The Question
So what is it about? Three families, one war, and one very long argument about history. Two young men, Pierre and Prince Andrew, one young woman, Natasha, and the year eighteen twelve, when Napoleon marched into Russia. This is a full summary, so it spoils everything, the ending included.
I used the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number twenty-six hundred, in the Maude translation. Every number in this video is my own count from that text.
How Big Is It
First, how many pages. An ebook has no pages, so I counted words. The story runs about five hundred and sixty-three thousand words, in fifteen books, two epilogues, and three hundred and sixty-five numbered chapters.
The Oxford World’s Classics paperback in the same translation is listed at thirteen hundred and ninety-two pages. That is reported by the publisher and by retailers, as of November twenty twenty-six. It works out to about four hundred words a page. Other editions change the number, so treat any page count as edition-dependent.
One more count, because the title begs for it. The word war appears two hundred and ninety-six times. The word peace appears one hundred and nine times. Pierre is named nearly two thousand times, Natasha twelve hundred, and Prince Andrew over eleven hundred. So this is their book.
Eighteen Oh Five
Book one opens in July eighteen oh five, at a party in Saint Petersburg, where a society hostess demands to know whether Napoleon means war. There we meet Pierre, a big, clumsy, kind young man who is the illegitimate son of a count, and Prince Andrew, his clever, bored friend, who is about to leave his pregnant wife to go and fight.
In Moscow the Rostov family throws a name day party. Count Rostov is generous and bad with money. His children are Vera, Nicholas, Natasha and little Petya, and their young cousin Sonya lives with them. Meanwhile Pierre’s father dies, and Pierre unexpectedly becomes Count Bezukhov, one of the richest men in Russia. People who ignored him now chase him. Prince Vasili Kuragin steers him toward his beautiful daughter Helene.
In book two Nicholas goes to the front as a hussar cadet, and Prince Andrew joins the staff of the general Kutuzov. Then comes Austerlitz, in book three, chapters fourteen to nineteen. Prince Andrew goes down holding a flagstaff, and lies on his back looking at a sky he says he never noticed before. Napoleon rides up, looks at him, and calls it a fine death. Andrew hears it like the buzzing of a fly.
Falling Apart
Book four is eighteen oh six, and everyone at Bald Hills thinks Prince Andrew is dead. Then he walks in, changed and softened, on the very night his wife Lise goes into labor. She dies. The baby, a boy, survives. Her dead face seems to ask what he has done to her.
Pierre’s marriage to Helene fails. In book four, chapter five, he fights a duel in the snow with the officer Dolokhov, and wounds him. After it, Pierre leaves Helene, and in book five he joins the Freemasons, trying to become a better man. Meanwhile Nicholas sits down to cards with the same Dolokhov, and keeps playing until he owes forty-three thousand rubles, the sum of his and Sonya’s ages. His father has to raise the money.
That is the pattern of the book. Every few chapters somebody falls, then starts again.
The Ball and the Fall
Books six to eight are the love story. At New Year’s, eighteen ten, sixteen-year-old Natasha goes to her first great ball, and Prince Andrew asks her to dance. The next day he finds her fresh and unlike anyone in Petersburg, and he calls on the Rostovs. He proposes. But his father insists they wait a year, and Andrew goes abroad.
In Moscow, in book eight, Natasha goes to the opera and meets Anatole Kuragin, Helene’s brother. He is charming, and he is secretly married. He plans to elope with her. The plan is caught in time, and her engagement to Prince Andrew is over. Natasha swallows arsenic and survives. Pierre, who loves her and has not said so, makes Anatole leave Moscow.
Eighteen Twelve
Book nine begins the invasion. Napoleon crosses into Russia. Nicholas fights as a cavalry officer. Old Prince Bolkonsky has a stroke and dies, and in book ten, chapter thirteen, Nicholas Rostov rides in and helps his daughter, Princess Mary, when the peasants at her estate refuse to let her leave.
The center of the book is Borodino, the second half of book ten. Pierre wanders onto the battlefield in a white hat and a green coat, and ends up inside a battery. Prince Andrew is hit by a shell and carried to a surgeon’s tent. On the next table is a man having his leg cut off. It is Anatole.
Moscow is given up in book eleven. The Rostovs flee in carts full of wounded, and one of the wounded, mortally, is Prince Andrew. Natasha is not told at first. Pierre stays in the empty city, and he is arrested and held to be tried as an arsonist. He is made to watch other prisoners shot.
The Dying and the Walking
In book twelve Helene dies in Petersburg. Officially it is angina. In private, the book says, the story is that she took too large a dose of a drug. Natasha and Mary nurse Prince Andrew at Yaroslavl, and in chapter sixteen he dies, quietly, with the book describing a strange lightness.
Pierre marches with the French prisoners. The peasant soldier Platon Karataev becomes his friend. When Karataev can no longer walk, a shot is fired behind Pierre, and a dog howls. Pierre does not turn around. Then Russian partisans attack. Petya Rostov, the youngest, charges with them and is killed. Denisov and Dolokhov free the prisoners, and Pierre is among them.
After the Smoke
In book fifteen Pierre is freed, falls ill at Orel, and recovers. Natasha has withdrawn from everyone since Andrew died, and in chapter seventeen of that book Pierre sees her again with Mary. Soon he is in love, and Natasha tells Mary she loves him back.
The first epilogue skips ahead to eighteen twenty. Natasha and Pierre marry in eighteen thirteen. Count Rostov dies that same year, leaving debts of double the value of the property. Nicholas takes them on, and marries Princess Mary. They live at Bald Hills, with Sonya.
The second epilogue is not a story. It is twelve short chapters of Tolstoy arguing about history and free will, and his answer is that kings do not move nations.
On Screen
If you are here because of the series, the BBC adaptation is reported to be six episodes, first shown on BBC One on the third of January, twenty sixteen. It was written by Andrew Davies and directed by Tom Harper, with Paul Dano as Pierre, Lily James as Natasha and James Norton as Prince Andrew, as of November twenty twenty-six. I only compare it with what the book has: the book is far larger than six hours.
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