History Is Not Made by Great Men — War and Peace

Title: War and Peace Author: Leo Tolstoy Creation Date: 1869 Location: Russia

Summary

War and Peace follows three aristocratic Russian families — the Rostovs, the Bolkonskys, and the Bezukhovs — across the Napoleonic Wars from 1805 to 1812 and its turbulent aftermath. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky rides to war seeking glory and finds disillusionment instead, lying wounded at Austerlitz beneath a sky that renders all ambition absurd. Pierre Bezukhov, an awkward illegitimate heir to a vast fortune, stumbles through Freemasonry, a disastrous marriage, and the carnage of Borodino in his restless search for meaning. Natasha Rostova grows from an exuberant, impulsive girl into a woman forged by love, grief, and the violence of occupation. The novel moves between intimate domestic scenes and sweeping battle panoramas, culminating in Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the burning of Moscow, and the French army's catastrophic winter retreat. Throughout, philosophical essays interrupt the narrative to press Tolstoy's central conviction: great men do not drive history — history drives them.

Why This Book Matters

War and Peace is the most ambitious attempt in European literature to hold the totality of human experience within a single work — the private and the public, the domestic and the military, the fleeting and the historical. Tolstoy's radical argument runs through every page: history is not made by great men such as Napoleon or Kutuzov but by the accumulated weight of millions of individual decisions, accidents, and failures of nerve. This struck directly at the Great Man theory that dominated 19th-century historiography, and it still unsettles comfortable assumptions about power and agency. Yet the novel's enduring claim on readers is not philosophical but sensory: Natasha at her first ball, Prince Andrei lying wounded at Austerlitz watching clouds drift across an infinite sky, Pierre wandering in bewildered terror through Borodino. These are scenes that do not merely describe human experience — they deliver it, with a vividness no other novelist has equalled.

Historical Context

Tolstoy composed War and Peace through the 1860s, serialising it in Russky Vestnik from 1865 to 1867 before the complete novel appeared in 1869. The writing years coincided with the Great Reforms — above all the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 — when Russia was confronting its feudal past and its ambivalent relationship to Western Europe. By anchoring the novel in Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia, Tolstoy engaged directly with the foundational myth of modern Russian national identity: the patriotic resistance that drove the Grande Armée to destruction in the winter retreat from Moscow. His research was exhaustive — military histories, memoirs, interviews with surviving witnesses — yet his account consistently undermines official heroic narratives, depicting Borodino and the campaigns around it as chaotic, contingent, and ungovernable by any commander's will. The official story of 1812 and Tolstoy's version have competed ever since.

Literary Significance

Tolstoy's method is radical realism: he renders physical sensation, social convention, and interior consciousness with the same precision, refusing to privilege any register over another. His narrative moves without effort between the close focus of a character's half-formed thought and the panoramic sweep of armies in motion across a continent. The novel's structure is deliberately anti-novelistic — no single plot, no single protagonist, and philosophical digressions that violate every convention of prose fiction — yet the cumulative effect is not formlessness but amplitude, the sense of life recorded at full scale. Isaiah Berlin's celebrated essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" used Tolstoy's conflicted intellectual position as its central metaphor. The major English translations — Aylmer Maude's, Constance Garnett's, and the more recent Pevear-Volokhonsky — each reflect different ideas about how much of Tolstoy's weight the English language can bear.

Research Notes

War and Peace is non-negotiable for the Russian civilisation segment and arguably the single most important novel written in any language. Serialised in Russky Vestnik from 1865 to 1867, the complete novel was published in 1869 and immediately recognised as sui generis. The three principal English translations each have a constituency: Aylmer Maude's has the confidence of a contemporary who knew Tolstoy personally; Constance Garnett's has long been the readable standard; the Pevear-Volokhonsky is the current critical favourite, though some find its literalness at odds with Tolstoy's prose rhythms. The novel's length is its main barrier, but Tolstoy's narrative momentum is genuine — the pages move. First-time readers need not be daunted by the philosophical essays: they can be read carefully, engaged with lightly, or skimmed entirely without losing the thread of Pierre Bezukhov, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, and Natasha Rostova.

The Reading

Volume One: 1805

"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes." Anna Pavlovna Scherer's drawing room in St. Petersburg, July 1805. The hostess, a lady-in-waiting to the Empress, orchestrates her soiree with the precision of a foreman at a spinning mill, steering conversations, separating quarrellers, producing topics of interest. The talk is of Napoleon, who has just been crowned Emperor of France and whose armies threaten all of Europe. Into this gilded world come the two young men whose fates will carry everything forward.

