War and Peace

Summary

War and Peace follows several Russian noble families from 1805 to 1820, through the wars against Napoleon and the French invasion of 1812. It opens at a St. Petersburg soirée given by Anna Pávlovna Schérer in July 1805, where talk of Bonaparte mixes with gossip about inheritances. Three young people stand at its center. Pierre Bezúkhov, the awkward illegitimate son of a rich count, unexpectedly inherits his father's fortune and is maneuvered by Prince Vasíli Kurágin into marrying his beautiful, faithless daughter Hélène. Pierre fights a duel with Dólokhov, separates from his wife, joins the Freemasons, tries to reform his estates and searches restlessly for the meaning of life. His friend Prince Andrew Bolkónski, proud and disillusioned, leaves his pregnant wife Lise at Bald Hills with his stern father and his devout sister Princess Mary, and goes to war seeking glory. Wounded at Austerlitz in December 1805, he lies under the open sky and sees Napoleon, his hero, as small and insignificant. He returns home as Lise dies in childbirth. Natásha Rostóva, the lively younger daughter of the generous, improvident Count Ilyá Rostóv in Moscow, grows from a girl of thirteen to a young woman whose vitality restores Andrew to life. They become engaged, but Andrew's father imposes a year's delay; while he is abroad Natásha is drawn into a plan to elope with Hélène's brother Anatole Kurágin. The plot is foiled, the engagement broken, and Natásha falls gravely ill. In 1812 Napoleon crosses the Niemen. Old Prince Bolkónski dies after a stroke, and Nicholas Rostóv, Natásha's brother, rescues Princess Mary from rebellious peasants at Bogucharovo. At Borodinó Pierre wanders the battlefield as a civilian, and Andrew is mortally wounded; at the dressing station he sees Anatole's leg amputated and forgives him. The army under Kutúzov abandons Moscow, the Rostóvs give their carts to the wounded, and Natásha finds Andrew among them and nurses him until his death. Pierre stays in burning Moscow, meaning to kill Napoleon, is arrested, watches prisoners shot, and in captivity learns from the peasant soldier Platón Karatáev a simple acceptance of life. During the French retreat Karatáev is shot by the roadside, and Pierre is freed by partisans in a raid in which young Pétya Rostóv is killed. The first epilogue shows Pierre married to Natásha and Nicholas married to Mary, raising families in 1820. Throughout, Tolstoy interrupts the story with essays arguing that history is not made by great men but by the sum of countless individual wills, and the second epilogue sets out this philosophy of history and the problem of freedom and necessity. The novel was serialized in part as The Year 1805 in The Russian Messenger in 1865–66 and published complete in 1868–69. The library text is the Maudes' translation, with both epilogues.

Top Lessons

• Greatness and goodness

  Tolstoy sets the vain Napoleon, who believes he commands history, against Kutúzov, who trusts patience, and against Karatáev, who has no ambition at all. He argues that greatness without simplicity, goodness and truth is not greatness.

• Searching for the meaning of life

  Pierre tries wealth, marriage, Freemasonry, philanthropy and a plan to kill Napoleon before he finds peace in captivity, where he has nothing. Andrew finds and loses meaning several times, at Austerlitz, at Otrádnoe and finally on his deathbed.

• Fall and recovery

  Natásha's near-elopement with Anatole nearly destroys her, and Tolstoy describes her illness, shame and slow return to prayer with great tenderness. Her later care for the dying Andrew and for her mother after Pétya's death shows love grown through suffering.

• Who makes history?

  In essays throughout the later books and in the second epilogue, Tolstoy argues that events arise from the combined wills of millions, not from the orders of generals and emperors, and that the more power a man seems to have, the less free his acts really are. Historians and philosophers have long disputed whether his argument succeeds.

• Family as the place of peace

  The book ends not on a battlefield but in two households, with Pierre and Natásha and with Nicholas and Mary. The Rostóv home, generous and disordered, is set against the cold salons of Petersburg.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The novel is a broad record of medicine in the Napoleonic era. Field dressing stations after Austerlitz and Borodinó show probing of wounds and amputation without anaesthesia; Nicholas's visit to Denísov in a typhus-ridden military hospital in 1807 gives one of the century's bleakest hospital scenes. The death of the little princess in childbirth at Bald Hills, with a Moscow accoucheur arriving too late to change the outcome, reflects the risks of confinement among the nobility. Tolstoy is openly skeptical of physicians: in Book Nine he describes the doctors who treat Natásha's illness after the broken engagement as wizards who prescribe by habit, while conceding that their attentions comfort the family; her symptoms of wasting, sleeplessness and despair are given in terms of moral and spiritual crisis, and later labels of depression are interpretive. Andrew's slow death from his Borodinó wound, nursed by Natásha, is a detailed literary study of dying. The French retreat shows starvation, frostbite and the shooting of exhausted prisoners. The old prince's decline and stroke in 1812, and the grief of Countess Rostóva after Pétya's death, round out a wide picture of illness, grief and care.

• Book Three, Ch. XIX

  Andrew, wounded at Austerlitz, is carried to a dressing station, probed, and commended by Napoleon to his surgeon Larrey, who judges him unlikely to recover.

• Book Four, Chs. VIII–IX

  Lise's labor and death in childbirth at Bald Hills as Andrew returns home.

• Book Five, Ch. XVII

  Nicholas visits Denísov in a crowded military hospital where typhus is raging and amputees lie untended.

• Book Nine, Ch. XVI

  Natásha's illness after the broken engagement and Tolstoy's reflections on the limits of the doctors who attend her.

• Book Ten, Ch. XXXVII

  The surgeons' tent after Borodinó, where Andrew sees Anatole's leg amputated.

• Book Twelve, Chs. XV–XVI

  Andrew's last days at Yaroslavl, nursed by Natásha and Princess Mary.

• Book Fourteen, Chs. XII–XIV

  Pierre's march with the prisoners in the French retreat: hunger, sore feet, cold, and the shooting of Karatáev.