strand of which he found on his sleeve when he was imprisoned. Mr. Lorry and Lucie take him back to England.
Book the Second: The Golden Thread[edit]
"The Golden Thread" redirects here. For the legal judgement, see Golden thread (law).
In 1780, French émigré Charles Darnay is on trial for treason against the British Crown. The key witnesses against him are two British spies, John Barsad and Roger Cly, who claim that Darnay gave information about British troops in North America to the French. Barsad states that he would recognize Darnay anywhere, at which point Darnay's defence counsel, Stryver, directs attention to Sydney Carton, a barrister present in the courtroom who looks almost identical to him. With Barsad's eyewitness testimony now discredited, Darnay is acquitted.
In Paris, the despised Marquis St. Evrémonde orders his carriage driven recklessly fast through the crowded streets, hitting and killing the child of a peasant, Gaspard. The Marquis throws a coin to Gaspard to compensate him for his loss, and Defarge comforts him, having observed the incident. As the Marquis's coach drives off, the coin is flung back into his coach by an unknown hand, enraging the Marquis.
Arriving at his château, the Marquis meets with his nephew and heir, Darnay. (Out of disgust with his family, Darnay shed his real surname and adopted an Anglicised version of his mother's maiden name, D'Aulnais.[4]) The following scene demonstrates the Marquis' thoughts:

"Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend," observed the Marquis, "will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof," looking up to it, "shuts out the sky."[5]
That night, Gaspard, who followed the Marquis to his château by riding on the underside of the carriage, stabs and kills the Marquis in his sleep. He leaves a note on the knife saying, "Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from JACQUES."[6] After nearly a year on the run, he is caught and hanged above the village fountain.
In London, Darnay gets Dr. Manette's permission to wed Lucie; but Carton confesses his love to Lucie as well. Knowing she will not love him in return, Carton promises to "embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you".[7] Stryver, the barrister who defended Darnay and with whom Carton has a working relationship, considers proposing marriage to Lucie, but Mr. Lorry talks him out of the idea.
On the morning of the marriage, Darnay reveals his real name and family lineage to Dr. Manette, a detail he had been asked to withhold until that day. In consequence, Dr. Manette reverts to his obsessive shoemaking after the couple leave for their honeymoon. He returns to sanity before their return, and the whole incident is kept secret from Lucie. Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross destroy the shoemaking bench and tools, which Dr. Manette had brought with him from Paris.
As time passes in England, Lucie and Charles begin to raise a family, a son (who dies in childhood) and a daughter, little Lucie. Mr. Lorry finds a second home and a sort of family with the Darnays. Stryver marries a rich widow with three children and becomes even more insufferable as his ambitions begin to be realised. Carton, even though he seldom visits, is accepted as a close friend of the family and becomes a special favourite of little Lucie.
In July 1789, the Defarges help to lead the storming of the Bastille, a symbol of royal tyranny. Defarge enters Dr. Manette's former cell, "One Hundred and Five, North Tower,",[8] and searches it thoroughly. Representatives of the aristocracy are dragged from their homes and publicly executed, and the St. Evrémonde château is burned to the ground.
In 1792, Mr. Lorry decides to travel to Paris to collect important documents from the Tellson's branch in that city and bring them to London for safekeeping against the chaos of the French Revolution. Darnay intercepts a letter written by Gabelle, one of his uncle's servants who has been imprisoned by the revolutionaries, pleading for the Marquis to help secure his release. Without telling his family or revealing his position as the new Marquis, Darnay sets out for Paris.
Book the Third: The Track of a Storm[edit]

 

 "The Sea Rises", an illustration for Book 2, Chapter 21 by "Phiz"
Shortly after Darnay arrives in Paris, he is denounced for being an emigrated aristocrat from France and jailed in La Force Prison.[9] Dr. Manette, Lucie, little Lucie, Jerry, and Miss Pross travel to Paris and meet Mr. Lorry to try to free Darnay. A year and three months pass, and Darnay is finally tried.
Dr. Manette, viewed as a hero for his imprisonment in the Bastille, testifies on Darnay's behalf at his trial. Darnay is released, only to be arrested again later that day. A new trial begins on the following day, under new charges brought by the Defarges and a third individual who is soon revealed as Dr. Manette. He had written an account of his imprisonment at the hands of Darnay's father and hidden it in his cell; Defarge found it while searching the cell during the storming of the Bastille.
While running errands with Jerry, Miss Pross is amazed to see her long-lost brother Solomon, but he does not want to be recognised in public. Carton suddenly steps forward from the shadows and identifies Solomon as Barsad, one of the spies who tried to frame Darnay for treason at his trial in 1780. Jerry remembers that he has seen Solomon with Cly, the other key witness at the trial, and that Cly had faked his death to escape England. By threatening to denounce Solomon to the revolutionary tribunal as a Briton, Carton blackmails him into helping with a plan.
At the tribunal, Defarge identifies Darnay as the nephew of the dead Marquis St. Evrémonde and reads Dr. Manette's letter. Defarge had learned Darnay's lineage from Solomon during the latter's visit to the wine shop several years earlier. The letter describes Dr. Manette's imprisonment at the hands of Darnay's father and uncle for trying to report their crimes against a peasant family. Darnay's uncle had become infatuated with a girl, whom he had kidnapped and raped; despite Dr. Manette's attempt to save her, she died. The uncle killed her husband by working him to death, and her father died from a heart attack on being informed of what had happened. Before he died defending the family honour, the brother of the raped peasant had hidden the last member of the family, his younger sister. The Evrémonde brothers imprisoned Dr. Manette after he refused their offer of a bribe to keep quiet. He concludes his letter by condemning the Evrémondes, "them and their descendants, to the last of their race."[10] Dr. Manette is horrified, but he is not allowed to retract his statement. Darnay is sent to the Conciergerie and sentenced to be guillotined the next day.
Carton wanders into the Defarges' wine shop, where he overhears Madame Defarge talking about her plans to have both Lucie and little Lucie condemned. Carton discovers that Madame Defarge was the surviving sister of the peasant family savaged by the Evrémondes.[11] At night, when Dr. Manette returns, shattered after spending the day in many failed attempts to save Darnay's life, he falls into an obsessive search for his shoemaking implements. Carton urges Lorry to flee Paris with Lucie, her father, and Little Lucie, asking them to leave as soon as he joins them in the coach.
Shortly before the executions are to begin, Solomon sneaks Carton into the prison for a visit with Darnay. The two men trade clothes, and Carton drugs Darnay and has Solomon carry him out. Carton has decided to be executed in his place, and has given his own identification papers to Mr. Lorry to present on Darnay's behalf. Following Carton's earlier instructions, the family and Mr. Lorry flee to England with the unconscious Darnay.
Meanwhile, Madame Defarge, armed with a dagger and pistol, goes to the Manette residence, hoping to apprehend Lucie and little Lucie and bring them in for execution. However, the family is already gone and Miss Pross stays behind to confront and delay Madame Defarge. As the two women struggle, Madame Defarge's pistol discharges, killing her and causing Miss Pross to go permanently deaf from noise and shock.

 

 The seamstress and Carton, an illustration for Book 3, Chapter 15 by John McLenan (1859)
The novel concludes with the guillotining of Carton. As he is waiting to board the tumbril, he is approached by a seamstress, also condemned to death, who mistakes him for Darnay (with whom she had been imprisoned earlier) but realises the truth once she sees him at close range. Awed by his unselfish courage and sacrifice, she asks to stay close to him and he agrees. Upon their arrival at the guillotine, Carton comforts her, telling her that their ends will be quick but that there is no Time or Trouble "in the better land where ... [they] will be mercifully sheltered", and she is able to meet her death in peace. Carton's unspoken last thoughts are prophetic:[12]
I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance [a lieutenant of Madame Defarge], the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man [Mr. Lorry], so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward.I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both.I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
Analysis[edit]


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A Tale of Two Cities is one of only two works of historical fiction by Charles Dickens (the second being Barnaby Rudge ).[13] It has fewer characters and sub-plots than a typical Dickens novel.[citation needed] Dickens relies much on The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle as a historical source.[14] Dickens wrote in his Preface to Tale that "no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book".[citation needed]
The 45-chapter novel was published in 31 weekly instalments in Dickens's new literary periodical titled All the Year Round. From April 1859 to November 1859, Dickens also republished the chapters as eight monthly sections in green covers. All but three of Dickens's previous novels had appeared only as monthly instalments. The first weekly instalment of A Tale of Two Cities ran in the first issue of All the Year Round on 30 April 1859. The last ran thirty weeks later, on 26 November.[1]
Language[edit]
Dickens uses literal translations of French idioms for characters who cannot speak English, such as "What the devil do you do in that galley there?!!" and "Where is my wife? ---Here you see me."[citation needed] The Penguin Classics edition of the novel notes that "Not all readers have regarded the experiment as a success."[citation needed]
Humour[edit]
A Tale of Two Cities stands out from most of Dickens's other novels as the one containing the least humour.[citation needed] That is not surprising, as the historical context and focus of the novel, the French Reign of Terror, might be too bleak to allow for the more humorous characters Dickens is often known for.[citation needed] Still, Dickens, in his usual manner, manages to find the opportunity to make a number of wry comments about various aspects of the era and of the bleaker side of people's behaviour. If a humorous character is to be found anywhere in the novel, it would likely be Jerry Cruncher; however, his occupation as a "resurrectionist" (grave-robber) and his abuse of his wife casts a more sinister light on his character.[citation needed]
Themes[edit]
Resurrection[edit]
In Dickens's England, resurrection always sat firmly in a Christian context.[citation needed] Most broadly, Sydney Carton is resurrected in spirit at the novel's close (even as he, paradoxically, gives up his physical life to save Darnay's—just as Christ died for the sins of the world.) More concretely, "Book the First" deals with the rebirth of Dr. Manette from the living death of his incarceration.
Resurrection appears for the first time when Mr. Lorry replies to the message carried by Jerry Cruncher with the words "Recalled to Life". Resurrection also appears during Mr. Lorry's coach ride to Dover, as he constantly ponders a hypothetical conversation with Dr. Manette: ("Buried how long?" "Almost eighteen years." ... "You know that you are recalled to life?" "They tell me so.") He believes he is helping with Dr. Manette's revival and imagines himself "digging" up Dr. Manette from his grave.
Resurrection is a major theme in the novel.[citation needed] In Jarvis Lorry's thoughts of Dr. Manette, resurrection is first spotted as a theme. It is also the last theme: Carton's sacrifice. Dickens originally wanted to call the entire novel Recalled to Life. (This instead became the title of the first of the novel's three "books".)[citation needed]
Jerry is also part of the recurring theme: he himself is involved in death and resurrection in ways the reader does not yet know. The first piece of foreshadowing comes in his remark to himself: "You'd be in a blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!" The black humour of this statement becomes obvious only much later on. Five years later, one cloudy and very dark night (in June 1780[15]), Mr. Lorry reawakens the reader's interest in the mystery by telling Jerry it is "Almost a night ... to bring the dead out of their graves". Jerry responds firmly that he has never seen the night do that.[16]
It turns out that Jerry Cruncher's involvement with the theme of resurrection is that he is what the Victorians called a "Resurrection Man", one who (illegally) digs up dead bodies to sell to medical men (there was no legal way to procure cadavers for study at that time).[citation needed]
The opposite of resurrection is of course death.[citation needed] Death and resurrection appear often in the novel. Dickens is angered that in France and England, courts hand out death sentences for insignificant crimes.[citation needed] In France, peasants are even put to death without any trial, at the whim of a noble.[citation needed] The Marquis tells Darnay with pleasure that "[I]n the next room (my bedroom), one fellow ... was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—his daughter!"[17]
Interestingly, the demolition of Dr. Manette's shoe-making workbench by Miss Pross and Mr. Lorry is described as "the burning of the body".[18] It seems clear that this is a rare case where death or destruction (the opposite of resurrection) has a positive connotation, since the "burning" helps liberate the doctor from the memory of his long imprisonment.[citation needed] But Dickens's description of this kind and healing act is strikingly odd:

 

 "The Accomplices", an illustration for Book 2, Chapter 19 by "Phiz"
So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.[19]
Sydney Carton's martyrdom atones for all his past wrongdoings. He even finds God during the last few days of his life, repeating Christ's soothing words, "I am the resurrection and the life".[20] Resurrection is the dominant theme of the last part of the novel.[citation needed] Darnay is rescued at the last moment and recalled to life; Carton chooses death and resurrection to a life better than that which he has ever known: "it was the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there ... he looked sublime and prophetic".
In the broadest sense, at the end of the novel Dickens foresees a resurrected social order in France, rising from the ashes of the old one.[citation needed]
Water[edit]
Hans Biedermann writes that water "is the fundamental symbol of all the energy of the unconscious—an energy that can be dangerous when it overflows its proper limits (a frequent dream sequence)."[21] This symbolism suits Dickens's novel; in A Tale of Two Cities, the frequent images of water stand for the building anger of the peasant mob, an anger that Dickens sympathises with to a point, but ultimately finds irrational and even animalistic.[citation needed]
Early in the book, Dickens suggests this when he writes, "[T]he sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction."[22] The sea here represents the coming mob of revolutionaries. After Gaspard murders the Marquis, he is "hanged there forty feet high—and is left hanging, poisoning the water."[23] The poisoning of the well represents the bitter impact of Gaspard's execution on the collective feeling of the peasants.
After Gaspard's death, the storming of the Bastille is led (from the St. Antoine neighbourhood, at least) by the Defarges; "As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled around Defarge's wine shop, and every human drop in the cauldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex..."[24] The crowd is envisioned as a sea. "With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into a detested word [the word Bastille], the living sea rose, wave upon wave, depth upon depth, and overflowed the city..."[24]
Darnay's jailer is described as "unwholesomely bloated in both face and person, as to look like a man who had been drowned and filled with water." Later, during the Reign of Terror, the revolution had grown "so much more wicked and distracted ... that the rivers of the South were encumbered with bodies of the violently drowned by night..." Later a crowd is "swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets ... the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled them away."
During the fight with Miss Pross, Madame Defarge clings to her with "more than the hold of a drowning woman". Commentators on the novel have noted the irony that Madame Defarge is killed by her own gun, and perhaps Dickens means by the above quote to suggest that such vicious vengefulness as Madame Defarge's will eventually destroy even its perpetrators.
So many read the novel in a Freudian light, as exalting the (British) superego over the (French) id.[citation needed] Yet in Carton's last walk, he watches an eddy that "turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it onto the sea"—his fulfilment, while masochistic and superego-driven, is nonetheless an ecstatic union with the subconscious.
Darkness and light[edit]
As is common in English literature,[citation needed] good and evil are symbolised by light and darkness. Lucie Manette is the light, as represented literally by her name; and Madame Defarge is darkness. Darkness represents uncertainty, fear and peril. It is dark when Mr. Lorry rides to Dover; it is dark in the prisons; dark shadows follow Madame Defarge; dark, gloomy doldrums disturb Dr. Manette; his capture and captivity are shrouded in darkness; the Marquis's estate is burned in the dark of night; Jerry Cruncher raids graves in the darkness; Charles's second arrest also occurs at night. Both Lucie and Mr. Lorry feel the dark threat that is Madame Defarge. "That dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me," remarks Lucie. Although Mr. Lorry tries to comfort her, "the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself". Madame Defarge is "like a shadow over the white road", the snow symbolising purity and Madame Defarge's darkness corruption. Dickens also compares the dark colour of blood to the pure white snow: the blood takes on the shade of the crimes of its shedders.
Social justice[edit]
Charles Dickens was a champion of the maltreated poor because of his terrible experience when he was forced to work in a factory as a child.[citation needed] (His father, John Dickens, continually lived beyond his means and eventually went to debtors' prison. Charles was forced to leave school and began working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, earning six shillings a week.)[citation needed] His sympathies, however, lie with the revolutionaries only up to a point; he condemns the mob madness which soon sets in. When mad men and women massacre eleven hundred detainees in one night and hustle back to sharpen their weapons on the grindstone, they display "eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun".[citation needed]
The reader is shown that the poor are brutalised in France and England alike.[citation needed] As crime proliferates, the executioner in England is "stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now hanging housebreaker ... now burning people in the hand" or hanging a broke man for stealing sixpence. In France, a boy is sentenced to have his hands removed and be burned alive, only because he did not kneel down in the rain before a parade of monks passing some fifty yards away. At the lavish residence of Monseigneur, we find "brazen ecclesiastics of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives ... Military officers destitute of military knowledge ... [and] Doctors who made great fortunes ... for imaginary disorders".[25] (This incident is fictional, but is based on a true story related by Voltaire in a famous pamphlet, An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de la Barre.)[26]
So riled is Dickens at the brutality of English law that he depicts some of its punishments with sarcasm: "the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action". He faults the law for not seeking reform: "Whatever is, is right" is the dictum of the Old Bailey.[27] The gruesome portrayal of quartering highlights its atrocity.
Dickens wants his readers to be careful that the same revolution that so damaged France will not happen in Britain, which (at least at the beginning of the book)[28] is shown to be nearly as unjust as France. But his warning is addressed not to the British lower classes, but to the aristocracy. He repeatedly uses the metaphor of sowing and reaping; if the aristocracy continues to plant the seeds of a revolution through behaving unjustly, they can be certain of harvesting that revolution in time. The lower classes do not have any agency in this metaphor: they simply react to the behaviour of the aristocracy. In this sense it can be said that while Dickens sympathises with the poor, he identifies with the rich: they are the book's audience, its "us" and not its "them". "Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind".[29]
With the people starving and begging the Marquis for food, his uncharitable response is to let the people eat grass; the people are left with nothing but onions to eat and are forced to starve while the nobles are living lavishly upon the people's backs. Every time the nobles refer to the life of the peasants it is only to destroy or humiliate the poor.[citation needed]
Relation to Dickens's personal life[edit]
Some have argued that in A Tale of Two Cities Dickens reflects on his recently begun affair with eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan, which was possibly platonic but certainly romantic. Lucie Manette has been noted as resembling Ternan physically.[30]
After starring in a play by Wilkie Collins titled The Frozen Deep, Dickens was first inspired to write Tale. In the play, Dickens played the part of a man who sacrifices his own life so that his rival may have the woman they both love; the love triangle in the play became the basis for the relationships between Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, and Sydney Carton in Tale.[31]
Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay may also bear importantly on Dickens's personal life. The plot hinges on the near-perfect resemblance between Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay; the two look so alike that Carton twice saves Darnay through the inability of others to tell them apart. Carton is Darnay made bad. Carton suggests as much:

'Do you particularly like the man [Darnay]?' he muttered, at his own image [which he is regarding in a mirror]; 'why should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have made in yourself! A good reason for talking to a man, that he shows you what you have fallen away from and what you might have been! Change places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes [belonging to Lucie Manette] as he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.'[32]
Many have felt that Carton and Darnay are doppelgängers, which Eric Rabkin defines as a pair "of characters that together, represent one psychological persona in the narrative".[33] If so, they would prefigure such works as Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Darnay is worthy and respectable but dull (at least to most modern readers), Carton disreputable but magnetic.[citation needed]
One can only suspect whose psychological persona it is that Carton and Darnay together embody (if they do), but it is often thought to be the psyche of Dickens himself. Dickens might have been quite aware that between them, Carton and Darnay shared his own initials.[34] However, he denied it when asked.
Setting[edit]
It is widely believed that the house at 1 Greek Street, now The House of St Barnabas, forms the basis for Dr Manette and Lucie's London house.[citation needed]
"In a building at the back, attainable by a courtyard where a plane tree rustled its green leaves, church organs claimed to be made, and likewise gold to be beaten by some mysterious giant who had a golden arm starting out of the wall... as if he had beaten himself precious."[35]
The 'golden arm' now resides at The Dickens House Museum but you can see a modern replica sticking out of the wall near the Pillars of Hercules pub at the western end of Manette Street (formerly Rose Street).[citation needed]
Characters[edit]

 

