“Alive, and very much so,” Tolstoy’s diary entry for November 19, 1889, begins. That is how it feels to be caught up in the bright sweep of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”: alive, and very much so. It is to succumb to the contagion of vitality. As his characters infect each other with the high temperature of their existence, so they infect us. Count Rostov dances the Daniel Cooper at a ball, and “all who were in the ballroom looked with smiles of joy at the merry old man.” His son Nikolai has “that merry brotherly tenderness with which all fine young men treat everyone when they are happy.” The Rostov girls are “always smiling at something (probably their own happiness)”; one of them, Natasha, loves to order the servants around, but they “liked carrying out Natasha’s orders as they did no one else’s.” The fat, naïve, bumbling hero of the novel, Pierre Bezukhov, is so infectious that footmen “joyfully rushed to help him off with his cloak and take his stick and hat.” We cannot resist these people, and they cannot resist themselves: Nikolai goes to war “because he could not resist the wish to go galloping across a level field,” and when the French start running toward him he is amazed that anyone would want to kill him: “To kill me? Me, whom everybody loves so?” Likewise, when Pierre is captured by the French he has a revelation of infinity that is also a revelation of his own infinity. Looking up at the numberless stars, he thinks, “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me! . . . And all this they’ve caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!”

Because this immense sense of self hums its own intoxicating music, these characters cannot play in the milder orchestras of give-and-take, and are often poor at crediting the discrete existence of others. But how vividly Tolstoy communicates their vitality to us! A major new translation of “War and Peace,” by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf; $37), brings us their palpability as perhaps never before. There is the “little princess,” Prince Andrei’s wife, with her short upper lip and faint mustache; and the soldier Denisov, with his “short fingers covered with hair”; and a shirtless Napoleon grunting, “Do it hard, keep going,” to the valet who is vigorously brushing his fat back and fat hairy chest; and the wise old Russian general Kutuzov, tired and sagging, who is always yawning through war councils (but who has a swivel eye for the girls); and the smooth Russian diplomat Bilibin, with his pompous habit of gathering the skin over his eyebrows when he is about to produce a bon mot.

Tolstoy is the great novelist of physical involuntariness. The body helplessly confesses itself, and the novelist seems merely to run and catch its spilled emotion. A friend of the novelist’s, the critic Aleksandr Druzhinin, ribbed him about it in a letter: “You are sometimes on the point of saying that so-and-so’s thighs showed that he wanted to travel in India!” The old patriarch Prince Bolkonsky, for instance, loves his son, Andrei, and his daughter, Marya, so fiercely that he cannot express that love in any form except spiteful bullying, yelling in the presence of his spinsterish daughter, “If only some fool would marry her!” His hands register “the still persistent and much-enduring strength of fresh old age,” but his face occasionally betrays suppressed tenderness. As he says farewell to his son, who is going to war, he is his usual self, gruffly shouting “Off with you!” Yet “something twitched in the lower part of the old prince’s face.”

Tolstoy can seem almost childlike in his simplicity, because he is not embarrassed to do the kind of thing beloved of children’s and fairy-tale writers when they read the emotions on the face of a cat or a donkey. When Prince Andrei’s wife dies in childbirth, her dead face appears to say to the living, “Ah, what have you done to me?” The old prince’s valet can “read” his master’s body; he knows that if the prince is “stepping full on his heels” something is up. At a ball in St. Petersburg, the sixteen-year-old Natasha Rostov has just finished a dance and, intoxicated with happiness, would like to rest. But someone asks her to dance again, and she agrees, flashing a smile at the man she will eventually become engaged to, Prince Andrei, who has been watching her. Tolstoy explains the smile:

That smile said: “I’d be glad to rest and sit with you; I’m tired; but you see, I’ve been asked to dance, and I’m glad of it, and I’m happy, and I love everybody, and you and I understand all that,” and much, much more.

