The composition of Tolstoy L.N. Summary: War and peace

An epic is an ancient genre where life is depicted on a national-historical scale. The novel is a new European genre associated with an interest in the fate of an individual.

The features of the epic in "War and Peace": in the center - the historical fate of the Russian people in the Patriotic War of 1812, the significance of its heroic role and the image of "integral" being.

Features of the novel: "War and Peace" tells about the private life of people, shows specific personalities in their spiritual development.

The genre of the epic novel is the creation of Tolstoy. The ideological and artistic meaning of each scene and each character becomes clear only in their linkages with the comprehensive content of the epic. The epic novel combines detailed pictures of Russian life, battle scenes, the author's artistic narration and philosophical digressions. The basis of the content of the epic novel is made up of events of a large historical scale, “life is common, not private,” reflected in the fates of individuals. Tolstoy achieved an unusually wide coverage of all strata of Russian life - hence the huge number of characters. The ideological and artistic core of the work is the history of the people and the path of the best representatives of the nobility to the people. The work was not written to recreate history, it is not a chronicle. The author created a book about the life of the nation, created an artistic, not historically reliable truth (much of the actual history of that time was not included in the book; in addition, real historical facts are distorted in order to confirm the main idea of ​​the novel - the exaggeration of old age and passivity of Kutuzov, a portrait and a number of actions of Napoleon).

Historical and philosophical digressions, the author's reflections on the past, present and future are an essential part of the genre structure of War and Peace. In 1873, Tolstoy made an attempt to lighten the structure of the work, to clear the book of reasoning, which, in the opinion of most researchers, caused serious damage to his creation. It is believed that the cumbersomeness, the heaviness of the periods (sentences), the multifaceted composition, the many plot lines, the abundance of author's deviations are integral and necessary features of War and Peace. The artistic task itself - the epic coverage of huge strata of historical life - required complexity, not lightness and simplicity of form. The complicated syntactic structure of Tolstoy's prose is an instrument of social and psychological analysis, an essential component of the style of an epic novel.

The composition of "War and Peace" is also subordinated to the requirements of the genre. The plot is based on historical events. Secondly, the meaning of the fate of families and individuals is revealed (analyze all the oppositions, see above).

"Dialectics of the Soul" (features of Tolstoy's psychologism).

"Dialectics of the Soul" is a constant image of the inner world of the heroes in motion, in development (according to Chernyshevsky).

Psychologism (showing characters in development) allows not only to objectively depict a picture of the spiritual life of the heroes, but also to express the author's moral assessment of the depicted.

Tolstoy's means of psychological depiction:

1. Psychological analysis on behalf of the author-narrator.
2. Disclosure of involuntary insincerity, a subconscious desire to see oneself better and to intuitively seek self-justification (for example, Pierre's thoughts about whether or not to go to Anatol Kuragin after he gives Bolkonsky his word not to do this).
3. An internal monologue that creates the impression of "overheard thoughts" (for example, the stream of consciousness of Nikolai Rostov during the hunt and pursuit of a Frenchman; Prince Andrew under the sky of Austerlitz).
4. Dreams, disclosure of subconscious processes (eg, Pierre's dreams).
5. Impressions of the characters from the outside world. Attention is focused not on the object and phenomenon itself, but on how the character perceives them (for example, Natasha's first ball).
6. External details (e.g. oak on the road to Otradnoye, Austerlitz sky).
7. The discrepancy between the time at which the action actually took place and the time of the story about it (for example, the internal monologue of Marya Bolkonskaya about why she fell in love with Nikolai Rostov).

According to N. G. Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy was most interested in “the psychic process itself, its forms, its laws, the dialectics of the soul, in order to directly depict the psychic process with an expressive, definitive term”. Chernyshevsky noted that Tolstoy's artistic discovery was the image of an internal monologue in the form of a stream of consciousness. Chernyshevsky singles out the general principles of the “dialectic of the soul”: a) The depiction of the inner world of a person in constant motion, contradiction and development (Tolstoy: “man is a fluid substance”); b) Tolstoy's interest in turning points, crisis moments in a person's life; c) Eventfulness (the influence of events in the external world on the inner world of the hero).

