It is about history, and both the tsar and Napoleon make awesome appearances. Its details are not exquisite recreations of lost practice, but ways in which an individual psychology can engage with the real world.

(After 300 pages, you will agree that this is the best way to write a novel.)Ĥ This is not a historical novel, but a novel that discusses events of the recent past within the memory of many of Tolstoy’s first readers. It doesn’t mean that the consciousness of the moment has any particular importance it is just how these events were seen by one particular observer, and another observer will take up the baton in a page or two. The subject of the book is the wildness of possibility, and how the world can be changed by one woman saying, for no particular reason that she can explain, “I have had so little happiness in my life.”ģ The novel has a particular technical feature it passes from mind to mind, showing us the world as a consciousness moves through it. Even the characters won’t be able to explain why they do what they do, perhaps until weeks or months later.

Don’t expect to be able to predict what happens. The book will try to understand why people behave as they do, and it may make the best case possible for some strange actions, but it won’t make apologies for anyone and won’t pass a final judgment. It understands and sympathises with those ideas but it excuses itself from repeating them. It forgives ideas of heroism, most beautifully in the last words any character speaks in the book, as Andrei’s son thinks of his father at the end of the First Epilogue. Andrei Bolkonsky is not Tolstoy’s hero, and Natasha is not a romantic heroine. This is the story of a group of people living within a society. The miracle of the book is that the Natasha who falls in love with anyone and everyone in the ballrooms of the opening is recognisably the same woman who withdraws from society at the end.Ģ There is no hero and no heroine.

The characters in War and Peace endure extreme experiences, and emerge at the end as quite different people.

War and peace tolstoy book