Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, about Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign, is well-known for its national mythology, but less so for its imperial one.  Yet both myths interweave in Tolstoy’s dense historical canvas and his fictional characters’ human dramas.  Using a postcolonial lens, this talk examines Tolstoy’s comparisons between the French and Russian empires and their Orientalisms.  Balancing between alternately denying and affirming Russia’s imperial status, between rejecting some imperial attitudes and reinforcing others, War and Peace navigates the national and imperial contradictions of nineteenth-century Russia and its triangular relations to East and West. 

Edyta M. Bojanowska is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University.  She is the author of two prize-winning monographs about empire and nationalism in nineteenth-century Russian culture and intellectual history: Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (2007) and A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (2018).  An effort to integrate Russia into accounts of European imperialism connects the second book with Professor Bojanowska’s current project, Empire and the Russian Classics, which is a postcolonial rereading of the Russian nineteenth-century literary canon.  Her scholarship has been supported by the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Division of Literature and Languages and the Russian department.