His aim was less to ensure the accuracy of his historical setting, but more to demonstrate the pitfalls of historical records. From the first publication to this day, opinion is divided on the interest and relevance of these historical essays.
He philosophizes! Tolstoy himself found that the inclusion of his historical essays made it hard to categorize his work as a novel. It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed. War and Peace. Home Episodes Clips Features. Tolstoy wrote deeply flawed characters who wrestle with their nature to try and do the right thing for themselves and the people they love.
None of them are perfect, and each and every one of them are so real they might as well crawl out of the book, sit down next to you and tell you their stories — and that is just amazing. In fact, the further I go into the story, the more I grew to appreciate Marya, whom I had originally dismissed as a religious nutcase. I know I would! What a piece of work. She is ultimately the architect of her own downfall, and I felt sad for her near the end, but she is so selfish, manipulative and vicious. Of course, she is using her sexuality, one of the very few powers women had back then, but her deliberate attempt to corrupt Natasha, out of spite towards her husband who admires the young girl so much, is simply egregious.
She eventually forgets that despite being married to the richest man in Russia, some mistakes are just not easily forgiven. I mostly felt bad for Pierre, whose feelings for her were genuine at the beginning yet even he knew something was not quite right with her , and who realized too late that he basically married a viper. Tolstoy is rather coy about her various escapades, which I confess I was slightly disappointed by: I would have enjoyed more sordid details about this notoriously depraved character.
What can I say, her irreducible bubbliness eventually got grating. And what she did to Andrei, in my humble opinion, is unforgivable. I get it, girl: hormones are a thing, and Anatole is a hot scoundrel, but Jesus! Go sit in a snowbank or something, and calm down! I think what I mostly hated about Natasha is that marriage turns her from a spontaneous and lively creature into a bossy matron almost overnight.
Her personality simply vanishes! And you based that character on your wife, Leo? Safe to say her and I would not have been good friends. Marya and Sonya are too good for you. Slimy little social climbing creep, you gross me out. To save Marya from making a really bad decision, I know; I still wanted to chuck the book out the window every time she talked — but that might have knocked out an innocent pedestrian.
But gawd, I was happy when the fighting was over and done with and we could get back to talking about people! It can be interesting, but by then, the actual story is over I talked about it constantly as I was reading it, to my husband and to anyone who was silly enough to ask me what I was reading these days.
I just became completely obsessed. It really got under my skin like few books have done before. To Tolstoy, writing about the generation who fought off Napoleon is a bit like someone my age writing about their grandfather who fought in WWII, there is certainly a certain amount of idealization injected in the story that one needs to be aware of as you travel through this book, as these people were to Tolstoy what the so-called Greatest Generation is to us: we tend to overlook their less honorable moments and focus on their awesomeness.
It certainly makes for more exciting storytelling! He also wanted to convey the idea that history is something that is both influenced and felt by everyone, not just the big names: his slightly outdated theories of historiography aside feel free to skim his appendix on the subject , the idea of showing the impact of major social and political upheaval on the everyday life of a select group of people does shine a light on the fact that we are all affected by what goes on in the world, in small and big ways.
In many instances, his musings about events having not one single cause but a multitude of small ones brought to mind teachings about co-dependent arising, which surprised and fascinated me. As usual with massive classics like this one, they get a bad rep about being too long and dense, the language being too flowery and ornate. This edition also included a helpful list of characters with full Russian names including patronymics , nicknames and common French versions, so you can untangle who is who as you go through the story if you are not familiar with it.
I still think a book this massive requires a good dose of patience, but dismissing its quality based on its age or page count would be a terrible mistake. It is not a perfect book, but it is nevertheless magnificent, very entertaining and important.
I know this might sound difficult to believe, but I had a hard time putting it down, as my sore wrists can attest to. Too lazy to plow through over a thousand pages of epic Russian storytelling? And yes, I know the film with Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrer and Audrey Hepburn is a classic, but may the divine Miss Hepburn forgive me, I found it dated and too clean… It was clearly tailored for its audience, and tiptoed around the more debauched and sordid details — which I happen to enjoy.
View all 44 comments. This Tolstoyan masterpiece is one of the best-written books on War and its effect on people's lives. The War is the Napoleonic war where Russia was invaded by a strong French army conquering Moscow, and the subsequent defeat and flight of the conquering army. Although some of the previous battles such as Austerlitz have been included, the story's "War" was mainly centered on the Napoleonic campaign.
