War and Peace: The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind
February 25, 2019 2:06 AM Subscribe
.... but only if you're part of the aristocracy, royalty, or otherwise very rich, as far as Tolstoy is concerned. Where do I read about the other 99.99% of the Russian population during the Napoleonic Wars?
In War and Peace, Tolstoy only has eyes for the Princes, the Countesses, the privileged, the very highest of society. When he deigns to spend a page or two upon the proles, they are pathetic caricatures without a mind of their own. The novel is obviously engrossing but when Natasha is once more in raptures at some beautiful aspect of her entitled life or Rostov whines that he's being lined up to marry a rich countess or Pierre wanders a battlefield at will just because of his position in society, I find myself grinding my teeth at the narrowest of narrow focus.
Point me to novels or histories of this period - French, Russian, whatever - that examine those who worked, fought, or died on behalf of the upper class and rich.
In War and Peace, Tolstoy only has eyes for the Princes, the Countesses, the privileged, the very highest of society. When he deigns to spend a page or two upon the proles, they are pathetic caricatures without a mind of their own. The novel is obviously engrossing but when Natasha is once more in raptures at some beautiful aspect of her entitled life or Rostov whines that he's being lined up to marry a rich countess or Pierre wanders a battlefield at will just because of his position in society, I find myself grinding my teeth at the narrowest of narrow focus.
Point me to novels or histories of this period - French, Russian, whatever - that examine those who worked, fought, or died on behalf of the upper class and rich.
Maybe you would enjoy some Fernand Braudel? It won't be Russia specific, but his "Civilization and Capitalism" series looks at pre- and post-industrial Europe from the bottom up. I read only excerpts in grad school; they are doorstop books, and they take a wide view.
I spent a few years working my way through Carlo Ginzburg, too - I particularly enjoyed The Cheese and the Worms and The Night Battles. They are deep dives in Italian archives (mostly from Inquisitorial records) to uncover folk practices and beliefs that resisted easy incorporation into Catholic worldview - so, pre-industrial. He reads the historical record against the grain, so to speak. They are also just beautifully written books, and I think he was very lucky in his translators (I don't read Italian.)
Another classic, from French history, is The Return of Martin Guerre, by Natalie Zemon Davis. There's a great movie version, but the book is its own pleasure.
You might also like W.G. Sebald. Austerlitz is beautiful and sad and entirely European. It's 20th c., looking back to WWII and before. Sebald operates in this kind of long 20th century, though.
I guess none of my recs are exactly 19th c. so take them all as you will.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 7:12 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]
I spent a few years working my way through Carlo Ginzburg, too - I particularly enjoyed The Cheese and the Worms and The Night Battles. They are deep dives in Italian archives (mostly from Inquisitorial records) to uncover folk practices and beliefs that resisted easy incorporation into Catholic worldview - so, pre-industrial. He reads the historical record against the grain, so to speak. They are also just beautifully written books, and I think he was very lucky in his translators (I don't read Italian.)
Another classic, from French history, is The Return of Martin Guerre, by Natalie Zemon Davis. There's a great movie version, but the book is its own pleasure.
You might also like W.G. Sebald. Austerlitz is beautiful and sad and entirely European. It's 20th c., looking back to WWII and before. Sebald operates in this kind of long 20th century, though.
I guess none of my recs are exactly 19th c. so take them all as you will.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 7:12 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]
I read this years ago but it's stayed with me: Montaillou , a historical reconstruction of life in a 14th century French village. There's a sense of a whole slice of life across the social strata with all the different individuals. It was slow and lovely.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:41 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:41 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Sadly my areas of interest have mostly been the UK and the US, so these are not exactly where you want to be studying, but they might give you some ideas.
Peter Linebaugh has written some popular history that deals specifically with the working classes of 18th and 19th century England, with some carryover to western Europe.
Many of the working people in Western Europe and the Americas were enslaved, so books about their experiences also fall under your header. Robin Blackburn'sThe Making of New World Slavery and other books are kind of dense (I have them but have only read parts of them) but interesting.
You might want to look at Verso Books' website, since they publish a lot of...I dunno, marxisty left stuff that tends to focus on working people. You should also look at university press websites - the U of M, NYU, anywhere big - because they'll have a bunch of specialty books. A lot of those will be too specialty, but they'll give you some ideas about googling.
Eric Hobsbawm wrote a set of leftish histories covering Europe basically from the dawn of "modernity" (~French Revolution) to the present.
A History of Private Life is a pretty neat series with some extended sections on France in Vol. 4
Lark Rise To Candleford is a relatively autobiographical account by Flora Thompson of working class rural life in the late 19th century. She writes pretty extensively about the survivals of 18th and early 19th century life into her present. It's one of my favorite books and opened up a lot of lines of inquiry for me, just in a "she observes this, I wonder why" way.
PM Press also publishes some really neat history - you'd need to patiently comb through their rather old-school website, but I'd be surprised if they didn't have something of interest.
I was just sort of googling around looking for this one Russian peasant memoir I'd heard of but not read and came across A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia, which is a little late for what you're looking for but at least starts in the 19th century.
The peasant memoir is A Life Under Russian Serfdom.
You might also find Emile Zola's crude, depressingRougon-Macquart series to be of interest. I've only read Germinal, an incredibly depressing (seriously, it is rough) account of a miners' strike, but I think they capture a whole range of class experiences and Zola did really believe in doing his research. You wouldn't necessarily swear to their accuracy down to the last word, but he didn't just make stuff up - for instance, he went down in the mines and talked to a bunch of striking miners before writing Germinal. Respectable people disapproved of Zola and did their best to sink his career because of his improper and grim depictions of French life.