Readers always feel that Tolstoy is both an intrusive narrator—breaking in to explain things, telling us what to think, writing essays and sermons—and a miraculously absent one, who simply lets his world narrate itself. As Isaac Babel put it, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.” There is a sense in which Tolstoy is saying to us—to dare a Tolstoyan reading of Tolstoy, for a minute—“I will gladly help you read Natasha’s or Pierre’s or the little princess’s face, but, really, anyone could do it. You don’t need me. For these are the largest, most universal, most natural emotions, not the precious little sweets of the stylish novelist.” The old prince, ignoring his son Andrei’s efforts to tell him about Napoleon’s designs, breaks into croaky song, and sings “in an old man’s off-key voice.” A few pages later, we see “the old prince in his old man’s spectacles and his white smock.” An old man with an old man’s voice and old man’s spectacles: Tolstoy pushes such characterization toward the simplest tautology: What was the old man like? He was like an old man—that is to say, like all old men. What is a young man like? He is like a young man—that is to say, like all young men. What is a happy young woman like? Like all happy young women. The Austrian minister of war is described thus: “He had an intelligent and characteristic head.” A character will tend to look characteristic in both senses of the word: full of character, and somehow typical.

There is a powerful tension in Tolstoy’s work between persons and types, the particular and the general, freedom and laws. The quintessential Tolstoyan atmosphere is one in which highly particularized characters, with their hairy fingers and short lips, experience universal emotions that might easily be transferred from one character to another. This is why the minor characters are as alive as the major ones. In the novel’s epilogue, Nikolai Rostov’s aged mother, the Countess, hears the conversation around her and suddenly perks up. She had finished her tea, Tolstoy writes, “and clearly wished to find a pretext for getting angry after eating.” Now, that is a very Tolstoyan observation, but it is not unique to the Countess. Almost anyone of a certain age in this novel might have felt the same way. (Chekhov, who learned so much from Tolstoy, is comparably subtle, but without the urge to generalize.)

Babel’s conceit, about Tolstoy’s work being so life-filled that he somehow does not seem to write at all, has been the dominant modern tribute paid to the Master’s animism, from Matthew Arnold’s admonition that we should take “Anna Karenina” not as a work of art but as a “piece of life” to A. N. Wilson’s assertion that “War and Peace,” “for seven-eighths of the time . . . does not feel as if it is being narrated at all.” The paradox is not only that “War and Peace” can seem unwritten, even though the accumulated drafts amount to five thousand pages. It is also that its author can seem unread, someone who has never needed to read anybody else’s fiction, even though he was a gigantic reader of fiction in English, French, and German, a devotee of Stendhal, Sterne, Dickens, Goethe, Flaubert, Thackeray. (He especially loved another novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, “Vanity Fair.”) For all that, he described “War and Peace” as “not a novel,” and saw Russian fiction as best represented by its awkward misfits, like Gogol’s “Dead Souls” and Dostoyevsky’s barely fictionalized book about the Siberian prison camp, “The House of the Dead”—unconventional works that were nothing like what he called “European forms.”

Tolstoy wrote this enormous not-a-novel between 1863 and 1868, and it is thought that one of his early intentions was to write a domestic saga in the English, Trollopian mode. In his diaries for September, 1865, one can find the following: “Read Trollope, good.” A few days later, he is still admiring Trollope, who “overwhelms me with his skill.” But by October 3rd he has “finished Trollope. Too much that is conventional.” That is the key to the restless zeal with which he began to write and rewrite his novel, his impatience with conscripted conventions. Though “all of life” may course through the book—birth, death, marriage, warfare—the writing has none of the serial vividness of Thackeray or Dickens or, indeed, Dostoyevsky. (One thinks of the gathering in Dostoyevsky’s “Demons” into which a man bursts shouting, “The suburbs are on fire!”) The undulations of “dramatic conflict” are levelled. Cliff-hangers become hill-walkers. The beginning seems arbitrary (a trivial salon) and the fatigued closure still tends to disappoint (an epilogue concerning quiet domestic life seven years after the great events of 1812).

