How Buddenbrooks drew on War and Peace
A documented line of influence: Thomas Mann demonstrably engaged Leo Tolstoy’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann · 1901
ModernRelevance
7/10
On Buddenbrooks’s page
- Buddenbrooks is young Mann reaching for Tolstoy's scale: a generational family saga built on the sweeping-epic ambition and obsessive attention to domestic texture he learned from the Russian master.
- Mann revered Tolstoy as a chief source of his artistic formation, and the resemblance is structural as well as tonal, the novel's opening family gathering echoes the society soirée that opens War and Peace.
On War and Peace’s page
- From Tolstoy, Mann took the appetite for the sweeping epic and the almost painful observation of minute detail. Buddenbrooks, written at twenty-five, tracks four generations of a merchant family with the same patient breadth Tolstoy lavished on the Bolkonskys and Rostovs.
- The kinship runs to structure: critics note how Buddenbrooks opens on a homecoming party gathering the family's whole world, the way War and Peace opens on Anna Pávlovna's soirée gathering society's.