Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ Made Simple

Don’t let the length deter you. You can sum up the theme of the novel in five words: Free will is an illusion.

Reading War and Peace is like walking into a large cocktail party at which you don’t know anybody until, hours later, Napoleon turns up fresh from his victory in the Battle of Austerlitz. How do you get your bearings on a novel that has more than 500 characters and, even in the relatively compact Modern Library edition, 1,386 pages?

More than most masterpieces, War and Peace asks you to make a leap of faith and repays the effort. Characters who at first swarm at you soon coalesce into sets. Chief among them are three well-to-do families — the Rostovs, the Bezuhovs, and the Bolkonskys — whose fates rise and fall in the years just before and after Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in the winter of 1812.

Tolstoy tells the three families’ stories in an engaging, conversational tone set in his first sentence, a line of dialogue spoken at a party: “Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family.”

That opener isn’t as famous as the first line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike …” But it has its own genius: It creates the impression that you’re eavesdropping, which makes it hard to resist reading further.

The plot of War and Peace unfolds against a teeming panorama of Russian history as it develops the…