Report

Genre features of the novel "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy

Iva Zyuzina

III course, Ph.D. 4636

Russian philology

The novel "War and Peace" is a large-scale work. It covers 16 years (from 1805 to 1821) of the life of Russia and more than five hundred different heroes. Among them there are real characters of the described historical events, fictional heroes and many people to whom Tolstoy does not even give names, for example, "the general who ordered", "the officer who did not get there." Thus, the writer wanted to show that the movement of history does not occur under the influence of any specific personalities, but thanks to all participants in the events. To combine such a huge material into one work, the author created a genre that had not been used by any writer before, which he called an epic novel. This is one of the few works in world literature of the 19th century, for which the name of an epic novel is rightfully proposed. Events of a large historical scale, life in general, and not private, form the basis of its content, the historical process is revealed in it, an unusually wide coverage of Russian life in all its layers has been achieved, and as a result of this, the number of characters is so large, in particular characters from the popular environment.

The novel describes real historical events: Austerlitz, Shengrabenskoe, Borodino battles, the conclusion of the Tilsit Peace Treaty, the capture of Smolensk, the surrender of Moscow, partisan war and others, in which real historical personalities manifest themselves. Historical events in the novel also play a compositional role. Since the Battle of Borodino largely determined the outcome of the war of 1812, 20 chapters are devoted to its description, it is the culmination center of the novel. The work contains pictures of the battle, giving way to the image of the world as the complete opposite of war, peace, as the existence of a community of many, many people, as well as nature, that is, everything that surrounds a person in space and time. Disputes, misunderstandings, latent and overt conflicts, fear, hostility, love ... All this is real, alive, sincere, like the heroes of a literary work themselves.

The breadth of coverage of the Russian nation in the work is striking: noble estates, aristocratic capital salons, village holidays and diplomatic receptions, the greatest battles and pictures of peaceful life, emperors, peasants, dignitaries, landowners, merchants, soldiers, generals. We meet more than 500 characters on the pages of the novel. All of them, especially the goodies, are in constant search. Favorite heroes of Tolstoy are not flawless, but they strive for perfection, they are looking for the meaning of life, tranquility for them is equivalent to spiritual death. But the path to truth and truth is difficult and thorny. The characters created by Tolstoy reflect the moral and philosophical research of the author of the novel himself. The novel tells about the events taking place at three stages of the struggle between Russia and Bonapartist France. Volume 1 describes the events of 1805, when Russia was waging a war on its territory with France in alliance with Austria. In the 2nd volume of 1806-1807, when Russian troops were in Prussia. The 3rd and 4th volumes are devoted to a broad image of the Patriotic War of 1812, which Russia waged on its native land. The epilogue takes place in 1820.

The most complex artistic, historical and philosophical fabric of the novel is woven from everyday life and historical pictures, from the depiction of epochal events in the life of the people and the culminating moments of the life of individuals - great and unknown, real and fictional; from the speech of the narrator and the passionate monologues of the author himself, who, as it were, came to the fore and removed his heroes, stopped the action of the novel in order to talk about something of the utmost importance with the reader, sharply challenge the generally accepted point of view of professional historians, and substantiate his principles.

The very first and general theme of any epic is war and peace. The title is in the highest degree consistent with the "spirit of the epic", which, as everyone admits, is performed in Tolstoy's book. What the theme and the main event of the book is about is war and peace, and in the composition the main division is carried out into chapters into "peaceful" and "military", replacing each other. At the same time, the meaning of the title seems to double - namely, the meaning of the second concept: peace. Here it is no longer so unambiguous and simple - the question arises in what sense the word "world" is given, for the text of the book provides a basis for this. After all, this word is not only in the title, but also penetrates the entire text of the novel, covers a wide range of content and forms a whole grid of meanings. The "world" in the text of Tolstoy's novel, in its essence, is untranslatable. This is not only the “peace” that is opposite to war, a sign of silence, peace and harmony, but also “peace”, which appears in the sense of the cosmic meaning - “all the world” or “all people”.

