War and Peace

ELI5/TLDR

It is a book about five young people in Russia between 1805 and 1820, and about the things that happen to them, and about what those things have to do with the half-million men who march east from France in 1812 and the rather smaller number who walk back. You will be told, by the people who teach history, that those men marched because Napoleon willed it. You will read this book and come to suspect, slowly and against your training, that nobody willed any of it — not Napoleon, not the Tsar, not the colonels who issued the orders, not the soldiers who froze in the snow — and that what we call history is the name we give to a great many small private lives that happened to occur in the same place at the same time. The novel is long because life is long. It begins in a drawing room in St. Petersburg with a woman complaining about Bonaparte in French, and it ends with a peasant teaching a Count, in a wooden shed, that God is here and everywhere and that the Count had been looking for Him, all his life, in entirely the wrong direction.

The Full Story

The world Tolstoy wants you to see

It is July of 1805. In a drawing room in St. Petersburg, the maid of honor Anna Pávlovna Schérer is giving one of her receptions, and she is conducting it the way the foreman of a spinning mill conducts his hands — moving from group to group, hastening to check the spindle that creaks too loud and to set in motion the one that has fallen silent. The conversation is in French, because the French language is what one thinks in if one belongs to the people who matter, even though France is now governed by a man whom the maid of honor sincerely believes to be the Antichrist. The first sentence of the novel is hers, and it is the sound of the world being described:

“Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist—I really believe he is Antichrist—I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my ‘faithful slave,’ as you call yourself!”

This is the surface. Underneath it lie the things the surface ignores. There are the great houses in Moscow, where the old Count Rostóv has been giving dinners and balls for thirty years and is gradually ruining himself doing it, and where his wife runs the household with affection and his daughter Natásha runs through the rooms barefoot and laughing because no one has yet thought to stop her. There are the estates in the country — the Bolkónskis at Bald Hills, where an old prince of Catherine’s day rises at the same hour every morning, works at his lathe, drills his daughter in geometry, and refuses to die, and the smaller places where neighbors who are called Uncle keep packs of borzois and ride out on a frosty September morning to take a wolf. There are the peasants who plow the fields that all of this rests on, and whom the people in the drawing rooms remember once or twice a year, when feeling especially Christian. There are the regiments forming up to march west and meet a French army no one in the drawing room has ever seen.

The thing to understand, before any character is named, is that all of this — the salons and the estates and the regiments and the peasants — is happening at the same time, and that none of these worlds knows the others very well, and that the novel intends to put you inside each one of them in turn until you stop believing in the boundaries between them.

Five people

Pierre Bezúkhov is the illegitimate son of an enormously rich Count of Catherine’s day, and at the start of the book he is twenty, large, clumsy, nearsighted, and so badly mannered that the maid of honor visibly winces when he enters her drawing room. He has been educated abroad and has come back full of opinions about Rousseau and the balance of power, which he expresses to whoever will listen and several people who will not. His father dies, leaves him everything, and the rest of the book is the slow and painful business of discovering what a person like Pierre is supposed to do with that much money and that much soul. He marries the wrong woman because she is beautiful and the room expects him to. He fights a duel he does not want to fight. He becomes a Freemason because he wants to be improved and the Freemasons promise improvement. He raises emancipation schemes for his serfs which his stewards quietly defeat behind his back. He is, throughout, the most lovable man in the book, and the one whose soul is most visibly under construction.

Natásha Rostóva is thirteen when she runs into the drawing room of her parents’ house in Moscow with her doll, and over the course of the novel she becomes one of the great creations of any literature, which is a thing the reader has to take on faith for the first six hundred pages and then takes on direct experience for the last six hundred. Her quality is that she does not perform. She loves what she loves with her whole body — her brother, her mother, a song, a sleigh ride, the first young man who looks at her seriously, the next young man who looks at her seriously, a wounded man dying in a room she cannot leave. She is also vain, and impatient, and capable of nearly destroying herself, and Tolstoy refuses to soften any of it. The first time she stands in a Petersburg ballroom and is afraid no one will ask her to dance, you understand that this is the secret center of the book.

