War & Peace

At some point last year, wanting to make better use of the time on my hands, I decided to combat my literary ignorance by reading some of the high-profile novels that I missed through my hitherto sparse literary education. Logically, I searched the numerous lists of highly rated books and tried to find titles or authors that I had at least heard of to start with. War and Peace made the top of most lists, so it is there that I started. Since odds are that most of my blog readers will not find the time to read such an intensive tome, I wanted to essentially review the book and try to explain why this book is so highly regarded. Also, this review is spoiler-free, so if this sort of thing seems up your alley, feel free to pick-up a copy and discover it’s intricacies for yourself.



Leo Tolstoy once said of War and Peace that it is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle." With the average English translation coming in at more the 560,000 words on about 1,400 pages, War and Peace is undoubtedly an epic. The reason for the author’s enigmatic description of his work is the diversity of genres that Tolstoy employs to achieve his many aims for this text: a semi-historical account of the Napoleonic Wars, the invasion of Russia, and the burning of Moscow; a philosophical treatise on free-will, heroic figures, and causes of the course of human history; and most prominently a novel revolving around the intertwining lives of five Russian aristocratic families. The novelistic portion is significant because it is through the interactions of the characters both with each other and historical events that Tolstoy relays the historical account and illustrates his philosophic messages.

For example, relatively early in the book, the character Prince Andrei is allowed through connections he has made on his rise to modest societal prominence to sit in on the planning meeting of the Allied generals prior to the critical battle with Napoleon at Austerlitz. As a fly on the wall, the reader is allowed to hear the varied and mutually exclusive plans of the various generals. Once the loudest voices assert their dominance, the meeting adjourns and a widely criticized plan is dispersed for the battle the following day.


We then see the battle both from the perspective of Prince Andrei, who is serving as an adjutant to an old general, and from Nikolai Rostov, another main character who is a young hussar blindly serving his beloved Emperor. Through the accounts of these two characters we learn that the plans from the previous night were both flawed and not carried out. Sometimes a stubborn general whose views were spurned in the deliberations would simply not act out his orders. Other times the choice of a single infantryman could change the course of the entire battle.


Tolstoy would then write an essay on various larger ideas that are illustrated by such events. To start, it was not the genius or greatness of Napoleon the won the battle of Austerlitz. In fact the battle did not progress in the fashion that any general on either side had strategized. The choices of individual men, with little regard to rank or perceived importance, decided the pattern of events that unfolded. This idea is the crux of the book. “Great” people, as deemed by historians are no more in control of the course of human events than the lowliest serf.


At one point, Tolstoy employs the most remarkable analogy to illustrate the point. In calculus (yes, the scary math discipline), the area under a curve is estimated by taking infinitesimally slim rectangles and adding their respective areas together. The idea is that one can crudely estimate a curve with just a few rectangles, but the more rectangles one uses, the more accurate the estimation. Calculus allows mathematicians (and all manner of social and physical scientists) to calculate the exact area by adding infinite rectangles of infinitesimally small width.


Tolstoy posits that historians could really only grasp the true causes of an event if they could somehow add up every action, thought, and predisposition of each person involved. This is, of course infeasible, but the point is that by attributing the causes of historical events to the actions of a handful of “great” men, a historian would only be providing a very crude estimation of the true circumstances.


This idea leads to several of the major philosophical ideas presented at the end of the book, including a paradoxical proof of the necessity and inherent lack of free-will in human actions. But for the sake our collective sanity, I will save this discussion for another time.


All deep thoughts and historical proofs aside, the most resonant aspect of this book, for me, was the elaborate collection of characters. Over the course of the book, the reader follows characters from childhood to parentage. We watch as children mature through adulthood, as the old diminish and decay, and as the torch of responsibility is passed from generation to generation.


It’s not hard to find elements of yourself and everyone you know in them. Tolstoy can describe subtle movements, emotions, and motives with such deft skill that I often felt almost embarrassed that someone has seen through the veil that everyone, including myself, hides behind to protect our true feelings. I find it remarkable that this book was written nearly 150 years ago and human nature has not fundamentally changed in any way.


Humans can be noble and virtuous as readily as we are wicked and corrupt. Tolstoy doesn’t pass judgment on his species, but rather illustrates who we are and leaves it to the reader to conclude what one will. Our kind has come a long way since the 1800s technologically, but we are the same fundamental beings that we have been since far before that. If extraterrestrials landed and asked for some reading on our species, I’d probably give them an anatomy book, the Constitution, and War and Peace. At least to start…