Sitting on a table, War and Peace looks like half a loaf of pumpernickel and weighs about twice as much. Some people call it the world’s greatest novel, but almost everyone else imagines it to be among the least readable works in all of fiction. But the only really hard thing about Tolstoy’s masterpiece is lugging it around (I cut my edition into three separate chunks for easy transport). As in his other most famous book, Anna Karenina, the prose is straightforward—deceptively simple, actually—and the plotlines a compelling mix of Napoleon’s march toward Moscow and the lives and loves of various Russian gentry. Intimidating as it might appear at first glance, the truth is that War and Peace's 1,444 pages will rarely bore you, often amaze you, and consistently entertain you.
And even if you don’t agree that War and Peace is the single greatest novel ever (my vote would probably be for America’s homegrown Moby Dick), there’s no question that Tolstoy, of all history’s novelists, is the great poet of understated grandeur, of historiography, of the Russian character, of military tactics, and of spiritual epiphany. In the same novel, we go from hearing Napoleon, Europe’s most notorious sixty-two-inch scourge, addressing captured Russian soldiers, to one of Tolstoy’s great human heroes, Pierre, beginning to discover the real essence of life, the “significance of everything” in “a happiness beyond the reach of human forces … a happiness of the soul alone, the happiness of loving.” In a sense the whole book is about struggling, about Napoleon struggling for material victories and failing, about Pierre and Andrei and Natasha struggling for spiritual ones and succeeding. Distances are traveled: Napoleon marches his army from Austria to Moscow, leaves the Russian capital smoldering, and flees back to France. Andrei, the prince turned soldier turned malcontent, goes from saying cheery things like “Life has become a burden to me of late. I see I have come to understand too much” to finding real understanding in piety and love. If the primary historical arc of the novel is the failure of the French campaign in Russia, the primary human arc is the success of the various characters in their soulful, desperate searches for meaning. If the point of the long novel is transformation—and there is no genre that permits the possibility for so much—then War and Peace is the utmost realization, the book in which more changes, grows, and transforms than in any other. And we the reader, in Tolstoy’s grip for a month or twelve, can transform right along.
Wisdom is never easy to come by, and it’s clear that Tolstoy intimately understood the noumenal, metaphysical longing that agonizes many of us. What makes his book’s epiphanies especially meaningful—and convincing—is that the characters have to go through significant gyrations and missteps to reach them. They grope pitiably in the darkness before finding something solid to hold on to (there is a verb in French—a language Tolstoy spoke fluently—that describes the fumbling process and pretty much sums up being in the world: tâtonner). The something they eventually come to grasp is invariably a sense of larger meaning: Andrei being wounded in the battle of Austerlitz and gazing at the limitless sky, Pierre learning in the abjection of prison what is truly necessary to life. Tolstoy attributes to Pierre—and to Russians—a special capacity for “seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take any serious part in life,” but he, like Dostoevsky or Dickens, could see all the evil and falsehood without having to reject existence. For Dickens, life could be embraced and goodness found amid the dreck; for Tolstoy as with Dostoevsky, life gives us the capacity to love and to anticipate the infinite bounty of Christian salvation.
In that sense, the characters of War and Peace make up an impressive, instructional tableau, there both to remind us of ourselves and to help us reach our full potential. In Natasha we recognize our own restlessness and the need to balance free-spiritedness with devotion; in Pierre we see the tribulations and tragicomedy of the search for meaning and the need to attach one’s self to the true essence; in Andrei, the rational and world-weary man, we are confronted with the sublimity of acceptance.
We read Tolstoy to learn the history of Napoleonic Europe and we read Tolstoy to learn what calms a troubled soul and enlarges the human spirit. And the answer to that question of questions, Tolstoy’s magnum opus both says and shows, is love.
The Buzz: War and Peace is the historical novel. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia not only forms the backdrop of the book, but Napoleon himself has a number of speaking cameos. The battle scenes, especially the famous clash of Austerlitz, are among the most vivid descriptions of war in the history of literature—and the most realistic. Tolstoy goes to great pains to deromanticize and demythologize both military tactics and the real experience of battle. You finish the scene and see that war is just as ugly, hopeless, and indefensible as you thought it was.
What People Don’t Know (But Should): War and Peace is a far more literary novel than Anna Karenina. Among its many breathtaking stylistic moments, and apart from the “Best Line” below, there are two extended metaphors that need to be highlighted: the first, describing the initiation of the battle of Austerlitz like the movement of a large clock (in a metaphor just as intricate), the second the description of the conquered Moscow as a dead beehive, instinctually defended by the last remaining bees, but queenless, lifeless, and ultimately torched and abandoned by the beekeeper. Both metaphors are imagistic and conceptual tours de force and by themselves make the case that this is Tolstoy’s masterpiece.
Best Line: Here is one lovely bit of epiphany; again, though, if you read the entire novel and experience it in the context of Pierre’s development, it’s that much richer: “While imprisoned … Pierre had learned, not through his intellect but through his whole being, through life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness lies in himself, in the satisfaction of basic human needs, and that all happiness is due not to privation but to superfluity. But now, during these last three weeks of the march, he had learned still another new and comforting truth—that there is nothing in the world to be dreaded. … He learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom and that these limits are not far away, that the person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he suffered now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side of him freezing.”
What’s Sexy: The sexiest passage in War and Peace—and, granted, there aren’t many—concerns Pierre’s eventual wife, Hélène, and his original motive for marrying her. “She was, as she always did for parties, wearing a gown cut in the fashion of the day, very low back and front. Her bosom, which always reminded Pierre of marble, was so close to him that his shortsighted eyes could not but perceive the living charm of her neck and shoulders, so near to his lips that he need only stoop a little to have touched them. He was conscious of the warmth of her body, of the smell of perfume, and heard the slight creak of her corset as she breathed. He saw not her marble beauty forming a single whole with her gown, but all the fascination of her body, which was only veiled by her clothes.”
Quirky Fact: War and Peace has two epilogues: The first tells what happened to the main characters in the decades that follow the end of the narrative proper. The second, though, is an extended (and mostly rather boring) philosophical essay on history, agency, free will, causality, and divinity. It’s one thing to sneak a lot of philosophy into your novel proper (Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet is the most egregious example of this), but I find it pretty funny to have one narrative epilogue to your novel and then one purely philosophical one. I guess Tolstoy still had a few things to get off his chest.
What to Skip: For a fourteen-hundred-plus-page book, it’s all pretty incredible. Apart from the second epilogue, which is expendable, you can also skip or skim the long disquisitions on military tactics (unless you’re interested) and, after reading one, skip the remaining and repetitive lectures on the nature of history (and how it’s impossible to do properly). He repeats himself repeatedly.