Readerly opinion among those who ever actually finish Tolstoy’s 1867 magnum opus War and Peace is generally split. One faction prefers the first half of that mammoth novel, with its primary focus on the inter-family dynamics of various Russian aristocrats in the early-19th century. This faction considers the novel’s second half–which shifts focus from family drama to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia during the War of 1812–to be an abnegation of duty, an abandonment of the psychological complexity that made the first half so compelling.

The other faction, however, considers the first half of the novel to be largely a soap opera, a collection of tropes about rich-people-behaving-badly; that these coddled aristocrats do not become genuinely interesting until Napoleon invades, when they are stripped by circumstance of all their various privileges and creature comforts. It is only then, when they genuinely suffer–and are thus genuinely tested–that we finally get to see what they’re really made of.

Both responses to War and Peace are valid; like all art, whichever half of the novel you prefer is a Rorschach test that will reveal more about you to yourself than it ever will about Leo Tolstoy or Russian literature generally. In the interests of full disclosure, I personally am very much a partisan of the second half, and only ever slogged through the first half out of a sense of English major duty (back when I was young and felt like I had to prove myself by reading all the famous long books). But I also understand that those exasperated with the novel’s second half aren’t just put off by its slogging wartime battle descriptions (which Tolstoy never romanticizes), but because the novel in effect transforms into an essay.

Whereas Tolstoy remains an unobtrusive third-person narrator throughout the first half, once Napoleon launches his ill-starred invasion, Tolstoy begins to take repeated breaks from the plot to address the reader directly. For he has a thesis, you see, one he obviously felt was important enough to disrupt the narrative-flow of his novel. He was responding against the “Great Men of History” theory then prevalent in the late 19th century–one that held, though the great majority of us are indeed swept away by currents of history beyond our control, there nevertheless remains a tiny cadre of supermen upon whose staggering genius, strength, and sheer iron-will the entire course of human history pivots. Cited examples of the same tended to be famous figures like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, and Napoleon Bonaparte then-most recently. Tolstoy, as a true patriotic Russian, had no patience for lionizing Napoleon.

But his purpose with War and Peace wasn’t just to argue that Napoleon didn’t belong on the list of “Great Men of History,” but, notably, to undermine the theory entirely. As Tolstoy is at immense pains to belabor throughout the second half, Napoleon was just as much a pawn of history as any of us. He argues, for example, that in the lead-up to the War of 1812, Napoleon had obsessed all his attention onto invading England, his last unconquered European rival; that he had negotiated the peace treaty with Czar Nicholas II specifically so that England would be left without allies; that all of his planning and scheming, based on all available correspondence and official documentation from the period, was centered on the conquest of Great Britain.

So why, then, did he break treaty and invade Russia instead? According to Tolstoy, it’s because Napoleon was no more in control of his marching orders than the meanest foot soldier of his Grande Armée was. Napoleon, in his arrogance, only thought he was in total control of the situation. Rather, argues Tolstoy, an infinitely complex confluence of historical influences and factors beyond human comprehension conspired together to send the largest army in world history marching into Russia for no good reason, and Napoleon could not have stopped the invasion even if he’d given the order.

Tolstoy also uses this theory to explain why Napoleon never used his vaunted personal Guard to finish off the Russian army at the Battle of Borodino; why General Kutuzov had no choice but to leave Moscow open to Napoleon despite winning the Battle of Borodino (albeit punically); why the French troops failed to properly stock up on winter-clothing and provisions during their brief occupation of Moscow; and why Napoleon failed to travel through the nearby wheat-heavy regions of western Russia to replenish provisions during his disastrous retreat. Everyone was reacting to historical pressures, not controlling them; not just Napoleon, but the entire Russian leadership too, says Tolstoy, were constantly writing perfectly sensible orders that were never obeyed, because they could not be obeyed, because at no point was anyone ever obeying an actual human being. (I could get into more detail, but at that point, I’d just be re-writing the second half of War and Peace myself.)

Anyways, when I first read War and Peace as an impressionable young grad student around 2010 or so, I took an intellectual curiosity in Tolstoy’s thesis, but nothing more. No respectable historian has taken the “Great Men of History” theory seriously in over a hundred years, so part of me was bemused that Tolstoy went to such extravagant lengths to debunk an idea that was soon on its way out anyways. I checked the book off my list, and before long started to chill out about my insecure need to read long novels overall.

Then Election 2016 happened, and suddenly the idea that we are all carried along by inscrutable flows of history resonated a lot more with me. (Certainly when I read reports that said Trump would never win the election, I was reminded of the part in War and Peace when Pierre Bezukov reads a report that declares Napoleon would never march into Moscow–and that is the precise moment when he realizes Napoleon would do just that). Although I was mercifully over my long-novel phase by then, I nevertheless still picked up my old copy of War and Peace, and started reading it again.

And then started re-reading it a third time after Election 2020–the wild, inscrutable, and unpredictable flows of history that had swept Trump into office had also swept him out. He wasn’t some political savant playing 4-D chess like his supporters and even some of his opponents claimed, no: he was no more in charge than the rest of us. Tolstoy just might be right after all!

And I had just finished re-reading it when Russia invaded Ukraine over a year ago. The question so many pundits were asking at the time was why Putin would launch such an ill-advised, ill-prepared, insane invasion at a time like this, when we’re all still recovering from the pandemic? But then, as Tolstoy might argue with a wry smile, Putin only thinks he’s in control; he is being swept along by currents he can scarcely comprehend, let alone influence.

This strange hybrid novel/essay resonated in a wide-variety of contexts, I found.

For that matter, War and Peace not only tries to explain history, but theology. Indeed, the armchair theologian in me is tempted to speculate that the only way one can reconcile God’s omniscience with human free-will is via the model proposed by Tolstoy’s novel, wherein the future is maybe not set in stone, but is thoroughly predictable–yet with the caveat that it is only fully predictable by an infinite and eternal God who alone can be perfectly aware of all these inscrutable historical forces and how they flow together at once. In The Book of Mormon then, when the Resurrected Savior tells of how the fourth generation of Nephites will be destroyed in unbelief, he is not foretelling this event in the soothsayer sense, but in the probabilistic one, for example.

But then, I don’t get the impression that Tolstoy is particularly interested in the question of free will. He believed in God and Christ, and that our own individual choices matter, but only in how we respond to events that are well beyond our individual ability to influence. Perhaps instead, this is why the Lord tells Moroni, “If they have not charity it mattereth not unto thee, thou hast been faithful; wherefore, thy garments shall be made clean. And because thou hast seen thy weakness thou shalt be made strong, even unto the sitting down in the place which I have prepared in the mansions of my Father” (Ether 12:37). In this reading, the limits of your free agency are only yourself–you can only choose how you will react to events, but not how you can influence them.

As the Book of Mormon notes at the end of its own war chapters, “But behold, because of the exceedingly great length of the war between the Nephites and the Lamanites many had become hardened, because of the exceedingly great length of the war; and many were softened because of their afflictions, insomuch that they did humble themselves before God, even in the depth of humility” (Alma 62:41). Whether the war hardened or softened their hearts was the one choice they had–or perhaps it would be more precise to say that the war revealed who they were all along.

Such is why both of these texts–the Book of Mormon, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace–have been more on my mind lately. Every time I survive another election, every time it looks like the forces of darkness are encroaching upon us–and every time it feels like the forces light are pushing back–or (as is more frequently the case) when it looks like both are happening at the same time–I take a glance at the door-stopper copy of War and Peace on my shelf and the scripture-quad on my nightstand, and reflect how we are all being swept along by historical forces beyond our comprehension and control. It is both my terror and my consolation.