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    War and Peace
    War and Peace
    War and Peace
    Ebook2,373 pages33 hours

    War and Peace

    By Leo Tolstoy

    4.5/5

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    The epic Tolstoy novel. Probably the greatest novel of all time. With color reproductions of ten painings by Vasily Vereshchagin.According to Wikipedia: "Leo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828 –1910) was a Russian writer widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina stand, in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life, at the very peak of realist fiction... Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin (Russian: Васи́лий Васи́льевич Вереща́гин, October 26, 1842 – April 13, 1904) was one of the most famous Russian war artists and one of the first Russian artists to be widely recognized abroad. The graphic nature of his realist scenes led many of them to never be printed or exhibited... Aylmer Maude (28 March 1858 – 25 August 1938) and Louise Maude (1855–1939) were English translators of Tolstoy's works, and Aylmer Maude also wrote his friend Tolstoy's biography. After living many years in Russia the Maudes spent the rest of their life in England translating Tolstoy's writing and promoting public interest in his work."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeltzer Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2018
    ISBN9781455389834
    Author

    Leo Tolstoy

    Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is the author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and other classics of Russian literature.

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    Reviews for War and Peace

    4.5/5

    3,531 ratings170 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Incredibly entertaining even if very long. The description of war hospitals is absolutely fabulous! Beware of old translations, use this one instead!
    • 4/5
      An epic that spans multiple intrigues of the lives of its principal characters. A story that is remembered for its immensity and scope and recommended to all of those who enjoy to read literary fiction.
    • 5/5
      I read Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" when I was in middle school at a time I was too young to really appreciate it as anything but an accomplishment that impressed my teachers at the time. And even though I read a ton of Russian novels in college, something about that early experience put me off Tolstoy... (I was definitely more of a Dostoevsky girl.)At any rate, I spent the last couple of months reading "War and Peace" and it was absolutely marvelous... I enjoyed nearly everything about it-- from the ins and outs of the family drama during peace time, to the descriptions of Napoleone's failed march into Russia to Tolstoy's musings on the nature of man and war. Overall, just an excellent book.
    • 4/5
      There's always a worry with such great works like this one that they won't live up to the hype.For 2/3 of its length W&P *does* and is an excellent read. Everything is suitably grand, as is Tolstoy's style, and his prose is wonderfully easy to read as well.However the final 1/3 of the novel, starting with Napoleon's invasion of Russia, drags the rest of the epic down. From there on in Tolstoy goes into historian mode, spending many chapters reiterating the same points over and over again, temporarily forgetting all about his characters.Some of that context is nice, but Tolstoy certainly over does it. If most of it were edited out then I might just give this work the full 5 stars. As it is, just 4 will have to do.
    • 5/5
      I'm not really sure how to review this book. My copy has a brief guide to Russian naming conventions as well as a list of major characters which I referred to constantly, and they were of great assistance in following along, as are Tolstoy's incredibly short chapters. I read a surprising amount of this book just waiting for my morning ride to work.It's an easy read. It's long, but the language isn't lofty or hard to get through. The story follows several families and their lives during Napoleon's invasion of Russia. They people change as time passes and they encounter various hardships and situations. Tolstoy has a curious way of describing even passing characters in a fashion that they wind up memorable for at least a time (though I still remember the scene with the woman with over-large front teeth).The characters make the book. The back of the book highlights Natasha Rostov, Prince Andrew Bolkonsky, and Pierre Bezukhov, but there are many others that bring their own tales, such that two people might read the book in an entirely different fashion depending on which character stands out to them. Both my most loved and most detested literary figures come from this book.
    • 4/5
