Title: War and Peace Author: Leo Tolstoy Creation Date: 1869 Location: Russia Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
War and Peace was published by Leo Tolstoy in serialized form between 1865 and 1869, first in the journal Russky Vestnik, and then revised for book publication in 1869. Tolstoy revised the novel substantially again in 1873, removing the philosophical digressions that had become one of its most discussed features, before restoring them in a final version that is the standard text today. The novel covers the years 1805 to 1812, from the Third Coalition against Napoleon through Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the burning of Moscow, and then adds an epilogue set in 1820. Its central characters are three members of the Russian aristocracy — Pierre Bezukhov, Natasha Rostova, and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky — tracked through war, peace, and the transformation of Russia.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin read War and Peace multiple times and wrote about Tolstoy in a series of articles between 1908 and 1911, prompted by the centenary of the 1812 war and by Tolstoy's death in 1910. The Lenin-Tolstoy relationship was one of the great ambivalent intellectual encounters in Russian history. Lenin thought Tolstoy was a genius and a social contradiction: he saw the injustice of the Russian aristocratic order clearly, portrayed it with devastating accuracy, but his prescription — pacifism, moral self-improvement, "non-resistance to evil" — was, from Lenin's perspective, precisely what the ruling class needed the peasantry to believe. Tolstoy was "the mirror of the Russian Revolution" because he reflected its contradictions without resolving them.
The novel's structure alternates between war sequences (Austerlitz, Borodino, the retreat from Moscow) and peace sequences (Moscow and Petersburg society, the Rostov country estate at Otradnoye, Pierre's spiritual and social wandering). Interspersed are philosophical chapters, addressed directly to the reader, arguing against the Great Man theory of history — the view that Napoleon decided the outcome of battles and wars — in favor of a determinist account in which millions of individual acts, none of them decisive in isolation, aggregate into historical outcomes. This argument, embedded in a novel, was what Lenin found most interesting about it: Tolstoy had grasped something true about the collective nature of historical force, then drawn the wrong conclusions about what to do with that insight.
The Country
Russia in the 1860s was a country trying to decide whether it belonged to Europe or to itself. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 — the year Tolstoy began serious work on War and Peace — had removed the legal foundation of the old aristocratic order without replacing it with anything that worked. Alexander II's Great Reforms were modernising the army, the judiciary, and local government, but the fundamental questions remained unanswered: what was Russia's place among nations, and what kind of society should it become?
The 1812 war against Napoleon was the event that had made these questions possible. Before Borodino and the burning of Moscow, Russia had been a semi-peripheral European power whose aristocracy spoke French and whose peasantry spoke Russian and the two populations barely overlapped. The expulsion of Napoleon — accomplished not by a brilliant strategy but by the sheer absorptive capacity of Russian winter and Russian space — created for the first time a Russian national consciousness that included both the aristocrat and the serf. The officers who returned from Paris in 1815 with liberal ideas and conspiratorial habits became the Decembrists of 1825; the peasants who had burned their own villages to deny Napoleon shelter became the foundation myth of Russian popular courage.
Tolstoy was writing in the aftermath of the Crimean War (1853–56), whose humiliating defeat had exposed the backwardness of the Russian military and state apparatus. The response was reform — but reform raised the question of what Russian civilisation was for, if not the maintenance of the aristocratic order that had produced both the glory of 1812 and the disaster of 1856. The Slavophiles argued for a distinctly Russian path grounded in Orthodoxy and the peasant commune; the Westernisers argued for modernisation along European lines. Tolstoy belonged to neither camp and to both: he was an aristocrat who believed in the peasantry, a Westernised intellectual who rejected Western rationalism, a man who had seen war firsthand in the Caucasus and at Sevastopol and who knew that the heroic narratives told about it were lies.
War and Peace was his attempt to tell the truth about 1812 — to strip the national myth of its official grandeur and show what actually happened: not the decisions of generals but the accumulated weight of millions of individual acts, most of them confused, most of them frightened, most of them brave in ways that no one would remember.
