“War and Peace” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1,312 pages, $40) tells us how in 1812, the grandest army in the world lurched into an invasion that enabled those who fought by different rules to humbleit; theleaders on both sides were weak and ignorant, except for the few scorned figures who realized that history emerges from a million uncontrollable sacrificial or self-serving actions, and not from any imperious will.

Tolstoy presents peacetime just as fiercely. He is already a Tolstoyan, presenting, as confidently as the proverbial hedgehog, certitudes about family, money, government, religion, and morality that he would systematize and call the fruits of a conversion experience two decades later, and which would inspire legions of followers to embrace his idiosyncratic world view as a kind of religion. But here, more like the fox in Isaiah Berlin’s classic study, who knows many small things, Tolstoy also details the vices and devices of society, sometimes as judged by a moral omniscience, and sometimes from inside a sympathetic or repugnant soul. Tolstoy knew acutely that he sinned himself, but also abhorred the complacent feeling that things aren’t all that bad.

Tolstoy’s characters have the same searching impulse. They seek the meaning of life, and sometimes find that it cannot be separated from life itself. For Tolstoy, mockery or moral protest often takes the form of accurate reporting: he sees things as they are, cannot imagine being wrong, and strives to infect his readers with his highest awarenesses. He uses a romantic hero, Prince Andrew — handsome, proud, disdainful of society, almost destroyed by gunfire and by a miserable marriage, but saved by a beautiful heroine, Natasha. He also uses a realistic hero, Pierre, rising in society, striving to perfect himself and others, often rejected, but finally rescuing the same beautiful heroine, Natasha.

In “War and Peace,” Tolstoy is not yet a pacifist, but he does question the authority upon which the military rests. His emperors know less than the generals, who know less than the line officers, who know less than the soldiers, who in turn have no idea what the higher authorities want them to do. In peacetime, the sleazy dissembling and self-serving deals of the Kuragin family inspire our distaste for the St. Petersburg life of courts, bureaucracies, and armies.

Misused authority and misspent money underlie this dehumanization, and Tolstoy was already, on both counts, an anarchist at heart, longing for a money-free economy. Moscow is an older, more aristocratic city, where the hospitality, impracticality, and affection of the Rostov family contrasts and then collides with the Kuragin vices. The Rostovs’ spontaneity endangers their finances, but at the end of the novel, they recover some of their prosperity and happiness by fleeing the city and settling instead on almost self-sufficient family farms. The social miseries of seduction, gambling, and lying give way to the blessings of family, rural prosperity, and the strenuous use of the mind for the pursuit of truth and virtue.

Sheer size makes any translation of “War and Peace” a heroic undertaking. Richard Pevear, an American poet, and his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, a native Russian, have spent three years on this one monument as they make their way through the heroic work of retranslating the greatest array of Russian prose works since Constance Garnett’s achievement a century ago. The task of the translator is different now. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gogol are widely recognized as master stylists rather than inexplicable exotics. A modern translation needs to render Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s purposeful contortions of the Russian language, but faces an even harder task with the transparency of Tolstoy’s crafted simplicity. Tolstoy, a count and an ex-officer, wrote “War and Peace” mostly about aristocrats, but he wrote it for the benefit of all humanity, and his translators have faced the task of making more than 1,300 brilliant pages accessible to all of us. Garnett is still in print, in a Modern Library edition as readable as ever, and accurate where it matters most. Louise and Aylmer Maude, who translated “War and Peace” in the 1920s, were true Tolstoyans, and Tolstoy, who read English comfortably, praised their translation, which is now canonized as the Norton Critical Edition. A two-volume Penguin edition by Rosemary Edmonds is still in the bookstores, often just an editing of the Maude, and now supplanted in Penguin by Anthony Briggs’s free and highly readable translation. Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky catch Tolstoy’s verbal brilliance best, but all the others have their virtues.

Let us look at five translations of the passage where Prince Andrew stands at the Rostovs’ window, rejuvenated by overhearing Natasha’s youthful joy. English uses word order to tell us whether the dog bit the man or the man bit the dog. Russian does that with word endings and uses word order for other purposes, such as telling whether the unfortunate fellow was bitten by A dog or THE dog. So word-by-word translations are clumsy and obscure many meanings, but here is mine:

“And concern [there is] not for my existence!” thought Prince Andrew at that time when he was listening to her talk, for some reason expecting and fearing that she would say something about him. — “And again she! — And as if on purpose.” thought he.

Garnett translated that first sentence: “And nothing to do with my existence,” the Maudes, “For her I might as well not exist.” The Maudes make a clearer statement, and Garnett is closer to the elliptical original, but Russians almost never use the verb “to be” in the present tense, so the only thing the Maudes really add is the “for her.” A century later, Briggs, usually the least literal, adds a sense of forgetfulness, “Oblivious to my existence!” and Pevear-Volokhonsky, like the Maudes, tell us who is being talked about: “She doesn’t care about my existence.”

Andrew’s last quoted thought in the passage is harder.

Garnett: “And she again! As if it were on purpose!”

The Maudes: “There she is again, as if it were on purpose.”

Briggs: “It’s her again. It almost seems planned.”

Pevears: “And she again, as if on purpose.”

The Maudes found a way to make the “she” less pedantic, and Briggs characteristically changed it to the “her” of spoken English. Garnett is clear, and faithful to the original. The Pevear-Volokhonsky is, tellingly and typically, the most literal. This translation, which often clears from the page some of the more elaborate elements of earlier efforts, could not have been used when the novel was less wellknown, before the text became canonical and earned its due literary attention, when it required energy on the part of the translator to attract the audience the book deserved. At this stage, however, their cutting closeness to the text makes Tolstoy’s literary sophistication only more accessible.

Tolstoy was a hedgehog, in Berlin’s formulation, not a writer versed in many subjects and offering many insights, but one who knew one big thing well and who did one big thing well. The Maudes caught this didacticism more pressingly than the others. Garnett remains more than an early explorer, mixing readability with fidelity to the warmth and the sharpness of the depictions of peace. Mr. Briggs set himself a different task, to carry readers who sometimes skip the war passages quickly through the whole of a huge text, and he succeeds in this effort. Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky are the beneficiaries of a rich and admirable tradition. They are not standing on the shoulders of giants. Rather, they are benefiting from giants who cut away the underbrush that used to keep us from seeing the thinking and the writing in Tolstoy’s text as cleanly and brilliantly as they present it.

Mr. Belknap is a professor emeritus of Russian at Columbia University.