War and Peace: Everything you need to know about the new BBC epic

Has anyone actually read War and Peace?” went the cry on Twitter last Sunday night. As the first episode of BBC1’s adaptation of the Russian epic galloped by in a blur of ballrooms, battles, bottoms, bosoms and bears, more than six million viewers were enthralled. Many were also struggling to keep up. Who’s related to whom? Is that Anna Mikhaylovna Drubetskaya or Anna Pavlovna Scherer (Tolstoy later throws in an Anna Ignatyevna Malvintsev to flummox everyone further)? And is there a single British establishment actor who isn’t in this cast?

Across the UK, though, there was a small army of swots who knew our moment had come. The world was finally offering compensation for the myopia, the vitamin D deficiency and the head-down-the-loo flushings that are the war wounds of the truly bookish teen. Now it’s our turn to be insufferable. Of course we’ve read it! Do you mean you haven’t? Ha, this makes up for that school sports day when we were lapped in the 800m!

Still, we nerds are a magnanimous sort. So if you’ve downloaded the novel but are still being taunted by the Kindle gauge that shows you’re only three per cent of the way through and have a mere 22 hours of reading left, then this cheat sheet should help with the next five episodes.

It’s like those Cliff Notes that you were supposed to read to supplement your GCSE English lit texts, but you actually read instead of the texts. Sorry, I’m done being smug now. Well, until someone makes a new adaptation of Anna Karenina.

The novel

War and Peace was published in full in 1869 (sections had earlier been serialised in the magazine, the Russian Messenger). Tolstoy himself didn’t think of it as a novel: it is full of philosophical musings, especially about the nature and meaning of history (“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”) The French novelist Flaubert wasn’t a fan of these passages: “He repeats himself! He philosophises!”

Tolstoy wrote whole paragraphs in French, as many in the Russian aristocracy preferred to speak it. This is also a device to mock a famous stereotype of the time: the Russian who would prefer to be French.

A theme of the novel is a nation starting to find its own identity, though, with the aristocracy switching linguistically and starting to appreciate their own culture, the latter embodied by the heroine Natasha dancing to a local folk song. French is used to hint at artifice (Pierre’s proposal to Helene is in French) while Russian is portrayed as the language of veracity and openness.

What everyone knows about War and Peace is that it’s long. Even Andrew Davies, the screenwriter for the BBC’s adaptation, revealed he “took the kitchen scissors and hacked” it in two so it seemed less intimidating. It’s more than a novel — it’s a challenge, the literary Marathon des Sables, only with less chance of nipple chafing. Or death.

It isn’t the biggest monster out there, though — not by a long shot. That title goes to Artamène, a 17th-century novel written either by Madeleine de Scudéry or her brother, Georges. And Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time comes in at 1.3 million words, compared with War and Peace’s mere 587,287.

Even the Scientology bible Mission Earth (written by its founder L Ron Hubbard) is some 1.2 million words. That has been accused of featuring “chronic masochism, child abuse... [and] bloody murder”. Which makes the BBC’s slightly sexed-up War and Peace seem rather tame, and the novel laudably short.

The heroes

Pierre (played by Paul Dano) is not a regular hero. The illegitimate son of the wealthy Count Bezukhov, he’s a socially awkward, aspiring revolutionary who talks politics when others want to gossip. Think Jeremy Corbyn during his as-yet-unrevealed party-boy past.

Pierre is well-meaning but a bit of a mess at the novel’s opening: he’s easily led and has — Andrei aside — poor taste in friends, including the gambler and bounder Dolokhov (Tom Burke). Tolstoy writes of Pierre: “He did not know how to enter a drawing room and still less how to leave one.” That’s a Russian idiom, apparently.

In the first episode Pierre inherits his father’s estate. This transforms him from social pariah to gent so eligible he’d be starring in 19th-century Russia’s version of The Bachelor. His wallet is calling all the ladies to the (court)yard; his “ungainly, huge red hands” suddenly forgotten. His name “Bezukhov” means “without ears” — a nod to Pierre’s inability to comprehend what’s occurring around him.

Pierre’s most loyal friend is the courageous Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, played by James Norton, the actor whose chiselled jaw and toned torso are set to illustrate the latest batch of articles about whether it’s a feminist act for women to perve on men now.

A nihilist with a bit of a death wish, Andrei heads to war to avoid his stifling marriage to his charming if insipid wife Lise, who’s understandably peeved when she’s packed off to the country and left with his father Prince Bolkonsky (Jim Broadbent).

Andrei’s advice to Pierre? “Tie yourself up with a woman and, like a chained convict, you lose all freedom ... Never marry, my dear fellow!”

The heroines

According to the Encyclopedia of Literature (yeah, I nicked this bit off Wikipedia), Natasha is Tolstoy’s “ideal woman”. Which seems a smidge creepy given that she’s also supposed to be based on Tatyana Behrs, the younger sister of Tolstoy’s wife Sofia.

Natasha is impulsive to a fault but vivacious, bewitching and kind. As the novel opens she is supposed to be 13. This has always made her tricky to play: an actress has to run the gamut from innocent teen to (spoiler alert!) plump mother. Perhaps wisely, in the BBC adaptation Natasha — played by 26-year-old Lily James — is 15 at its start, made to look more youthful with a fake fringe and curls. Davies wisely edited out the part where Natasha makes Boris — her puppy-love crush, played by Welsh actor Aneurin Barnard — kiss her doll before kissing her.

Natasha is a member of the Rostov family. They’re the backbone of the story — a more loving and close-knit version of Jane Austen’s Bennets — and are struggling for cash. Her brother Nikolai (Jack Lowden, the poor soul who was out-acted by a horse last Sunday) is romantically entangled with Sonya, his spaniel-like cousin (Aisling Loftus). This kind of match was more common, less Kentucky, back then, although as Anna Pavlovna notes: “Cousinage — dangereux voisinage” (“Cousinhood is a dangerous neighbourhood”). That’ll be especially true when the religious (and rich) Princess Marya (Jessie Buckley) enters the picture.