As his characters infect each other with the high temperature of their existence, so they infect us. It is to succumb to the contagion of vitality. That is how it feels to be caught up in the bright sweep of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”: alive, and very much so. “Alive, and very much so,” Tolstoy’s diary entry for November 19, 1889, begins. Photograph from Novosti / Camera Press / Retna Ltd. Tolstoy can seem at once an intrusive narrator, telling us what to think, and an absent one, letting the world speak for itself.
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