On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”
War and Peace reminds me of David Lynch&#x27;s &quot;Dune&quot;.  Aspects of it are utterly brilliant.  Perhaps unsurpassed.  As a whole though, it suffers from the effects of poor decisions.<p>Tolstoy famously said that he didn&#x27;t even consider War and Peace to be a novel, but something else that sort of passes for one.  Where another author with an axe to grind would tell a story that leads the reader to the desired conclusion, Tolstoy spends entire, insufferable chapters hammering home his message, sometimes in seeming contradiction to the plot.  His portrayal of Napoleon in particular is comically ham-fisted, perhaps intentionally so.<p>One of his central points, on which he expounds endlessly, is dealt with in the first part of the article.  Namely, that society and war are impossible to understand or predict.  They just are.  On the battlefield, it&#x27;s not the army with the better strategy or equipment that prevails, but the one whose soldiers simply decide it&#x27;s their time to win.  It reminds me of Japan&#x27;s &quot;Shikata ga nai&quot; (It cannot be helped) saying.  While this is a valid coping mechanism for the incompetent or someone caught up in the heat of the moment, it&#x27;s hardly a productive approach for those with the time to tackle tough problems.  Kutuzov ends a strategy meeting on the eve of battle recognizing that it&#x27;s too late for further revelations in understanding to be implemented, which is sane, but Tolstoy does indeed take things further and state such solutions are impossible to come by in the first place, which is unfounded.  Complex systems can be understood.  Just because they don&#x27;t immediately surrender to analysis doesn&#x27;t mean there is no solution.  War and society are hard nuts to crack because they change based on the current understanding of them, like self-modifying code.  That doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re fundamentally impossible to understand.<p>This, at least, is my belief.  Holding this belief made reading War and Peace a bit of a chore.  Tolstoy creates wonderfully nuanced and realistic characters, but in War and Peace he hammers you over the head with his own philosophy and it&#x27;s an unpleasant experience if you happen to disagree with it.  The book would be better if he&#x27;d been more subtle, and could still benefit from having entire chapters (you know which ones) excised completely.