Prince Andrei Bolkónski is everything Pierre is not. He is handsome, married (unhappily, to a charming pregnant wife whose only fault is that she loves him in the manner of a kitten and he is not a kitten), bored to ferocity by Petersburg society, and convinced that the only thing worth doing is to perform some magnificent action under the eye of Napoleon, whom he secretly admires. He goes to war wanting his Toulon. He gets, instead, the wound at Austerlitz that is the first hinge of his life, the death of his wife in childbirth that is the second, a love affair with Natásha that is the third, and a slow death from a fragment of shell at Borodinó that is the fourth and last. He keeps coming back to one image: a sky.

Princess Márya Bolkónskaya is Prince Andrei’s sister, and the most quietly Christian person in the book. She lives at Bald Hills with her father, who loves her in the way a man loves a stove that has burned him many times — gratefully, and with abuse. She has a heavy tread and, by the official judgment of Petersburg, a plain face, and she keeps a kind of secret religious life among traveling pilgrims whom her father and brother find embarrassing. The novel does to her what novels rarely do to women like her: it gives her, in the end, exactly the husband she would never have dared to ask for, and lets her have him without making her any less herself.

Nikolai Rostóv is Natásha’s older brother and the simplest soul in the foreground of the book. He goes to the war as a hussar because hussars wear an excellent uniform and because his country is at war. He learns to ride a horse, to charge a French dragoon, to lose at cards, to suffer for losing at cards, to admire his Emperor with a love that is closer to being in love than he himself understands, and eventually to settle down on a small ruined estate and run it well. Tolstoy gives Nikolai every conventional virtue and one private one: an honesty about his own ordinariness which the cleverer characters around him never quite manage.

There are others — Sónya the orphan cousin who loves Nikolai and will not in the end be loved back; Hélène Kurágina, the marble-shouldered Petersburg beauty Pierre marries, who is bad in the simple direct way some people are bad, like a bad smell; her brother Anatole, handsome and vacant, who almost destroys Natásha; the old Prince Bolkónski, formidable and frightened and tender all at once; Denísov the lisping hussar; Dólokhov the duelist; little Pétya Rostóv, fifteen, killed in his first skirmish three weeks before the war ends, with a saber half drawn — but those are the five whose souls the camera follows.

The shape of the novel

The book opens in 1805 with Russia drifting into its first war against Napoleon, and the first two volumes do something patient and odd: they cut, again and again, between salons in Petersburg and Moscow, household crises at Bald Hills and Otrádnoe, and a chaotic Austrian campaign in which the Russian army keeps almost being trapped and somehow is not. The campaign ends at Austerlitz, on the Pratzen Heights, where Prince Andrei runs forward with a flagstaff in his hands, is hit on the head by something he never sees, and falls. He lies on the field looking up.

“Where is it, that lofty sky that I did not know till now, but saw today? And I did not know this suffering either. Yes, I did not know anything, anything at all till now. But where am I?”

Napoleon, who has won, comes by on horseback and notices him, and stops. Andrei has been in love with Napoleon all his adult life — Napoleon was the man he was going to become — and now Napoleon is standing six feet from him calling him a fine death, and Andrei is looking past him at the sky and discovering that Napoleon is small. Not metaphorically. Physically small. A creature not much bigger than a fly buzzing in a room where a man is dying and the room is enormous. This is the first of the book’s spiritual reversals, and it sets the pattern for all of them: an enormous public idea collapses inside one private person’s head, and afterwards that person cannot find his way back to the room where it used to mean something.

The next stretch is peace. Russia and France have signed at Tilsit, the war is over for the moment, and the novel slows down and lets the household world breathe. Pierre marries Hélène and discovers what kind of marriage that is. Andrei loses his wife in childbirth (she dies looking at him as if to ask why he did not save her, and the look does not leave his face for years) and goes home to Bald Hills to manage his estate and raise his small son and tell himself that he is finished with public life. He rides through a birch forest one spring and notices an old gnarled oak that is still bare and brown when everything else is in leaf, and he agrees with the oak that life is over. A few weeks later he rides past it again and the oak is in full sappy green and he agrees with it again, having in the meantime spent one night under a window in the country and overheard a girl named Natásha refuse to go to bed because the moon is too lovely.