I will say that only when I lay things out like this do I realize just how short of women's history and women academics my reading is until I hit the late 19th century.
posted by Frowner at 8:02 AM on February 25, 2019 [5 favorites]
Peter Linebaugh has written some popular history that deals specifically with the working classes of 18th and 19th century England, with some carryover to western Europe.
Many of the working people in Western Europe and the Americas were enslaved, so books about their experiences also fall under your header. Robin Blackburn's
You might want to look at Verso Books' website, since they publish a lot of...I dunno, marxisty left stuff that tends to focus on working people. You should also look at university press websites - the U of M, NYU, anywhere big - because they'll have a bunch of specialty books. A lot of those will be too specialty, but they'll give you some ideas about googling.
Eric Hobsbawm wrote a set of leftish histories covering Europe basically from the dawn of "modernity" (~French Revolution) to the present.
A History of Private Life is a pretty neat series with some extended sections on France in Vol. 4
Lark Rise To Candleford is a relatively autobiographical account by Flora Thompson of working class rural life in the late 19th century. She writes pretty extensively about the survivals of 18th and early 19th century life into her present. It's one of my favorite books and opened up a lot of lines of inquiry for me, just in a "she observes this, I wonder why" way.
PM Press also publishes some really neat history - you'd need to patiently comb through their rather old-school website, but I'd be surprised if they didn't have something of interest.
I was just sort of googling around looking for this one Russian peasant memoir I'd heard of but not read and came across A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia, which is a little late for what you're looking for but at least starts in the 19th century.
The peasant memoir is A Life Under Russian Serfdom.
You might also find Emile Zola's crude, depressingRougon-Macquart series to be of interest. I've only read Germinal, an incredibly depressing (seriously, it is rough) account of a miners' strike, but I think they capture a whole range of class experiences and Zola did really believe in doing his research. You wouldn't necessarily swear to their accuracy down to the last word, but he didn't just make stuff up - for instance, he went down in the mines and talked to a bunch of striking miners before writing Germinal. Respectable people disapproved of Zola and did their best to sink his career because of his improper and grim depictions of French life.
I will say that only when I lay things out like this do I realize just how short of women's history and women academics my reading is until I hit the late 19th century.
posted by Frowner at 8:02 AM on February 25, 2019 [5 favorites]
Yes Hobsbawm!!!
Also maybe The Country and the City by Raymond Williams.
I also really enjoyed Landscape for a Good Woman, which is 20th c. again but looks at working class women in England over several generations.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:06 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]
Also maybe The Country and the City by Raymond Williams.
I also really enjoyed Landscape for a Good Woman, which is 20th c. again but looks at working class women in England over several generations.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 8:06 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]
Best answer: The answer will have to depend on how narrowly you want to define this period. My recommendations will focus on Tolstoy's own lifetime, rather than the period (several generations earlier) in which War and Peace is set. I should note that there is a great deal of literature about Russia's poor from the nineteenth century, but most of this is not translated.
For fiction, Dostoevsky is a good place to look. Crime and Punishment is an obvious choice for novels of nineteenth-century Russian (urban) poverty. But his first novel, Poor People, will give you plenty of that as well. Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter is a series of sketches and stories about serfs, as a liberal young aristocrat horrified by the institution of serfdom wanted people to see them. If you go a bit later in the nineteenth century, Chekhov's late stories "The Peasants" and "In the Ravine" are sobering, to say the least. "The Peasants" was very controversial because it refused to idealize the peasants--something many writers (certainly Tolstoy) did.
For a vivid account of growing up in the 1870s and 80s among small-time tradespeople, Check out Gorky's autobiographical trilogy: Childhood, Among People, and My Universities. Dostoevsky and Gorky had personal experience with privation that the other big names I mention generally did not (although Chekhov, grandson of a former serf, had humble origins).
There is also a very small number of memoirs left by literate former serfs. I recommend the collection Four Russian Serf Narratives.
posted by a certain Sysoi Pafnut'evich at 9:01 AM on February 25, 2019 [6 favorites]
For fiction, Dostoevsky is a good place to look. Crime and Punishment is an obvious choice for novels of nineteenth-century Russian (urban) poverty. But his first novel, Poor People, will give you plenty of that as well. Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter is a series of sketches and stories about serfs, as a liberal young aristocrat horrified by the institution of serfdom wanted people to see them. If you go a bit later in the nineteenth century, Chekhov's late stories "The Peasants" and "In the Ravine" are sobering, to say the least. "The Peasants" was very controversial because it refused to idealize the peasants--something many writers (certainly Tolstoy) did.
For a vivid account of growing up in the 1870s and 80s among small-time tradespeople, Check out Gorky's autobiographical trilogy: Childhood, Among People, and My Universities. Dostoevsky and Gorky had personal experience with privation that the other big names I mention generally did not (although Chekhov, grandson of a former serf, had humble origins).
There is also a very small number of memoirs left by literate former serfs. I recommend the collection Four Russian Serf Narratives.
posted by a certain Sysoi Pafnut'evich at 9:01 AM on February 25, 2019 [6 favorites]
One really great book is The Life of a Simple Man, by Emile Guillaumin.
It tells the story of a farmer who was born in 1823. One thing that I appreciated after reading it is that at that time, most people would be born and live their entire lives without ever travelling more than 20-30 miles from the place of their birth.
posted by Maxwell_Smart at 5:24 PM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]
It tells the story of a farmer who was born in 1823. One thing that I appreciated after reading it is that at that time, most people would be born and live their entire lives without ever travelling more than 20-30 miles from the place of their birth.
posted by Maxwell_Smart at 5:24 PM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]
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Ivan Turgenev
"Sketches from A Hunter's Album"
(Punguin Classics)
posted by james33 at 5:08 AM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]