War and Peace

Tolstoy now takes us to war, and it looks nothing like the paintings. Nikolai Rostov, eager for glory, finds that his first skirmish is mostly confusion; at Schöngrabern he falls from his wounded horse, sees French soldiers running at him, and simply flees, astonished that anyone could want to kill someone so well-loved by his mother. The real hero of that day is a shy little artillery captain named Tushin, who holds his position through sheer stubbornness and is then nearly scolded for losing two guns. Andrei, watching, learns that official reports and actual events have very little in common.

Back in Petersburg, Prince Vasili decides Pierre’s new fortune would look lovely attached to his daughter Hélène, a dazzling beauty with nothing behind the smile. Pierre never actually proposes; he just fails to stop the wedding from happening around him.

Then comes Austerlitz, in December 1805. The Austrian generals read out a battle plan so detailed that it is useless the moment the fog lifts. The Russians are routed. Andrei, seizing a fallen standard, charges forward like the hero he has always wanted to be, and is struck down. Lying on his back, he sees the high, grey, endless sky, and suddenly everything he wanted—fame, Napoleon’s admiration, victory—looks tiny. When Napoleon himself rides by and praises his “fine death,” Andrei’s former idol seems like a buzzing fly.

Andrei is believed dead. He turns up at Bald Hills, wounded and changed, on the very night Lise goes into labour. She dies giving birth to their son, Nikolenka, and her small dead face seems to ask what she ever did to deserve this. Andrei withdraws to his estates and decides that the best a person can do is avoid hurting others and live quietly for himself.

Pierre’s marriage is a disaster. Rumours spread that Hélène is having an affair with Dolokhov, a cold, reckless officer and gambler. At a dinner Dolokhov insults him, and Pierre—who has never held a pistol—challenges him to a duel, closes his eyes, fires, and wounds the crack shot. Horrified at himself, he separates from Hélène and hands her much of his fortune. On the road, at a post station, he meets an old Freemason who promises him a way to become good, and Pierre throws himself into the brotherhood with the zeal of a convert. He resolves to free his serfs and build schools and hospitals on his estates; his stewards nod, stage grateful welcomes from the peasants, and carry on exactly as before, while Pierre drives home glowing with virtue.

Nikolai, home on leave, falls into Dolokhov’s orbit too. Dolokhov proposes to Sonya, is refused because she loves Nikolai, and takes revenge at the card table, where Nikolai loses 43,000 roubles in a single night—a sum his kind, hopeless father pays, sinking the family further into debt. Natasha, meanwhile, receives her first proposal, from Nikolai’s friend Denisov, and is mostly flattered and confused.

Pierre visits Andrei and, on a river ferry at sunset, argues passionately that life has meaning and that there is a God. Andrei looks up at the sky for the first time since Austerlitz. In 1807 Nikolai watches Tsar Alexander embrace Napoleon at Tilsit, and cannot make it square with all the men he has seen die.

In one of the most famous passages in literature, Andrei, riding through a birch forest in spring, passes an ancient, gnarled oak that refuses to bud. It seems to agree with him: hope is a trick, and life is over. Then, on business at the Rostovs’ country estate, Otradnoe, he overhears Natasha at an open window, unable to sleep because the moonlit night is too beautiful, begging Sonya to come and look. On the ride home the old oak is covered in fresh green leaves. “No, life is not over at thirty-one!” he decides.

Andrei moves to Petersburg to work on legal reforms with the brilliant minister Speransky, while Pierre, now a prominent Mason, slowly realizes that his brothers are as vain and petty as everyone else. Andrei admires Speransky’s cool, logical mind until a cosy dinner at the minister’s house, where the great man’s forced, ringing laugh suddenly breaks the spell. On New Year’s Eve Natasha, sixteen, attends her first great ball, terrified no one will dance with her. Pierre nudges Andrei, Andrei asks her, and something clicks. He proposes. His father, who dislikes the Rostovs and their money troubles, insists on a year’s delay. Andrei goes abroad, and Natasha, who has never had to wait for anything, is left counting days.

The Rostovs’ last good winter follows. There is a glorious wolf hunt, and an evening at the cottage of a poor relative they call “Uncle,” where Natasha, raised by a French governess, hears a folk song on the guitar and dances a peasant dance as if she had known it all her life. At Christmas the young people dress up as mummers and race through the snow by sleigh, and Nikolai, seeing Sonya in a moustache and hussar’s jacket, decides to marry her—to his mother’s horror.

