Traditionally, I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace on New Year’s Day. I always look forward to attending Princess Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s glittering reception, where she and her aristocratic friends discuss their enemy Bonaparte (“the anti-Christ’) and the greatness of their own Prince Alexander.

Through the refined, if witty, conversations at this salon, Tolstoy introduces many of the main characters. Anna Pavlovna welcomes the first guest, Prince Vasili, who speaks French “with the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance” and worries desperately about marrying off his three decadent children. His exquisite daughter, Helene, is stupid but at least wants to marry a rich man. His oldest son, Hippolyte, is, truly, an idiot. Anna Pavolvna has a suggestion: perhaps his rakish younger son Anatole, a gambler often in trouble with the police, could marry Marya Bolkonsky, the spinster daughter of rich Prince Nicholas Bolkonsky. Thus are deals brokered, though they often fall through.

As light relief, we meet gauche young Pierre, the “natural son” of Count Bezukhov. Anna Pavlovna despairs of Pierre’s social skills: he talks too much and too earnestly about politics, so Pavlovna gently detaches him from the Abbe, one of the guests of honor. Once Pierre inherits money, though, Anna Pavlovna changes her tune. Everything Pierre says is suddenly brilliant and charming.

From beginning to end, this is a delightful, intriguing novel, with much charm and fun along with the drama and tragedy of war. Tolstoy’s multi-layered story is so splendid and brilliantly plotted that you find yourself racing through it. You think, Is this a family saga? Is this a historical novel blockbuster? Well, perhaps both. You feel the crunch of snow and see the moon as the young Rostovs, Natasha, Nicholas, Sonya, and Petya, dress up as mummers and ride sledges through the snow on the third day of Christmas.

This is one of my favorite snowy passages in literature:

Nicholas set off following the first sledge: behind him the others moved noisily, their runners squeaking. At first they drove at a steady trot along the narrow road. While they drove past the garden, the shadows of the bare trees fell across the road and hid the brilliant moonlight as soon as they were past the fence, the snowy plain, bathed in moonlight and motionless, spread out before them glittering like diamonds and dappled with bluish shadows. Bang, bang! went the first sledge over a cradle-hole in the snow of the road, and each o f the other sledges jolted in the same way, and rudely breaking the frost-bound stillness the troykas began to speed along the road one after the other.

Some complain that Tolstoy’s prose is rough and repetitive in Russian, but this is not reflected in the smooth older translations by the Maudes, Constance Garnett, and Rosemary Edmonds. I do notice both repetition and alliteration in the passage above: “ “hid the brilliant moonlight” and “bathed in moonlight and motionless.” There is also a parallel construction of initial letters of the parallel phrases: “brilliant moonlight” and “bathed in moonlight.” If this is the repetition Russian readers complain about, I gently insist that it enhances our sense of a cold winter’s night.

Tolstoy moves skillfully from scenes of balls and parties to the field of war. In one memorable scene, Nicholas gets lost on the battlefield and suddenly realizes that the French are chasing him. He has a moment of derealization: Can they really be after him? Do they want to kill him? This seems unbelievable. Nicholas loves the life of the soldier, being outdoors, hanging out with friends and officers, and talking around the fire. But the realization that he could die – that is the last thing on the minds of Nicholas and his lisping, fearless hussar friend, Denisov.

There is something unique about the so-called Russian giants of the 19th century. Perhaps it is because they were constantly being banished and exiled, and that they were, in a way, writers on the run.

But Tolstoy was never banished. There goes my theory.

Is War and Peace the greatest novel of all time?