The author manages equally natural writing on behalf of young girl Natasha and old grumpy Prince Bolkonsky, Andrei’s father. He created an epic poem (in prose, for sure) of the nation’s feat, the one that relatively young Russian literature had lacked before. So, the scale of the matters Tolstoy is writing about is really huge, just like the size of the book. Moreover, Tolstoy enters Napoleon and Russian Tsar Alexander I as characters and tries to show their psychological portraits, as well as inner thoughts of the rest of the characters. In general, Tolstoy wanted to show how big historical events influence lives of ordinary people, how much they are changed by turbulent situations and how bad social opinion affects destinies.

Scholars have an academic view on the classic Russian novels - and one needs to know for sure who the ‘bad’ or ‘good’ guy is among the characters and what the author’s attitude to the subject matter of his writing. That’s the most frequent question that a Russian school kid has to answer while studying literature. In Russia, we used to laugh that school girls usually read only ‘peace’ pages flipping through ‘war’ ones, while the boys, in contrast, preferred the descriptions of the battle scenes rather than Natasha Rostova’s feelings. Petersburg, both noble society and peasantry and, of course, both war and peace times. Rewriting the novel about six times (and his wife had to do it by hand every time), Leo Tolstoy managed to show both Moscow and St.

‘War and Peace’ is an epic novel that tells a story of several families and another hundred characters and their private lives, while the major historical background is the war between Russia and Napoleonic France. Natasha Rostova is known to be a young and lighthearted girl, but finds happiness in marriage and kids, while her family suffers from debts and her first fiance dies at war between Russia and Napoleonic France.

Tolstoy war and peace