A writer who influenced Mahatma Gandhi during the freedom struggle was dragged into court on Wednesday with Justice Sarang Kotwal asking activist Vernon Gonsalves about a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, among other books, he had at his home. “Why would you keep a book about a war in another country at your home?” the Bombay High Court judge asked.

What is the story about?

War and Peace, considered one of Tolstoy’s masterpieces, is a sweeping saga of the French invasion of Russia and its impact on everyday lives told through the stories of two families, the fun-loving Rostovs and the grim Bolkonskys, with the quixotic Count Pierre Bezukhov crossing their paths. He began writing it in 1863, and like other novels of the time it came out serially before being published in its entirety, over 1,000 pages, in 1869. Tolstoy sets it in the period of the Napoleonic wars (1805-1812), and ‘war’ and ‘peace’ intersect, from the battlefield to happy homes, old associations forgotten, new connections made. (To give just one example, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who is engaged to Natasha Rostov, goes off to war and dies; Pierre is taken prisoner by the French but ultimately survives to marry Natasha.) In Penguin's Vintage Classics edition, Richard Pevear writes in the introduction that War and Peace embodies the national myth of “Russia’s glorious period,” in the confrontation of Napoleon and Field Marshal Kutuzov, and at the same time it challenges that myth and all such myths through the vivid portrayal of the fates of countless ordinary people, men and women, young and old, French as well as Russian, and through the author’s own passionate questioning of the truth of history. There are vivid descriptions of battles, many love stories, an enquiry of ideas, Western and Russian, philosophical studies of life and its vicissitudes, and a quest for answers to moral questions. On war, Tolstoy wrote emphatically, “On the twelfth of June, the forces of Western Europe crossed the borders of Russia and war began – that is, an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature.”

How was it received?

When it was first published, some readers were overwhelmed by the sheer size, and the array of characters. Aware of the dismay it caused, Tolstoy tried to explain the book in an article, “It is not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed…” Read in translation, Henry James described it as a “large, loose baggy monster”, but also added that “Tolstoy is a reflector as vast as a natural lake; a monster harnessed to his great subject—all human life!”

What did Gandhi think of Tolstoy?

In 1893, after Gandhi was thrown off the train at Pietermartizburg Station in South Africa, he read Tolstoy’s ‘Kingdom of God is Within You’, which talked about non-violence. On December 14, 1908, Tolstoy responded to Taraknath Das’s plea for help in overthrowing British rule with ‘A Letter to a Hindu’, bringing up the idea of passive resistance. Sharing Tolstoy’s ideals, Gandhi sought permission to republish it in his South African newspaper, Indian Opinion. He also began corresponding with Tolstoy till the writer’s death. In a letter dated May 8, 1910, Tolstoy said, “I just received your letter and your book Indian Home Rule. I read your book with great interest because I think that the question you treat in it-the passive resistance-is a question of the greatest importance not only for India but for the whole humanity.” In Johannesburg, Gandhi befriended a German-born rich Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach. When he donated a 1,000 acre-farm to help house Gandhi’s satyagrahis in 1910, it was called Tolstoy Farm, inspired by the Russian great’s writings. The passive resistance campaign grew from here till Gandhi returned to India in 1914 to spearhead India’s struggle for Independence.