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"An unjust and evil thing": Tolstoy's condemnation of war in his early fiction".(The Evolution of War and Its Representation in Literature and Film)(Critical essay)

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From: West Virginia University Philological Papers
Date: 20040922
Author:Gamache, Ray

At the beginning of Leo Tolstoy's "The Raid," the narrator announces, "War always interested me, not war in the sense of manoeuvres devised by great generals ... but the reality of war, the actual killing" (1). That Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, would invest the narrator of his very first short story about a military engagement with such an interest is, in itself, not surprising. During the writing of his epic masterpiece, Tolstoy accepted war as an inevitable aspect of human existence. Arguably, this is not the same man who a few years later advocated a position of ...

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