Perhaps Tolstoy really didn’t know where to start or end. He had originally wanted to write about 1856, and a patrician revolutionary’s return to Russian life from long Siberian exile. He himself had bitter experience of the mood of futility that characterized the years just after the pointless blundering of the Crimean War. He had fought in the Crimea, had witnessed the bloody suttee of that campaign, where men willingly sacrificed themselves on the national pyre, and for nothing. His “Sebastopol Sketches” lucidly described the opacities of war. In order to write well about 1856, however, he felt that he needed to go back to 1825, when the upper-class rebels known as the Decembrists were executed and exiled. But 1825 could not be evoked, Tolstoy explained in a note, without the great year 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia and occupied Moscow for four weeks. And 1812 would need 1805 as preparation, which is when the novel opens. Whatever Tolstoy’s precise intentions, in 1865 he began to shape the quiet “English” novel—at this point still called “All’s Well That Ends Well”—into a Russian epic about Alexander and Napoleon; by 1867-68, he was writing about the savage national trauma of 1812, and beginning to add long essays on warfare, freedom and determinism, and the philosophy of history. Here was the most flagrant strike against the “pure” European form of the novel. Tolstoy barges into his own work, and unloads his years of reading and thinking about history on the reader, with an autodidact’s sleepless certitude. A fictional description of the battle of Borodino gives way to a military history of the actual battle, complete with a map of the battlefield. “Il se répète! Et il philosophise!!” a shocked Flaubert commented. Some contemporary Russian critics, too, were appalled by this didactic, philosophical presence.

But the essays belong with the fictional narrative, as peace belongs to war. Essentially, “War and Peace” is the story of two families and an outrider: the Rostovs, zestful Moscow aristocrats; the Bolkonskys, ruled by the domineering old prince, on his country estate; and Pierre Bezukhov, the large, lofty, comic quester who becomes involved with both families. In the “peace” of the novel’s title, people give birth, and die, and marry, and think and talk and dine. But “peace” is inevitably intertwined with “war.” Nikolai Rostov and his brother, Petya, go off to fight Napoleon, as does Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. Having been wounded at Austerlitz in 1805, and having lost his wife in childbirth, Andrei becomes engaged to the irrepressible Natasha Rostov. She breaks off that engagement in a spasm of fickleness, but is haunted by it; indeed, she will nurse the dying Andrei, mortally wounded at Borodino, in 1812. Nikolai, who is all bold charm and youthful high spirits—Tolstoy writes that before Austerlitz he is momentarily aimless, because “there was no one to cut down (as he had always pictured battle to himself)”—survives the war, and marries Andrei’s sister, Princess Marya. The fat, inquisitive metaphysician Pierre marries, separates, becomes a Mason, is widowed, and, wearing an absurd white hat and green tailcoat, blunders into the theatre of war at Borodino. He returns to Moscow as the French are closing in on the city, garbed in a coachman’s caftan and determined to assassinate Napoleon. He is obviously “a disguised gentleman,” Tolstoy writes, perhaps presciently, since this was the kind of costume that Tolstoy himself wore in fierce, bearded later life, looking for all the world like a landowning Moses wrapped in an eiderdown. There is a very funny moment in which caftanned Pierre is spotted by the Rostovs as they are leaving Moscow, fleeing from the French. Natasha, characteristically, hangs out of the carriage, exclaiming, “Look, for God’s sake, it’s Bezukhov!” Pierre is eventually captured by the French, held for more than a month, and nearly executed. In time, he marries Natasha; the novel’s epilogue brings a description of the happy marriages of these two couples, Nikolai and Marya and Pierre and Natasha. All’s well that ends well.

Or not, because the epilogue concludes not with the fictional narrative but with a final, dragonish blast from the flaming, irritable, essay-writing Tolstoy, eager to put us right about freedom and predestination. “War and Peace” is “not a novel” but a frequently essayistic national epic, and this side of the story also involves two families and an outrider—the two “families” of the French and Russian nations, and Napoleon, who forced them together when he invaded Russia and took Moscow, in 1812. “War and Peace” vibrates with anti-Napoleonic anger; the irony is that this novel about great egotists and solipsists (Pierre and Andrei are just the chief representatives), written by perhaps the greatest egotist ever to put pen to paper, is a cannon aimed directly at the egotism of Napoleon. As a result, Tolstoy the novelist, whenever he describes Napoleon dramatically, cannot help crediting the very vitality that Tolstoy the Russian patriot hates.

