Napoleon at Jaffa and Nikolai Rostov's Hospital Visit in War and Peace

• In Event: Mental, Physical, and Artistic Journeys in Tolstoy’s War and Peace

Abstract

Tolstoy's polemical engagement with Antoine Jean-Gros's painting, Napoleon on the Bridge at Arcola (1796), has received effusive scholarly attention. The visual subtext of Gros's Napoleon Visits the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa (1804) in War and Peace is no less important. Tolstoy's reaction against the latter art work and its many popular reproductions is sustained through emphasis on the bravery of Nikolai Rostov when he visits Vasilii Denisov recuperating in the field hospital filled with victims of typhus.

Author

• Charles Byrd, U of Georgia