How War and Peace drew on The Charterhouse of Parma
A documented line of influence: Leo Tolstoy demonstrably engaged Stendhal’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal · 1839
RomanticismThe influenced
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869
The Age of the NovelRelevance
8/10
On War and Peace’s page
- Borodino has a father, and it's Stendhal — Tolstoy avowed that he learned to write war from The Charterhouse of Parma
- Stendhal's Waterloo gave him the method: battle as chaos seen from below, fragmentary and uncomprehended, never the clean map of the generals
- Read Stendhal's Waterloo first and Tolstoy's whole antiheroic vision of war comes into focus — the irony was already there, waiting to be made epic
On The Charterhouse of Parma’s page
- Tolstoy said he learned how to write war from Stendhal — by his own account, The Charterhouse of Parma taught him how battle actually feels on the page
- Stendhal's Waterloo — confused, fragmentary, seen by a bewildered boy who never grasps the larger picture — is the direct model for Tolstoy's Borodino
- The antiheroic philosophy of War and Peace, its refusal of grand strategy and heroic clarity, traces back to Stendhal's irony