War and Peace (Wordsworth Classics) (Wadsworth Collection) by Leo Tolstoy (1997) Paperback

by Leo Tolstoy

996 pages, Paperback

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

See also:
French → Léon Tolstoï
Spanish → León Tolstói

Reviews

[Teague · Rating 5 out of 5]

In three months I have done the task that took Charlie Brown merely a weekend: I have read War and Peace. In all honesty, this novel's title truly gives away its entire plot-- despite this I still have some thoughts on the book. I think what has made this work so renowned is that it seems to be three different transcripts intermingled together. There is the historical text, which covers the battles of the Napoleonic wars, the diplomatic crises that led to them, and a showcase of the Russian social system; there is the narrative text which places the Rostovs, Bolkonskys, and Bezukhovs into this historical landscape; finally, Tolstoy strings these two pieces together by including his own thesis on what the history of science really is-- which I would argue is the most compelling part of the text.

Tolstoy's entire argument that he makes in the last 20 pages of the book is that the hundreds of pages that preceded this moment happened as a chain of mostly inevitable events. Inevitable in the sense that there is no other possible way that these wars could have played out. Often when historians look to explain the past they begin to point to the 'great' leaders or generals, or emphasize an even more obscure concept such as 'power'. Tolstoy discards these views, and shows that none of these explanations can account for the vast amount of historical evidence we have access to. Instead you must discard these ideas of free will and the choices of people influencing history, and instead recognize the inevitability of these actions. History will always proceed in this way, because under these exact same conditions humans-- despite their supposed free will-- will always make these exact same decisions. That is the beauty of this book. It builds a 1000 page world that has the reader on the edge of their seat waiting to see how things play out, until it is revealed to them that what they are waiting for is an already predetermined chain of events. Our excitement comes from our misconception of free will.

[Saskia · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I give this book five stars I’m really giving them to myself for finishing this epic in exactly four months. Don’t get me wrong, the book completely deserves five stars, but I do too, because this is a LONG read. Everyone already knows that though. What you might not know is that this specific translation is excellent. The translators notes at the start are very informative and quite an important prelude to the book itself so I was glad to read that first. I was honestly not expecting to enjoy this as much as I did. I took it on because I thoroughly enjoyed Anna Karenina, despite the book being more about farming than Anna herself, and I thought it might be that I actually like Tolstoy’s work. I wasn’t wrong. This book is a journey, it’s a lived experience, and it’s one that will stay with me for a long time. I hope one day I have the time to read it again, I know there is a lot more that I could get out of it in a second read, and perhaps a slightly different translation would be interesting. I don’t know if I can find more words to describe exactly what I so enjoyed about this beast of a book, all the usual stuff like ‘I felt I really knew the characters’ or ‘the language was beautifully immersive’ or ‘the story was so powerful’ don’t really seem to do justice to my feelings about it. I learned a lot, I felt a lot, and I spent a lot of time just staring into space and thinking after reading certain parts. Yes, some of the lectures about history and war that Tolstoy drops into the middle of the plot can be considered a little dry, but it felt like having someone reach through time and help me a little along the way to understand more context and see the bigger picture that surrounded these characters. It is a long book, but it is not a boring book, and it is not difficult to read if you pick a good translation.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

At one chapter/day, this book was such a good companion for the year. I laughed, i cried, i yawned, i loved it.

[Lindsay Jacobs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here’s my advice: when you finally enter the prologues of this 1000 page adventure, do not wrestle through the second prologue. Either skim through or skip altogether. I believe that final few pages nearly wrecked the whole experience for me! If tolstoy HAD to include his loooong winded ideas on why history goes the way it does, he should’ve done that before wrapping up the part his readers actually cared about.

It was quite the feat Tolstoy accomplished writing this. It was almost as much so reading it. After spending so much time with one book, I would’ve thought I’d miss it like I usually do (it took weeks for me to stop regularly thinking about Anna Karenina). But whether it was the second prologue or just the excessive war talk and characters, or both, I find I’m so excited and relieved to be done! I didn’t like any of the characters which was also true of Anna but I felt like I could get to know them in Anna. In W&P, talk of war interrupts so often that I couldn’t remember the main characters by the time he got back to them.

In the end, I’m happy to check it off the TBR and move on.

[Stasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"While there is life, there is happiness".

[Andrew Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

So glad I finished this masterpiece but Leo, what the fuck was that last epilogue??