Hundred Days
The Hundred Days marked the period between Napoleon's return from exile on the island of Elba to Paris on 20 March 1815 and the second restoration of King Louis XVIII on 8 July 1815. This period saw the War of the Seventh Coalition, includes the Waterloo Campaign, the Neapolitan War as well as several other minor campaigns; the phrase les Cent Jours was first used by the prefect of Paris, comte de Chabrol, in his speech welcoming the king back to Paris on 8 July. Napoleon returned. On 13 March, seven days before Napoleon reached Paris, the powers at the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw, on 25 March Austria, Prussia and the United Kingdom, members of the Seventh Coalition, bound themselves to put 150,000 men each into the field to end his rule; this set the stage for the last conflict in the Napoleonic Wars, the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, the second restoration of the French kingdom, the permanent exile of Napoleon to the distant island of Saint Helena, where he died in May 1821.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars pitted France against various coalitions of other European nations nearly continuously from 1792 onward. The overthrow and subsequent public execution of Louis XVI in France had disturbed other European leaders, who vowed to crush the French Republic. Rather than leading to France's defeat, the wars allowed the revolutionary regime to expand beyond its borders and create client republics; the success of the French forces made a hero out of Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1799, Napoleon staged a successful coup d'état and became First Consul of the new French Consulate. Five years he crowned himself Emperor Napoleon I; the rise of Napoleon troubled the other European powers as much as the earlier revolutionary regime had. Despite the formation of new coalitions against him, Napoleon's forces continued to conquer much of Europe; the tide of war began to turn after a disastrous French invasion of Russia in 1812 that resulted in the loss of much of Napoleon's army.
The following year, during the War of the Sixth Coalition, Coalition forces defeated the French in the Battle of Leipzig. Following its victory at Leipzig, the Coalition vowed to depose Napoleon. In the last week of February 1814, Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher advanced on Paris. After multiple attacks and reinforcements on both sides, Blücher won the Battle of Laon in early March 1814; the Battle of Reims went to Napoleon, but this victory was followed by successive defeats from overwhelming odds. Coalition forces entered Paris after the Battle of Montmartre on 30 March 1814. On 6 April 1814, Napoleon abdicated his throne, leading to the accession of Louis XVIII and the first Bourbon Restoration a month later; the defeated Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba off the coast of Tuscany, while the victorious Coalition sought to redraw the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna. Napoleon spent only nine months and 21 days in uneasy retirement on Elba, watching events in France with great interest as the Congress of Vienna gathered.
He had been escorted to Elba by Sir Neil Campbell, who remained in residence there while performing other duties in Italy, but was not Napoleon's jailer. As he foresaw, the shrinkage of the great Empire into the realm of old France caused intense dissatisfaction among the French, a feeling fed by stories of the tactless way in which the Bourbon princes treated veterans of the Grande Armée and the returning royalist nobility treated the people at large. Threatening was the general situation in Europe, stressed and exhausted during the previous decades of near constant warfare; the conflicting demands of major powers were for a time so exorbitant as to bring the Powers at the Congress of Vienna to the verge of war with each other. Thus every scrap of news reaching remote Elba looked favourable to Napoleon to retake power as he reasoned the news of his return would cause a popular rising as he approached, he reasoned that the return of French prisoners from Russia, Germany and Spain would furnish him with a trained and patriotic army far larger than that which had won renown in the years before 1814.
So threatening were the symptoms that the royalists at Paris and the plenipotentiaries at Vienna talked of deporting him to the Azores or to Saint Helena, while others hinted at assassination. At the Congress of Vienna the various participating nations had different and conflicting goals. Tsar Alexander of Russia had expected to absorb much of Poland and to leave a Polish puppet state, the Duchy of Warsaw, as a buffer against further invasion from Europe; the renewed Prussian state demanded all of the Kingdom of Saxony. Austria wanted to allow neither of these things, while it expected to regain control of northern Italy. Castlereagh, of the United Kingdom, supported France and Austria and was at variance with his own Parliament; this caused a war to break out, when the Tsar pointed out to Castlereagh that Russia had 450,000 men near Poland and Saxony and he was welcome to try to remove them. Indeed, Alexander stated "I shall be the King of Poland and the King of Prussia will be the King of Saxony".
