War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

 

War and Peace

There is no entirely honest way to describe War and Peace in a short space, because the novel is, by design, resistant to abbreviation. It contains a war, a peace, approximately five hundred characters, multiple philosophical interludes on the nature of historical causation, and a sustained argument — conducted through narrative rather than polemic — about what a human life is actually for. Any summary will be a falsification. What follows is a set of coordinates.

Pierre Bezukhov arrives in the novel as a large, clumsy, newly wealthy young man who doesn't know what to do with himself and is honest enough to admit it. His search for meaning — through Freemasonry, through political enthusiasm, through the campaigns of 1812, through personal catastrophe and unexpected grace — provides the novel's philosophical through-line. Pierre keeps getting it wrong and trying again, which is what makes him so immediately and persistently sympathetic.

Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is Pierre's opposite: precise where Pierre is chaotic, ambitious where Pierre is adrift. His life traces a different arc — from idealism through disillusionment through a particular kind of peace that only becomes available after the worst has happened. His experience at Austerlitz, looking up at the enormous Russian sky while wounded and waiting to die, is one of the most famous passages in fiction, and it earns its fame.

Natasha Rostova is the novel's great irruption of life — pure appetite and feeling in early chapters, more complex and more painful as she grows. Her youthful mistakes and their consequences are handled by Tolstoy without either mercy or cruelty, which is the most honest way to handle them.

The war itself, when it comes in earnest, is nothing like the heroic military spectacle that Andrei initially pursued. Borodino is chaos — no one in command fully understands what is happening, chance determines as much as strategy, and the most consistently effective military figure is Kutuzov, who understands that the most important thing a commander can sometimes do is refuse to act. This anti-heroic view of historical causation runs through the novel and gives its epilogue — sometimes criticized for its didacticism — its strange honesty.

War and Peace is the novel that makes every other novel feel slightly small by comparison, not because of its length but because of its ambition: to show, in real time and at human scale, how people make meaning in the middle of history that doesn't care about their meanings. Tolstoy does not resolve this problem. He just shows you, in enormous and loving detail, how people live inside it.

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