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    War and Peace: Original Version
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    War and Peace: Original Version
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    War and Peace: Original Version
    Ebook1,497 pages31 hours

    War and Peace: Original Version

    By Leo Tolstoy

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    An alternative version – the one Tolstoy originally intended, but has been hitherto unpublished – of Russia’s most famous novel; with a different ending, fewer digressions and an altered view of Napoleon – it’s time to look afresh at one of the world’s favourite books.

    ‘War and Peace’ is a masterpiece – a panoramic portrait of Russian society and its descent into the Napoleonic Wars which for over a century has inspired reverential devotion among its readers.

    This version is certain to provoke controversy and devotion in equal measures. A ‘first draft’ of the epic version known to all, it was completed in 1866 but never published. A closely guarded secret for a century and a half, the unveiling of the original version of ‘War and Peace’, with an ending different to that we all know, is of huge significance to students of Tolstoy. But it is also sure to prove fascinating to the general reader who will find it an invigorating and absorbing read. Free of the solemn philosophical wanderings, the drama and tragedy of this sweeping tale is reinforced. His characters remain central throughout, emphasising their own personal journeys, their loves and passions, their successes and failures and their own personal tragedies.

    500 pages shorter, this is historical fiction at its most vivid and vital, and readers will marvel anew at Tolstoy’s unique ability to conjure the lives and souls of Russia and the Russians in all their glory. For devotees who long for more, for those who struggled and didn’t quite make it to the end, or for those who have always wanted to know what all the fuss is about, this is essential reading.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateOct 7, 2010
    ISBN9780007396993
    Unavailable
    War and Peace: Original Version
    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.

    Read more from Leo Tolstoy

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    Reviews for War and Peace

    4.5/5

    118 ratings107 reviews

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    • 5/5
      It is a book that tells the story of several Russian family members.
      It is difficult to read, that is to say, it is not a book that you can read lightly; You have to be very focused to understand the whole story.
      But equally, it is very well written and interesting to read.
    • 2/5
      very good book
    • 4/5
      Almost five star. Great book, I'm just not sure I like this translation version.
    • 5/5
      Is the Best pice of literature ever reading
    • 4/5
      Exhaustive account of five Russian families during the Napoleonic and French Wars. Never boring, but hard to absorb at times. Once I got used to the Russian names (and nicknames) it wasn't too bad of an expereince. A lot of details, but intriuging all the way. Not as memorable for it's story as it is for it's massiveness. Finally read it for bragging rights more than interest (even though it was on my TBR forever).
    • 5/5
      Read this book as a teen and I remember I really loved it. Wanna read again, this tiem in English. (The first copy was translated in Dutch)
    • 5/5
      What a master story teller ... and the translation is a delight
    • 1/5
      Oh gosh. This is one of the books that I really, really want to be able to read. It's a classic! But the book is just to heavy, I can't push myself through all that information-packed, slow paced, text over several several pages. Maybe another time...!
    • 5/5
      This book does two things.

      First, it tells a sweeping saga of four interrelated Russian families before, during, and after Napoleon's invasion of Russia, covering the years 1805-1820. You could say that in a way it's the template for the later American novel Gone With the Wind. But the latter book is much more of a potboiler. Tolstoy's book is much more psychologically complex and realistic. Not only in terms of knowing what makes people tick, but in terms of showing how irrational, fickle, and foolish we can be. The big-hearted Pierre is one of the most lovable characters you'll meet in literature, as is the initially tomboyish Natasha. But they are only two of the hundreds of characters you'll meet. Also worthy of mention is the ne'er-do-well Dolokhov, who for all his cruelty, becomes a real asset to his country in time of war.

      Some of the characters are really put through the wringer. Those that reach the very border of life and death find therein an unexpected sense of peace. And upon returning to life as they knew it (if they make it) find a new perspective that enriches them. There's a little of everything here. Battle, politics, society intrigue, bucolic festivities in the countryside, and, to be sure, heart-tugging love stories.

