In brief
Between a Petersburg party in July 1805 and a nursery in 1820, three families and hundreds of others live through Napoleon’s wars. Pierre Bezukhov, a clumsy illegitimate son, inherits a vast fortune and looks for a reason to have it. Prince Andrew Bolkonsky wants glory, then wants nothing, then wants Natasha Rostova, whose appetite for being alive is the book’s central fact. The French reach Moscow and the city burns. The survivors marry and have children and argue about politics over dinner.
That summary is accurate and useless, since what the book is really about is the gap between what people think they are doing and what is happening to them. Tolstoy applies this to a boy in his first cavalry charge and to the Emperor of the French, and finds the same thing in both. Few novels are so pleasurable to live inside, and few authors so determined to interrupt the pleasure with an argument. I think the argument is half wrong and the novel is better for it.
The argument
Each main character is handed the same question: what is a life for? Each answers with a system, and experience breaks the system. Andrew begins with Napoleon as his model. At Austerlitz he seizes a standard, runs forward, is shot down and finds himself on his back beneath “the lofty sky”. His thought there is the novel’s first great reversal: “How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran” (Book 3, ch. 16). Three chapters later Napoleon, his hero, rides up, and seems to him a small, insignificant creature (Book 3, ch. 19).
Pierre goes through wealth, debauchery, a bad marriage, a duel, Freemasonry, estate reform and a numerological proof that he is destined to stop Napoleon (Book 9, ch. 19). What answers him is being a prisoner of the French, beside a peasant with no system at all. He learns “that man is created for happiness” and that “all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity” (Book 14, ch. 12). Natasha comes through on vitality, which is Tolstoy’s real answer and one he could never quite state.
The moral weight falls on ordinary things done without theory. Natasha makes her parents empty the carts of their furniture so that wounded soldiers can ride (Book 11, ch. 16). Captain Tushin, small and forgotten by his commanders, holds his battery at Schöngrabern and is then asked why two guns were abandoned (Book 2, ch. 21).
The shape of the book
The Maude text runs to fifteen books and two epilogues, 365 chapters in all. The first third moves between war and home in 1805 and after, and Tolstoy’s title is exact about the alternation. Books 1 to 3 run from the Petersburg salon to Austerlitz. Books 4 and 5 give the duel, the death of Andrew’s wife Lise and the Tilsit peace. Books 6 to 8 are the great stretch of peace: Andrew’s recovery, the wolf hunt, Natasha’s engagement and her ruin by Anatole Kuragin. Book 8 ends with Pierre looking up at the comet, which pairs with Andrew’s sky (Book 8, ch. 22).
Then the rhythm breaks. Book 9 opens with Napoleon crossing the Niemen and Tolstoy announcing his philosophy, and from there war and peace stop alternating because the war has come home. Borodino fills the end of Book 10. Moscow is emptied in Book 11. Andrew is carried out of the city among the Rostovs’ wounded, and Natasha finds him at Mytishchi (Book 11, ch. 32). Pierre stays behind and is taken (Book 11, ch. 34).
The First Epilogue is the most daring thing in the structure: the story simply carries on for seven more years into domestic comedy. The Second Epilogue then abandons the characters for an essay on free will. Tolstoy will not let you finish with the feeling that a story has explained anything.
The voice
The narrator goes anywhere with no sign of effort, from a horse’s fear to a tsar’s vanity, and rarely signals the move. His great technique is refusing to accept conventions. Natasha goes to the opera in a serious mood and sees only “painted cardboard” and oddly dressed people singing in a bright light (Book 8, ch. 9); by the end of the evening, beside Anatole, she has stopped finding it strange. Later critics named this device estrangement, but Tolstoy uses it as a moral instrument: battle plans and court ritual are described as if by someone who has not been told what they mean.
He also fixes people with a recurring physical detail. Lise’s short upper lip charms a drawing room in Book 1, and it is still there on her dead face in Book 4. Battle comes through the same habit of attention. Nicholas Rostov, charged by a Frenchman, thinks: “To kill me? Me whom everyone is so fond of?” (Book 2, ch. 19). Pierre rides across Borodino in a white hat, getting in the soldiers’ way (Book 10, ch. 31), and no general could show you as much.
