Harvard College, Slavic 118: War and Peace Last updated:Tuesday, December 14th, 2021
As the basis of my project, I will conduct a data-based investigation of Tolstoy’s use of happiness, joy, and rapture (счастье, радость, & восторг) in the novel and compare the data-based perspective with existing scholarship pertaining to the characterization of selected characters throughout the novel. I will draw my data from the Russian text, search for forms of the keywords above in the vicinity of different characters (Andrei, Pierre, & Natasha). I also will look at other words or concepts that frequently occur in the vicinity of these keywords and characters in order to examine the settings (at the front vs. in the salon), gestures (laughter, tears, speech, etc.), or objects (eyes, smile, sky, etc.) that are associated with the happiness of different characters. It is my hypothesis that (1) different characters are more predisposed toward certain intensities of joy (schast'ye being the most reserved, vostorg being most intense, and radost' somewhere in the middle), and/or (2) that Tolstoy includes repeated, subtle associations between happiness and other words that may differ across characters or time. Because of the project’s emphasis on word choice, I investigate the etymological differences between these word and discuss the implications of the words used in translation for schast’ye, radost’, and vostorg. Lastly, I hope to briefly discuss the advantages and disadvantages to examining literature as data.
I scraped the full Russian version of War and Peace from this website: https://ilibrary.ru/text/11/index.html. Using Python in Jupyter Lab, I assembled my own dataset of the Russian text, using tools from Natasha, Alexander Kukushkin's extensive GitHub respository for Russian natural language processing tasks. I mostly made use of Slovnet, Kukushkin's deep learning model for Russian, to lemmatize words, since I was interested in finding all forms of words (like schast'ye, schastlivy, schastlivo, etc.). At this point, I searched through the parts of War and Peace for paragraphs where both a character and one of the happiness keywords appeared. The "happiness keywords" used in my analysis were schast'ye (happiness), radost', (joy) and vostorg (rapture/delight). I assembled a set of paragraphs that contained character/happiness associations, making note of the volume, part, and chapter of the example, the character mentioned, and the "type" of happiness involved. I was able to find these paragraphs by looping over all the paragraphs in the novel, breaking each paragraph down word by word, converting those words into lemmas (standard dictionary forms of the word), and checking to see if the lemma matched one of the character names (Andrei, Pierre, or Natasha) or one of the happpiness lemmas of interest (happiness, joy, rapture). Because characters are often referred to by more than one name or nickname, I checked multiple names variations for each character: Andrei is also referred to Bolkonsky by his military compatriots and Andrusha by Princess Marya. Pierre is referred to as Pyotr Kirillovich on occasion (or Bezukhov) and Natasha is occasionally referred to by her French nickname, Nathalie. It is also necessary to check for different grammatical forms of their names, since Andrei's name will change to Andreya in the genitive case. I went through those paragraphs that contained more than one character name to try to disambiguate which character in particular was associated with happiness during that paragraph and removed by hand anything clearly mis-attributed. I used the resulting lists of associations for Andrei, Pierre, and Natasha to build the count-based visualizations below.
The data files for all the data below are in .csv or .json format, although they could be converted to Excel if required. I built all the visualizations below in D3, a Javascript library and framework for data visualization. D3 creates visualizations by binding the data and graphical elements to the Document Object Model. These visualizations are loosely based on simple graph examples, like the line chart, stacked area chart, stacked bar chart, and bubble chart. (see https://www.d3-graph-gallery.com/about.html) and highly adapted for my purposes below. D3 binds data-based elements to the Document Object Model, which means that the graphs are all interactive and are associated with other elements on the web page. All of the code on the webpage is HTML, CSS, or Javascript-based, although my analysis was conducted in Python. My highly cluttered GitHub code base with works in progress and failed tries is here: and the code for this webpage in particular is here.
This project is interested in occurrences of the words happiness (schast'ye), joy (radost'), and rapture (vostorg) when used in the context of contentment, pleasure, and emotional happiness, although these words can have alternate meanings (like "happy coincidence," where happy is more akin to fortunate). English definitions and etymology are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary online. Russian definitions come from Kuznetsov's Comprehensive Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language. Russian etymology from Vasmer's Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language (Translations of excerpts from both Russian dictionaries are my own).
