In Russia's struggle with Napoleon, Tolstoy saw a tragedy that involved all mankind.

Yet while his historical vision ranged beyond national frontiers, his imaginative vision focused, with extraordinary intensity, on the lives of individuals, on the physical reality of human experience and its bewildering complexity.

Greater than a historical chronicle, War and Peace is an affirmation of life itself, 'a complete picture', as a contemporary reviewer put it, 'of everything in which people find their happiness and greatness, their grief and humiliation'.