In the "world" the author has given the specific meaning of worldly life, the whole infinity of connections in human life with its diversity of relationships, opinions, events, comprehensible or not goals, in which it is necessary to navigate and make decisions. This life "in the world", which is the image of the "disorder of free light", is contrasted with another meaning of "peace" in Tolstoy's novel. In the context of the novel, another meaning of “world” is the antipode of the word “earth”, which in its meaning approaches the word “heaven” and resembles with the concepts of God, faith and death. The world is not just a general connection of human life, which was more than once presented to the characters in Tolstoy's books as chaos, a play of chance, but it is also a special purposeful connection, a harmonious whole, "the kingdom of truth." Within the boundaries of the original text, this difference is also conveyed by different spellings of a specific word - "mir" and "mir", where the concept of "mir" appears in places where it is clearly opposed to war, and "mir" is used in the meaning of "the whole world / all people."

There have been many attempts to study the main composition of the novel, which are fundamentally different in their approach. At first, the researchers saw their task in finding in the novel the main stages in the development of the action, what they should be according to generally accepted concepts of composition - the opening, the culmination, the denouement. Of the author's works on this topic, one can note T.L. Motyleva, who clarifies in her research that despite the absence of a tie in the generally accepted sense of the word - an initial event that would determine the further development of the action, from the very first pages of the work there is an imminent conflict , which underlies the epic. Namely: the contradiction and the brewing war between the Russian state and the Napoleonic army. The main spring of the action is the concrete deepening and development of this storyline, the battle of Borodino can be considered the culmination of the narrative, and the expulsion of Napoleon from Russia can be considered the denouement. In this case, the place of the denouement itself is rather unusual - since the action of the novel does not stop after it. This traditional view of the composition of the novel, according to other researchers, is a too general scheme that does not cover the completeness and logic of the plot lines of the novel, just as it does not subjugate many of the life processes depicted in the book.

Another attempt to interpret the composition of the novel can be noted in the works of B.Bursov, who decides to move away from the traditional theoretical and literary scheme. He adheres to the theory of the separate compositional centers of "War and Peace", which are the most significant moments of the historical event in it, but taken separately. In the first volume, such a center, according to Bursov, is the Battle of Austerlitz, and in the third - Borodino. Moreover, the significance of the Battle of Borodino is considered here, not only as the compositional center of the third volume, but also of the entire work as a whole.

A completely different principle of considering the peculiarities of the composition of the novel was derived in the monograph by A. Saburov. The episode of the Borodino battle is recognized as the culmination of the work, but the leading role in this development is taken by his so-called "external structure" I. This development examines the relationship in the novel of the factual side and fiction, war and peace, the author's reasoning and the narrative part, the scenic and descriptive element. As a result, this work examines the peculiarities of the genre composition of the novel separately from the writer's specific views on life, from the peculiarities of his worldview. A method that was not accepted by another part of the researchers, who focused in their developments on the moral and philosophical ideas of the author and Reeve. The development was adopted. specifies the features of the Jeanne composition of the novel separately from the writer's specific views on life, the particular novel (V. Selinov, S. Leushev).

Of course, without taking into account the philosophical basis of the novel, it is impossible to understand the methods of its construction. Everything here is determined by the writer's desire to substantiate artistically his view of people, life, and society. The author's fiction occupies no less place in the novel than reliable material in terms of significance, and also contains many philosophical premises in understanding not only military actions, but also in the everyday civil and everyday life of people. Particular attention is paid to the role of the masses in history, the ethical representations of the best and thinking people from the advanced families of the nobility, the material and careerist motives of the ruling class, the problems of love, marriage and family.