Happiness - Derived from “hap” meaning good fortune, chance
Schast'ye/Счастье - Orthodox origins (sъčęstь̂je) from sъ-: Old-Ind. su- "good" + * čęst "part", that is, "good lot"
Joy - Middle English: from Old French joie, based on Latin gaudium, from gaudere ‘rejoice’
Radost'/Радость - Possible relationship with the Anglo. rót "joyful, noble", Old Norse. rǿtask "to clear up, to have fun",
Rapture - late 16th century (in the sense ‘seizing and carrying off’): from obsolete French, or from medieval Latin raptura ‘seizing’, partly influenced by rapt.]
Vostorg/Восторг - From voz+ torgat' (воз + торгать). Voz coming from voz (cart/wagon) originally – conveyance, transference. Torgat' may have its roots in the Indo-European tr̥ṇḗḍhi "shattered, broken" and is possibly related to Russian terzat'/терзать, meaning torment and dyorgat'/дёргать, meaning to tug or pull at.
Because this project deals with the Russian text, I am concerned with the specific words schast'ye, radost', and vostorg -- the words used in English translations may vary among happiness, gladness, joy, delight, rapture, and other close synonyms. However, the most common substitution for schast'ye is happiness, radost' is joy, and vostorg is rapture or delight, depending on the translation. The words happiness and schast'ye have a very close correspondence based on their etymology, both derived from the original meaning of "good fortune" or "good lot." Joy and radost' have a less clear etymological link. The English word joy comes from the Latin verb gaudere, "to rejoice," while the etymological origins of radost' are much less clear. Rapture and vostorg both have interesting alternate definitions and etymological histories. They follow similar grammatical structure "to be in rapture" and "byt' v vostorg'ye". Both originate from roots of conveyance and transportation. Rapture has religious connotations in English, and while vostorg does not have explicitly religious roots, the prefix voz is associated with religious terminology like Voznesenie/Вознесение, or Ascension Day. Although the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary defines vostorg as "delight, rapture," rapture seems to be a more apt translation of vostorg because of their religious associations which delight lacks. "Ecstasy" (1. the state of being ‘beside oneself’, thrown into a frenzy or a stupor, with anxiety, astonishment, fear, or passion. 2. an exalted state of feeling which engrosses the mind to the exclusion of thought; rapture, transport.) is sometimes also used in place of vostorg in English translations, but ecstasy is not as associated with pleasure and good feeling as words like delight and rapture. I refer to the following pairs -- happy/schast'ye, joy/radost', and rapture/vostorg -- for the purposes of my project because their definitions generally line up in terms of intensity of happiness (happy/schast'ye being least intense, joy/radost' next most intense, and rapture/vostorg most intense). The English definitions of these Russian words in the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary correspond with this ranking, but the ranking is not entirely clear based on the Russian definitions from the Comprehensive Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language. More investigation of Russian dictionaries would be helpful in disambiguating the subtle emotional differences between schast'ye and radost'.
I compare a few English translations of War and Peace to see the usual translations of the words schast'ye, radost', and vostorg. In this project, I am primarily concerned with the Russian word choice, but of course, the choices in English translation are highly impactful on how readers perceive the characters and the novel as a whole and raise questions about the subtleties of translating emotional states.
The translations of schast'ye and radost' are overall very consistent across the translations. In Garnett's early translation, she translates one instance of schastlivymi as "blissful" instead of "happy." Maude, in 1922, translates radost' as "pleasure" while the other two translations translate it as "joy."
РАДОСТНОЕ, неожиданное сумасшествие, к которому Пьер считал себя неспособным, овладело им. Весь смысл жизни, не для него одного, но для всего мира, казался ему заключающимся только в его любви и в возможности ее любви к нему. Иногда все люди казались ему занятыми только одним — его будущим СЧАСТЬЕМ. Ему казалось иногда, что все они РАДУЮТСЯ так же, как и он сам, и только стараются скрыть эту РАДОСТЬ, притворяясь занятыми другими интересами. В каждом слове и движении он видел намеки на свое СЧАСТЬЕ. Он часто удивлял людей, встречавшихся с ним, своими значительными, выражавшими тайное согласие, СЧАСТЛИВЫМИ взглядами и улыбками. Но когда он понимал, что люди могли не знать про его СЧАСТЬЕ, он от всей души жалел их и испытывал желание как-нибудь объяснить им, что все то, чем они заняты, есть совершенный вздор и пустяки, не стоящие внимания.
