War and Peace

Tolstoy follows the Rostov, Bolkonsky, and Bezukhov families through Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the years on either side of it, from the glittering drawing rooms of Petersburg in 1805 to the burning of Moscow and beyond. Pierre Bezukhov, illegitimate, wealthy, and forever searching for a way to live that means something, marries badly, survives the disaster at Borodino as a civilian wandering the battlefield, and is taken prisoner by the French before the war ends. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, proud and driven, is grievously wounded at Borodino and dies slowly afterward, reconciled with Natasha Rostova, the woman he once loved and nearly lost to a broken engagement. Natasha herself, impulsive and full of feeling through the whole book, eventually marries Pierre once peace returns, and Andrei's sister Marya marries Natasha's brother Nikolai, the two of them settling at Bald Hills to raise Andrei's orphaned son alongside their own family.

Reading Tolstoy at this length means adjusting to a cast that runs past a hundred named characters and roughly a hundred sixty real historical figures woven in among them, and to the long stretches of essay that interrupt the story outright to argue, at length, that history turns on countless small human decisions rather than the will of great men. Tolstoy himself refused to call the finished book a novel, or a poem, or a historical chronicle, and the label still does not sit easily. The pace is patient and occasionally demanding, particularly through the war chapters, but the domestic scenes move with real warmth, and the accumulation across four volumes builds an intimacy with these families that a shorter book could not manage.

The novel runs to well over a thousand pages in most editions and three hundred sixty one chapters, with dialogue in the aristocratic circles often switching into French exactly as Tolstoy's own class actually spoke.