 Illustration from a serialised edition of the story, showing three tricoteuses knitting, with the Vengeance standing in the center.
Many of Dickens's characters are "flat", not "round", in the novelist E. M. Forster's famous terms, meaning roughly that they have only one mood.[36] For example, the Marquis is unremittingly wicked and relishes being so; Lucie is perfectly loving and supportive. (As a corollary, Dickens often gives these characters verbal tics or visual quirks that he mentions over and over, such as the dints in the nose of the Marquis.) Forster believed that Dickens never truly created rounded characters.
Sydney Carton – A quick-minded but depressed English barrister. Though he is portrayed in the beginning as a cynical alcoholic, he ultimately becomes a selfless hero.
Lucie Manette – An ideal pre-Victorian lady, perfect in every way. She is loved by both Carton and Charles Darnay (whom she marries), and is the daughter of Dr. Manette. She is the "golden thread" after whom Book the Second is named, so called because she holds her father's and her family's lives together (and because of her blond hair like her mother's). She also ties nearly every character in the book together.[37]
Charles Darnay – A young French noble of the Evrémonde family. In disgust at the cruelty of his family to the French peasantry, he took on the name "Darnay" (after his mother's maiden name, D'Aulnais) and left France for England.[38] He exhibits an admirable honesty in his decision to reveal to Doctor Manette his true identity as a member of the infamous Evrémonde family. So, too, does he prove his courage in his decision to return to Paris at great personal risk to save the imprisoned Gabelle.
Dr. Alexandre Manette – Lucie's father, kept as a prisoner in the Bastille for eighteen years. Dr. Manette dies 12 years after Sydney Carton.
Monsieur Ernest Defarge – The owner of a French wine shop and leader of the Jacquerie; husband of Madame Defarge; servant to Dr. Manette as a youth. One of the key revolutionary leaders, he embraces the revolution as a noble cause, unlike many other revolutionaries.
Madame Therese Defarge – A vengeful female revolutionary, arguably the novel's antagonist.
Jacques One, Two, and Three – Revolutionary compatriots of Ernest Defarge. Jacques Three is especially bloodthirsty and serves as a juryman on the Revolutionary Tribunals.
The Vengeance – A companion of Madame Defarge referred to as her "shadow" and lieutenant, a member of the sisterhood of women revolutionaries in Saint Antoine, and revolutionary zealot. (Many Frenchmen and women did change their names to show their enthusiasm for the Revolution[39])
The Mender of Roads – A peasant who later works as a woodsawyer and assists the Defarges.
Jarvis Lorry – An elderly manager at Tellson's Bank and a dear friend of Dr. Manette. He serves as a sort of trustee and guardian of the Manette family.
Miss Pross – Lucie Manette's governess since Lucie was ten years old. She is fiercely loyal to Lucie and to England.
Marquis St. Evrémonde[40] – The cruel uncle of Charles Darnay. Also called "The Younger." He inherited the title at "the Elder"'s death.
The Elder and his wife – The twin brother of the Marquis St. Evrémonde, referred to as "the Elder" (he held the title of Marquis St. Evrémonde at the time of Dr. Manette's arrest), and his wife, who fears him. They are the parents of Charles Darnay.
John Barsad (real name Solomon Pross) – An informer for Britain, and later employee of the Marquis St. Evremonde. He later becomes a spy for revolutionary France (at which point he must hide his British identity). He is the long-lost brother of Miss Pross.
Roger Cly – Another spy, Barsad's collaborator.
Jerry Cruncher – Porter and messenger for Tellson's Bank and secret "Resurrection Man" (body-snatcher). His first name is short for either Jeremiah or Gerald; the latter name shares a meaning with the name of Jarvis Lorry.
Young Jerry Cruncher – Son of Jerry and Mrs. Cruncher. Young Jerry often follows his father around to his father's odd jobs, and at one point in the story, follows his father at night and discovers that his father is a resurrection man. Young Jerry looks up to his father as a role model, and aspires to become a resurrection man himself when he grows up.
Mrs. Cruncher – Wife of Jerry Cruncher. She is a very religious woman, but her husband, somewhat paranoid, claims she is praying against him, and that is why he does not often succeed at work. She is often abused verbally, and, almost as often, physically, by Jerry, but at the end of the story, he appears to feel a bit guilty about this.
Mr. Stryver – An arrogant and ambitious barrister, senior to Sydney Carton.[41] There is a frequent misperception that Stryver's full name is "C. J. Stryver", but this is very unlikely. The mistake comes from a line in Book 2, Chapter 12: "After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer case could be."[42] The initials C. J. almost certainly refer to a legal title (probably "chief justice"); Stryver is imagining that he is playing every role in a trial in which he attempts to browbeat Lucie Manette into marrying him.
The Seamstress – A young woman caught up in The Terror. She precedes Sydney Carton, who comforts her, to the guillotine. She and Barsad are the only people in Paris who know Carton has taken Darnay's place.
Théophile Gabelle – Gabelle is "the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary, united"[43] for the tenants of the Marquis St. Evrémonde. Gabelle is imprisoned by the revolutionaries, and his beseeching letter brings Darnay to France. Gabelle is "named after the hated salt tax".[44]
Gaspard – Gaspard is the man whose son is run over by the Marquis. He then kills the Marquis and goes into hiding for a year. He eventually is found, arrested, and executed.
"Monseigneur" – The appellation "Monseigneur" is used to refer to both a specific aristocrat in the novel, and the general class of displaced aristocrats in England.
A peasant boy and his sister – Victims of the Marquis St. Evrémonde and his brother. They are revealed to be Madame Defarge's brother and sister.
Sources[edit]
While performing in The Frozen Deep, Dickens was given a play to read called The Dead Heart by Watts Phillips which had the historical setting, the basic storyline, and the climax that Dickens used in A Tale of Two Cities.[45] The play was produced while A Tale of Two Cities was being serialised in All the Year Round and led to talk of plagiarism.[46]
Other sources are History of the French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle;[14] Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton; The Castle Spector by Matthew Lewis; Travels in France by Arthur Young; and Tableau de Paris by Louis-Sébastien Mercier. Dickens also used material from an account of imprisonment during the Terror by Beaumarchais, and records of the trial of a French spy published in The Annual Register.[47]
Adaptations[edit]

 

Classic Comics issue #6
Films[edit]
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1911 silent film.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1917 silent film.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1922 silent film.
The Only Way, a 1927 silent British film directed by Herbert Wilcox.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1935 black-and-white MGM film starring Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone and Edna May Oliver. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1958 version, starring Dirk Bogarde, Dorothy Tutin, Christopher Lee, Leo McKern and Donald Pleasence.
A Tale of Two Cities, a 1980 version for TV, starring Chris Sarandon, Peter Cushing, Alice Krige and Billie Whitelaw.
Radio[edit]
On 25 July 1938, The Mercury Theatre on the Air produced a radio adaptation starring Orson Welles. Welles also starred in a version broadcast on Lux Radio Theater on 26 March 1945.
In 1945, a portion of the novel was adapted to the syndicated programme The Weird Circle as "Dr. Manette's Manuscript."
In 1950, The BBC broadcast a radio adaptation by Terence Rattigan and John Gielgud of their unproduced 1935 stage play.
A half-hour version titled "Sydney Carton" was broadcast on 27 March 1954, on Theatre Royal hosted by and starring Laurence Olivier
In June 1989, BBC Radio 4 produced a seven-hour drama adapted for radio by Nick McCarty and directed by Ian Cotterell. This adaptation has been occasionally repeated by BBC Radio 7 (most recently in 2009).
In December 2011, as part of its special season on Charles Dickens' Bicentenerary,[48] BBC Radio 4 produced a new five-part adaptation for radio by Mike Walker with original music by Lennert Busch and directed by Jessica Dromgoole and Jeremy Mortimer[49] which won the 2012 Bronze Sony Radio Academy Award for Best Drama.[50]
Television[edit]
ABC produced a two part mini-series in 1953.[51]
The BBC produced an eight-part mini-series in 1957 starring Peter Wyngarde as "Sydney Carton", Edward de Souza as "Charles Darnay" and Wendy Hutchinson as "Lucie Manette".
The BBC produced a ten-part mini-series in 1965.
The BBC produced another eight-part mini-series in 1980 starring Paul Shelley as "Carton/Darnay", Sally Osborne as "Lucie Manette" and Nigel Stock as "Jarvis Lorry".
ITV Granada produced a two-part mini-series in 1989 starting James Wilby as "Sydney Carton", Xavier Deluc as "Charles Darnay" and Serena Gordon as "Lucie Manette". The production also aired on Masterpiece Theatre on the PBS in the United States.
Stage productions[edit]
Royal & Derngate Theatre produced an adaptation of Tale of Two Cities by Mike Poulton with original music by Rachel Portman, directed by James Dacre
Stage musicals[edit]


 This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2015)
A 1968 stage version, Two Cities, the Spectacular New Musical, with music by Jeff Wayne, lyrics by Jerry Wayne and starring Edward Woodward.
In 1997 Paul Nicholas commissioned an adaptation with music by David Pomeranz and book by Steven David Horwich and David Soames. Co-produced by Bill Kenwright, the show ran at the New Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham during their 1998 Christmas season with Paul Nicholas as Sydney Carton.
In 2008, Jill Santoriello wrote a new musical theatre adaption.
Opera[edit]
Arthur Benjamin's operatic version of the novel, subtitled Romantic Melodrama in six scenes, was premiered by the BBC on 17 April 1953, conducted by the composer; it received its stage premiere at Sadler's Wells on 22 July 1957, under the baton of Leon Lovett.[52]
Notes[edit]
1.^ Jump up to: a b "Facsimile of the original 1st publication of "A Tale of Two Cities" in All the year round". S4ulanguages.com. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
2.Jump up ^ Mitchell, David. (8 May 2010) "David Mitchell on Historical Fiction", The Telegraph: "Charles Dickens’ second stab at a historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities, has sold more than 200 million copies to date, making it the bestselling novel — in any genre — of all time...."
3.Jump up ^ Wikisource:A Tale of Two Cities/Book the First/Chapter I
4.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 191 (Book 2, Chapter 16).
5.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 128 (Book 2, Chapter 9). This statement (about the roof) is truer than the Marquis knows, and another example of foreshadowing: the Evrémonde château is burned down by revolting peasants in Book 2, Chapter 23.
6.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 134 (Book 2, Chapter 9)
7.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 159 (Book 2, Chapter 14)
8.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 330 (Book 3, Chapter 9)
9.Jump up ^ Emigration is about to be made illegal but is not yet. See Dickens 2003, p. 258 (Book 3, Chapter 1)
10.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 344 (Book 3, Chapter 10)
11.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, (Book 3, Chapter 12)
12.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 390 (Book 3, Chapter 15)
13.Jump up ^ "www.dickensfellowship.org, 'Dickens as a Fiction Writer'". Retrieved 2015-01-01.
14.^ Jump up to: a b Dickens, Charles (1970) [1859]. George Woodcock, ed. A tale of two cities. Illust. by Hablot L. Browne. Penguin Books. pp. 408, 410; Notes 30 and 41. ISBN 0140430547.
15.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. xxxix
16.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, pp. 107–108 (Book 2, Chapter 6)
17.Jump up ^ The Marquis emphasises his because Dickens is alluding to the (probably mythical) Droit du seigneur, under which any girl from the Marquis's land would belong to the Marquis rather than to her parents. Dickens 2003, p. 127 (Book 2, Chapter 9)
18.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 212 (Book 2, Chapter 19)
19.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 214 (Book 2, Chapter 19)
20.Jump up ^ John 11.25-6
21.Jump up ^ Biedermann 1994, p. 375
22.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 21 (Book 1, Chapter 4)
23.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 178 (Book 2, Chapter 15)
24.^ Jump up to: a b Dickens 2003, p. 223 (Book 2, Chapter 21)
25.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 110 (Book 2, Chapter 7)
26.Jump up ^ The Chevalier de la Barre was indeed executed for acts of impiety, including failure to pay homage to a procession of monks. These acts were attributed to him, it seems, by his mother's slighted lover. A synopsis of the story is given by Stanford University's Victorian Reading Project. See also Andrew Sanders, Companion to A Tale of Two Cities (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p.31; see also Voltaire, An Account of the Death of the Chevalier de la Barre (1766); translated by Simon Harvey, Treatise on Tolerance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
27.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 63 (Book 2, Chapter 2). Dickens is quoting Alexander Pope's Essay on Man of 1733.
28.Jump up ^ Ruth Glancy has argued that Dickens portrays France and England as nearly equivalent at the beginning of the novel, but that as the novel progresses, England comes to look better and better, climaxing in Miss Pross's pro-Britain speech at the end of the novel.
29.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 385 (Book 3, Chapter 15)
30.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. xxi
31.Jump up ^ "Context of A Tale of Two Cities". Retrieved 3 August 2009.
32.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 89 (Book 2, Chapter 4) p. 89
33.Jump up ^ Rabkin 2007, course booklet p. 48
34.Jump up ^ Schlicke 2008, p. 53
35.Jump up ^ A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
36.Jump up ^ "In their purest form [flat characters] ... are constructed round a single idea or quality. ... Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and caricatures, people whom we recognise the instant they re-enter, and yet achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow. Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad." Forster 1927, p. 67, 71–72
37.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 83 (Book 2, Chapter 4)
38.Jump up ^ After Dr. Manette's letter is read, Darnay says that "It was the always-vain endeavour to discharge my poor mother's trust, that first brought my fatal presence near you." (Dickens 2003, p. 347 [Book 3, Chapter 11].) Darnay seems to be referring to the time when his mother brought him, still a child, to her meeting with Dr. Manette in Book 3, Chapter 10. But some readers also feel that Darnay is explaining why he changed his name and travelled to England in the first place: to discharge his family's debt to Dr. Manette without fully revealing his identity. (See note to the Penguin Classics edition: Dickens 2003, p. 486.)
39.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 470
40.Jump up ^ The Marquis is sometimes referred to as "Monseigneur the Marquis St. Evrémonde." He is not so called in this article because the title "Monseigneur" applies to whoever among a group is of the highest status; thus, this title sometimes applies to the Marquis and other times does not.
41.Jump up ^ Stryver, like Carton, is a barrister and not a solicitor; Dickens 2003, p. xi
42.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 147
43.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 120 (Book 2, Chapter 8)
44.Jump up ^ Dickens 2003, p. 462
45.Jump up ^ Dickens by Peter Ackroyd; Harper Collins, 1990, p. 777
46.Jump up ^ Dickens by Peter Ackroyd; Harper Collins, 1990, p. 859
47.Jump up ^ Dickens by Peter Ackroyd; Harper Collins, 1990, p. 858-862
48.Jump up ^ "Dickens on Radio 4".
49.Jump up ^ Dromgoole, Jessica. "A Tale of Two Cities on BBC Radio 4. And a podcast too!".
50.Jump up ^ "Sony Radio Academy Award Winners". The Guardian. 15 May 2012. Retrieved 12 March 2014.
51.Jump up ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0504306/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_45
52.Jump up ^ "Benjamin, Arthur". Boosey & Hawkes. Retrieved 12 March 2014.
Works cited[edit]
A Tale of Two Cities Shmoop: Study Guides & Teacher Resources. Web. 12 Mar 2014.
Biedermann, Hans. Dictionary of Symbolism. New York: Meridian (1994) ISBN 978-0-452-01118-2
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Edited and with an introduction and notes by Richard Maxwell. London: Penguin Classics (2003) ISBN 978-0-14-143960-0
Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 5th ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press (1985) ISBN 0-19-866130-4
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel (1927). 2005 reprint: London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-144169-6
Orwell, George. "Charles Dickens". In A Collection of Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1946) ISBN 0-15-618600-4
Rabkin, Eric. Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind: Literature's Most Fantastic Works. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company (2007)
Schlicke, Paul. Coffee With Dickens. London: Duncan Baird Publishers (2008) ISBN 978-1-84483-608-6
A Tale of Two Cities: Character List SparkNotes: Today's Most Popular Study Guides. Web. 11 Apr 2011.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins (1990). ISBN 0-06-016602-9.
Further reading[edit]
Alleyn, Susanne. A Tale of Two Cities: A Reader's Companion. Albany, NY: Spyderwort Press (2014) ISBN 978-1496113672
Glancy, Ruth. Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge (2006) ISBN 978-0-415-28760-9
Sanders, Andrew. The Companion to A Tale of Two Cities. London: Unwin Hyman (1989) ISBN 978-0-04-800050-7 Out of print.
External links[edit]
 Wikisource has original text related to this article:
A Tale of Two Cities
 
 Wikiquote has quotations related to: A Tale of Two Cities
 Wikimedia Commons has media related to A Tale of Two Cities.
A Tale of Two Cities at Internet Archive.
A Tale of Two Cities at Project Gutenberg
A Tale of Two Cities – The original manuscript of the novel, held by the Victoria and Albert Museum (requires Adobe Flash).
'Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities', lecture by Dr. Tony Williams on the writing of the book, at Gresham College on 3 July 2007 (with video and audio files available for download, as well as the transcript).
Speaker Icon.svg A Tale of Two Cities public domain audiobook at LibriVox
Analysis of A Tale of Two Cities on Lit React


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A Tale of Two Cities (1935 film)

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Jump to: navigation, search


A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities 1935 film.JPG
1935 US Theatrical Poster
 
Directed by
Jack Conway
Produced by
David O. Selznick
Written by
W. P. Lipscomb (screenplay)
S. N. Behrman
Based on
A Tale of Two Cities
 by Charles Dicens
Starring
Ronald Colman
Elizabeth Allan
Music by
Herbert Stothart
Cinematography
Oliver T. Marsh
Edited by
Conrad A. Nervig
Distributed by
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Release dates

December 27, 1935
 

Running time
 123 minutes
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$1,232,000[1]
Box office
$1,111,000 (Domestic earnings)[1]
 $1,183,000 (Foreign earnings)[1]
A Tale of Two Cities is a 1935 film based upon Charles Dickens' 1859 historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities. The film stars Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton, Donald Woods and Elizabeth Allan. The supporting players include Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka, and Edna May Oliver. It was directed by Jack Conway from a screenplay by W. P. Lipscomb and S. N. Behrman. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Film Editing. The story is set in the French Revolution and deals with two men who are alike, not only in appearance, but in their love for the same woman.


Contents  [hide]
1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Critical reception
4 References
5 External links

Plot[edit]
On the eve of the French Revolution, Lucie Manette (Elizabeth Allan) is informed that her father (Henry B. Walthall) is not dead, but has been a prisoner in the Bastille for many long years before finally being released. She travels to Paris to take her father to her home in England. Dr. Manette has been taken care of by a friend, Ernest Defarge (Mitchell Lewis), and his wife (Blanche Yurka). The old man's mind has given way during his long ordeal, but Lucie's tender care begins to restore his sanity.
On the trip across the English Channel, Lucie meets Charles Darnay (Donald Woods), a French aristocrat who, unlike his unfeeling uncle, the Marquis de St. Evremonde (Basil Rathbone), is sympathetic to the plight of the downtrodden French masses. Darnay is framed for treason, but is saved by the cleverness of the dissolute Sydney Carton (Ronald Colman). Carton goes drinking with Barsad (Walter Catlett), the main prosecution witness, and tricks him into admitting that he lied. When Barsad is called to testify, he is horrified to discover that Carton is one of the defense attorneys and grudgingly allows that he might have been mistaken. Darnay is released.
Carton is thanked by Lucie, who has attended the trial of her new friend. He quickly falls in love with her, but realizes it is hopeless. Lucie eventually marries Darnay, and they have a daughter.
By this time, the Reign of Terror has engulfed France. The long-suffering commoners vent their fury on the aristocrats, condemning scores daily to Madame Guillotine. Darnay is tricked into returning to Paris and arrested. Dr. Manette pleads for mercy for his son-in-law, but Madame Defarge, seeking revenge against all the Evremondes, regardless of guilt or innocence, convinces the tribunal to sentence him to death with a letter Dr. Manette wrote exposing the guilt of Darnay's uncle, Marquis de St. Evremonde.
While trying to comfort the family, Carton knows that they're in grave danger. When Lorry tries to convince him otherwise, Carton admits he is aware that Madame Defarge will stop at nothing just to get the vengeance she craves for. He comes up with a desperate rescue plan. He first persuades Lucie and her friends to leave Paris by promising to save Darnay. Next he confronts an old acquaintance, Barsad, now an influential man in the French government, to enable him to visit Darnay in jail. When he refuses to cooperate, Carton blackmails him into doing what he asks by threatening to reveal his secret about being a paid spy for the Marquis to the tribunal if he doesn't allow him to see Darnay. There, Carton drugs the prisoner unconscious, switches places with him, and finishes the letter to Lucie to be put in his jacket pocket. Barsad and the guard has Darnay carried out to be reunited with his family.
Madame Defarge, her thirst for vengeance still unsatisfied, goes to have Lucie and her daughter arrested, only to find that they have fled with Dr. Manette. As she goes to raise the alarm, she is confronted by Miss Pross (Edna May Oliver), Lucie's devoted servant. She warns her to keep her distance of Lucie and her family at once, to which Madame Defarge refuses to listen. In the ensuing struggle, Madame Defarge is killed by Miss Pross. She clutches her ear and runs from the scene.
Meanwhile, only a condemned seamstress (Isabel Jewell) notices Carton's substitution, but keeps quiet. She draws comfort in his heroism as they ride in the same cart to the execution place. As the camera rises just before the blade falls, Carton's voice is heard, saying, "It's a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done. It's a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known."
Cast[edit]
Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton. Colman had long wanted to play Sydney Carton on film. He was even willing to shave off his moustache.[2]
Elizabeth Allan as Lucie Manette
Edna May Oliver as Miss Pross
Reginald Owen as Stryver
Basil Rathbone as Marquis de St. Evremonde
Blanche Yurka as Madame Therese Defarge
Henry B. Walthall as Dr. Manette
Donald Woods as Charles Darnay
Walter Catlett as Barsad
Claude Gillingwater as Jarvis Lorry
H. B. Warner as Gabelle
Fritz Leiber as Gaspard
Lucille La Verne as The Vengeance
Mitchell Lewis as Ernest Defarge
Isabel Jewell as the Seamstress
Tully Marshall as a Woodcutter
Fay Chaldecott as Lucie Darnay, a child
Billy Bevan as Jerry Cruncher
Eily Malyon as Mrs. Cruncher
Donald Haines as Jerry Cruncher, Jr.
E. E. Clive as Judge in Old Bailey
Robert Warwick as Judge at tribunal
Lawrence Grant as a Prosecutor
Ralf Harolde as a Prosecutor
John Davidson as Morveau
Tom Ricketts as Tellson, Jr.
Barlowe Borland as Jacques
Critical reception[edit]
Andre Sennwald wrote in the New York Times of December 26, 1935: "Having given us "David Copperfield," Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer now heaps up more Dickensian magic with a prodigally stirring production of "A Tale of Two Cities" ... For more than two hours it crowds the screen with beauty and excitement, sparing nothing in its recital of the Englishmen who were caught up in the blood and terror of the French Revolution ... The drama achieves a crisis of extraordinary effectiveness at the guillotine, leaving the audience quivering under its emotional sledge-hammer blows ... Ronald Colman gives his ablest performance in years as Sydney Carton and a score of excellent players are at their best in it ... Only Donald Woods's Darnay is inferior, an unpleasant study in juvenile virtue. It struck me, too, that Blanche Yurka was guilty of tearing an emotion to tatters in the rôle of Madame Defarge ... you can be sure that "A Tale of Two Cities" will cause a vast rearranging of ten-best lists.[3]
References[edit]
1.^ Jump up to: a b c Glancy, H. Mark "When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood 'British' Film 1939–1945" (Manchester University Press, 1999)
2.Jump up ^ Quirk, Lawrence, The Films of Ronald Colman. Lyle Stuart, 1979.
3.Jump up ^ Sennwald, Andre (December 26, 1935). "Ronald Colman in 'A Tale of Two Cites,' at the Capitol – 'If You Could Only Cook.'". New York Times. Retrieved January 28, 2009.
External links[edit]
A Tale of Two Cities at the TCM Movie Database
A Tale of Two Cities at the Internet Movie Database
A Tale of Two Cities at AllMovie
A Tale of Two Cities Starring Ronald Colman Tribute site: synopsis, images and list of actors.