“It is not enough for me to know what I have in me—everyone must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to fly away into the sky, everyone must know me, so that my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!”

These are the years when the book slows almost to a stop and lets you live in it: the famous hunt at Otrádnoe with a hundred and thirty borzois and the old wolf taken alive; the evening in the country where Natásha and Nikolai and Sónya come back from the hunt and dance to a balalaika in their uncle’s house and Tolstoy briefly believes — and almost makes you believe — that Russia is a thing the upper classes can recover by feel; Natásha’s first ball in Petersburg, where she stands by the wall, certain no one will ask her, and a man in a white uniform who has been watching the women breathlessly longing to be asked walks across the floor and asks her, and it is Andrei.

“I have long been waiting for you,” that frightened happy little girl seemed to say by the smile that replaced the threatened tears, as she raised her hand to Prince Andrew’s shoulder.

They become engaged. His father, terrified of losing him, makes them wait a year. In that year — Andrei abroad on his father’s orders, Natásha alone in Moscow — Anatole Kurágin appears, beautiful and stupid and married already without anyone knowing it, and decides to seduce her. She nearly elopes. She is stopped at the last possible moment by people who happen to be in the right room. She survives her shame the way some people survive a fever, by being changed afterwards, and something in her never quite returns. Andrei, when he hears, refuses to take her back. Pierre — who has loved Natásha helplessly and quietly for the last two hundred pages without quite admitting it to himself — goes to her and is gentle, and tells her that if he were free and the best man in the world he would ask for her hand on his knees, and then walks out into the Moscow night and looks up at a comet hanging in the sky over the Arbát and is, for no reason he can name, suddenly happy.

It is 1812. Napoleon crosses the Niemen with six hundred thousand men and the war comes east, and the second half of the novel begins, and it is a different book.

War, not as historians describe it

Tolstoy did not believe in battles the way historians describe them. He thought the descriptions were lies — not lies on purpose, but lies of structure: that the very form of the official account, with its commanders and their dispositions and their decisive orders, presupposed something that does not in fact exist. What exists, on the day of a battle, is several hundred thousand frightened men, none of whom can see more than fifty yards in any direction, doing what they can to stay alive and obey the man immediately above them, who in turn cannot see anything either. The general at headquarters writes a dispatch which is contradicted by reality before the ink is dry; subordinates ignore orders they consider impossible; messengers get lost; a battery on the left flank holds because nobody told it to retreat. Out of all this emerges what the next day’s dispatches will call a victory or a defeat, and the historians a hundred years later will call a turning point, and Tolstoy will call the weather.

The book demonstrates this twice, with care. At Austerlitz, the Allies have a beautiful plan worked out the night before in three languages by men who have never seen the ground in daylight, and they march to its destruction in a fog. At Borodinó — the great battle outside Moscow in August 1812, fought all day in a haze of cannon smoke until forty thousand Russians and thirty thousand French are dead and nothing is decided — Napoleon stands behind his lines giving orders that are never executed, while Pierre Bezúkhov, who has wandered onto the battlefield in a white hat as a kind of tourist of his own apocalypse, watches a Russian battery hold a redoubt for an hour with its officer joking and its men dying, and afterwards cannot say what he saw. Kutúzov, the old one-eyed Russian commander-in-chief, falls asleep at his council of war and wakes up to declare that the wisest thing the Russian army can do is keep itself in existence, and so he gives up Moscow without a fight, because the alternative is to lose the army and Russia along with it, and his subordinates and his Tsar and his historians despise him for it, and he is the only person in the book who is correct.

“In giving and accepting battle at Borodinó, Kutúzov acted involuntarily and irrationally. But later on, to fit what had occurred, the historians provided cunningly devised evidence of the foresight and genius of the generals who, of all the blind tools of history were the most enslaved and involuntary.”