Anna Pavlovna's gilded St Petersburg drawing room — candles, silks, and the murmur of Napoleon's name circulating like a contagion.

Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is handsome, coldly intelligent, and bored to death by society. His beautiful wife, the little Princess Lise, is pregnant, and he treats her with weary courtesy. Andrei is leaving for the war — not from patriotism but from a desperate need to escape the suffocating emptiness of his life. He dreams of glory, of his own Toulon, a moment of heroic action that will give his existence meaning.

Prince Andrei in greatcoat at the threshold, Lise's pale hand on the doorframe — a husband leaving for the war his marriage cannot hold him from.

Pierre Bezukhov is Andrei's opposite: large, clumsy, bespectacled, earnest, perpetually out of place. He is the illegitimate son of the enormously wealthy Count Bezukhov, and when the old count dies, Pierre inherits his vast fortune and finds himself suddenly one of the richest men in Russia. Prince Vasily Kuragin, a scheming courtier, manoeuvres Pierre into marriage with his daughter Helene — a woman of breathtaking beauty and absolute emptiness. The marriage is a disaster from the first night.

The old Count Bezukhov on his deathbed beneath ikons and candlelight — courtiers circling for the will that will remake Pierre's life.

At the Rostov household in Moscow, life is warm and chaotic. Count and Countess Rostov preside over a generous, debt-ridden family. Their eldest son Nikolai, ardent and uncomplicated, has enlisted in the hussars. Their daughter Natasha, thirteen years old, is a force of pure vitality — singing, dancing, laughing, demanding that everyone around her be happy. She is the embodiment of the conviction that life, felt fully, is its own justification.

Natasha mid-dance at the Rostov name-day, lamplight on a crowded table — a household whose generosity outruns its accounts.

At the old Bolkonsky estate of Bald Hills, Prince Andrei's father — the fierce, eccentric old Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky — tyrannises his daughter Marya with his intellect and his temper. Princess Marya is deeply religious, plain-faced, and possessed of beautiful luminous eyes. She endures her father's cruelty with a patience that is not weakness but strength.

The war begins. Prince Andrei serves as aide-de-camp to General Kutuzov at the Battle of Austerlitz. There is no Olympian overview of battle, no coherent strategic narrative. Instead, there is confusion, fog, orders that arrive too late, regiments that fire on their own side, officers who cannot find their units. In the midst of this chaos, Andrei seizes a fallen standard and leads a charge. He is wounded and falls.

Russian columns marching in grey light beneath low banners — a vast machine moving toward Austerlitz with no one truly in command.

He lies on his back on the battlefield, looking up at the sky. "How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as it was when I was running," he thinks. "How was it I did not see this lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last. Yes! All is vanity, all is delusion, except these infinite heavens." Napoleon himself rides past the wounded and remarks that here is "a fine death." But Andrei, gazing at the infinite sky, finds Napoleon suddenly small and insignificant. The dream of glory has been shattered by the real experience of war.

Andrei on his back at Austerlitz, the fallen standard beside him, the infinite Russian sky vast and indifferent above.

Volume Two: 1806–1811

The years between wars are the deepest subject. Pierre, trapped in his miserable marriage, discovers that Helene has been unfaithful. He fights a duel with her lover Dolokhov — Pierre, who has never held a pistol, somehow wounds the experienced duelist — and then separates from his wife. Lost and despairing, he turns to Freemasonry, drawn to its promise of moral improvement and spiritual truth. He throws himself into philanthropic projects, attempting to free his serfs and improve their conditions, but his efforts founder on the resistance of his stewards and his own lack of practical ability. Pierre's quest for meaning leads him through one enthusiasm after another, each time approaching something real and each time falling short.

Pierre at dawn in a snowy clearing, pistol heavy in his hand, Dolokhov falling — a duel won by accident, not skill.

Andrei returns from the war transformed. His wife Lise dies in childbirth, her small face frozen in an expression that seems to say: "What have you done to me?" The guilt of this — that he had wished to be free of her — settles into him like a stone. He retreats to his country estate and devotes himself to practical reforms, convinced that life offers nothing beyond duty.

Lise lifeless on the bed, her small reproachful face turned upward, Andrei standing at the doorway too late.

