I don't love War and Peace or Tolstoy. The book is amazing, but it's 'Great' with a Capital G and wears its importantitis proudly on its sleeve. I think Tolstoy secretly wanted to be an 18th century French gentleman. He hated the nobility as only a noble could. He got so much of his philosophy from Rousseau who stoked the fires of France to the point of revolution, and it's not hard to think that even after the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, Tolstoy might have looked at the Soviet Union with approval.
But Tolstoy doesn't know crap about life outside high society and his philosophy is the end result of someone who idolizes a lower class life he doesn't understand. The peasant classes were like Dostoevsky. They didn't want money or material well-being. They wanted to stop feeling humiliated, they wanted pride. You see something like that in Trumpers just as you do with Russian peasants or Putinists. Tolstoy, rather, knew everything there is to know about high society, and that's why he so hated it. He knew nothing about any social class beneath the society to which he was born, and the one true peasant character in War and Peace is just a kind of 'Magical Peasant' who only exists as a character to teach Pierre a life lesson.
But the last meeting between Pierre and Prince Andrei alive and well is enough to move anyone to tears. Prince Andrei, the hardened cynic who cares about nothing and scoffs at everything, finally finds something he's passionate about, and what he's passionate about is finding a way to sacrifice himself that rights all the wrongs he sees in the world.
You could say that Pierre and Andrei are two characters whose essence and friendship is based on that Pierre answers every question with 'yes,' and Andrei answers every question with 'no.' Pierre believes in everything and everyone, Andrei believes in nothing. Pierre always gives everything and everyone the benefit of the doubt, and Andrei always interprets uncharitably. Objectively speaking, Pierre is usually wrong, but it's his naivete that lets him create a better life for himself and perhaps improve the world a little, while Andrei is usually right, but the price of his correctness is that he can never make a good life for himself, and other than some peasant reforms, can't affect too much improvement in others either. So perhaps Pierre, ultimately, is right on a deeper level than Andrei's objective harsh truth.
When hearing about what's going on 'over there,' it's impossible not to resonate with Andrei's complaints about war and how it is the most ignominious human activity, yet the people who engage in it are the people we most reward. War's a game designed to give the best rewards to the worst people. And yet, once war is upon the world, what's left to do but fight for what's right and make the best result from the worst situation?
There must be literally hundreds of millions of soldiers throughout human history who've felt the way Prince Andrei does. Life is hard, and you're faced with so many unpleasantnesses and disappointments, and one can easily get to thinking: is there any way that I can sacrifice myself so that people after me don't have to suffer as I did?
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