      The other thing this book is, is a philosophy text. By saying that, I don't want to scare you off, but peppered throughout the book are sections where Tolstoy tells you how he feels about the "great man" theory of history, reserving especial scorn for Napoleon, who he characterizes less as a military genius than a very lucky, and very spoiled man-child. The last hundred pages of the book (the second epilogue) are a treatise, where Tolstoy tears down various theories of history and the concept of free will. He calls for a unified theory of history, which would explain both large bodies (nations and mass movements) and individuals, explaining their actions in the context of their time, place and circumstances rather than dwelling on freely made decisions, which he doesn't believe in. This last section reminded me a lot of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and made me wonder how much Tolstoy influenced Asimov's creation of Hari Seldon, the great fictional psycho-historian and predictor of future events.

      Seriously, a book club could spend a month of meetings on this book. I haven't even touched on other things in it, such as religion, freemasonry, the French Revolution, and Tolstoy's idea of an ideal marriage. I could go on and on.
    • 5/5
      So, I read this. It took a couple minutes.

      Some of it is the same old stuff I remember from Anna Karenina: huge numbers of rich people screwing each other over. But the other stuff - I guess that's the "War" stuff, although it's mostly all war, one way or another - the stuff about Napoleon surprised me because I don't think Tolstoy saw this as "historical fiction." I think he saw it as some fiction parts, and some history parts, and during the history parts he really meant for you to almost switch gears entirely. He did original research: interviewed veterans, visited battlefields. He wrote an enormous novel, interspersed with an enormous history book. Neat, right? It's like a mashup. A really, really long mashup. Holy shit! It's like when Danger Mouse released that album-length mashup of the Beatles' White album (representing history) and Jay-Z's Black album (representing rich people screwing each other)!

      Now you know exactly like War & Peace is like. I'm so much awesomer than Sparknotes.

      I didn't like this as well as I liked Anna Karenina. Maybe it's because I read AK first, so Tolstoy's tricks - the sprawling casts, the terrifying knowledge of human nature - aren't new to me anymore. Or, maybe it's because W&P is too fucking long. You know this was supposed to be the first of a trilogy? Ha, Tolstoy was such an asshole. And that 40 pages at the end...whew. That's some Ayn-Rand-near-the-end-of-Atlas-Shrugged BS right there (my wife's point, not mine), and you know how I feel about Atlas Shrugged.

      That said, though, saying "I liked Anna Karenina better" is like saying "I liked having sex with whats-her-name from Weeds better." The bar is high. War & Peace is a very good book. And I liked the historical stuff, even if it's pretty clear that all that high-minded talk about history's drift could have been summed up as "I totally hate Napoleon."

      Translation(s) Review
      I read the Briggs and Pevear & Volokhonsky translations alternately. Just swapped back and forth at random. I don't recommend it. They spell names slightly differently, and Briggs has Denisov speak like Barbara Walters for some reason, so the switch is confusing. But here's my verdict: they're both fine. I give the edge to Pevear & Volokhonsky, but only if you don't mind some French; it feels like a lot, but it's only 2%. I do think Briggs can be a bit clunky - and I now know, from P&V's amusingly catty intro, that Briggs wussed out on a bit of Tolstoy's weird tendency to repeat words like six times in a paragraph. (But Briggs' afterword, by Figes, is better.) Really, you're good either way.
    • 5/5
      I am no longer afraid of the big ass Russian novel.* Who knew it would be so readable? The most difficult thing about it was keeping all of the characters straight, but even that was only in the beginning. By the end of the book, the characters were so fully drawn that I couldn't believe that I'd once had to rely on a cheat sheet remember who they were or what relation they had to one another.

      I'm kind of peeved that I can't give this book 5 stars**. Overall, I thought it was fantastic. I even liked the war sections. Well, the "action" war sections that featured our characters, not the "strategy" war sections where Tolstoy basically repeated his views on history and the war over and over and over again. That and the second epilogue kept me from being completely enamored. Come on, Leo! End it with a bang, not a whimper!

      By the way, I'm totally Team Andrei.



      *Or the big ass French novel, for that matter. I'm still kind of scared of the big ass American novel (looking at you, Herman "whale anatomy" Melville), and I sometimes have PTSD-like flashbacks from my monthlong run in with the big ass Irish novel (you know who you are, James "snotgreen
      scrotumtightening sea" Joyce).