The Peace is somewhat ambiguous but can be surmised as the everyday life of the upper-class This Tolstoyan masterpiece is one of the best-written books on War and its effect on people's lives. The Peace is somewhat ambiguous but can be surmised as the everyday life of the upper-class Russian nobles and the effect of war on them.
Tolstoy interlaces both these parts well and brings to the readers a memorable story. If one sections out the story, one finds three distinctive yet interconnected parts: the war, the peace, and Tolstoy's musings. The war occupies most of the book and dominates the story. Tolstoy with his brilliant writing brings out the brutal side of the war in detail. The atrocities committed by both sides of the army - Russian and the French, the callous and cold-hearted actions of the two opposing camps against one another forgetting that they are, after all, human brothers, and the absolute butchery that takes place in the name of fame and glory are spilled from Tolstoy's pen without any scruple.
It was hard to stomach it all, knowing that somewhere in history, those deeds were actually committed. However, Tolstoy is determined to show the moments of humanity, in between battles, when the men of war are relaxed and can think for themselves rather than following the commanding orders.
It seems that he wanted to counter the hellish side of the war by showing that the men preserved humanity to some extent without totally turning themselves into monsters in the heat of the action. When the parts of the war are taken out the rest of it occupies the lives of the upper-class Russian nobles.
Their ambitions, hopes, and dreams, and their love, loyalty, and betrayal are all portrayed in a fascinating bundle. This is a work of countless characters both historical and fiction, but it still can be narrowed down to a considerably small number for the purposes of the story. The inter-relationship between Natasha, Andrei, and Pierre is instrumental in exposing the themes of love, loyalty, tolerance, and the need to forgive.
With sensitivity and a clear mind as to true human nature, Tolstoy has voiced efficiently on his favourite themes. However, I had trouble connecting with the characters. Although I didn't dislike them, I couldn't embrace them with my whole heart either.
They were distant and a little cold, and at times, inconsistent. The only steady character was Andrei to me at least and his role doesn't run through to the end.
Finally, Tolstoy's musings fill in the gaps wherever a gap can be found. And it is quite often, I assure you. It is quite relevant given that death is an expected consequence of War. Some of his thoughts are quite interesting, although he can be exceedingly preachy.
His thoughts also run on the deterministic nature of history and a detailed analysis as to the causes that determined the historical events are presented in the form of a second Epilogue! Forster has once said that Epilogues are for Tolstoy. If you read this complete Epilogue of War and Peace , you'll understand what he meant. It was by no means an easy read, but I made it in a little more than two months. The credit goes entirely to Tolstoy's writing. It is simply breathtaking. Tolstoy is a great master of creative compositions, yet, in my view, War and Peace is the best literary product of Tolstoy when it comes to writing.
View all 17 comments. All the stars in the sky are nowhere near enough stars I could give this book! Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy. I cannot help loving the light What is love? Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.
It is the one thing we are interested in here. I tried for five months to write something more polished, less rambling. This is all I've got: "While he is alive, the morning is still fresh and dewy, the vampires sleep. But if the sun sets, if father Tolstoy dies and the last genius leaves - what then? Embracing the whole epoch, it is the grandiose literary event, showcasing the gallery of great men painted by a lively brush o I tried for five months to write something more polished, less rambling.
Embracing the whole epoch, it is the grandiose literary event, showcasing the gallery of great men painted by a lively brush of the great master This is one of the most, if not the most profound literary work ever. No European work of fiction of our present day comes anywhere near it. Furthermore, the idea underlying it shows that it is ours, ours, something that belongs to us alone and that is our own property, our own national 'new word' or, at any rate, the beginning of it.
These are just some of the glowing, adoring quotes that I have drawn from the absolutely glittering gallery of homages that have been written to Tolstoy. It makes me understand muckraking tabloid journalism. This is definitely the sort of moment where we could all use a cooling off article about the tax fraud he committed for years or some pictures from a bar fight he started.
The movie brilliantly explored the grand old man standing at the same crossroads over and over again as people tried to force him to take one path or another: either to buy into his own mythical propaganda, or at least to use it to some good purpose and become the sort of icon that Russia needed to begin to undertake serious reforms, that is, to act the part of the pure saint that he often wished that he was and live the way that others felt he owed it to them to live or whether he could simply be and live as the complicated, imperfect, sometimes silly, sometimes angry, loving man that he actually was.
