About this item
From the award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov comes this magnificent new translation of Tolstoys mastwerwork.War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleons invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men. As Napoleons army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgroundspeasants and nobility, civilians and soldiersas they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture.
About the Author
(Russian: ; most appropriately used ; 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 and , 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 , were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
