War and Peace

Across the Napoleonic Wars of 1805 to 1812, Tolstoy follows the Bezukhov, Bolkonsky and Rostov families through the salons of Petersburg, the society of Moscow, the country estates, and the battlefields where private lives and vast history collide. The novel maps a real geography: the imperial capital and the old city, the Bolkonsky estate in the provinces, the field of Austerlitz where Prince Andrei looks up at the infinite sky, and Borodino, after which Moscow burns and the French begin their ruinous retreat.

Prince Andrei

Saint Petersburg

1805

The book begins at Anna Pavlovna Scherer's soirée in Petersburg, where the war is still a topic of drawing-room talk and the young Pierre blunders through society. Tolstoy sets the glittering, hollow world of the capital's salons against the reality of the front to come, the peace whose complacency the war will shatter.

Volume I

explicit The novel opens in the salons of Saint Petersburg, the real imperial capital, where the aristocracy debates the coming war with Napoleon; sited in the city.

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Prince Andrei

Austerlitz

1805

At Austerlitz, carrying the standard forward, Prince Andrei falls wounded and lies staring up at the high, endless sky, and all his dreams of glory drain away before its vast indifference. Tolstoy makes the battle the book's first great collision of human ambition with something immeasurably larger, the sky that reduces Napoleon himself to an insect.

Volume I, the campaign

explicit The Battle of Austerlitz (1805) in Moravia, where Prince Andrei is wounded, is a real battle; sited at the field near Slavkov, far outside the Russian setting.

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