Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812: from War and Peace

By Leo Tolstoy and Dave Malloy

Dave Malloy here presents the stunning twenty-two chapter selection from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace that formed the basis of his hit Broadway sensation, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812—called “the most innovative and the best new musical since Hamilton” by the New York Times.

While Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is kept at the front during Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, his betrothed, a young Natasha, catches the attention of Moscow society’s notorious playboy—the dashing, rogue Anatole. It falls to Prince Andrei’s friend, the wealthy, slothful, philosophizing aristocrat Pierre to rescue Natasha’s reputation and make amends between her and Andrei.

A Vintage Shorts ebook Selection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Release date: May 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9780525436256

Leo Tolstoy

Dmitry Chukhrai is an internationally exhibited artist based in Moscow. Alexandr Poltorak is the creator of several popular Russian children’s books, magazines, and television programs. Leo Tolstoy is one of the preeminent novelists and humanist philosophers of the 19th century. His world-famous novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina are widely considered classics and his philosophical works and commitment to pacifism, which led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church, continue to inspire readers more than a century after his death.

Book preview

Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812

from War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa

Volokhonsky

Foreword by Dave Malloy

A Vintage Short

Vintage Books

A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

New York

Translation copyright © 2007 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Foreword copyright © 2017 by Dave Malloy

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 was originally published as part of War and Peace in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2007.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for War and Peace is available from the Library of Congress.

Vintage eShort ISBN 9780525436256

Cover art © SpotCo.

www.vintagebooks.com

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

About the Authors

Publisher’s Note

Foreword

Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812

COUNT LEO TOLSTOY (1828–1910) was born in central Russia. After serving in the Crimean War, he retired to his estate and devoted himself to writing, farming, and raising his large family. His novels and outspoken social polemics brought him world fame.

RICHARD PEVEAR has published translations of Alain, Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Savinio, Pavel Florensky, and Henri Volohonsky, as well as two books of poetry. He has received fellowships or grants for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the French Ministry of Culture. LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY was born in Leningrad. She has translated works by the prominent Orthodox theologians Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff into Russian.

Together, Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated Dead Souls and The Collected Stories by Nikolai Gogol, The Complete Short Novels of Chekhov, and The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, Demons, The Idiot, and The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky. They were twice awarded the PEN Book of the Month Club Translation Prize (for their version of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and for Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina), and their translation of Dostoevsky’s Demons was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France.

DAVE MALLOY is a composer/writer/performer/orchestrator/sound designer. He has written eleven musicals, including Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on a slice of Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Ghost Quartet, a song cycle about love, death, and whiskey; Preludes, a musical fantasia set in the hypnotized mind of Sergei Rachmaninoff; Three Pianos, a drunken romp through Schubert’s Winterreise; Black Wizard/Blue Wizard, an escapist RPG fantasy; Beowulf—A Thousand Years of Baggage, an anti-academia rock opera; Beardo, a retelling of the Rasputin myth; Sandwich, a musical about killing animals; and Clown Bible, Genesis to Revelation told through clowns. He has won two Obie Awards, the Richard Rodgers Award, an ASCAP New Horizons Award, and a Jonathan Larson Grant, and has been a MacDowell fellow and Composer-in-Residence at Ars Nova. Future projects include adaptations of Moby-Dick and Shakespeare’s Henriad. He lives in Brooklyn. davemalloy.com

Publisher’s Note

Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, the Broadway musical sensation called "the most innovative and the best new musical since Hamilton" by the New York Times, was adapted from twenty-two chapters in volume 2 of Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel War and Peace. While the primary source for the libretto is Aylmer and Louise Maude’s 1922 translation, creator Dave Malloy also consulted several others, and he here introduces Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s acclaimed version, which is published by Vintage Books.

Foreword

I’m often asked, "How did you pick this section of War and Peace?" In a novel so bursting with riches, with so many unforgettable characters and astonishing moments, how to pick just one section to adapt? But the truth is, for me there was never a choice; this section chose me. The parallel stories of Natasha’s ruin and Pierre’s awakening are so perfectly and tautly crafted by Tolstoy, so wonderfully interwoven and complementary, and so full of passion and despair, that to me they immediately sang out in the voice of musical theater.

