Inverarity is not a Scottish village

A couple of things that should colour our understanding of this novel are that Tolstoy was himself a top, immensely rich aristocrat who was troubled by his rank and wealth all his life - the illegitimacy of Pierre seems to be a projection of his own self-doubts about rank and wealth - and that, as a young army officer, he experienced war both on the Caucasus and, in particular, in Sebastopol, where the inefficient and indeed practically absent leadership of the imperial government was made up for, almost to the point of victory (but not quite) by the incredibly courageous and devoted behaviour of the common troopers. Sebastopol was to Tolstoy what the world wars were to the artists of the twentieth century, but there is something rather troubling about the fact that, having experienced what was ultimately a Russian defeat, he cast his great myth of war into an elemental victory of the irresistible spirit of the Russian people - that same people who had in fact been, in spite of its heroism, been bested and forced into surrender in Sebastopol by French, British, Turkish and Italian invaders.