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Categories: 1935 films
English-language films
American films
American historical films
Black-and-white films
Films based on A Tale of Two Cities
Films directed by Jack Conway
Films directed by Robert Z. Leonard
1930s historical films
1930s romantic drama films
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American romantic drama films
Films produced by David O. Selznick




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A Tale of Two Cities (1935 film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search


A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities 1935 film.JPG
1935 US Theatrical Poster
 
Directed by
Jack Conway
Produced by
David O. Selznick
Written by
W. P. Lipscomb (screenplay)
S. N. Behrman
Based on
A Tale of Two Cities
 by Charles Dicens
Starring
Ronald Colman
Elizabeth Allan
Music by
Herbert Stothart
Cinematography
Oliver T. Marsh
Edited by
Conrad A. Nervig
Distributed by
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Release dates

December 27, 1935
 

Running time
 123 minutes
Country
United States
Language
English
Budget
$1,232,000[1]
Box office
$1,111,000 (Domestic earnings)[1]
 $1,183,000 (Foreign earnings)[1]
A Tale of Two Cities is a 1935 film based upon Charles Dickens' 1859 historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities. The film stars Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton, Donald Woods and Elizabeth Allan. The supporting players include Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka, and Edna May Oliver. It was directed by Jack Conway from a screenplay by W. P. Lipscomb and S. N. Behrman. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Film Editing. The story is set in the French Revolution and deals with two men who are alike, not only in appearance, but in their love for the same woman.


Contents  [hide]
1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Critical reception
4 References
5 External links

Plot[edit]
On the eve of the French Revolution, Lucie Manette (Elizabeth Allan) is informed that her father (Henry B. Walthall) is not dead, but has been a prisoner in the Bastille for many long years before finally being released. She travels to Paris to take her father to her home in England. Dr. Manette has been taken care of by a friend, Ernest Defarge (Mitchell Lewis), and his wife (Blanche Yurka). The old man's mind has given way during his long ordeal, but Lucie's tender care begins to restore his sanity.
On the trip across the English Channel, Lucie meets Charles Darnay (Donald Woods), a French aristocrat who, unlike his unfeeling uncle, the Marquis de St. Evremonde (Basil Rathbone), is sympathetic to the plight of the downtrodden French masses. Darnay is framed for treason, but is saved by the cleverness of the dissolute Sydney Carton (Ronald Colman). Carton goes drinking with Barsad (Walter Catlett), the main prosecution witness, and tricks him into admitting that he lied. When Barsad is called to testify, he is horrified to discover that Carton is one of the defense attorneys and grudgingly allows that he might have been mistaken. Darnay is released.
Carton is thanked by Lucie, who has attended the trial of her new friend. He quickly falls in love with her, but realizes it is hopeless. Lucie eventually marries Darnay, and they have a daughter.
By this time, the Reign of Terror has engulfed France. The long-suffering commoners vent their fury on the aristocrats, condemning scores daily to Madame Guillotine. Darnay is tricked into returning to Paris and arrested. Dr. Manette pleads for mercy for his son-in-law, but Madame Defarge, seeking revenge against all the Evremondes, regardless of guilt or innocence, convinces the tribunal to sentence him to death with a letter Dr. Manette wrote exposing the guilt of Darnay's uncle, Marquis de St. Evremonde.
While trying to comfort the family, Carton knows that they're in grave danger. When Lorry tries to convince him otherwise, Carton admits he is aware that Madame Defarge will stop at nothing just to get the vengeance she craves for. He comes up with a desperate rescue plan. He first persuades Lucie and her friends to leave Paris by promising to save Darnay. Next he confronts an old acquaintance, Barsad, now an influential man in the French government, to enable him to visit Darnay in jail. When he refuses to cooperate, Carton blackmails him into doing what he asks by threatening to reveal his secret about being a paid spy for the Marquis to the tribunal if he doesn't allow him to see Darnay. There, Carton drugs the prisoner unconscious, switches places with him, and finishes the letter to Lucie to be put in his jacket pocket. Barsad and the guard has Darnay carried out to be reunited with his family.
Madame Defarge, her thirst for vengeance still unsatisfied, goes to have Lucie and her daughter arrested, only to find that they have fled with Dr. Manette. As she goes to raise the alarm, she is confronted by Miss Pross (Edna May Oliver), Lucie's devoted servant. She warns her to keep her distance of Lucie and her family at once, to which Madame Defarge refuses to listen. In the ensuing struggle, Madame Defarge is killed by Miss Pross. She clutches her ear and runs from the scene.
Meanwhile, only a condemned seamstress (Isabel Jewell) notices Carton's substitution, but keeps quiet. She draws comfort in his heroism as they ride in the same cart to the execution place. As the camera rises just before the blade falls, Carton's voice is heard, saying, "It's a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done. It's a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known."
Cast[edit]
Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton. Colman had long wanted to play Sydney Carton on film. He was even willing to shave off his moustache.[2]
Elizabeth Allan as Lucie Manette
Edna May Oliver as Miss Pross
Reginald Owen as Stryver
Basil Rathbone as Marquis de St. Evremonde
Blanche Yurka as Madame Therese Defarge
Henry B. Walthall as Dr. Manette
Donald Woods as Charles Darnay
Walter Catlett as Barsad
Claude Gillingwater as Jarvis Lorry
H. B. Warner as Gabelle
Fritz Leiber as Gaspard
Lucille La Verne as The Vengeance
Mitchell Lewis as Ernest Defarge
Isabel Jewell as the Seamstress
Tully Marshall as a Woodcutter
Fay Chaldecott as Lucie Darnay, a child
Billy Bevan as Jerry Cruncher
Eily Malyon as Mrs. Cruncher
Donald Haines as Jerry Cruncher, Jr.
E. E. Clive as Judge in Old Bailey
Robert Warwick as Judge at tribunal
Lawrence Grant as a Prosecutor
Ralf Harolde as a Prosecutor
John Davidson as Morveau
Tom Ricketts as Tellson, Jr.
Barlowe Borland as Jacques
Critical reception[edit]
Andre Sennwald wrote in the New York Times of December 26, 1935: "Having given us "David Copperfield," Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer now heaps up more Dickensian magic with a prodigally stirring production of "A Tale of Two Cities" ... For more than two hours it crowds the screen with beauty and excitement, sparing nothing in its recital of the Englishmen who were caught up in the blood and terror of the French Revolution ... The drama achieves a crisis of extraordinary effectiveness at the guillotine, leaving the audience quivering under its emotional sledge-hammer blows ... Ronald Colman gives his ablest performance in years as Sydney Carton and a score of excellent players are at their best in it ... Only Donald Woods's Darnay is inferior, an unpleasant study in juvenile virtue. It struck me, too, that Blanche Yurka was guilty of tearing an emotion to tatters in the rôle of Madame Defarge ... you can be sure that "A Tale of Two Cities" will cause a vast rearranging of ten-best lists.[3]
References[edit]
1.^ Jump up to: a b c Glancy, H. Mark "When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood 'British' Film 1939–1945" (Manchester University Press, 1999)
2.Jump up ^ Quirk, Lawrence, The Films of Ronald Colman. Lyle Stuart, 1979.
3.Jump up ^ Sennwald, Andre (December 26, 1935). "Ronald Colman in 'A Tale of Two Cites,' at the Capitol – 'If You Could Only Cook.'". New York Times. Retrieved January 28, 2009.
External links[edit]
A Tale of Two Cities at the TCM Movie Database
A Tale of Two Cities at the Internet Movie Database
A Tale of Two Cities at AllMovie
A Tale of Two Cities Starring Ronald Colman Tribute site: synopsis, images and list of actors.


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War and Peace

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This article is about the Tolstoy novel. For other uses, see War and Peace (disambiguation).
War and Peace
Front page of War and Peace, first edition, 1869 (Russian)
Author
Leo Tolstoy
Original title
Война и миръ
Country
Russia
Language
Russian, with some French
Genre
Historical, Romance, War novel, philosophical
Publisher
The Russian Messenger (serial)

Publication date
 1869
Media type
Print (Hardback & Paperback) & Audio book
Pages
1,225 (first published edition)
War and Peace (Pre-reform Russian: Война и миръ, Voyna i mir) is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in its entirety in 1869. Epic in scale, it is regarded as one of the central works of world literature.[1][2][3] It is considered Tolstoy's finest literary achievement, along with his other major prose work, Anna Karenina (1873–1877).
War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. Portions of an earlier version of the novel, then known as The Year 1805,[4] were serialized in the magazine The Russian Messenger between 1865 and 1867. The novel was first published in its entirety in 1869.[5] Newsweek in 2009 ranked it first in its list of the Top 100 Books.[6] In 2003, the novel was listed at number 20 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.[7]
Tolstoy himself, somewhat enigmatically, said of War and Peace that it is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle". Large sections of the work, especially in the later chapters, are philosophical discussion rather than narrative.[8] He went on to elaborate that the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence hesitated to call War and Peace a novel. (Instead, Tolstoy regarded Anna Karenina as his first true novel.)


Contents  [hide]
1 Crafting the novel
2 Realism
3 Language 3.1 English and other translations
4 Background and historical context
5 Principal characters in War and Peace
6 Plot summary 6.1 Volume One
6.2 Volume Two
6.3 Volume Three
6.4 Epilogue in two parts
7 Reception
8 Full translations into English 8.1 Comparing translations
9 Adaptations 9.1 Film
9.2 Television
9.3 Opera
9.4 Theatre
9.5 Radio
9.6 Music
10 See also
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links

Crafting the novel[edit]

 

 Only known color photograph of the author, Leo Tolstoy, taken at his Yasnaya Polyana estate in 1908 by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
 

 Tolstoy's notes from the ninth draft of War and Peace, 1864
War and Peace is well known as being one of the longest novels ever written, though not the longest.
Tolstoy never documented why in 1867 he changed the name of his novel from The Year 1805 to War and Peace. He may have borrowed the title from the 1861 work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: La Guerre et la Paix ('The War and the Peace' in French).[4] The title may also be another reference to Titus, who is described as being a master of "war and peace" in The Twelve Caesars, written by Suetonius in 119 CE.
He began writing War and Peace in the year that he finally married and settled down at his country estate. The first half of the book was written under the name "1805".
During the writing of the second half, he read widely and acknowledged Schopenhauer as one of his main inspirations. However, Tolstoy developed his own views of history and the role of the individual within it.[9]
The first draft of War and Peace was completed in 1863. In 1865, the periodical Russkiy Vestnik published the first part of this early version under the title 1805. In the following year, it published more of the same early version. Tolstoy was dissatisfied with this version, although he allowed several parts of it to be published with a different ending in 1867, still under the same title "1805". He heavily rewrote the entire novel between 1866 and 1869.[5][9] Tolstoy's wife, Sophia Tolstaya, copied as many as seven separate complete manuscripts by hand before Tolstoy considered it again ready for publication.[9] The version that was published in Russkiy Vestnik had a very different ending from the version eventually published under the title War and Peace in 1869.
The completed novel was then called Voyna i mir (new style orthography; in English War and Peace).
The 1805 manuscript (sometimes referred to as "the original War and Peace") was re-edited and annotated in Russia in 1983 and since has been translated separately from the "known" version, to English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Albanian, and Korean. The fact that so many versions of War and Peace survive make it one of the best insights into the mental processes of a great novelist.
Russians who had read the serialized version were anxious to acquire the complete first edition, which included epilogues, and it sold out almost immediately. The novel was translated almost immediately after publication into many other languages.
The novel can be generally classified as historical fiction. It contains elements present in many types of popular 18th and 19th century literature, especially the romance novel. War and Peace attains its literary status by transcending genres.
Tolstoy was instrumental in bringing a new kind of consciousness to the novel. His narrative structure is noted for its "god-like" ability to hover over and within events, but also in the way it swiftly and seamlessly portrayed a particular character's point of view. His use of visual detail is often cinematic in its scope, using the literary equivalents of panning, wide shots and close-ups, to give dramatic interest to battles and ballrooms alike. These devices, while not exclusive to Tolstoy, are part of the new style of the novel that arose in the mid-19th century and of which Tolstoy proved himself a master.[10]
Realism[edit]
Tolstoy incorporated extensive historical research. He was also influenced by many other novels.[9] A veteran of the Crimean War, Tolstoy was quite critical of standard history, especially the standards of military history, in War and Peace. Tolstoy read all the standard histories available in Russian and French about the Napoleonic Wars and combined more traditional historical writing with the novel form. He explains at the start of the novel's third volume his own views on how history ought to be written. His aim was to blur the line between fiction and history, in order to get closer to the truth, as he states in Volume II.
The novel is set 60 years earlier than when Tolstoy wrote it, "in the days of our grandfathers," as he puts it. He had spoken with people who had lived through war during the French invasion of Russia in 1812, so the book is also, in part, accurate ethnography fictionalized. He read letters, journals, autobiographical and biographical materials pertaining to Napoleon and the dozens of other historical characters in the novel. There are approximately 160 real persons named or referred to in War and Peace.[11]
Language[edit]

 

 Cover of War and Peace, Italian translation, 1899
Although Tolstoy wrote most of the book, including all the narration, in Russian, significant portions of dialogue (including its opening paragraph) are written in French and characters often switch between the two languages. This reflected 19th century Russian aristocracy, where French, a foreign tongue, was widely spoken and considered a language of prestige and more refined than Russian.[12] This came about from the historical influence throughout Europe of the powerful court of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, leading to members of the Russian aristocracy being less competent in speaking their mother tongue. In War and Peace, for example, Julie Karagina, Princess Marya's friend, has to take Russian lessons in order to master her native language.
It has been suggested[13] that it is a deliberate literary device employed by Tolstoy, to use French to portray artifice and insincerity as the language of the theater and deceit while Russian emerges as a language of sincerity, honesty and seriousness. It displays slight irony that as Pierre and others socialize and use French phrases, they will be attacked by legions of Bonapartists in a very short time. It is sometimes used in satire against Napoleon. In the novel, when Pierre proposes to Hélène, he speaks to her in French—Je vous aime ("I love you"). When the marriage later emerges to be a sham, Pierre blames those French words.
The use of French diminishes as the book progresses and the wars with the French intensify, culminating in the capture and eventual burning of Moscow. The progressive elimination of French from the text is a means of demonstrating that Russia has freed itself from foreign cultural domination.[13] It is also, at the level of plot development, a way of showing that a once-admired and friendly nation, France, has turned into an enemy. By midway through the book, several of the Russian aristocracy, whose command of French is far better than their command of Russian, are anxious to find Russian tutors for themselves.
English and other translations[edit]
War and Peace has been translated into many languages. It has been translated into English on several occasions, starting with Clara Bell working from a French translation. The translators Constance Garnett and Louise and Aylmer Maude knew Tolstoy personally. Translations have to deal with Tolstoy’s often peculiar syntax and his fondness for repetitions. About 2% of War and Peace is in French; Tolstoy removed the French in a revised 1873 edition, only to restore it later.[13] Most translators follow Garnett retaining some French, Briggs uses no French, while Pevear-Volokhonsky and Amy Mandelker's revision of the Maude translation both retain the French fully.[13] (For a list of translations see below)
Background and historical context[edit]

 

In 1812 by the Russian artist Illarion Pryanishnikov
The novel begins in the year 1805 during the reign of Tsar Alexander I and leads up to the 1812 French invasion of Russia by Napoleon. The era of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), when the royal court in Paris was the centre of western European civilization,[14] is still fresh in the minds of older people. Catherine, fluent in French and wishing to reshape Russia into a great European nation, made French the language of her royal court. For the next one hundred years, it became a social requirement for members of the Russian nobility to speak French and understand French culture.[14] This historical and cultural context in the aristocracy is reflected in War and Peace. Catherine's grandson, Alexander I, came to the throne in 1801 at the age of 24. In the novel, his mother, Marya Feodorovna, is the most powerful woman in the Russian court.
War and Peace tells the story of five aristocratic families—the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Kuragins and the Drubetskoys—and the entanglements of their personal lives with the then contemporary history of 1805 to 1813, principally Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. The Bezukhovs, while very rich, are a fragmented family as the old Count, Kirill Vladimirovich, has fathered dozens of illegitimate sons. The Bolkonskys are an old established and wealthy family based at Bald Hills. Old Prince Bolkonsky, Nikolai Andreevich, served as a general under Catherine the Great, in earlier wars. The Moscow Rostovs have many estates, but never enough cash. They are a closely knit, loving family who live for the moment regardless of their financial situation. The Kuragin family has three children, who are all of questionable character. The Drubetskoy family is of impoverished nobility, and consists of an elderly mother and her only son, Boris, whom she wishes to push up the career ladder.
Tolstoy spent years researching and rewriting the book. He worked from primary source materials (interviews and other documents), as well as from history books, philosophy texts and other historical novels.[9] Tolstoy also used a great deal of his own experience in the Crimean War to bring vivid detail and first-hand accounts of how the Russian army was structured.[15]
The standard Russian text of War and Peace is divided into four books (fifteen parts) and an epilogue in two parts – one mainly narrative, the other thematic. While roughly the first half of the novel is concerned strictly with the fictional characters, the later parts, as well as one of the work's two epilogues, increasingly consist of essays about the nature of war, power, history, and historiography. Tolstoy interspersed these essays into the story in a way that defies previous fictional convention. Certain abridged versions remove these essays entirely, while others, published even during Tolstoy's life, simply moved these essays into an appendix.
Principal characters in War and Peace[edit]
Main article: List of War and Peace characters

 

