How War and Peace drew on Les Misérables
A documented line of influence: Leo Tolstoy demonstrably engaged Victor Hugo’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo · 1862
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869
The Age of the NovelRelevance
8/10
On War and Peace’s page
- Tolstoy called Les Misérables the book whose influence on him in his War and Peace years was "enormous" — he read and admired it before he began
- Hugo showed him the form: an epic that swallows a whole society and a whole war, pausing to argue history and morality directly with the reader
- Read Hugo first and you meet the ambition Tolstoy answered — the panoramic, conscience-driven novel that War and Peace would take even further (Tolstoy held it up again as model art decades later)
On Les Misérables’s page
- Tolstoy read and admired Les Misérables before writing War and Peace, and later named it the single book whose influence on him between ages 35 and 50 — his War and Peace years — was "enormous"
- Hugo's model is right there in the finished novel: the vast historical canvas, the moral seriousness, the willingness to stop the story cold and address the reader on war, history, and the soul
- Decades on he was still holding Hugo up — in What Is Art? (1898) he praised these novels as the real thing, model art