To sell property and buy a trousseau, Count Rostov takes Natasha to Moscow. A visit to Andrei’s family goes badly: the old prince appears in his dressing gown to insult her, and Marya is stiff with nerves. Wounded and lonely, Natasha goes to the opera, where Tolstoy describes the stage with deadpan literalness—painted boards, people singing in a row—until the artifice starts to seem normal to her. In the next box sits Hélène, who takes her up, and Hélène’s brother Anatole, a gorgeous, brainless rake. He stares at her bare shoulders, writes her a love letter that Dolokhov composes, and Natasha, who cannot bear an empty present, convinces herself she loves him.

She breaks her engagement in a letter to Marya and agrees to elope. Only the vigilance of the formidable family friend Marya Dmitrievna stops the troika at the door. Then Pierre tells Natasha the truth: Anatole is already married. She swallows arsenic, survives, and falls ill with shame. Andrei, returning, coldly refuses to forgive her.

Pierre, sent to comfort her, blurts out that if he were free and the best man in the world he would ask for her hand on his knees. Then he steps out into the frosty night and sees the great comet of 1812 blazing over Moscow. Everyone says it means disaster. To Pierre it looks like his own heart, newly alive.

In June 1812 Napoleon’s Grand Army crosses the Niemen into Russia, and Tolstoy begins interrupting his story with essays. Why did half a million men march east? Not, he insists, because of Napoleon’s will. A king, he writes, is history’s slave: countless small decisions by ordinary people add up to events that no general controls.

The Russians retreat. As the French approach, the old Prince Bolkonsky suffers a stroke and dies, finally whispering tender words to the daughter he spent years tormenting. Marya, left alone at the Bogucharovo estate, finds the serfs refusing to let her leave. By pure chance Nikolai Rostov rides up with his hussars, faces down the peasants, and escorts her to safety. Neither forgets it. Earlier that summer, at Ostrovno, Nikolai led a dashing cavalry charge, slashed a French officer from his horse and took him prisoner, and was decorated for it—yet he cannot stop thinking about the man’s frightened face, fair and young with a dimple in the chin, more homely than hostile. Heroism, up close, feels oddly hollow.

The old one-eyed general Kutuzov takes command. He is fat, sleepy and fond of French novels, and Tolstoy loves him because he does nothing heroic: he simply waits, listens and lets the spirit of the army work. On the eve of battle Andrei, now a regimental commander, tells Pierre that war is no game, and that if nobody took prisoners there would be far fewer wars.

Borodino, in September 1812, is one of the bloodiest days of the century. Riding out the day before, Pierre passes peasant militiamen digging earthworks in clean white shirts—put on, someone remarks, so they will be ready to die. On the day itself Pierre, in a white hat and green coat, wanders onto the battlefield as a civilian sightseer and ends up carrying cannonballs at a battery as it is overrun. Andrei’s regiment stands in reserve for hours under artillery fire; a shell spins at his feet, and out of pride he does not lie down. It explodes. In the field hospital, beside him, surgeons cut off a man’s leg, and Andrei recognizes Anatole Kuragin, sobbing like a child. All his hatred melts into pity and love.

Kutuzov makes the decision no one else dares: to give up Moscow without a fight to save the army. The city empties. As the Rostovs pack their furniture and paintings onto carts, wounded soldiers beg for transport, and Natasha flies into a passion, shaming her parents into dumping their possessions and filling the carts with men instead. One of the wounded travelling with them is Andrei. When Natasha learns this, she creeps into his room at night and begs his forgiveness. He gives it, and tells her he loves her more than before. She nurses him from then on.

Pierre stays behind. Disguised as a peasant, with a pistol and a dagger, he plans to assassinate Napoleon and convinces himself it is his destiny. Instead, as fires spread through the wooden city, he rescues a little girl from a burning house and attacks a French soldier who is robbing a young woman. He is arrested as an arsonist, questioned by the stern Marshal Davout, and saved only because the two men happen to look at each other as human beings. He is then forced to watch the execution of other prisoners, and his faith in everything collapses.

In the prisoners’ shed he meets Platon Karataev, a round, gentle peasant soldier who hums, chatters in proverbs, shares his baked potatoes and loves everyone equally. Karataev seems to Pierre the very spirit of simple goodness. Far away in Petersburg, Hélène, juggling two suitors and planning a divorce, dies suddenly; society says the cause was angina pectoris, but the novel hints at a dangerous medicine.

In the town of Yaroslavl, Andrei slowly lets go of life. Marya arrives with his little son, and the two women who love him watch him drift into a calm, distant state in which death looks like an awakening. He dies peacefully, and Natasha and Marya, grief-stricken, become close friends.

