War And Peace: Leo Tolstoy (Penguin Classics)

by Leo Tolstoy (Author), Anthony Briggs (Author), Leo Tolstoy (Author), Anthony Briggs (Author), Leo Tolstoy (Author)

• New

  Illustrated
  2007

  $15.25

  Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is a sprawling epic covering the impact of Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia on five different families. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with an introduction and notes by Anthony Briggs, with an afterword by Orlando Figes, author of A People's Tragedy: Russian Revolution 1891-1924 . At a glittering society party in St Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon's army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace , Tolstoy entwines grand themes - conflict and love, birth and death, free will and faith - with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur. Anthony Briggs' superb translation combines stirring, accessible prose with fidelity to Tolstoy's original, while Orlando Figes' afterword discusses the novel's vast scope and depiction of Russian identity. This edition also contains appendices, notes, a list of prominent characters and maps. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, in central Russia. After marrying Sofya Behrs in 1862, Tolstoy settled down, managing his estates and writing two of his best-known novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878). In 1884 Tolstoy experienced a spiritual crisis, becoming an extreme moralist, rejecting the state, the church and private property. His last novel, Resurrection (1900), was written to raise money for the Doukhobor sect of Christian spiritualists. If you enjoyed War and Peace , you might also like Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov . A masterpiece...This new translation is excellent . (Anthony Beevor). A book that you don't just read, you live . (Simon Schama).

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $5.15

  Considered by many to the greatest novel ever written, Tolstoy's masterpiece is a story of family life set against the backdrop of war. The novel begins in 1805, in the crowded and gossip-filled rooms of a St Petersburg party, and follows the fortunes of the aristocratic Bolkonsky and Rostov families as Napoleon's armies sweep through Europe, culminating in the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and Napoleon's defeat. Tolstoy's vast novel takes in both the epic sweep of national events and the private experience of individuals, from the keen young soldier to Napoleon himself, and at the heart of it all, the complicated triangle of affection that binds his central characters.

• New

  Paperback
  2001

  $8.44

  War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery. This translation is one which received Tolstoy's approval.

• New

  Hardcover
  1992

  $52.48

  This is a three-volume boxed set of Tolstoy's historical chronicle of Russia's struggle with Napoleon. The novel is an affirmation of life itself, focusing on the lives of individuals and the physical reality of human experience and its bewildering complexity.