Real Life Goes On — War and Peace

In 1809 the intimacy between Napoleon and Alexander, called the world's two arbiters, has gone so far that when Napoleon declares war on Austria a Russian corps crosses the frontier to co-operate with the old enemy Bonaparte against the old ally the Emperor of Austria. In court circles people speak of a possible marriage between Napoleon and one of Alexander's sisters. Foreign policy is not the only talk. Russian society also watches, keenly, the internal changes being undertaken in all the departments of government: reconstruction plans that fill salons as if the world pivoted on their details.

Meanwhile real life, Tolstoy says, goes on as usual. Its essential interests are health and sickness, toil and rest. Its intellectual interests are thought, science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, and passions. That life runs independently of political friendship or enmity with Napoleon Bonaparte, and independently of all the schemes of reconstruction. Emperors may be intimate; departments may be rewritten; marriage alliances may be rumoured; none of that is the same thing as a body getting well or falling ill, a day's labour, a poem, a quarrel, or a friendship.

Book Six, dated 1808 to 1810, opens on that claim. The headlines of alliance, reform, and dynastic talk have been named; the next stretch of the story will have to live among those ordinary stakes rather than among the friendship of the two arbiters. What continues is not the programme of reconstruction but the health, work, love, and hatred that do not wait for emperors to finish talking.