Tolstoy objected to the way Napoleon’s solipsism and vanity (“It was clear that only what went on in his soul was of interest to him,” he writes) was indulged by so much nineteenth-century historical writing, which essentially agreed with Hegel’s quip that Napoleon was the World Spirit on horseback. The aggression of the narrative descriptions of Napoleon gains power from the aggression of the historical essays, in which Tolstoy recurringly argues against the cult of the “great man.” The writers and philosophers whom Tolstoy had started reading in earnest in the mid-eighteen-sixties were inclined to think that in 1812, as Tolstoy puts it, millions of people went from west to east and slaughtered each other to no purpose, all because one man told them to. Even those who admitted many and various historical causes never admitted enough. For there are billions of causes of such a bloody migration, Tolstoy says, from Napoleon’s war lust to the most humble hussar’s need to be fed and paid. And that would be the wrong way to order things anyway, because, according to Tolstoy, Napoleon’s ambition probably has less to do with historical determinations than with the hussar’s blind need.

What should absorb us as historians is not the singular glory of a Napoleon but the mute, inglorious lives of ordinary people—what Tolstoy calls the “swarmlike life, where man inevitably fulfills the laws prescribed for him.” He writes, “Kings are the slaves of history. History, that is, the unconscious swarmlike life of mankind, uses every moment of a king’s life as an instrument for its purposes.” Napoleon himself was a slave to historical inevitability, since what happened was always going to happen. Every action of the so-called great men, “which to them seems willed by themselves, in the historical sense is not willed, but happens in connection with the whole course of history and has been destined from before all ages.” Tolstoy’s conclusion is epistemological skepticism. We know much less than we thought we did: “The more we try to explain sensibly these phenomena of history, the more senseless and incomprehensible they become for us.” Only by admitting the most infinitesimal units for observation “can we hope to comprehend the laws of history.”

Tolstoy thus has the commitment to rich, ordinary detail that the Annales school of history made famous a hundred years later. But he does not believe that any narrative can describe a historical event successfully. He believes that history has laws, and he believes in divine predestination. Of the battle of Borodino, he writes, “The terrible thing continued to be accomplished, which was accomplished not by the will of men, but by the will of Him who governs people and worlds.” But these laws are only partly discoverable; even if we were to describe accurately all the causes of a historical event we would still be unable to describe “the one cause of all causes.” Tolstoy believes that we are not free but that we have to believe we are, in order to live. Reason expresses the laws of necessity, he writes. Yet consciousness expresses the essence of freedom. Consciousness says, “I am alone, and all that exists is only I.” So Tolstoy’s “public” history-writing is consonant with his “private” novel-writing: in war and in peace, we feel like persons, but helplessly obey the laws of typology (a young man is like all young men).

There are considerable contradictions here. One is that the great historiographical skeptic is also a great sermonizing bully, not only telling us what we must think but clearly writing a form of history himself. (As the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky succinctly put it, “He was history itself.”) Another is that the novelist who sermonizes about the “swarmlike life” of men is a novelist who seldom writes about ordinary people. Yet another is that “War and Peace,” for all its radical unconventionality, emits that characteristically vague growl of nineteenth-century doubt in which God is no longer describable but impossible to abandon. War, rendered so painstakingly in all its senselessness and evil, finally serves only to confirm God’s benevolent presence, however spectral. A theodicy is begun, and then fudged. In this respect, Thomas Hardy, say, was a bolder novelist. And isn’t there a special tension between the novelist who insists on predestination and the novelist who wants to give his own characters—his own creations—the freedom to break away from him? Tolstoy’s radical relaxation of the melodramas of conventional “plot” is an unwinding of authorial tyranny, but he has a coercive tendency to bully toward Christian widsom the heroes he most cares about—Andrei and Pierre, Levin, Ivan Ilyich. Again, Napoleon is the interesting challenge: Tolstoy must make him vital without making him seem too vital, and thus too free. He must remain a deluded slave of historical forces beyond his control.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation gives us new access to the spirit and order of the book. Literary translators tend to divide into what one could call originalists and activists. The former honor the original text’s quiddities, and strive to reproduce them as accurately as possible in the translated language; the latter are less concerned with literal accuracy than with the transposed musical appeal of the new work. Any decent translator must be a bit of both. Though Tolstoy has been well served in English, his translators, like Constance Garnett, Rosemary Edmonds, and Aylmer and Louise Maude, have tended to be somewhat activist, sidestepping difficult words, smoothing the rhythm of the Russian, and eliminating one of Tolstoy’s most distinctive elements, repetition. Pevear and Volokhonsky, who are justly celebrated for their translations of Dostoyevsky, are closer to the originalist camp than to the activist. Without being Nabokovians (Nabokov used such clanking words as “mollitude” in his outlandishly literal translation of “Eugene Onegin,” and insisted on calling Stiva Oblonsky, in “Anna Karenina,” “Steve”), they want the English to sound as close to the Russian as possible, and they are fervent about the importance of “roughening up” their versions when the Russian demands it. Translation is not a transfer of meaning from one language to another, Pevear writes, but a dialogue between two languages.