The fiction in the novel also expands from the intentions of the writer, in addition to the historical event, to show in its entirety the life of people, which is not always directly related to the ongoing war. According to the writer himself, reflected in the draft preface, he distinguishes his task from the task of the historian: “The historian and the artist, describing the historical epoch, have two completely different subjects. Just as the historian will be wrong, if he tries to present a historical person in all his wholeness, in all the complexity of relations to all aspects of life, and thus involuntarily overlooking and overshadowing his main task - to indicate the participation of a person in a historical event, so the artist will not fulfill his work understanding a person as a historian, always presenting it in a historical sense ”(13, 57). Precisely these words of the author himself show that he considers it his duty to touch all aspects of life and, of course, to illuminate them from a philosophical point of view. The task of the writer is to create an epic, i.e. as it seems to him, a complete picture of the life of society at the beginning of the century with all types of life and customs of serf Russia. Mainly this intention explains the exceptional completeness of the description of everyday phenomena of life - the birth and death of a person, the experiences of lovers, hunting, gambling, duel, illness, disobedience of peasants to a lady, the experiences of a soldier's mother, poisoning of a lover, religious feelings of a person - in a word, everything that then there was a man. Throughout the reading of the entire novel, one can see how the writer tries to fully embrace the life of the era, describe the life of humanity at a certain historical stage, show the sequence of events and how people lived then.

For two equal halves, the author assigns a place in the novel to both military operations and events of civilian life. In this respect, the alternation of military and everyday scenes is given in approximately the same parts, it is in equilibrium in relation to the whole volume of the novel. Interrupting the descriptions of military operations, the narrative describes the development of almost all lines of family chronicle - the lives of the Kuragin, Bolkonsky, Bezukhov, Rostov. In the work on the first half of the novel, the description of all families is usually carried out - for example, after the Shengraben battle, in connection with the development of the plot, the Kuragin, Pierre Bezukhov and the Bolkonsky are shown. About any events in the family life of the Rostovs is not mentioned here, but the author mentions them, observing the accepted order of keeping them in the field of vision of the narrative.

In the author's mind, the two halves of the novel - the military-historical and the civil one - correspond to the meaning of the title - "War and Peace" and serve as its refinement, ie. Peace is here again conceived not only as the opposite of war, but also as the everyday civilian, non-military life of people. In the comparison of one and the other, however, there are also semantic shades that speak about the influence of war on the world, people, their views, feelings and behavior.

The combination of family chronicles with the events of the people's war represents the main pivot of the development of the action in the novel. In a skillful interweaving of two-sided action, the author traces the private fates of people with vital observation, figuring out how people of different positions, views and characters withstood the great test and behaved, what influence a crucial historical moment had on them.

In accordance with this, the novel begins with a show of the world, and then moves on to the pictures of war. Thus, the reader gets to know the main characters before they become participants in the war. And this already affects the very perception of the description of war as a phenomenon - it is no longer just a war, but a war with the participation of familiar faces who have their own life, thoughts and aspirations.

The question of the genre of "War and Peace" is one of the most difficult topics in school lessons. Usually, students find it difficult to answer due to the large volume of this work, which does not allow them to understand all the features of the book from the first time. Therefore, in the course of reading, it is necessary to draw the attention of schoolchildren to the main points in the construction of the composition, which will help determine the genre features of the novel.

Features of the plot

The problem of the "War and Peace" genre directly rests on the plot of the work. The novel covers several decades in the life of the main characters. The author pays the main attention to the period of the struggle of the Russian people with the French army of Napoleon. The epic grasp of events determined the structure of the work, which consists of several storylines dedicated to different families, whose fates are intertwined in the course of the narrative.

However, the Russian people are considered the main protagonist of the work. Therefore, the genre of "War and Peace" should be defined as an epic. The wide scope of events also determined the features of the plot. The heroes of the work act against the background of historical events of the early 19th century. They find themselves drawn into the military events of the period under review, and their fates and lives are dependent on the vicissitudes of the war.

