The novel's moral center and most beloved character. An illegitimate heir thrust into wealth he cannot manage, a man who tries on systems of meaning — Freemasonry, Napoleonic idealism, mysticism — and finds all of them too small. His education comes from Platon Karataev and the stripping away of everything except the need to walk and eat and feel the cold. He arrives at something Tolstoy calls love — not romantic love but the love Andrei discovers on his deathbed, expansive and unconditional. Pierre's happiness in the epilogue is earned by the specific trajectory of his suffering.

The most intellectually brilliant character in the novel and the most rigidly proud. His three awakenings — the sky at Austerlitz, the oak tree, the deathbed — map a spiritual education that costs him everything. He cannot forgive Natasha, cannot abandon his pride, and therefore cannot have the life Pierre eventually finds. His death is not punishment but completion: he arrives at love only at the moment when he has nothing left to protect.

Tolstoy's most alive creation. She is the novel's argument against the kind of self-conscious striving that kills Andrei and exhausts Pierre: Natasha is simply present, fully, in every moment. Her betrayal of Andrei with Anatole is not wickedness but the failure of someone whose entire nature is immediate experience — she cannot sustain a relationship that exists only in letters and separation. Her transformation in the epilogue into absorbed wife and mother is either Tolstoy's ideal of fulfilled womanhood or his most disturbing capitulation to patriarchy, depending on your reading.

Long underrated, now recognized as one of Tolstoy's most nuanced female portraits. Her father's intellectual tyranny and her own plain face have given her a life of enforced humility that becomes genuine spiritual depth. Her love for Nikolai Rostov is the novel's most quietly moving romance: two improbable people finding each other after the war has stripped away everything social convention would have prevented.

Appears in only a handful of chapters and never names himself a philosopher. Yet he is the novel's ideological answer to everything the aristocrats cannot find. He accepts, he lives in the present, he tells circular stories with no moral except their own continuity. He is Tolstoy's idealized peasant — probably too idealized, critics note — but as a structural device, he is the novel's pivot.

The great man of Tolstoy's anti-great-man argument. Rendered not as monster but as small, vain, self-dramatizing, and ultimately irrelevant to the forces he believes he commands. Napoleon's historical greatness is the lie the Second Epilogue dismantles.

The one military commander Tolstoy admires, and he admires him precisely for doing as little as possible. Old, fat, apparently senile, Kutuzov understands what Napoleon doesn't: that the battle is already won by a people who will not surrender their land, and his job is to stay out of the way of that victory.