Most great novels succeed in terms of their complete individuality. They seem free in a very special sense – free of fashion and intention, free even of the conditions under which they were composed. War and Peace appears as a supreme example of this freedom, and some comments by the author show why this is so, surprising – even rather shocking – as they are.

We might raise our eyebrows at this descendant of so many aristocratic diplomats shamelessly expounding so equivocal a doctrine. Is this the casuistry, the bottomless cynicism, which Conrad the novelist says is in the politics of the Russian soul? Perhaps it is, and yet the freedom which Tolstoy enjoyed as a privileged gentleman under the Tsarist system is undeniable. No War and Peace could have been written under the Soviet system: any equivalent would either have been conformist, or it would have been secret and rebellious; and it is the great strength of War and Peace that it is neither, and needs to be neither.

Tolstoy once said that he had learnt from the French novelist Stendhal how to describe war. What had struck him, as it has struck many more recent readers, for Stendhal's novels caused no great stir in their own time, was the way the Frenchman had recognized and described the fragmentary banality which is all the experience the average individual has of battle. Stendhal's hero is never afterwards sure whether he has been at the battle of Waterloo or not, for everything that happened to him that day, however sickening or frightening, seemed also quite fragmentary and inconclusive.

Tolstoy frees, so to speak, Stendhal's shoulder-shrugging and offhand perception and gives it the whole wide perspective of his panoramic vision. In his early accounts of military action, in the Caucasus and the Crimea, he had demonstrated very effectively the homeliness of the military life, and the way in which soldiers pass their time, even in situations of danger.