War and Peace simple family tree
 

War and Peace detailed family tree
 

 Natasha Rostova, a postcard by Elisabeth BohmCount Pyotr Kirillovich (Pierre) Bezukhov: The large-bodied, ungainly, and socially awkward illegitimate son of an old Russian grandee. Pierre, educated abroad, returns to Russia as a misfit. His unexpected inheritance of a large fortune makes him socially desirable. Pierre is the central character and often a voice for Tolstoy's own beliefs or struggles.
Prince Andrey Nikolayevich Bolkonsky: A strong but skeptical, thoughtful and philosophical aide-de-camp in the Napoleonic Wars.
Princess Maria Nikolayevna Bolkonskaya: Sister of Prince Andrew, Princess Maria is a pious woman whose eccentric father attempted to give her a good education. The caring, nurturing nature of her large eyes in her otherwise thin and plain face are frequently mentioned.
Count Ilya Andreyevich Rostov: The pater-familias of the Rostov family; terrible with finances, generous to a fault.
Countess Natalya Rostova: Wife of Count Ilya Rostov, mother of the four Rostov children.
Countess Natalya Ilyinichna (Natasha) Rostova: A central character, introduced as "not pretty but full of life" and a romantic young girl, although impulsive and highly strung, she evolves through trials and suffering and eventually finds happiness. She is an accomplished singer and dancer.
Count Nikolai Ilyich (Nikolenka) Rostov: An hussar, the beloved eldest son of the Rostov family.
Sofia Alexandrovna (Sonya) Rostova: Orphaned cousin of Vera, Nikolai, Natasha, and Petya Rostov.
Countess Vera Ilyinichna Rostova: Eldest of the Rostov children, she marries the German career soldier, Berg.
Pyotr Ilyich (Petya) Rostov: Youngest of the Rostov children.
Prince Vasily Sergeyevich Kuragin: A ruthless man who is determined to marry his children well, despite having doubts about the character of some of them.
Princess Elena Vasilyevna (Hélène) Kuragin: A beautiful and sexually alluring woman who has many affairs, including (it is rumoured) with her brother Anatole.
Prince Anatole Vasilyevich Kuragin: Hélène's brother and a very handsome and amoral pleasure seeker who is secretly married yet tries to elope with Natasha Rostova.
Prince Ippolit Vasilyevich: The eldest and perhaps most dim-witted of the Kuragin children.
Prince Boris Drubetskoy: A poor but aristocratic young man driven by ambition, even at the expense of his friends and benefactors, who marries for money, rather than love, an heiress, Julie Karagina.
Princess Anna Mihalovna Drubetskaya: The mother of Boris.
Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov: A cold, almost psychopathic officer, he ruins Nikolai Rostov by luring him into an outrageous gambling debt (by which he, Dolokhov, profits), he only shows love to his doting mother.
Adolf Karlovich Berg: A young Russian officer, who desires to be just like everyone else.
Anna Pavlovna Scherer: Also known as Annette, she is the hostess of the salon that is the site of much of the novel's action in Petersburg.
Maria Dmitryevna Akhrosimova: An older Moscow society lady, she is an elegant dancer and trend-setter, despite her age and size.
Amalia Evgenyevna Bourienne: A French woman who lives with the Bolkonskys, primarily as Princess Marya's companion.
Vasily Dmitrich Denisov: Nikolai Rostov's friend and brother officer, who proposes to Natasha.
Platon Karataev: The archetypal good Russian peasant, whom Pierre meets in the prisoner of war camp.
Napoleon I of France: the Great Man, whose fate is detailed in the book.
General Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov: Russian commander-in-chief.
Osip Bazdeyev: the Freemason who interests Pierre in his mysterious group, starting a lengthy subplot.[citation needed]
Tsar Alexander I of Russia: He signed a peace treaty with Napoleon in 1807 and then went to war with him.
Many of Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace were based on real-life people known to Tolstoy himself. His grandparents and their friends were the models for many of the main characters, his great-grandparents would have been of the generation of Prince Vassily or Count Ilya Rostov. Some of the characters, obviously, are actual historic figures.
Plot summary[edit]
War and Peace has a large cast of characters, the majority of whom are introduced in the first book. Some are actual historical figures, such as Napoleon and Alexander I. While the scope of the novel is vast, it is centered around five aristocratic families. The plot and the interactions of the characters take place in the era surrounding the 1812 French invasion of Russia during the Napoleonic wars.[16]
Volume One[edit]

 

 The Empress Dowager, Maria Feodorovna, mother of reigning Tsar Alexander I, is the most powerful woman in the Russian royal court, in the historical setting of the novel.
The novel begins in July 1805 in Saint Petersburg, at a soirée given by Anna Pavlovna Scherer—the maid of honour and confidante to the queen mother Maria Feodorovna. Many of the main characters and aristocratic families in the novel are introduced as they enter Anna Pavlovna's salon. Pierre (Pyotr Kirilovich) Bezukhov is the illegitimate son of a wealthy count, an elderly man who is dying after a series of strokes. Pierre is about to become embroiled in a struggle for his inheritance. Educated abroad at his father's expense following his mother's death, Pierre is essentially kindhearted, but socially awkward, and owing in part to his open, benevolent nature, finds it difficult to integrate into Petersburg society. It is known to everyone at the soirée that Pierre is his father's favorite of all the old count’s illegitimate children.
Also attending the soirée is Pierre's friend, the intelligent and sardonic Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, husband of Lise, the charming society favourite. Finding Petersburg society unctuous and disillusioned with married life after discovering his wife is empty and superficial, Prince Andrei makes the fateful choice to be an aide-de-camp to Prince Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov in the coming war against Napoleon.
The plot moves to Moscow, Russia's ancient city and former capital, contrasting its provincial, more Russian ways to the highly mannered society of Petersburg. The Rostov family are introduced. Count Ilya Andreyevich Rostov has four adolescent children. Thirteen-year-old Natasha (Natalia Ilyinichna) believes herself in love with Boris Drubetskoy, a disciplined young man who is about to join the army as an officer. Twenty-year-old Nikolai Ilyich pledges his love to Sonya (Sofia Alexandrovna), his fifteen-year-old cousin, an orphan who has been brought up by the Rostovs. The eldest child of the Rostov family, Vera Ilyinichna, is cold and somewhat haughty but has a good prospective marriage in a Russian-German officer, Adolf Karlovich Berg. Petya (Pyotr Ilyich) is nine and the youngest of the Rostov family; like his brother, he is impetuous and eager to join the army when of age. The heads of the family, Count Ilya Rostov and Countess Natalya Rostova, are an affectionate couple but forever worried about their disordered finances.
At Bald Hills, the Bolkonskys' country estate, Prince Andrei departs for war and leaves his terrified, pregnant wife Lise with his eccentric father Prince Nikolai Andreyevich Bolkonsky and devoutly religious sister Maria Nikolayevna Bolkonskaya, who refuses to marry the son of a wealthy aristocrat on account of her devotion to her father.
The second part opens with descriptions of the impending Russian-French war preparations. At the Schöngrabern engagement, Nikolai Rostov, who is now conscripted as ensign in a squadron of hussars, has his first taste of battle. Boris Drubetskoy introduces him to Prince Andrei, whom Rostov insults in a fit of impetuousness. Even more than most young soldiers, he is deeply attracted by Tsar Alexander's charisma. Nikolai gambles and socializes with his officer, Vasily Dmitrich Denisov, and befriends the ruthless, and perhaps, psychopathic Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov. Both Bolkonsky, Rostov and Denisov are involved in the disastrous Battle of Austerlitz, in which Andrei is wounded as he attempts to rescue a Russian standard.




 

 Scene in Red Square, Moscow, 1801. Oil on canvas by Fedor Yakovlevich Alekseev.
Book Four begins with Nikolai Rostov briefly returning on home leave to Moscow. Nikolai finds the Rostov family facing financial ruin due to poor estate management. He spends an eventful winter at home, accompanied by his friend Denisov, his officer from the Pavlograd Regiment in which he serves. Natasha has blossomed into a beautiful young girl. Denisov falls in love with her, proposes marriage but is rejected. Although his mother pleads with Nikolai to find himself a good financial prospect in marriage, Nikolai refuses to accede to his mother's request. He promises to marry his childhood sweetheart, the dowry-less Sonya.
Pierre Bezukhov, upon finally receiving his massive inheritance, is suddenly transformed from a bumbling young man into the richest and most eligible bachelor in the Russian Empire. Despite rationally knowing that it is wrong, he is convinced into marriage with Prince Kuragin's beautiful and immoral daughter Hélène (Elena Vasilyevna Kuragina), to whom he is superficially attracted. Hélène, who is rumoured to be involved in an incestuous affair with her brother, the equally charming and immoral Anatol, tells Pierre that she will never have children with him. Hélène is rumoured to have an affair with Dolokhov, who mocks Pierre in public. Pierre loses his temper and challenges Dolokhov, a seasoned dueller and ruthless killer, to a duel. Unexpectedly, Pierre wounds Dolokhov. Hélène denies her affair, but Pierre is convinced of her guilt and, after almost being violent to her, leaves her. In his moral and spiritual confusion, Pierre joins the Freemasons, and becomes embroiled in Masonic internal politics. Much of Book Two concerns his struggles with his passions and his spiritual conflicts to be a better man. Now a rich aristocrat, he abandons his former carefree behavior and enters upon a philosophical quest particular to Tolstoy: how should one live a moral life in an ethically imperfect world? The question continually baffles Pierre. He attempts to liberate his serfs, but ultimately achieves nothing of note.
Pierre is vividly contrasted with the intelligent and ambitious Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. Andrei recovers from his near fatal artillery wound in a military hospital and returns home, only to find his wife Lise dying in childbirth. He is stricken by his guilty conscience for not treating Lise better when she was alive, and is haunted by the pitiful expression on his dead wife's face. His child, Nikolenka, survives.
Burdened with nihilistic disillusionment, Prince Andrei does not return to the army but chooses to remain on his estate, working on a project that would codify military behavior to solve problems of disorganization responsible for the loss of life on the Russian side. Pierre visits him and brings new questions: where is God in this amoral world? Pierre is interested in panentheism and the possibility of an afterlife.
Volume Two[edit]
Pierre's estranged wife, Hélène, begs him to take her back, and against his better judgment and in trying to abide by the Freemason laws of forgiveness, he does. Despite her vapid shallowness, Hélène establishes herself as an influential hostess in Petersburg society.
Prince Andrei feels impelled to take his newly written military notions to Petersburg, naively expecting to influence either the Emperor himself or those close to him. Young Natasha, also in Petersburg, is caught up in the excitement of dressing for her first grand ball, where she meets Prince Andrei and briefly reinvigorates him with her vivacious charm. Andrei believes he has found purpose in life again and, after paying the Rostovs several visits, proposes marriage to Natasha. However, old Prince Bolkonsky, Andrei's father, dislikes the Rostovs, opposes the marriage, and insists on a year's delay. Prince Andrei leaves to recuperate from his wounds abroad, leaving Natasha initially distraught. She soon recovers her spirits, however, and Count Rostov takes her and Sonya to spend some time with a friend in Moscow.
Natasha visits the Moscow opera, where she meets Hélène and her brother Anatole. Anatol has since married a Polish woman whom he has abandoned in Poland. He is very attracted to Natasha and is determined to seduce her. Hélène and Anatole conspire together to accomplish this plan. Anatole kisses Natasha and writes her passionate letters, eventually establishing plans to elope. Natasha is convinced that she loves Anatole and writes to Princess Maria, Andrei's sister, breaking off her engagement. At the last moment, Sonya discovers her plans to elope and foils them. Pierre is initially horrified by Natasha's behavior, but realizes he has fallen in love with her. During the time when the Great Comet of 1811–2 streaks the sky, life appears to begin anew for Pierre.
Prince Andrei coldly accepts Natasha's breaking of the engagement. He tells Pierre that his pride will not allow him to renew his proposal. Ashamed, Natasha makes a suicide attempt and is left seriously ill.
Volume Three[edit]

 

 The Battle of Borodino, fought on September 7, 1812 and involving more than 250,000 troops and 70,000 casualties was a pivotal turning point in Napoleon's failed campaign to take Russia. It is vividly depicted in great detail through the plot and characters in War and Peace.
 Painting by Louis-François, Baron Lejeune, 1822.
With the help of her family, especially Sonya, and the stirrings of religious faith, Natasha manages to persevere in Moscow through this dark period. Meanwhile, the whole of Russia is affected by the coming confrontation between Napoleon's troops and the Russian army. Pierre convinces himself through gematria that Napoleon is the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation. Old prince Bolkonsky dies of a stroke while trying to protect his estate from French marauders. No organized help from any Russian army seems available to the Bolkonskys, but Nikolai Rostov turns up at their estate in time to help put down an incipient peasant revolt. He finds himself attracted to Princess Maria, but remembers his promise to Sonya.
Back in Moscow, the war-obsessed Petya manages to snatch a loose piece of the Tsar's biscuit outside the Cathedral of the Assumption; he finally convinces his parents to allow him to enlist.
Napoleon himself is a main character in this section, and the novel presents him in vivid detail, as both a thinker and would-be strategist. His toilette and his customary attitudes and traits of mind are depicted in detail. Also described are the well-organized force of over 400,000 French Army (only 140,000 of them actually French-speaking) that marches quickly through the Russian countryside in the late summer and reaches the outskirts of the city of Smolensk. Pierre decides to leave Moscow and go to watch the Battle of Borodino from a vantage point next to a Russian artillery crew. After watching for a time, he begins to join in carrying ammunition. In the midst of the turmoil he experiences firsthand the death and destruction of war; Eugène's artillery continues to pound Russian support columns, while Marshals Ney and Davout set up a crossfire with artillery positioned on the Semyonovskaya heights. The battle becomes a hideous slaughter for both armies and ends in a standoff. The Russians, however, have won a moral victory by standing up to Napoleon's reputedly invincible army. For strategic reasons and having suffered grievous losses, the Russian army withdraws the next day, allowing Napoleon to march on to Moscow. Among the casualties are Anatole Kuragin and Prince Andrei. Anatole loses a leg, and Andrei suffers a grenade wound in the abdomen. Both are reported dead, but their families are in such disarray that no one can be notified.
The Rostovs have waited until the last minute to abandon Moscow, even after it is clear that Kutuzov has retreated past Moscow and Muscovites are being given contradictory, often propagandistic, instructions on how to either flee or fight. Count Rostopchin is publishing posters, rousing the citizens to put their faith in religious icons, while at the same time urging them to fight with pitchforks if necessary. Before fleeing himself, he gives orders to burn the city. The Rostovs have a difficult time deciding what to take with them, but in the end, Natasha convinces them to load their carts with the wounded and dying from the Battle of Borodino. Unknown to Natasha, Prince Andrei is amongst the wounded.
When Napoleon's Grand Army finally occupies an abandoned and burning Moscow, Pierre takes off on a quixotic mission to assassinate Napoleon. He becomes an anonymous man in all the chaos, shedding his responsibilities by wearing peasant clothes and shunning his duties and lifestyle. The only people he sees while in this garb are Natasha and some of her family, as they depart Moscow. Natasha recognizes and smiles at him, and he in turn realizes the full scope of his love for her.
Pierre saves the life of a French officer who fought at Borodino, yet is taken prisoner by the retreating French during his attempted assassination of Napoleon, after saving a woman from being raped by soldiers in the French Army.

 

 Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Painting by Adolf Northern (1828–1876)
Pierre becomes friends with a fellow prisoner, Platon Karataev, a peasant with a saintly demeanor, who is incapable of malice. In Karataev, Pierre finally finds what he has been seeking: an honest person of integrity (unlike the aristocrats of Petersburg society) who is utterly without pretense. Pierre discovers meaning in life simply by living and interacting with him. After witnessing French soldiers sacking Moscow and shooting Russian civilians arbitrarily, Pierre is forced to march with the Grand Army during its disastrous retreat from Moscow in the harsh Russian winter. After months of trial and tribulation—during which the fever-plagued Karataev is shot by the French—Pierre is finally freed by a Russian raiding party, after a small skirmish with the French that sees the young Petya Rostov killed in action.
Meanwhile, Andrei, wounded during Napoleon's invasion, has been taken in as a casualty and cared for by the Rostovs, fleeing from Moscow to Yaroslavl. He is reunited with Natasha and his sister Maria before the end of the war. Having lost all will to live, he forgives Natasha in a last act before dying.
As the novel draws to a close, Pierre's wife Hélène dies from an overdose of abortion medication (Tolstoy does not state it explicitly but the euphemism he uses is unambiguous). Pierre is reunited with Natasha, while the victorious Russians rebuild Moscow. Natasha speaks of Prince Andrei's death and Pierre of Karataev's. Both are aware of a growing bond between them in their bereavement. With the help of Princess Maria, Pierre finds love at last and, revealing his love after being released by his former wife's death, marries Natasha.
Epilogue in two parts[edit]
The first part of the epilogue begins with the wedding of Pierre and Natasha in 1813. It is the last happy event for the Rostov family, which is undergoing a transition. Count Rostov dies soon after, leaving his eldest son Nikolai to take charge of the debt-ridden estate.
Nikolai finds himself with the task of maintaining the family on the verge of bankruptcy. His abhorrence at the idea of marrying for wealth almost gets in his way, but finally he marries the now-rich Maria Bolkonskaya and in so doing also saves his family from financial ruin.
Nikolai and Maria then move to Bald Hills with his mother and Sonya, whom he supports for the rest of their lives. Buoyed by his wife's fortune, Nikolai pays off all his family's debts. They also raise Prince Andrei's orphaned son, Nikolai Andreyevich (Nikolenka) Bolkonsky.
As in all good marriages, there are misunderstandings, but the couples — Pierre and Natasha, Nikolai and Maria — remain devoted to their spouses. Pierre and Natasha visit Bald Hills in 1820, much to the jubilation of everyone concerned. There is a hint in the closing chapters that the idealistic, boyish Nikolenka and Pierre would both become part of the Decembrist Uprising. The first epilogue concludes with Nikolenka promising he would do something with which even his late father "would be satisfied..." (presumably as a revolutionary in the Decembrist revolt).
The second part of the epilogue contains Tolstoy's critique of all existing forms of mainstream history. The 19th-century Great Man Theory claims that historical events are the result of the actions of "heroes" and other great individuals; Tolstoy argues that this is impossible because of how rarely these actions result in great historical events. Rather, he argues, great historical events are the result of many smaller events driven by the thousands of individuals involved (he compares this to calculus, and the sum of infinitesimals). He then goes on to argue that these smaller events are the result of an inverse relationship between necessity and free-will, necessity being based on reason and therefore explainable by historical analysis, and free-will being based on "consciousness" and therefore inherently unpredictable.
Reception[edit]
The novel that made its author "the true lion of the Russian literature" (according to Ivan Goncharov)[17][18] enjoyed great success with the reading public upon its publication and spawned dozens of reviews and analytical essays in the press, some of which (by Pisarev, Annenkov, Dragomirov and Strakhov) formed the basis for the research of later Tolstoy scholars.[18] Yet the Russian press's initial response to the novel was muted, most critics feeling bewildered by this mammoth work they couldn’t decide how to classify. The liberal newspaper Golos (The Voice, April 3, #93, 1865) was one of the first to react. Its anonymous reviewer posed a question later repeated by many others: "What could this possibly be? What kind of genre are we supposed to file it to?.. Where is fiction in it, and where is real history?"[18]

 

 Leonid Pasternak's 1893 illustration to War and Peace"
Writer and critic Nikolai Akhsharumov, writing in Vsemirny Trud (#6, 1867) suggested that War and Peace was "neither a chronicle, nor a historical novel", but a genre merger, this ambiguity never undermining its immense value. Pavel Annenkov, who praised the novel too, was equally vague when trying to classify it. "The cultural history of one large section of our society, the political and social panorama of it in the beginning of the current century," was his suggestion. "It is the [social] epic, the history novel and the vast picture of the whole nation's life," wrote Ivan Turgenev in his bid to define War and Peace in the foreword for his French translation of "The Two Hussars" (published in Paris by Le Temps in 1875).
In general, the literary left received the novel coldly. They saw it as totally devoid of social critique, and keen on the idea of national unity. They saw its major fault as the "...author's inability to portray a new kind of revolutionary intelligentsia in his novel," as critic Varfoomey Zaytsev put it.[19] Articles by D.Minayev, V.Bervi-Flerovsky and N.Shelgunov in Delo magazine characterized the novel as "lacking realism", showing its characters as "cruel and rough", "mentally stoned", "morally depraved" and promoting "the philosophy of stagnation". Still, Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin, who never expressed his opinion of the novel publicly, in the private conversation was reported to have expressed delight with "how strongly this Count has stung our higher society".[20] Dmitry Pisarev in his unfinished article "Russian Gentry of Old" (Staroye barstvo, Otechestvennye Zapiski, #2, 1868) while praising Tolstoy's realism in portraying members of high society, still was unhappy with the way the author, as he saw it, 'idealized' the old nobility, expressing "unconscious and quite natural tenderness towards" the Russian dvoryanstvo. On the opposite front, the conservative press and "patriotic" authors (A.S.Norov and P.A.Vyazemsky among them) were accusing Tolstoy of consciously distorting the 1812 history, desecrating the "patriotic feelings of our fathers" and ridiculing dvoryanstvo.[18]
One of the first comprehensive articles on the novel was that of Pavel Annenkov, published in #2, 1868 issue of Vestnik Evropy. The critic praised Tolstoy's masterful portrayal of man at war, marveled at the complexity of the whole composition, organically merging historical facts and fiction. "The dazzling side of the novel", according to Annenkov, was "the natural simplicity with which [the author] transports the worldly affairs and big social events down to the level of a character who witnesses them." Annekov thought the historical gallery of the novel was incomplete with the two "great raznotchintsys", Speransky and Arakcheev, and deplored the fact that the author stopped at introducing to the novel "this relatively rough but original element". In the end the critic called the novel "the whole epoch in the Russian fiction".[18]
Slavophiles declared Tolstoy their "bogatyr" and pronounced War and Peace "the Bible of the new national idea". Several articles on War and Peace were published in 1869–1870 in Zarya magazine by Nikolai Strakhov. "War and Peace is the work of genius, equal to everything that the Russian literature has produced before," he pronounced in the first, smaller essay. "It is now quite clear that from 1868 when the War and Peace was published the very essence of what we call Russian literature has become quite different, acquired the new form and meaning," the critic continued later. Strakhov was the first critic in Russia who declared Tolstoy's novel to be a masterpiece of level previously unknown in Russian literature. Still, being a true Slavophile, he could not fail to see the novel as promoting the major Slavophiliac ideas of "meek Russian character'ss supremacy over the rapacious European kind" (using Apollon Grigoriev's formula). Years later, in 1878, discussing Strakhov's own book The World as a Whole, Tolstoy criticized both Grigoriev's concept (of "Russian meekness vs. Western bestiality") and Strakhov's interpretation of it.[21]

