War and Peace Summary: Tolstoy's Novel of Napoleonic Russia Explained
What War and Peace is about
War and Peace is Leo Tolstoy's epic novel of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. It was published in full in 1869, after an earlier version titled The Year 1805 had appeared in instalments in The Russian Messenger between 1865 and 1867. Tolstoy rewrote the whole thing before releasing it as the book we now read.
The story chronicles the French invasion of Russia and what followed. Tolstoy builds it out of five interlocking narratives, each following a Russian aristocratic family, and uses them to show how Napoleon reshaped Tsarist society from the ballroom down to the battlefield. The scale is enormous, but the method is intimate. You watch history arrive in the lives of people who are mostly preoccupied with inheritance, marriage prospects, debts and love affairs.
It opens in July 1805 in Saint Petersburg, at a soirée given by Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honour and confidante to the dowager empress Maria Feodorovna. Guests arrive and the cast assembles. Talk turns to the coming war with Napoleon. From there the book moves to Moscow, which Tolstoy sets against Petersburg deliberately, the provincial and more recognisably Russian city against the European polish of the capital. A third setting is Bald Hills, the Bolkonsky country estate, where the old order sits stubbornly in place.
One thing worth knowing before you start. Large stretches, especially later on, are not narrative at all. They are Tolstoy arguing about history and philosophy. He refused to classify the book, saying it is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle". He thought of Anna Karenina as his first true novel.
The main characters
Pierre Bezukhov is the illegitimate son of a very rich dying count. Educated abroad after his mother's death, he is kindhearted and socially awkward, and he cannot find a career or a comfortable place in Petersburg society. Everyone at Anna Pavlovna's party knows he is his father's favourite among the old count's illegitimate children, so they treat him well on the assumption that the fortune is coming his way. An inheritance struggle is waiting for him.
Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is Pierre's friend and his opposite in manner. He is clever, cold on the surface, and thoroughly disillusioned with society and with his marriage to Lise, a charming society favourite he finds empty. He escapes by taking a post as aide-de-camp to Prince Mikhail Kutuzov in the coming war. At Bald Hills he leaves behind his pregnant wife, his eccentric father Prince Nikolai Andreyevich and his devout sister Maria, who has refused a good marriage out of loyalty to her father and suspicion of her suitor.
The Rostovs supply the warmth. Count Ilya and Countess Natalya are an affectionate pair with badly disordered finances. Natasha is thirteen at the start and convinced she loves Boris Drubetskoy. Nikolai, twenty, pledges himself to Sonya, the orphaned cousin raised in the household. Vera is the cold eldest. Petya is nine and desperate to join the army. Around them circle Anna Mikhaylovna Drubetskaya, Boris's ambitious mother, and the soldiers Vasily Denisov and the ruthless Fyodor Dolokhov.
The Austerlitz turn
Nikolai joins the hussars and gets his first taste of battle at Schöngrabern. Then comes Austerlitz, the book's first great set piece. Andrei goes into it expecting glory, thinking the day will be "his Toulon, or his Arcola", comparing himself to the young Napoleon. He is badly wounded trying to rescue a Russian standard, falls into enemy hands, and meets Napoleon face to face. The meeting destroys the idol. Napoleon looks petty to him, vain and small, set against the "lofty, righteous and kindly sky" he has just lain under and understood. Tolstoy frames the defeat as a test Russia failed, because her soldiers were fighting for glory and reputation rather than for anything higher.
The themes
War is the obvious subject, and Tolstoy is interested less in tactics than in what men believe they are fighting for. Power is the second thread, and his argument is sceptical. Great men are not the engines of history so much as its passengers.
Identity runs through Pierre and Andrei, both men searching for a way to live that does not disgust them. Love covers everything from Natasha's girlish infatuations to Denisov's rejected proposal, from Maria's duty to her father to the quiet endurance of ordinary marriages.
Why it still matters
It has a genuine claim to being the greatest novel ever written, and it is regarded alongside Anna Karenina as Tolstoy's finest achievement. It remains an internationally praised classic of world literature. Part of the reason is range. Few books hold a court ball and a cavalry charge in the same frame and make both feel true. Part of it is Tolstoy's refusal to flatter history. It suits readers who want scale, slow development and characters who change over many years rather than many chapters.