The Maudes’ English is plain and even, and it suits this. Much of the opening is French in Tolstoy, a class thinking in the language of the nation about to invade it. The book’s first words are French, on Genoa and Lucca as “family estates of the Buonapartes” (Book 1, ch. 1), and the Maude version keeps only the odd phrase untranslated.
Who makes history
Book 9 begins with a question: “What produced this extraordinary occurrence?” (Book 9, ch. 1). Hundreds of thousands of men marched east to kill one another, and the historians’ explanations are in Tolstoy’s view ridiculous beside the scale of the event. His answer is that great men are labels. “A king is history’s slave”, moved by what he calls the “hive life” of mankind. He pushes this to comedy in the chapter asking whether Russia survived because Napoleon had a cold at Borodino (Book 10, ch. 28), and to its limit in the Second Epilogue, which asks us “to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious” (Second Epilogue, ch. 12).
Kutuzov is the doctrine in a uniform. Old, fat and half asleep at councils, he believes in “patience and time” (Book 10, ch. 16), does as little as possible, and weeps with “Russia is saved” when he hears the French have left Moscow (Book 13, ch. 17). The Napoleon of these pages is a vain man with a cold who believes he is steering. This is the book’s real injustice: Tolstoy’s Napoleon is a caricature, and a theory that no one decides anything sits oddly in a novel where so much depends on what Natasha decides about a set of carts.
Isaiah Berlin’s essay The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953) is still the best account of this tension: Tolstoy, by gift a fox who sees everything in its particularity, wanted to be a hedgehog with one big truth. The novel’s life comes from that failure. The theory does its work anyway: it puts the people above the map, and makes the fall of Moscow, “a dying queenless hive” (Book 11, ch. 20), feel like a natural event.
The people
Pierre
The clown who is also the conscience. He starts by defending Napoleon at a party (Book 1, ch. 5) and ends by telling a shocked brother-in-law about a society of honest men. In the French camp he laughs out loud at the idea of being held captive: “My immortal soul?” (Book 13, ch. 14). He is the only one allowed to be ridiculous and right.
Natasha
A girl bursting into a drawing room in Book 1. The scene everyone remembers is the dance at “Uncle’s” after the hunt, when a countess raised by a French governess takes up a peasant dance with “inimitable and unteachable” rightness (Book 7, ch. 7). Her fall to Anatole is the most painful sequence in the book because Tolstoy never lets it be simply a sin. The “robust, motherly woman” of the epilogue, who has given up singing and shows her husband a stain on the baby’s napkin, has angered readers ever since (First Epilogue, ch. 10), and they are right to be. It is an argument about what vitality turns into, by a man who wanted it to turn into this.
Andrew
Proud and clever and exhausted by other people. His moments of grace come from outside him: the sky, an oak that looks dead in spring and in full leaf weeks later (Book 6, ch. 3), a girl’s voice at a window on a moonlit night (Book 6, ch. 2). His dying, which takes up much of two books, is the most sustained account of death I know in fiction, and it ends in an “estrangement from everything belonging to this world” (Book 12, ch. 15).
Nicholas and Mary
Nicholas is a decent, limited man. He adores the Tsar, loses forty-three thousand roubles at cards to Dolokhov (Book 4, ch. 14), and in 1820 tells Pierre that “if Arakchéev ordered me to lead a squadron against you and cut you down, I should not hesitate an instant” (First Epilogue, ch. 14). Princess Mary, plain and devout, is bullied by her father over geometry lessons (Book 1, ch. 25) and marries Nicholas after he rescues her from her own rebellious peasants (Book 10, ch. 14). Their marriage is the happiest and least romantic in the novel.
Karataev
Platon Karataev is a peasant soldier Pierre meets in captivity, “the personification of everything Russian, kindly, and round” (Book 12, ch. 13), who says “things happen not as we plan but as God judges” (Book 12, ch. 12). He falls sick on the march and is shot by the roadside, and Pierre does not look back (Book 14, ch. 14). He is partly a landowner’s fantasy, and the novel’s own peasants at Bogucharovo (Book 10, ch. 9) are a good deal less serene.
