I'm in the middle of reading War and Peace and just encountered a passage that was really perplexing. Several of the major characters are at an opera in Moscow and Tolstoy keeps describing how one of the female characters in the audience is nude. First he says she was "completely undressed" and then later he says "her bosom was completely bare."
I must be misunderstanding. Surely women in circa 1810 Russia didn't get undressed as they watched the opera?
No, they did not. I have a few past answers on women's fashion in the early nineteenth century that may help to make things clearer:
How did English Regency-era fashionable women stay warm in the winter?
Why were some women's dresses from the 1800s actually really simple?
The type of clothing described in these answers was perceived as being a step above nudity, and the short sleeves and low necklines of evening dress (which is what was worn to the opera) were sometimes seen as shockingly "bare".
Looks like your account has been suspended and both this post (and my comment) will be removed.
This is really a literature question, not a history question. And yes, you have misunderstood. Tolstoy is describing women as scantily clad, not actually naked.
Early in the book he describes Hélène:
With a slight rustle of her white dress trimmed with moss and ivy, with a gleam of white shoulders, glossy hair, and sparkling diamonds, she passed between the men who made way for her, not looking at any of them but smiling on all, as if graciously allowing each the privilege of admiring her beautiful figure and shapely shoulders, back, and bosom—which in the fashion of those days were very much exposed—and she seemed to bring the glamour of a ballroom with her as she moved toward Anna Pávlovna.
Later in the book, in the scene at the opera, similar fashions are described. Natasha notices that "ladies sat with bare arms and shoulders" and feels "hundreds of eyes looking at her bare arms and neck." Tolstoy describes her arm as "bare to above the elbow." She can't help looking at the bodies of other women similarly dressed. She saw "A tall, beautiful woman with...much exposed plump white shoulders and neck" take her seat and "involuntarily gazed at that neck, those shoulders...".
Later "all the women with gems on their bare flesh, turned their whole attention with eager curiosity to the stage."
What is meant by bare flesh and exposed bosoms is simply that the evening-wear worn by wealthy women at the time the story was set, in the early 19th century, exposed a lot more of the arms, shoulders and décolletage than the fashions of the mid/later 19th century when Tolstoy was writing the story.
I'm not sure if you're reading in Russian or some other translation, but most English translations don't contain the phrase "completely undressed."