This great novel is discounted by Tolstoy enthusiasts who do not meet the endearing human paintings Karenina or P & G. It is true that the "hero" is shabby and his redemption without interest .. The preface, for once, just said: it is a work "in search of its kind." Started as a novel but out of the novel. It would apply to it the adjective that Solzhenitsyn blamed his Gulag Archipelago: "literary investigation test". This is not the only common point of these parallel explorations of oppressive hell. Tolstoy is not content to beautifully describe the logic of the oppressive Tsarist system (which appeared as a paradise in the eyes of Solzhenitsyn), he wondered how educated people, even liberals become almost innocently effectors of hell. And here we find the great Tolstoy "system application" War and Peace. It is not the human will that counts but the structure. No one is "good" or "bad." Water from a devastating torrent is the same as that of a lake, it is the "banks" that structure the water and make it a disaster or happiness.