But in the spring, driving through a forest, Andrei sees a gnarled old oak tree, still bare while everything around it bursts with green. "Spring, and love, and happiness!" the oak seems to say. "How can you not be weary of that same stupid, meaningless deception?" On the way back, weeks later, the same oak is covered in dark green leaves. "No, life is not over at thirty-one," Andrei thinks, and a feeling of springtime joy floods through him.

The gnarled oak suddenly in full green leaf among the birches — life refusing the verdict Andrei had given it.

He meets Natasha at a ball. She is sixteen, in her first society season, trembling with excitement and terror. Andrei asks her to dance. The bare shoulders, the shy smile, the way Natasha's joy makes her beautiful. Andrei falls in love. He proposes; Natasha accepts; but old Prince Bolkonsky, contemptuous of the Rostovs, insists they wait a year.

Natasha in her first white gown stepping into the ballroom's chandelier-light, Andrei turning toward her — the moment a life pivots.

During Andrei's absence, the handsome rake Anatole Kuragin — Helene's brother — pursues Natasha. He flatters her, overwhelms her with attention, and persuades her to elope. The plan is discovered at the last moment. Natasha, shattered by shame, tries to poison herself. When Andrei learns of her betrayal, he returns the letters and considers himself free. Natasha's grief and illness are devastating.

Natasha at a back gate in furs and tears, Anatole's gloved hand reaching for hers — an elopement caught a heartbeat before it ruins her.

Nikolai Rostov serves with the hussars and experiences war's reality — the fear he will not acknowledge, the loyalty to his comrades that becomes the bedrock of his character. On leave, he meets Princess Marya. Something passes between them, though neither is ready to see it.

A troika tearing through moonlit snow, bells in the frozen air — hussars on leave galloping toward home.

Volume Three: 1812

Napoleon invades Russia with the Grande Armée of over six hundred thousand men. The Russian army retreats. No one controls what is happening. Not Napoleon, not Tsar Alexander, not Kutuzov. The movement of armies, the decisions of commanders, the outcome of battles — all are the product of millions of individual impulses, accidents, and circumstances that no human mind can encompass. The Great Man theory of history is a comforting illusion. "A king is the slave of history."

Napoleon astride his horse watching the Grande Armée pour across the Niemen on pontoon bridges — the invasion that will swallow itself.

Russian infantry trudging eastward in summer dust, fields burning behind them — a retreat that is also a strategy no one chose.

The Battle of Borodino. Pierre, who has come to the battlefield as a civilian observer, motivated by an obscure feeling that he must be present at this moment. He wanders through the carnage in his white hat, utterly out of place, watched with bemusement by the soldiers. Through his bewildered eyes, the battle becomes what it was for most participants: incomprehensible violence, ear-splitting noise, smoke so thick that nothing can be seen, men falling everywhere, the sense that something enormous and terrible is happening but no one can say what.

Pierre in his absurd white hat wandering through Borodino's smoke, gunners loading around him — a civilian inside the world's end.

Prince Andrei stands with his regiment in reserve, under artillery fire, forbidden to move or take cover. A shell lands at his feet, spinning on the ground. "Can this be death?" he thinks. "I can't, I don't want to die, I love life, I love this grass, this earth, this air..." The shell explodes. Andrei is wounded in the abdomen.

A shell spinning in the trampled grass at Andrei's boots, his regiment frozen behind him — the second between life and the wound.

In the field hospital, delirious with pain, Andrei sees a man at the next table having his leg amputated — and recognises Anatole Kuragin, the man who nearly ruined Natasha. In this moment, looking at his enemy's sobbing, destroyed face, Andrei feels a rush of love and compassion. "Compassion, love for our brothers, for those who love us, love for those who hate us, love for our enemies — yes, that love which God preached on earth." It is the spiritual climax of his journey.

Lantern-lit field hospital, surgeons at the next table, Andrei recognising Anatole's ruined face — enmity dissolving into pity.

Moscow is abandoned. The Rostov family flees, and Natasha — in a gesture that defines her — insists they throw off their belongings and use the family carts to carry wounded soldiers. Among the wounded, unknown to her, is Prince Andrei.

Moscow rooftops and onion-domes ablaze under a copper sky, abandoned carts in the streets — the city given to fire rather than to Napoleon.