      In 1805 Pierre Bezukhov returns to Saint Petersburg to the bedside of his dying father, and ends up inheriting Count Bezukhov’s title and all of his assets. Suddenly, he’s the most eligible (and most socially-awkward) bachelor in all of Russia. All the ladies are after him, and he is very confused, so ends up ill-advisedly marrying the seductive and manipulative Helene Kuragin, who is probably sleeping with her equally debauched brother. Whoops! Meanwhile, war is about to break out between Tsar Alexander and Emperor Napoleon, and all the young men want in on it. Pierre’s friend Prince Andrei Bolkonsky wants to go to war to get away from his very amiable, very pregnant wife. 20-year-old Nikolai Rostov of Moscow wants to go to war to prove he is an adult (and he has a huge platonic crush on Tsar Alexander). Nikolai’s best friend Boris wants to go to war because he’s broke, and in love with Nikolai’s 13-year-old sister Natasha. As is everyone else. These men are all very rich and they think war is very glamorous. Turns out, it is not.The inter-personal plot of this epic tale is quite excellent, but boy is it bogged down by both detailed descriptions of troop movements and battles, as well as Tolstoy’s personal axe-grinding against his contemporaries. It’s possible that it was insightful at the time of publication, but now, not so much. These characters though! The main characters (especially Pierre and Natasha) are mostly boring and insufferable and deserve each other. But the villains and minor characters are so delightful. Boris’ eventual wife Julie (who is only in about 10 pages of the book) is SUPER GOTH - Boris woos her by writing poetry about death and drawing her a picture of a grave. Pierre’s wife Helene is an awful person but boy does she know how to work with what she’s given. She sleeps with EVERYONE – her brother (a great villain), Pierre’s houseguest Dolokov (also a great villain), Boris (boring except for his great taste in women), a government official and a Catholic priest (playing them against each other in an elaborate plot to divorce Pierre), and dies in a botched abortion. Truly a legend. Tolstoy is not particularly great at writing women, certainly not by today’s standards, but just due to the fact that there are 600 named characters in this book, by default some of the female characters have to be unique and interesting. Good job! On the flip side from the villains is sweet Denisov, Nikolai’s mentor and Natasha’s first suitor. His only characteristics are that he is nice to everyone and he talks with a lisp and he likes to eat sausages while writing letters.
    • 5/5
      “All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.”I’m not sure that I understood this book so much as I observed it. These three quotes pulled from Tolstoy’s masterpiece I believe speak to this; certainly more show than tell. And Tolstoy says a lot. Apparently, over 566,000 words, if the introduction is to be trusted—and why shouldn’t it be? Or bee. We’re all drones of one sort or another. Some just happen to drag a stinger through the honeycomb, with more sense of touch than rigid intention, and paint a portrait of the colony of humanity with more exactitude because of its dragged memory, faint graze through the chambers, the conglomeration of history through personal experience and hindsight. The only extra material I did not read from this edition was the foreword. Once I’d seen that the second part of that was concerned with the parallels between Napoleon’s invasion and Hitler’s of Russia, I stopped giving a shit. I did skim it, to be fair, and was bored to tears. Somehow Tolstoy managed to make nearly 1500 pages riveting, even with the lengthy second epilogue about free will and power. Some artists can dip the quill into honey and pull from that well the inextricably sticky souls of humans who were and are and will forever be (bee) too busy to turn head over thorax and see what they’d inadvertently written.“That is, power is power: in other words, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.”And Tolstoy said it better than I ever could:“A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee’s existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension.”
    • 4/5
      The ending was disappointing. (Tolstoy puts up strawman after strawman to justify his theory of history.) Until then, though, it is a very interesting book, with lots of scope and engaging characters.
    • 3/5
      This book is mainly famous for being very long and in that respect, it's no dissapointment. It is a mixture of:- character observation. Tolstoy is very good here. He shows people who delude themselves, people who rationalise selfishness and people who slowly work out what it's all about. What It's All About turns out to be Tolstoy's idea of being properly traditional and in touch with earthy things, so this is a bit of a disapointment, especially if you're female (in which case barefoot and pregnant is what you get at the end of your quest for enlightenment)Tolstoy's thoughts on history; I found this very waffly. The gist is that history moves along regardless of individuals. Tolstory has a Hume-like scepticism about historical causes and effects. Overall the book is worth perservering with but not a patch on Anna Karenina.
    • 5/5
