War and Peace — themes & analysis

Tolstoy’s historical argument runs against the grain of every nineteenth-century history written about the period. He argues that Napoleon does not move armies; armies move themselves and Napoleon takes credit. The famous chapters on the Battle of Borodino describe a battle in which neither commander could see what was happening, orders were carried by aides on horseback who arrived too late or were killed on the way, regiments marched in the wrong direction because their colonels misheard, soldiers fired without aiming, and the outcome was decided by hundreds of thousands of unrelated small acts that no commander on either side had imagined or willed.

Pierre, who has come to the field as a civilian observer wanting to see history happen, finds himself standing in a battery without orders, helping to pass shells, and afterwards cannot reconstruct what he did or why. This is Tolstoy’s image of historical causation: not a plan executed, but a pressure distributed across a hundred thousand bodies doing what they happen to do.

The two long epilogues at the end of the book argue the case explicitly. History is the sum of motives so numerous and small that no historian can recover them. The mathematical metaphor in the second epilogue is that history works in differential calculus: the macroscopic event is the integral of an unimaginable number of microscopic acts of will, and the historian who tries to read it back from the macroscopic to a single cause is doing arithmetic where calculus is required.

The argument is still controversial and still compelling. Any contemporary debate about whether one leader or another made some large outcome happen is, knowingly or not, in this argument.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (Anna Pavlovna’s salon), Chapter 68 (Austerlitz, the sky), Chapter 191 (Borodino begins), Chapter 354 (Second Epilogue, the argument).

Tolstoy gives each of his four central characters the time to develop, fail, change, marry the wrong person, lose what they thought they wanted, and become someone unrecognizable from where they began. There are no shortcuts. Pierre’s arc spans fifteen years and includes a duel, a Masonic conversion he half-believes in, a captivity that comes within an hour of execution, a friendship with a peasant who resets him from inside, and a slow ordinary marriage to Natasha that is described with the same careful attention as the catastrophes of his youth.

Natasha is thirteen at her first appearance, dancing in a corridor, and pushing thirty by the second epilogue, where she is a slightly heavy mother of four who has stopped singing. Tolstoy’s evident approval of her matron’s life, and many readers’ dismay at it, is itself part of the argument. The fullness of a life is not the brilliance of any one of its phases but the willingness to live each phase completely as it comes.

Andrei dies. Marya, who has been kept on the family estate at Bald Hills by her bullying old father and has long since stopped expecting any happiness for herself, marries Natasha’s brother Nikolai and becomes the moral centre of the closing chapters.

Tolstoy’s method is to refuse summary. A character who matters is allowed to be all the things they are over time, including the embarrassing and the dull and the unexpectedly competent. Reading the novel is closer to watching real people live than any other novel of the nineteenth century.

Where to follow it: Chapter 2 (Natasha first appears), Chapter 28 (Pierre after Austerlitz), Chapter 338 (the survivors, 1820).

Pierre and Andrei spend most of the novel asking how to live well. They try wealth, romantic love, war, philosophy, Freemasonry, religion, asceticism, the ordinary domestic round, and explicit philosophical conversation with each other on what human existence is for. Andrei is given the dazzling answer at Austerlitz — staring up at the infinite sky after his wound, the small ambitions of his old life suddenly visible as the small things they always were — and is then given a life in which that revelation has to be lived day by day, and dies trying.

Pierre is given the more durable answer through Platon Karataev, a captured peasant fellow prisoner during the French retreat, whose cheerful acceptance of suffering and immediate kindness toward strangers is the closest the novel comes to a working model. Karataev is not idealized; Tolstoy paints him in three short scenes, lets him die without ceremony along the road as the French shoot stragglers, and refuses to let Pierre romanticize him afterwards.

What the figure does is loosen something in Pierre that the previous decade of effort had not loosened. By the first epilogue Pierre is married to Natasha and has begun to participate in what will become the Decembrist movement. He is still searching. The novel refuses a clean formula — it puts a serious adult question at the centre of fiction and lets it stay open across decades of fictional time.

Where to follow it: Chapter 4 (Pierre returns from Paris), Chapter 68 (Andrei at Austerlitz), Chapter 262 (Karataev), Chapter 346 (Pierre and Natasha, 1820).

We meet Natasha at thirteen in 1805, dancing in a corridor of her parents’ Moscow house with no premonition of the world about to come down on it. She is not the cleverest character in the book — Andrei is cleverer, Marya is more learned, Helene is more cunning. She is the most fully alive.

Tolstoy lets her be everything in turn. She is exuberant at the family hunt in Volume Two and dances a Russian peasant dance at her uncle’s house that she has never been taught and somehow knows. She makes her debut at the great ball of 1810 in a passage Tolstoy revises until it carries the entire weight of her arrival in the world. She falls in love with Andrei, is engaged to him for a year while he is abroad, nearly elopes with the worthless Anatole Kuragin, breaks her engagement, and is shattered by what she has done.

As Moscow is evacuated in front of the French in 1812, she and her family load their carts with their furniture; Natasha sees the wounded soldiers being left behind and forces her parents, in tears, to throw the furniture off and load the soldiers instead. One of the soldiers turns out to be Andrei. She nurses him as he dies. She marries Pierre in 1813.

By the second epilogue, in 1820, she is twenty-eight, has four children, has gained weight, and has stopped singing. Critics for a hundred and fifty years have been disappointed by the matron she becomes. Tolstoy is not. The argument the novel makes through her is that the fullness of a life is not the brilliance of any one of its phases but the willingness to live each phase completely as it comes.

Where to follow it: Chapter 2 (first appearance), Chapter 20 (Natasha’s first ball), Chapter 246 (the carts, the soldiers), Chapter 347 (Natasha, 1820).

Tolstoy refused to call War and Peace a novel because the form he was inventing did not fit the category. There are roughly three kinds of writing in the book and they are not separated into different sections; they alternate freely from chapter to chapter, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph. There is the family chronicle — the salons, the country estates, the ballroom, the hunt, the engagement, the wedding, the deathbed. There is the war narrative — the campaign of 1805 ending at Austerlitz, the French invasion of 1812, the battles of Borodino and Krasnoye, the long retreat. And there is the philosophical essay — short interpolations in the body of the novel, then the long sustained second epilogue.

The choice not to separate these three was deliberate and is part of the book’s argument. A life is not lived in one register at a time. A young officer at Austerlitz is not in a war novel; he is in his life, which has war in it that day. A young woman at her first ball is not in a love story; she is in her life, which has a ball in it that night.

The result is a form that is structurally untidy and emotionally exact, that is impossible to imitate and has rarely been attempted since, and that remains, almost a hundred and sixty years after publication, the standard against which large ambition in fiction is measured.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (drawing room, opening), Chapter 66 (Austerlitz battle), Chapter 191 (Borodino, history argument), Chapter 353 (Second Epilogue begins).