In 2011 Radio 4 staged an eight-hour dramatisation of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman’s epic novel set during the battle of Stalingrad and the second world war. The success of Life and Fate set BBC producers thinking: what about doing something even more ambitious? There was only one work that might match Grossman’s for historical range and sheer depth of characterisation. It’s set during another moment of crisis in Russia, and is arguably the most complete work of literary fiction ever created. We’re talking War and Peace.
On New Year’s Day the BBC will broadcast a 10-hour radio version of Leo Tolstoy’s mammoth work, adapted by the playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker. Radio 4 has cleared its FM schedule, kicking everything but the news and The Archers on to long wave. Tolstoy’s novel takes a while to get going. The Radio 4 adaptation, by contrast, begins at a ripping pace; the expectation is that a hungover nation will be instantly gripped.
For those who haven’t read it, War and Peace is a contrapuntal saga set during the years of Napoleon’s European wars and invasion of Russia. It features five aristocratic families. The story begins in the salons of St Petersburg. It quickly morphs into something bigger. There are brilliant characters – made up ones (Natasha Rostova, Pierre Bezukhov) and actual historical ones (Napoleon, General Kutuzov, Alexander I).
In large part War and Peace is an epic of Russian national awakening, written by Tolstoy in the 1860s, but set half a century earlier, between 1805 and 1813. There are vividly realised battle scenes – nobody does the chaos of war better - and chunks of philosophical reflection. Tolstoy famously rejected all attempts to define War and Peace and insisted it wasn’t a novel at all.
It’s a long book. My battered World’s Classics edition runs to a mighty 1,312 pages. (It has a dashing count on the cover, wearing tight white breeches. He’s holding a sword, and gazes dreamily into the middle distance). Yet Tolstoy writes with terrific economy. A single phrase captures mood or emotion. The plot never misses a beat.
Jeremy Howe, Radio 4’s drama commissioner, says Wertenbaker was the perfect choice to adapt War and Peace for radio: “With Timberlake you get rigorous dramatic intelligence.” Of her all-day adaptation, he says: “It’s a lot more dramatic than the novel. It starts more quickly, in media res, with pace and energy. It’s clever. She’s turned it into a 21st-century piece of drama.”
Earlier this week the BBC announced a new TV version of War and Peace, which will be shown later in 2015. The prolific Andrew Davies is writing the script. Filming begins in January in Russia, Lithuania and Latvia.
Howe dismisses any question of rivalry and says radio has some some advantages over TV. “We can afford to do battle scenes on the radio. You don’t need 20,000 extras or a tonne of CGI,” he notes. “It’s such a protean novel. Timberlake is more interested in Tolstoy’s politics and philosophy, and she has the space to explore this. Andrew Davies’s version will be more character-driven.”
The prospect of doing War and Peace, Howe says, attracted a strong group of actors. Wertenbaker’s adaptation features John Hurt, Simon Russell Beale and Lesley Manville. It was recorded over a month in un-Russian Sussex, at a hotel in Lewes and on the South Downs, its greenery doubling for the battlefields of Borodino. Howe describes Hurt’s performance – he plays the ageing Prince Bolkonsky – as “extraordinary”: “He is like gunpowder waiting to go off,” he says.
Tolstoy’s novel has obsessed Wertenbaker “ever since I can remember”, she says. She first read it in French, then in English, and managed “about a page” in the Russian original before giving up. A few years ago she met the translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Their acclaimed edition of War and Peace appeared in 2007, and it’s this one – good on dialogue and voices – that she uses.
“It was like discovering a whole new book. They have stayed very close to Tolstoy’s Russian,” Wertenbaker says. Pevear-Volokhonsky told her how they had included Tolstoy’s deliberate repetitions. “I always felt radio could do something with this great novel that film and television might not,” says Wertenbaker. “The novel is full of reflections on the purpose of life, on history, on the strategic confusions of war and the emotional ones of peace. Radio can give you that time.”
The playwright says it was refreshing to see another side to Napoleon, whom Tolstoy dismisses as delusional. She grew up in France, where Bonaparte is still treated as a hero. “I particularly loved working on the battle scenes, and I’m pretty convinced I could now lead one of those battles myself,” she says. “Throughout the book, you feel Tolstoy’s probing mind and heart, searching, searching.”
Tomorrow’s Radio 4 drama is merely the latest in a string of War and Peace adaptations. There have been film and stage versions, ballets, operas – including a rock one – and political, historical and philosophical commentaries. A witty biopic, The Last Station, came out to coincide with the centenary of Tolstoy’s death in 1910. Tolstoy’s appeal is international: there are Tolstoy book fairs in Cuba and Mexico; two new English translations of Anna Karenina recently appeared and the Japanese revere Tolstoy for his spirituality.
According to Pevear, War and Peace is amenable to all sorts of adaptation because it’s such a “vast and multifaceted book”. It’s full of dialogue, the translator says – not just between the main characters, or between parents and children, but between Russian soldiers and their French prisoners, or the peasant Platon Karataev and the aristocrat Pierre Bezukhov. There are fascinating exchanges among the generals of various nationalities, who meet to devise a common strategy against Napoleon.
“Tolstoy rendered these voices masterfully, so that we hear the inner life of the speakers in their words. His narrator is also multi-voiced, moving from grand historical generalisations to the most elusive living details. All this play with voicing can be captured very well in a radio adaptation,” Pevear says.
Tolstoy’s writing remains popular, Pevear argues, because he is concerned with what is “basically and universally human”. Readers today, wherever they live, can be as at home in Tolstoy’s world as Russians were when the novel was first published in 1869, he says. This is certainly true. Tolstoy’s work – while rooted in the specific and the local – transcends group, class and nation. This universal artistic quality is “extremely rare”, Pevear says.
Rosamund Bartlett, author of a Tolstoy: A Life and a 2014 translation of Anna Karenina, agrees. It is Tolstoy’s “acute and sympathetic understanding of human psychology”, she says, which accounts for his popularity. She likens him to a “great cinema director” who approaches an “extraordinary narrative canvas from different angles”.
“One moment we have been set on a mountain-top and had a telescope put into our hands, as Virginia Woolf put it, while the next Tolstoy’s characters are brought into such close focus that we can almost feel them breathing.”
Few critics would disagree. Howe says recent international events such as Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea – where Tolstoy served as a young officer, witnessing first-hand the murderous siege of Sevastopol – have put Russia “more on the radar”. Paradoxically, Tolstoy is currently feted everywhere except Russia. His expulsion by the orthodox church makes him a problematic figure for the current regime.
To run alongside the New Year’s Day programme, the BBC’s interactive team will be doing a 10-hour Twitterthon to help those who confuse their Bolonskys with their Bezukhovs. Radio 4 will be tweeting family trees, maps and historical trivia. For those who lack the stamina to listen all day, the drama will be available online all across next month.
This massive endeavour seems to send a message: that the BBC can still do impressive large-scale projects. It has no plans to dumb down. Get comfy, put the kettle on and tune in. There’s no better way to banish those New Year blues.
• This article was amended on 31 December 2014. The original version wrongly gave Jeremy Howe’s name as Richard. This has been corrected.
