If ever there was an epic novel, War and Peace is that novel. Its 1440 pages cover 1805 to 1813, which encompasses the period leading up to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia to a few years after his ultimate defeat. This is a review of an edition translated by Rosemary Edmonds and first published in 1957.
The novel’s main characters are nearly all members of the aristocracy. There are three main male characters:
Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov. He inherits the Count’s fortune when he dies early in the novel. Pierre is a freethinking and sometimes reckless man who wants to know the truth of what really is happening in Russia and the world at large. He is a genuine socialist who wants to improve the lives of his peasant workers.
Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky is the son of Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky. He is a brave and somewhat arrogant soldier who enthusiastically marches to war seeking glory.
Nikolai Rostov is the eldest Rostov son. He also enthusiastically enlists in the Russian military, but his war experience is very different from Andrei Bolhonsky’s.
The two main female characters are:
Natasha Rostov, who is a very naïve and self-centred teenager. She is engaged to marry Prince Bolkonsky but is happiest when she is in the presence of Pierre Bezukhov. Her faithfulness is tested by Bolkonsky’s frequent absences.
Princess Maria Bolkonskaya lives with her father, who treats her harshly in an attempt to break her will and any desire she has to get married and leave his side. Maria uses religion to find meaning in her life and spiritually escape her father.
Apart from being a story about war and whether the main characters will survive, the novel is somewhat of a love story. Prince Bolkonsky’s father is very much against his son marrying Natasha Rostov, as he considers her family inferior. Will they get married, or will she ditch her betrothed and end up with her confidante Pierre Bezukhov? Readers will also want to find out if Maria can escape the grip of her domineering father.
The blurb on the back of the novel says it gives a complete picture of the Russia of the day. It does not, as the novel overwhelmingly focuses on the Russian aristocracy. The peasants and working class of Russia barely get a mention except when interacting with the aristocracy, which usually involves them being ordered to do some tasks. In many ways, the lower classes seem completely disposable, such as when Emperor Alexander orders the aristocracy to send 10 per cent of the men working on their estates to fight in the war.
The novel could be seen as Tolstoy critiquing Russian society at the time or Tolstoy just showing it like it was without questioning the ethics of the aristocracy and their lack of caring about the proletariat. An example of this indifference occurs when the Rostovs are evacuating Moscow before Napoleon’s forces attack. They fill 23 wagons with their belongings while hundreds of wounded soldiers lie around their estate. Only when Natasha intervenes, in one of her more enlightened moments, do they decide to leave some of their precious possessions and take some of the wounded with them. During the evacuation, the Rostovs realise they have left valuable possessions at their estate, so they send servants to retrieve them, putting them at risk of running into the invading French army. Leo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, was born into the aristocracy, so maybe he was just showing the interactions between the aristocracy and the rest of society as they were at the time without any moral judgment. If the aristocracy treated the proletariat in real life as they do in the novel, it is no wonder Russia had a revolution.
The novel is written in a different style from most novels. Many sections of the book begin with Tolstoy stating his preferred version of what historians said happened at the time. He frequently debates the reasons for specific events, and then the novel returns to the story. He ends the novel with 40 pages questioning the different versions of history around the Napoleonic wars and whether people’s actions during that war were guided by free will or necessity. He concludes that history is the product of necessity.
Tolstoy goes into a lot of detail with the battle scenes. He knew about war and the military as he served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War. He was involved in the siege of Sevastopol, which had around 250,000 casualties. During that war, Tolstoy was recognised for his courage and promoted to lieutenant, but he was appalled by the number of deaths he saw in that war and left the army at the end of the Crimean War. Some battles he describes in War and Peace have massive casualties, over a hundred thousand in a single day. Tolstoy wrote War and Peace in 1867.
Some of the strategies and deceptions carried out by both sides in the novel surprise. At one battle, French officers, under a flag of truce, ride into a Russian camp and convince the Russian commander that the Russians have surrendered. The commander then lets the entire French army cross a bridge to advance further into Russia. In the novel, nations frequently swap sides, sometimes fighting with the French, as Russia did, sometimes fighting with the Russians against the French. Another surprise is that the Russian army retreats a lot and rarely engages the French in battle. The Russians also have a hopeless chain of command complicated by too many generals who frequently ignore orders because they think they know better, don’t like the Russian commander, or think it might advance their careers to have the commander lose a battle.
Apart from the surprises in the war strategies, readers unfamiliar with Russian history would probably be surprised at the vast size of the aristocracy and their influence on Russian society at that time. Many of the aristocracy spoke French and had frequently visited France. The aristocracy immediately became officers when they joined the army, seemingly without military training. Officers had to buy their own uniforms (maybe this is why the aristocracy were made officers, as normal citizens could not afford to buy uniforms). Another surprise is that masons were allowed to operate in Russia.
As mentioned, the novel spends a lot of time with the aristocracy. The main role of women seems to be arranging dinner parties and balls while seeking men of their own social ranking or above to marry their daughters. They invite provocateurs to stir up debate at the dinner parties. The provocateurs often speak about the war, spreading totally incorrect rumours about how the war is going and who is responsible for a victory or loss. Pierre Bezukhov is one of the few who questions the rumours.
The novel does a great job of exploring its central characters. Like real people, the characters have many faults. Each of the central characters changes throughout the novel. But not all of them make it to the end. Pierre is probably the most admirable character as he tries to understand and make the world a better place. However, due to his non-aristocratic background, he is continually misled by those around him. His naivety also causes him to put himself in perilous situations. Another character who eventually grows is Natasha, who, after a particularly selfish act, starts thinking more about others than her own beautiful self.
The novel’s prose is easy enough to read, even if it is more formal and denser than in today’s novels. Tolstoy is big on landscape descriptions when describing battle scenes. However, he habitually calls characters different names or just uses their title, so the list of principal characters at the novel’s start becomes a much-used reference. Tolstoy obviously loved his characters and wrote about them with great empathy, even the somewhat reprehensible ones. The book occasionally uses French terms or phrases, the meaning of which usually becomes apparent by the words around them. Readers might also find themselves googling items or events mentioned in the novel to find out what they are and more about them.
There are some questionable aspects of the novel, such as Pierre trudging through snow, day after day, with no proper boots in the freezing Russian winter. Would his feet not get frostbite and cause him to be unable to walk any further? And he is saved a couple of times by almost deus ex machina interventions.
Tolstoy was not a fan of the press back then. He felt it was full of falsehoods and propaganda. He called printed matter “the most powerful engine of ignorance”. He was also not an admirer of Napolean. Tolstoy did not think Napoleon was the genius many historians of the time said he was. Ultimately, the Russians didn’t beat the French; Napolean’s arrogance defeated the French, killing about three million people along the way.
War and Peace is a grand adventure with dramatic elements that can verge on soap opera. It is much more than just a book about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia; it gives the reader an insight into Russian society at the time and inadvertently shows why the Russians had a revolution. It is full of flawed characters who go on expansive growth arcs. It is an epic worth putting aside a couple of months to read. But it is not, as some claim, the greatest novel ever written. 1984 probably holds that spot.