David's Reviews > War and Peace

War and Peace. That benchmark by which all long books are compared. (Note that War and Peace is not the longest novel ever written by a long shot, or even the longest novel on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list.) It's got a reputation for being very long, very difficult, and very Russian.

Okay, it is long. Weighing in at 587,287 words, it's 1400-2100 pages depending on edition and font size. But it's big.

Very Russian, for sure, and this is what makes it difficult for most English readers, I think. Russian names are a whole thing ("Count Pyotr Kirillovich Bezukhov," even if he's just Pyotr, or "Pierre," throughout most of the book), and everyone is a Count or a Prince or a Princess. And there are a lot of named characters... literally hundreds.

But is really that difficult to read (by which I mean, understand and follow the story)?

Nah. Not if you've ever read a big book before. And especially not if you have read epic fantasy doorstoppers like Lord of the Rings or The Stormlight Archives or The Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones, etc.

Yes, there are a ton of names, but Tolstoy mostly focuses on a handful of main characters (not to omit some real scenery-chewing speeches by Napoleon), and the story is basically about the Napoleon's invasion of Russia, with high society soap operas between battles.

Now here is where I admit that while I enjoyed this book, I didn't love it. I read a lot of big fat classic novels, but Russian literature, to be honest, has never been my favorite. And frankly I kind of think Graf Tolstoy was a bit full of himself. (His Kreutzer Sonata is quite a trip. The man had issues.) But the man was a genius, and this is considered the quintessential Russian novel (so much so that when Hollywood made it into a movie in 1956, the USSR decided that Russian honor required them to film a proper version, produced in the early 1960s with 12,000 Soviet soldiers drafted as extras for the battle scenes).

What makes it such an epic book, and not just a fat historical drama? Partly, of course, as is often the case, its place in history. It's an early example of a historical novel; Tolstoy published War and Peace in 1867, over 50 years after the events he was depicting. The Napoleonic Wars ended before he was born, but he did talk to surviving veterans before writing it. Timewise, it would be the equivalent of someone born in the 1980s writing a novel about the Vietnam War today. (Tolstoy did not, of course, invent the historical novel. Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities, about the French Revolution, in 1859.) But Tolstoy doesn't just write about France's invasion of Russia, and the vices and financial and marital woes of Russian nobles. He digresses frequently, especially towards the end, with his views about history and historians, morality, and free will. The author getting up on a soapbox to lecture the reader with his critique of the Great Man theory of history for three chapters is not something authors can do today, so this book is both a grand epic tale and a heavyweight dose of Russian moralizing. And somehow it works and fits with the story, and when you finish this book, you have seen a glimpse into the Russian soul. (One of my favorite books about books, Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, includes a detailed analysis of American, British, French, and Russian novels and how they differ, observing that while American novels have always glorified the heroic outsider and British novels are usually about class, Russian novels are about Russian identity; Russians are always asking the question "Who and what is a Russian?")

Of course I read an English translation, and there are several translations which each have their fierce partisans and critics. The version I listened to was Thandiwe Newton's excellent 60(!) hour reading of the original English translation by Aylmer Maude.

Count Pyotr "Pierre" Kirillovich Bezukhov

No one character features in every chapter, and Tolstoy writes in omniscient third person and focuses on several characters over the course of the book, but if War and Peace has a single "main character," it's Count Pyotr "Pierre" Kirillovich Bezukhov.

Pierre is introduced as a socially awkward dork praising Napoleon as a great man. He's the most bookish, least heroic of the central characters, though he ends up fighting a duel, marrying the hottest chick in the book (too bad she's a greedy narcissist who cheats on him with every man in sight, including her own brother), schemes to personally assassinate Napoleon, is taken prisoner by the French, and eventually marries his childhood sweetheart.

Pierre is the illegitimate son of the very wealthy Count Bezukhov, who dies in book one and unexpectedly recognizes Pierre as his legitimate heir and leaves him everything. Pierre instantly becomes the most popular man in St. Petersburg. Fabulously wealthy, he remains idealistic throughout the book. He spends some time deciding he's going to liberate his serfs (and Tolstoy describes in detail how all his naive efforts are thwarted by greedy managers who put on a great show for him while siphoning off his money). He spends some time becoming deeply involved in Freemasonry. Still searching for a purpose for himself, he eventually goes to war himself, thoroughly unprepared, and survives a horrific stint as a prisoner of war being force-marched by the French out of Moscow. But he does get a happy ending, unlike most of the other characters.

Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky

Prince Andrei, Pierre's best friend, is the other main character. Andrei is handsome, intellectual, and cynical. He starts the book married to a faithful wife whom he regards with benign contempt. Conveniently, she dies in childbirth, and Andrei courts Natasha Rostova. He also spends much of the book fighting on the front lines. He is wounded at the Battle of Austerlitz, and again at the Battle of Borodino. He's a cynical, worldly counterpart to Pierre's naive idealism, and his character arc is one of redemption and forgiveness, as he has stacked up grievances and grudges over the course of the novel, which he eventually lets go before he dies. His sister, Princess Maria, is a pious, intelligent girl who spends most of the book being dominated by their eccentric father and seemingly doomed to spinsterhood (well, "doomed" in that she kept rejecting jerks who want to marry her, not that you can blame her), but eventually marries Nikolai Rostov.

Countess Natalya "Natasha" Ilyinichna Rostova

Natasha starts the book at age 13. She's the closest War and Peace has to a "heroine" (though Princess Maria Bolkonsky shares the spotlight a bit). She's a nice enough girl but as you might expect from someone who's basically a teenager for most of the book, she falls in and out of love easily and ruins her engagement to Andrei Bolkonsky by letting a cad seduce her. But she gets a happy ending with Pierre.

Count Nikolai Ilyich Rostov

Nikolai, Natasha's older brother, has the same basic decency but lack of sense as his sister. He joins the Hussars to go fight Napoleon, blows a huge chunk of his father's money twice gambling, and despite rejecting his family's plans for him to marry a rich chick to rescue their family's fortunes, ends up not marrying the childhood sweetheart who was waiting for him. Instead, he winds up with Maria Bolkonsky, who is exactly the sort of rich heiress his family wanted him to marry, but he salvages their fortunes on his own.

These five characters are the protagonists around which most of the chapters revolve, with many other secondary characters moving in and out of the story.

War and Peace starts in 1805. Napoleon is starting to threaten Europe, but he and Emperor Alexander are buddies so of course there's no danger he will invade Russia, and anyway that would be stupid, right?

Well, it was stupid, but he did it, and the book spans 15 years, Napoleon's invasion, the occupation of Moscow, and the French army's eventual disastrous retreat. Pierre, Andrei, Maria, Natasha, and Nikolai are involved throughout in various ways, and the chapters alternate between descriptions of the war, including the great battles, and the peacetime antics of Russian aristocracy. Tolstoy zooms in on the lives and petty squabbles of his characters, then zooms out to cover the war in a way that makes it clear that individuals, including Napoleon himself, are largely irrelevant to the forces of history.

If anything, this is the thesis of War and Peace. Tolstoy explicitly criticizes the "Great Man" theory of history, whereby historical events happen because of the decisions of individuals, and despite casting Napoleon himself as one of his secondary characters (who gets some great speeches, while being depicted, as you'd expect a Russian to depict him, as a two-faced narcissistic egomaniac), makes it clear that he thinks Napoleon, Tsar Alexander, and everyone else were just cogs being moved by historical forces generated by a sort of collective will.

“But could it be otherwise?” he thought. “Here is this capital at my feet. Where is Alexander now, and of what is he thinking? A strange, beautiful, and majestic city; and a strange and majestic moment! In what light must I appear to them!” thought he, thinking of his troops. “Here she is, the reward for all those fainthearted men,” he reflected, glancing at those near him and at the troops who were approaching and forming up. “One word from me, one movement of my hand, and that ancient capital of the Tsars would perish. But my clemency is always ready to descend upon the vanquished. I must be magnanimous and truly great. But no, it can’t be true that I am in Moscow,” he suddenly thought. “Yet here she is lying at my feet, with her golden domes and crosses scintillating and twinkling in the sunshine. But I shall spare her. On the ancient monuments of barbarism and despotism I will inscribe great words of justice and mercy.... It is just this which Alexander will feel most painfully, I know him.” (It seemed to Napoleon that the chief import of what was taking place lay in the personal struggle between himself and Alexander.) “From the height of the Krémlin—yes, there is the Krémlin, yes—I will give them just laws; I will teach them the meaning of true civilization, I will make generations of boyars remember their conqueror with love. I will tell the deputation that I did not, and do not, desire war, that I have waged war only against the false policy of their court; that I love and respect Alexander and that in Moscow I will accept terms of peace worthy of myself and of my people. I do not wish to utilize the fortunes of war to humiliate an honored monarch. ‘Boyars,’ I will say to them, ‘I do not desire war, I desire the peace and welfare of all my subjects.’ However, I know their presence will inspire me, and I shall speak to them as I always do: clearly, impressively, and majestically. But can it be true that I am in Moscow? Yes, there she lies.”

War and Peace is a deep and richly rewarding book. I do recommend it to everyone to read at least once. But I won't remember it as one of my favorites. Honestly, I remain indifferent to Tolstoy's philosophy and moralizing, and while I appreciated how he wove so many characters together in so many intertwining plot threads, they were very realistic but really not that interesting. I didn't like or care about any of them, because they all felt very much like cogs being moved by plot forces generated by the will of the author. Skillfully and intricately portrayed, like finely painted figures, but Tolstoy seemed to regard them as much as mouthpieces for various points of view he wanted to express as characters.