      War and Peace is a stunning panorama of Russian life during the Napoleonic Wars, mostly from the perspective of the nobility or upper class.Tolstoy's ability to pull the reader into the story is, IMO, unsurpassed. I feel as if I not only followed the fortunes of the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Bezukhovs, etc., but I feel as if I lived with them for the six weeks or so it took me to read this book. I even feel as if I were able to catch glimpses into the minds of a few of the world leaders of the time, like Napoleon and Czar Nicholas.My only complaint is the ending; the last 40 pages or so. It felt, then, that Tolstoy was speaking in his own voice. It seemed like a piece of expository writing, as if it might have been an excerpt from an essay. Since this only pertains to the last 40 pages or so of the book, and since I was immersed in the world crafted by Tolstoy for more than 1400 pages and for over six weeks, this complaint seems petty and insignificant.War and Peace confirmed the love for Tolstoy that I discovered when I read Anna Karenina, and has become my favorite book of all-time.
    • 5/5
      Probably the greatest book I have ever read.
    • 2/5
      I'm never reading this book in 3 1/2 days again. If you want the easy time of it watch the film with Audrey Hepburn then read the last 100-150 pages of the book.
    • 5/5
      Just finished it. Of course it deserves all the acclaim, five stars, etc. But I'm afraid all the fuss intimidates people to a book that is actually (once you get into it) quite easy reading. The style is so graceful, so simple and nice, that the words nearly disappear. And it's not stuffy as the title Literature makes it seem - it's terribly exciting and fun. There are, admittedly, a few "lags" in the narrative - I found scenes with Natasha sometimes inferior to that of the Pierre/Andrew/Nicholas narratives - but these easily melt away as you rush to the good bits. And they're still very nice. I wouldn't call anything in the novel slow, and for such a huge novel the prose never seems to have any filler. It's all relevant, interesting, and touching.As for what's really amazing about this book: it's deeply moving. I found myself crying in at least five different parts. And this is coming from someone who's only cried at the end of Watership Down. But it's not a cheap tugging at the heart strings. The pain feels real, and matters, and you care about the characters in way I'd never before experienced.Highly recommended to ANYONE. Do not be intimidated by all the talk of high art or the size of the book. The pages turn quickly.
    • 4/5
      Yes, it's a LONG book, and yes, it's a bit slow at the start. But what a story! So much complexity, and yet all of it told with the sort of subtlety that makes literature so entrancing for me. A love story, a war story, political intrigue, War and Peace has it all. I little patience is required, as at times the plot lags, but it is so worth the time and effort.
    • 5/5
      Really excellent. BUT. Did it really nead ONE epilogue, let alone two plus an author's note?
    • 2/5
      While mind-numbingly tedious, I did actually finish this book, and I remembered enough of what I read from one sitting to the next that the characters and plot didn't run together too much. So, I guess as epic fiction goes, this was not terrible. Will I read it again? Probably not. All the characters cry seemingly all the time, the thesis about how individuals are carried along by history pops up way too much in the last 3 books, so that the pedantic lecturer gets in the way of the storyteller and the story a lot. And, if the novel was meant to serve as a tool for discussing the philosophy, in much the same way as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is a vehicle for the long, tedious essay 'speech' near the end, the thesis needed to be woven into the story better.
      The mostly philosophy epilogues were not as good as the rest of the book. The fiction bits in these sections seemed less well edited and had less focus to them. The philosophy was presented as if the story serves to illustrate Tolstoy's points, but he doesn't really make those connections in this section of his text. As straight philosophy these sections do a lousy job of defining the terms Tolstoy is using in his arguments.
    • 3/5
      Parts of this were really good, but a lot of it just seemed like unnecessary padding.
    • 5/5
      This book is written quite different from his Anna Karininan. The is the story of the French and Russian war as told from the Russian front. At the beginning there are quite of few of the social aspects, the balls, parties, parlor visits, etc, but when it get into the war, Tolstoy really puts you there in the war. The logistics of war and wartime are laid right out there. The French were so not prepared for where their Napoleon took them. He didn't fight the war he had planned. And Alexander responded in kind. It very much came to the generals and commanders calling their own plays and battles. I much preferred Tolstoy's "War" to his "Peace". But I also liked how he wrapped up the story.The very wimpy Pierre turns out to be the man after all. We get to see several sides of Alexander and of Napoleon. I had never read of Napoleon and so really found all that quite interesting. All in all, this is a great story and deserves to be read today and has it's place in literature today. I think it has proven and will continue to be proven a timeless epic of "War and Peace".
