This chapter sketches the shape of Tolstoy’s oeuvre by focusing on a key text from each decade of his long and varied career. In Childhood (1852), his first published work, Tolstoy had already begun both to draw upon and to distrust the powers of realist fiction. This tension is palpable in his great novels War and Peace (1865–9) and Anna Karenina (1875–8), and it motivated his sporadic turns away from artistic literature during the years he was writing them. Confession (1879–82), which marked the most dramatic of these crises, is a conversion narrative that ends with a call to rethink the edifice of Christianity. In the second half of his life he pursued this task in a range of genres. Lavishing his gift for evocative description on polemical accounts of social atrocities, in his fiction he now reached for emblematic universality. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), a celebrated short story, and “The First Step” (1892), a treatise on vegetarianism, exemplify these divergent styles. However, they stirringly reconverge in posthumously published works like the historical novella Hadji Murat (1896–1904), where Tolstoy represented escape from the mortal body in paradoxically vivid realist detail.

While Tolstoy is best known as a novelist, many become acquainted with his works through musical adaptations. These multinational adaptations span different genres and vary in their degrees of fame, sophistication, and resemblance to the original. This chapter adopts the analogy of a theme and variations to consider the symbiotic relationship between source texts and adaptations. The characteristics unique to literature vis-à-vis music are also discussed to illustrate the advantages and challenges of setting literature, in particular prose, to music. The chapter examines works in each genre with musical analyses and offers genre-specific commentary. In addition to instrumental music, ballet, and opera, musicals are included because they bridge high art and more popular genres and have been instrumental in revitalizing many classics of Russian literature. The chapter concludes with a discussion of operatic adaptations, using Prokofiev’s War and Peace as an example. The opera illustrates many challenges typical of setting sprawling prose texts to music of various genres, such as reducing the number of scenes and characters as well as reimagining the text. The appendix includes a list of adaptations; as many works on the list are not well known, they may be further examined by scholars.

Tolstoy’s works have been adapted into film more often than any other Russian writer except for Dostoevsky. This chapter covers Russian and world cinematic adaptations of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, and various shorter works of Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s novels, with their vast length, broad canvas, and complex plots, create unique challenges for prospective filmmakers. While some directors attempt to film his texts as closely as possible, others choose to single out particular aspects of his novels as their foci. Adapters of Anna Karenina, for instance, often focus almost exclusively on Anna and Vronsky’s love affair, while minimizing the plotline involving Levin. Cultural factors often come into play, for instance in Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, which adapts Tolstoy’s text in light of the Brezhnev-era demand for monumentalism, and for conveying the patriotic aspects of the novel. Shorter works such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata have inspired particularly creative approaches, as directors often freely combine Tolstoy’s short narratives with other texts and set them in remarkably different social, historical, and cultural contexts.

The general continuity of investment treaties stands in contrast to traditional rules, according to which the outbreak of war abrogated treaties between belligerents. Even today, it remains a common narrative that specialised customary rules exist on the (dis-)continuity of treaties at the outbreak of armed conflict. Chapter 2 critically scrutinises and ultimately rejects this doctrine of the effects of armed conflicts on treaties. While investment treaties also continue to operate under the International Law Commission’s ‘Draft Articles on the Effects of Armed Conflicts on Treaties’, remaining uncertainties as to the state of the law render a comprehensive examination necessary. The chapter argues that the Draft Articles and the doctrine they incorporate suffer from severe shortcomings. The better approach towards the effects of armed conflicts on treaties and more appropriate reading of contemporary international law, the chapter submits, is to discontinue the traditional invocation of specialised customary rules and reorient the debate exclusively toward general treaty law and the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

The classics not only gave Shakespeare the images of war that he drew on in plays based on classical subjects, they also shaped his representation of war more generally. His knowledge of the place of war in the ancient world influenced his view of the ways in which that past informed his own present. Topics in this chapter include the relation of the classical past to the English present, the relation between foreign and domestic war, and the relation between war and peace. What happens when the hero comes home (the subject of Greek and Senecan tragedy): when Titus finishes killing, Antony lets his hair down, Hector relaxes with his family, Achilles withdraws into his tent, Tarquin takes a night off, or Coriolanus tries to turn politician. How also does war inform peace and, further, what is the relation between the “arts” of war and the arts of peace, especially literature?

Focusing upon the more-or-less contemporaneous Korean war, and the agreement ending the war at Panmunjom in 1953, this chapter focuses upon the way in which the Cold War is evoked, not in terms of a singular event with a singular beginning and a singular ending but, rather, as a series of events with multiple points of beginning and even multiple endings – an ‘end’ that does not occur all at once but is delivered in a series of instalments through time. In light of that analysis the question is raised whether the announcement that the Cold War is over is not merely a way of keeping it alive, preserving its historical valence in the present through its repression. What this brings into view, it is suggested, is the idea that the Cold War was not simply a titanic contest between self-styled hegemons, but rather a headlong struggle for the supreme model of political organisation in which command over history itself is one of the necessary objectives.

Imperial Russia’s most popular historical novel was not War and Peace but a story of folkloric origins that celebrated freedom and poked fun at authority. The Legend of How a Soldier Saved Peter the Great from Death appeared in multiple versions from 1843 onward and drew upon mythologies of the Fool – in sacred accounts, the Holy Fool (Iurodivyi); in secular tales, little Ivan the Fool (Ivanushka-Durachok). The hero of Russia’s first commercialized folktale, Tsarevich Ivan, the Firebird, and the Grey Wolf, tricks a tsar as the protagonist of the contemporaneous children’s classic, The Little Humpbacked Horse. The freedom of fools was attractive enough in traditional society; amidst multi-dimensional change after the Emancipation, the idea of release from traditional constraint was electrifying. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others created a dialogue between the familiar and the new by peopling their works with recognizable characters, foremost among which was the Fool. In so doing they illuminated ideas of self-fulfillment free from oppressive and unjust authority. But the era’s authors and readers also knew that when authority seemed most in shadow, it could return in force. The tension between freedom and order reflected ambivalence toward each that endured in Russian traditions and new works.