Historical background

When defining the genre of "War and Peace", the historical basis of the plot should also be taken into account. The author not only limited himself to describing the struggle of the Russian people for liberation from the French invasion, but also depicted a panorama of Russian social life at the beginning of the 19th century. In the center of his attention is the life of several noble families (Rostovs, Bolkonskys and others). However, he did not ignore the life of the common people.

In his book there are sketches of peasant and village life, a description of the life of ordinary people. All this allows us to say that the novel "War and Peace" is a broad epic of the life of the people. The book can be called a kind of encyclopedia of Russian history at the beginning of the reign of Alexander I. L. N. Tolstoy drew a large amount of archival material to depict real events and historical figures. Therefore, his work is notable for its truthfulness and reliability.

Characters (edit)

Traditionally, it is customary to single out the three main characters of the work - Natasha Rostova, Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov. It was in their images that the writer embodied the best qualities inherent in the nobility of the period under consideration. In addition, the heroes of the second plan also played an important role in the development of the plot: Natasha's brother Nikolai Rostov, the family of Prince Andrei and other representatives of the nobility, who from time to time appear in the course of the narrative.

Such a large number of characters gave the scale of the work of art, which once again proves that the novel "War and Peace" is a work of epic character.

Story lines

To determine the genre of the book, it is also necessary to pay attention to the large number of plot narratives in the work. In addition to the main stories - the lines of Pierre, Natasha and Prince Andrew - the novel contains a large number of additional auxiliary sketches from the life of society of the time in question. Tolstoy describes a number of noble families that somehow influence the main plot.

The heroes of War and Peace belong to a wide variety of sectors of society, and this complicates the composition of the narrative. In addition to secular paintings, the writer very truthfully shows the rise of the national spirit during the invasion of the French. Therefore, the military theme occupies a prominent, perhaps even the main place in the narrative.

War image

Tolstoy in his work focused on the popular character of the war. It is the simple Russian people who are rightfully considered the main character of the entire book. Therefore, it is customary to call the work an epic. This idea of ​​the author determined the features of the plot. In the text, the life of the nobility during a time of common trouble is closely intertwined with the life of ordinary people.

The heroes of the novel "War and Peace" for some time are torn from the usual circle of their lives and find themselves in the most terrible epicenter of events. Prince Andrey is mortally wounded, Pierre is captured by the French and together with his new friend, an ordinary peasant peasant Platon Karataev, suffers all the hardships of captivity, Natasha and her family leave Moscow and take care of the wounded. Thus, the writer showed how, at the moment of danger, the entire population of Russia united to fight. This proves once again that War and Peace is an epic novel.

Main events

The fact that the book is written in the spirit of the epic is evidenced by the fact that the most important key events of the narrative are large-scale. For example, the wound of Prince Andrew on the Austerlitz field, when there was a revolution in his worldview, is a scene that amazes the reader with the grandeur and breadth of the panorama. After all, this battle was one of the most important in the course of the Napoleonic wars, it involved a large number of participants, and it was of great importance for strengthening the success of France. The same can be said about the Battle of Borodino. "War and Peace" is a novel in which the author sought, first of all, to show the general impulse of the entire Russian people in the struggle against the enemy. And the scene of this battle best of all shows the patriotic enthusiasm of all participants. Pierre helps ordinary soldiers as best he can during an artillery attack, and although he does not know how to handle weapons at all, he nevertheless acts to the best of his ability in order to help the soldiers.

Thus, the author places his heroes at the very epicenter of events in order to show their unity with the people. This once again proves the epic nature of the work. Covering all aspects of society is an important feature of the work. The writer showed the history of Russia at the beginning of the 19th century by depicting the social and cultural life of all its estates. Therefore, his book is rightfully considered the most famous and significant epic in the literature of this century. And only in the 20th century M. Sholokhov managed to create an equally grandiose canvas of folk life in the novel "Quiet Don".