This is the book’s quiet, persistent theme of the war chapters: the men with the maps and the colored pins are not in charge of anything. The thing in charge — if there is a thing — is the aggregate of every soldier who that morning decided whether to run or to stay, and there is no point in the chain of command at which that aggregate is visible to anyone. Kutúzov’s wisdom is to know this, and to refuse to pretend otherwise, and to wait. Napoleon’s tragedy is that he believes in the maps, and the maps believe in him back, and so everyone marches to Moscow.

Moscow, and Pierre in the shed

Moscow is taken and Moscow is empty. The Rostóvs flee with the wounded — Andrei is among the wounded, though Natásha does not yet know it, and the moment she learns and what she does with it is one of the great quiet passages in any novel. The city is set on fire, possibly by the French and possibly by the Russians and possibly by no one and everyone at once — Tolstoy spends twenty pages refusing to give a reason because the truth is that an abandoned wooden city will always burn. Pierre stays behind, having privately decided that he must assassinate Napoleon. He fails to find Napoleon, rescues a child from a burning house, attacks a French soldier who is robbing an Armenian woman, and is arrested as a probable arsonist. He is taken to an interrogation where four other prisoners are shot in front of him, and the fifth man is Pierre, and the rifles are leveled at him, and the order is canceled, and they take him away to a shed.

In the shed he meets Platón Karatáev.

The novel’s quiet center

Karatáev is a peasant soldier of about fifty, taken prisoner like Pierre, suffering from fever, with brilliantly white teeth and a body and head and shoulders that strike Pierre on first sight as round. He sings to himself in the dark like a bird, not as a performance but the way other people stretch when they are stiff. He talks in proverbs which are sometimes the opposite of each other and which both turn out to be right. He cooks, sews, mends boots, prays to the horse-saints Frola and Lavra because one ought to pity the animals too. He has no theory of anything. He has no plan. He loves whoever happens to be next to him, including his dog and including the French, and Pierre understands that if he were taken away from Pierre tomorrow he would not grieve, and that this is not because he does not love Pierre but because his love is not the kind of love that fastens itself to a single object. His life, as he holds it, has meaning only as part of a whole he does not need to name.

“Lay me down like a stone, O God, and raise me up like a loaf.”

It is in the shed with Karatáev, and on the road afterwards as the French retreat from Moscow in the snow and the prisoners are dragged along behind them and shot if they fall, that the second great spiritual reversal of the book happens, and this time it is Pierre’s. He has searched, all his life, for the meaning of his life. He has looked for it in books and in Freemasonry and in his wife and in the wine cellar and in the assassination of Napoleon. One night during the retreat, sitting alone by the wheel of a cart in the moonlight, having been turned back by a French sentinel, he suddenly bursts out laughing.

“The soldier did not let me pass. They took me and shut me up. They hold me captive. What, me? Me? My immortal soul? Ha-ha-ha!”

He looks up at the sky and the limitless distance beyond the campfires.

“And all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I! And they caught all that and put it into a shed boarded up with planks!”

Karatáev does not survive the retreat. He grows too sick to walk, sits down by the side of the road, smiles at Pierre, says nothing, and is shot by a French escort, and Pierre walks on without turning his head, because Karatáev has already taught him what to do with such moments. Pierre is rescued. He goes home. He has been ruined materially and discovers, with a faint smile that he has not had in his life before, that he is much richer than he was. His wife has died in his absence, of a complication of an illegal abortion which Tolstoy declines to name; he reads the news without feeling much of anything. He marries Natásha, who has by then sat at Andrei’s deathbed for some weeks and learned, before she met Pierre at all, the things Pierre has just learned in his shed.

