Tolstoy does not open his novel in Russian. He opens it in French. For the Russian aristocracy of 1805 — the class Tolstoy was born into, the class he spent his whole life both inside and in revolt against — French was the language in which one did all serious speaking. Russian was the language for servants and coachmen. The novel's first sentence is therefore already an ironic joke. The Russian nobility is being introduced to us in exactly the language they are, in a few hundred pages, going to be asked to go to war against.

The hostess is Anna Pavlovna Scherer, forty, favourite of the Dowager Empress, very well connected. Her soirée is an evening like any other evening in the white Petersburg summer: diplomats, vicomtes, an abbé, a few generals, a scattering of bored wives and dutiful daughters. The conversation is about Napoleon. Napoleon has just occupied Genoa and Lucca; Napoleon is a Corsican upstart; Napoleon is a new Charlemagne; Napoleon is a vulgar man who cannot be trusted. The guests take their turns on the subject as if they were reading lines at an audition.

And into this glittering, tight, socially-scripted room Tolstoy releases one impossible character after another. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky — sardonic, sharp, married to a beautiful wife he has decided to despise, hungry for war because peace is unbearable to him. Pierre Bezukhov — huge, awkward, illegitimate son of an immensely rich Russian count, just returned from school in France, unable to speak Russian properly and unable to manage his own hands and feet in a drawing-room. Hélène Kuragina — slender, statuesque, bored, looking at Pierre in a way that promises the whole second chapter of his life. Prince Vasily — oily, magnificently unprincipled, the senator who will be arranging most of the inheritance machinations for the first hundred pages.

Tolstoy does the work of introduction with the lightest possible touch. Everyone in the book is already here. But what he is actually showing us, in this opening chapter, is a whole society that does not yet know it is about to be tested. The war these people are discussing as a subject for after-dinner conversation is going to be fought, six months later, in the first person, by three of the young men now listening politely to the vicomte. The empire they are flattering each other's opinions about is going to burn Moscow inside seven years. Their French is going to stop being fashionable. Their certainties are going to go through fire.

Tolstoy does not warn them. He does not warn us. He lets the chapter end gracefully, the guests go home in their carriages, the candles in the drawing-room be snuffed out one by one, and the novel — all 1,300 pages of it — open out behind them like a fresh field.

Prince Andrei, young, proud, sure that war will reveal him to himself, goes to Austria with the Russian staff to oppose Napoleon. He imagines, concretely, the moment of his glory. He imagines it in advance: a charge, a flag, a wounded general, and himself — Andrei — picking up the flag and leading the men over the ridge, and thereby being seen, finally, for what he is.

At Austerlitz, the battle that Tolstoy considers the most misunderstood in Russian history, the Russians are beaten. Badly. It is the first time Napoleon's method has fully worked on a Russian army, and the Russian staff, having spent three days convincing themselves they had a plan, have no plan. The fog is thick. Units have lost each other. Commanders are giving contradictory orders. At some point the enemy is suddenly already on top of the position.

Prince Andrei gets his moment. There is a broken Russian battery, a fleeing battalion, a fallen flag. He picks up the flag. He shouts: boys, forward. He runs up the slope with it, sure that the men are behind him. He does not look back. A French soldier steps out in front of him. He has time to notice the brass clasp of the enemy's tunic. Then something hits him in the head.

He wakes up, or half wakes up, on his back. He does not know how long he has been there. He cannot move. He does not know if the battle is still going on. Above him, instead of the glory he had planned for, there is only the sky.

Tolstoy gives us the famous paragraph. The high, high grey sky. Clouds drifting across it, slow, indifferent. Andrei, lying on his back, feeling his body but not quite able to care about his body, looks up at the sky and thinks: how could I not have noticed before. How quiet it is. How high it is. How little anything else matters. He does not think about the flag. He does not think about his wife, who is pregnant and whom he has not treated kindly. He does not think about the French. He thinks: the sky.

And then, in one of the most famous small scenes in Russian literature, a short man in a grey overcoat walks across the field with his entourage and stops near Andrei. The short man looks down. He speaks a sentence in French. He says: voilà une belle mort — there's a fine death. Andrei knows the voice. It is Napoleon. The man he has been flattering and worshipping, from a great distance, for the whole of his education. Napoleon, in person, a few feet away. Stepping over him on the way to the next corpse.

Andrei, looking up at Napoleon, is for the first time completely bored by him. The greatest man of his century is standing next to him and Andrei, still thinking mostly about the sky, cannot be bothered. Napoleon walks on. Andrei closes his eyes.