      **Give me a year and I will forgive you for your whimper of an ending. This book was pretty freaking amazing.
    • 3/5
      Plot Summary - This book is too great to rotate around the lives of some handful of characters. So, let's prod along and talk about the lives of 100 thousand characters.

      Tolstoy's wife should get a major recognition for getting this work published as she copied the original manuscript by hand which contained some 460,000 Russian and French words.

      She ended up copying the manuscript 7 times before it got published!
    • 3/5
      This takes place during the Napoleonic wars. Early 1800s in Russia. It seems to be more a book of manners than a commentary on war or peace. It is lovely if you have the time and patience to dawdle through the complexities and nuances of courtly life in Russia at that time, and it certainly details the style of living in the upper cast of Russia. Tolstoy is a marvelous writer, and the narrator was very good as well, but the audio wouldn't load on my phone and I haven't really the patience for this sort of story right now, so I didn't finish it.
    • 3/5
      I loved Anna Karenina. I think it may be my favorite novel, so I have nothing against Tolstoy. Maybe this translation is a chore to get through, but I simply did not get pulled into this story, unfortunately, and had to put it aside.
    • 4/5
      War and Peace... it's not an easy read. At my workplace, it's slang for a long and tedious email. I have a vague memory of reading this in my early teens, but it must have been an abridged version and anyways I remember nothing except a sense of the inevitable in the characters' lives. War and Peace was published in 1869 and is considered Tolstoy's most important contribution to literature. I'll be careful not to call it a novel since he apparently objected to that label. I'm sure someone has coined a term for this hybrid of history and narrative.I'll be honest: this was a slog. I love Dickens and gulp down Hugo. Collins has no terrors for me (well, besides his Gothic-y ones) and I've plowed through Radcliffe without a tremor. I didn't think War and Peace would be so hard to get through, but it was. I started well but then just lost interest. Finally, several months later, I picked it back up and began, determinedly, to make my way to the end. I was going to finish it or be finished by it. Just under a year later, I read the last page and found myself both relieved and a bit sorry to be leaving that world.Resignation, a prominent virtue in some of the characters, is important in the reader as well. Indeed, for me the substantial enjoyment of the book only began once I gave myself up to it. By approaching the digressive sections with the same attitude as the narrative portions, I began to appreciate it and see why it has been hailed as such an important piece of literature. I feel a little foolish, actually... only discovering how to enjoy it in the last three hundred pages or so.The story sprawls and spreads in all directions, encompassing a wide range of characters who are all made real to the reader via Tolstoy's omniscient narrator voice. We get inside their heads and are privy to all their thoughts, recognizing our own mental landscape in their often illogical, self-absorbed thinking. Natasha is one of the most vivid characters I've ever read. Pierre, Andrei, Marya, Sonya, Nikolai, Petya... they all come alive and I remember them almost as people I knew rather than characters I read about.Tolstoy has a very decided opinion on historical figures and events, and expounds on it frequently! He believes that history is determined not by the decisions and actions of single figures (like Napoleon) but by the interplay of thousands and millions of individual wills. Again and again Tolstoy picks apart the historical analyses of critical battles and tries to demonstrate that success doesn't prove there was brilliant planning, and failure doesn't necessarily indicate ineptitude. He says that the ancients gave us a model of historical events that focused on the actions and personalities of hero-figures, and we can't get used to the idea of history without them — so we fashion historical protagonists and endow them with our belief in their power. He's eloquent and persuasive, but I found I had much less interest in his digressions than with Hugo's novel-length forays into the Napoleonic battles or Melville's detailed descriptions of whaling. Perhaps it's the repetition and the almost-petulant tone of his arguments?About halfway through the book, I watched the three-hour movie version starring Audrey Hepburn (perfectly cast as Natasha) and Henry Fonda. It was surprisingly faithful and we enjoyed it quite a bit. Of course the movie can't show the spiritual transformations several characters experience, like Prince Andrei's moment of illumination in the surgeons' tent, Pierre's slow maturation, or the fascinating mind and vitality of Natasha. Nor did the movie delve into Pierre's experimentation with Freemasonry, which Tolstoy describes in great detail. I wonder if knowing the end of the story actually helped me to enjoy the latter part of the book, seeing it all unfold with the details that the screen version simply can't convey.I read the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which is reputed to be among the best. My expectations were probably too high. There are definitely some awkward sentences, especially when Tolstoy is describing a character's inner thoughts and motivations, but it seems to be more what he wrote rather than a translator's misstep.Books have been written on this book, and a quick review will hardly do it justice. And with my experience of the story spread out over a year, I'm not going to capture all my thoughts about it. I will just say: I am glad I read it and learned the art of literary surrender.
    • 5/5
      War and Peace was one of those books I always intended to get round to, someday, when I had more time. Since I'm unlikely to find myself with more free time than I have now in the future, it's probably for the best that my dad dared me to read the whole book -- he was quite specific about this -- including the epilogue. The whole epilogue. In translation, obviously, although he did jokingly suggest I learn Russian first and try it then.

