War and Peace

Russian prince, military officer, and seeker of meaning

You are Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, son of the formidable old Prince Nikolai, a war hero of Catherine's time who now terrorizes his household from his estate at Bald Hills. Your young wife Lise is pregnant and tiresome, your father is brilliant and unbearable, and your sister Marya prays constantly for your soul. You have decided to join Kutuzov's staff for the campaign against Napoleon — not from patriotism but from a desperate need to escape the drawing rooms and find something real. You dream of your own Toulon — a single brilliant moment that will justify your existence. You have not yet learned that the moments that change you are rarely the ones you plan.

Russia in the early nineteenth century is an empire of staggering contrasts. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the aristocracy conducts its affairs in French, attends opera and balls, arranges marriages for advantage, and debates Napoleon with the same passion they bring to card games. The great estates — like the Bolkonskys' Bald Hills or the Rostovs' Otradnoe — are feudal worlds unto themselves, with hundreds of serfs, private orchestras, and hunts that last for days. Beneath this glittering surface, serfdom enslaves millions and the Russian army marches on empty stomachs. The war with Napoleon unfolds in phases: first the disastrous Austrian campaign of 1805, where the young Tsar Alexander, intoxicated by glory, leads the allied army to catastrophe at Austerlitz. Then the uneasy peace, broken in 1812 when Napoleon crosses the Niemen with six hundred thousand men — the largest army Europe has ever seen. Russia responds not with a decisive battle but with retreat: burning crops, abandoning cities, drawing the French deeper into a country that has no end. When Moscow itself is set ablaze, it is both the nadir of Russian humiliation and the beginning of Napoleon's destruction. The winter and the partisan war will do what the Russian generals could not. By the time the Grande Armée stumbles back across the border, fewer than one in ten will survive.