War and Peace. Genre features, history of creation

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

Tolstoy began writing War and Peace at the end of 1863, finishing work on the story The Cossacks. In 1869, the novel was written; published in a thick journal by M.N. Katkov "Russian Bulletin". The novel is based on historical military events, artistically transformed by the writer. Historical scholars argue that War and Peace is not only historically believable, but also historically valid.

Genre features

“War and Peace” is a unique genre phenomenon (in the work of more than 600 heroes, including 200 historical figures, countless everyday scenes, 20 battles) .. Tolstoy understood perfectly well that his work did not fit into any of the genre canons. In his article "A Few Words About the Book" War and Peace "(1868), Tolstoy wrote:" This is not a novel, even less a poem, an even less historical chronicle. " He immediately added: "From Gogol's" Dead Souls "to Dostoevsky's" Dead House ", in the new period of Russian literature there is not a single outstanding fictional work of prose that would fully fit into the form of a novel, poem or story." Tolstoy is right in that Russian literature boldly experimented with the genre form.

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

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

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

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

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

1. history is made by the masses themselves;

2. people make history one by one, not together;

3. people make history unconsciously.

The novel shows the antithesis of Napoleon and Kutuzov. Tolstoy paints a portrait of Napoleon somewhat reduced. Napoleon plays in everything; he is an actor.

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

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

Distinctive features of the novel:

• the image of a person in complex life processes,
• the multilinearity of the plot, covering the fate of a number of characters,
• greater volume in comparison with other epic forms.

In the foreground are the images of ordinary people, their personal fate, events of private life and the reflection in them of the events of the era, the integral social world that gave birth to them. Usually the action of works in the genre of the novel takes place in the contemporary reality of the writer (with the exception of historical and fantastic texts) or events of the recent past.

Genre originality in Tolstoy's novel

The novel "War and Peace" is an extremely complex genre work.

Like a historical novel

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

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

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

Therefore, the genre "War and Peace" goes beyond the framework of a simply historical novel.

Like a family romance

On the other hand, you can refer to "War and Peace" to a family romance: Tolstoy traces the fate of several generations of noble families (Rostovs, Bolkonskys, Bezukhovs, Kuraginins). But the fates of these people are inextricably linked with large-scale historical events in Russia. In addition to these heroes, in "War and Peace" there is a huge number of characters who are not directly related to the fate of the heroes.

Appearance on the pages of the novel of images:

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

takes the novel beyond the family genre.

Like a social romance

"War and Peace" can be called social romance... Tolstoy is worried about issues related to the structure of society.

The writer shows his ambiguous attitude towards the nobility in describing the St. Petersburg and Moscow nobility, their attitude, for example, to the war of 1812. Equally important for the author is the relationship between the nobility and serfs. These relations are ambiguous, and Tolstoy cannot but say about it (peasant partisan detachments and the behavior of the Bogucharov peasants). In this regard, we can say that the novel of the writer does not fit into these genre frameworks.

Like a philosophical novel

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

"Like a child riding in a carriage, pulling at the fringe and thinking that he is driving the carriage."

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

Tolstoy's reasoning about the war is remarkable. As a humanist, he rejects war as a way to resolve conflicts, war is disgusting, it looks like a hunt (it's not for nothing that Nikolai Rostov, fleeing from the French, feels like a hare being hunted by hunters), Andrei Bolkonsky tells Pierre about the antihuman essence of war before the Battle of Borodino. The writer sees the reasons for the victory of the Russians over the French in the spirit of patriotism, which engulfed the entire nation and helped stop the invasion.

Like a psychological romance

Tolstoy is a master and psychological prose... Deep psychologism, mastering the subtlest movements of the human soul is an undoubted quality of a writer.

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

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

The large scale of the events described, the globality of the problems, the huge number of characters, social, philosophical, moral aspects make this novel a unique genre work.