War and Peace is of such epic proportions that its endless outpourings of martial history, personal saga, and social document carries the reader along as a helpless spectator caught up in the full tide of life. Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (New York: The Viking Press, 1957) says it is a combination of two stories:"It is like an Iliad, the story of certain men, and an Aeneid, the story of a nation, compressed into one book."
The way Tolstoy combines the personal, Iliad-like novel with the historical, Aeneid-like novel forms the dualistic structure of War and Peace. Beyond this duality — in fact beyond the bounds of the novel itself — the unifying focus of the book lies within the mind of its author, in his endless lifetime search to extract a single truth out of the profusion of specific experiences. The unifying element of War and Peace, although somewhat disclosed in Tolstoy's philosophic epilogue on the nature of history, is not evident within the material of the novel.
The complexity and sweep of War and Peace, lacking the singularity of viewpoint achieved, for instance, in Anna Karenina, derives from the tension between two constant and interlocking orientations: the collective and the personal, the events of a nation and the experience of individuals.
Thus the protagonists of the novel have a dual significance. On one plane they reveal individuals in their quest for self-definition, on the other they are participants in a mass movement whose pattern is forever undisclosed to them. By the same duality, public events and public figures reveal basic truths about the nature of private experience, and the relationship between moment-by-moment experiences of individuals, and their long-term search for meaning, with the unfolding destiny of a nation generates the dramatic conflicts and the individual turning points of the novel.