At that point, was his life really his own any longer to decide what to do with? What did he owe to the millions who knew his name and thought they knew what he stood for?
Did he have the right to be less than what he was constantly told people needed him to be? War and Peace is, as so many have noted, about a lot of Serious Ideas and Movements.
Although some of his ideas can seem silly from the vantage point of the 21st century, the process that is put into them does not seem so. And at the time, there seemed to be no one who could come up with the words to refute him in any satisfying way. Under all the rage about Napoleons and Alexanders, it seemed to me that perhaps the major underlying theme of War and Peace was just this: The search for that Great Man or equivalent idea that could make Tolstoy stop seeking and asking and live content.
It seemed to me that Tolstoy would give anything if he felt he could give up seeking and rest in full trust. This whole book has his thinly veiled author proxies searching for something to give themselves over to, wholeheartedly and without regrets. The read I got was that Tolstoy wanted to find this Great Man, be his servant, follow his dictates and trust that when the day comes that he questions them, the Great Man will be able to justify what he tells him in a way that admits of no argument.
More than this, he wants this Great Man to be able to change him and purify him of what he sees as his petty enjoyments, loves, hatreds and cynicisms, and make him into a perfect vessel of love and generosity to those around him, who is only inspired by the greatest of good-doings and rejects worldly pleasures.
So, you can see where this is going, right? This was the heartbreaking thing about this book for me, watching him try to find this impossible ideal, because it seems like he really thought that this was possible , in his heart of hearts.
He never could get rid of the thought that The Ideal, the Utopia, the Perfect Heaven, existed somewhere and he was just missing out on it. Other members of the vast cast show up to take over the baton for a few moments and chime in about the glories of the Emperor s , God, the brotherhood that can be found in the army or idea of The Fatherland, and, on the part of the women, religious obsessions, the love of children, and the perfections of a man who deigns to marry them.
This book is a thousand pages long. It happens a lot of times, and to almost all the characters that we have any sympathy for.
This is something that Tolstoy clearly struggled a lot with. But God was always the out. God allowed him to hold onto the idea that the Ideal existed and allowed him a vessel into which to pour all his hopes after everything else, inevitably, disappointed him. Sometimes I felt like I was the Cary Grant character in The Philadelphia Story , wanting to face down Katherine Hepburn and tell her that she needed to have some regard for human frailty. If Tolstoy was like that, it would be easy to dismiss him.
His rage would have no power. It would be simply a delusion, not an ideal. But he does understand it, is the thing. To his great despair. Tolstoy is afraid of that frailty and spends this whole book running from it. This was some of the great power of Anna Karenina for me, as well as this book. He understands the flaws far too well. They keep changing and evolving for a very specific reason: because they keep living. It reminded me of something something he wrote in Anna Karenina about the blissful period after Anna and Vronsky run away together: He felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected.
It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires. At first, after he had united with her and put on civilian clothes, he felt the enchantment of freedom in general He soon felt arise in his soul a desire for desires, an anguish. They get to keep living , and that is all.
Natasha, like Anna, is a unique female figure for this time period in literature in that she gets to live, think and love very much as a male protagonist would do. She gets her own inner soul and feelings and Tolstoy is very firm about protecting that, no matter what ideals the men want to project on her from the outside.
Natasha is flighty, self-involved and changeable in her feelings depending on the moment or situation. Natasha loves acting the part of romance, but finds that she cannot sustain her feelings long enough to make it worth it. This puts her in sharp contrast to most of the other women in this novel: her childhood friend and cousin Sonya, who remains self-sacrificing and self-effacing and loyal as a dog to the man she declares she loves in ways that are often humiliating , being one example, and the religious, blushing, pure Princess Marya being another.
Since the morning all her powers had been directed towards getting all of them-herself, mama, Sonya-dressed in the best possible way Natasha wants to be young and admired and have a wonderful time every day of her life. It makes her heedless and reckless. It also makes her at least the temporary desire or deep love of almost every man that comes into contact with her in this novel.
People judge her for this constantly, which gradually gives her a self-conscious complex which I think has a lot to do with why she agrees to marry Prince Andrei under the worst idea-ever-in-the-world circumstances. Is anyone surprised when the engagement fails?
