War and Peace

Overview

Thirteen hundred pages, four volumes and two epilogues, serialised from 1865 and published complete in 1869. It follows five aristocratic families through the Napoleonic wars, from the Petersburg drawing rooms of 1805 to Austerlitz, Borodino, the burning of Moscow and the French retreat.

The reputation for difficulty is misplaced. The sentences are plain, the scenes are short, and the storytelling is as gripping as anything in the nineteenth century. What is genuinely demanding is the length, the number of names, and the essays on historiography that interrupt the narrative with increasing frequency and take over the second epilogue entirely.

Tolstoy was thirty-seven when he started, had fought at Sevastopol, and was writing about his grandparents’ generation from family papers and memoirs. He said it was not a novel, not a poem, and not a chronicle.

What happens

Three people carry it. Pierre Bezukhov is illegitimate, fat, short-sighted, kind and aimless, and inherits an enormous fortune in the first hundred pages, which ruins his life. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is proud, cold and dissatisfied, and goes to war looking for glory. Natasha Rostova is thirteen when we meet her, and is the most alive person Tolstoy ever wrote.

Andrei finds his glory at Austerlitz by seizing a standard, is wounded, and lies looking at the sky, which makes Napoleon’s voice sound small and meaningless. He comes home to find his wife dying in childbirth. Pierre marries the beautiful and unfaithful Hélène, fights a duel, joins the Freemasons, tries to free his serfs and is cheated by his stewards.

Natasha grows up. She and Andrei become engaged, his father insists on a year’s delay, and in that year she is nearly seduced into an elopement by Anatole Kuragin, who is already married. The engagement collapses. It is the most painful sequence in the book and the most exactly observed.

Napoleon invades in 1812. At Borodino, Pierre wanders the field as a civilian in a white hat, understanding nothing, while the battle is decided by exhaustion and morale. Kutuzov, old, fat and half-asleep in councils, is the only commander who grasps that his job is not to direct the battle but to preserve his army and let time and Russia do the work. Moscow burns. Andrei is wounded again, is nursed by Natasha, forgives her, and dies. Pierre, captured by the French, meets the peasant Platon Karataev, who lives without a plan and is content, and marches with the prisoners through the retreat.

The first epilogue jumps seven years. Pierre and Natasha are married with children, and Natasha has become a stout, preoccupied mother with no interest in charm. The second epilogue abandons the story entirely for forty pages on free will and historical causation.

How to read it

Get the name system straight in the first fifty pages. Every Russian has a first name, a patronymic and a surname, plus French and diminutive forms: Andrei is Prince Andrei, Andrei Nikolaevich Bolkonsky, and André. Keep the character list at the front open for the first two hundred pages and you will stop needing it.

Do not skip the war. Readers who read the peace chapters and skim the battles end up with a domestic saga, and Tolstoy’s argument about history only works if you have felt the confusion of Borodino from inside.

Do read the historical essays, but know what you are in for. They get longer and more insistent as the book goes on, and the second epilogue is a philosophical treatise. Read the first epilogue, then decide whether you want the second; many editions and most courses treat it as optional, and Tolstoy would have been annoyed by that.

On translations: Pevear and Volokhonsky keep the French passages in French with footnotes, which preserves the class marker Tolstoy intended, and read a little stiffly. Briggs translates everything into English and moves faster. Maude is the classic and was made with Tolstoy’s help. Any is fine; the differences matter less here than with Dostoevsky.

The common misreading is that Napoleon is the villain and Kutuzov the hero. Tolstoy’s claim is stranger: neither of them is causing anything much, and Kutuzov is admirable precisely because he knows it.

Questions it raises

• If commanders do not determine battles, what does, and can Tolstoy’s answer be stated as anything more than the sum of everything?
• The second epilogue holds that we feel free and that every act is caused. Is leaving the contradiction standing a failure of nerve or the honest result?
• Natasha ends up absorbed in her children and indifferent to society. Is that fulfilment or diminishment, and does the novel know?
• Platon Karataev is unreflective and content, and Pierre learns from him. Is that a real answer to Pierre’s search, or a wealthy man’s idea of a peasant?
• Tolstoy insists this is not a novel. What is at stake for him in refusing the label?
• If history is made by everyone and directed by no one, what follows for blame after a war?