      I have to say, I loved it. The quote on the spine of my edition is: "It's a book that you don't just read, you live." And to some extent, that's true. I started out reading it intending to read one hundred pages a day -- a pretty easy goal for me, and one I thought I could keep up, even if I found the book boring. Then one day I had quite a bit of free time and... I read three hundred pages in a single day. And after that, the book was virtually never out of my hand, unless I needed both hands to eat dinner or play a video game (or, to be realistic, type -- I live and die a ten fingered typist). It went everywhere with me.

      The characters in this book came to life in my head. I loved the Rostovs, aww'd at Pierre, and adored Andrei. I didn't think I'd like the old Prince Bolkonsky, but I ended up loving him too. The characters are written so well. There's so many of them, yet they all stick in my head. Every single one of them had some life, even if they whirled in and out of the story and had only a handful of chapters they even appeared in. Obviously, I'm no judge of the accuracy of the translation, but I liked the way it was written.

      The thing I didn't get on so well with was the philosophising about war. I'm not very familiar with the period in history discussed, so I had a little trouble following that. The second part of the epilogue struck me as both unnecessary -- the main narrative got all those points across -- and extremely boring. In fact, I sort of wondered how Tolstoy had got a time travel machine and sat in on my Religious Studies A Level, because a lot of the stuff about free will came right out of my syllabus. (I concluded he was probably a soft determinist, in case anyone wanted to know.)

