Great story, of course. I'm not the first to make that point. It also has interspersed throughout a series of essays discussing and dissing the great Man theory of history. Tolstoy argues in essence that if Napoleon hadn't come along, we'd have invented someone else to play his role. It was Just Time.
Along those lines, much discussion of free will and religion. Part II of the epilog is entirely thematic.
Book is available free on-line. I read the Briggs translation.
http://www.online-literature.com/booksearch.php
Some keeper sections in the book. Here was one that cracked me up. PL54, if you happen to read this part of the site, you'll appreciate this...
And on marriage...The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labor- idleness- was a condition of the first man's blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man's primitive blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class- the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.
Berg smiled with a sense of his superiority over a weak woman, and paused, reflecting that this dear wife of his was after all but a weak woman who could not understand all that constitutes a man's dignity, what it was ein Mann zu sein.* Vera at the same time smiling with a sense of superiority over her good, conscientious husband, who all the same understood life wrongly, as according to Vera all men did. Berg, judging by his wife, thought all women weak and foolish. Vera, judging only by her husband and generalizing from that observation, supposed that all men, though they understand nothing and are conceited and selfish, ascribe common sense to themselves alone.
