“There is a certain amount of nudity,” screenwriter Andrew Davies admitted to The Telegraph, implying that traditional constraints may have prevented Leo Tolstoy from offering a realistic depiction of amorous scenes. “When you expect someone to be nude, they are.”
Then there’s the incest. War and Peace briefly mentions that rumors had circulated in the glittering Russian aristocracy that the socialite Helene Kuragin had had an affair with her brother, Anatole. When Davies took up the task of condensing the book into a six-episode miniseries, set to debut in January, he decided to include the incest storyline, offering a glimpse of Helene and her brother in bed together. Academics are calling Davies’s version “ripe” and “inappropriate.”
It’s worth remembering Davies faced similar criticism before. In the months before his famous 1995 adaption of Pride and Prejudice debuted, critics were outraged at reports that he had inserted a nude scene into the miniseries. It turned out that the only nudity occurs when Colin Firth, playing Mr. Darcy, steps out of a copper bathtub, exposing—prepare yourself—the back of his shoulders.