Tolstoy published War and Peace between 1865 and 1869, originally serialized in a Russian literary journal. The novel follows five aristocratic families, most centrally the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, and the Bezukhovs, across the Napoleonic Wars of 1805 to 1812, culminating in the French invasion of Russia and the burning of Moscow. Its cast runs to over 500 named characters. The three figures at the novel's center are Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, a soldier of cold intelligence who becomes disillusioned with the glory he once sought; Pierre Bezukhov, an illegitimate heir who stumbles through Freemasonry and philosophical inquiry in search of meaning; and Natasha Rostova, whose vitality Tolstoy presents as something close to a force of nature.
Tolstoy built into the novel a sustained polemic against what he called the "great man" theory of history. His Napoleon is not a genius directing events; he is a man responding to momentum he did not create and cannot fully understand. The same is true of Kutuzov, the Russian general who wins less by tactical brilliance than by doing nothing, trusting the Russian winter and the exhaustion of overextended supply lines to accomplish what no battle plan could. The philosophical essays interspersed through the narrative form the structural spine of Tolstoy's argument: that historical causation is so complex and distributed that attributing it to individual will is a comfortable fiction, useful for generals and historians but not for understanding what actually happened.
The scene where Andrei lies wounded at Austerlitz and looks up at the open sky, finally indifferent to the career he had spent his life constructing, is one kind of writing. The scene where Natasha dances at her uncle's house after months of anxiety and heartbreak, her body remembering something her social education had no vocabulary for, is another kind entirely. Tolstoy manages both without apparent strain, and that range is not a feature of length, it is a feature of unmatched imaginative intelligence. No other novel in any language covers the same territory with the same consistency of quality across its full span.
Charles Dickens walked up to 20 miles a night through London streets gathering material for his novels.
This book is in the public domain , its copyright has expired, meaning it now belongs to everyone. All books on EbookVaultFree are sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library. Downloading them is 100% legal, free, and requires no sign-up.