War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy (1869)
“The longest novel you'll ever love — a God's-eye view of Napoleon's invasion of Russia that somehow makes every human life feel infinite and every death feel personal.”
Character Analysis
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.
Stumbling, over-qualified, earnest — his language always chases a thought too big for the sentence