Napoleon enters Moscow and finds it empty. Then the fires begin. The great city burns for days. Pierre, who has stayed behind with a confused notion of assassinating Napoleon, wanders through the burning streets, saves a child from a fire, and is captured by the French as a suspected arsonist. He is brought before a firing squad. Other prisoners are shot before his eyes. This encounter with death strips everything false from Pierre's soul. In the prison camp, he meets Platon Karataev, a simple peasant soldier whose calm acceptance of life, whose effortless faith and kindness, teaches Pierre something that all his books and philosophies could not: "Man is created for happiness. Happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of natural human needs."

Pierre at a stake against a Moscow wall, French muskets levelled, a prisoner crumpling beside him — the moment that empties his soul of everything false.

Volume Four: 1812 and After

Natasha nurses the dying Andrei. Their reunion is quiet and devastating. He has moved beyond personal love into something larger — a love that encompasses everything and everyone. "Love is God, and dying means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source." Natasha cannot follow him there. She loves him with all the fierce, particular, human love that he is leaving behind. He dies.

Natasha kneeling at Andrei's bedside in lamplight, his hand in hers — a love that has nowhere to follow him.

The French retreat from Moscow becomes a catastrophe. Hunger, cold, and Russian guerrilla attacks destroy the Grande Armée. The disintegration unfolds with merciless precision — the soldiers eating their horses, then their boots, then dying in the snow. Pierre marches with the prisoners, growing thinner, weaker, and paradoxically freer. Karataev, too weak to walk, is shot by a guard. Pierre barely registers it; he has learned Karataev's lesson too well to grieve for a single death.

Karataev seated against a birch in the snow with his small dog beside him, a French guard raising a musket — a peasant going gently into death.

Skeletal columns of the Grande Armée stumbling through Russian snow, abandoned cannon and frozen horses — an empire eating itself on the road home.

Pierre is rescued by a Russian partisan detachment. He returns to Moscow, ill and broken, and in his recovery finds that everything has changed. The old anxieties, the restless searching, the need to find meaning in some system or philosophy — all have been burned away. He simply lives. He is kind. He is present.

He and Natasha find each other. Their love is not the moonlit ecstasy of youth but something steadier and deeper. Natasha, who was once all impulse and fire, has been tempered by suffering. Pierre, who was once all confusion and good intentions, has been clarified by his encounter with death. They marry.

Pierre and Natasha at a small Moscow chapel altar, candles between them — a marriage of two people who have already died once.

Nikolai Rostov marries Princess Marya. The Rostov fortune is gone; Marya's fortune restores it. Nikolai becomes a stern, competent landowner, running his estate with the same loyalty and practical decency he brought to his hussar regiment. He and Marya create a household of quiet, deep happiness.

The Rostov-Bolkonsky household at evening — Marya at the samovar, Nikolai at his ledgers, children underfoot — quiet, deep, restored.

Epilogue

The epilogue, set in 1820, shows us the families in domestic peace. Natasha has become a devoted mother and wife — almost unrecognisably changed from the radiant girl of the early volumes. This transformation is not a diminishment but a fulfilment. Pierre is drawn to the secret societies that will eventually produce the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Young Nikolenka, Andrei's son, idolises Pierre and dreams of doing something his dead father would be proud of.

Young Nikolenka gazing up at Pierre by candlelight, a portrait of Andrei on the wall behind them — a boy carrying his father's unfinished dream.

The final chapters are pure philosophy. The theory of history is laid out at length: that the movements of peoples are not caused by the will of great leaders but by forces as impersonal and as powerful as the laws of physics. Free will is an illusion when applied to historical events; what we call leadership is merely the unconscious expression of the collective will. Historians who attribute events to the genius of Napoleon or the wisdom of Kutuzov are like primitive peoples who attribute rain to the will of the gods.

The point is that the meaning of life is not to be found in grand historical action — in Andrei's dream of glory, in Pierre's schemes for reform — but in the ordinary, irreducible moments of being alive: a child laughing, a wife's hand on a husband's arm, the oak tree in spring, the sky over Austerlitz. History grinds on, vast and indifferent. But within it, human beings love, suffer, forgive, and begin again. That is the answer, and it is enough.

This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's 2007 translation (originally Knopf, now widely available in Vintage paperback) has become the standard English edition — praised for its fidelity to Tolstoy's distinctive stylistic shifts between formal and colloquial registers. The Vintage Classics paperback is the most convenient single-volume format.

Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Knopf hardcover edition — the standard scholarly translation, praised for its fidelity to Tolstoy's prose.

Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Vintage Classics paperback — the most accessible and convenient single-volume format of the standard translation.

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