Book Review: “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy
“War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy has attained a status as one of the most famous, yet most daunting, books in the modern library. The primary reason for its fearsome reputation is because the book is well over a thousand pages in most printed editions. Yet, in spite of the fact that it is so challenging, it has maintained a legacy of being a masterpiece and is beloved by many who read it.
“War and Peace” is a book that is still relevant to the modern reader because it’s a book about life. It’s a book that expertly relays the beauty of merely being alive through its relatable characters, moving scenes and realistic character development. And this is no less valuable in a messy modern world, than it was when the novel was first written.
As Richard Pevear notes in the introduction to his translation of “War and Peace,” the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev once criticized the novel because he claimed that the characters were “all mediocrities.” This is true, in a sense. The characters Tolstoy depicts, contrary to other Russian novelists like Dostoevsky, are quite ordinary. Russian literature has a very clear tendency towards extravagantly unique characters who defy society and have crazy existential dilemmas. “War and Peace” seems to break this mold in this regard to its protagonists.
This aspect of ordinarity is actually one of the novel’s greatest strengths. Most of us tend to be more ordinary and stable than standard Russian literary characters, and it’s much easier for many to relate to a character like Natasha Rostov or Pierre Bezukhov from War and Peace than to someone like “the underground man” from “Notes from Underground” by Dostoevsky. Through the normalcy of his characters, Tolstoy is able to express the extraordinariness of everyday living more broadly.
In one such example, Nikolai Rostov, one of the novel’s central characters, gambles his way into tremendous debt and comes home devastated. As he is contemplating suicide, he hears his sister Natasha singing. He had heard his sister sing countless times before, but this was the first time he had listened to her intentionally. While listening to Natasha sing, Rostov is temporarily transformed. He forgets all about his debts and his afflictions and can think only of that musical harmony and how it touched him. Tolstoy wrote “Oh, how that third had vibrated, and how touched was something that was best in Rostov’s soul. And that something was independent of anything in the world and higher than anything in the world.” Through this scene, among many other events of the book, Tolstoy is able to convey how an ordinary event such as listening to music is actually quite extraordinary.
Because the novel is so long, it gives Tolstoy room for unparalleled character development. We, as readers, get to witness the characters as they go through trials and and struggle through life. Some characters go from being readers’ favorites to later being despised, to eventually becoming beloved once again. In a sense, reading through War and Peace allows the reader to grow with the characters through continual observation. There are very few books in the world that produce such a profound transformative effect on the reader as War and Peace. Readers will feel like a different person after completing the novel. I certainly did.
Andrew Kaufman, a professor of Russian literature at the University of Virginia, wrote an article titled 7 Reasons You Should Give War and Peace a Chance. He remarked for his final point that “it’ll make you feel better about being alive.” I cannot think of better words to describe the novel than these. I felt like a different man after finishing the novel. Similar to the experience of Nikolai listening to his sister sing in the novel, something about reading War and Peace touched my soul. It is a book that I think everyone ought to power through, because it’s not merely a book, but an experience.