sings and dances, dramatizes the essential Russianness of Natasha’s nature. Her nearly consummated love affair with Anatole Kuragin, her loss of Andrey, and her final happy marriage to Pierre show how intensely life-giving she is. One of the great experiences of readingWar and Peace is found in witnessing her slow transition from slim, exuberant youth to thick-waisted motherhood. For Tolstoy, Natasha can do nothing that is not natural and right.

Kutuzov stands above the generals who cluster about him. Forgotten at the start of the war, he is called into action when all else seems to have failed. Unlike the other generals, many of them German, Kutuzov knows that battles are not won in the staff room by virtue of elaborate planning but by the spirit of the soldiers who actually do the fighting. Kutuzov alone knows that one must wait for that moment when the soldiers’ spirits are totally committed to the battle. He knows that the forces of war are greater than any one man can control and that one must wait upon events and know when not to act as well as when to act. His naturalness is opposed to Napoleon’s artificiality. A brilliant strategist and planner, Napoleon believes that he controls events. His pride and vanity are self-blinding; he cannot see that if he invades Russia, he is doomed. Kutuzov’s victory over Napoleon is a victory of the natural and the humble, for he is, after all, a man of the people. Furthermore, the figure of Kutuzov is very closely related to Tolstoy’s philosophy of historical change and necessity.

The characters of Andrey and Pierre probably represent two sides of Tolstoy, the rational-spiritual and the passionate-mystical, although these labels are far too simple. Andrey’s group of characters centers on the Bolkonsky family: the merciless, autocratic, but brilliant General Bolkonsky, Andrey’s father, and his sister Princess Marya, who is obedient, pious, and loving and who blossoms when she marries Nikolay Rostov. When readers first see Andrey, he is bored and even appears cynical; yet, like Pierre, he is searching for an answer to life, and he undergoes a series of awakenings that bring him closer to the natural. The first awakening occurs when he is wounded at Austerlitz and glimpses infinity beyond the blue sky; the second, at his wife’s death; the third, when he falls in love with Natasha; and the last, when he dies. In all of these instances, Andrey moves closer to what he conceives of as the essential. This state of mind involves a repudiation of the world and its petty concerns and passions. In all but one of these instances, death is involved. Indeed, Andrey’s perception of the natural is closely related to his acceptance of death. He comes to see death as the doorway to infinity and glory and not as a fearful black hole. Death becomes part of the natural rhythm, a cycle that promises spiritual rebirth.

Pierre’s group is composed of St. Petersburg socialites and decadents: the Kuragin family, comprising the smooth, devious Prince Vassily; his son, the rake Anatole, and daughter, the beautiful, corrupt Hélène, Pierre’s first wife; the rake Dolokhov; and finally, in Pierre’s third or fourth transformation, the peasant Platon Karataev. Unlike Andrey, Pierre takes an approach to life that seems almost strategically disordered and open—he embraces all forms of life passionately and hungrily. Compared to Andrey, with his rigorous and discriminating mind, Pierre seems hopelessly naïve and chaotic.

Pierre, however, even more than Natasha, is capable of vital and creative change. As Andrey seems fitted to perceive intimations of essences beyond the world, Pierre seems fitted to find his essences in the world. He shucks off his mistaken connection with Hélène and her family and experiences the first of his own awakenings in the conversion to freemasonry (one of several interesting “false” conversions in the novel, one other being Natasha’s after she is rejected by Andrey). Pierre, too, learns from death, both in his duel with Dolokhov and in his observations of the battle of Borodino. His two most important awakenings, however, occur in his love for Natasha and in his experience as a prisoner of the French. In the latter instance, he encounters the harmonious, perfectly round (whole) peasant Karataev, who teaches him to accept all things—even death—in good grace and composure of spirit. When Natasha encounters Pierre after he has had this experience, she rightly recognizes that he has been transformed. All that is superficial and nonessential is gone from him. Their eventual marriage is a union of two vital human beings tempered by suffering. At the end, there is more than a hint that Pierre is involved in efforts on the part of the aristocracy to modify the ossified system of government under the czars. Life and change go on.

War and Peace, perhaps beyond any other work, shows the advantages of the long novel. Readers of War and Peace feel a sense of space and a sense of change through the passage of time that are impossible to transmit so vividly in shorter fiction. This great novel reveals the beauty and injustice, the size and complexity, of life itself.