War and Peace

Most historical fiction tell a story within a historical context; Tolstoy instead speaks history through the mouths of his characters. The context is set as Napoleon’s invasion of Russia during 1805 to 1812. The cast is as colorful as it is multidimensional; many characters change so much so often that it’s inadequate and unfair to describe them statically aside from their most superficial descriptions, and this deep and extended character development is the bulk of the value during my reading. As a work whose topic is life, it speaks of aristocracy and its superficies, of purpose and the illusion of glory, of love and passion’s blindness, of wealth and its burdens, and of convalescence and religion. If you have time to commit to the book, it will teach you, as it has taught me, foremost about different people, and second of the unique history of early 19th century Russia, depicting not just the major heroes or political matters, but the lives of the people from the peasants to the emperors.

The most valuable idea I learned was Tolstoy’s approach to historical storytelling, which is grassroots history, and the idea is present in every aspect in the work. Tolstoy notes that “kings are the slaves of history. History, that is, the unconscious, swarmlike life of mankind, uses every moment of a king’s life as an instrument for its purposes”. Just as when Andrei Bolkonsky met Napoleon on the Austerlitz battlefield and realizes that his great hero Napoleon is only mortal, or when Nikolai Rostov notices that even tsar Alexander hesitates from close, Tolstoy points out and attacks the human psychological bias to idolize and attribute too much to individuals, rather than the abstract collective, or even worse, the more-abstract randomness and chaos. Tolstoy’s theory is humbling, and War and Peace is the theory’s manifestation; if anything, the realism of the characters, especially the realism of the “heroes” exemplified in the emperors and tsars and commanders, lends itself to more enjoyable history for the readers.