War and Peace

Tolstoy highlights the ironically festive atmosphere that settles over Moscow in the face of immediate invasion by Napoleon's troops: 

After the sovereign’s departure from Moscow, Moscow life flowed on in its former, habitual way, and the course of that life was so habitual that it was hard to remember the recent days of patriotic rapture and enthusiasm, and it was hard to believe that Russia was actually in danger [...] With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Muscovites’ view of their situation not only did not become more serious, but, on the contrary, became still more light-minded, as always happens with people who see great danger approaching.

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In a passage that exemplifies situational irony, Tolstoy writes that Pierre finally found the "peace and harmony" that he has spent much of his life searching for while imprisoned under horrific conditions by the French army: 

In devastated and burnt Moscow, Pierre experienced almost the final limits of privation that a man can endure, but [...] he bore his situation not only lightly, but joyfully. And precisely in that time he received the peace and contentment with himself that he had previously striven for in vain. In his life he had long sought in various directions for that peace, that harmony with himself [...] And, without thinking, he had received that peace and harmony with himself only through the horror of death, through privation, and through what he had understood in Karataev.

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