Castlereagh approached King Frederick William III of Prussia to offer him British and Austrian support for Prussia's annexation of Saxony in return for Prussia's support of an independent Poland. The Prussian king repeated this offer in public, offending Alexander so that he chal
Marquess
A marquess is a nobleman of high hereditary rank in various European peerages and in those of some of their former colonies. The term is used to translate equivalent Asian styles, as in Imperial China and Imperial Japan. In the German lands, a margrave was a ruler of an immediate Imperial territory, not a nobleman like a marquess or marquis in Western and Southern Europe. German rulers did not confer the title of marquis; the word marquess entered the English language from the Old French marchis in the late 13th or early 14th century. The French word was derived from marche, itself descended from the Middle Latin marca, from which the modern English words march and mark descend; the distinction between governors of frontier territories and interior territories was made as early as the founding of the Roman Empire when some provinces were set aside for administration by the senate and more unpacified or vulnerable provinces were administered by the emperor. The titles "duke" and "count" were distinguished as ranks in the late empire, with dux being used for a provincial military governor and the rank of comes given to the leader of an active army along the frontier.
Several marquesses lived in Belgium, still today this title exists. The Marquis of Beauffort; the Marquis of la Boëssière-Thiennes the Marquis of Trazegnies d'Ittre the Marquis du Parc. the Marquis Imperiali. The Marquis of Radiguès; the Marquis of Ruffo de Bonneval de la Fare the Marquis of Spontin the Marquis of Assche the Marquis of Yve. the Marquis of Saint-Floris the Marquis of Becelaere the Marquis of Wemmel the Marquis of Bergen op Zoom the Marquis of Rode the Marquis of Lede Currently in Spain the rank of Marquess/Marchioness still exists. 142 of them are Spanish grandees. A'marqués is addressed as "Illustrious Lord", or if he/she is a grandee as "Your Excellency". Examples include 10th Marquis of Villaverde; the honorific prefix "The Most Honourable" is an honorific that precedes the name of a marquess or marchioness in the United Kingdom. In Great Britain and in Ireland, the correct spelling of the aristocratic title of this rank is marquess. In Scotland the French spelling is sometimes used.
In Great Britain and in Ireland, the title ranks below a duke and above an earl. A woman with the rank of a marquess, or the wife of a marquess, is called a marchioness in Great Britain and Ireland, or a marquise elsewhere in Europe; the dignity, rank or position of the title is referred to as a marquessate. The theoretical distinction between a marquess and other titles has, since the Middle Ages, faded into obscurity. In times past, the distinction between a count and a marquess was that the land of a marquess, called a march, was on the border of the country, while a count's land, called a county was not; as a result of this, a marquess was trusted to defend and fortify against hostile neighbours and was thus more important and ranked higher than a count. The title is ranked below that of a duke, largely restricted to the royal family; the rank of marquess was a late introduction to the British peerage: no marcher lords had the rank of marquess, though some were earls. On the evening of the Coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838, the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne explained to her why: I spoke to Ld M. about the numbers of Peers present at the Coronation, & he said it was quite unprecedented.
I observed that there were few Viscounts, to which he replied "There are few Viscounts," that they were an old sort of title & not English. Like other major Western noble titles, marquess is sometimes used to render certain titles in non-Western languages with their own traditions though they are, as a rule unrelated and thus hard to compare. However, they are considered "equivalent" in relative rank; this is the case with: In ancient China, 侯 was the second of five noble ranks 爵 created by King Wu of Zhou and is translated as marquess or marquis. In imperial China, 侯 is but not always, a middle-to-high ranking hereditary nobility title, its exact rank varies from dynasty to dynasty, within a dynasty. It is created with different sub-ranks. In Meiji Japan, 侯爵, a hereditary peerage rank, was introduced in 1884, granting a hereditary seat in the upper house of the imperial diet just as a British peerage did, with the ranks rendered as baron, count and duke/prince. In Korea, the title of 현후, of which the meaning is "marquess of district", existed for the hereditary nobility in the Goryeo dynasty.
It was equivalent to the upper fifth rank of nine bureaucratic orders, was in the third rank of six nobility orders. In the Joseon dynasty, there was no title equivalent to marquess. In Vietnam's Annamite realm / empire, hầu
Battle of Borodino
The Battle of Borodino was a battle fought on 7 September 1812 in the Napoleonic Wars during the French invasion of Russia. The fighting involved around 250,000 troops and left at least 70,000 casualties, making Borodino the deadliest day of the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon's Grande Armée launched an attack against the Russian army, driving it back from its initial positions but failing to gain a decisive victory. Both armies were exhausted after the battle and the Russians withdrew from the field the following day. Borodino represented the last Russian effort at stopping the French advance on Moscow, which fell a week later. However, the French had no clear way of forcing Tsar Alexander to capitulate because the Russian army was not decisively defeated, resulting in the ultimate defeat of the French invasion following the retreat from Moscow in October. After a series of Russian retreats at the beginning of the campaign, the nobility grew alarmed about the advancing French troops and forced the Tsar to dismiss the army's commander, Barclay de Tolly.
