War and Peace

About the book

Pierre Bezukhov, Andrei Bolkonsky, and Natasha Rostova move through a Russian society whose private hopes become entangled with the Napoleonic wars. Tolstoy shifts between households, drawing rooms, military camps, battles, and reflections on historical explanation. Courtship, embarrassment, ambition, grief, and moments of ordinary happiness receive as much attention as public events. The changing scale encourages readers to question accounts that attribute vast outcomes to the intentions of a few celebrated individuals. Characters also struggle to make coherent stories of their own lives, repeatedly discovering that experience exceeds a theory or plan. This expansive work rewards patient acquaintance with its families and rhythms, bringing the apparent grandeur of history into contact with the vulnerable, immediate business of living through it.

• History and agency
• Family life
• Searching for meaning

Why read it

For the extraordinary movement between intimate experience and the broad forces through which people try to explain their lives.

English translation