Rob Baker’s Reviews > War and Peace > Status Update

Mr. Tolstoy: If you are trying to end your epic novel with the 33 most boring possible pages, you are succeeding.

What a trudge this final section is, but I'm not going to skip it after reading over 1000 pages.

Tolstoy hypothesizes on the forces of history, what the power is that cause historical events to happen. It's not without the occasional interesting idea, but it's very repetitive and drawn out.

A group of friends discuss and complain about politics.

"Why, everything is going to ruin...Everybody sees that it can't go on like this. The strain is too great, and the string must snap," said Pierre (as men always do say, looking into the world of government so long as governments have existed)" (1066).

Ups and downs of daily family life and loving marriages.

A man decides to treat his serfs better, promising his wife he will no longer beat them when he's mad at them. He still slips up a couple of times, but his intentions are true.

"He could not at once agree with her in his heart that what he had been used to from childhood (beating the serfs), what he looked upon as a matter of course, was wrong (1046).

Started the Epilogue!

A family falls into financial ruin, hides it from the elderly mother.

Tolstoy reflects on the impossibility of understanding historical events and figures.

"The ideal of glory and of greatness, consisting in esteeming nothing one does wrong, and glorying in every crime and ascribing it to an incomprehensible value...is elaborated on a grand scale in Africa" (1034).

A man & woman who before felt they had found love with others now find it with each other.

"PIerre's madness showed itself in his not waiting, as in old days, for those personal grounds, which he had called good qualities in people, in order to love them; but as love was brimming over in his heart he loved men without cause, and so never failed to discover incontestable reasons that made them worth loving" (1024).

When a man stops seeking God, he sees Him everywhere.

Muscovites return to their ruined city.

Russian soldiers follow the fleeing French army:

"One would naturally have expected that in the wretched conditions in which Russian soldiers were placed--without thick boots, without fur coats, without a roof, with frost of 18°C/a-8°F -- they must have presented a depressing spectacle. It was quite the opposite" (994).

A guilt-plagued woman re-imagines what she could have said to her dying fiance.

A family learns their son/brother was killed in the war.

Tolstoy acts as apologist for the behavior of the Russian armies (and specifically for General Kutuzov) during the French retreat.

"To the flunkey no man can be great, because the flunkey has his own flunkey conception of greatness" (990).

The fleeing French army loses huge numbers of men due to starvation, freezing, drowning, and skirmishes.

A young man finds adventure and thrills in being in the army and can't wait for skirmishes and missions. As he sits in an army camp, he sees it as "a land of fairies, where everything is possible" and, though he is not musical, composes symphonies of joy in his head (960-961).

A Russian regiment attacks a French and rescues some prisoners.

The Russian's practice guerilla/partisan warfare as the French withdraw.

Tolstoy discusses why, even though the French won the Battle of Borodino and occupied Moscow, this resulted in the destruction of Napoleon's army.


"The Battle of Borodino with the occupation of Moscow and the flight of the French that followed without anymore battles, is one of the most instructive phenomena in history" (939).