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I started War and Peace last year and spent a good chunk of my reading time dedicated to Tolstoy’s inestimable masterpiece. It’s not a novel, or an epic, or a chronicle. It is, according to Tolstoy, “what the author wanted and was able to express, in the form in which it is expressed.�� That does not say much about what kind of genre Tolstoy wrote in, but I sense that Tolstoy used a bit of everything from novel, epic, and chronicle to create a special kind of meganovel, for lack of a better term. Either way, I think Tolstoy was right.

It has epic similes, natural details and flows that can only come from an epic mindset (and Homer and Milton, two of the greatest epic poets, are nature-obsessed through their similes). A totality of coverage, of armies, peoples, nations, and historical forces, gives us the epic sense. Yet, since it doesn’t have the definitive epic “shape�� of the epic poems of Homer, Tasso, Virgil, or Milton, it is not “epic�� proper.

It has a novelistic love of details, authorial narration, long passages of probing into characters�� emotions and psychologies, coverage of various social milieus, intrigues, romances, and more. Yet since it isn’t a Dickens or Balzac novel with recognizable conventions derived from the novelistic mode, it isn’t a novel proper.

It isn’t a chronicle proper either, though it is focused on wars, national history, military leaders, kings, and peoples. The historical digressions of Tolstoy are a testament to the historical emphasis of the work. But since there is so much fiction and fictional shaping, it can’t be a proper “chronicle.��

So I am left with Tolstoy’s assessment that it is what he wanted to express in the unique form of expression. And he did a magnificent work.

The characters have this special ability to be both types and have individual features such that they are all fully realized human beings. Only Shakespeare better than Tolstoy at this. It seem as if he created them and then sets them to move with a life of their own, a life that’s not quite “free will�� but also not determined in a deterministic way by their creator. This later taps, I think, into Tolstoy’s handling of freedom and necessity in the epilogue. The way Tolstoy makes his characters allows for the subtleties and plausible outcomes that result from change.

Pierre the idealist and searcher goes through these fascinating changes and adventures inner and outer that make him perhaps the closest thing War and Peace has to central “hero��. By the end of the novel he’s a renewed man with a greater sense of inner freedom and a finer tuned storyteller with an almost Tolstoyan ability to enchant the listener.

Natasha is perhaps Tolstoy’s best portrait of a real human woman before Anna Karenina. With all her flaws and impetuous rashness, there’s a real transformation that goes on, for the better. Whether she’s at her worst or best, Tolstoy’s characteristic realism works to give us a lifelike girl/woman in Natasha that feels both like a type and a believable personality who could exist in a world such as our own.

The same goes with the thoughtful and sky-touched Andrei Bolkonsky, the paragon of Christian sainthood that is Marya Bolkonsky, the simple folk sage Platon Karataev, Nikolai Rostov the chief son of the Rostov family, and the rest of Tolstoy’s characters. When I think of Andrei, I always think of the infinite sky that he saw and took comfort in

I just love Tolstoy’s style. Lucid, clear, readable, able to accommodate the large scale of the book in its various tones, shifts, and scenes. The way he writes can capture with precision gestures, emotions, faces, feelings, natural details, general movements, thoughts, psychology, and historical analysis in such a way that there’s a unifying grandeur in it all. It feels like Homer reconfigured for the prose era, yet so much more than that. It is the unique property of Tolstoy. Like all great writers, his style is both something to aspire to and also something you can’t successfully imitate. If it was just a matter of accumulating detail, one could do that with an adequate amount of attention, yet it still wouldn’t be Tolstoy (and that’s OK). If it were a matter of simple sentences, then that could be done, but it wouldn’t have Tolstoy’s simplicity (and that’s fine). Either way, in Tolstoy, the style is the substance.

It’s not exactly a novel, though Virginia Woolf calls it the greatest of novels. It’s something more. One of a kind.

I also find fascination with the ending portions, where Tolstoy gives us portraits of genuine happiness and resolution but also shows us a sense of irony which only the reader, not the characters, can comprehend. Remember, Tolstoy was planning to write about the Decembrists, and he never got to it, but War and Peace has Decembrist intimations near the end, thus giving me the feeling that for all the happiness the Rostovs and Bolkonskys and Bezukhovs feel now, it could all go to whack when history returns again. That’s life. And Tolstoy wrote like life.

I want to conclude the review, long as it already is, with a reflection on Tolstoy’s body of work. I haven’t read Anna Karenina yet, so I will get on to that. But having read the later novellas he wrote, I see a little bit of all of them in War and Peace. I can see in W&P a touching portrait death and dying (The Death of Ivan Ilyich). There is also a searching analysis of sexual troubles and social mores (The Kreutzer Sonata). A wide panoply of perspectives ultimately finding a kind of unity (The Forged Coupon). Exquisite handling of history that still feels relevant while also touched with timelessness (Hadji Murad). Religious longings and models and the search for knowing God truly (Alyosha the Pot and Father Sergius).

I don’t know how often I will get to reread War and Peace. There’s so much to read, and I sense I will reread it less than I do other books. But I am sure I will give this magnificent work more readings. My time with this book was a year well spent; while I read other books, I stuck with this such that I lived with it. Some days I read more than others. Other days I didn’t touch it at all. But I stuck with it. I think that’s how to read it and benefit the most.