Tolstoy’s epic about Russian involvement in the Napoleonic Wars is both grand in ambition and minute in detail. In letting individual characters and intimate family descriptions exposit on the nuances of Russian society at large and realpolitik in war, Tolstoy has weaved a beautifully intricate tale into the fabric of greater social commentary. Tolstoy was no idle observer, but part of a landed gentry that saw its world drastically changing throughout the nineteenth century. A new class of merchants and industrialists was rising, the Tsar’s influence was waning, new Enlightenment ideas and technologies were spreading into Russia from the West, and the question of freedom for the millions of Russian serfs was being entertained. Tolstoy manages to comment on this social upheaval in a non-didactic way, while telling a grand tale about life in Russia’s most opulent aristocratic houses and on the battlefields of Europe, where general’s pretended to hold sway, but it was luck, contingency, and the unnoticed hand of the foot soldier that decided the battles upon which empires would rise or fall.
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