War and Peace. New Trans. By Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

by Leo Tolstoy

Hardcover

Published January 1, 2007

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.

Reviews

[Harris Tweed · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are bits of significant excellence in this thing. There is also a whole lot of... I don't know exactly how to describe it and I feel like slagging off W&P is just going to invite a whole lot of backlash from strangers that I'm not particularly interested in dealing with. All I'll say, having looked at most of the words in the Garnett translation when I was 14 and having now looked at all the words in the P/V translation, is that if you want to read War and Peace this is probably the one you should read.

[Trent Robb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mostly great. I like the Peace parts more than the war parts. I took a big break in the middle, and was also reading other books at the same time. Reading other books was great, but I wish I would have kept plugging away on this all the way through. Also wish it was four physical books instead of one huge one. Minor complaint.

[Lexi Norvet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genuinely, I think Playboi Carti would enjoy War and Peace