He will be carried back to the Russian lines. He will survive. He will go home to find his wife dead in childbirth of a son he had not wanted. And he will never again believe in the kind of glory he went to Austria to find. Austerlitz will not make him a hero. Austerlitz will make him an adult.

Five years have passed. Natasha Rostova is sixteen. Natasha has been, through the first volume, a child at the edges of scenes — singing, running, laughing, the youngest daughter of the warm, chaotic, generous Rostov household in Moscow. She has now been brought up to Petersburg for her first grown-up ball. It is the most important evening of her life so far.

Tolstoy gives us the whole run-up. The hours in front of the mirror. The maid pinning her hair. The white tulle dress. The gloves. The drive in the carriage. The arrival at the brightly-lit house on the Fontanka. The broad staircase. The footmen. The smell of a large, heated, perfumed, lit room full of people who all know each other and none of whom she knows.

And then, in the doorway of the great ball, Natasha stops. Because the truth, which her whole household and her own vanity have been concealing from her for a week, is that she is nobody yet. She is a young girl in a white dress. There are fifty other young girls in white dresses. There are princes present. There are hussars present. There is an emperor present. She has been promised nothing by anyone. And she thinks — Tolstoy gives it to us in her own free indirect voice — can it really be that nobody will invite me.

This is the grammar of the whole ball scene. It is not a scene about splendour. Tolstoy is not impressed with Petersburg and does not wish to impress us with it. The scene is about a sixteen-year-old girl standing on a threshold, willing herself visible, terrified she is not. She stands. She does not cry. Her sister does. Her mother looks for old friends. The minutes go. A polonaise begins and passes without her. A mazurka begins.

And at that moment Pierre Bezukhov — now married, miserable, huge — crosses the room to Prince Andrei and says quietly: Andrei, ask her to dance. Andrei looks over. Andrei, who has come home sick of himself after Austerlitz and his wife's death and a long cold year on his estate, sees the girl in the white dress and is, for the first time in two years, interested in a human face. He walks across the room. He bows. He asks Natasha Rostova for the next waltz.

She accepts. And — Tolstoy is very careful here — he does not give us the waltz as triumph. He gives it to us as relief. Relief that is already turning into something else. Natasha is suddenly, on the waltz floor, light, surrounded, looked at. She is also, without knowing it yet, falling in love. By the end of the mazurka three other men have approached. By the end of the ball she has become what she was terrified she never was. Petersburg will never not ask her again.

But the scene belongs, in spite of all that, to the minute before the dance. To the sixteen-year-old girl at the edge of the ballroom, willing herself into existence. Tolstoy — who loved Natasha, who wrote her with the tenderness he only rarely permitted himself — gives us the real meaning of a first ball in one sentence of free indirect thought. Can it really be that nobody will invite me. The rest of the chapter is the long sigh of not having to find out.

The Rostovs have come home to Otradnoye for the season. Otradnoye is their country estate, modest by aristocratic standards, run at a loss, full of dogs and old servants and peasants who have known the family for three generations. The children have been growing up there in the long summers. This is the chapter in which Tolstoy gives the modern world, for its records, what a Russian country autumn actually was.

A wolf hunt is organized. A wolf has been getting into the sheep. The old count Rostov, his son Nikolai, his teenage daughter Natasha, a distant cousin named Petya, and a small household of huntsmen ride out at dawn with a pack of borzois — tall, thin, hot-tempered Russian coursing dogs bred for the steppe. Tolstoy gives us the whole hunt in technical detail. Who rides where, with which dogs. The stand-off with the wolf. The dogs pulling him down. Nikolai, in boyish triumph, dispatching him.

And then, as the party comes home through the dusk, they stop, almost by accident, at the house of an uncle of the family — an unmarried gentleman who lives by himself in the country, who has let himself go a bit, who keeps servants loosely, who reads very little, who is wholly happy. He feeds them. A serving woman brings in dishes no Petersburg dinner would know how to name. The uncle produces a balalaika.

And the uncle begins to sing, the way the people sing — the way the Russian peasants sing, the way his own serfs sing, the way the coachmen sing on the road at night. A folk song. Unadorned, not very in tune, not very polished, perfect. Natasha, sitting on a low stool, listens. And then, without preparation, without training, without thinking, she stands up, takes a shawl off a chair, throws it around her shoulders the way her nurse wore hers, and begins to dance. She dances — Tolstoy writes it as a puzzle which he then, in one great paragraph, solves — she dances like a Russian peasant girl, in the right rhythm, with the right gestures, with the right small stamps of the foot, exactly as if she had been raised on black bread in a peasant hut instead of in French in a Petersburg drawing-room.

