We continue to be surprised by how the extremely rewarding world that Leo Tolstoy created is a dynamic, still growing one. When the Russian writer sat down in 1863 to begin what became War and Peace, he utilized portraits of family members, as well as images of himself in what, at first, constituted a lightly fictionalized family chronicle; he evidently used the exercise to consider how he and the present state of his country came to be. This involved a rethinking of how his parents' generation withstood the French invasion of 1812, slightly more than a half century prior, both militarily and culturally. Of course, one thinks about many things in the course of six highly creative years, and his text reflects many of these interests. His words are over determined in that a single scene or even image typically serves several themes as he simultaneously pondered the Napoleonic Era, the present day in Russia, his family, and himself, as well as much else. Self-development being the first order for any serious artist, we see anticipations of the protean challenges Tolstoy posed to the contemporary world decades after War and Peace in terms of religion, political systems, and, especially, moral behavior. In other words, he grew in stature. As the initial reception of the novel shows, Tolstoy responded to the consternation of its first readers by increasing the dynamism of its form and considerably augmenting its intellectual ambitions. In his hands, fiction became emboldened to question the structure of our universe and expand our sense of our own nature. We are all much the richer spiritually for his achievement.

One of the happy accidents of literary history is that War and Peace and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment were first published in the same literary periodical, The Russian Messenger. Furthermore, as Janet Tucker explains, both novels express concern whether Russia should continue to conform its culture to West European models, simultaneously seizing on the same figure, Napoleon Bonaparte, in one case leading a literal invasion of the country, in the other inspiring a premeditated murder. Both recoil from the “ends justify the means” amorality of Napoleon and incline their novels in a distinctly Russian direction. Dostoevsky extols the saintly prostitute Sonya for her adherence to Russian Orthodoxy, while Tolstoy posits the idealized peasant, Platon Karataev.

The year 1863 was also a time of increasingly radical critics, who demanded that literature should address the ills of society. They were by no means content with the Great Emancipation of 1861, when Tsar Alexander II initiated the peaceful freeing of Russia's serfs, by far the majority of its population. Although Tolstoy strongly argued for the freedom of art, the prospects for the peasants to rise up against their oppression is an important theme in War and Peace. Anne Hruska shows how social class is a lens through which Russians viewed all social interactions, also how (then) Count Tolstoy envisioned that the nobility held the responsibility to raise the living standards of those less fortunate; both Pierre and Prince Andrei attempt to effect improved conditions on their estates. Alexander II's reforms, however, created expectations and, therefore, hopes for more radical measures—which may partly explain why the novel foreshadows the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, a failed attempt to replace Russia's absolutist monarchy—wherein the tsar was all-powerful—with a constitution limiting his rule.

One of the ironies of the first scene of War and Peace is that the first line is delivered not in Russian, but in French: evidently Western culture has already occupied Russia, or, at least, the upper class of its capital city, St. Petersburg. Only by tacitly admitting its inferiority could Russia import West European culture on such a massive scale, as it had during the eighteenth century. Russia's defeat at the hands of France, Great Britain, and Turkey in the Crimean War in 1855 was a recent reminder that a significant cultural gap remained, thus motivating Alexander II's reforms. War and Peace covers a period, as Sara Stefani tells it, when this relationship was beginning to be reversed; Russians not only threw off the French invaders, they began to appreciate their own language and indigenous culture. The result was one of the peaks in world cultural history in the middle of the century, that of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as partially witnessed by War and Peace.

Of course, War and Peace relates many of the battles, large and small, of the Napoleonic Era. Rick McPeak explains how different detachments fought at a time of smooth-bore, i.e., inaccurate, rifles and cavalry charges. Except for the artillery, these modes of fighting are now outmoded, but not the continual struggle between duty and self-preservation, between destruction of and empathy for the enemy, who may also be just doing his duty, even unwillingly. Soldiers are subject to the emotional consequences of heated action, including our internal resistance to harming others. Notable are many incidents of fraternization between the two sides, bringing out the absurdity of war. However, as we see in the latter part of the novel, national defense is another matter: there, the conflict takes on a more heated, even vicious, character, guerilla warfare is invented and few prisoners are taken. In the midst of this misery, however, Tolstoy introduced moments of epiphany when his characters, and their readers, enjoy a greater fullness of being. According to Olga Vladimirovna Slivitskaya, such poetry is requisite in an epic. These instances of lyricism make Tolstoy's positive characters highly attractive in that they capture a valuable human potential. A Prince Andrei might remain stiff and off-putting, but for his vision of the sky at Austerlitz, his encounters with a slow-blooming oak tree, and a glimpse of Natasha in all her youthful charm. Thus, Tolstoy often reminds us of our need to pause and appreciate that life can be so wonderful. This same thinking underlies many of the set pieces in the novel, scenes where time and the narrative come to a near stop and, for the most famous examples, the Rostov siblings enjoy hunting or dressing up in “mummers'” costumes at Yuletide. Ronald D. LeBlanc shows that dinner scenes rival battles in number and significance. With its many Homeric feasts, War and Peace is itself a source of pleasures to be savored, not just a vehicle for its many intertwined plots. This is evident from Tolstoy's detailed descriptions of what is served and, in particular, how the company comports itself. Admittedly, most of these interludes are situated in the first half of the novel before, like Pierre, Tolstoy abandons these pleasures and seeks rewards not of the flesh.