For instance, there is a famous scene in “War and Peace” when Prince Andrei visits family estates in Ryazan. On the way, in a forest, he sees a great, gnarled oak, surrounded by trees already succumbing to spring. He feels like the oak: it seems to say (here is one of Tolstoy’s characters now “reading” a tree!), “Spring, and love, and happiness . . . senseless deception!” But, returning a month later, he cannot at first identify the oak, because it has leafed out like all the other trees:

The whole day had been hot, there was a thunderstorm gathering somewhere, but only a small cloud had sent a sprinkle over the dust of the road and the juicy leaves. The left side of the woods was dark, in the shade; the right side, wet, glossy, sparkled in the sun, barely swayed by the wind. Everything was in flower; nightingales throbbed and trilled, now near, now far. . . . The old oak, quite transformed, spreading out a canopy of juicy, dark greenery, basked, barely swaying, in the rays of the evening sun. Of the gnarled fingers, the scars, the old grief and mistrust—nothing could be seen. Juicy green leaves without branches broke through the stiff, hundred-year-old bark, and it was impossible to believe that this old fellow had produced them. “Yes, it’s the same oak,” thought Prince Andrei, and suddenly a causeless springtime feeling of joy and renewal came over him.

Tolstoy’s repetition of that adjective “juicy”—three times in a short passage—is typical, and should not deserve the scorn of the Flaubertian fanatic. Flaubert, the agonist of style, swatted repetitions like insects, and today’s copy editor, no less than Tolstoy’s early translators, is post-Flaubertian in this way. But Tolstoy surely wants the word “juicy” to take the weight of Andrei’s renewed optimism; if the passage is written in a loose, free indirect style, we should feel Andrei coming back to this word in his half-articulated thoughts, feel the sap flowing, slowly, then faster, through his veins. “Sappy” is, indeed, the word that Constance Garnett uses to translate the Russian sochnye, and, unusually for her, she uses the same word three times, like Tolstoy. The Maudes use “sappy,” too, but drop the third iteration, as if it were slightly embarrassing. Anthony Briggs, in his 2005 translation, renders the word as “lush,” uses it twice, and then substitutes “succulent.” “Juicy” is a precise translation of the Russian; but the striking comparison is between the rhythm of Pevear and Volokhonsky and the rhythm of the other translators.

Here is Garnett:The whole day had been hot; a storm was gathering, but only a small rain-cloud had sprinkled the dust of the road and the sappy leaves. The left side of the forest was dark, lying in shadow. The right side, glistening with the raindrops, gleamed in the sunlight, faintly undulating in the wind.

This sounds like good English, while Pevear and Volokhonsky’s version, with its hiccupped run-on, does not: “The whole day had been hot, there was a thunderstorm gathering somewhere, but only a small cloud had sent a sprinkle over the dust of the road and the juicy leaves.” More than that, their prose sounds, in the course of the entire scene, like a man working his way toward an apprehension. “Of the gnarled fingers, the scars, the old grief and mistrust—nothing could be seen”: this has the dynamic intermittence of actual thought. The Maudes’ ”Neither gnarled fingers nor old scars nor old doubts and sorrows were any of them in evidence now” sounds like an English lyric poet—Housman, perhaps.