Tolstoy asks the question in our voice. Where did she learn this. She did not learn it. Nobody taught her. There is, he says, in every Russian of every class, something that comes up unprompted at a balalaika — a rhythm, a body memory — that ties them to the land, that does not go away under three generations of French governesses, that can be recovered instantly in the right room with the right uncle's old instrument.

The chapter is the book's most generous. Tolstoy the reformer — the man who will eventually renounce his aristocratic rank and try to live among his own peasants as one of them — is here in miniature. Russia, he is saying, is underneath us. We can pretend we are French. We can quote the vicomte at Anna Pavlovna's. But put on a shawl at an uncle's house at dusk and the country, unprompted, will dance up through us. Natasha's dance is the novel's loveliest gift to anyone who has ever wondered what Tolstoy, in all his length, was trying to say.

In September 1812 Napoleon finally brings the Grand Army onto Russian soil in pursuit of the withdrawing Russian forces. At the village of Borodino, seventy miles west of Moscow, Kutuzov — the old, one-eyed, nearly asleep Russian commander whom Tolstoy quietly considers the hero of the novel — decides to stand. The French come on in the morning. The battle lasts all day. By nightfall there are some seventy thousand dead and wounded on the two sides combined, and neither army has, in a clear sense, won.

Tolstoy spends a hundred pages on Borodino. This is by far the longest battle in the book, and he writes it with a fury of documentary detail and a fury of philosophical argument that sit uneasily together on the page and are meant to.

The documentary detail puts the reader inside the battle from three different angles. From a hill, where Pierre Bezukhov — a civilian who has ridden out to watch with no sense of what he is watching — wanders around getting in the way, being shelled, seeing his first man killed in front of him. From a redoubt, where he finds himself, dazed, helping gunners with cartridges, still in his white hat, still mostly a tourist. From the staff tent, where Kutuzov is dozing off between reports, refusing to give detailed orders, nodding to subordinates, asking irrelevant questions, in a manner that has driven and will drive his younger generals to distraction.

And the philosophical argument, which runs alongside, says something that no military historian of the nineteenth century was prepared to say out loud. Tolstoy argues, flatly, that Kutuzov's refusal to give orders is correct; that Napoleon's detailed orders, on the other side of the field, were all futile; that once a battle of seventy thousand men has begun, no commander is actually commanding anything; that a modern battle is fought by thousands of small units making thousands of local decisions, and that the side which simply endures longer will be the one that, in the historians' accounts written later, will be said to have been out-generaled or out-thought or out-positioned. No such thing happened, Tolstoy says. Nobody out-thought anyone. Men stood in fields. Men were shot. Some men, and their families at home, felt more reason to stand than others. Those men stood. That is the whole of it.

This is the central heretical claim of the novel. Tolstoy is not denying that Napoleon was a great man; he is denying that greatness, in the sense historians use the word, is a historical category. It is a projection made onto history after the fact, to give shape to a chaos the projector cannot tolerate otherwise. Borodino is Tolstoy's laboratory for the thesis. He shows us, in exhaustive detail, a battle that by every reasonable measure the Russians lost — they retreated afterwards, they gave up Moscow — and then asks us to consider seriously the possibility that by the only measure that mattered they won, because the Grand Army that had won the field never recovered its forward momentum and would, inside three months, be gone.

It is the book's angriest argument and its most radical one. A reader who finishes Borodino and disagrees is under no obligation to change her mind. A reader who finishes Borodino and is not at least unsettled in her view of what a battle is has not been paying attention.

After Borodino the Russian army withdraws and Moscow is abandoned. Most of the population leaves in a vast improvised exodus — carts, carriages, horses, peasants, dogs, icons, possessions tied up in linen bundles. The Rostovs leave. The Bolkonskys have already left. Pierre, whose life is currently without structure, stays. He stays because he has formed an idea — in the fevered state that has taken him over since Borodino — that he is destined to personally assassinate Napoleon with a dagger. He wanders the half-empty streets of Moscow in the disguise of a coachman, waiting for his chance.

Napoleon, with an unused army and a general who has never been denied the key to a European capital before, enters Moscow expecting the mayor and the keys. He is met, instead, with silence. The palaces are empty. The inns are empty. The nobility has gone. No one has stayed to negotiate. The Grand Army walks into a city that has, overnight, ceased to include anyone who matters.

