[By Leo Tolstoy ] War and Peace (Vintage Classics) (Paperback)【2018】by Leo Tolstoy (Author)

by Leo Tolstoy

Excellent Book

Unknown Binding

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

[Michael Martin]

A brilliant book of course. When I read it before (many years ago) I remembered the thesis at the end more than the novel probably because it almost eclipses the stories of the individuals. This time I read it after seeing the BBC adaptation, which did strongly influence my pictures of the characters and kept certain episodes alive through Tolstoy's fulminations about Napoleon - plot spoiler: Tolstoy did not like Napoleon.

[Kin Cosner · Rating 5 out of 5]

My third reading of this masterpiece lost none of its power. Simply stated, my favorite novel.

[Kevin James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Urban aristocrats in 1805 St. Petersburg flirt, drink, and gossip about "the Anti-Christ", Napoleon Bonaparte, whose French army approaches Russia with imperial ambition.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

2023 a chapter a day