The opening scene is a wonderful example of over-determination. Tolstoy devised it after many abortive sketches for a beginning to his novel, a scene where he could introduce the main characters and set them in a particular social and political context—all without drawing attention to his method. LeBlanc describes how it is one of three comparable scenes, which allow the reader to distinguish the stuffy and false crowd at Anna Scherer's soirée in St. Petersburg from the emotionally generous Rostovs in Moscow and also from the stiff and formal Bolkonskys in the countryside. Kevin O'Brien discerns a distinction between separateness and connectedness amongst the characters, which pervades the entire novel. He further suggests how these tendencies, like generosity, run in families, much as Natasha seems to have inherited that quality from her father. Another device is how Tolstoy imperceptibly arrays his characters so as to enable subconscious comparisons.

War and Peace resonates with readers in countries such as our own, far from Russia of the early nineteenth century in time and space. Tolstoy's methods depend on readers being able to efficiently grasp subtle details of the personalities he depicts and their interactions. His patterning of human actions is potentially universal, one that gives evidence of our shared human nature. Furthermore, War and Peace is, at the same time, profoundly educational in the manner that it displays, possibly even develops, potential human psychological responses, as in the case of how he sensitizes readers to the “body language” of unconscious, sometimes involuntary, gestures. Another human universal is the nuclear family, very much a unit of Tolstoy's thinking in this very family-centered novel. Anna A. Berman roots Tolstoy's considerable idealism in his immense attachment to domestic structures. While the author was an orphan, he enjoyed the company of loving siblings and aunts. Born out of wedlock and separated from both his parents, Pierre is deprived of even these comforts and thus all the more seeks the love that was so missing in his childhood. He continually seeks friends, ultimately a spiritually inspired “brotherhood.” His is the most poetic and ambitious vision, hence it generates the greatest interest for many readers.

Elizabeth Blake observes developing spirituality also in Princess Marya and Natasha. She reminds us that the French invasion is also a Roman Catholic intrusion into Russia, something that a Russian Orthodox, as Tolstoy was when he wrote the novel, would be sensitive to. The author's aversion to Catholicism may be sensed in his portrayal of Hélène perversely converting for the sake of obtaining a divorce. Western readers should note that Orthodox worship is more a mystical than intellectual faith, one that attempts to put worshipers in direct contact with Heavenly truths. Blake compares Princess Marya's luminous eyes to those featured in Russian icons. Natasha's renewed religious devotion plays an important role in her recovery. This dimension, much like the capacity for poetic epiphany Slivitskaya observes, appears to be one of the deficits of Sonya, whose treatment near the end of the novel leaves a sour taste for some readers. Donna Oliver, however, argues that her commitment to Nikolai carries with it a heart that is not open to experience and change. Being dependent on her Rostov foster parents, Sonya is not one of the free minds that Tolstoy extols. This consideration suggests a static-dynamic dichotomy to complement O'Brien's connected-separate. Even the intellectually limited Nikolai senses Sonya's lack of depth. In this sense, War and Peace is a Romantic novel in that it requires a range of unrealized possibility from its central heroes.

The last section of our collection is occupied with the ill-fit between history and fiction. The former is determined, usually well known (e.g., it is evident to all readers that Napoleon will not complete his conquest of Russia), while the latter is open to a wide range of possibilities. This might be one reason why Tolstoy devoted so much attention to the little-known engagement at Schöngraben. Much as in science fiction time travel stories, where the protagonist can never actually change the past, so, too, Tolstoy is constrained not to put words in the mouths of past notables. On the other hand, as Ani Kokobobo relates, these notables were human beings, hence, had bodies, which subjected them to limitations like our own. Napoleon, for example, may express his will, via his army, over Europe, but he is unable to control the muscle twitching in his leg. So, by recourse to body language, Tolstoy is able to undercut traditional portraits of the French emperor and war hero as all-powerful, revealing instead his immense egotism and consequent solipsism.

Jeff Love closes the volume by tackling the most vexing issue of all: what to do with the infamous essays on history, its nature and writing, especially the second part of the Epilogue. How are they integral to the foregoing novel, in particular its fiction? Love emphasizes Tolstoy's advocacy of a more complex model for how and why things happen. In this manner, history would approach the nuance of great fiction, wherein every “over determined” word is integral, usually for more than one reason. He argues that Tolstoy's carefully balanced antinomy of free will and scientific laws actually constitutes a codependency, that one cannot be understood without the other. A related consideration is that, as we develop reasons for what we find in War and Peace, we appear to constrain Tolstoy's room for authorial license, but, at the same time, we increasingly reveal the meaning of his immense achievement.