Krieg und Frieden

In the organizer's words:

He haunts Tolstoy's text like a ghost: Napoléon Bonaparte, Emperor of France and the bearer of a very special project. Like a collective obsession, visitors to the Moscow salons follow every piece of news about the Corsican's private and public life. Admiration and rejection, fascination and fear characterize the Russian upper classes, who not only fear Bonaparte's troops. For the self-proclaimed world conqueror also carried the values of the French Revolution with him like an invasion: liberty, equality, fraternity and the abolition of a corporative society in favor of the rule of law. Even after the Frenchman's crushing defeat, the Russian victors paid tribute to him, even though nothing would change for a long time in the ossified salons of the late Tsarist Empire.

For today's readers, Leo Tolstoy's gigantic novel, published in 1867, offers an astonishing insight into a way of thinking not really in the past at a historical moment whose repercussions extend to today's terrible crimes in the name of present-day Russia. And by looking at the other side, it makes us realize who we ourselves are and what values guide us. Martin Laberenz will devote his own version to the impossible task of bringing Tolstoy's novel of the century to the stage.