      I'm giving it five stars because it sucked me in so much and made me care so much, despite the bits I didn't so much enjoy.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      If you need confirmation from me, take it: War and Peace's reputation as one of the best books ever written is well deserved. As well as the empathic and imaginative genius of its author, and the boldness with which he stated its theme and stuck to it, I was particularly astonished by how easy Tolstoy made this book to read. It’s a page-turner – and there isn’t a chapter in it that’s longer than five. You’re sucked in before you know it and the only reason to pause is if your eyes or arms get tired.I’m serious: War and Peace is /fast/. As long as you don’t include all the years of telling myself I’d get around to it, the time it took me to read was negligible. If you’re putting it off too, stop. War and Peace is one of the greatest reading experiences of my entire life. I would recommend it to /everybody/.
    • 5/5
      Finally, I made my way all the way through this classic last year. Mid way through I was still trying to learn the names of families and characters, by the end I was in love with the whole thing.- the kind of book that fills your heart and your whole vision of the world for a time. It inspired me to read a bio of Tolstoy and will try Anna Karenina. No doubt that this is a great work, on a grand scale, working with themes of war and peace as they played out in Tolstoy's homeland.
    • 5/5
      Beyond the panoramic Battles of Austerlitz and Borodino, the muffled burning of Moscow and Napoleon’s dilapidated retreat, Tolstoy in War and Peace painted the Napoleonic War’s dislodging the cast of characters from their apparel concerns, gossipy sorties, troubled marriages and career ambitions and through their social clumsiness, oppressive ideals, spiritual dullness and determined naivete, extorted their unavoidable responses to these tidal waves.While Napoleon sought to drive history’s course through his lashing will and reining determination by marching onto Moscow, Kutuzov by sensing and attuning to the historical current tactically retreated beyond Moscow and after the Napoleonic army’s natural dissipation trailed its chaotic retreat. Tolstoy, who believed historical crosswinds to be too complicated for any Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan to align, favored Kutuzov’s naturalistic craftsmanship and through Pierre, applied it to personal destiny.After his wife had left him, Pierre’s clumsy and sometimes-comic search for meaning led him to freemasonry, whose esoteric philosophy failed to pave a new path beyond the thorns and thistles. Although he accepted life storms serenely, his what for and so what would continue to harass him until he met Karataev, who showed him the life unified to the land, the sea and the air and harmonious with their rhythms¾a mystical naturalism favored by Tolstoy. However, at the novel’s conclusion, our hero’s life as a conscientious nobleman, a contributing intelligentsia and an accommodating family man, perhaps a sign that age would squander aspirations and the years would sap physical and emotional energy, smelled of defeat to his previous pilgrimage. On the other hand, Andrei’s escaping from marriage, career and the mundane drudgery, and impulsively grasping after the wintry Polaris led to the battlefield where he almost died. Although Natasha’s love provided respite, her unfaithfulness confirmed his suspicion of an earthly Eden. In the end, even though he had forgiven her, he gave up that love for the ultimate rainbow, death, wherein he finally could rest. If he had not died, he probably would have been disillusioned by his love for Natasha. It is sad that Andrei had given up youth, love and the possibilities of life, but it is equally sad that Pierre had decayed into a Nikolai Rostov after his courageous journey through what for and so what. Must we like the samurai commit seppuku to immortalize youth, vitality, creativity and aspiration so as not to decay into a grumpy and lecherous old man or a jealous and nagging old woman? Tolstoy’s determinism would dictate that Pierre would ultimately return to the natural cycle of birth, growth, education, career, marriage, procreation, contribution, decay and death. But whether we agree with Tolstoy or not, War and Peace would continue to tower above the greatest novels.
    • 4/5
