Reading War and Peace as a Translingual Novel

This article re-examines Lev Tolstoy’s novel Voina i mir (War and Peace) in light of recent research in the field of translingual literary studies. This Russian novel contains numerous passages, phrases, and words in French. Tolstoy’s extensive use of the French language in a Russian novel puzzled many of his contemporary critics; it has also tended to be less visible in translations into other languages. The article surveys previous research on the multilingual dimension of War and Peace by well-known scholars such as Viktor Vinogradov, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Uspensky, R. F. Christian, and Gary Saul Morson. Among the explanations offered for the presence of French in the text are realism, characterization, and ostranenie (defamiliarization). Applying Formalist principles and Thomas O. Beebee’s concept of transmesis, the current article suggests a translingual reading of this canonical novel. The analysis focuses on selected passages in which multiple languages are at play, showing how they draw the reader’s attention to language as a medium through depictions of code-switching and multilingual situations; metalinguistic commentary; biscriptuality; and code-mixing on the level of the text.