War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
384 chapters
4.17from 376,993 ratingson Goodreads
Five families and something like six hundred characters live through Russia's war with Napoleon, from the drawing rooms of Petersburg in 1805 to the burning of Moscow and the retreat. Pierre inherits a fortune he has no idea what to do with, Prince Andrei goes looking for glory, and Natasha grows up in the middle of it.
About the book
Published complete in 1869, War and Peace follows five aristocratic families through the fifteen years from 1805 to the aftermath of Napoleon’s invasion. Pierre Bezukhov inherits an enormous fortune he has no idea how to use and marries badly; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky leaves a pregnant wife to find something worth doing at Austerlitz; Natasha Rostova grows from a girl of thirteen into the centre of both their lives. Around them are Borodino, the burning of Moscow, the retreat, and several hundred other people. Tolstoy denied it was a novel, and it stops repeatedly to argue that history is not made by great men at all but by the sum of millions of small actions, which no general can direct and no historian can reconstruct. The domestic chapters and the argument are the same book: what is true of a battle is true of a marriage.
Characters
Pierre Bezukhov — Protagonist
The illegitimate son who inherits everything, and spends the war looking for something to believe.
Prince Andrei Bolkonsky — Officer
Ambitious, disillusioned and cold at home, seeking glory at Austerlitz and finding the sky instead.
Natasha Rostova — Protagonist
A girl of thirteen when the book opens, whose vitality and one disastrous mistake drive much of it.
Nikolai Rostov — Hussar
Natasha’s brother, a cavalry officer whose gambling debts threaten a family already sliding into ruin.
Princess Marya — Andrei’s sister
Pious, plain and bullied by her father, running the estate at Bald Hills with the French at the gate.
Hélène Kuragina — Pierre’s wife
Beautiful, admired and entirely without scruple, married to Pierre for his fortune.
Platon Karataev — Peasant soldier
A serf Pierre meets in captivity, whose acceptance of everything changes how Pierre sees his own life.
General Kutuzov — Commander
The one-eyed Russian commander who understands that a battle cannot be directed, only endured.
About the author
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian novelist born into the landed aristocracy and orphaned before he was ten. He served as an artillery officer at the siege of Sevastopol and wrote about it while it was still going on, which made his name; War and Peace and Anna Karenina followed on the estate he had inherited. A crisis in his fifties turned him into a Christian anarchist who preached non-violence, renounced his property and the copyrights on his later work, and quarrelled with his family about it for thirty years. He left home at eighty-two and died at a railway station a few days later.