 

Battle of Schöngrabern by K.Bujnitsky
Among the reviewers were military men and authors specializing in the war literature. Most assessed highly the artfulness and realism of Tolstoy's battle scenes. N.Lachinov, a member of the Russky Invalid newspaper stuff (#69, April 10, 1868) called the Battle of Schöngrabern scenes "bearing the highest degree of historical and artistic truthfulness" and totally agreed with the author's view on the Battle of Borodino, which some of his opponents disputed. The army general and respected military writer Mikhail Dragomirov, in an article published in Oruzheiny Sbornik (The Military Almanac, 1868-1870), while disputing some of Tolstoy's ideas concerning the "spontaneity" of wars and the role of commander in battles, advised all the Russian Army officers to use War and Peace as their desk book, describing its battle scenes as "incomparable" and "serving for an ideal manual to every textbook on theories of military art."[18]
Unlike professional literary critics, most prominent Russian writers of the time supported the novel wholeheartedly. Goncharov, Turgenev, Leskov, Dostoyevsky and Fet have all gone on record as declaring War and Peace the masterpiece of the Russian literature. Ivan Goncharov in a July 17, 1878, letter to Pyotr Ganzen advised him to choose for translating into Danish War and Peace, adding: "This is positively what might be called a Russian Ilyad. Embracing the whole epoch, it is the grandiose literary event, showcasing the gallery of great men painted by a lively brush of the great master... This is one of the most, if not the most profound literary work ever.[22] In 1879, unhappy with Ganzen having chosen Anna Karenina to start with, Goncharov insisted: "War and Peace is the extraordinary poem of a novel, both in content and execution. It also serves as a monument to Russian history's glorious epoch when whatever figure you take is a colossus, a statue in bronze. Even [the novel's] minor characters carry all the characteristic features of the Russian people and its life."[23] In 1885, expressing satisfaction with the fact that Tolstoy's works have now been translated into Danish, Goncharov again stressed the immense importance of War and Peace. "Count Tolstoy really mounts over everybody else here [in Russia]," he remarked.[24]
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (in a May 30, 1871, letter to Strakhov) described War and Peace as "the last word of the landlord's literature and the brilliant one at that". In a draft version of the Teenager novel he described Tolstoy as "a historiograph of the dvoryanstvo, or rather, its cultural elite." "The objectivity and realism impart wonderful charm to all scenes, and alongside people of talent, honour and duty he exposes numerous scoundrels, worthless goons and fools," he added.[25] In 1876 Dostoyevsky wrote: "My strong conviction is that a writer of fiction has to have most profound knowledge - not only of the poetic side of his art, but also the reality he deals with, in its historical as well as contemporary context. Here [in Russia], as far as I see it, only one writer excels in this, Count Lev Tolstoy."[26]
Nikolai Leskov, then an anonymous reviewer in Birzhevy Vestnik (The Stock Exchange Herald), wrote several articles praising highly War and Peace, calling it "the best ever Russian historical novel" and "the pride of the contemporary literature". Marveling at the realism and factual truthfulness of Tolstoy's book, Leskov thought the author deserved the special credit for "having lifted up the people's spirit upon the high pedestal it deserved". "While working most elaborately upon individual characters, the author, apparently, has been studying most diligently the character of the nation as a whole; the life of people whose moral strength came to be concentrated in the Army that came up to fight mighty Napoleon. In this respect the novel of Count Tolstoy could be seen as an epic of the Great national war which up until now has had its historians but never had its singers," Leskov wrote.[18]
Afanasy Fet, in a January 1, 1870, letter to Tolstoy, expressed his great delight with the novel. "You've managed to show us in great detail the other, mundane side of life and explain how organically does it feed the outer, heroic side of it," he added.[27]
Ivan Turgenev gradually re-considered his initial skepticism as to the novel’s historical aspect and also the style of Tolstoy's psychological analysis. In his 1880 article written in the form of a letter addressed to Edmond Abou, the editor of the French newspaper Le XIX-e Siecle, Turgenev described Tolstoy as "the most popular Russian writer" and War and Peace as "one of the most remarkable books of our age".[28] "This vast work has the spirit of an epic, where the life of Russia of the beginning of our century in general and in details has been recreated by the hand of a true master... The manner in which Count Tolstoy conducts his treatise is innovative and original. This is the great work of a great writer, and in it there’s true, real Russia," Turgenev wrote.[29] It was largely due to Turgenev's efforts that the novel started to gain popularity with the European readership. The first French edition of the War and Peace (1879) paved the way for the worldwide success of Leo Tolstoy and his works.[18]
Since then many world famous authors have praised War and Peace as a masterpiece of the world literature. Gustave Flaubert expressed his delight in a January 1880 letter to Turgenev, writing: "This is the first class work! What an artist and what a psychologist! The first two volumes are exquisite. I used to utter shrieks of delight while reading. This is powerful, very powerful indeed."[30] Later John Galsworthy called War and Peace "the best novel that had ever been written". Romain Rolland, remembering his reading the novel as a student, wrote: "this work, like life itself, has no beginning, no end. It is life itself in its eternal movement."[31] Thomas Mann thought War and Peace to be "the greatest ever war novel in the history of literature."[32] Ernest Hemingway confessed that it was from Tolstoy that he'd been taking lessons on how to "write about war in the most straightforward, honest, objective and stark way." "I don't know anybody who could write about war better than Tolstoy did," Hemingway asserted in his 1955 Men at War. The Best War Stories of All Time anthology.[18]
Isaak Babel said, after reading War and Peace, "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy."[33] Tolstoy "gives us a unique combination of the 'naive objectivity' of the oral narrator with the interest in detail characteristic of realism. This is the reason for our trust in his presentation."[34]
Full translations into English[edit]
Clara Bell (from a French version) (1885–86)
Nathan Haskell Dole (1898)
Leo Wiener (1904)
Constance Garnett (1904)
Aylmer and Louise Maude (1922–3)
Rosemary Edmonds (1957, revised 1978)
Ann Dunnigan (1968)
Anthony Briggs (2005)
Andrew Bromfield (2007), translation of the first completed draft, approx. 400 pages shorter than other English translations
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2007)
Maude translation revised by Amy Mandelker, Oxford University Press (2010) ISBN 978-0-19-923276-5
Comparing translations[edit]
Academic Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit has this to say about the translations of War and Peace available in 2000: "Of all the translations of War and Peace, Dunnigan's (1968) is the best....Unlike the other translators, Dunnigan even succeeds with many characteristically Russian folk expressions and proverbs....She is faithful to the text and does not hesitate to render conscientiously those details that the uninitiated may find bewildering: for instance, the statement that Boris's mother pronounced his name with a stress on the o – an indication to the Russian reader of the old lady's affectation."
On the Garnett translation Pavlovskis-Petit writes: "her...War and Peace is frequently inexact and contains too many anglicisms. Her style is awkward and turgid, very unsuitable for Tolstoi." On the Maudes' translation she comments: "this should have been the best translation, but the Maudes' lack of adroitness in dealing with Russian folk idiom, and their style in general, place this version below Dunnigan's." She further comments on Edmonds's revised translation, formerly on Penguin: "[it] is the work of a sound scholar but not the best possible translator; it frequently lacks resourcefulness and imagination in its use of English....a respectable translation but not on the level of Dunnigan or Maude."[35]
Adaptations[edit]
Film[edit]
The first Russian adaptation was Война и мир (Voyna i mir) in 1915, which was directed by Vladimir Gardin and starred Gardin and the Russian ballerina Vera Karalli. F. Kamei produced a version in Japan in 1947.
The 208-minute long American 1956 version was directed by King Vidor and starred Audrey Hepburn (Natasha), Henry Fonda (Pierre) and Mel Ferrer (Andrei). Audrey Hepburn was nominated for a BAFTA Award for best British actress and for a Golden Globe Award for best actress in a drama production.
The critically acclaimed Soviet version by the director Sergei Bondarchuk was released in four parts in 1966 and 1967. It starred Lyudmila Savelyeva (as Natasha Rostova) and Vyacheslav Tikhonov (as Andrei Bolkonsky). Bondarchuk himself played the character of Pierre Bezukhov. The series' length was some seven hours; it involved thousands of extras and took six years to finish the shooting, as a result of which the actors age changed dramatically from scene to scene. It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for its authenticity and massive scale.[36] Bondarchuk's film is considered to be the best screen version of the novel. It attracted some controversy due to the number of horses killed during the making of the battle sequences and screenings were actively boycotted in several US cities by the ASPCA.[37]
Television[edit]
War and Peace (1972): The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) made a television serial based on the novel, broadcast in 1972–73. Anthony Hopkins played the lead role of Pierre. Other lead characters were played by Rupert Davies, Faith Brook, Morag Hood, Alan Dobie, Angela Down and Sylvester Morand. This version faithfully included many of Tolstoy's minor characters, including Platon Karataev (Harry Locke).[38][39]
La guerre et la paix (2000): French TV production of Prokofiev's opera War and Peace, directed by François Roussillon. Robert Brubaker played the lead role of Pierre.[40]
War and Peace (2007): produced by the Italian Lux Vide, a TV mini-series in Russian & English co-produced in Russia, France, Germany, Poland and Italy. Directed by Robert Dornhelm, with screenplay written by Lorenzo Favella, Enrico Medioli and Gavin Scott. It features an international cast with Alexander Beyer playing the lead role of Pierre assisted by Malcolm McDowell, Clémence Poésy, Alessio Boni, Pilar Abella, J. Kimo Arbas, Ken Duken, Juozapas Bagdonas and Toni Bertorelli.[41]
War and Peace (2015): On 18 February 2013, the BBC announced plans for a six-part adaptation of the novel to be scripted by Andrew Davies and aired on BBC One in 2015.[42][43]
Opera[edit]
Initiated by a proposal of the German director Erwin Piscator in 1938, the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev composed his opera War and Peace (Op. 91, libretto by Mira Mendelson) based on this epic novel during the 1940s. The complete musical work premiered in Leningrad in 1955. It was the first opera to be given a public performance at the Sydney Opera House (1973).[44]
Theatre[edit]
The first successful stage adaptations of War and Peace were produced by Alfred Neumann and Erwin Piscator (1942, revised 1955, published by Macgibbon & Kee in London 1963, and staged in 16 countries since) and R. Lucas (1943).
A stage adaptation by Helen Edmundson, first produced in 1996 at the Royal National Theatre, was published that year by Nick Hern Books, London. Edmundson added to and amended the play[45] for a 2008 production as two 3-hour parts by Shared Experience, directed by Nancy Meckler and Polly Teale.[46] This was first put on at the Nottingham Playhouse, then toured in the UK to Liverpool, Darlington, Bath, Warwick, Oxford, Truro, London (the Hampstead Theatre) and Cheltenham.
A musical adaptation by OBIE Award-winner Dave Malloy, called Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 premiered at the Ars Nova theater in Manhattan on October 1, 2012. The show is described as an electropop opera, and is based on Book 8 of War and Peace, focusing on Natasha's affair with Anatole.[47]
Radio[edit]
The BBC Home Service broadcast an eight-part adaptation by Walter Peacock from 17 January to 7 February 1943 with two episodes on each Sunday. All but the last instalment, which ran for one and a half hours, were one hour long. Leslie Banks played Pierre while Celia Johnson was Natasha.
In December 1970, Pacifica Radio station WBAI broadcast a reading of the entire novel (the 1968 Dunnigan translation) read by over 140 celebrities and ordinary people.[48]
A dramatised full-cast adaptation in 20 parts, edited by Michael Bakewell, was broadcast by the BBC. Transmission Times: 30.12.1969 to 12.5.1970 Cast included: David Buck, Kate Binchy, Martin Jarvis
A dramatised full-cast adaptation in ten parts was written by Marcy Kahan and Mike Walker in 1997 for BBC Radio 4. The production won the 1998 Talkie award for Best Drama and was around 9.5 hours in length. It was directed by Janet Whitaker and featured Simon Russell Beale, Gerard Murphy, Richard Johnson, and others.[49]
On New Year's Day 2015, BBC Radio 4 broadcast the drama over 10 hours. These episodes [50] are also available to listen to afterwards on iPlayer. The dramatisation, by playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, was directed by Celia de Wolff and starred Paterson Joseph and John Hurt.
It was accompanied by a Tweetalong: live tweets throughout the day which offered a playful companion to the book, and included plot summaries and entertaining commentary. The Twitter feed also shared maps, family trees and battle plans.[51]
Music[edit]
Composition by Nino Rota[52]
Referring to album notes, the first track "The Gates of Delirium", from the album Relayer, by the progressive rock group Yes, is said to be based loosely on the novel.[53]
See also[edit]

Portal icon Novels portal
List of historical novels
References[edit]
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2.Jump up ^ Thirlwell, Adam "A masterpiece in miniature." The Guardian (London, UK) October 8, 2005
3.Jump up ^ Briggs, Anthony. 2005. "Introduction" to War and Peace. Penguin Classics.
4.^ Jump up to: a b Pevear, Richard (2008). "Introduction". War and Peace. Trans. Pevear; Volokhonsky, Larissa. New York City, New York: Vintage Books. pp. VIII–IX. ISBN 978-1-4000-7998-8.
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6.Jump up ^ Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List, retrieved on 07 July 2009
7.Jump up ^ "BBC - The Big Read". BBC. April 2003, Retrieved October 27, 2012
8.Jump up ^ "Introduction?". War and Peace. Wordsworth Editions. 1993. ISBN 978-1-85326-062-9. Retrieved 2009-03-24.
9.^ Jump up to: a b c d e Kathryn B. Feuer; Robin Feuer Miller; Donna Tussing Orwin (January 2008). Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-7447-7. Retrieved 29 January 2012.
10.Jump up ^ Emerson, Caryl (1985). "The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin". PMLA 100 (1): 68–80 (68–71). doi:10.2307/462201. JSTOR 462201.
11.Jump up ^ Pearson and Volokhonsky op cit.
12.Jump up ^ Flaitz, Jeffra (1988). The ideology of English: French perceptions of English as a world language. Walter de Gruyter. p. 3. ISBN 978-3-110-11549-9. Retrieved 22 November 2010.
13.^ Jump up to: a b c d Figes O (November 22, 2007). "Tolstoy's Real Hero". The New York Review of Books 54 (18).
14.^ Jump up to: a b Inna, Gorbatov (2006). Catherine the Great and the French philosophers of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Grim. Academica Press, LLC. p. 14. ISBN 978-1-933-14603-4. Retrieved 3 December 2010.
15.Jump up ^ Troyat, Henri. Tolstoy, a biography. Doubleday, 1967.
16.Jump up ^ Randomhouse.com. (PDF) . Retrieved on 2012-01-29.
17.Jump up ^ Sukhikh, Igor (2007). "The History Of XIX Russian literature". Zvezda. Retrieved 2012-03-01.
18.^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i Opulskaya, L.D. War and Peace: the Epic. L.N. Tolstoy. Works in 12 volumes. War and Peace. Commentaries. Vol.7. Moscow, Khudozhesstvennaya Literatura. 1974. Pp. 363-389
19.Jump up ^ Zaitsev, V. Pearls and Adamants of the Russian Journalism. Russkoye Slovo, 1865, #2.
20.Jump up ^ Kuzminskaya, T.A. My Life at home and at Yasnaya Polyana. Tula, 1958, 343
21.Jump up ^ Gusev, N.I. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Materials for Biography, 1855-1869. Moscow, 1967. Pp 856-857.
22.Jump up ^ The Literature Archive, vol. 6, Academy of Science of the USSR, 1961, p. 81
23.Jump up ^ Literary Archive, p.94
24.Jump up ^ Literary Archive, p. 104.
25.Jump up ^ The Beginnings (Nachala), 1922. #2, p.219
26.Jump up ^ Dostoyevsky, F.M., Letters, Vol. III, 1934, p. 206.
27.Jump up ^ Gusev, p. 858
28.Jump up ^ Gusev, pp 863-874
29.Jump up ^ The Complete I.S.Turgenev, vol.XV, Moscow-Leningrad, 1968, 187-188
30.Jump up ^ Motylyova, T. Of the worldwide significance of Tolstoy. Moscow. Sovetsky pisatel Publishers, 1957, p.520.
31.Jump up ^ Literaturnoye Nasledstsvo, vol. 75, book 1, p. 61
32.Jump up ^ Literaturnoye Nasledstsvo, vol. 75, book 1, p. 173
33.Jump up ^ "Introduction to War and Peace" by Richard Pevear in Pevear, Richard and Larissa Volokhonsky, War and Peace, 2008, Vintage Classics.
34.Jump up ^ Greenwood, Edward Baker (1980). "What is War and Peace?". Tolstoy: The Comprehensive Vision. London: Taylor & Francis. p. 83. ISBN 0-416-74130-4.
35.Jump up ^ Pavlovskis-Petit, Zoja. Entry: Lev Tolstoi, War and Peace. Classe, Olive (ed.). Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, 2000. London, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, pp. 1404–1405.
36.Jump up ^ "War and Peace (1967)". IMDb.com.
37.Jump up ^ Curtis, Charlotte. "War-and-Peace - Trailer - Cast - Showtimes - NYTimes.com". Movies.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2014-04-20.
38.Jump up ^ War and Peace. BBC Two (ended 1973). TV.com. Retrieved on 2012-01-29.
39.Jump up ^ War & Peace (TV mini-series 1972–1974). IMDb.com
40.Jump up ^ La guerre et la paix (TV 2000). IMDb.com
41.Jump up ^ War and Peace (TV mini-series 2007)
42.Jump up ^ Danny Cohen, Controller, BBC One (2013-02-18). "Media Centre - BBC One announces adaptation of War And Peace by Andrew Davies". BBC. Retrieved 2014-04-20.
43.Jump up ^ and Peace Filming in Lithuania
44.Jump up ^ History – highlights. Sydney Opera House. Retrieved on 2012-01-29.
45.Jump up ^ Cavendish, Dominic (February 11, 2008). "War and Peace: A triumphant Tolstoy". The Daily Telegraph (London).
46.Jump up ^ War and Peace at the Wayback Machine (archived December 20, 2008)[dead link]. Sharedexperience.org.uk
47.Jump up ^ Vincentelli, Elisabeth (October 17, 2012). "Over the Moon For Comet". The NY Post (New York).
48.Jump up ^ The War and Peace Broadcast: 35th Anniversary at the Wayback Machine (archived February 9, 2006)[dead link]. Pacificaradioarchives.org
49.Jump up ^ "Marcy Kahan Radio Plays". War and Peace (Radio Dramatization). Retrieved 2010-01-20.
50.Jump up ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04w82wh
51.Jump up ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/a9644825-840d-46a4-b2b6-ce8da89aba50
52.Jump up ^ War and Peace at the Wayback Machine (archived June 18, 2008)[dead link]. Billboard.com. June 17, 2008
53.Jump up ^ Yesworld.com. Yesworld.com (2011-07-12). Retrieved on 2012-01-29.
Further reading[edit]
Orlando Figes (6 October 2003). Natasha's dance: a cultural history of Russia. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-312-42195-3. Retrieved 29 January 2012.- cultural history of Russia using the name of the main female character
External links[edit]
 Wikisource has original text related to this article:
War and Peace
 
 Wikimedia Commons has media related to War and Peace.
English audio recording at LibriVox.org
English translation at Gutenberg
Searchable version of the gutenberg text in multiple formats SiSU
Full text of War and Peace in modern Russian orthography
An audio version of Book 1 of War and Peace (other books are available through links).
A searchable online version of Aylmer Maude's English translation of War and Peace
SparkNotes Study Guide for War and Peace
Birth, death, balls and battles by Orlando Figes. This is an edited version of an essay found in the Penguin Classics new translation of War and Peace (2005).
Homage to War and Peace Searchable map, compiled by Nicholas Jenkins, of places named in Tolstoy's novel (2008).
War and Peace map Map of places named in Tolstoy's novel (2012).
Russian Army during the Napoleonic Wars
War and Peace at the Internet Book List
Radio documentary about 1970 marathon reading of War and Peace on WBAI, from Democracy Now! program, December 6, 2005
Discussion-Forum at Reading Group Guides


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War and Peace

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This article is about the Tolstoy novel. For other uses, see War and Peace (disambiguation).
War and Peace
Front page of War and Peace, first edition, 1869 (Russian)
Author
Leo Tolstoy
Original title
Война и миръ
Country
Russia
Language
Russian, with some French
Genre
Historical, Romance, War novel, philosophical
Publisher
The Russian Messenger (serial)

Publication date
 1869
Media type
Print (Hardback & Paperback) & Audio book
Pages
1,225 (first published edition)
War and Peace (Pre-reform Russian: Война и миръ, Voyna i mir) is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in its entirety in 1869. Epic in scale, it is regarded as one of the central works of world literature.[1][2][3] It is considered Tolstoy's finest literary achievement, along with his other major prose work, Anna Karenina (1873–1877).
War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. Portions of an earlier version of the novel, then known as The Year 1805,[4] were serialized in the magazine The Russian Messenger between 1865 and 1867. The novel was first published in its entirety in 1869.[5] Newsweek in 2009 ranked it first in its list of the Top 100 Books.[6] In 2003, the novel was listed at number 20 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.[7]
Tolstoy himself, somewhat enigmatically, said of War and Peace that it is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle". Large sections of the work, especially in the later chapters, are philosophical discussion rather than narrative.[8] He went on to elaborate that the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence hesitated to call War and Peace a novel. (Instead, Tolstoy regarded Anna Karenina as his first true novel.)