A joyful, unexpected frenzy, of which Pierre had believed himself incapable, seized upon him. The whole meaning of life, not for him only, but for all the world, seemed to him centred in his love and the possibility of her loving him. Sometimes all men seemed to him to be absorbed in nothing else than his future happiness. It seemed to him sometimes that they were all rejoicing as he was himself, and were only trying to conceal that joy, by pretending to be occupied with other interests. In every word and gesture he saw an allusion to his happiness. He often surprised people by his significant and blissful looks and smiles, that seemed to express some secret understanding wih him. But when he realised that people could not know of his happiness, he pitied them from the bottom of his heart, and felt an impulse to try to make them somehow understand that all that they were interested in was utter nonsense and trifles not deserving of attention.
A joyful, unexpected frenzy, of which he had thought himself incapable, possessed him. The whole meaning of life—not for him alone but for the whole world—seemed to him centered in his love and the possibility of being loved by her. At times everybody seemed to him to be occupied with one thing only—his future happiness. Sometimes it seemed to him that other people were all as pleased as he was himself and merely tried to hide that pleasure, by pretending to be busy with other interests. In every word and gesture he saw allusions to his happiness. He often surprised those he met by his significantly happy looks and smiles which seemed to express a secret understanding between him and them. And when he realized that people might not be aware of his happiness, he pitied them with his whole heart and felt a desire somehow to explain to them that all that occupied them was a mere frivolous trifle unworthy of attention.
A joyful, unexpected madness, of which Pierre considered himself incapable, came over him. The whole meaning of life, not only for him, but for all the world, seemed to him to consist only in his love and the possibility of her love for him. Sometimes all people seemed to him to be occupied with only one thing—his future happiness. It sometimes seemed to him that they were all rejoicing as he was, and only tried to conceal their joy, pretending to be occupied with other interests. In every word and movement he saw hints at his happiness. He often surprised people who met him by his significant happy glances and smiles, expressive of a secret complicity. But when he realized that people could not know of his happiness, he pitied them with all his heart and felt a desire to explain to them somehow that everything they were occupied with was completely nonsensical and trifling, not worthy of attention.
This excerpt highlights the various ways to translate vostorg. Respectively, the Garnett, Maude, and P&V translations translate vostorzhennaya (an adjectival form of vostorg) as "passionate," "ecstatic," and "rapturous." Where vostorg shows up earlier in the paragraph, the two later translators translate it as "rapture," while Garnett translated it as "ecstatic enjoyment." Although "ecstatic enjoyment" seems closer to vostorg than "ecstasy" alone (see etymology section), this unusual word combination probably obfuscates more than necessary.
И вдруг новое, неожиданное воспоминание из мира детского, чистого и любовного, представилось князю Андрею. Он вспомнил Наташу такою, какою он видел ее в первый раз на бале 1810 года, с тонкой шеей и тонкими руками, с готовым на ВОСТОРГ, испуганным, СЧАСТЛИВЫМ лицом, и любовь и нежность к ней, еще живее и сильнее, чем когда-либо, проснулись в его душе. Он вспомнил теперь эту связь, которая существовала между им и этим человеком, сквозь слезы, наполнявшие распухшие глаза, мутно смотревшим на него. Князь Андрей вспомнил все, и ВОСТОРЖЕННАЯ жалость и любовь к этому человеку наполнили его СЧАСТЛИВОЕ сердце.
And all at once a new, unexpected memory from that childlike world of purity and love rose up before Prince Andrey. He remembered Natasha, as ge had seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with her slender neck and slender arms, and her frightened, happy face, ready for ecstatic enjoyment, and a love and tenderness awoke in his heart for her stronger and more loving than ever. He recalled now the bond that existed between him and this man, who was looking vaguely at him through the tears that filled his swollen eyes. Prince Andrey remembered everything, and a passionate pity and love for that suffering man filled his happy heart.
