tolstoy again...

     The narrator of War and Peace - none other than Tolstoy himself perhaps? - is capable of subtle irony and humor in the pursuit of moral perception.  One can, of course, offer this passage as an example of the former:

'Since the end of the year 1811 an intense arming and concentration of western European forces had begun, and in the year 1812 those forces - millions of men (including those who transported and fed them) - moved from west to east, to the borders of Russia, towards which, since the year 1811, the forces of Russia had been drawn in exactly the same way.  On the twelfth of June, the forces of western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began - that is, an even took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature' [III.i.1].

Too true, that, but it's also the start of an extended essayistical meditation on necessity and freedom in history.  Note that western and Russian forces seem drawn to the border of Russia like iron filings following a magnet under a piece of paper.  What's more, even, or rather, especially the Great Ones, Napoleon and Alexander, are 'slaves of history', caught in a web of forces set in motion by a million contingent decisions and actions.  So says the narrator - and I think he's on to something.
     Still, I must confess that there are other passages even more biting in their anger-forged irony, while being quite funny if you linger with 'em a moment.  Consider this - there is no need for any context I should think:

'Balaga was a famous troika driver, who had known Dolokhov and Anatole for six years already and furnished them with his troikas....  More than once he had driven Dolokhov, when he had had to elude pursuit; more than once he had taken them for a ride around town with Gypsies and "damsels," as Balaga called them.  More than once, while in their employ, he had run down folk and cabbies in Moscow, and his "gentlemen," as he called them, had always helped him out.  More than once he had been overdriven under them.  More than once he had been beaten by them; more than once they had gotten him drunk on champagne and Medeira, which he liked, and he knew a thing or two about each of them which would have sent an ordinary man to Siberia long ago....  While in their service, he risked his life and his hide twenty times a year, and he had driven more horses to death than they had paid him in roubles.  But he liked them....  He liked giving a painful lash on the neck to a peasant, who even without that was trying, more dead than alive, to get out of his way.  "Real gentlemen!" he thought' [II.v.16].