Every life has moments of “before” and “after,” incidents that, for better or worse, slice time neatly into halves. One of mine came the first time I saw the 1966 Soviet film adaptation of War and Peace.
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It’s hard to capture the scope and depth of the resources the Soviet state spent on filming War and Peace—both because the answer is complex and because it’s hard to believe. In her book Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, film historian Denise Youngblood estimates that the total cost of the film—between its actual budget and the scads of jewelry, weaponry, furniture, clothing and livestock donated by museums, families, and farmers around the country—was nearly $700,000,000 in today’s dollars.
The Cold War was at its peak, and, as is often the case in acts of war, the Kremlin had decided that no expense would be spared. The Russian public had been alarmed by King Vidor’s 1956 Italian/American version of War and Peace, starring Audrey Hepburn. Many Soviet artists wrote angry letters demanding that the Americans not be allowed to have the last word on Leo Tolstoy.
One of these artists was Sergei Bondarchuk, a young actor-turned-director who had only made one film but worshiped Tolstoy. “Why is it that this novel, the pride of Russian national character, was adapted in America and released in their cinema halls?” he wrote. “And we ourselves are not able to adapt it? It’s a disgrace to the entire world!”
Soon, the Kremlin greenlit its own film version, and Bondarchuk was chosen to direct it.
Many Soviet artists wrote angry letters demanding that the Americans not be allowed to have the last word on Leo Tolstoy.
Bondarchuk considered himself an artist, not an apparatchik—and unlike the Soviet state, he didn’t see his magnum opus as propaganda. To him, this film needed to be great because Tolstoy was great, and he intended to give his literary hero his due. He not only wrote and directed the film, supervising every detail down to the last chandelier, but cast himself as Pierre.
Production took six grueling years, and the strain (along with the Kremlin breathing down his neck) nearly killed him: halfway through, a heart attack left him legally dead for several minutes. (Watch the scene of Moscow burning and you won’t just be surprised that Bondarchuk survived the production—you’ll be surprised anyone did.)
The resulting film is over seven hours long, astoundingly faithful to its source material and deeply relevant, even (and especially) sixty years later.
I first saw it in the Detroit Film Theatre, an opulent Art Deco movie palace attached to the equally lustrous Detroit Institute of Arts. Because of its length, the film was shown in installments over three days, which made it feel less like a movie and more like a long, lucid dream. (During its original theatrical run in Russia, the film was released in four parts over the course of two years.)
It was nothing like the dull historical dramas of my childhood—in fact, it didn’t feel historical at all. The cinematography was startlingly modern: the camera followed characters’ gazes through the window and out into the street, or trailed on their reflections in a rippling pond. Later, I’d learn that when Bondarchuk filmed the grand ball scene, he brushed the camera with scarves and fans to give viewers a visceral sense of all the sartorial grandeur.
One of the things that astonishes most about Bondarchuk’s direction is his mastery of scale. Unlike most epics, War and Peace is both grand in scope and startlingly intimate. Bondarchuk, like Tolstoy himself, does not neglect the drama of minor characters: even in the midst of Borodino’s carnage, he manages to make the death of a single officer devastating.
While most historical films are confined to museum-like sets, Bondarchuk allows his characters to wander—through palaces, through battlefields, through entire cities, so their world feels large. The film is filled with tracking shots that seem to stretch on for miles.
In particular, the helicopter shot of a Napoleonic battlefield, thousands upon thousands of soldiers riding in concentric circles always mystifies me. It is the kind of spectacle CGI could conjure up in a heartbeat. But this was shot in 1966, and what I saw was unquestionably real, no matter how unbelievable it seemed.
Bondarchuk’s film stuck with me, long after Moscow had burned and the last cannon had been fired. I greedily ordered the Criterion Collection DVD as soon as it was released, and I kept both the DVD and Denise Youngblood’s book on my desk as reminders of the kind of art I wanted to make. I devoured every documentary and bit of archival footage I could find. As is often the case with my work, I amassed tons of material without realizing I was preparing for something.
That fall, after a year of toying around with the idea for my first novel, I finally started writing it during an artist’s residency in a secluded corner of Northern Michigan. I knew I wanted to tell a story, set in the Vaganova Academy of Ballet, about the role that ballet and the arts played in the Cold War.
I wanted a visceral novel, one that could be felt as sensually as Bondarchuk’s scarves grazing the camera.
My studio sat in a quiet prairie edged by trees, Lake Michigan lapping just beyond. Unnerved by the silence, I put on War and Peace for background noise and hammered away at my typewriter. Soon, to my astonishment, Bondarchuk’s film—and Sergei Bondarchuk himself—snuck onto my pages. Though I’d planned to write a book about ballet, the book itself, like all impish children, had plans of its own.
Writing fiction about real people can feel dangerous, even dishonest—but in this case, the history was just too fascinating to ignore. Youngblood’s book burst with the kind of details a novelist only dreams of, like an actor wearing white gloves for the entire shoot after Bondarchuk belittled his large hands, or a hairdresser being flown in from Paris just to do Ludmila Savelyeva’s hair for Natasha’s famous waltz.
When I learned that Savelyeva had been born during the Siege of Leningrad and educated at the Vaganova, the pieces of my story finally came together.
The more I studied War and Peace, the more I realized that I wanted my book to be like Bondarchuk’s film, not just about it. I wanted my novel to be epic and roaming without losing a sense of intimacy. I wanted it to be moving, but truthful; deeply human, but never sentimental.
I wanted a visceral novel, one that could be felt as sensually as Bondarchuk’s scarves grazing the camera. I wanted to know when to leap through time and when to wade in it.
My forthcoming novel, Maya & Natasha, is about many things—Soviet ballet, the Cold War, sisterhood. But more than anything else, it’s an attempt to capture the feeling of being immersed in something so beautiful that you want to spend your whole life loving it.
And for that, I have Sergei Bondarchuk to thank.
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Maya & Natasha by Elyse Durham is available via Mariner.
