1. It is worth noting that the Russian original of War and Peace starts as follows:

Eh bien, mon prince. Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des ????????, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous préviens que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j'y crois) — je ne vous connais plus, vous n'êtes plus mon ami, vous n'êtes plus ??? ?????? ???, comme vous dites ??, ????????????, ????????????. Je vois que je vous fais peur, ???????? ? ?????????????.

The fact that the upper classes in Russia were fond of French is expressed far better by the fact that long, extended passages in the book are written in French. There are a couple of letters in German as well.

This Francophilia is juxtaposed in the way that Natasha Rostova dances a traditional Russian dance (effortlessly and as though it is in her blood) when, in Part II, the Rostovs are at their hunting lodge. Tolstoy shows that, despite the surface appearance, even the nobility is really Russian, and not French. This ties in with his Russian patriotism and religious-philosophical ideas.

2. Anna Pavlovna Sherer drops out of the novel after Tolstoy uses her as a plot device for Chapter I of Part I. I think she appears in one or two minor episodic moments after that.

3. Tolstoy's take on the meaning of the war ties into his (to my mind repulsive) maniacal obsession with the Russian peasant and the mythical attributes that Tolstoy bequeaths to the Russian peasant. Salvation, in Tolstoy's mind, comes from this class of people. His heresy (for which he was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church) helped to fuel a lot of the delusions that would characterize the role of the peasantry in the Bolshevik state, and the idealization of the lower classes that led to the absurd conclusions that streetsweepers and ditchdiggers were qualified to govern nations.

Not only that, but his assertion that the individual (in this case, Napoleon) is meaningless is patently absurd. Individuals shape history in ways that Tolstoy seems unwilling to recognize. I would love to see Tolstoy try to explain how someone like Hitler or, to take the other extreme, Gandhi, was insignificant. He not only discounts the individual as such, but also the individual as being capable of directing masses of people. His own country was to show him just how wrong he was, with Lenin and Stalin annihilating most of his propositions (including regarding the peasantry) and making him an irrelevant relic from an ideological perspective.

4. I wasn't aware that any translations made Prince Andrei "Prince Andrew". It sounds very non-Russian and removes the stark, jarring and out-of-place sound of the name "Pierre" for Pierre Bezrukov (actually, he's Pyotr, but he goes by Pierre since he is the representative of the most Westernized, Russia-renouncing wing of the nobility). Princess Marya, Nikolai Rostov, Andrei Bolkonsky (I almost wrote Volkonsky, since all the people are based on real noble families and the Volkonskys are the basis for the name, just like the Trubetskois for the Drubetskois and the Kurakins for the Kuragins) - these are the way the names are supposed to look. I think that any translation that Anglicizes the names is doing a major disservice to the book.

5. Why don't you talk about or cite the "big moments" of the book? Andrei looking at the sky at Austerlitz, Natasha dancing, Pierre at Borodino - these are the big moments.

6. Nothing about the Epilogue? Nothing at all? The Epilogue is perhaps the greatest crime committed by Tolstoy, the most odious thing perpetrated in the history of Russian literature.