War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth--he had learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and those limits are very close; that the man who suffers because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered in sores.

Here it is, my first book of 2026: Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. I'm on track to read 365 books and 730,000 pages. And of course, whatever I try to say about it here will be by rights insufficient to it. It's not just a book that's long, or large in scope, but a book whose capaciousness attempts to take in all of human history; it is, in the end, a treatise on the relationship between history and the illusion of free will. But it's also a pretty good story, so let me start with an attempt at a summary. In early 19th century Russia, Pierre Bezhukov is blessed with the title and fortune of his late father, despite being illegitimate. Being a rich count gives him no sense of purpose or goodness, and so he struggles to find ways to contribute, from the military to Freemasonry to an ill-advised marriage to a selfish and narrow-minded woman. There are others in Pierre's social orbit, like his friend Andrei, a widower who falls for Natasha Rostov, who is the sister of Nikolai, a young man searching for glory in the war against Napoleon. These four--Pierre, Andrei, Natasha, and Nikolai--are, I would say, the core four in a book with an immense cast. As Napoleon enters Russia in the fateful year of 1812, the war goes from being an embarrassment to a threat, and these four all find their lives upended by the arrival of total war to Moscow.

My first impressions of War and Peace were that, unlike Anna Karenina, it all seemed a little slapdash. The various storylines didn't seem to hang together very well, although there's a lot in the book's first half that's really delightful, like Pierre being accidentally successful in a duel with his wife's lover. But it's the book's second half, with the arrival of Napoleon and the war--not the fake war of Austerlitz, which seems almost like a feint by Tolstoy in the book's first section--where the book really gains a sense of purpose and direction. (Maybe, in that sense, it's a lot like Pierre.) The war provides a crucible for the love between Andrei and Natasha, even as we know that it will also (even if we're only familiar with the title of a certain Broadway play based on War and Peace) spell that love's doom. But the real highlights, I think, are the scenes where we follow Pierre during the Napoleonic occupation and burning of Moscow: Pierre convincing himself that numerology suggests he should go out and assassinate Napoleon; Pierre sort of accidentally saving the life of a friendly French nobleman; Pierre being ultimately captured and sent to a French prison camp, where he comes to a deeper and more profound understanding of human nature (the passage above). Pierre is the book's singular creation, a genial but hapless oaf--I loved how often Tolstoy reminds us he's a big fat guy--whose heart goes searching after wisdom, and amazingly, finds it.

You know, I said there's four main characters, but now that I think about it, there's really five, because Napoleon is one, too, right? Not knowing all that much about the Napoleonic wars outside of the basics, I found the "War" stuff interesting but often pretty tedious. But I really was interested in War and Peace's depiction of Napoleon, who Tolstoy describes as an overly proud man who believes in himself as a manifestation of the will of the people. This often verges on the comical, as when Napoleon seems convinced that even a Russian envoy, who just wants to deliver a message, will be charmed enough by his grandeur to kiss his ring. Among the more incisive things said by Tolstoy, whose editorial hand is much heavier here than in Anna Karenina, is that the myth of Napoleon's "greatness" has elided how evil he was, and how many people he wantonly murdered; that's true to some extent even today. I really enjoyed the way that Tolstoy cuts him down to size. Tolstoy manages to make interesting, memorable characters out of a few of the war's other figures, like the Russian military leaders Kutuzov and Rastopchin, though I imagine these depictions might resonate even more with a Russian audience for whom these figures are well-known.

Tolstoy interrupts the narrative time and time again to tell us that his real subject is history and its causes, and their relationship to free will. As insidious as his Napoleon is, Tolstoy informs us that to blame the war on Napoleon is a categorical error. War happens not simply because one man wills it, but because of the wills--such as they are--of millions of men. And in fact, even this is not quite right, because Tolstoy ends the book with a long treatise telling us that there is no such thing as free will. This is the realization that brings Pierre such joy in the prison camp, that happiness emerges from accepting the thought that one's will his limited. Tolstoy's argument is captured best by a dream Pierre has of a friend in the camp holding a globe which is composed of millions of drops; each man is a drop but also a manifestation of the entire sea, into which he ultimately returns. In the end, I wonder if War and Peace might have been an even better book--if it's not sacrilege to say so--if Tolstoy had kept that singular image and dropped the last thirty pages of sermonizing. But perhaps he wrote only the book that the forces of history drove him to write.