The Writer
Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born on 9 September 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate south of Moscow, into the Russian landed aristocracy at its most secure and its most troubled. He was orphaned young — his mother died when he was two, his father when he was nine — and raised by relatives. He studied at Kazan University without distinction, returned to the estate, attempted to improve the lives of his serfs and failed, gambled, drank, and finally enlisted in the army in 1851, serving in the Caucasus and then at Sevastopol during the Crimean War. His Sevastopol Sketches (1855), published while the siege was still underway, made him famous at twenty-seven: they described war without glory, suffering without redemption, and the specific textures of fear, boredom, and mutilation that the official dispatches left out.
By the time he began War and Peace in 1863 he was already the author of Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, and The Cossacks, and was married to Sophia Andreyevna Behrs, who was eighteen to his thirty-four. Sophia became the novel's first reader and its copyist — she transcribed the manuscript seven times as Tolstoy revised — and the marriage, which would later collapse under the weight of Tolstoy's moral mania, was in these years a working partnership of extraordinary productivity.
Tolstoy's method was archaeological. He read everything available on the 1812 campaign — memoirs, dispatches, French and Russian military histories — and then systematically dismantled the heroic narrative they told. He visited the battlefield at Borodino in 1867, walking the terrain with maps. He interviewed survivors and their descendants. And then he wrote a novel that argued, through its characters and through long philosophical digressions addressed directly to the reader, that the standard account of the war was wrong: Napoleon did not decide to invade Russia; Kutuzov did not decide to abandon Moscow; no one decided anything. Events on this scale are not decided. They happen, and the people caught inside them understand what happened only afterward, and usually incorrectly.
He worked on the novel for six years, from 1863 to 1869, publishing it in serial form in Russky Vestnik before revising it heavily for the book edition. The philosophical chapters — the passages where Tolstoy breaks from the story to argue with historians — were controversial from the start; he removed them in an 1873 revision, then restored them. They remain the novel's most debated feature and its most original contribution: a theory of history embedded in a novel, arguing that the novel form is better equipped to describe historical reality than the discipline of history itself.
The Reckoning
The novel was a sensation on publication. Russian readers recognised in it something that no previous Russian novel had attempted: a panoramic treatment of Russian society at its most consequential historical moment, written with a psychological depth that made Stendhal and Balzac look schematic by comparison. Turgenev, who had been the leading Russian novelist, read it with admiration and unease; he thought it magnificent and overstuffed, a cathedral with too many side chapels. Dostoevsky admired it from a greater distance. Flaubert, reading the French translation in the 1880s, exclaimed: "What an artist and what a psychologist!"
The novel's political afterlife was shaped by Lenin's engagement with it. In a series of articles published between 1908 and 1911, Lenin argued that Tolstoy was "the mirror of the Russian Revolution" — a writer who saw the contradictions of Russian society with devastating clarity but whose aristocratic position and moral philosophy prevented him from drawing the correct conclusions. Tolstoy understood that history was made by collective forces, not great men; but instead of organising those forces, he preached non-resistance and individual moral improvement. Lenin found the diagnosis indispensable and the prescription useless. In the Soviet period the novel was treated as a national treasure — it confirmed the greatness of Russian culture — while Tolstoy's pacifism was quarantined as a class limitation.
Internationally, War and Peace became the reference point for what a novel could be. Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and later writers like Vasily Grossman (whose Life and Fate was explicitly modelled on it) all worked in its shadow. It established the convention that a novel could contain philosophy, military history, domestic comedy, and spiritual crisis in a single structure, and that the ambition to do so was not grandiosity but necessity.
The novel has been translated into virtually every written language and has never gone out of print. Its philosophical argument — that history is not shaped by the decisions of leaders but by the aggregate behaviour of millions — remains as radical now as when Tolstoy wrote it. It is one of the few novels that even people who have not read it know they should, and one of the fewer still that rewards the reading with more than the reputation promised.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's 2007 translation has become the standard English edition — praised for its fidelity to Tolstoy's distinctive 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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