Richard Pevear, in an eloquent introduction, provides a startling example of the ways in which translators do not simply tidy up texts but make things “clear” that they deem obscure. In the novel’s epilogue, Marya enters the nursery: “The children were riding to Moscow on chairs and invited her to come with them.” That is exactly what Tolstoy writes, because he wants us to experience a little shock of readjustment as the adult meets the otherworldliness of childish fantasy. But Garnett, the Maudes, and Briggs all insert an explanatory “playing at,” to make things easier for the adults. As the Maudes render it, “The children were playing at ‘going to Moscow’ in a carriage made of chairs, and invited her to go with them.”

This might seem like a trivial point, but it is a little clue to the vision of the whole novel. Tolstoy sees reality as a system of constant adjustments, a long, tricky convoy of surprises, as realities jostle together and the vital, solipsistic ego is affronted by the otherness of the world. Nikolai Rostov thinks that warfare is a glamorous business of “cutting people down.” But warfare is nothing like that, and when he finally has the chance to cut down a Frenchman he cannot do it, because the soldier’s face is not that of an enemy but “a most simple, homelike face.” He gets a medal and is called a hero, but can think only, “So that’s all there is to so-called heroism?” By the time Prince Andrei fights at Borodino, he has lost any sense he once had that a battle can be successfully commanded, and applauds General Kutuzov for at least knowing when to leave well enough alone. On a trip home, he sees two girls stealing plums from the estate’s trees, and is comforted, feeling “the existence of other human interests, totally foreign to him and as legitimate as those that concerned him.”

One of the great sequences of adjustment involves Pierre’s experience as a prisoner of the French, during which he undergoes a colossal moral correction, brought on by witnessing the execution of his fellow-captives and by listening to the wise old peasant Platon Karataev, who preaches a kind of Christian stoicism. Pierre watches as four men are shot by the French. Now it is the turn of the fifth, a factory worker, a thin boy of eighteen. Pierre will be next. The factory worker is blindfolded, but, just before he is killed, he straightens the knot at the back of his head, to make it more comfortable. It is a superb scene, every detail charged, as if lit by lightning: the pale, frightened faces of the French executioners, the young French soldier who stands by the pit where the bodies are being buried, swaying back and forth like a drunkard, and then the comment of one of the French soldiers: “That’ll teach them to set fires.” Tolstoy, in his simple, fairy-tale mode, somehow at once the intrusive narrator and as absent as air, has Pierre decode this muttering: “It was a soldier who wanted to comfort himself at least somehow for what had been done, but could not.” (Again, a universal shame is given particularity by a minor character.)

What strikes us nowadays is the mysterious pointlessness of the man fiddling with his blindfold just before death. It was perhaps with the help of Tolstoy’s instruction that George Orwell watched a condemned Burmese man, in his essay “A Hanging,” walk toward the gallows and swerve to avoid a puddle on the way. Both Tolstoy and Orwell are making a point about uniqueness and typicality. The human animal will tend to look after its own interests, even when the gesture is so useless that it seems not typical but radically individual. And Tolstoy the determinist is doubtless interested in the nature of the action: is the condemned man exercising the sweetest gratuity of his free will or helplessly responding to the discomfort of the knot? Either way, the absolute selfishness (in the most basic sense) of another man must be instructive to the self-sufficient Pierre. After his experiences, his sense of the differences of other people begins to expand. The factory worker adjusts his blindfold and dies; Pierre, figuratively speaking, adjusts his blindfold and lives.

