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Product Details
Hardcover: 1296 pages
Publisher: Vintage Books USA; Gift ed edition (April 1, 2009)
This review is broken down into two segments, a Descriptive Summary and an Evaluative Summary. If you're already very familiar with the story of "War and Peace," you may wish to skip directly to the latter facet of my review which is essentially the critique of this particular volume.
DESCRIPTIVE SUMMARY:
In 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Austria to expand his European empire. Russia, being an ally of Austria, stood with their brethren against the infamous Emperor. Napoleon prevailed and a treaty was ultimately signed at Tilsit. In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia, again in an effort to expand his empire. The end result of this tragic war was that Napoleon's army of about 600,000 soldiers was reduced to roughly 60,000 men as the defamed Emperor raced from Moscow (which he had taken), back across the frozen Russian tundra in his carriage (leaving his troops behind to fend for themselves) for Paris. That encapsulizes the military aspect of this work.
But the more intricate story involves both the activities and the peccadillos of, primarily, three Russian families of nobility: The Rostovs, the Bolkonskys, and the Bezukovs. The continual thorn of "The Antichrist," Napoleon, really just provides the wallpaper for this story of romance, riches, desolation, love, jealousy, hatred, retribution, joy, naiivety, stupidity and so much more. Tolstoy has woven an incredibly intricate web that interconnects these noble families, the wars, and the common Russian people to a degree that would seem incomprehensible to achieve - but Tolstoy perseveres with superb clarity and great insight to the human psyche.Read more ›
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Tolstoy's professed purpose in writing War and Peace was to create a truer account of the Napoleonic War of 1812 than what was available from contemporary historians, and relate the war as to how it happened to real people. In his "Apropos to War and Peace," he claims:
"A historian and an artist, describing a historical epoch, have two completely different objects. For a historian, considering the contribution rendered by some person towards a certain goal, there are heroes; for the artist, considering the correspondence of this person to all sides of life, there cannot and should not be any heroes, but there should be people. The historian is sometimes obliged, by bending the truth, to bring all the actions of a historical figure under the one idea he has put into that figure. The artist, on the contrary, sees the very singularity of that idea as incompatible with his task, and only tries to understand and show not the famous figure but the human being. A historian has to do with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event." (p. 1219)
Tolstoy also observed "a particular inclination to high-flown speech, in which falsehood and distortion often touch not only the events, but also the understanding of the meaning of an event" when it comes to historian's accounts of historic events. The way these historians exaggerated the heroicism of leaders, made their motives look pure and purposeful, and came to simple and solemn interpretations about events made Tolstoy so vexed that he said, "I did not know whether to laugh or weep when I remembered that these books are the sole memorials of that epoch and have millions of readers.Read more ›
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Whenever anyone hears the title "War and Peace", they think of an insurmountable tome which takes a lifetime of literary study in order to read and comprehend.
On the other hand, from the very first chapter I was pleasantly surprised by the readability and engaging nature of this book. The language was very modern, and follows the fates of five different families in imperial Russia. What was most interesting, was often times the book would jump back and forth in time slightly, so that the reader would have no idea what was going on with a particular set of characters until they meet with the set he was focused on, and then it would move backwards to explain how they got to where they are. This way it built suspense in a different manner than most books. By not informing the reader about what actually happened directly, and then later filling in with an outside source, it added to the mystery. In addition to this, it added to the idea of how anonymously people die in war. Often times, they are injured, moved into a hospital, and then die alone.
The unique way of telling the deaths of soldiers and other events in battle conveys the idea of the meaninglessness of war. Several times in the novel the allies and enemies change, different people come in and out of power, and people fall in and out of love. All of these occurrences are often times random and without explanation. By the end of the book, Tolstoy shifts into a more philosophical mode where he has entire chapters talking about the philosophy of history and conflict. As opposed to the way most historians describe history as a set of deliberate decisions by brilliant leaders such as Tsar Alexander and Napoleon, history is a jumble of random occurrences by ordinary people that compound into the events.Read more ›
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