The First Epilogue

Seven years pass. Napoleon is on St. Helena. The Rostóvs and the Bolkónskis and the Bezúkhovs have settled into a single connected household at Bald Hills. Pierre is married to Natásha and they have several children; Nikolai is married to Princess Márya — yes, that pairing, the simple country soldier and the religious bookish princess, and it works — and they have several children; Sónya, the orphan, is unmarried and pours the tea. Natásha, who was a flame of a girl, has become a heavy and slightly dishevelled mother who notices nothing in the world except her husband and her babies and is uninterested in what she looks like, and Tolstoy notes this with a steadiness that some readers have always taken as a betrayal of her and others as the deepest tribute he could pay her: he is saying that this is what the flame becomes when it is not extinguished but housed. Pierre comes back from a trip to Petersburg full of plans for what may be the beginnings of the Decembrist movement; Nikolai, who would die for his Emperor and is alarmed by Pierre’s politics, says he would lead a squadron against Pierre if Arakchéev ordered him to. They argue, and the argument is unresolved, and they are still brothers. In the next room little children are laughing because their nurse Anna Makárovna has finished knitting two stockings at once and is pulling one out of the other, and Pierre stops at the door and says:

“You know, why I’m especially fond of that music? It is always the first thing that tells me all is well. When I was driving here today, the nearer I got to the house the more anxious I grew. As I entered the anteroom I heard Andrúsha’s peals of laughter and that meant that all was well.”

Andrei’s small son Nikólenka, fifteen now and living with his aunt Márya, listens in the corner to Pierre talking about secret societies and asks afterwards, with shining eyes, whether his father would have agreed with Pierre, and Pierre says yes, reluctantly, because he can already see the boy bending toward something that may eventually kill him. The book has already buried the parents and is beginning, in this last paragraph, to carry the children forward. Then it stops.

The philosophy of history

There is a Second Epilogue. A great many editions print it. A great many readers skip it. One of the things this summary will not do is skip it, because Tolstoy spent ten years on the novel and he ended it with a hundred pages of philosophical argument, and the argument is the part of the book he believed most needed to be written.

The argument is simple, and it takes him a hundred pages because no simple argument is easy to land against the entire grain of how human beings think.

The grain is this: when a great event occurs — a war, a revolution, the migration of millions of people from one part of the continent to another — we instinctively look for a person who caused it. Napoleon went to Russia because Napoleon decided to. Six hundred thousand men crossed the Niemen because Napoleon ordered it. The historians, having rejected the older idea that God was directly responsible for human history, replaced God with a smaller god named the Great Man, and they have been writing the history of the Great Men ever since. Tolstoy says: this is incoherent. If you ask of any specific Great Man how exactly his words made millions of bodies move, the historians cannot tell you. They give you, instead, more Great Men, on the theory that one Great Man’s words moved a few hundred near him, who in turn moved a few hundred near them, and so on, like a chain; but the chain never adds up. The component forces are never equal to the resultant. Somewhere in the explanation, a hidden term has to be smuggled in, and the hidden term is power, and the historians cannot tell you what power is. They cannot tell you because no one knows.

“A locomotive is moving. Someone asks: ‘What moves it?’ A peasant says the devil moves it. Another man says the locomotive moves because its wheels go round. A third asserts that the cause of its movement lies in the smoke which the wind carries away.”

Each of these answers is wrong in a different way, but each is also the same kind of wrong: an attempt to point to one visible part of a system and call it the cause of the whole. The historians who write about Napoleon are pointing at the smoke. The truth, Tolstoy says — and this is the word he is heading toward all along — is that history is not made by individuals at all. It is made by everyone at once. The half-million men who marched to Moscow each made his own decision to march, for his own reasons, on his own legs, and the resultant of all those private decisions is what we, after the fact, call Napoleon’s invasion. Napoleon is a name we have given to a phenomenon that does not pass through him. He is more like a flag flying over an army than like a rider holding its reins.

This is uncomfortable, because if it is true then we lose something we very much want to keep, which is the consoling illusion that there is somebody in charge. Tolstoy is happy to take that consolation away. He compares the situation to Copernicus: for thousands of years humans believed the earth was stationary because they could feel that it was, and the work of modern astronomy was to renounce a feeling that was wrong. The work of modern history, he says, is the same. We feel that Napoleon did it. We are wrong. The price of being right is to give up the feeling, and the gain is to begin to look at the actual locomotive.