      I finished the book in 86 days and it did feel like an endurance test at times. Now to write something about this masterpiece that will do it justice. The story is of two families, the Bolkonshys and Rostovs and uses their lives to portray Russia before and during the conflict with Napoléon. Tolstoy gives you a panoramic view as great as Russia; a view of the city, the country, the movement of armies. There is a lot of detail in these pages. His character develop is built on little physical details. Such as Pierre’s shortsightedness, Mary’s eyes, Lise’s lip. In the lives of these people, Tolstoy gives you insight through their eyes as unique individuals. Interspersed with the personal lives of the characters is the historical novel and Tolstoy’s own philosophy of history and power. I never was very good at paying attention to history when younger though it is a lot more interesting now, I will have to say, I learned a lot about Napoleon and the war of 1812 that I didn’t get in school. I’ve read all of the Tolstoy novels on the 1001 list now and while War and Peace is not my favorite, I really like Tolstoy’s works and am glad to have read them.
    • 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
      So some brief, tired thoughts on War and Peace. I don't think its all that great an accomplishment to have read it or anything - its a good book, it goes pretty quickly all things considered, and after all its just like any other book; its just made up of *words* after all. And its an enjoyable read if you like 19th century novels. And if you like 19th century novels, well this one has a lot of words, so you might like this one for a long time.Basically, I liked it because it did pull together a couple different things. It was at heart a novel about Russian aristocracy and their involvement (or not) with the War of 1812 but it was also a bit of a skewering treatise on history and the philosophy of history. Tolstoy makes many jabs at contemporary historians and their conclusions regarding Napoleon and why things turned out the way they did - but more importantly about whether, over the course of history, individuals (e.g. Napoleon or Tsar Alexander) or masses of individuals (not just armies but the people making up armies) matter. Actually, that's really what the heart of the second epilogue is really all about (the first epilogue had to tie up all the loose ends and lives of all the main characters). So yes, its about the nature of Power and History and the Individual and Free Will and all that, but it tackles all that with the use of a novel to make the points interspersed with some more abstract assertions/ramblings as opposed to an all-out uber-essay. Whether or not one agrees with Tolstoy or likes the story or the characters I feel that for the attempt that is being made, the novel is 'Worth Reading', simply for the scope of what it attempts to do. And even with the room to run, I don't think it manages to achieve it. Which makes me think that this is a limitation of the format/venue. There's only so much persuasion that assertions and made up characters (even ones with clear predilections and personalities and thus behaviors that are 'in character') can achieve.On the whole, I liked, or at least sympathized or related with several of the characters and felt they were well-rounded and not flat at all (though some minor ones were still kinda two-dimensional and others though named barely get mentioned - but hey, there's a lot of characters). Some of them I felt were timeless - in that human nature was reflected well and I could see someone today behaving similarly, albeit with different social circumstances. The wild drunken party at the beginning was something out of Animal House or Superbad or any other similar movie. Pierre's socialite wife Ellen winds up with a different ending to a scene in Dirty Dancing. Natasha is a Nice Young Girl who happens to have a crush and winds up making out with just about every male character except for her brother (but including her cousin) until she winds up falling in love with a sugar daddy. Most characters wrestle at some point with the Existence of God, the Meaning of Life, and/or What It Means To Suffer so there goes the connection with the Human Condition. Pierre is that person in so many people's lives who is Always Looking For Something and wanders through so many phases.. from atheism to wine and women to Freemasonry to altruism to politics to playing at the military to Suffering to something akin to zen/Buddhism until he finds Love (oh how cliche by now!). Boris is the ambitious one and Nickolai has the gambling problem and two loves (well, actually, there are a lot of characters with two loves). Prince Andrei is the capable practical pragmatic handsome one who gets philosophically burned and goes all Ayn Rand but then in one last return to duty/country dies young. So, my point is simply that Tolstoy had a good handle on how to flesh out characters to make them 'real people' and to put them in situations that forces them to change in ways that a reader can relate to.
    • 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.
    • 1/5
      War And Peace is not a novel.

