War and Peace
1812 in Tolstoy and Dornhelm
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
In his novel War and Peace (1868/69), Leo Tolstoy showed how the events of the War of 1812 illuminated the social contradictions within Russia and the epochal break throughout Europe, something he vividly depicted on the basis of four families. In his television adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel (2007), Robert Dornhelm was less concerned with the tension between personal destinies and great history than with the transformation of the novel into a (globalised) melodrama, in which the private realm takes centre stage and with it completely commonplace feelings such as love, hope, or sadness.
(Osteuropa 1/2013, pp. 93–102)