Mikhail Kutuzov was appointed as his replacement. In a final attempt to save Moscow, the Russians made a stand near the village of Borodino, west of the town of Mozhaysk, they waited for the French to attack. The Russian right wing occupied ideal defensive terrain, so the French tried to press the Russian left for much of the battle; the highlight of the fighting became the bloody struggle for the large Raevsky redoubt near the village of Borodino. The French managed to capture this redoubt late into the day forcing the rest of the Russian army to pull back as well; the Russians suffered terrible casualties during the fighting. French losses were heavy, exacerbating the logistical difficulties that Napoleon encountered in the campaign; the exhaustion of the French forces, the lack of information on the condition of the Russian army, persuaded Napoleon to remain on the battlefield with his army instead of ordering the kind of vigorous pursuit reminiscent of previous campaigns. Napoleon's Imperial Guard, the only unit on the battlefield that saw no fighting, was available to swing into action at a moment's notice.
In refusing to commit the Guard, some historians believe, he lost his one chance to destroy the Russian army and to win the campaign. The capture of Moscow proved a pyrrhic victory, since the Russians had no intention of negotiating with Napoleon for peace; the French evacuated Russia's spiritual capital in October and conducted a difficult retreat that lasted until December, by which point the remainder of the Grande Armée had unraveled. Historical reports of the battle differed depending on whether they originated from supporters of the French or Russian side. Factional fighting among senior officers within each army led to conflicting accounts and disagreements over the roles of particular officers; the French Grande Armée began its invasion of Russia on 16 June 1812. In response, Emperor Alexander I prepared to face the French. According to the plan of German general Karl Ludwig von Phull, the Russian troops under the command of Count Michael Barclay de Tolly had to face the Grande Armée in the Vilnius region.
However, Phull's plan soon proved to be a serious mistake, as the enormous Grande Armée was more than enough to separate and crush both Russian armies at the same time. Furthermore, the participation of Tsar Alexander I as commander caused more chaos in the Russian army; the Russian forces which were massed along the Polish frontier were obliged to fall back in the face of the swift French advance. Napoleon advanced from Vitebsk, hoping to catch the Russian army in the open where he could annihilate it; the French army was not positioned well for an extended overland campaign. French supply lines were vulnerable and Cossacks, light cavalry, guerrilla forces and French deserters attacked and depleted French supply columns; the central French force under Napoleon's direct command had crossed the Niemen with 286,000 men but by the time of the battle was reduced to 161,475 through starvation and disease. Nonetheless, the prospect of a decisive battle lured Napoleon deeper into Russia and further stretched his supply lines.
Infighting between Barclay's subordinates prevented the Russian commander from committing his forces to battle. Barclay's fellow generals and the Russian court viewed the constant retreat as a reluctance to fight. Although the 67-year-old General Kutuzov was not seen by his contemporaries as the equal of Napoleon, he possessed the ability to muster a good defence, he was favoured over Barclay because he was Russian whereas Barclay was of Scottish descent and officers subordinate to Barclay could accept Kutuzov, thereby uniting the army. On 18 August Kutuzov arrived at Tsaryovo-Zaymishche to greet the army. After taking over the army, Kutuzov organized a strong rearguard under the command of General Konovnytsyn and ordered the army to prepare for battle. Kutuzov understood that Barclay's decision to retreat was correct, but the Russian troops could not accept further retreat. A battle had to occur; the new commander had still not managed to establish a defensive position when the armies were within 125 kilometres of Moscow.
He ordered another retreat to Gzhatsk on 30 August, by which time the ra
Laudanum
Laudanum is a tincture of opium containing 10% powdered opium by weight. Reddish-brown and bitter, laudanum contains all of the opium alkaloids, including morphine and codeine. Laudanum was used to treat a variety of conditions, but its principal use was as a pain medication and cough suppressant; until the early 20th century, laudanum was sold without a prescription and was a constituent of many patent medicines. Today, laudanum is recognized as addictive and is regulated and controlled as such throughout most of the world; the United States Uniform Controlled Substances Act, for one example, lists it on Schedule II. Laudanum is known as a "whole opium" preparation since it contained all the opium alkaloids. Today, the drug is processed to remove all or most of the noscapine present as this is a strong emetic and does not add appreciably to the analgesic or anti-propulsive properties of opium. Laudanum remains available by prescription in the United States and theoretically in the United Kingdom, although today the drug's therapeutic indications are confined to controlling diarrhea, alleviating pain, easing withdrawal symptoms in infants born to mothers addicted to heroin or other opioids.