    • 5/5
      A masterpiece, marred only by some overblown philosophical waffle. The depth of the characters, the description of the Napoleonic Wars, the description of the lives the the aristocrats... this book has it all. Once I got into it, it was an easier book than I'd feared.
    • 5/5
      Curious to read this translation. Rate the book five stars - but that attributes to the Maude translation that I have read.
    • 5/5
      This review is of the Maude translation, which is the only version of the work I've read. As such, I am in no position to evaluate how well it captures Tolstoy's voice, but the literary style of the work is a joy to read.War and Peace is simply a magisterial work. In an essay included in an Appendix to this edition, Tolstoy tells us that this work is neither novel, poetry nor historical chronicle, and I think he is quite right in this. The book has a sprawling narrative that takes a long time to come together, and even when it does, the reader is often following a number of distinct plot lines. At the same time, Tolstoy intersperses digressions on the nature of history and our overly simplistic understanding of world events. If one were to read the work as a straight story, it would feel disjointed and scattered I suspect.Yet it accomplishes a pair of goals with such power that one cannot help but be awed by the book. First is the incredible set of characters which he assembles. Tolstoy begins with a guiding idea for each character - Pierre's attempts to reconcile his spiritualism with his daily demeanor in contrast to Andrew's rationalism, or Natasha's overwhelming youth to Sonya's "sterile flower" approach to the Rostov's. These are typically coupled with a physical description that is repeated a number of times throughout (Pierre's size, Mary's eyes). From this simple base, the characters grow to be complex and subtle people. My hypothesis is that it is Tolstoy's mastery of written conversation, in which we get glimpses of real people, rather than bundles of preordained qualities. His characters also show fragmentation, and this makes them real. Throughout the work, Tolstoy illustrates his claim that events are determined by an immense nexus of causal forces (such as the "spirit" of the arm), rather than the seemingly free decisions of people and leaders. This comes through in his characters. Even while Pierre is undergoing his Masonic transformation, he finds himself unable to change when with friends. Natasha is swept up by the glamor of the theater and Helene and into a terrible mistake. Nicholas' betting scene with Dolokhov stands out as perhaps the best example of this. The underlying virtue of these characters does not make them immune to the situation they find themselves in. Just as our characters are not nearly as unified as we intuitively think they are (see work in situationist psychology), the same holds for Tolstoy's characters. I suspect that this is a vital contributor to their depth. (Indeed, Tolstoy is far better at revealing his characters than he is at describing them - the passages in the Epilogue describing Nicholas and his intuitive relationship to his peasants is a bit jarring in its simplifications and idealization, but it is followed with a set of moving glimpses of his character in his interaction with Mary and in an important conversation with Pierre.)Indeed, as the characters become more realized to us the readers, the plot is bound together. As the novel progresses, the simple sketches are rounded out, and this brings us along throughout the many branches of the plot.I have already gestured at Tolstoy's second goal, which is the illustration of his thesis that history is determined by the complex causal history of an event. In a number of chapters he defends this view explicitly, and it gets a full treatment at the end of the novel. While not all of his arguments are entirely convincing (and at times he seems to reify "the spirit of the army" rather than using it as a shorthand for a more complex phenomena), he illustrates his thesis very powerfully. The battle scenes (Austerlitz stuck out to me in this regard) show how military action is determined by small decisions and events, rather than grand strategy. The "great man" thesis is far more intuitive than the one Tolstoy develops, so by showing us how this happens he makes his own view that much easier to grasp. There is much else one could say about War and Peace. It is the sort of work that envelops you for a long period of time. One ought not read it for a thrilling series of events (though there are many such passages), but rather for a grand sweep of ideas, times and characters. It is an immensely rewarding read.
    • 5/5
      I read this translation a few years ago and like it very much. Reading another translation now.
    • 5/5