And suddenly a new unexpected memory from that realm of pure and loving childhood presented itself to him. He remembered Natásha as he had seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with her slender neck and arms and with a frightened happy face ready for rapture, and love and tenderness for her, stronger and more vivid than ever, awoke in his soul. He now remembered the connection that existed between himself and this man who was dimly gazing at him through tears that filled his swollen eyes. He remembered everything, and ecstatic pity and love for that man overflowed his happy heart.
And suddenly a new and unexpected memory from the world of childhood, purity, and love came to Prince Andrei. He remembered Natasha as he had seen her for the first time at the ball in 1810, with her slender neck and arms, with her frightened, happy face ready for rapture, and in his soul love and tenderness for her awakened, stronger and more alive than ever. He now remembered the connection between him and this man, who was looking at him dully through the tears that filled his swollen eyes. Prince Andrei remembered everything, and a rapturous pity and love for this man filled his happy heart.
These visualizations are based on the dataset I compiled of instances of happiness, joy, and rapture co-occurring with the characters Andrei, Pierre, and Natasha. All of the visualizations have interactive elements and are intended for exploratory purposes.
The line chart below covers all 17 parts of War and Peace across the 4 volumes and Epilogue. The height of the line corresponds to the count of instances in the part where a character's name occurs in conjunction with any one of the happiness keywords - schast'ye (happiness), radost', (joy) and vostorg (rapture/delight) in any form. Each individual line corresponds to one character: (Andrei, Pierre, & Natasha). Click on the circles in the legend on the right to show/hide certain lines for less clutter. Note that low points in the graph do not necessarily mean that a character is sad or depressed during that part - the graph only indicates the presence or absence of the words schast'ye, radost', and vostorg.
Select a dot from the graph to see the textual examples for a specific character during a certain part of the book.
This graph maps the same data from Figure 1a with more detail. In this graph, counts of happiness, joy, and rapture are separated, indicated by color. Click the circles on the right to toggle between the different characters. The height of each color in the graph's area corresponds to the number of examples with that specific keyword associated with the character.
Words in the bubble are lemmas (dictionary form) of the word, since the same word might appear in multiple sentences in different forms.
Select a character to see word associations with happiness:
Note: I would like to spend more time analyzing the data and visualizations in the context of the novel, but the data scraping and visualizations were very time-consuming processes, so I did not have much time left for extended analysis, especially because there is so much to discusss. Now that the visualizations are created, I can continue on this section in the future. Some of my observations are below.
Starting with Figure 1a, we can examine the spikes in the graph to see the parts of novel where the characters are associated more frequently with happiness (when their name co-occurs with one of the three happiness keywords). Prince Andrei experiences an intense spike in Volume 2, Part 3, the part when Andrei falls in love and proposes to Natasha, and notable but lower spikes in Volume 1, Part 2 (the Battle of Schongraben) and Volume 3, Part 3 (the Battle of Borodino). Pierre experiences two peaks in the first half of the novel in Volume 1, Part 3 (Pierre's engagement to Helene) and Volume 2, Part 2 (Pierre's introduction to Masonry). However, Pierre's highest peak comes in Volume 4, Part 4 (Pierre's reunion with Natasha) and stays similarly high in Part 1 of the Epilogue, which describes Pierre and Natasha's family life. Natasha experiences her highest peak in Volume 2, Part 3, the same point as Andrei's highest peak (Andrei's proposal to Natasha). Natasha's second highest peak is in Volume 4, Part 4 (her reunion with Pierre). There is a general lull during Volume 3, which focuses on the French invasion into Russia in 1812.
