Tolstoy opposed all forms of violence and repression. The novelist and prophet of peace is at his most urgent in a time of war
These days many Ukrainians find it hard to listen to Russian voices, even those of dissidents. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, recently signed a law that restricts the printing of contemporary. A magnificent exception to this rupture is a production this year of Sergei Prokofiev’s “War and Peace” at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.
The villain-in-chief moved to neutralise Tolstoy and co-opt him for his own purposes. Less than a month before sending his forces into Ukraine, Mr Putin signed a decree. “Taking into account the outstanding contribution of Leo Tolstoy to national and world culture,” it read, “I hereby resolve…to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Tolstoy’s birth in 2028.”
During the second world war, Stalin’s regime ransacked “War and Peace” for parallels between the struggle against the Nazis and Russia’s defeat of Napoleon in 1812. On the day the Soviet Union was invaded, Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign minister, declared: “Napoleon’s march into Russia was answered with a patriotic war, and Napoleon was defeated…The Red Army and all our people will once again lead a victorious patriotic war for the fatherland, for honour and for freedom.
Prokofiev began composing his operatic version before the invasion. He was more interested in the lyrical “peace” scenes than in the stylistic diktats of Socialist Realism. When war began he was advised to rethink the heroic aspects of the story and enhance the choral elements that could represent a unified mass rising against invaders. Prokofiev complied—but never saw his opera fully staged.
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