Contents  [hide]
1 Crafting the novel
2 Realism
3 Language 3.1 English and other translations
4 Background and historical context
5 Principal characters in War and Peace
6 Plot summary 6.1 Volume One
6.2 Volume Two
6.3 Volume Three
6.4 Epilogue in two parts
7 Reception
8 Full translations into English 8.1 Comparing translations
9 Adaptations 9.1 Film
9.2 Television
9.3 Opera
9.4 Theatre
9.5 Radio
9.6 Music
10 See also
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links

Crafting the novel[edit]

 

 Only known color photograph of the author, Leo Tolstoy, taken at his Yasnaya Polyana estate in 1908 by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
 

 Tolstoy's notes from the ninth draft of War and Peace, 1864
War and Peace is well known as being one of the longest novels ever written, though not the longest.
Tolstoy never documented why in 1867 he changed the name of his novel from The Year 1805 to War and Peace. He may have borrowed the title from the 1861 work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: La Guerre et la Paix ('The War and the Peace' in French).[4] The title may also be another reference to Titus, who is described as being a master of "war and peace" in The Twelve Caesars, written by Suetonius in 119 CE.
He began writing War and Peace in the year that he finally married and settled down at his country estate. The first half of the book was written under the name "1805".
During the writing of the second half, he read widely and acknowledged Schopenhauer as one of his main inspirations. However, Tolstoy developed his own views of history and the role of the individual within it.[9]
The first draft of War and Peace was completed in 1863. In 1865, the periodical Russkiy Vestnik published the first part of this early version under the title 1805. In the following year, it published more of the same early version. Tolstoy was dissatisfied with this version, although he allowed several parts of it to be published with a different ending in 1867, still under the same title "1805". He heavily rewrote the entire novel between 1866 and 1869.[5][9] Tolstoy's wife, Sophia Tolstaya, copied as many as seven separate complete manuscripts by hand before Tolstoy considered it again ready for publication.[9] The version that was published in Russkiy Vestnik had a very different ending from the version eventually published under the title War and Peace in 1869.
The completed novel was then called Voyna i mir (new style orthography; in English War and Peace).
The 1805 manuscript (sometimes referred to as "the original War and Peace") was re-edited and annotated in Russia in 1983 and since has been translated separately from the "known" version, to English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Albanian, and Korean. The fact that so many versions of War and Peace survive make it one of the best insights into the mental processes of a great novelist.
Russians who had read the serialized version were anxious to acquire the complete first edition, which included epilogues, and it sold out almost immediately. The novel was translated almost immediately after publication into many other languages.
The novel can be generally classified as historical fiction. It contains elements present in many types of popular 18th and 19th century literature, especially the romance novel. War and Peace attains its literary status by transcending genres.
Tolstoy was instrumental in bringing a new kind of consciousness to the novel. His narrative structure is noted for its "god-like" ability to hover over and within events, but also in the way it swiftly and seamlessly portrayed a particular character's point of view. His use of visual detail is often cinematic in its scope, using the literary equivalents of panning, wide shots and close-ups, to give dramatic interest to battles and ballrooms alike. These devices, while not exclusive to Tolstoy, are part of the new style of the novel that arose in the mid-19th century and of which Tolstoy proved himself a master.[10]
Realism[edit]
Tolstoy incorporated extensive historical research. He was also influenced by many other novels.[9] A veteran of the Crimean War, Tolstoy was quite critical of standard history, especially the standards of military history, in War and Peace. Tolstoy read all the standard histories available in Russian and French about the Napoleonic Wars and combined more traditional historical writing with the novel form. He explains at the start of the novel's third volume his own views on how history ought to be written. His aim was to blur the line between fiction and history, in order to get closer to the truth, as he states in Volume II.
The novel is set 60 years earlier than when Tolstoy wrote it, "in the days of our grandfathers," as he puts it. He had spoken with people who had lived through war during the French invasion of Russia in 1812, so the book is also, in part, accurate ethnography fictionalized. He read letters, journals, autobiographical and biographical materials pertaining to Napoleon and the dozens of other historical characters in the novel. There are approximately 160 real persons named or referred to in War and Peace.[11]
Language[edit]

 

 Cover of War and Peace, Italian translation, 1899
Although Tolstoy wrote most of the book, including all the narration, in Russian, significant portions of dialogue (including its opening paragraph) are written in French and characters often switch between the two languages. This reflected 19th century Russian aristocracy, where French, a foreign tongue, was widely spoken and considered a language of prestige and more refined than Russian.[12] This came about from the historical influence throughout Europe of the powerful court of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, leading to members of the Russian aristocracy being less competent in speaking their mother tongue. In War and Peace, for example, Julie Karagina, Princess Marya's friend, has to take Russian lessons in order to master her native language.
It has been suggested[13] that it is a deliberate literary device employed by Tolstoy, to use French to portray artifice and insincerity as the language of the theater and deceit while Russian emerges as a language of sincerity, honesty and seriousness. It displays slight irony that as Pierre and others socialize and use French phrases, they will be attacked by legions of Bonapartists in a very short time. It is sometimes used in satire against Napoleon. In the novel, when Pierre proposes to Hélène, he speaks to her in French—Je vous aime ("I love you"). When the marriage later emerges to be a sham, Pierre blames those French words.
The use of French diminishes as the book progresses and the wars with the French intensify, culminating in the capture and eventual burning of Moscow. The progressive elimination of French from the text is a means of demonstrating that Russia has freed itself from foreign cultural domination.[13] It is also, at the level of plot development, a way of showing that a once-admired and friendly nation, France, has turned into an enemy. By midway through the book, several of the Russian aristocracy, whose command of French is far better than their command of Russian, are anxious to find Russian tutors for themselves.
English and other translations[edit]
War and Peace has been translated into many languages. It has been translated into English on several occasions, starting with Clara Bell working from a French translation. The translators Constance Garnett and Louise and Aylmer Maude knew Tolstoy personally. Translations have to deal with Tolstoy’s often peculiar syntax and his fondness for repetitions. About 2% of War and Peace is in French; Tolstoy removed the French in a revised 1873 edition, only to restore it later.[13] Most translators follow Garnett retaining some French, Briggs uses no French, while Pevear-Volokhonsky and Amy Mandelker's revision of the Maude translation both retain the French fully.[13] (For a list of translations see below)
Background and historical context[edit]

 

In 1812 by the Russian artist Illarion Pryanishnikov
The novel begins in the year 1805 during the reign of Tsar Alexander I and leads up to the 1812 French invasion of Russia by Napoleon. The era of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), when the royal court in Paris was the centre of western European civilization,[14] is still fresh in the minds of older people. Catherine, fluent in French and wishing to reshape Russia into a great European nation, made French the language of her royal court. For the next one hundred years, it became a social requirement for members of the Russian nobility to speak French and understand French culture.[14] This historical and cultural context in the aristocracy is reflected in War and Peace. Catherine's grandson, Alexander I, came to the throne in 1801 at the age of 24. In the novel, his mother, Marya Feodorovna, is the most powerful woman in the Russian court.
War and Peace tells the story of five aristocratic families—the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Kuragins and the Drubetskoys—and the entanglements of their personal lives with the then contemporary history of 1805 to 1813, principally Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. The Bezukhovs, while very rich, are a fragmented family as the old Count, Kirill Vladimirovich, has fathered dozens of illegitimate sons. The Bolkonskys are an old established and wealthy family based at Bald Hills. Old Prince Bolkonsky, Nikolai Andreevich, served as a general under Catherine the Great, in earlier wars. The Moscow Rostovs have many estates, but never enough cash. They are a closely knit, loving family who live for the moment regardless of their financial situation. The Kuragin family has three children, who are all of questionable character. The Drubetskoy family is of impoverished nobility, and consists of an elderly mother and her only son, Boris, whom she wishes to push up the career ladder.
Tolstoy spent years researching and rewriting the book. He worked from primary source materials (interviews and other documents), as well as from history books, philosophy texts and other historical novels.[9] Tolstoy also used a great deal of his own experience in the Crimean War to bring vivid detail and first-hand accounts of how the Russian army was structured.[15]
The standard Russian text of War and Peace is divided into four books (fifteen parts) and an epilogue in two parts – one mainly narrative, the other thematic. While roughly the first half of the novel is concerned strictly with the fictional characters, the later parts, as well as one of the work's two epilogues, increasingly consist of essays about the nature of war, power, history, and historiography. Tolstoy interspersed these essays into the story in a way that defies previous fictional convention. Certain abridged versions remove these essays entirely, while others, published even during Tolstoy's life, simply moved these essays into an appendix.
Principal characters in War and Peace[edit]
Main article: List of War and Peace characters

 

War and Peace simple family tree
 

War and Peace detailed family tree
 

 Natasha Rostova, a postcard by Elisabeth BohmCount Pyotr Kirillovich (Pierre) Bezukhov: The large-bodied, ungainly, and socially awkward illegitimate son of an old Russian grandee. Pierre, educated abroad, returns to Russia as a misfit. His unexpected inheritance of a large fortune makes him socially desirable. Pierre is the central character and often a voice for Tolstoy's own beliefs or struggles.
Prince Andrey Nikolayevich Bolkonsky: A strong but skeptical, thoughtful and philosophical aide-de-camp in the Napoleonic Wars.
Princess Maria Nikolayevna Bolkonskaya: Sister of Prince Andrew, Princess Maria is a pious woman whose eccentric father attempted to give her a good education. The caring, nurturing nature of her large eyes in her otherwise thin and plain face are frequently mentioned.
Count Ilya Andreyevich Rostov: The pater-familias of the Rostov family; terrible with finances, generous to a fault.
Countess Natalya Rostova: Wife of Count Ilya Rostov, mother of the four Rostov children.
Countess Natalya Ilyinichna (Natasha) Rostova: A central character, introduced as "not pretty but full of life" and a romantic young girl, although impulsive and highly strung, she evolves through trials and suffering and eventually finds happiness. She is an accomplished singer and dancer.
Count Nikolai Ilyich (Nikolenka) Rostov: An hussar, the beloved eldest son of the Rostov family.
Sofia Alexandrovna (Sonya) Rostova: Orphaned cousin of Vera, Nikolai, Natasha, and Petya Rostov.
Countess Vera Ilyinichna Rostova: Eldest of the Rostov children, she marries the German career soldier, Berg.
Pyotr Ilyich (Petya) Rostov: Youngest of the Rostov children.
Prince Vasily Sergeyevich Kuragin: A ruthless man who is determined to marry his children well, despite having doubts about the character of some of them.
Princess Elena Vasilyevna (Hélène) Kuragin: A beautiful and sexually alluring woman who has many affairs, including (it is rumoured) with her brother Anatole.
Prince Anatole Vasilyevich Kuragin: Hélène's brother and a very handsome and amoral pleasure seeker who is secretly married yet tries to elope with Natasha Rostova.
Prince Ippolit Vasilyevich: The eldest and perhaps most dim-witted of the Kuragin children.
Prince Boris Drubetskoy: A poor but aristocratic young man driven by ambition, even at the expense of his friends and benefactors, who marries for money, rather than love, an heiress, Julie Karagina.
Princess Anna Mihalovna Drubetskaya: The mother of Boris.
Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov: A cold, almost psychopathic officer, he ruins Nikolai Rostov by luring him into an outrageous gambling debt (by which he, Dolokhov, profits), he only shows love to his doting mother.
Adolf Karlovich Berg: A young Russian officer, who desires to be just like everyone else.
Anna Pavlovna Scherer: Also known as Annette, she is the hostess of the salon that is the site of much of the novel's action in Petersburg.
Maria Dmitryevna Akhrosimova: An older Moscow society lady, she is an elegant dancer and trend-setter, despite her age and size.
Amalia Evgenyevna Bourienne: A French woman who lives with the Bolkonskys, primarily as Princess Marya's companion.
Vasily Dmitrich Denisov: Nikolai Rostov's friend and brother officer, who proposes to Natasha.
Platon Karataev: The archetypal good Russian peasant, whom Pierre meets in the prisoner of war camp.
Napoleon I of France: the Great Man, whose fate is detailed in the book.
General Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov: Russian commander-in-chief.
Osip Bazdeyev: the Freemason who interests Pierre in his mysterious group, starting a lengthy subplot.[citation needed]
Tsar Alexander I of Russia: He signed a peace treaty with Napoleon in 1807 and then went to war with him.
Many of Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace were based on real-life people known to Tolstoy himself. His grandparents and their friends were the models for many of the main characters, his great-grandparents would have been of the generation of Prince Vassily or Count Ilya Rostov. Some of the characters, obviously, are actual historic figures.
Plot summary[edit]
War and Peace has a large cast of characters, the majority of whom are introduced in the first book. Some are actual historical figures, such as Napoleon and Alexander I. While the scope of the novel is vast, it is centered around five aristocratic families. The plot and the interactions of the characters take place in the era surrounding the 1812 French invasion of Russia during the Napoleonic wars.[16]
Volume One[edit]

 

 The Empress Dowager, Maria Feodorovna, mother of reigning Tsar Alexander I, is the most powerful woman in the Russian royal court, in the historical setting of the novel.
The novel begins in July 1805 in Saint Petersburg, at a soirée given by Anna Pavlovna Scherer—the maid of honour and confidante to the queen mother Maria Feodorovna. Many of the main characters and aristocratic families in the novel are introduced as they enter Anna Pavlovna's salon. Pierre (Pyotr Kirilovich) Bezukhov is the illegitimate son of a wealthy count, an elderly man who is dying after a series of strokes. Pierre is about to become embroiled in a struggle for his inheritance. Educated abroad at his father's expense following his mother's death, Pierre is essentially kindhearted, but socially awkward, and owing in part to his open, benevolent nature, finds it difficult to integrate into Petersburg society. It is known to everyone at the soirée that Pierre is his father's favorite of all the old count’s illegitimate children.
Also attending the soirée is Pierre's friend, the intelligent and sardonic Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, husband of Lise, the charming society favourite. Finding Petersburg society unctuous and disillusioned with married life after discovering his wife is empty and superficial, Prince Andrei makes the fateful choice to be an aide-de-camp to Prince Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov in the coming war against Napoleon.
The plot moves to Moscow, Russia's ancient city and former capital, contrasting its provincial, more Russian ways to the highly mannered society of Petersburg. The Rostov family are introduced. Count Ilya Andreyevich Rostov has four adolescent children. Thirteen-year-old Natasha (Natalia Ilyinichna) believes herself in love with Boris Drubetskoy, a disciplined young man who is about to join the army as an officer. Twenty-year-old Nikolai Ilyich pledges his love to Sonya (Sofia Alexandrovna), his fifteen-year-old cousin, an orphan who has been brought up by the Rostovs. The eldest child of the Rostov family, Vera Ilyinichna, is cold and somewhat haughty but has a good prospective marriage in a Russian-German officer, Adolf Karlovich Berg. Petya (Pyotr Ilyich) is nine and the youngest of the Rostov family; like his brother, he is impetuous and eager to join the army when of age. The heads of the family, Count Ilya Rostov and Countess Natalya Rostova, are an affectionate couple but forever worried about their disordered finances.
At Bald Hills, the Bolkonskys' country estate, Prince Andrei departs for war and leaves his terrified, pregnant wife Lise with his eccentric father Prince Nikolai Andreyevich Bolkonsky and devoutly religious sister Maria Nikolayevna Bolkonskaya, who refuses to marry the son of a wealthy aristocrat on account of her devotion to her father.
The second part opens with descriptions of the impending Russian-French war preparations. At the Schöngrabern engagement, Nikolai Rostov, who is now conscripted as ensign in a squadron of hussars, has his first taste of battle. Boris Drubetskoy introduces him to Prince Andrei, whom Rostov insults in a fit of impetuousness. Even more than most young soldiers, he is deeply attracted by Tsar Alexander's charisma. Nikolai gambles and socializes with his officer, Vasily Dmitrich Denisov, and befriends the ruthless, and perhaps, psychopathic Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov. Both Bolkonsky, Rostov and Denisov are involved in the disastrous Battle of Austerlitz, in which Andrei is wounded as he attempts to rescue a Russian standard.




 

 Scene in Red Square, Moscow, 1801. Oil on canvas by Fedor Yakovlevich Alekseev.
Book Four begins with Nikolai Rostov briefly returning on home leave to Moscow. Nikolai finds the Rostov family facing financial ruin due to poor estate management. He spends an eventful winter at home, accompanied by his friend Denisov, his officer from the Pavlograd Regiment in which he serves. Natasha has blossomed into a beautiful young girl. Denisov falls in love with her, proposes marriage but is rejected. Although his mother pleads with Nikolai to find himself a good financial prospect in marriage, Nikolai refuses to accede to his mother's request. He promises to marry his childhood sweetheart, the dowry-less Sonya.
Pierre Bezukhov, upon finally receiving his massive inheritance, is suddenly transformed from a bumbling young man into the richest and most eligible bachelor in the Russian Empire. Despite rationally knowing that it is wrong, he is convinced into marriage with Prince Kuragin's beautiful and immoral daughter Hélène (Elena Vasilyevna Kuragina), to whom he is superficially attracted. Hélène, who is rumoured to be involved in an incestuous affair with her brother, the equally charming and immoral Anatol, tells Pierre that she will never have children with him. Hélène is rumoured to have an affair with Dolokhov, who mocks Pierre in public. Pierre loses his temper and challenges Dolokhov, a seasoned dueller and ruthless killer, to a duel. Unexpectedly, Pierre wounds Dolokhov. Hélène denies her affair, but Pierre is convinced of her guilt and, after almost being violent to her, leaves her. In his moral and spiritual confusion, Pierre joins the Freemasons, and becomes embroiled in Masonic internal politics. Much of Book Two concerns his struggles with his passions and his spiritual conflicts to be a better man. Now a rich aristocrat, he abandons his former carefree behavior and enters upon a philosophical quest particular to Tolstoy: how should one live a moral life in an ethically imperfect world? The question continually baffles Pierre. He attempts to liberate his serfs, but ultimately achieves nothing of note.
Pierre is vividly contrasted with the intelligent and ambitious Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. Andrei recovers from his near fatal artillery wound in a military hospital and returns home, only to find his wife Lise dying in childbirth. He is stricken by his guilty conscience for not treating Lise better when she was alive, and is haunted by the pitiful expression on his dead wife's face. His child, Nikolenka, survives.
Burdened with nihilistic disillusionment, Prince Andrei does not return to the army but chooses to remain on his estate, working on a project that would codify military behavior to solve problems of disorganization responsible for the loss of life on the Russian side. Pierre visits him and brings new questions: where is God in this amoral world? Pierre is interested in panentheism and the possibility of an afterlife.
Volume Two[edit]
Pierre's estranged wife, Hélène, begs him to take her back, and against his better judgment and in trying to abide by the Freemason laws of forgiveness, he does. Despite her vapid shallowness, Hélène establishes herself as an influential hostess in Petersburg society.
Prince Andrei feels impelled to take his newly written military notions to Petersburg, naively expecting to influence either the Emperor himself or those close to him. Young Natasha, also in Petersburg, is caught up in the excitement of dressing for her first grand ball, where she meets Prince Andrei and briefly reinvigorates him with her vivacious charm. Andrei believes he has found purpose in life again and, after paying the Rostovs several visits, proposes marriage to Natasha. However, old Prince Bolkonsky, Andrei's father, dislikes the Rostovs, opposes the marriage, and insists on a year's delay. Prince Andrei leaves to recuperate from his wounds abroad, leaving Natasha initially distraught. She soon recovers her spirits, however, and Count Rostov takes her and Sonya to spend some time with a friend in Moscow.
Natasha visits the Moscow opera, where she meets Hélène and her brother Anatole. Anatol has since married a Polish woman whom he has abandoned in Poland. He is very attracted to Natasha and is determined to seduce her. Hélène and Anatole conspire together to accomplish this plan. Anatole kisses Natasha and writes her passionate letters, eventually establishing plans to elope. Natasha is convinced that she loves Anatole and writes to Princess Maria, Andrei's sister, breaking off her engagement. At the last moment, Sonya discovers her plans to elope and foils them. Pierre is initially horrified by Natasha's behavior, but realizes he has fallen in love with her. During the time when the Great Comet of 1811–2 streaks the sky, life appears to begin anew for Pierre.
Prince Andrei coldly accepts Natasha's breaking of the engagement. He tells Pierre that his pride will not allow him to renew his proposal. Ashamed, Natasha makes a suicide attempt and is left seriously ill.
Volume Three[edit]

