War and Peace is a complex, composite, multi-layered, messy, lumpy novel. It is a multilingual book, 90% Russian, 10% French, with traces of German. It is an epic-scale chronicle covering the history of Russia from 1805 to 1820 and, more specifically, the Napoleonic invasion of 1812. It is a panoramic picture of a whole society with its cities, dvoryanstvo, muzhiks, political leaders and military campaigns. It is an enormous volume that focuses on massive historical events and a myriad of tiny, intimate moments. It is a treatise on the philosophy of history and the problem of determinism. It is a vast prose symphony that oscillates between moments of Beethovenian majesty and passages of soap-opera cheesiness.

Some characters are historical figures, slightly satirised: French Emperor Bonaparte, a plump arrogant buffoon with ambitions of world domination; Russian Tsar Alexander, a fretful biscuit eater; field marshal Kutuzov, a sleepy, heavy, one-eyed underrated military genius. Others are fictional but based on Tolstoy’s own family and friends and indeed feel more human, more real than the aforementioned “great men”: the cynical Andrei Bolkonsky, the starry-eyed man magnet Natasha Rostova, the revolutionary, idealist and socially awkward Pierre Bezukhov (the Tolstoyian heart of the novel), et al.

These main characters are, however, but the tip of the iceberg. War and Peace deploys an incredible ensemble of secondary figures; some of them are perhaps more memorable even than the protagonists. The wise captive Platon Karataev and the exuberant and sleazy French officer Ramballe, although appearing briefly and late in the novel (around the turn of Book IV), are utterly unforgettable.

Similarly, among all the chapters and scenes in the novel, some are absolutely remarkable: Andrei’s Ecclesiastes-type epiphany while staring at the eternal blue sky above the battlefield (I, 3, 16), the wolf hunt and the delicious troika ride on Christmas night (II, 4, 4-5 and 12), and of course, the Stendhalian plat de resistance of the novel, the Battle of Borodino, as seen through the eyes of Pierre Bezukhov, an improvised embedded journalist avant la lettre (III, 2, 24-37)—probably reminiscent of Tolstoy’s experience during the Crimean War.

And so, a substantial part of the novel focuses on three or four families, who periodically meet at Anna Pavlovna Sherer’s unshakable salon mondain in the course of the book: the Rostovs, the Bolkonskys, the Kuragins and the Bezukhovs. The lives of their members intersect on different levels, under two prominent influences:

Firstly, the influence of love: Pierre marries La Belle Hélène, but she cheats on him; Natasha loves Andrei, but Andrei goes away; Nikolai loves Sonya, but Sonya has no dowry; then Natasha loves the wastrel Anatole, but it goes badly; and then Nikolai meets Princess Maria; and then Natasha realises Pierre is charming… In short, much simping and ditching and friend-zoned bffs, and endless suchlike humbug. A significant slice of Tolstoy’s novel goes like that: Jane Austen style.

Secondly, the narrative progresses according to the influence of historical events and warfare: Andrei wounded at Austerlitz and glancing Napoleon; Nikolai seeing Alexander; Pierre at Borodino and Andrei injured a second time… This is a wholly different slice of Tolstoy’s novel, a sort of modern Iliad or Mahabharata or Henry VI, where the epic, brutal, warlike aspect of Tolstoy’s writing holds sway.

Underneath these two forces of love and war, a third undercurrent, philosophical this time, starts to rear its head every few chapters from the start of Book III and becomes an iterative soapbox interruption as the novel progresses towards its ending. The Second Epilogue is a downright philosophical enquiry on the nature of historical events, national movements, the origin of war, the laws presiding over “interconnected infinitesimal elements of freewill”, and the mistakes and fallacies of historiography. This last prominent slice of Tolstoy’s novel is indeed a theoretical, disembodied discussion with historians such as Adolphe Thiers or Joseph de Maistre and philosophers like Hegel, Schopenhauer and Carlyle; a conversation that heralds 20th-century history theory and economics.

Ultimately, War and Peace, with all its disjointed slices, cross-cutting layers, fragmented pieces, is a masterful example of what the novel is capable of—to move and fly swiftly, Hermes-like, between history and fiction, immensity and intimacy, macro and micro, aristocrats and enslaved people, emperors and privates, battlefields and drawing rooms, French and Russian, sky and mud, deep and shallow, feminine and masculine, romance and epic, comedy and tragedy, facts and theory, history and philosophy, war and peace. In short, what Tolstoy demonstrates is that the novel, elevated at this level of world-building chutzpah and demiurgic virtuosity, is as rich and complex as life itself, messy, virtually limitless and all-encompassing.

Nuff said, I need a shot of vodka now…