War and Peace
1845
- classic
- history
- russian empire
- fiction
- russia
- russia (federation), fiction
- fiction, historical
- classic literature
- historical fiction
- napoleon i, emperor of the french, 1769-1821 in fiction
The story
War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. The novel begins in the year 1805 during the reign of Tsar Alexander I and leads up to the 1812 French invasion of Russia by Napoleon. The era of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), when the royal court in Paris was the centre of western European civilization,[16] is still fresh in the minds of older people. Catherine, fluent in French and wishing to reshape Russia into a great European nation, made French the language of her royal court. For the next one hundred years, it became a social requirement for members of the Russian nobility to speak French and understand French culture.[16] This historical and cultural context in the aristocracy is reflected in War and Peace. Catherine's grandson, Alexander I, came to the throne in 1801 at the age of 24. In the novel, his mother, Marya Feodorovna, is the most powerful woman in the Russian court. War and Peace tells the story of five aristocratic families — the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Kuragins and the Drubetskoys—and the entanglements of their personal lives with the history of 1805–1813, principally Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. The Bezukhovs, while very rich, are a fragmented family as the old Count, Kirill Vladimirovich, has fathered dozens of illegitimate sons. The Bolkonskys are an old established and wealthy family based at Bald Hills. Old Prince Bolkonsky, Nikolai Andreevich, served as a general under Catherine the Great, in earlier wars. The Moscow Rostovs have many estates, but never enough cash. They are a closely knit, loving family who live for the moment regardless of their financial situation. The Kuragin family has three children, who are all of questionable character. The Drubetskoy family is of impoverished nobility, and consists of an elderly mother and her only so
What it’s like
Long, unhurried passages of prose that drift between drawing rooms lit by candles and tallow lamps, snow-muffled Moscow winters, sunlit country estates with birch and wheat fields, and the smoky chaos of battlefields under gray autumn skies. The voice is warm and essayistic, moving easily from a ballroom's gossip to a soldier's confusion and back, with the sensory world built through small domestic detail: the clink of samovars, the smell of cabbage soup, horses breathing steam in cold air. Pacing is deliberately expansive, with long stretches of talk, letters, and reflection punctuated by sudden stillness. The emotional register is melancholy and humane, sliding between tender, wry, and grave, and its people's arcs are slow reckonings: a disillusioned prince finding his way back to life, a restless young countess growing into her heart, a searching aristocrat stumbling toward meaning. Violence is present and unsparing when it comes, mostly in the form of extended, matter-of-fact battle scenes and the toll of illness and death, rendered with restraint rather than gore, and some sequences of wartime suffering are hard to sit with. Romance and social maneuvering appear without explicitness. Best suited to readers who want a sprawling, immersive winter-reading companion and are happy to live with a large cast and a leisurely, philosophical pace.
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