The Kuragins
Prince Vasili’s children are the book’s nearest thing to villains, and the portrait is unfair. Hélène is given beauty, stupidity and adultery, and very little interior life, and her death (Book 12, ch. 2) is reported as gossip, a clear sign of her author’s disgust. Anatole gets the better ending: in the surgeons’ tent at Borodino, Andrew sees him sobbing after his leg is cut off and is overcome by pity and love (Book 10, ch. 37).
How it was made
Tolstoy planned a novel about a Decembrist returning from Siberian exile in 1856, and the story kept going backwards, to the 1825 rising and then to 1812 and 1805, in search of how such a man came to be. He began the book proper in 1863, the year after his marriage to Sofia Behrs, and worked at Yasnaya Polyana. Parts appeared as The Year 1805 in The Russian Messenger from 1865. He rewrote heavily, and the whole came out as War and Peace by 1869. Sofia is reported to have copied the manuscript in full as many as seven times.
He read widely in the histories, memoirs and letters of the period, and spoke to people who remembered 1812. The families are built from his own. Bolkonsky is a thin disguise for Volkonsky, his mother’s name; Natasha draws on his sister-in-law Tanya Behrs and on Sofia. Tolstoy’s mother died when he was two, and the novelist Stephen Vizinczey has suggested that Princess Mary comes from his longing for her. The novel’s Decembrist origins surface in its last pages, when Pierre’s politics and young Nicholas Bolkonsky’s dream point towards 1825, and the boy promises “I will do something with which even he would be satisfied” (First Epilogue, ch. 16).
Readers and critics
The Russian public bought it at once. Critics were less sure what it was; Dostoevsky called it, in a private letter, the brilliant last word of landowners’ literature. Tolstoy answered the question of genre in a note of 1868: it was “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle”. Turgenev moved from early scepticism about the history to open admiration, and sent a French translation to Flaubert, who replied in January 1880: “What an artist and what a psychologist!” He adored the first two volumes, and said the third collapsed because the author repeated himself and philosophised.
That complaint has never gone away. Henry James, in a preface of 1908, asked what “large loose baggy monsters” like Peace and War could artistically mean. The answer most readers have reached is that the form imitates the unplotted way life goes on, and holds together through the voice rather than a design.
Afterlives
King Vidor’s American film (1956) has Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda and Mel Ferrer in 208 minutes. Sergei Bondarchuk’s Soviet version (1966–67) runs over seven hours, won the Oscar for best foreign language film, and is still the one with the scale. The BBC serialised it in 1972–73 with Anthony Hopkins as Pierre, and in 2016 with Paul Dano.
Prokofiev’s opera, written across the 1940s, was staged complete in Leningrad in 1955. Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 turned Book 8 alone into an electropop musical, off Broadway in 2012 and on Broadway in 2016 with Josh Groban. The comet itself is real: the Great Comet of 1811, which Tolstoy calls the comet of 1812.
How to read it
- Choose your translation deliberately. The free Maude text used here is complete, and the Maudes knew Tolstoy personally, though it does turn most of the French into English. Anthony Briggs (2005) is livelier; Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2007) keep the French in place with notes; Amy Mandelker’s Oxford revision of the Maudes (2010) is the best of the older line.
- Read the essay chapters as argument, not as padding. Disagree with them. Tolstoy wants you to, and they are short.
- Go through Book 7 slowly. The hunt, the dance and the sleigh ride are the happiest pages he wrote, and their happiness is the measure of what follows.
- Watch who is looking. At every battle, ask who is seeing this and what they cannot see.
Read next
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878). Same eye, tighter design, and a much harder look at what Natasha’s domestic ending costs.
- Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). The Waterloo chapters, where a boy cannot find the battle, are the model Tolstoy admired.
- Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (1980). A deliberate successor set at Stalingrad, with two tyrannies in place of one Napoleon.