      I read somewhere that Russian books don’t translate well into English and their style of writing is usually dull and boring to an average English reader. This book is a classic example of this point of view.

      This book was dull. It was boring and didn’t know what it wanted to be. It seemed that when Leo Tolstoy sat down to write this he had so many ideas running around his mind and he just had to get them all out and put down on paper. The result was War And Peace.

      At times this is an episode of Days Of Our Lives, an essay on the quality of historians, a biography of military leaders or a non-fiction book about war. It just didn’t know what it wanted to be. It ended up being so dull and boring and absolutely ridiculous.

      I would not recommend this to anyone. It is just so pointless.
    • 2/5
      I actually remember finding Tolstoy's Anna Karenina a good read, although it's been so long I'd have to reread it to relate what I found absorbing. War and Peace is a very different matter. It's a mammoth novel, one of the longest in the Western canon, roughly 560,000 words; it comes to over a thousand pages in the editions I've seen. I was determined to stick it out to the end because this is considered one of the greatest and most influential novels in literature, so I wanted to experience it first hand, and I didn't want to ever have to go back for another try again. I took it in slow steps, reading only one "book" of the 15 each day. Encompassing dozens of characters written in a God's eye omniscient view, it takes hundreds of pages before you get a sense who are the important characters. Among the LibraryThing reviews is an interesting comment by CS Lewis about War and Peace. It's meant to be complimentary, but expresses well exactly what I hated in it as a novel. Lewis talks about how Tolstoy negates what is "dangerous" in the novel form by never invoking the "narrative lust" to find out what happens next and instilling an indifference to the fate of the characters "which is not a blank indifference at all, but almost like submission to the will of God." In other words, you rarely care about what happens or about any of the characters.The novel centers on five interconnected aristocratic families, and if the novel has a chief character, it's Count Pierre Bezukhov. And he's a buffoon. When we first meet him, he's described as a "a stout, heavily built young man" with "natural" manners (meaning none) and he's such a social disaster his hostess follows him around to try to repair the damage of his ill-judged outbursts. He lisps, he stammers. He's easily led yet subject to grandiose delusions, he's absentminded and he's lucky he comes into an inheritance, because he had no idea what to do for a career, and lacks the basic competence to succeed. Soon after the party introducing him, he gets involved in a drunken incident where a police officer was tied to a bear and thrown into a river. Following him and his emo musings around for hundreds of pages wasn't a joy. It occurred to me that if we were in an Jane Austen novel, Pierre would be the comic relief--a Mr Collins or Mr Rushworth--not a character taken seriously. But it wasn't as if any of the characters initially popped out at me as distinctive or sympathetic or complex. Nicholas Rostov struck me as a fool, Prince Andrew Bolkonsky arrogant and callous, Boris Drubetskoy a mercenary social climber and all the Kuragins are despicable. Whenever I started to feel sympathy for some of the characters, such as Prince Andrew or his sanctimonious sister Princess Mary or the flighty Natasha Rostov, before long they'd do something to lose my liking.Pierre and his loves take up a lot the peace part, which contain long drawn-out set pieces such as masonic initiations, aristocratic hunting parties and opera performances. The book does give you a sense of everyday life among the 19th century Russian gentry. But the book is also famously about the Napoleonic Wars, but if anything, I found that part even more wanting. Please understand, I've read and finished and enjoyed lots of weighty 19th century classics, and a lot of them have been very, very long. And I love history, too, having read plenty of books on the subject around as long as War and Peace. This also isn't a girl thing. I was fascinated by Shaara's novel Killer Angels centering on the Battle of Gettysburg. But Tolstoy's battles are on the whole as sleep-inducing as his ballrooms. Despite some gory imagery here and there, and some vivid passages, his battle scenes are rarely exciting except when one of the major characters are in danger of their lives or wounded--a few pages out of many dozens. Tolstoy expressed well the contingent, chaotic aspect of battle, but neither leadership nor the bond between brother soldiers is something his view of war encompasses. Any time there are flashes of brilliance in his battle scenes, you can be sure the momentum will be broken by endless, repetitive digressions on Tolstoy's one-note theory of history (complete with algebraic equations at one point).Despite its reputation as the ultimate historical novel, I didn't feel as if I gained any insight into the history of the Napoleonic Wars and the personages involved. But then Tolstoy doesn't believe that leaders play an important role: "A king is history's slave. History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes." Tolstoy scoffs at the very idea of military science or "military genius" determining outcome. His Napoleon comes across as a caricature. Tellingly, Tolstoy scoffs even at the idea that one can diagnose a disease--"no disease suffered by a live person can be known." Tolstoy at one point indulges in a long paragraph of national stereotypes--I had to shake my head at his characterizations of Russians, because it sounded so much like a description of himself as betrayed in his novel: "A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known." If you can't believe in knowledge, then you can't have knowledge to impart. Ultimately, for me War and Peace was a monstrosity that steamrolls you with its very length. And boy, that epilogue? Tolstoy serves up two, with the second containing no story but only a rant on history and the Theory-Of-It-All (tm.) he'd been constantly expounding upon for hundreds of pages. I guess by the time most people get to the end of over a thousand pages, they want to think it worth it. I can't say I do. Well, except now I have bragging rights. I actually read from cover to cover--actually finished War and Peace! After this, even James Joyce's Ulysses and Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude can hold no terror.
    • 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
      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
      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.
    • 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
      It's all about the casual brutality of war and the casual evil of serfdom, told through the intertwined lives of characters you can really care about. Beautiful details of the texture of life lift it out of the depressing category. The book seems very modern to me in its radical realism about the futility of avoiding war, and the futility of well intentioned efforts at reforming labor relationships. Also very modern in pondering the meaning of courtship and marriage...Rereading it I noticed a lot of subtext that I had missed when I read it in college because Tolstoy uses descriptions rather than direct labels: so incest, homoeroticism in the military, 19th century efforts at birth control, a fatal abortion, the joys of cross-dressing, dieting, sexual exploitation, it's all in there, just not in the Cliff-Notes type plot summaries. The happy ending also has a subtext. Pierre and Natasha enjoy marital bliss, but his ideas are dangerous and the untold story of the probable following chapter is implied for those who know a little Russian history: someone with Pierre's ideas and of his class would likely join the Decembrist revolt and get sent to Siberia, and someone with Natasha's character would probably join him in exile. As other reviewers have pointed out, it's a long book, but the most important points are left unsaid and left to the reader to extrapolate. I pretty much came away from the book a convinced pacifist and a convinced believer in reforming exploitive relationships, even though the causes seem hopeless, you gotta care regardless.