Recent enforcement action by the U. S. Food and Drug Administration against manufacturers of paregoric and opium tincture suggests that opium tincture's availability in the U. S. may be in jeopardy. The terms laudanum and tincture of opium are interchangeable, but in contemporary medical practice the latter is used exclusively. Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss-German alchemist, experimented with various opium concoctions, recommended opium for reducing pain. One of his preparations, a pill which he extolled as his "archanum" or "laudanum", may or may not have contained opium. Paracelsus' laudanum was strikingly different from the standard laudanum of the 17th century and beyond, containing crushed pearls, musk and other substances. One researcher has documented that "Laudanum, as listed in the London Pharmacopoeia, was a pill made from opium, castor, ambergris and nutmeg". Laudanum remained unknown until the 1660s when English physician Thomas Sydenham compounded a proprietary opium tincture that he named laudanum, although it differed from the laudanum of Paracelsus.
In 1676 Sydenham published a seminal work, Medical Observations Concerning the History and Cure of Acute Diseases, in which he promoted his brand of opium tincture, advocated its use for a range of medical conditions. By the 18th century, the medicinal properties of opium and laudanum were well known, the term "laudanum" came to refer to any combination of opium and alcohol. Several physicians, including John Jones, John Brown, George Young, the latter of whom published a comprehensive medical text entitled Treatise on Opium, extolled the virtues of laudanum and recommended the drug for every ailment. "Opium, after 1820, was mixed with everything imaginable: mercury, cayenne pepper, chloroform, whiskey and brandy." As one researcher has noted: "To understand the popularity of a medicine that eased -- if only temporarily -- coughing and pain, one only has to consider the living conditions at the time". In the 1850s, "cholera and dysentery ripped through communities, its victims dying from debilitating diarrhoea", dropsy, consumption and rheumatism were all too common.
By the 19th century, laudanum was used in many patent medicines to "relieve pain... to produce sleep... to allay irritation... to check excessive secretions... to support the system... as a soporific". The limited pharmacopoeia of the day meant that opium derivatives were among the most effective of available treatments, so laudanum was prescribed for ailments from colds to meningitis to cardiac diseases, in both adults and children. Laudanum was used during the yellow fever epidemic. Innumerable Victorian women were prescribed the drug for relief of vague aches. Nurses spoon-fed laudanum to infants; the Romantic and Victorian eras were marked by the widespread use of laudanum in Europe and the United States. Mary Todd Lincoln, for example, the wife of the US president Abraham Lincoln, was a laudanum addict, as was the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, famously interrupted in the middle of an opium-induced writing session of Kubla Khan by a "person from Porlock". A working class drug, laudanum was cheaper than a bottle of gin or wine, because it was treated as a medication for legal purposes and not taxed as an alcoholic beverage.
Laudanum was used in home prescriptions, as well as a single medication. For example, a 1901 medical book published for home health use gave the following two "Simple Remedy Formulas" for "dysenterry": Thin boiled starch, 2 ounces. In a section entitled "Professional Prescriptions" is a formula for "diarrhoea": Tincture opium, deodorized, 15 drops. "Diarrhoea": Aqueous extract of ergot, 20 grains. Take one pill every three or four hours."The early 20th century brought increased regu
Novel
A novel is a long work of narrative fiction written in prose form, and, published as a book. The entire genre has been seen as having "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in classical Greece and Rome, in medieval and early modern romance, in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella. Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji has been described as the world's first novel. Spread of printed books in China led to the appearance of classical Chinese novels by the Ming dynasty. Parallel European developments occurred after the invention of the printing press. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, suggested that the modern novel was born in the early 18th century. Walter Scott made a distinction between the novel, in which "events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society" and the romance, which he defined as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse.
However, many such romances, including the historical romances of Scott, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, are frequently called novels, Scott describes romance as a "kindred term". This sort of romance is in turn different from the genre fiction love romance novel. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo, en roman." A novel is a fictional narrative which describes intimate human experiences. The novel in the modern era makes use of a literary prose style; the development of the prose novel at this time was encouraged by innovations in printing, the introduction of cheap paper in the 15th century. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the Italian novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". Most European languages use the word "romance" for extended narratives.
