Christian is an English educator, translator, and critic specializing in Russian literature. He wrote Tolstoy's "War and Peace," which is a book-length study of the work. In the following excerpt from that book, Christian analyzes characterization in War and Peace.

The subject [of characterization in War and Peace] is complicated by the sheer number and variety of the dramatis personae, but we can narrow it down from the very start by drawing a general distinction between the treatment of historical and non-historical characters in the novel. It is a fact that the generals and statesmen, the great historical names of the period of the Napoleonic wars, are almost without exception flat and static figures. Little or nothing is revealed of their private lives We do not see them in intimate relationships with other people. Their loves, their hobbies, their personal dramas are a closed book to us...