Tolstoy can seem at once an intrusive narrator, telling us what to think, and an absent one, letting the world speak for itself. Photograph from Novosti / Camera Press / Retna Ltd.

“Alive, and very much so,” Tolstoy’s diary entry for November 19, 1889, begins. That is how it feels to be caught up in the bright sweep of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”: alive, and very much so. It is to succumb to the contagion of vitality. As his characters infect each other with the high temperature of their existence, so they infect us. Count Rostov dances the Daniel Cooper at a ball, and “all who were in the ballroom looked with smiles of joy at the merry old man.” His son Nikolai has “that merry brotherly tenderness with which all fine young men treat everyone when they are happy.” The Rostov girls are “always smiling at something (probably their own happiness)”; one of them, Natasha, loves to order the servants around, but they “liked carrying out Natasha’s orders as they did no one else’s.” The fat, naïve, bumbling hero of the novel, Pierre Bezukhov, is so infectious that footmen “joyfully rushed to help him off with his cloak and take his stick and hat.” We cannot resist these people, and they cannot resist themselves: Nikolai goes to war “because he could not resist the wish to go galloping across a level field,” and when the French start running toward him he is amazed that anyone would want to kill him: “To kill me? Me, whom everybody loves so?” Likewise, when Pierre is captured by the French he has a revelation of infinity that is also a revelation of his own infinity. Looking up at the numberless stars, he thinks, “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me! . . . And all this they’ve caught and put in a shed and boarded it up!”

Because this immense sense of self hums its own intoxicating music, these characters cannot play in the milder orchestras of give-and-take, and are often poor at crediting the discrete existence of others. But how vividly Tolstoy communicates their vitality to us! A major new translation of “War and Peace,” by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf; $37), brings us their palpability as perhaps never before. There is the “little princess,” Prince Andrei’s wife, with her short upper lip and faint mustache; and the soldier Denisov, with his “short fingers covered with hair”; and a shirtless Napoleon grunting, “Do it hard, keep going,” to the valet who is vigorously brushing his fat back and fat hairy chest; and the wise old Russian general Kutuzov, tired and sagging, who is always yawning through war councils (but who has a swivel eye for the girls); and the smooth Russian diplomat Bilibin, with his pompous habit of gathering the skin over his eyebrows when he is about to produce a bon mot.

Tolstoy is the great novelist of physical involuntariness. The body helplessly confesses itself, and the novelist seems merely to run and catch its spilled emotion. A friend of the novelist’s, the critic Aleksandr Druzhinin, ribbed him about it in a letter: “You are sometimes on the point of saying that so-and-so’s thighs showed that he wanted to travel in India!” The old patriarch Prince Bolkonsky, for instance, loves his son, Andrei, and his daughter, Marya, so fiercely that he cannot express that love in any form except spiteful bullying, yelling in the presence of his spinsterish daughter, “If only some fool would marry her!” His hands register “the still persistent and much-enduring strength of fresh old age,” but his face occasionally betrays suppressed tenderness. As he says farewell to his son, who is going to war, he is his usual self, gruffly shouting “Off with you!” Yet “something twitched in the lower part of the old prince’s face.”

Tolstoy can seem almost childlike in his simplicity, because he is not embarrassed to do the kind of thing beloved of children’s and fairy-tale writers when they read the emotions on the face of a cat or a donkey. When Prince Andrei’s wife dies in childbirth, her dead face appears to say to the living, “Ah, what have you done to me?” The old prince’s valet can “read” his master’s body; he knows that if the prince is “stepping full on his heels” something is up. At a ball in St. Petersburg, the sixteen-year-old Natasha Rostov has just finished a dance and, intoxicated with happiness, would like to rest. But someone asks her to dance again, and she agrees, flashing a smile at the man she will eventually become engaged to, Prince Andrei, who has been watching her. Tolstoy explains the smile:

That smile said: “I’d be glad to rest and sit with you; I’m tired; but you see, I’ve been asked to dance, and I’m glad of it, and I’m happy, and I love everybody, and you and I understand all that,” and much, much more.

Readers always feel that Tolstoy is both an intrusive narrator—breaking in to explain things, telling us what to think, writing essays and sermons—and a miraculously absent one, who simply lets his world narrate itself. As Isaac Babel put it, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.” There is a sense in which Tolstoy is saying to us—to dare a Tolstoyan reading of Tolstoy, for a minute—“I will gladly help you read Natasha’s or Pierre’s or the little princess’s face, but, really, anyone could do it. You don’t need me. For these are the largest, most universal, most natural emotions, not the precious little sweets of the stylish novelist.” The old prince, ignoring his son Andrei’s efforts to tell him about Napoleon’s designs, breaks into croaky song, and sings “in an old man’s off-key voice.” A few pages later, we see “the old prince in his old man’s spectacles and his white smock.” An old man with an old man’s voice and old man’s spectacles: Tolstoy pushes such characterization toward the simplest tautology: What was the old man like? He was like an old man—that is to say, like all old men. What is a young man like? He is like a young man—that is to say, like all young men. What is a happy young woman like? Like all happy young women. The Austrian minister of war is described thus: “He had an intelligent and characteristic head.” A character will tend to look characteristic in both senses of the word: full of character, and somehow typical.

There is a powerful tension in Tolstoy’s work between persons and types, the particular and the general, freedom and laws. The quintessential Tolstoyan atmosphere is one in which highly particularized characters, with their hairy fingers and short lips, experience universal emotions that might easily be transferred from one character to another. This is why the minor characters are as alive as the major ones. In the novel’s epilogue, Nikolai Rostov’s aged mother, the Countess, hears the conversation around her and suddenly perks up. She had finished her tea, Tolstoy writes, “and clearly wished to find a pretext for getting angry after eating.” Now, that is a very Tolstoyan observation, but it is not unique to the Countess. Almost anyone of a certain age in this novel might have felt the same way. (Chekhov, who learned so much from Tolstoy, is comparably subtle, but without the urge to generalize.)