1. Why I Read It
The first time through War and Peace I stalled in Book One. Titles, cousins, French pleasantries for eighty pages, and still no thread to hold on to, so I closed it. The second time I cheated: I jumped straight into Book Two and read Andrew and Pierre arguing at the ferry about whether a man should go on living. That time it took.
I finished it later, in a second-hand bookshop. I opened a Chinese translation and landed on Austerlitz, Andrew lying wounded in the field, looking up at the sky. I stood there and read the two pages, then went home and started over. This time I read it as two books at once: one telling a story, one tucked inside the story to argue.
What surprised me most is how often Tolstoy stops. Andrew is gravely wounded, and in go a dozen pages on how an army marches. Napoleon enters Moscow, and in goes a whole chapter on whether great men do anything at all. Young me found those digressions tiresome; now I think they are the thing he wanted to say.
2. The Skeleton First
War and Peace was written between 1863 and 1869 and first published in instalments. Standard editions divide it into four volumes and an epilogue, more than three hundred chapters, roughly 580,000 words in Russian (divisions and counts vary by edition). It runs from 1805 to 1820, and its main characters come from four noble families: the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, and the Kuragins.
If you keep losing the thread, you are probably missing a timeline. This is the one I use:
| Part | Years | Through-line |
|---|---|---|
| Volume One | 1805 | The salon, Pierre’s inheritance, Schöngrabern and Austerlitz |
| Volume Two | 1806–1811 | Years of peace, Freemasonry, the old oak, Natasha’s ball and betrothal |
| Volume Three | 1812 | Napoleon’s invasion, Borodino, the burning of Moscow |
| Volume Four | 1812–1813 | Pierre’s captivity, Karataev, Petya’s death, the partisan war |
| Epilogue | 1813, 1820 | Marriages and the next generation, and a whole chapter on freedom and necessity |
Expand: four families, plus a few people who belong to none (my own annotations)
- The Bezukhovs: Pierre, the illegitimate son, the closest thing to a reader in the book — he is always trying to work out how to live
- The Bolkonskys: the old prince, Andrew, Marya; proud and exact — the novel’s pole of reason
- The Rostovs: the count’s household, Natasha and Nikolai; the pole of vitality, the warmest and the least able to take a blow
- The Kuragins: Prince Vasily, Hélène, Anatole; the emptiest kind of respectability
- People on no family tree: Kutuzov, Napoleon, Karataev, Dolokhov — they steer the story, and none of them grows on a family tree
One warning: do not rush to read Kutuzov as the good general and Napoleon as the villain. Tolstoy does the opposite. He makes Kutuzov slow, idle, unwilling to interfere, and then explains in the margins that this very refusal to act is why he wins.
3. Passages and Marginalia
On the opening: one line tells you where a character stands
“Well, prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.”
— Book One, Part One, Chapter 1; Anna Pavlovna’s first words to her guest, in French in the original (Constance Garnett’s rendering)
The book’s first line is not narration; it is a hostess greeting a guest. And she says it in French: at the court of 1812, even talk about Russia borrowed the enemy’s language.
笔记Tolstoy puts French in his aristocrats’ mouths on purpose. One sentence carries class, circle and stance — what worries her is not Russia, it is the drawing rooms of Europe.
On the sky: the most-quoted passage in the book
“How is it I never saw that lofty sky before? Everything is empty, everything is a lie, except this infinite sky.”
— Book One, Part Three; Andrew lying wounded on the field at Austerlitz
My own working translation.
The most-quoted passage in the book, and Andrew’s turning point. He is not argued out of his ambition; he is talked out of it by something he looks up and sees.
着重点Watch how those two pages are built: he does not think, “I must give up glory”; he sees the sky first, and the glory collapses on its own. Sensation before conclusion — the seeing comes first, the reasoning catches up afterwards.
On the oak: the same tree, twice
“No, life is not over at thirty-one.”
— Book Two, Part Three; Andrew, passing the old oak for the second time
My own working translation.
The first time he passes it, the oak is bare and he thinks that a man of his age should settle for what he has. A month or so later the oak has come into leaf, and he understands: the world did not change, the eye he looked at it with did. One tree, two answers.
笔记This passage doubles as a manual for reading the whole novel: Tolstoy writes the same thing twice — the same tree, the same ball, the same battle — and all the weight sits on whether the point of view has shifted.
On greatness: one line that marks the whole cast
“There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.”
— the narrator, writing of Napoleon
My own working translation.
危险A pass mark, applied to every character in the book. Napoleon shrinks on the page, Kutuzov grows duller, precisely because the latter’s plainness is counted as a virtue.
My note: Tolstoy never denies that Napoleon was capable. He denies that capable equals great. Move the yardstick from achievement to simplicity, goodness and truth, and the novel’s centre of gravity slides off the battlefield and onto ordinary people like Karataev.
Is the essay a flaw in the novel?
Two camps have argued for more than a century. One says the dozens of pages of philosophy in the second epilogue are sermonising, they sink the ending, and you may skip them whole. The other says they are the point of the book, and the thousand pages before exist to prove them. My compromise is story first, argument second: until the story is done, the argument is only idling.
One trap in translations
In the original, aristocrats speak French outright, and Tolstoy reworks it in Russian afterwards. Chinese translations differ sharply: some render all the French as Chinese, which reads smoothly but loses the badge of “speaking French”; others keep the original and add footnotes. The opening line is French. To choose a version, open it at the salon and see how it handles this, then at the epilogue and see how it divides the volumes1.
4. Three Reading Habits That Actually Stuck
- People first, events second. For the first hundred pages, ignore the campaigns and match the names to faces: what Pierre is looking for, what Andrew is hiding from, what Natasha is waiting for. Learn five people and the next thousand pages have somewhere to stand.
- Treat the essays as white space. When a long historical digression arrives, skip it; read the stretch of story, then come back. The same passage reads differently before and after.
- Read one scene twice. The book’s core structure is “the same thing the second time”. Pick the one that moved you most — the oak, the ball, Borodino — and deliberately go back to it.
5. Closing
Finishing it changed an old habit: I no longer picture history as a few men on a stage making decisions. Tolstoy’s hardest move is to let the people who ought to matter do almost nothing, and let countless unnamed people push everything along together. It is a little dispiriting, and a little freeing.
Next: Crime and Punishment. Again nineteenth-century Russia, again the question “how should a person live” — one looking for the answer in a Moscow drawing room, one thinking it through in a Petersburg attic. I want to see how far apart the two questions are.
Footnotes
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The most widely circulated Chinese version in recent decades is Cao Ying’s, translated from the Russian collected works; older editions were sometimes relayed through another language. Versions differ over the French passages, the division of volumes, and even how names are rendered — the same paragraph can run half a page longer in one book than another. When choosing, name renderings and volume divisions matter more than how pretty the prose reads. ↩
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