 

 The Battle of Borodino, fought on September 7, 1812 and involving more than 250,000 troops and 70,000 casualties was a pivotal turning point in Napoleon's failed campaign to take Russia. It is vividly depicted in great detail through the plot and characters in War and Peace.
 Painting by Louis-François, Baron Lejeune, 1822.
With the help of her family, especially Sonya, and the stirrings of religious faith, Natasha manages to persevere in Moscow through this dark period. Meanwhile, the whole of Russia is affected by the coming confrontation between Napoleon's troops and the Russian army. Pierre convinces himself through gematria that Napoleon is the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation. Old prince Bolkonsky dies of a stroke while trying to protect his estate from French marauders. No organized help from any Russian army seems available to the Bolkonskys, but Nikolai Rostov turns up at their estate in time to help put down an incipient peasant revolt. He finds himself attracted to Princess Maria, but remembers his promise to Sonya.
Back in Moscow, the war-obsessed Petya manages to snatch a loose piece of the Tsar's biscuit outside the Cathedral of the Assumption; he finally convinces his parents to allow him to enlist.
Napoleon himself is a main character in this section, and the novel presents him in vivid detail, as both a thinker and would-be strategist. His toilette and his customary attitudes and traits of mind are depicted in detail. Also described are the well-organized force of over 400,000 French Army (only 140,000 of them actually French-speaking) that marches quickly through the Russian countryside in the late summer and reaches the outskirts of the city of Smolensk. Pierre decides to leave Moscow and go to watch the Battle of Borodino from a vantage point next to a Russian artillery crew. After watching for a time, he begins to join in carrying ammunition. In the midst of the turmoil he experiences firsthand the death and destruction of war; Eugène's artillery continues to pound Russian support columns, while Marshals Ney and Davout set up a crossfire with artillery positioned on the Semyonovskaya heights. The battle becomes a hideous slaughter for both armies and ends in a standoff. The Russians, however, have won a moral victory by standing up to Napoleon's reputedly invincible army. For strategic reasons and having suffered grievous losses, the Russian army withdraws the next day, allowing Napoleon to march on to Moscow. Among the casualties are Anatole Kuragin and Prince Andrei. Anatole loses a leg, and Andrei suffers a grenade wound in the abdomen. Both are reported dead, but their families are in such disarray that no one can be notified.
The Rostovs have waited until the last minute to abandon Moscow, even after it is clear that Kutuzov has retreated past Moscow and Muscovites are being given contradictory, often propagandistic, instructions on how to either flee or fight. Count Rostopchin is publishing posters, rousing the citizens to put their faith in religious icons, while at the same time urging them to fight with pitchforks if necessary. Before fleeing himself, he gives orders to burn the city. The Rostovs have a difficult time deciding what to take with them, but in the end, Natasha convinces them to load their carts with the wounded and dying from the Battle of Borodino. Unknown to Natasha, Prince Andrei is amongst the wounded.
When Napoleon's Grand Army finally occupies an abandoned and burning Moscow, Pierre takes off on a quixotic mission to assassinate Napoleon. He becomes an anonymous man in all the chaos, shedding his responsibilities by wearing peasant clothes and shunning his duties and lifestyle. The only people he sees while in this garb are Natasha and some of her family, as they depart Moscow. Natasha recognizes and smiles at him, and he in turn realizes the full scope of his love for her.
Pierre saves the life of a French officer who fought at Borodino, yet is taken prisoner by the retreating French during his attempted assassination of Napoleon, after saving a woman from being raped by soldiers in the French Army.

 

 Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Painting by Adolf Northern (1828–1876)
Pierre becomes friends with a fellow prisoner, Platon Karataev, a peasant with a saintly demeanor, who is incapable of malice. In Karataev, Pierre finally finds what he has been seeking: an honest person of integrity (unlike the aristocrats of Petersburg society) who is utterly without pretense. Pierre discovers meaning in life simply by living and interacting with him. After witnessing French soldiers sacking Moscow and shooting Russian civilians arbitrarily, Pierre is forced to march with the Grand Army during its disastrous retreat from Moscow in the harsh Russian winter. After months of trial and tribulation—during which the fever-plagued Karataev is shot by the French—Pierre is finally freed by a Russian raiding party, after a small skirmish with the French that sees the young Petya Rostov killed in action.
Meanwhile, Andrei, wounded during Napoleon's invasion, has been taken in as a casualty and cared for by the Rostovs, fleeing from Moscow to Yaroslavl. He is reunited with Natasha and his sister Maria before the end of the war. Having lost all will to live, he forgives Natasha in a last act before dying.
As the novel draws to a close, Pierre's wife Hélène dies from an overdose of abortion medication (Tolstoy does not state it explicitly but the euphemism he uses is unambiguous). Pierre is reunited with Natasha, while the victorious Russians rebuild Moscow. Natasha speaks of Prince Andrei's death and Pierre of Karataev's. Both are aware of a growing bond between them in their bereavement. With the help of Princess Maria, Pierre finds love at last and, revealing his love after being released by his former wife's death, marries Natasha.
Epilogue in two parts[edit]
The first part of the epilogue begins with the wedding of Pierre and Natasha in 1813. It is the last happy event for the Rostov family, which is undergoing a transition. Count Rostov dies soon after, leaving his eldest son Nikolai to take charge of the debt-ridden estate.
Nikolai finds himself with the task of maintaining the family on the verge of bankruptcy. His abhorrence at the idea of marrying for wealth almost gets in his way, but finally he marries the now-rich Maria Bolkonskaya and in so doing also saves his family from financial ruin.
Nikolai and Maria then move to Bald Hills with his mother and Sonya, whom he supports for the rest of their lives. Buoyed by his wife's fortune, Nikolai pays off all his family's debts. They also raise Prince Andrei's orphaned son, Nikolai Andreyevich (Nikolenka) Bolkonsky.
As in all good marriages, there are misunderstandings, but the couples — Pierre and Natasha, Nikolai and Maria — remain devoted to their spouses. Pierre and Natasha visit Bald Hills in 1820, much to the jubilation of everyone concerned. There is a hint in the closing chapters that the idealistic, boyish Nikolenka and Pierre would both become part of the Decembrist Uprising. The first epilogue concludes with Nikolenka promising he would do something with which even his late father "would be satisfied..." (presumably as a revolutionary in the Decembrist revolt).
The second part of the epilogue contains Tolstoy's critique of all existing forms of mainstream history. The 19th-century Great Man Theory claims that historical events are the result of the actions of "heroes" and other great individuals; Tolstoy argues that this is impossible because of how rarely these actions result in great historical events. Rather, he argues, great historical events are the result of many smaller events driven by the thousands of individuals involved (he compares this to calculus, and the sum of infinitesimals). He then goes on to argue that these smaller events are the result of an inverse relationship between necessity and free-will, necessity being based on reason and therefore explainable by historical analysis, and free-will being based on "consciousness" and therefore inherently unpredictable.
Reception[edit]
The novel that made its author "the true lion of the Russian literature" (according to Ivan Goncharov)[17][18] enjoyed great success with the reading public upon its publication and spawned dozens of reviews and analytical essays in the press, some of which (by Pisarev, Annenkov, Dragomirov and Strakhov) formed the basis for the research of later Tolstoy scholars.[18] Yet the Russian press's initial response to the novel was muted, most critics feeling bewildered by this mammoth work they couldn’t decide how to classify. The liberal newspaper Golos (The Voice, April 3, #93, 1865) was one of the first to react. Its anonymous reviewer posed a question later repeated by many others: "What could this possibly be? What kind of genre are we supposed to file it to?.. Where is fiction in it, and where is real history?"[18]

 

 Leonid Pasternak's 1893 illustration to War and Peace"
Writer and critic Nikolai Akhsharumov, writing in Vsemirny Trud (#6, 1867) suggested that War and Peace was "neither a chronicle, nor a historical novel", but a genre merger, this ambiguity never undermining its immense value. Pavel Annenkov, who praised the novel too, was equally vague when trying to classify it. "The cultural history of one large section of our society, the political and social panorama of it in the beginning of the current century," was his suggestion. "It is the [social] epic, the history novel and the vast picture of the whole nation's life," wrote Ivan Turgenev in his bid to define War and Peace in the foreword for his French translation of "The Two Hussars" (published in Paris by Le Temps in 1875).
In general, the literary left received the novel coldly. They saw it as totally devoid of social critique, and keen on the idea of national unity. They saw its major fault as the "...author's inability to portray a new kind of revolutionary intelligentsia in his novel," as critic Varfoomey Zaytsev put it.[19] Articles by D.Minayev, V.Bervi-Flerovsky and N.Shelgunov in Delo magazine characterized the novel as "lacking realism", showing its characters as "cruel and rough", "mentally stoned", "morally depraved" and promoting "the philosophy of stagnation". Still, Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin, who never expressed his opinion of the novel publicly, in the private conversation was reported to have expressed delight with "how strongly this Count has stung our higher society".[20] Dmitry Pisarev in his unfinished article "Russian Gentry of Old" (Staroye barstvo, Otechestvennye Zapiski, #2, 1868) while praising Tolstoy's realism in portraying members of high society, still was unhappy with the way the author, as he saw it, 'idealized' the old nobility, expressing "unconscious and quite natural tenderness towards" the Russian dvoryanstvo. On the opposite front, the conservative press and "patriotic" authors (A.S.Norov and P.A.Vyazemsky among them) were accusing Tolstoy of consciously distorting the 1812 history, desecrating the "patriotic feelings of our fathers" and ridiculing dvoryanstvo.[18]
One of the first comprehensive articles on the novel was that of Pavel Annenkov, published in #2, 1868 issue of Vestnik Evropy. The critic praised Tolstoy's masterful portrayal of man at war, marveled at the complexity of the whole composition, organically merging historical facts and fiction. "The dazzling side of the novel", according to Annenkov, was "the natural simplicity with which [the author] transports the worldly affairs and big social events down to the level of a character who witnesses them." Annekov thought the historical gallery of the novel was incomplete with the two "great raznotchintsys", Speransky and Arakcheev, and deplored the fact that the author stopped at introducing to the novel "this relatively rough but original element". In the end the critic called the novel "the whole epoch in the Russian fiction".[18]
Slavophiles declared Tolstoy their "bogatyr" and pronounced War and Peace "the Bible of the new national idea". Several articles on War and Peace were published in 1869–1870 in Zarya magazine by Nikolai Strakhov. "War and Peace is the work of genius, equal to everything that the Russian literature has produced before," he pronounced in the first, smaller essay. "It is now quite clear that from 1868 when the War and Peace was published the very essence of what we call Russian literature has become quite different, acquired the new form and meaning," the critic continued later. Strakhov was the first critic in Russia who declared Tolstoy's novel to be a masterpiece of level previously unknown in Russian literature. Still, being a true Slavophile, he could not fail to see the novel as promoting the major Slavophiliac ideas of "meek Russian character'ss supremacy over the rapacious European kind" (using Apollon Grigoriev's formula). Years later, in 1878, discussing Strakhov's own book The World as a Whole, Tolstoy criticized both Grigoriev's concept (of "Russian meekness vs. Western bestiality") and Strakhov's interpretation of it.[21]

 

Battle of Schöngrabern by K.Bujnitsky
Among the reviewers were military men and authors specializing in the war literature. Most assessed highly the artfulness and realism of Tolstoy's battle scenes. N.Lachinov, a member of the Russky Invalid newspaper stuff (#69, April 10, 1868) called the Battle of Schöngrabern scenes "bearing the highest degree of historical and artistic truthfulness" and totally agreed with the author's view on the Battle of Borodino, which some of his opponents disputed. The army general and respected military writer Mikhail Dragomirov, in an article published in Oruzheiny Sbornik (The Military Almanac, 1868-1870), while disputing some of Tolstoy's ideas concerning the "spontaneity" of wars and the role of commander in battles, advised all the Russian Army officers to use War and Peace as their desk book, describing its battle scenes as "incomparable" and "serving for an ideal manual to every textbook on theories of military art."[18]
Unlike professional literary critics, most prominent Russian writers of the time supported the novel wholeheartedly. Goncharov, Turgenev, Leskov, Dostoyevsky and Fet have all gone on record as declaring War and Peace the masterpiece of the Russian literature. Ivan Goncharov in a July 17, 1878, letter to Pyotr Ganzen advised him to choose for translating into Danish War and Peace, adding: "This is positively what might be called a Russian Ilyad. Embracing the whole epoch, it is the grandiose literary event, showcasing the gallery of great men painted by a lively brush of the great master... This is one of the most, if not the most profound literary work ever.[22] In 1879, unhappy with Ganzen having chosen Anna Karenina to start with, Goncharov insisted: "War and Peace is the extraordinary poem of a novel, both in content and execution. It also serves as a monument to Russian history's glorious epoch when whatever figure you take is a colossus, a statue in bronze. Even [the novel's] minor characters carry all the characteristic features of the Russian people and its life."[23] In 1885, expressing satisfaction with the fact that Tolstoy's works have now been translated into Danish, Goncharov again stressed the immense importance of War and Peace. "Count Tolstoy really mounts over everybody else here [in Russia]," he remarked.[24]
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (in a May 30, 1871, letter to Strakhov) described War and Peace as "the last word of the landlord's literature and the brilliant one at that". In a draft version of the Teenager novel he described Tolstoy as "a historiograph of the dvoryanstvo, or rather, its cultural elite." "The objectivity and realism impart wonderful charm to all scenes, and alongside people of talent, honour and duty he exposes numerous scoundrels, worthless goons and fools," he added.[25] In 1876 Dostoyevsky wrote: "My strong conviction is that a writer of fiction has to have most profound knowledge - not only of the poetic side of his art, but also the reality he deals with, in its historical as well as contemporary context. Here [in Russia], as far as I see it, only one writer excels in this, Count Lev Tolstoy."[26]
Nikolai Leskov, then an anonymous reviewer in Birzhevy Vestnik (The Stock Exchange Herald), wrote several articles praising highly War and Peace, calling it "the best ever Russian historical novel" and "the pride of the contemporary literature". Marveling at the realism and factual truthfulness of Tolstoy's book, Leskov thought the author deserved the special credit for "having lifted up the people's spirit upon the high pedestal it deserved". "While working most elaborately upon individual characters, the author, apparently, has been studying most diligently the character of the nation as a whole; the life of people whose moral strength came to be concentrated in the Army that came up to fight mighty Napoleon. In this respect the novel of Count Tolstoy could be seen as an epic of the Great national war which up until now has had its historians but never had its singers," Leskov wrote.[18]
Afanasy Fet, in a January 1, 1870, letter to Tolstoy, expressed his great delight with the novel. "You've managed to show us in great detail the other, mundane side of life and explain how organically does it feed the outer, heroic side of it," he added.[27]
Ivan Turgenev gradually re-considered his initial skepticism as to the novel’s historical aspect and also the style of Tolstoy's psychological analysis. In his 1880 article written in the form of a letter addressed to Edmond Abou, the editor of the French newspaper Le XIX-e Siecle, Turgenev described Tolstoy as "the most popular Russian writer" and War and Peace as "one of the most remarkable books of our age".[28] "This vast work has the spirit of an epic, where the life of Russia of the beginning of our century in general and in details has been recreated by the hand of a true master... The manner in which Count Tolstoy conducts his treatise is innovative and original. This is the great work of a great writer, and in it there’s true, real Russia," Turgenev wrote.[29] It was largely due to Turgenev's efforts that the novel started to gain popularity with the European readership. The first French edition of the War and Peace (1879) paved the way for the worldwide success of Leo Tolstoy and his works.[18]
Since then many world famous authors have praised War and Peace as a masterpiece of the world literature. Gustave Flaubert expressed his delight in a January 1880 letter to Turgenev, writing: "This is the first class work! What an artist and what a psychologist! The first two volumes are exquisite. I used to utter shrieks of delight while reading. This is powerful, very powerful indeed."[30] Later John Galsworthy called War and Peace "the best novel that had ever been written". Romain Rolland, remembering his reading the novel as a student, wrote: "this work, like life itself, has no beginning, no end. It is life itself in its eternal movement."[31] Thomas Mann thought War and Peace to be "the greatest ever war novel in the history of literature."[32] Ernest Hemingway confessed that it was from Tolstoy that he'd been taking lessons on how to "write about war in the most straightforward, honest, objective and stark way." "I don't know anybody who could write about war better than Tolstoy did," Hemingway asserted in his 1955 Men at War. The Best War Stories of All Time anthology.[18]
Isaak Babel said, after reading War and Peace, "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy."[33] Tolstoy "gives us a unique combination of the 'naive objectivity' of the oral narrator with the interest in detail characteristic of realism. This is the reason for our trust in his presentation."[34]
Full translations into English[edit]
Clara Bell (from a French version) (1885–86)
Nathan Haskell Dole (1898)
Leo Wiener (1904)
Constance Garnett (1904)
Aylmer and Louise Maude (1922–3)
Rosemary Edmonds (1957, revised 1978)
Ann Dunnigan (1968)
Anthony Briggs (2005)
Andrew Bromfield (2007), translation of the first completed draft, approx. 400 pages shorter than other English translations
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2007)
Maude translation revised by Amy Mandelker, Oxford University Press (2010) ISBN 978-0-19-923276-5
Comparing translations[edit]
Academic Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit has this to say about the translations of War and Peace available in 2000: "Of all the translations of War and Peace, Dunnigan's (1968) is the best....Unlike the other translators, Dunnigan even succeeds with many characteristically Russian folk expressions and proverbs....She is faithful to the text and does not hesitate to render conscientiously those details that the uninitiated may find bewildering: for instance, the statement that Boris's mother pronounced his name with a stress on the o – an indication to the Russian reader of the old lady's affectation."
On the Garnett translation Pavlovskis-Petit writes: "her...War and Peace is frequently inexact and contains too many anglicisms. Her style is awkward and turgid, very unsuitable for Tolstoi." On the Maudes' translation she comments: "this should have been the best translation, but the Maudes' lack of adroitness in dealing with Russian folk idiom, and their style in general, place this version below Dunnigan's." She further comments on Edmonds's revised translation, formerly on Penguin: "[it] is the work of a sound scholar but not the best possible translator; it frequently lacks resourcefulness and imagination in its use of English....a respectable translation but not on the level of Dunnigan or Maude."[35]
Adaptations[edit]
Film[edit]
The first Russian adaptation was Война и мир (Voyna i mir) in 1915, which was directed by Vladimir Gardin and starred Gardin and the Russian ballerina Vera Karalli. F. Kamei produced a version in Japan in 1947.
The 208-minute long American 1956 version was directed by King Vidor and starred Audrey Hepburn (Natasha), Henry Fonda (Pierre) and Mel Ferrer (Andrei). Audrey Hepburn was nominated for a BAFTA Award for best British actress and for a Golden Globe Award for best actress in a drama production.
The critically acclaimed Soviet version by the director Sergei Bondarchuk was released in four parts in 1966 and 1967. It starred Lyudmila Savelyeva (as Natasha Rostova) and Vyacheslav Tikhonov (as Andrei Bolkonsky). Bondarchuk himself played the character of Pierre Bezukhov. The series' length was some seven hours; it involved thousands of extras and took six years to finish the shooting, as a result of which the actors age changed dramatically from scene to scene. It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for its authenticity and massive scale.[36] Bondarchuk's film is considered to be the best screen version of the novel. It attracted some controversy due to the number of horses killed during the making of the battle sequences and screenings were actively boycotted in several US cities by the ASPCA.[37]
Television[edit]
War and Peace (1972): The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) made a television serial based on the novel, broadcast in 1972–73. Anthony Hopkins played the lead role of Pierre. Other lead characters were played by Rupert Davies, Faith Brook, Morag Hood, Alan Dobie, Angela Down and Sylvester Morand. This version faithfully included many of Tolstoy's minor characters, including Platon Karataev (Harry Locke).[38][39]
La guerre et la paix (2000): French TV production of Prokofiev's opera War and Peace, directed by François Roussillon. Robert Brubaker played the lead role of Pierre.[40]
War and Peace (2007): produced by the Italian Lux Vide, a TV mini-series in Russian & English co-produced in Russia, France, Germany, Poland and Italy. Directed by Robert Dornhelm, with screenplay written by Lorenzo Favella, Enrico Medioli and Gavin Scott. It features an international cast with Alexander Beyer playing the lead role of Pierre assisted by Malcolm McDowell, Clémence Poésy, Alessio Boni, Pilar Abella, J. Kimo Arbas, Ken Duken, Juozapas Bagdonas and Toni Bertorelli.[41]
War and Peace (2015): On 18 February 2013, the BBC announced plans for a six-part adaptation of the novel to be scripted by Andrew Davies and aired on BBC One in 2015.[42][43]
Opera[edit]
Initiated by a proposal of the German director Erwin Piscator in 1938, the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev composed his opera War and Peace (Op. 91, libretto by Mira Mendelson) based on this epic novel during the 1940s. The complete musical work premiered in Leningrad in 1955. It was the first opera to be given a public performance at the Sydney Opera House (1973).[44]
Theatre[edit]
The first successful stage adaptations of War and Peace were produced by Alfred Neumann and Erwin Piscator (1942, revised 1955, published by Macgibbon & Kee in London 1963, and staged in 16 countries since) and R. Lucas (1943).
A stage adaptation by Helen Edmundson, first produced in 1996 at the Royal National Theatre, was published that year by Nick Hern Books, London. Edmundson added to and amended the play[45] for a 2008 production as two 3-hour parts by Shared Experience, directed by Nancy Meckler and Polly Teale.[46] This was first put on at the Nottingham Playhouse, then toured in the UK to Liverpool, Darlington, Bath, Warwick, Oxford, Truro, London (the Hampstead Theatre) and Cheltenham.
A musical adaptation by OBIE Award-winner Dave Malloy, called Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 premiered at the Ars Nova theater in Manhattan on October 1, 2012. The show is described as an electropop opera, and is based on Book 8 of War and Peace, focusing on Natasha's affair with Anatole.[47]
Radio[edit]
The BBC Home Service broadcast an eight-part adaptation by Walter Peacock from 17 January to 7 February 1943 with two episodes on each Sunday. All but the last instalment, which ran for one and a half hours, were one hour long. Leslie Banks played Pierre while Celia Johnson was Natasha.
In December 1970, Pacifica Radio station WBAI broadcast a reading of the entire novel (the 1968 Dunnigan translation) read by over 140 celebrities and ordinary people.[48]
A dramatised full-cast adaptation in 20 parts, edited by Michael Bakewell, was broadcast by the BBC. Transmission Times: 30.12.1969 to 12.5.1970 Cast included: David Buck, Kate Binchy, Martin Jarvis
A dramatised full-cast adaptation in ten parts was written by Marcy Kahan and Mike Walker in 1997 for BBC Radio 4. The production won the 1998 Talkie award for Best Drama and was around 9.5 hours in length. It was directed by Janet Whitaker and featured Simon Russell Beale, Gerard Murphy, Richard Johnson, and others.[49]
On New Year's Day 2015, BBC Radio 4 broadcast the drama over 10 hours. These episodes [50] are also available to listen to afterwards on iPlayer. The dramatisation, by playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, was directed by Celia de Wolff and starred Paterson Joseph and John Hurt.
It was accompanied by a Tweetalong: live tweets throughout the day which offered a playful companion to the book, and included plot summaries and entertaining commentary. The Twitter feed also shared maps, family trees and battle plans.[51]
Music[edit]
Composition by Nino Rota[52]
Referring to album notes, the first track "The Gates of Delirium", from the album Relayer, by the progressive rock group Yes, is said to be based loosely on the novel.[53]
See also[edit]