He spends the last twenty pages on the related problem of free will. We know, from inside, that we are free — that we could have stayed in bed this morning, that we did not have to say the cruel thing we said, that the choice was ours. We know, from outside, that we are not — that any human action, looked at from far enough away, falls into patterns the actor did not see and could not have escaped, and that the larger the group the more lawlike the patterns become. Both of these are true. Tolstoy will not let either of them go. He says that the consciousness of freedom is as undeniable as the consciousness of being a self, and that the laws of inevitability are as undeniable as the laws of physics, and that history’s job is to live in the contradiction without resolving it — the way astronomers had to learn to live with an earth that feels stationary and is not.

It is a strange way to end a novel about Natásha and Pierre and a wolf hunt and a birch forest and a man dying with his sister at his bedside, and yet by the time you arrive at it, after fifteen books of watching individuals act with what they thought was sovereign will and produce what looks, from a thousand feet up, like weather — by then it does not feel strange at all. It feels like the sentence the whole novel has been waiting to write.

Claude’s Take

Let me drop the voice and talk to you straight.

What holds up: almost everything that matters. Natásha is one of the great creations in any novel — Tolstoy gives you a thirteen-year-old, a sixteen-year-old, a twenty-year-old, and a thirty-year-old who are unmistakably the same person changing in real time, and nobody else has ever quite pulled that off. The battlefield writing is the best in the language; if you have read any subsequent novelist on combat — Crane, Hemingway, anyone — you are reading a downstream of Tolstoy whether they cite him or not. Pierre’s spiritual journey is the most honest portrait I know of a rich, smart, decent man who genuinely does not know what to do with his decency, and the resolution Tolstoy gives him through Karatáev is not cheap — it is hard-won, and it is psychologically continuous with the man Pierre was on page one. The refusal of the great-man theory of history is, I think, basically right, and it becomes more right every decade we get further from believing it. And the book makes you feel time passing over a generation in a way almost no other novel does, because Tolstoy was patient enough to let it.

What creaks. The Second Epilogue is genuinely tedious on a second read. Tolstoy makes the same argument seven times because he is afraid you will not believe him, and after the third time you are believing him hard and want him to stop. A great many smart people skip it, and I will not pretend they are wrong to — they are missing something but not the most important thing. The portrayal of Napoleon and the French is uneven; Tolstoy is too contemptuous of Napoleon to draw him with the patience he gives to a Russian peasant, and the contempt thins the writing whenever Napoleon is on the page. The First Epilogue’s domestic settling has divided readers for a hundred and fifty years: some find the heavy-mother Natásha a profound truth about what flames become, some find her a betrayal of the girl, and Tolstoy is plainly aware of both readings and refuses to choose. Princess Márya is the character Tolstoy loves most uncomplicatedly and therefore the one he is least curious about; she is good in a way that makes her slightly less alive than the others. And the length is the length. Anyone who tells you it doesn’t drag is lying. It drags. You should let it.

What a modern reader should take from it. Two things, mainly. First, the specific Tolstoyan conviction that the people running history don’t understand what they’re doing, and that the actual texture of life happens below the level of the official story. This is more useful in 2026 than it was in 1869, because we now have an entire industry of confidently-narrated explanations for events whose actual causes are fifty million people doing fifty million things at once, and Tolstoy is the writer who will inoculate you against believing the explanations. Second, and harder to articulate: he will train your eye to see the moments that count. Most novels train you to look for plot. War and Peace trains you to look at a hundred and thirty borzois moving across a wet field, or a girl who has never been to a ball watching the first couple step out, or an old peasant telling a story about going to fetch wood, and to recognize that if anything was ever happening to you, it was happening then.

Read it slowly. It is not supposed to feel fast. If you give it three months and read forty pages a night you will have one of the experiences that most justify being literate, and at the end you will close it and think about the people in your own house with a slightly different attention, which is probably the only serious thing a novel can do.