And then the fires begin. Small fires at first, in outbuildings. Then larger. By the second night a wind has come up and half the quarter is burning. By the fourth night a large part of Moscow is gone. Tolstoy is careful. He does not say the Russians set the fires on purpose; he does not say the French set them; he says, with the calm of a man who has examined the documents carefully, that Moscow being an old Russian city of wooden houses left half-empty with soldiers billeted in it and no one looking after the stoves, it was in the nature of the situation that Moscow would burn. And burn it does.

Napoleon sits in the Kremlin with a city burning around him and slowly understands that the campaign has ended. Not on the battlefield, where he was supposedly triumphant, but here in a capital where his enemy has declined to be his host. He waits for a peace offer. None comes. He sends emissaries. They are ignored. The weather turns cold. The army begins to starve. And in mid-October, humiliated and silent, Napoleon orders the retreat.

In the middle of this Pierre is arrested. He has not managed to assassinate anyone, but he has, in a fit of courage, pulled a child out of a burning house and tried to prevent a French soldier from molesting a woman. The French take him for a dangerous incendiary. He is held as a prisoner of war. He will march out of Moscow with the retreating French army, under guard, in a line of wretched prisoners, in conditions that will shortly become the cruellest in the book.

Moscow burning is Tolstoy's richest image. It is simultaneously a historical event — a capital city going up, under a light wind, over five days — and a perfect structural metaphor for what the whole book is about. Napoleon, the great man, the supposed shaper of history, has walked into the centre of Russia and been completely ignored. The country he has invaded has simply — like a dog turning away from an unwanted caress — moved out of his reach. He finds himself in the middle of a city of wooden houses on fire and realizes that at this moment he controls nothing. The fire is not being set by him or at his direction. It is not being fought by anyone either. It is just happening, because it is what happens when soldiers occupy an empty old wooden capital in September. He watches it from a window. He orders his retreat.

In the line of French prisoners marching west out of Moscow in late autumn is Pierre Bezukhov. He has lost his hat. He has lost his boots — he is wearing cloth wrapped round his feet. He has lost weight. He has been cold for weeks. He has watched men be shot by the guards for lagging behind. He is close, physically, to dying.

And next to him in the prisoner barn at night — across a scrap of earth that has been rearranged into a sleeping-place — is a small round Russian peasant soldier who has also been captured. His name is Platon Karataev. He is perhaps fifty. He is missing some teeth. He is gentle and tireless. He talks in proverbs that do not always make logical sense but that always, in the hearing, turn out to fit the situation. He has a little dog that he feeds from his own ration. He is sick, probably dying himself. He does not know this.

Karataev is the novel's answer to everything it has been asking. This is a bold claim. The novel has been asking, for 1,200 pages: how should a man live. Andrei has tried glory, at Austerlitz, and been cured of it under a sky. Pierre has tried philosophy, and Freemasonry, and reformism, and political assassination, and been cured of all of them in a French prison camp. Natasha has tried love, and been betrayed by a scoundrel, and is, back home, ill for a year. Everyone has been looking for a way to live. Tolstoy, with enormous quiet craft, now produces his answer in the person of an illiterate peasant infantryman with a little dog.

Karatayev does nothing spectacular. He sews a shirt for a French soldier in exchange for a scrap of bread. He gives his bread to the dog. He falls ill. He tells Pierre a long unremarkable story about a merchant falsely accused of murder who goes to Siberia and forgives the real murderer. He sings a few bars of a peasant song under his breath. When one evening he is too weak to walk any more and sits down by the roadside, a French guard steps out of line and shoots him. The dog howls. Pierre walks on, forbidden to stop. The dog follows.

Pierre, in the barn that night, cannot weep. He cannot yet quite formulate what he has lost. But something in his long miserable march is set — the only kind of setting that Tolstoy considers real. He has seen a human being live and die without any notion of living and dying as a drama. He has seen a man for whom existence was simply, continually, a gift, and the absence of bread and the presence of bread were variations on the same underlying mercy. Pierre, who has spent his life asking whether life has a meaning, sees in Karataev that life is a meaning, and is enough of one, and was all along.

He will survive the march. He will find Natasha again, whom he had never dared to hope for. He will marry her and have children and grow quiet. Andrei will die of his Borodino wound, with Natasha at his bedside, having himself arrived at something that may or may not be the same as what Pierre learns on the prisoner road. The novel will close with a portrait of the two families — the Rostovs and the Bezukhovs — on an ordinary afternoon at a country estate, children running in and out of the room, a child being scolded for wetting himself, a husband and wife leaning against each other in a way that Tolstoy describes with the absolute minimum of drama, because drama would spoil it.

This is the book's final answer. It is not an argument. It is a barn at night in the rain with a peasant telling a story that does not quite make sense and is nevertheless, in the hearing, sufficient.