Portal icon Novels portal
List of historical novels
References[edit]
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2.Jump up ^ Thirlwell, Adam "A masterpiece in miniature." The Guardian (London, UK) October 8, 2005
3.Jump up ^ Briggs, Anthony. 2005. "Introduction" to War and Peace. Penguin Classics.
4.^ Jump up to: a b Pevear, Richard (2008). "Introduction". War and Peace. Trans. Pevear; Volokhonsky, Larissa. New York City, New York: Vintage Books. pp. VIII–IX. ISBN 978-1-4000-7998-8.
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7.Jump up ^ "BBC - The Big Read". BBC. April 2003, Retrieved October 27, 2012
8.Jump up ^ "Introduction?". War and Peace. Wordsworth Editions. 1993. ISBN 978-1-85326-062-9. Retrieved 2009-03-24.
9.^ Jump up to: a b c d e Kathryn B. Feuer; Robin Feuer Miller; Donna Tussing Orwin (January 2008). Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-7447-7. Retrieved 29 January 2012.
10.Jump up ^ Emerson, Caryl (1985). "The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin". PMLA 100 (1): 68–80 (68–71). doi:10.2307/462201. JSTOR 462201.
11.Jump up ^ Pearson and Volokhonsky op cit.
12.Jump up ^ Flaitz, Jeffra (1988). The ideology of English: French perceptions of English as a world language. Walter de Gruyter. p. 3. ISBN 978-3-110-11549-9. Retrieved 22 November 2010.
13.^ Jump up to: a b c d Figes O (November 22, 2007). "Tolstoy's Real Hero". The New York Review of Books 54 (18).
14.^ Jump up to: a b Inna, Gorbatov (2006). Catherine the Great and the French philosophers of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Grim. Academica Press, LLC. p. 14. ISBN 978-1-933-14603-4. Retrieved 3 December 2010.
15.Jump up ^ Troyat, Henri. Tolstoy, a biography. Doubleday, 1967.
16.Jump up ^ Randomhouse.com. (PDF) . Retrieved on 2012-01-29.
17.Jump up ^ Sukhikh, Igor (2007). "The History Of XIX Russian literature". Zvezda. Retrieved 2012-03-01.
18.^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i Opulskaya, L.D. War and Peace: the Epic. L.N. Tolstoy. Works in 12 volumes. War and Peace. Commentaries. Vol.7. Moscow, Khudozhesstvennaya Literatura. 1974. Pp. 363-389
19.Jump up ^ Zaitsev, V. Pearls and Adamants of the Russian Journalism. Russkoye Slovo, 1865, #2.
20.Jump up ^ Kuzminskaya, T.A. My Life at home and at Yasnaya Polyana. Tula, 1958, 343
21.Jump up ^ Gusev, N.I. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Materials for Biography, 1855-1869. Moscow, 1967. Pp 856-857.
22.Jump up ^ The Literature Archive, vol. 6, Academy of Science of the USSR, 1961, p. 81
23.Jump up ^ Literary Archive, p.94
24.Jump up ^ Literary Archive, p. 104.
25.Jump up ^ The Beginnings (Nachala), 1922. #2, p.219
26.Jump up ^ Dostoyevsky, F.M., Letters, Vol. III, 1934, p. 206.
27.Jump up ^ Gusev, p. 858
28.Jump up ^ Gusev, pp 863-874
29.Jump up ^ The Complete I.S.Turgenev, vol.XV, Moscow-Leningrad, 1968, 187-188
30.Jump up ^ Motylyova, T. Of the worldwide significance of Tolstoy. Moscow. Sovetsky pisatel Publishers, 1957, p.520.
31.Jump up ^ Literaturnoye Nasledstsvo, vol. 75, book 1, p. 61
32.Jump up ^ Literaturnoye Nasledstsvo, vol. 75, book 1, p. 173
33.Jump up ^ "Introduction to War and Peace" by Richard Pevear in Pevear, Richard and Larissa Volokhonsky, War and Peace, 2008, Vintage Classics.
34.Jump up ^ Greenwood, Edward Baker (1980). "What is War and Peace?". Tolstoy: The Comprehensive Vision. London: Taylor & Francis. p. 83. ISBN 0-416-74130-4.
35.Jump up ^ Pavlovskis-Petit, Zoja. Entry: Lev Tolstoi, War and Peace. Classe, Olive (ed.). Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, 2000. London, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, pp. 1404–1405.
36.Jump up ^ "War and Peace (1967)". IMDb.com.
37.Jump up ^ Curtis, Charlotte. "War-and-Peace - Trailer - Cast - Showtimes - NYTimes.com". Movies.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2014-04-20.
38.Jump up ^ War and Peace. BBC Two (ended 1973). TV.com. Retrieved on 2012-01-29.
39.Jump up ^ War & Peace (TV mini-series 1972–1974). IMDb.com
40.Jump up ^ La guerre et la paix (TV 2000). IMDb.com
41.Jump up ^ War and Peace (TV mini-series 2007)
42.Jump up ^ Danny Cohen, Controller, BBC One (2013-02-18). "Media Centre - BBC One announces adaptation of War And Peace by Andrew Davies". BBC. Retrieved 2014-04-20.
43.Jump up ^ and Peace Filming in Lithuania
44.Jump up ^ History – highlights. Sydney Opera House. Retrieved on 2012-01-29.
45.Jump up ^ Cavendish, Dominic (February 11, 2008). "War and Peace: A triumphant Tolstoy". The Daily Telegraph (London).
46.Jump up ^ War and Peace at the Wayback Machine (archived December 20, 2008)[dead link]. Sharedexperience.org.uk
47.Jump up ^ Vincentelli, Elisabeth (October 17, 2012). "Over the Moon For Comet". The NY Post (New York).
48.Jump up ^ The War and Peace Broadcast: 35th Anniversary at the Wayback Machine (archived February 9, 2006)[dead link]. Pacificaradioarchives.org
49.Jump up ^ "Marcy Kahan Radio Plays". War and Peace (Radio Dramatization). Retrieved 2010-01-20.
50.Jump up ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04w82wh
51.Jump up ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/a9644825-840d-46a4-b2b6-ce8da89aba50
52.Jump up ^ War and Peace at the Wayback Machine (archived June 18, 2008)[dead link]. Billboard.com. June 17, 2008
53.Jump up ^ Yesworld.com. Yesworld.com (2011-07-12). Retrieved on 2012-01-29.
Further reading[edit]
Orlando Figes (6 October 2003). Natasha's dance: a cultural history of Russia. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-312-42195-3. Retrieved 29 January 2012.- cultural history of Russia using the name of the main female character
External links[edit]
 Wikisource has original text related to this article:
War and Peace
 
 Wikimedia Commons has media related to War and Peace.
English audio recording at LibriVox.org
English translation at Gutenberg
Searchable version of the gutenberg text in multiple formats SiSU
Full text of War and Peace in modern Russian orthography
An audio version of Book 1 of War and Peace (other books are available through links).
A searchable online version of Aylmer Maude's English translation of War and Peace
SparkNotes Study Guide for War and Peace
Birth, death, balls and battles by Orlando Figes. This is an edited version of an essay found in the Penguin Classics new translation of War and Peace (2005).
Homage to War and Peace Searchable map, compiled by Nicholas Jenkins, of places named in Tolstoy's novel (2008).
War and Peace map Map of places named in Tolstoy's novel (2012).
Russian Army during the Napoleonic Wars
War and Peace at the Internet Book List
Radio documentary about 1970 marathon reading of War and Peace on WBAI, from Democracy Now! program, December 6, 2005
Discussion-Forum at Reading Group Guides


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 NLA: 35552269
 

  


Categories: 1869 novels
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War and Peace
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace





 



War and Peace (1956 film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search


War and Peace
Poster - War and Peace (1956) 03.jpg
Theatrical poster
 
Directed by
King Vidor
Produced by
Dino De Laurentiis
Carlo Ponti
Screenplay by
Bridget Boland
Robert Westerby
King Vidor
Mario Camerini
Ennio De Concini
Ivo Perilli
Gian Gaspare Napolitano
Mario Soldati
Based on
War and Peace
 by Leo Tolstoy
Starring
Audrey Hepburn
Henry Fonda
Mel Ferrer
Oscar Homolka
Anita Ekberg
Music by
Nino Rota
Cinematography
Jack Cardiff
Edited by
Leo Cattozzo
Distributed by
Paramount Pictures

Release dates

August 21, 1956
 

Running time
 208 minutes
Language
English
Budget
$6 million
Box office
$6.25 million (rentals)[1]
War and Peace is the first English-language film version of the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It is an American/Italian production, directed by King Vidor and produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti. The music score was by Nino Rota and the cinematography by Jack Cardiff. The film was made by Dino de Laurentiis Productions and distributed by Paramount Pictures.
The film stars Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Mel Ferrer, along with Vittorio Gassman, Herbert Lom and Anita Ekberg, in one of her first breakthrough roles. It had Academy Awards nominations for Best Director (King Vidor), Best Cinematography, Color (Jack Cardiff) and Best Costume Design, Color (Maria De Matteis).


Contents  [hide]
1 Differences from the novel
2 Cast
3 Gallery
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

Differences from the novel[edit]
The film script had to condense the extensive original. It is primarily focused on Natasha, Pierre, and Andrei, their complex relationship and personal maturation on the backdrop of the historical events of the Napoleonic invasion. In Moscow, most of the scenes take place at the Rostov residence, and episodes at the country estates are curtailed, with some exceptions such as the hunt where Natasha first meets Andrei. This is a condensation of two scenes at the Rostov country estate, since in the novel Andrei, who by then is already Natasha's fiancé, is not present at the hunt. There is no scene from St. Petersburg. The relationship between Nikolas, Sonya, and Mary is toned down. Historical figures retained are General Kutuzov and Napoleon. Minor battles are omitted, while Napoleon's crossing of the Berezina is added. The concept of the inner dialogue is retained, notably in regard to Natasha, but the extensive use of French is not retained in the movie. Events of the epilogue are not included in the movie, nor are Tolstoy's discourses about history.
Cast[edit]
Audrey Hepburn as Natasha Rostova
Henry Fonda as Count Pierre Bezukhov
Mel Ferrer as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky
Vittorio Gassman as Anatole Kuragine
Herbert Lom as Napoleon
Oscar Homolka as General Kutuzov
Anita Ekberg as Helene
Helmut Dantine as Dolokhov
Tullio Carminati as Prince Vasili Kuragine
Barry Jones as Count Rostov
Milly Vitale as Lise
Lea Seidl as Countess Rostova
Anna-Maria Ferrero as Mary Bolkonskaya
Wilfrid Lawson as Prince Bolkonsky (credited as Wilfred Lawson)
May Britt as Sonya Rostova
Jeremy Brett as Nicholas Rostov
John Mills as Platon Karataev
Patrick Crean as Denisov
Sean Barrett as Petya Rostov
Alan Furlan as Russian Officer
Gallery[edit]




Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer in the set of War and Peace in 1955
 



Screenshot of Audrey Hepburn in the role of Natasha and Mel Ferrer as Prince Andrei

See also[edit]
List of American films of 1956
War and Peace - 1966-67 film series directed by Sergei Bondarchuk
War and Peace - 1972 TV 20-part BBC Production.
War and Peace - 2007 TV 4-Part Mini Series.
War and Peace - 1941 Opera composed by Sergei Prokofieff.
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ 'The Top Box-Office Hits of 1956', Variety Weekly, January 2, 1957.
External links[edit]
 Wikimedia Commons has media related to War and Peace.
War and Peace at the Internet Movie Database


[show]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Films directed by King Vidor

 


































































 


[show]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869)

 










 








 











 










 





 


[show]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Nino Rota

 





 




 









 







 


Authority control
WorldCat ·
 VIAF: 176444716 ·
 LCCN: no2002114454
 

  


Categories: 1956 films
English-language films
Film scores by Nino Rota
1950s drama films
American epic films
American films
Films based on War and Peace
Films directed by King Vidor
Paramount Pictures films
Films produced by Dino De Laurentiis
Films produced by Carlo Ponti
Italian epic films






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This page was last modified on 6 September 2015, at 19:18.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace_(1956_film)





 



War and Peace (1956 film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search


War and Peace
Poster - War and Peace (1956) 03.jpg
Theatrical poster
 
Directed by
King Vidor
Produced by
Dino De Laurentiis
Carlo Ponti
Screenplay by
Bridget Boland
Robert Westerby
King Vidor
Mario Camerini
Ennio De Concini
Ivo Perilli
Gian Gaspare Napolitano
Mario Soldati
Based on
War and Peace
 by Leo Tolstoy
Starring
Audrey Hepburn
Henry Fonda
Mel Ferrer
Oscar Homolka
Anita Ekberg
Music by
Nino Rota
Cinematography
Jack Cardiff
Edited by
Leo Cattozzo
Distributed by
Paramount Pictures

Release dates

August 21, 1956
 

Running time
 208 minutes
Language
English
Budget
$6 million
Box office
$6.25 million (rentals)[1]
War and Peace is the first English-language film version of the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It is an American/Italian production, directed by King Vidor and produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti. The music score was by Nino Rota and the cinematography by Jack Cardiff. The film was made by Dino de Laurentiis Productions and distributed by Paramount Pictures.
The film stars Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Mel Ferrer, along with Vittorio Gassman, Herbert Lom and Anita Ekberg, in one of her first breakthrough roles. It had Academy Awards nominations for Best Director (King Vidor), Best Cinematography, Color (Jack Cardiff) and Best Costume Design, Color (Maria De Matteis).


Contents  [hide]
1 Differences from the novel
2 Cast
3 Gallery
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

Differences from the novel[edit]
The film script had to condense the extensive original. It is primarily focused on Natasha, Pierre, and Andrei, their complex relationship and personal maturation on the backdrop of the historical events of the Napoleonic invasion. In Moscow, most of the scenes take place at the Rostov residence, and episodes at the country estates are curtailed, with some exceptions such as the hunt where Natasha first meets Andrei. This is a condensation of two scenes at the Rostov country estate, since in the novel Andrei, who by then is already Natasha's fiancé, is not present at the hunt. There is no scene from St. Petersburg. The relationship between Nikolas, Sonya, and Mary is toned down. Historical figures retained are General Kutuzov and Napoleon. Minor battles are omitted, while Napoleon's crossing of the Berezina is added. The concept of the inner dialogue is retained, notably in regard to Natasha, but the extensive use of French is not retained in the movie. Events of the epilogue are not included in the movie, nor are Tolstoy's discourses about history.
Cast[edit]
Audrey Hepburn as Natasha Rostova
Henry Fonda as Count Pierre Bezukhov
Mel Ferrer as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky
Vittorio Gassman as Anatole Kuragine
Herbert Lom as Napoleon
Oscar Homolka as General Kutuzov
Anita Ekberg as Helene
Helmut Dantine as Dolokhov
Tullio Carminati as Prince Vasili Kuragine
Barry Jones as Count Rostov
Milly Vitale as Lise
Lea Seidl as Countess Rostova
Anna-Maria Ferrero as Mary Bolkonskaya
Wilfrid Lawson as Prince Bolkonsky (credited as Wilfred Lawson)
May Britt as Sonya Rostova
Jeremy Brett as Nicholas Rostov
John Mills as Platon Karataev
Patrick Crean as Denisov
Sean Barrett as Petya Rostov
Alan Furlan as Russian Officer
Gallery[edit]




Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer in the set of War and Peace in 1955
 



Screenshot of Audrey Hepburn in the role of Natasha and Mel Ferrer as Prince Andrei

See also[edit]
List of American films of 1956
War and Peace - 1966-67 film series directed by Sergei Bondarchuk
War and Peace - 1972 TV 20-part BBC Production.
War and Peace - 2007 TV 4-Part Mini Series.
War and Peace - 1941 Opera composed by Sergei Prokofieff.
References[edit]
1.Jump up ^ 'The Top Box-Office Hits of 1956', Variety Weekly, January 2, 1957.
External links[edit]
 Wikimedia Commons has media related to War and Peace.
War and Peace at the Internet Movie Database


[show]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Films directed by King Vidor

 


































































 


[show]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869)

 










 








 











 










 





 


[show]
v ·
 t ·
 e
 
Nino Rota

 





 




 









 







 


Authority control
WorldCat ·
 VIAF: 176444716 ·
 LCCN: no2002114454
 

  


Categories: 1956 films
English-language films
Film scores by Nino Rota
1950s drama films
American epic films
American films
Films based on War and Peace
Films directed by King Vidor
Paramount Pictures films
Films produced by Dino De Laurentiis
Films produced by Carlo Ponti
Italian epic films






Navigation menu



Create account
Not logged in
Talk
Contributions
Log in



Article

Talk





 



Read

Edit

View history










 






Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Wikipedia store

Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact page

Tools
What links here
Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Permanent link
Page information
Wikidata item
Cite this page

Print/export
Create a book
Download as PDF
Printable version

Languages
Azərbaycanca
Català
Čeština
Deutsch
Español
فارسی
Français
Hrvatski
Italiano
עברית
Македонски
Nederlands
日本語
Polski
Português
Русский
Srpskohrvatski / српскохрватски
Svenska
Українська
Edit links
This page was last modified on 6 September 2015, at 19:18.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Contact Wikipedia
Developers
Mobile view
Wikimedia Foundation
Powered by MediaWiki 
  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace_(1956_film)