Why I love Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace.

Lots of people find Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace intimidating because of its length, its literary reputation, and the number of Russian names. I don't see it recommended on Reddit as much as, say, Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo or Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. And I don't intend to bad mouth those great books, I like them too, although not as much as I like War and Peace. I just want to articulate why I love War and Peace.

I first read War and Peace because it was assigned in college. I read a lot of books for college courses, as I was a humanities major. I admired almost all of them (except a book by philosopher Georg Hegel that I still don't recommend), but Tolstoy's War and Peace is the only book I reread, voluntarily, for my own amusement, several times since college. So this is why I like it so much.

War and Peace is an unusual novel. Much of it is pure history, and much of it is philosophy, both of which interest me. And yet the novelistic parts are so well done that I find it hard to put down.

I turned my parents on to it as well. My father was not a fast reader, but he enjoyed it. I thought he would, because we both enjoyed war stories like Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, or Shelby Foote’s three volume The Civil War: A Narrative.

My mother was hesitant because she was not a fan of war stories, but she liked it. After she read it, she said she forgot the second half of the title was “Peace.” She loved all the descriptions of life in Russia far from the battles, or during times of peace between the battles. And she tolerated the battles.

In addition to the war story, there’s a lot of romance, gone wrong and gone right. There are young men getting in and out of trouble. There are religious pilgrims, country estates, grand balls, and aristocratic salons. There’s political intrigue and battles for money that are less violent but almost as vicious as battles with Napoleon. In short, there's a lot more of Jane Austen in War and Peace than most people realize. But there's a good deal of Alexandre Dumas' exciting and violent manly adventures as well.

Tolstoy, himself an aristocrat, did not have the common man view of another great 19th century Russian author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Although well educated, Tolstoy also didn't need to work for a living, and left university to live in leisure. After running up heavy gambling debts, though, he suddenly needed an income. As many Russian aristocrats who needed a job did in those days, young Tolstoy joined the army as an officer.

Tolstoy’s experience in the Russian army and subsequent trips around Europe turned him into a serious spiritual anarchist — or Christian socialist — who believed the Russian state and the aristocrats who ran it were thoroughly corrupt. Having lived among Russian aristocrats all his life, he was in a position to know. So although his novels depict the world of Russia’s ruling class, they also convey his deep skepticism about the quality and effectiveness of aristocratic rule.

Tolstoy’s other great novel Anna Karenina is even more on point, and arguably foretells the Russian Revolution, or at least some catastrophic event towards which Russia was headed during Tolstoy’s lifetime. But War and Peace is a historical novel, and the subject is Russia’s great triumph, defeating Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and sending him home with a very depleted army.

The Russians not only destroyed Napoleon's army, they also destroyed his reputation for invincibility, and within a few years Napoleon's great European empire had collapsed. So although the faults of Russians are on full display in Tolstoy's novel, so are their strengths and triumphs.

At the time Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, the Great Man Theory of history was popular. The theory is primarily attributed to the Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who gave a series of lectures on heroism in 1840, later published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. Carlyle stated that "The History of the world is but the Biography of great men." Carlyle divides these leaders into several different categories: The divine (Odin and other pagan gods who represent the heroic spirit), prophet (Muhammad), poet (Dante and Shakespeare), priest (Luther and Knox), philosopher (Johnson and Rousseau) and king (Cromwell and Napoleon).

Tolstoy strongly disagreed with the Great Man Theory. He also disagreed with the view that Napoleon, for better or for worse, was primarily responsible for monumental changes in European history. He believed the causes of historical events are infinitely varied and forever unknowable to humans.

When Tolstoy was a young officer in the army, he was tasked with interrogating soldiers after battles to find out what had happened. He discovered that if he conducted his interrogations within two hours of the battle, he would get many different stories, almost all of which were contradictory. They could not all be true. Indeed, Tolstoy questioned whether any of them were true, and whether anyone but an omniscient God could know what had really happened.

But if he repeated his interrogations more than 24 hours after the battle, Tolstoy would suddenly get pretty much the same story from everyone, even including those who had given him different stories two hours after the battle. That's because during the 24 hours after a battle, the soldiers and officers would informally talk with each other about what had happened and why. But although they would gradually agree upon a story, that didn't mean the story was true. It just meant it was agreeable to everyone, and eventually it would be reported as fact, and written down in history books as fact, and passed on to future generations as fact. But it wasn't fact. It was just the story that had won the most advocates and became accepted as fact.

Thus when Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, he did his own research. He visited battlefields, read history books on the Napoleonic Wars, and drew on real historical events. He doesn't claim to tell the true story — after all, he wrote a work of fiction, not yet another questionable history. But he pokes countless holes in the accepted histories of what occurred.

For example, Tolstoy shows why an inarticulate non-aristocratic artillery man might not get credited for true heroism, where a loud aristocratic officer might demand too much credit and get it. He shows why Napoleon or the Russian Tsar might get credited for anything that went right, while their underlings might be blamed for anything that went wrong. He showed why bold but foolish soldiers or officers might be seen as heroes, while cautious but wise soldiers or officers might be seen as underachievers, or worse yet as cowards.

Whether the stories happened as Tolstoy describes, i.e., whether Tolstoy got it right, isn't the point. The point is that we've all seen credit go to the wrong people, and can easily believe it would happen the way Tolstoy describes. The novel is clearly fiction, but Tolstoy reveals a truth about widely-accepted histories.

Tolstoy leads his readers to question official accounts and histories, even those based on so-called contemporaneous accounts written more than 24 hours after a battle. Yes, memories are fresh 24 hours after a battle, but they've already been tainted, and the account everyone agreed upon is certain to be inaccurate.

Thus, according to Tolstoy the significance of great individuals is imaginary. Even a man like Napoleon is only one of "history's slaves," realizing the decree of Providence.

This is a diversion, but there's another person often considered a Great Man of History who was a near contemporary of Napoleon's: George Washington. Like Napoleon, Washington was a general and leader of his country, but that's where the similarities end. For Washington, unlike Napoleon, never considered himself indispensable to the success of the American Revolution or the new government of the United States. Washington commonly credited Providence for any success he may have had, and calmly accepted setbacks as the work of Providence as well.

Early in Washington's life, when he was only 23 in 1755, he had reason to believe in Providence. For as he said in a letter to his brother after a battle in the French and Indian War:

By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability and expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, altho' death was levelling my companions on every side.

Napoleon probably would have taken that to mean that Providence intended him to be great, and to be acclaimed as great. But Washington seems to have taken it to mean that his achievements should be credited to Providence, not to him. And he also had faith that the country could get along without him.

Anyway, that's why I recommend War and Peace. As for the length and number of names, it's not so difficult. The important characters are highly memorable, and if a book is good I want it to be longer, not shorter. The plot is quite easy to follow — Tolstoy is not James Joyce. I'm sure any avid reader can handle it, and shouldn't pass it up for that reason.