[3] George Orwell wrote that Hardy had "set free his genius" by writing this drama and thought its main appeal was "in the grandiose and rather evil vision of armies marching and counter-marching through the mists, and men dying by hundreds of thousands in the Russian snows, and all for absolutely nothing.
The historical time period of Part Third covers Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 through his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
The design of The Dynasts is extremely ambitious, and because of its coverage of historical events of the same era, has received comparison to Tolstoy's War and Peace.
Emma Clifford has written that Hardy used Tolstoy's novel as one of many sources of inspiration for the work, and in fact owned an early translation.
There are extensive descriptions of landscape and battle scenes that are characterised by shifts of visual perspective that, in the opinion of John Wain,[7] anticipate cinematic techniques.
[9] Anna Henchman has written about Hardy's use of imagery in the manner of astronomical observation at great distances from the earth in this work.
Bailey has postulated an analogy of the Spirits in The Dynasts with other Mephistopheles-like figures in literature, and in relation to the Book of Job.