4 - The revolutionary epic

Summary

Introduction

The epic novel in Russian and Soviet literature is a branch of historical fiction. Greatly elaborated and enlarged though it may have been, the epic novel in nineteenth-century Russian literature had as its source the novels of Walter Scott and only emerged as a novelistic genre in its own right when the conventionally ‘historical’ features of the historical novel were deliberately ‘made strange’ or defamiliarised by L. Tolstoy and given epic proportions in his famous War and Peace (1863–9). In a strict sense, the term ‘epic’ when applied to a novel meant little more than ‘large in scale’, but the term has grown implicitly to denote an enlarged historical novel describing heroic events of national significance. The pattern and model for all epic novels in this sense are supplied by War and Peace, which has almost automatically been referred to by critics who seek to identify the epic novel in a context of Russian or Soviet literature.

The epic proportions of War and Peace – and therefore the work's novelty – can be identified in several ways. The work's temporal range spans approximately seven years (1805–12), to which can be added the time scale of the first epilogue and the further enhancement of the work's temporal significance through the way it mirrors obliquely the ethos and problems of the decade (the 1860s) in which it was written. The range of settings similarly extends geographically from Moscow to St Petersburg, from Borodino to Smolensk, and so on.