A fictional narrativeFictionality is most cited as distinguishing novels from historiography. However this can be a problematic criterion. Throughout the early modern period authors of historical narratives would include inventions rooted in traditional beliefs in order to embellish a passage of text or add credibility to an opinion. Historians would invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social and personal realities of a place and period with clarity and detail not found in works of history. Literary proseWhile prose rather than verse became the standard of the modern novel, the ancestors of the modern European novel include verse epics in the Romance language of southern France those by Chrétien de Troyes, in Middle English. In the 19th century, fictional narratives in verse, such as Lord Byron's Don Juan, Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, competed with prose novels. Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, composed of 590 Onegin stanzas, is a more recent example of the verse novel.
Content: intimate experienceBoth in 12th-century Japan and 15th-century Europe, prose fiction created intimate reading situations. On the other hand, verse epics, including the Odyssey and Aeneid, had been recited to a select audiences, though this was a more intimate experience than the performance of plays in theaters. A new world of individualistic fashion, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, "conduct", "gallantry" spread with novels and the associated prose-romance. LengthThe novel is today the longest genre of narrative prose fiction, followed by the novella. However, in the 17th century, critics saw the romance as of epic length and the novel as its short rival. A precise definition of the differences in length between these types of fiction, is, not possible; the requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that a novel should encompass the "totality of life." Although early forms of the novel are to be found in a number of places, including classical Rome, 10th– and 11th-century Japan, Elizabethan England, the European novel is said to have begun with Don Quixote in 1605.
Early works of extended fictional prose, or novels, include works in Latin like the Satyricon by Petronius, The Golden Ass by Apuleius, works in Ancient Greek such as Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, works in Sanskrit such as the 4th or 5th century Vasavadatta by Subandhu, 6th– or 7th-century Daśakumāracarita and Avantisundarīkathā by Daṇḍin, in the 7th-century Kadambari by Banabhatta, Murasaki Shikibu's 11th-century Japanese work The Tale of Genji, the 12th-century Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by Ibn Tufail, who wrote in Arabic, the 13th-century Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafis, another Arabic novelist, Blanquerna, written in Catalan by Ramon Llull, the 14th-century Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Gua
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century, in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical, it was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, the scientific rationalization of nature—all components of modernity. It was embodied most in the visual arts and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, the social sciences, the natural sciences, it had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing liberalism, radicalism and nationalism. The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension and terror, awe—especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature.
It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but spontaneity as a desirable characteristic. In contrast to the Rationalism and Classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, industrialism. Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of the French Revolution were proximate factors. Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of "heroic" individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society, it promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas. In the second half of the 19th century, Realism was offered as a polar opposite to Romanticism.
The decline of Romanticism during this time was associated with multiple processes, including social and political changes and the spread of nationalism. The nature of Romanticism may be approached from the primary importance of the free expression of the feelings of the artist; the importance the Romantics placed on emotion is summed up in the remark of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, "the artist's feeling is his law". To William Wordsworth, poetry should begin as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", which the poet "recollect in tranquility", evoking a new but corresponding emotion the poet can mold into art. To express these feelings, it was considered the content of art had to come from the imagination of the artist, with as little interference as possible from "artificial" rules dictating what a work should consist of. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others believed there were natural laws the imagination—at least of a good creative artist—would unconsciously follow through artistic inspiration if left alone.
As well as rules, the influence of models from other works was considered to impede the creator's own imagination, so that originality was essential. The concept of the genius, or artist, able to produce his own original work through this process of creation from nothingness, is key to Romanticism, to be derivative was the worst sin; this idea is called "romantic originality". Translator and prominent Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel argued in his Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Letters that the most phenomenal power of human nature is its capacity to divide and diverge into opposite directions. Not essential to Romanticism, but so widespread as to be normative, was a strong belief and interest in the importance of nature; this in the effect of nature upon the artist when he is surrounded by it, preferably alone. In contrast to the very social art of the Enlightenment, Romantics were distrustful of the human world, tended to believe a close connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy.
Romantic art addressed its audiences with what was intended to be felt as the personal voice of the artist. So, in literature, "much of romantic poetry invited the reader to identify the protagonists with the poets themselves". According to Isaiah Berlin, Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals"; the group of words with the root "Roman" in the various European languages, such as "romance" and "Romanesque", has a complicated history, but by the middle of the 18th century "romantic" in English and romantique in French were both in common use as adjectives of praise for natural phenomena such as views and sunsets, in a sense close to modern English usage but without the amorous connotation.