Figures 2a and 2b both offer breakdowns of schast’ye, radost’, and vostorg, 2a for the three characters in question, and 2b for the 17 parts of the novel. Therefore, 2a compares "happiness breakdown by character" while 2b is "happiness breakdown over time." We also get an idea of differences in total happiness counts -- in 2a, we see Andrei having less than half the number of happiness examples as both Pierre and Natasha. Pierre has the most examples, just barely more than Natasha. In terms of proportions, vostorg makes up only 7% of Andrei's examples, 17% of Pierre's, and 14% of Natasha's. This may point to Tolstoy's characterization of Andrei who is essentially serious, not prone to the "rapture" or "ecstasy" that Pierre and Natasha experience more frequently. Indeed, the only co-occurrence of Andrei and vostorg in the second half of book occurs when he is severely injured and half-conscious during his reunion with Natasha. Andrei has essentially the same number of schasty'e and radost' exampples, while Pierre's data slightly leans toward radost' and Natasha towards schast'ye. Figure 2b clearly shows that Part 6 (Volume 2, Part 3), is the part of the book with the highest happiness count, overshadowing neighboring parts by two times. It is almost 33% taller than the next tallest bar, which is Volume 4, Part 4 (Natasha and Pierre's reunion). Part 6 has an extremely high bar because of the alignment of Natasha and Andrei's peaks, which you can see in Figure 1a. Alignment to that degree does not occur elsewhere.
In general, words (excluding stopwords like он, это, который, то, etc.) that were highly associated with happiness were litso (face), govorit' (to say), moch' (to be able to/can), chelovek (person). The top words for Prince Andrei was zhizn' (life), Pierre's were govorit' (to speak) and chelovek (person), and Natasha's was govorit'. Some words that occurred with certain characters more often than others: Andrei's cloud includes voyenniy (military) while Natasha and Pierre's did not, for obvious reasons. Pierre's cloud notably includes dusha (soul), while Natasha's does not, even though the two characters have similar number of examples in the database. This difference may have something to do with the differences in interiority that Tolstoy lends to his characters. Natasha is the only one of the three characters with a notable number of occurrences with vesyoliy (merry/cheerful). The occurrence of this word along with the other keywords indicates that Natasha's episodes of happiness are generally quite intense and involve different synonyms for happy.
Several issues arise from a data-based look at happiness in War and Peace. For one, the dataset which I have assembled does not perfectly represent all co-occurrences of Andrei, Pierre, and Natasha with schast’ye, radost’, and vostorg. Because of the way I scraped the data, it's possible that there are paragraphs that mention a certain character and a certain keyword, but that character might not be experiencing that particular word. This is something that is difficult to search and ascertain in a text because of the difficulties of computer "understanding" of language, a problem that requires more complex analytic methods than I had access to. Computer understanding of natural languages is a field of study that is thought to be "AI-complete", the set of the most difficult problems in artificial intelligence. For that reason, my study is exploratory in both technique and analysis, and I hope that applying different idioms of digital humanities will lead to an array of results from which to accept and discard.
"Happiness" is also a deeply imperfect metric. I only look at 3 keywords that pertain to happiness. There are many other synonyms for happiness and many other ways that characters may "experience" happy emotions in the book (smiling, laughing, etc.). Thus, the examples here show more of the "telling" than the "showing" that Tolstoy is doing in his writing. Additionally, looking for these three keywords gives us some examples which don't necessary indicate that a character is happy. It's possible that the sentence says something in the negative, like "Pierre did not feel happiness because...", something hypothetical, like "Natasha would have been so happy if...", or something unrelated to current happiness, like "Andrei considered the pursuit of happiness a fruitless task." Because of the ambiguity of language and difficulty in clearly defining meaning for a computer, examples like these find themselves in my dataset, although I tried my best to clean it up as possible.
Additionally, since visualization is such an individual experience that relies heavily on the subjectivity of visual perception, the graphs above may not be the best way of showing the data that I have collected. In some cases, I had to make arbitrary choices about how to present data that spanned the whole novel: rather than breaking down by page or individual chapter, I opted to go by part. In this instance, the graph will be not be entirely "accurate" in terms of happiness over time, since there are some parts which have more chapters than others. I have also chosen to "round out" the lines in Figure 1a and Figure 1b to emphasize the continuity of the novel's plot, although it should be made clear that the data is discrete for each chapter.
Russian text of War and Peace online
Oxford English Dictionary Online
Vasmer, Max, and O. N. Trubachev. Etimologicheskii Slovar' Russkogo Iazyka. 1987.
Kuznetsov, S. A. Bol'shoi Tolkovyi Slovar' Russkogo Iazyka.
Natasha, a library for Russian natural language processing tasks
Last updated: Tuesday, December 14th, 2021.