Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869) follows several noble families through Russia's Napoleonic Wars, and the reader navigates its vast cast by learning three houses. The warm, spendthrift Rostovs; the severe, principled Bolkonskys; and the wealthy Bezukhovs are the families whose fortunes Tolstoy braids together, so that the private drama of marriages and inheritances runs alongside the public drama of Austerlitz and the burning of Moscow. The genealogy is the reader's map through the war.
Each house is drawn with its own character. Count Ilya Rostov and his countess have four children — the eldest Vera, the impetuous Nikolai, the luminous Natasha, and the young Petya — plus their orphaned cousin Sonya, raised as one of them. The Bolkonskys are just the old, exacting Prince Nikolai and his two children: the brilliant, disillusioned Prince Andrei and his devout, self-effacing sister Marya. Pierre Bezukhov, the awkward, searching illegitimate son of a dying count, inherits an immense fortune and with it a place at the center of the story.
As a genogram, War and Peace is a long convergence of these three lines through marriage and loss. Natasha Rostova is engaged to Andrei Bolkonsky, breaks with him after her infatuation with the rake Anatole Kuragin, and reconciles only as he dies of his wounds; Andrei's first wife, Lise, dies in childbirth, leaving a son, Nikolenka. In the end the survivors intermarry across the houses: Nikolai Rostov weds the pious Marya Bolkonskaya, rescuing his family's finances, and the widowed Natasha marries Pierre Bezukhov. The predatory Kuragins — Anatole and Hélène, Pierre's first wife — are the countercurrent, the family that damages every house it touches.
The Rostov and Bolkonsky family map endures because Tolstoy uses it to make history intimate. The wars matter to us because they fall on people we can place on a chart — a son at the front, a daughter jilted, a fortune inherited or lost. By the epilogue the three families have folded into two marriages, a new generation beginning as the guns fall silent. To read War and Peace is to hold that tree in mind and watch a nation's upheaval settle, at last, into a family.
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