War and Peace Lesson Plan

War and Peace is part of the canon of golden age Russian literature that runs from Zhukovsky and Pushkin, through Gogol, to Tolstoy and his contemporaries Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, and onward to Chekhov. These authors situated their work against the upheavals in Russian culture that were occurring through their times and applied a sensitivity that was uniquely Russian in its simultaneous attraction toward Western Europe and a celebration of its unique, Asian inflected cultural heritage. War and Peace has a relationship to the works of these Russian authors (e.g. Eugene Onegin, The Brothers Karamozov, Crime and Punishment, Fathers and Sons) as well as Tolstoy's other works set against a...