Why ‘War and Peace’ is my book of the year - The Boston Globe
▻https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/12/25/opinion/why-war-peace-is-my-book-year
“War and Peace” is about as far away from instant analysis as you can get. Writing during the 1860s, Tolstoy set his story in the years between 1805 and 1820, when Russia was swept up in the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath. He was not only writing a historical novel; he was also writing about history itself, looking back from a distance of several decades at what he described as “a period whose scent and sound are still perceptible to us, but remote enough for us to contemplate it unemotionally.” History requires perspective. Tolstoy’s characters are living through historic events — but they can’t understand what they are in the middle of, precisely because they are in the middle of it.