At the Newberry in 2025: Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” Part II and Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War”
Illustration to War and Peace. Artist Andrei Nikolaev, 1953-1955
We will finish reading slowly and closely the second part (Books 3, 4 and Epilogues) of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–69), together with Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of women in World War II The Unwomanly Face of War (1985).
Though War and Peace tells the story of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, it is also a story about many other things: friendship, love, violence, and death; parents and children; patriotism and the search for one’s place in the world. Following the main characters of the novel, we will explore the problems of causality, moral responsibility, and free will, the book’s reflection in film adaptations, and the way to read War and Peace now at the time of Russia’s turn towards imperialism and war.
During the last three sessions, we will turn to The Unwomanly Face of War, a book that analyzes WWII from the perspective of women and is based on powerful and poignant well-documented eyewitness accounts of wartime experiences. Similar to Tolstoy, Svetlana Alexievich emphasizes the discrepancy between the official Soviet story of victory and the true stories full of horror and tragedy.
We will meet online via Zoom on Saturday mornings from 10:00 am to noon Central Time, for nine weeks starting starting February 8, 2025 and ending April 26, 2025. Registration details will be updated on this website as they become available; for more information on registration procedures, see the Newberry’s Adult Education page. For the complete course description and reading assignments, click here
Please read War and Peace Book Three, Part One, pp. 647 – 73 for the first class.