You can say what you want about the repentance afterwards, but the way that Tolstoy sets it up, it is difficult to judge Natasha for the way things go down. As far as she knows, she's been told not to live or love for a year, and girl does not play like that. Natasha is loved and adored because she symbolizes passionate, uninhibited, it-goes-on- Life.
Again, human love. Like every other protagonist, she wants forgiveness and purification for her sins before she is able to be well again. But she wants forgiveness from a man , from Prince Andrei, not from a philosophy or a religion or a government. Love is at the center of her own sense of self, and if she is not allowed to give love she feels that her life is not worth anything.
He is allowed to give himself entirely over to Jesus and find the serenity that he has always lacked. I experienced the feeling of love, which is the very essence of my soul and needs no object… To love everything- to love God in all His manifestations. You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. He starts thinking about the man who she cheated with and how he wanted to kill him.
He thinks constantly about how near she is in the room. He starts to hope and negotiate with death. But life is too scary for him to do that. He ends up retreating away from confusion into death. Seriously, screw the men in this novel.
I would argue that the gauntlet thrown down to all these characters at the start of the novel is to find their way to honesty and peace. Natasha is the only character who consistently tackles the world with honesty, so she is the only one who can lead us to peace.
Draw your wider metaphors for the implications for world affairs. Which, you will notice, I did not touch on in this review. This is because they could not possibly matter less, except as a manifestation of everything else I am talking about here, just on a bigger and more impersonal scale, for those who can only recognize Truth when it is stated to them in a titanic voice with pomp and circumstance attached. What have you achieved, being guided by reason alone?
What are you? You are young, you are rich, you are educated, my dear sir. What have you done with all these good things that have been given to you? Are you content with yourself and your life?
From reading his two great works of fiction, it seemed like the one thing he always wanted. But on the other hand, he already told us, implicitly, that if he ever found the ideal he always said he was seeking, he would be dead inside. He would no longer be human. He would be God. Whatever you want to call it. Is this really what he wanted?
Or did he want to want it? Did he want that feeling of wanting it… that intense passion that only a human could feel? That desire for desires that never went away. Find joy where you can. I feel sure that that is perhaps the one way he could have avoided being disappointed. Tolstoy is two for two on breaking my heart with words. View all 58 comments. Jul 03, Lyn rated it really liked it.
This novel does contain just about everything; war and peace, battles, hospitals, military strategy, love and romance, marriage, estrangement and divorce, death, birth, families, relationships, friends, enemies, hatred, jealousy, fear, gambling, dueling, hunting, dances, music, religion and politics, mysticism, philosophy, economics, aristocracy, nobility, peasantry and farming, merchants, horses and cavalry, traveling and most all things Russian, European and universal.
A critic could cynically remark, with some truth, that if you put enough words on enough pages, you can talk about everything, but to do so in this epic, historic narrative is an extraordinary accomplishment. About a third of the way through it occurred to me that I had never read a book like this, at once on an epic, grand scale and yet at the same time personal and with great attention to detail.
Of course the truth is that I never have read another book like this because there probably is not another book like this, it is unique, even among other literary masterpieces. There are even elements of surrealism, absurdism and humor. Himself a veteran of the Crimean War, Tolstoy has an adept ability to describe life in the army and to detail military scenes.
What is it about? Four families living in the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the invasions of Russia. These were the people, after all, that had defeated Napoleon.
Many historic personages are present in the story, including Napoleon and Alexander, and also a whole populace of counts and countesses, princes and princesses, generals, officers, sergeants and soldiers, statesmen, freemasons, servants and serfs.
Tolstoy has a rare gift, akin to Dickens, at characterization, painting most all characters in a realistic, multi-dimensional brush. The leading protagonists are almost all dynamic, evolving and complex and the inter-relationships are rich.
View all 13 comments. Oct 07, Lizzy rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites-of-all-times , classics-literay-fiction , stars-5 , read-years-ago , read , russia-soviet-union. Just finished my second reading of War and Peace. Couldn't have loved it better. Maturity and knowledge of the times certainly helped my enjoyment. It didn't feel as long as it actually is. I loved all Tolstoy's meticulously created characters. I hope to write more soon. Not to be missed! However, I still remember how I enjoyed this epic, even if I might have been too young and lacked the knowledge about Russian history that would have Just finished my second reading of War and Peace.
However, I still remember how I enjoyed this epic, even if I might have been too young and lacked the knowledge about Russian history that would have allowed me to enjoy it even more. Anyway, it inspired me to keep reading, just for that I am grateful for Tolstoy.
