War and Peace

There remains the greatest of all novelists-for what else can we call the author of War And Peace? [Tolstoy's] senses, his intellect, are acute, powerful, and well nourished ... Nothing seems to escape him. Nothing glances off him unrecorded ... Every twig, every feather sticks to his magnet. He notices the blue or red of a child's frock; the way a horse shifts its tail; the sound of a cough; the action of a man trying to put his hands into pockets that have been sewn up. And what his infallible eye reports of a cough or a trick of the hands his infallible brain refers to something hidden in the character, so that we know his people, not only by the way they love and their views but also by the way they sneeze and choke. War and Peace is a historical novel that chronicles the tumultuous events in Russia during the Napoleonic war in the early nineteenth century. Focusing on an aristocratic way of life that had already started to fade at the time that Leo Tolstoy wrote the book in the 1860s, it covers a comparatively short span of time—fifteen years—but it renders the lives of disparate characters from all segments of society with vivid, well-realized details. The story captures a generation on the brink of change, with some defending the existing class structure with their lives while others realize that the old way of life is disappearing. Part history lesson, part grand romance, part battlefield revisionism, and part philosophy lecture, War and Peace has captivated generations of readers with its gripping narrative and its clear, intelligible understanding of the human soul.