The adjustment of vision forced on us by the condemned man, or even the children riding to Moscow, is related to a technique for which Tolstoy was praised by the Russian formalist critics of the nineteen-twenties and later—estrangement, or the art of making the familiar unfamiliar. Sometimes, this involves seeing the world as a child might. When Natasha goes to the opera, she refuses to see anything but painted cardboard and men and women peculiarly dressed, and finds the whole thing false and pretentious. Tolstoy is never greater in this novel than when, like Natasha at the opera, he refuses to make sense of warfare. Again and again, he reverses the martial tapestry and shoves the clumsy, illegible tufts of thread at us. Nikolai Rostov, standing on a wooden bridge in Enns, hears a rattling “as if someone had spilled nuts,” and a man falls beside him. A bullet sounds as if it were “complaining about something.” In one of the most beautiful of the novel’s scenes, Nikolai’s younger brother, Petya, riding with his comrades Denisov and Dolokhov, and some Cossack soldiers, foolishly gallops into a storm of French fire and is felled. His dying is described as if by his comrades, who cannot make sense of what is happening: “Petya galloped on his horse across the manor courtyard, and, instead of holding the reins, waved both arms somehow strangely and quickly, and kept sliding further and further to one side in his saddle.” Eventually, he falls heavily onto the wet ground. Denisov—he of the short, hairy fingers—approaches the body and, as he looks at Petya, “irrelevantly” recalls him once saying, “I’m used to something sweet. Excellent raisins, take them all.” There follows this extraordinarily moving sentence: “And the Cossacks glanced around in surprise at the sounds, similar to a dog’s barking, with which Denisov quickly turned away, went to the wattle fence, and caught hold of it.”

It is a very modern piece of writing and a very ancient one, as is so often the case with Tolstoy. Stephen Crane learned a great deal from Tolstoy about this kind of writing; in “The Red Badge of Courage,” a man with a shoeful of blood “hopped like a schoolboy in a game.” Ian McEwan uses a similar technique in the Dunkirk section of “Atonement.” But, if the hacking lament that sounds oddly like the barking of a dog is an example of modern estrangement, that young man gripping the wattle fence in grief and those startled Cossacks—especially the transfer of the emotion from the mourner to the Cossacks, from the involved audience to a less involved audience—seem almost Biblical. (In Genesis, when Joseph, in disguise, meets his brothers, “he wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard.”)

Tolstoy appears to write slightingly of women at one moment in the book, when he says, “About the war Princess Marya thought as women think about war. She feared for her brother, who was there; was horrified, not understanding it.” Another generalization: all women think like this. But the novel argues that no one understands war—indeed, that no one understands history. Napoleon says, on the eve of the battle of Borodino, “The chessmen are set up,” but a few pages earlier Pierre has likened war to a game of chess, only to earn Andrei’s scorn: “Yes . . . only with this small difference, that in chess you can think over each move as long as you like, you’re outside the conditions of time.” It is not, of course, a small difference; it is everything. If no one can understand war, then simply to fear for one’s brother, and to be horrified, is precisely to understand what can be understood of war. It is the right response, within the possible “conditions of time.” War has its “conditions of time,” and peace does, too.

So it is perhaps not a banal diminuendo when this novel closes its narrative with scenes, seven years after the epic disasters of 1812, from the domestic lives of Pierre and Natasha and Nikolai and Marya. These are some of the most serenely lovely passages in the book, not least because typology, which is to say, determinism, is turned on its head. It had always been the women who were talented at “reading” the faces and bodies of the men; the cowed Marya devotedly followed every twitch and spasm of her tyrannical old father, and Natasha, when Pierre first told her about his captivity, “understood precisely what he meant to convey . . . but also what he would have liked to but could not express in words.” Now, at last, it is the men, the vital solipsists, who understand the wordless gestures of their wives. We see Nikolai console his wife, and Tolstoy tells us that Pierre and Natasha “also talked as only a wife and husband can talk, that is, grasping thoughts and conveying them to each other with extraordinary clarity and quickness, in a way contrary to all the rules of logic.” Tolstoy then reproduces a page of this kind of illogical dialogue, one of the tenderest things he ever wrote:

“No, what were you saying? Speak, speak.”

“No, you tell me, mine was just something stupid,” said Natasha.

“. . . And what were you going to say?

“Just something stupid.”

“No, but still.”

“It’s nothing, trifles,” said Natasha, her smile shining still more brightly.

These are the triumphant “insignificant trifles” of family life. Prince Andrei, the professional soldier, the brilliant adjutant to General Kutuzov, falls in battle; Napoleon, the genius of world history, fails in battle; but the amateur, unheroic blunderers, Nikolai and Pierre, survive into peace, surrounded by women, who do not understand warfare, and by children, who must not. To live, the poet Yehuda Amichai writes, is to build a ship and a harbor at the same time: “And to finish the harbor / long after the ship has gone down.” ♦


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