If I didn't have so many unread masterpieces in my to-read list, I would revisit it. Highly recommended. View all 22 comments. Jun 07, Violet wells added it Shelves: classics , faves. I always believed War and Peace was one of my three favourite novels. Now, after reading it a second time, I wouldn't include it in my favourite Without question, to my mind, Anna Karenina is the better novel. On the positive side, it's astonishing how well Tolstoy knows all his characters and how vibrantly he brings them alive on the page.
There's so much of life in this book. It's a marvel how brilliantly he dramatizes many of life's key emotions. The first four hundred or so pages are a j I always believed War and Peace was one of my three favourite novels. The first four hundred or so pages are a joy to read. But then there's the war. And man, is he boring on the war.
At one point I couldn't help imagining him on a soapbox at Hyde Park corner perhaps alongside DH Lawrence, another brilliant writer who once he got an idea in his head relentlessly bludgeoned you with it. Towards the end it's almost as if his ambition is to make each new page even more unreadable than the previous one. It was like he become the drunken fixated bore at what previously seemed a promising dinner party. I think one could make a strong case for only reading half this novel.
But, in that case, is it really a great novel? View all 35 comments. I am no longer afraid of the big ass Russian novel. The most difficult thing about it was keeping all of the characters straight, but even that was only in the beginning. By the end of the book, the characters were so fully drawn that I couldn't believe that I'd once had to rely on a cheat sheet remember who they were or what relation they had to one another.
Overall, I thought it was fantastic. I even li I am no longer afraid of the big ass Russian novel. I even liked the war sections. Well, the "action" war sections that featured our characters, not the "strategy" war sections where Tolstoy basically repeated his views on history and the war over and over and over again.
That and the second epilogue kept me from being completely enamored. Come on, Leo! End it with a bang, not a whimper! Was War and Peace fiction, or was it non-fiction? The truth, of course, is that it was both. In dramatizing history with such scope and detail, Tolstoy had taken a massive leap towards the modern historical novel. History, Tolstoy believed, is the chronicle of individual lives, and fiction is the best way to reveal those lives. Many readers were on board, and War and Peace became a smash success.
Despite an overwhelmingly positive response to War and Peace from readers and critics, Tolstoy wanted to address those who criticized the work's genre ambiguity. It is not a novel, still less a [narrative] poem, and even less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted to and could express in the form in which it was expressed. The six years Tolstoy toiled away on War and Peace taxed both his mind and body. Toward the end of the writing process, he developed migraines, which he often tried to work through but which would sometimes stop him in his tracks.
After finishing the work, he came down with a severe case of the flu that left him feeling drained for weeks. The author took a prolonged hiatus from writing, focusing instead on learning Greek and building a schoolhouse for the children who lived at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy was no stranger to war. He served as an artillery officer during the Crimean War, where he witnessed the bloody orchestra of battle at places like Sevastopol. Tolstoy channeled his experiences into the battle sequences of War and Peace.
The Battle of Borodino, in particular, which comprises more than 20 chapters of the book, is widely praised as the finest battle sequence ever written. Many times, collective movements fail. But sometimes, they succeed, and in so doing, they change the world. Dramatizing the ways in which the small actions of lots of people add up to measurable impact is difficult, because our brains like to latch onto singular protagonists.
Instead of portraying the sweep of history, he portrays the lives of ordinary people in the face of it. History, War and Peace argues, is created by human beings, who are in turn limited by history. You cannot entirely escape your circumstances, but you can hope to change them. The concepts of both free will and determinism are ultimately wrong, because you are a product of the world you live in, but you also can make tiny changes to that world.
And those tiny changes combine with the tiny changes of others, which adds up to a movement. And when properly directed by a leader or a government, they might add up to something even greater still. War and Peace understands that this is true for everyone. Napoleon is a mythic figure, but also just some guy. He eats and sleeps and shits like everyone else, and his ambitions and huge successes do not make him necessarily better or even more effective than any of us. We are all caught in the wave of history.
I read this book together with a friend, who remarked during our last discussion of it that right now, when she looks at the world around us, she feels a bitter pessimism mixed with tremendous optimism. History is written by no one, because history is written by everyone.
Every action we take makes some small mark upon it, even if that mark is eventually inevitably erased. Nothing is certain, until it is. And that is when things change, for better or for worse.
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