Russia fights on the page as well as on the front line

Tolstoy's masterpiece chronicles Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia and shows how the defeat of Napoleon was a moment of national and individual liberation. The book also offers an unparalleled insight into the nature of war.

Far from being an orderly fight between two armies, military conflict is portrayed as brutish, bloody and chaotic. When Pierre Bezukhov wanders on to the battlefield of Borodino he expects to find the sort of neatly arranged battle scene that he has seen in paintings and read about in history books. Instead, "Nowhere was there a field of battle such as his imagination had pictured: there were only fields, clearings, troops, woods, the smoke of campfires, villages, mounds and streams; and try as he would he could descry no military 'position' in this landscape teeming with life. He could not even distinguish our troops from the enemy's."

Tolstoy drew from his own experience to portray historical events, having served as an officer in the Crimean War in the 1850s. Other Russian writers, like Alexander Pushkin, were also steeped in the military tradition. His poem The Bronze Horseman, ostensibly about the equestrian statue of St Peter the Great, is a meditation on imperialism and the ambiguous nature of power.

War is a theme reprised by successive generations of Russian authors. In a nod to Tolstoy, the great émigré writer Andrei Makine opened his recent novel, A Hero's Daughter, with a description of a Second World War battlefield that echoes War and Peace: "Before the war, from books, he used to picture battlefields quite differently: soldiers carefully lined up on the fresh grass, as if before dying they had time to adopt a particular, significant posture, one suggested by death ... Which is why when he was first skirting that meadow covered with dead, he had noticed nothing." There is no dignity in death: in war everyone gets reduced to brownish porridge.

Given their obsession with military matters, it is little wonder that Russian writers have also been so personally combative: when not fighting wars, they were always at each other's throats. Tolstoy challenged his fellow author Turgenev to a duel, afterwards apologising. And Pushkin was killed in a bloody duel in 1837, at the age of 38, by a French officer whom Pushkin supected of having an affair with his wife. In Russian literature, there is as much blood and guts spilled off the page as there is on it.