War and Peace

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1867

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Themes

Living a Meaningful Life

The characters in War and Peace search for meaning in a complex, chaotic world. This meaning takes many forms, from Pierre’s intellectualism to Marya’s religion to Nikolai’s patriotism. The search for meaning is an essential need, but not every character finds it.

Pierre’s search for meaning is mostly intellectual. Unhappy with his aristocratic trappings—a beautiful wife he doesn’t love and a wealth that allows him to indulge in endless physical comforts—he joins the Freemasons and allows himself to be mentored by Iosif Alexeevich Bazdeev. The secret spiritualism of the Freemasons is only a temporary reprieve. When he sees through the hypocrisy of the order, Pierre decides to focus on patriotism and the war effort, obsessed with killing Napoleon. This too fails. Pierre only finds meaning as a French prisoner—a horrific ordeal that teaches him to value the more mundane aspects of existence. This time of physical and psychological suffering is transformative. Pierre sees the flaws in his intellectual pursuits. After he marries Natasha, he blends the purposeful action of raising a family with the intellectual demands of the civil service. This simple, satisfying life makes him truly happy.

Andrei is a counterpoint to Pierre. He searches for meaning in the same places: He has a family, joins the army, and falls in love. However, Andrei is less curious and open-minded than Pierre, so every time his rigid ideals butt up against more nuanced reality, he feels betrayed and despondent. The government is full of calculating climbers who disrespect Kutuzov, war is a brutal sham in which innocent men are meaninglessly slaughtered, his family breaks apart when his wife randomly dies in childbirth and his son only makes Andrei feel guilty, and Natasha’s naive crush expires as soon as Andrei leaves her sight. Only in death does Andrei finally understand the meaning of life, accepting a kind of universal Christian love as a way of renouncing the world.

The Purpose of Suffering

A key theme of War and Peace is transformative suffering—an idea that was a large part of Tolstoy’s understanding of Christianity. Characters rarely suffer simply for the sake of suffering; instead, they evolve and grow, learning from the pain they endure. For example, Andrei’s life seems perfect, as he is a handsome and wealthy aristocrat. However, internally, he struggles to be happy. He does not love his wife Lisa, he rigidly adheres to ideals of glory, and he is deeply incurious about the world. Andrei’s war experience changes him: The careless careerism of the civilian administrators is dispiriting, and the random brutality and violence of battle fully disillusions him. He arrives home just in time to watch Lisa die in childbirth. The double shock of the war and Lisa’s death transforms Andrei into a guilt-ridden depressive husk of his former self who sees every vicissitude of life as a betrayal. Only when he is close to death does Andrei appreciate the moments of sublime transcendence he experienced earlier—the infinite sky above the battlefield connects him to a universal understanding of mankind. Andrei’s suffering allows him to quietly renounce the world in peace.

Pierre suffers emotionally. His loveless marriage to Helene, his bitter jealously toward Dolokhov, and his disillusionment with the teachings of the Freemasons cause Pierre a great deal of pain. He regularly invests himself in new ideas and opportunities, only to be hurt when these go wrong. The right kind of suffering for Pierre’s transformation turns out to be a combination of physical and psychological torment. The pain of the long, hard prison march out of Moscow coupled with the sight of other men being shot has a devastating effect on him. However, Pierre learns from his pain and emerges an empathetic man who now connects with others in a meaningful way.

History and Free Will

War and Peace spends its final epilogue reflecting on the nature of history and free will. This theme exists in earlier parts of the novel, but the final chapters bring the idea explicitly to the forefront and allow Tolstoy to speak directly to his audience. He leaves the action-packed scenes of war and the melodrama of high society for a thorough and academic investigation of historiography’s inadequate grappling with randomness and history’s inability to get beyond its obsession with “great men.” In the epilogue, Tolstoy describes history as almost impossibly complex. No one can truly understand this complexity—that would involve following the decisions and actions of each individual involved in the lead up to and execution of huge events.

We see the theme of history and free will in the fate of Kutuzov. The generals under him lambast Kutuzov as an old and out-of-touch relic. However, Tolstoy is writing to rehabilitate the man’s reputation, stressing Kutuzov’s deep and innate understanding that large events like wars are determined by chance occurrences as much as, if not more than, by leaders. The eventual success of Kutuzov’s tactics demonstrates that he is right.

Tolstoy also theorizes about the nature of free will. According to the narrator, free will is an illusion: Most people simply react to what has occurred previously. The narrator grants that certain great men like Kutuzov and Napoleon have slightly more power to alter history, since they issue orders to groups of men who ostensibly follow them. However, their influence is always overstated—in reality, they are parts of a larger machine. For Tolstoy, true free will is the sum of many millions of different free wills acting all at once.