Napoleon’s army, stuffed with loot, rots in Moscow and then begins its long retreat west in the snow. Kutuzov, mocked by younger generals for refusing to attack, simply follows, letting cold, hunger and the partisans do the work. When word comes that the French have truly left Moscow, the old man turns to the icons in the corner and weeps: Russia is saved. From then on he spends his energy holding his own army back from pointless attacks. The prisoners are marched along with the French. Pierre’s feet bleed, he is starving, and yet he discovers a strange freedom: he needs almost nothing. Karataev falls ill, cannot keep up, and is shot by the roadside.

The next day Cossacks and partisans under Denisov and Dolokhov ambush the column and free Pierre. In the same raid, Natasha’s little brother Petya, fifteen and desperate to be a hero, gallops into the gunfire and is killed. The news nearly destroys the countess, and Natasha comes back to life by nursing her mother through it. Kutuzov, his work done, dies; Tolstoy says simply that there was nothing left for him to do.

Pierre, recovering, finds he is a different man: simpler, kinder, interested in other people. Back in Moscow he calls on Marya and does not at first recognize the thin, serious woman in black beside her. It is Natasha. The look between them settles everything.

In 1813 Pierre and Natasha marry. Old Count Rostov dies the same year, leaving a mountain of debt, and Nikolai, too proud to court a rich woman, struggles in poverty until Marya visits and their feelings break through; they marry in 1814 and settle at Bald Hills, where Nikolai becomes a hard-working, sometimes hot-tempered farmer and Marya keeps a diary of her children’s souls. Sonya stays on in the household, useful and alone—“a sterile flower,” Natasha calls her.

It is December 1820. Natasha has become a broad, busy mother of four who has dropped singing and society, follows Pierre’s every idea, and is fiercely jealous of his time. Pierre is back from Petersburg, involved in a secret political society to reform Russia; Nikolai says that if ordered, he would ride against it. Listening in the dark is Andrei’s son, now fifteen. That night he dreams of marching behind Pierre and his dead father to glory, and wakes vowing to do something even his father would be proud of. Readers know what is coming: the Decembrist uprising of 1825.

Then Tolstoy steps out of the story entirely. The Second Epilogue is a long essay arguing that history is driven not by great men but by the sum of countless small wills, and that our sense of freedom is real but limited. His conclusion: we must give up a freedom that does not exist and accept a dependence we do not feel. He compares it to Copernicus: just as people had to abandon the feeling that the earth stands still, we must abandon the feeling that we are wholly free. Many readers skip it. Many others find it the key to everything that came before.

Andrei returns home just as his wife dies in childbirth, and he sinks into gloom. Pierre fights a duel with his wife’s lover, Dolokhov, leaves her, and throws himself into Freemasonry and good works. Nikolai gambles away a fortune. Then Andrei, passing an old oak that bursts into leaf, and hearing Natasha rejoicing at a moonlit window, decides his life is not over. He dances with her at her first ball and proposes, but his father makes them wait a year.

While he is abroad, Natasha is seduced by Hélène’s brother Anatole, a charming rake who is secretly married. Their elopement is stopped at the last minute, the engagement collapses, and a shamed Natasha falls gravely ill. Pierre, comforting her, realizes he loves her.

Napoleon invades. Tolstoy argues that history is moved by millions of people, not by great men, and his hero is the patient old general Kutuzov, who lets the invaders wear themselves out. At the bloody battle of Borodino, Andrei is mortally wounded; in the field hospital he forgives Anatole, who lies beside him with a leg cut off.

Moscow is abandoned and burns. Natasha makes her family throw out their belongings to carry wounded soldiers, finds Andrei among them, begs his forgiveness and receives it, and nurses him until he dies at peace with his sister Marya beside him. Pierre, who stayed behind to assassinate Napoleon, is captured instead. He rescues a child from a burning house, is arrested as an arsonist and is made to watch other prisoners being shot. His faith in everything collapses. Then, in a prisoners’ shed, he meets Platon Karataev, a simple peasant soldier who shares his potatoes, talks in proverbs and accepts whatever comes with gentle good humour. Karataev transforms him.

The French retreat through the snow. Karataev is shot when he cannot keep up, and Pierre is freed by partisans in a raid that kills Natasha’s young brother Petya. Hélène dies; Kutuzov dies. Starving and barefoot on the march, Pierre has discovered that a person needs very little to be free, and he comes home simpler and kinder. Visiting Marya, he barely recognizes the thin, grieving woman beside her: Natasha.

In the epilogue Pierre marries Natasha and Nikolai marries Andrei’s sister Marya. By 1820 they are busy parents, and Natasha has traded her old wildness for family life. Andrei’s son dreams of doing something heroic, a hint of the Decembrist revolt to come. Tolstoy closes with an essay: we are less free than we think, and history belongs to everyone. Plenty of readers skip that final essay; others think it unlocks the whole book.