“One step beyond the line” : the sensory experience of the battlefield in Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”.
Journal: University of Canterbury Research Repository (University of Canterbury)
Year: 2020

War and Peace is Tolstoy’s harrowing indictment of the Napoleonic Wars, laying bare the shattered expectations, illusions, and lives of a generation of young Russians. In this thesis I show how the methods employed by inter-disciplinary sensory historians can be applied to the novel, demonstrating how it can be read not simply as a depiction of war but as a sensory reaction to it. More than simply telling us what happened, Tolstoy uses a representation of the senses to explore the lived, or ‘fel