[The author, after an earlier failed attempt with War and Peace, recently re-started reading the classic right from the beginning.]

It is too early to pass a judgment on the novel; it would be too hasty to explain its deeper meaning at this time; it is too rash to recommend it to fellow readers. It is indeed premature to talk about War and Peace when I'm not even certain of finishing all the one thousand three hundred and fifty-eight pages; I'm not certain of remembering the names of more than five hundred characters; of getting intimate with the major families having unpronounceable names like Rostovs, Kuragins, Bezukhovs and Bolkonskies.

In spite of all these cautions, it remains irresistibly tempting to confess that Leo Tolstoy greatly resembles Jane Austen.

Jane Austen Vs Leo Tolstoy

Jane Austen was the daughter of an English clergyman. Leo Tolstoy was the son of a Russian nobleman. She lived through the horrors of Napoleon but never wrote about it. He was born after Napoleon's death but lived to write the greatest epic on his exploits. She never chronicled the lives of the Dickensian subjects of her country. He always fancied working for the oppressed serfs of his country. She died of (believed to be) Addison's disease at a young age of 42. He died of pneumonia at an old age of 82.

Their lives could not have been more different.

She adored Shakespeare. He disliked Shakespeare. She devoted her writing life in evoking the mundane charms of society gossip. He once vowed to reform the debaucheries of Moscow's high society. Her genteel world consisted of petticoats, tea and smelling salts. His rough world comprised of samovars, battle fields and Cossacks. Her novels had the daintiness of elegant lady-talk. His novels had the masculinity of gross soldier-talk.

Tolstoy was described as the greatest miniaturist in the history of the novel, while Austen herself admitted of having only a little bit (two inches wide) of Ivories on which she worked with so fine a brush that it produced little effect after much labor. He needed one of history's nastiest wars to write his greatest work while she was content with three or four families in a country village!

Their works could not have been more different.

Jane's Ghost Haunts Tolstoy's Epic

And yet, War and Peace, the celebrated novel about combats and strategies is strangely redolent of a woman who had never visited a battlefield in her entire life, was only "great in satin-stitch", and whose characters' fascination with regiments were confined to the agreeable manners and gentlemanlike appearances of their handsome officers.

In fact, reading the first chapter of War and Peace could make the reader delirious and see Jane Austen winking at him: A soft St. Petersburg evening, a party in a countess's living room, the gathering of the elegant and beautiful people, the talk of a ball in the English Embassy, the meaningless exclamations of the diamond-studded ladies carrying gold-embroidered velvet bags, grave gentlemen uniformed in dark-green dress coat, knee breaches and silk stockings, the whispers of a marriage proposal for a girl from a good and rich family, eye-witness account of a scandal, and, to set the Jane Austen-ish aura complete in its perfection: a little princess busy with needle-work!