history and criticism

Although my blind urge to read the Great Classics has (thankfully) faded somewhat over the years in favor of reading whatever I damn please, I finally decided it was time to give War and Peace a try. After all, how can anyone who enjoys novels resist the lure of "the greatest novel of all time"? And Tolstoy himself was an unusually interesting man -- not a screwed-up genius but one who seemed to eventually figure it all out. It took me maybe a hundred pages to get into the rhythm of the book and figure out who all those characters with multisyllabic Russian names were. After that, it was totally engrossing and surprisingly easy reading. There's no point giving you a book report on what happens -- you're supposed to read it yourself -- but I do disagree with some of the other reviewers who didn't care for the sections describing Tolstoy's philosophy of history. I found those sections (a very small proportion of the book) fascinating, albeit a change of pace. This is part of what makes the book great. War and Peace is not just a story of what happens to a bunch of made-up people, but a major work of art expressing the wisdom of a great man.

War and Peace is a complex story with revolves around the lives of three affluent families, the Bezuhov's, the Rostovs and Bolkonsky's, over a period of fifteen years. This book takes place during Russia's struggle against Napoleonic Europe, describing Russia's early defeats and then recounting how Napoleon fled Moscow in a weakened condition. The book begins with Pierre coming into his eventual title of Count Bezuhov, along with the enormous wealth accompanying it. Pierre is the pretty much the primary character in the book, and his path into his marriage of the young Helene is explored as well as his eventually affections for the young Natasha Rostov. War and Peace also explores Pierre's search for religion, his falling out with Christian beliefs and his joining of the Freemason's Order. Tolstoy's uses of description in the battles make the scenes come to life for the reader and portray a genuine picture of warfare during the Napoleonic Wars. The descriptions of Prince Andrei's exploits in battle are extraordinarily rich with details and in giving equal time to the description of the common soldier. Tolstoy's basic analysis of humanity is that instead of great leaders such as Napoleon and Czar Alexander being held responsible for the great occurrences of the time, it was instead the result of a million individual decisions from the common people participating. The reader takes away from this book an understanding of free will versus destiny and the way they shape our lives and the paths we take.

I have read a lot of books and so I've scrabbled together a fairly intelligent idea of what a great book is; the definition has always been complicated and hard to explain, but I really needn't have bothered. The concept can be summed up in only three words: "War and Peace".
This is, simply, what all novels want to be when they grow up. The novel format is as varied as the writers who attempt it---to call "War and Peace" and "Ulysses" examples of the same art form seems ridiculous, but it's true---but ultimately a novel is a story about humans that explains what humanity is, or might be, or could have been; through these characters whose adventures you're following, you might learn something about what it means to be a human being. Every art form is about this experience, but only the novel can really hunker down and explore humanity in all its billions of shapes. You can learn not only facts and feelings but you can learn TIME by spending it in these pages. You can learn GROWTH. You can learn LIFE.
The main characters in "War and Peace" are Pierre Bezuhov, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, and Natasha Rostov, three Russians caught in the middle of the war between their country and France in the years 1805 to 1813. Through them we meet dozens if not hundreds more characters, and through those dozens or hundreds we simply meet humanity itself. There's no other way to express it. The way Tolstoy tells us about his characters shows us ourselves; the identification is that strong. When a character falls, in battle or from old age, we feel that someone we know personally is gone, and we mourn them as though we couldn't simply flip back a few pages and resurrect them. The mass of life in this book is overwhelming: the story, like the title, is so big it seems impossible that you could find a moment of intimacy, but in fact there are hours here, even days. There is so much contained in the book, battles and weddings, parties and firestorms, evacuations and reunions, military history and moral philosophy, yet Tolstoy never loses track of his characters and how they are evolving while they watch the world tear itself apart and try, almost pitifully, to put itself back together again. It's an absolutely superhuman performance, one no writer could have dared hope for. Only one writer in history ever did it, and no writer ever will again.
"War and Peace" gets its reputation not from dusty old college professors, but from the sheer power of its story and the awesome scope of its understanding, and its ability to impart that understanding to the reader in the guise of a riveting tale of adventure and romance. The novel survives not because it's A CLASSIC, but because it is impossible to pick it up and not be sucked into its hurricane of humanity.