In particular, I loved subverting the form of the common two-couple musical (e.g., Guys and Dolls, Hello Dolly!, West Side Story) by having one of our couples be an existential relationship, that of Pierre and society/God/himself. Taken together, Natasha’s youthful capriciousness and Pierre’s middle-aged angst paint a beautiful picture of humanity at its most foolish, desperate, and divine.

This section (volume 2, part 5, omitting chapters 3–5, which deal with some other characters in the novel) marks a critical turning point for both Natasha and Pierre. Early in the novel, Pierre receives a large and unexpected inheritance, which thrusts him into a social life he is deeply ill at ease with. He drunkenly stumbles through life, allowing others to tell him how to live and what to do; his marriage to Hélène is a loveless and shallow one, which he was swindled into by Hélène’s father. It is in this state of deep existential confusion that Pierre’s story in Great Comet begins.

When we first meet Natasha, she is thirteen, a child stealing her very first kiss at a name day party. Throughout the first half of the novel, we see her slowly maturing—giggling about boys with Sonya, engaging in her first philosophical conversations with her brother, and eventually, falling in love. In Andrei, she thinks she has found a perfect husband; but her conception of love is still purely theoretical, her naïveté and idealism unchallenged. In the novel, Andrei’s father has told Andrei that he may only marry Natasha after he spends a year away, convalescing from his war wounds; Natasha sees this delay as a pointless cruelty (this plot point is elided with Andrei’s military service in Great Comet, to simplify the tale and make the war a little more immediate). It is in this state of youthful impatience and lovesickness that Natasha begins the show.

In addition to volume 2, part 5, this selection also includes two sections from earlier in the novel. The first is the basis for The Duel—in creating the show, we soon realized that we needed to include some of Pierre’s moments from earlier in the novel to expand on his character. The second is the basis for No One Else; in writing a love song for Natasha, it seemed perfect to go back to this iconic moment in the novel when Andrei and Natasha’s love is first forged, under the light of a magical Russian moon.

I hope this small taste inspires you to take the plunge and dive into Tolstoy’s full novel…there are so many other incredible moments, both before the events of Great Comet (Pierre and Hélène’s engagement; Dolokhov’s poker game with Natasha’s brother; Andrei’s vision of the sky at the battle of Austerlitz) and after (Natasha and Andrei’s reconciliation; Pierre in prison with Platon; Mary finding happiness; and of course Natasha and Pierre’s eventual marriage and family). In this novel, Tolstoy creates a vast, sweeping, and complicated tapestry of all that it is to be human, from the most trivial and amusing caprices of childhood, to the most profound and devastating encounters with the sublime.

Dave Malloy

February 2017

Volume II, Part One, Chapter IV

Pierre was sitting across from Dolokhov and Nikolai Rostov. He ate a lot and greedily, and drank a lot, as usual. But those who knew him intimately could see that some great change had taken place in him that day. He was silent all through dinner and, squinting and wincing, looked around him or, fixing his eyes with a completely absentminded air, rubbed the bridge of his nose with his finger. His face was dejected and gloomy. He seemed to see and hear nothing of what was going on around him and to be thinking of some one painful and unresolved thing.

This unresolved question that tormented him came from the hints of the young princess in Moscow at Dolokhov’s intimacy with his wife, and from an anonymous letter he had received that morning, which said, with the mean jocularity of all anonymous letters, that he saw poorly through his spectacles and that his wife’s liaison with Dolokhov was a secret to no one but him. Pierre decidedly did not believe either the princess’s hints or the letter, but it was scary for him now to look at Dolokhov, who was sitting in front of him. Each time his gaze chanced to meet Dolokhov’s handsome, insolent eyes, Pierre felt something terrible and ugly rise up in his soul, and he quickly turned away. Involuntarily recalling all his wife’s past and her relations with Dolokhov, Pierre saw clearly that what was said in the letter might be true, might at least seem true, if it had not concerned his wife. Pierre involuntarily recalled how Dolokhov, to whom everything had been restored after the campaign, had returned to Petersburg and come to see him. Using his relations of carousing friendship with Pierre, Dolokhov had come straight to his house, and Pierre had put him up and lent him money. Pierre recalled how Hélène, smiling, had expressed her displeasure at Dolokhov’s living in their house, and how Dolokhov had cynically praised his wife’s beauty to him, and how from then