      It's known that it took Tolstoy six years to write War and Peace. It took me almost two years to read it - not because I didn't enjoy it, but just the way my reading time was used. I liked this book. It's many characters were interesting, diverse, intertwined in many cases, and individual. Tolstoy did a great job of making each one different from the others. There was no way I could keep remembering who every person was or how one connected with another, but I didn't mind that. It was interesting and I'm glad I read it.
    • 4/5
      Good, but no Anna Karenina
    • 5/5
      This title is so often used as an example of a big book that it has achieved almost unreal status. I believe it is considered as such because it contains several styles: parlour manners and politics in the spirit of Jane Austen, battle scenes reminiscent of the Red Badge of Courage, and historical and philosophical commentary. It is a rare reader who does not become tired with at least one of these. Also, the story contains over 500 characters and is contained in either 1300 small print pages or a two-volume set. I happen to be one of those rare readers; for me, it was a page-turner. I enjoy works that integrate history, philosophy, human behavior, and religion. Tolstoy's masterpiece is an attempt to answer the question "what is history?" through a creative medium, while also exploring numerous other topics. That aside, there is a great plot and entertaining prose. Tolstoy mentions himself that most of the preeminent Russian writers of the time wrote works that could not be described properly as prose, epic, or poetry.
    • 2/5
      This story was a drag. I tried I really did. In hopes of learning one of the great stories of history I decided to go with the Audio book. This is why it jumped out at me as it was the largest Audio Book in the library. 48 CDs. As far as an audio book production quality it was fairly well. The foreigner reading the English version was good, the end of each CD was properly announced, the beginning of the next likewise, and the track splits made sense. 48 CDs is a lot to manage, and I think about 3 or 4 MP3 CDs would have been better. The Library still had this item marked as NEW yet the box was already falling apart. That is a problem. Worst of all I couldn't renew it because the audio book was already reserved for someone else. The story dragged on and on and on. After the first 6 discs nothing had really happened. Some guy died, someone else joined the army and a bunch of rich bastards talked about how great it is that French people kill other people, and how awesome it is to get drunk. After having to return the discs due to what was described above, I decided to watch the movie before I wrote this review. I got about half way through the 4 hour movie before I realized I still wasn't following it due to how much it dragged on and on about nothing. Save yourself some time, unless you need to for a class, or you have a much stronger desire than I to read it just because its classic literature, don't.
    • 4/5
      At times, this book offers penetrating insights into the human condition and the flow of history. At others, it is a barely-connected set of disjunct meanderings through the broad and un-managed forest of Russian sentimentality. It is also, incontrovertibly, rather long. I enjoyed the broad sweep of the book, and the lightness with which Tolstoy dots his work with character and humanity; I was rather less keen on the endless appeals to "peasant virtue" and the impossibility of acknowledging any cause but god. Well worth reading, but set some time aside!
    • 5/5
      Through war, courtship, and marriage Leo Tolstoy leads the reader to explore a more profound existences on earth. As the characters find dissatisfaction with an empty and shallow life I am also challenged to do the same.
    • 4/5
      I read W & P for the first time as a teenager, when it meant everything to me, and completely changed the way I looked at the world. Now, re-reading the book shortly before my 50th birthday, I have to admit that it meant less to me on the second go-through.Perhaps I'm less tolerant of the lecturing tone that Tolstoy employs through so much of the text.I still think that there are chapters in W & P that are as brilliantly written as anything written by anyone anywhere. (c.f. Natasha's first big ball, the big Rostov hunt scene, Prince Andrei's reflections before and after meeting Natasha, Pierre wandering about on the Borodino battlefield.) But maybe the proportion of these "good scenes" is smaller than I remember. And however much you have to respect the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, it really seems clear that Count Tolstoy could have used a good editor. In summary, I guess I'd argue that every serious reader needs to read W & P once in their life. A second time? Prolly not really necessary.
    • 4/5
      Of the innumerable characters in War and Peace, Kitty and Levin continue to resonate. Truthfully, I'm not sure I still remember why. War and Peace is a classic which definitely merits a reread.

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    War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

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