The application of the term to literature first became common in Germany, where the circle around the Schlegel brothers, critics August and Friedrich, began to speak of romantische Poesie in the 1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in terms of spirit rather than dating. Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his Dialogue on Poetry, "I seek and find the romantic among th
War and Peace
War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. It is regarded as a central work of world literature and one of Tolstoy's finest literary achievements; the novel chronicles the history of the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families. Portions of an earlier version, titled The Year 1805, were serialized in The Russian Messenger from 1865 to 1867; the novel was first published in its entirety in 1869. Tolstoy said War and Peace is "not a novel less is it a poem, still less a historical chronicle." Large sections the chapters, are a philosophical discussion rather than narrative. Tolstoy said that the best Russian literature does not conform to standards and hence hesitated to call War and Peace a novel. Instead, he regarded Anna Karenina as his first true novel; the Encyclopædia Britannica states: "It can be argued that no single English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace".
Tolstoy began writing War and Peace in 1863, the year that he married and settled down at his country estate. The first half of the book was written under the name "1805". During the writing of the second half, he read and acknowledged Schopenhauer as one of his main inspirations. Tolstoy wrote in a letter to Afanasy Fet that what he has written in War and Peace is said by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation. However, Tolstoy approaches "it from the other side."The first draft of the novel was completed in 1863. In 1865, the periodical Russkiy Vestnik published the first part of this draft under the title 1805 and published more the following year. Tolstoy was dissatisfied with this version, although he allowed several parts of it to be published with a different ending in 1867, he rewrote the entire novel between 1866 and 1869. Tolstoy's wife, Sophia Tolstaya, copied as many as seven separate complete manuscripts before Tolstoy considered it again ready for publication; the version, published in Russkiy Vestnik had a different ending from the version published under the title War and Peace in 1869.
Russians who had read the serialized version were anxious to buy the complete novel, it sold out immediately. The novel was translated immediately after publication into many other languages, it is unknown why Tolstoy changed the name to Peace. He may have borrowed the title from the 1861 work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: La Guerre et la Paix; the title may be another reference to Titus, described as being a master of "war and peace" in The Twelve Caesars, written by Suetonius in 119 CE. The completed novel was called Voyna i mir; the 1805 manuscript was re-edited and annotated in Russia in 1893 and since has been translated into English, French, Dutch, Finnish, Albanian and Czech. Tolstoy was instrumental in bringing a new kind of consciousness to the novel, his narrative structure is noted for its "god-like" ability to hover over and within events, but in the way it swiftly and seamlessly portrayed a particular character's point of view. His use of visual detail is cinematic in scope, using the literary equivalents of panning, wide shots and close-ups.
These devices, while not exclusive to Tolstoy, are part of the new style of the novel that arose in the mid-19th century and of which Tolstoy proved himself a master. The standard Russian text of War and Peace is divided into an epilogue in two parts; the first half is concerned with the fictional characters, whereas the latter parts, as well as the second part of the epilogue consist of essays about the nature of war, power and historiography. Tolstoy interspersed these essays into the story in a way. Certain abridged versions remove these essays while others, published during Tolstoy's life moved these essays into an appendix; the novel is set 60 years before Tolstoy's day, but he had spoken with people who lived through the 1812 French invasion of Russia. He read all the standard histories available in Russian and French about the Napoleonic Wars and had read letters, journals and biographies of Napoleon and other key players of that era. There are 160 real persons named or referred to in War and Peace.
He worked from primary source materials, as well as from history books, philosophy texts and other historical novels. Tolstoy used a great deal of his own experience in the Crimean War to bring vivid detail and first-hand accounts of how the Imperial Russian Army was structured. Tolstoy was critical of standard history military history, in War and Peace, he explains at the start of the novel's third volume his own views on how history ought to be written. His aim was to blur the line between fiction and history, to get closer to the truth, as he states in Volume II. Although the book is in Russian, significant portions of dialogue are in French, it has been suggested that the use of French is a deliberate literary device, to portray artifice while Russian emerges as a language of sincerity and seriousness. It could, however simply represent another element of the realistic style in which the book is written, since French was the common language of the Russian aristocracy at the time. In fact, the Russian nobility knew only enough Russian to command their
The Chartreuse of Parma public domain audiobook at LibriVox
