War and Peace, Book 1 of 4

by Leo Tolstoy

”War and Peace” is a panoramic novel: It is its own justification, and perhaps needs no introduction. It always reminds the translator of a broad and mighty river flowing onward with all the majesty of Fate. On its surface, float swiftly by logs and stumps, cakes of ice, perhaps drowned cattle or men from regions far above. These floating straws, insignificant in themselves, tell the current. Once embark upon it, and it is impossible to escape the onward force that moves you so relentlessly. What landscapes you pass through, what populous towns, what gruesome defiles, what rapids, what cataracts! The water may be turbid, or it may flow translucent and pure, – but still it rushes on. Such to me is “War and Peace.”

“War and Peace,” like all of Count Tolstoi’s works, is a mighty protest against war. There is no arguing in it about the waste, and the demoralization, and the cruelty, and the unmanliness of it, but, like all Russian argument, it is by vivid pictures such as no one can resist.

The present translation has been made from the original Russian. Tolstoi has been felicitously called “the Russian Rembrandt.” It is not fair to reproduce Rembrandt as a Teniers. One may be sometimes tempted to substitute the curved line of beauty for the straight line of duty, or soften a harsh silhouette, but beyond certain unavoidable issues of the sort necessary for reproducing the impression given by the original, the translator ought to be as faithful as possible. Here the old law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, repudiated by Count Tolstoi, ought to have a new application. (from the Preface by N.H. Dole)

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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.