Ilya Repin, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, 1887. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Everyman's Library
War and Peace
The novel against which all others are measured.
$35.00
Available · worldwide delivery
The maison’s notePenguin Classics (Briggs) is the default
- Author
- Leo Tolstoy; trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude
- Publisher
- Everyman's Library
- Published
- January 1992
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Hardcover
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
Not a Novel, Its Author Insisted
Tolstoy said that War and Peace was not a novel, and one sees his point; it is Russia between 1805 and 1812, with Napoleon's invasion at its centre, carried by several hundred characters and interrupted by the author's own arguments about how history moves. Yet the Rostovs, the Bolkonskys and Pierre Bezukhov are the most alive people in fiction, and readers finish the book knowing them as they know their own families.
It appeared complete in 1869 and has stood ever since as the measure other novels are taken against. Louise and Aylmer Maude, who knew Tolstoy and translated with his blessing, made the English version he himself endorsed, and Everyman's Library keeps their translation in cloth, single-volume and unabridged, as the book demands to be met.
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