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Title: War And Peace (Greenwich House Classics Library) by Leo Tolstoy, Rosemary Edmonds ISBN: 0-517-39993-8 Publisher: Random House Value Publishing Pub. Date: 12 December, 1988 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.99

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (231 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: A Life Changing Experience!!!
Comment: I first read War and Peace with Anna Karenina during a course in the fall of 2002. I had always aspired to read Karenina but not necessarily War and Peace. I was very much surprised. War and Peace is a cultural gem, not necessariy a novel but an exprerience.

What I liked about War and Peace was Tolstoy's incredible means of developing his characters. In essence, we see his characters as adolescents and twenty-somethings develop into middle-aged people who have gone through child-rearing and career development. The key figures to watch are Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei as they seek out the quest for fulfillment. We see them as young people trying to figure out questions of religion and love interests. We see them lose people they love, get divorced and do the wrong things sometimes. We read their letters, diaries, find out their secrets, and watch them fight out duels. We experience the characters becoming parents, nursing their babies, and fighting petty arguments.

Tolstoy wrote this work during a happy time in his life, and this is especially evident through his portrayal of Pierre and Natasha. The other characters are memorable -- through Tolstoy's vivid use of visual imagery -- Helene's white shoulders, Princess Mary's heavy walk, etc. etc. The cities are characterized -- Moscow is good Russia, St. Petersburg has been corrupted by too many European influences. The Rostovs are admirable Russians whereas the Kuragins tend towards corruption.

The historial tracts and the portrayals of the historical characters are interesting -- I can't say enough things about this work. It was life-changing, and it inspired me more than any other book that I have ever read.

Try to get this Maude translation -- it is the best one and it has wonderful explanations and background information!

Rating: 5
Summary: Not a War of Attrition!
Comment: War and Peace had stared at me from my bookshelf for over a year before I had the courage to begin. A present from a friend, War and Peace seemed more like a challenge than a gift: a challenge that could develop into a war of attrition between my completism and my boredom.

Nevertheless, one chilly December day, I took the plunge into nineteenth century Russian life, into the lives of a circle of aristocrats, and into the Napoleonic wars. I was immediately struck by Tolstoy's flowing prose, his humour both gentle and ascerbic, and his skill in creating and developing characters of real depth. War and Peace was a suprisingly easy read. Each short chapter containing interesting incident. It is also a book of great variety. It vividly depicts the sufferings of war, the opulence of the Russian aristocracy, and the joys and woes of family life. It touches phychological, social, political, historical, and religious themes all intertwined in a charming story.

However, its outstanding feature is its characterisation. One cannot help but feel intimately connected to the Rostov family, the well-meaning but flawed Pierre, the self-sacrificing Princess Mary, and the tragically disillusioned Prince Andrew. As I became increasingly involved in the book I looked forward with real anticipation to reading my nightly chapter. I did not want the story to end.

The only disappointing feature was Tolstoy's insistence on including chapters devoted to elaborating his historical philosophy. To my mind, his philosophy simply marred the gently unfolding story, was repetitive and boring, and seemed irrelevant. Fortunately the strength of the rest of the novel outweighs this Achilles Heel.

Rating: 5
Summary: Yes, the Greatest Novel Ever Written
Comment: I have read a lot of books and so I've scrabbled together a fairly intelligent idea of what a great book is; the definition has always been complicated and hard to explain, but I really needn't have bothered. The concept can be summed up in only three words: "War and Peace".
This is, simply, what all novels want to be when they grow up. The novel format is as varied as the writers who attempt it---to call "War and Peace" and "Ulysses" examples of the same art form seems ridiculous, but it's true---but ultimately a novel is a story about humans that explains what humanity is, or might be, or could have been; through these characters whose adventures you're following, you might learn something about what it means to be a human being. Every art form is about this experience, but only the novel can really hunker down and explore humanity in all its billions of shapes. You can learn not only facts and feelings but you can learn TIME by spending it in these pages. You can learn GROWTH. You can learn LIFE.
The main characters in "War and Peace" are Pierre Bezuhov, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, and Natasha Rostov, three Russians caught in the middle of the war between their country and France in the years 1805 to 1813. Through them we meet dozens if not hundreds more characters, and through those dozens or hundreds we simply meet humanity itself. There's no other way to express it. The way Tolstoy tells us about his characters shows us ourselves; the identification is that strong. When a character falls, in battle or from old age, we feel that someone we know personally is gone, and we mourn them as though we couldn't simply flip back a few pages and resurrect them. The mass of life in this book is overwhelming: the story, like the title, is so big it seems impossible that you could find a moment of intimacy, but in fact there are hours here, even days. There is so much contained in the book, battles and weddings, parties and firestorms, evacuations and reunions, military history and moral philosophy, yet Tolstoy never loses track of his characters and how they are evolving while they watch the world tear itself apart and try, almost pitifully, to put itself back together again. It's an absolutely superhuman performance, one no writer could have dared hope for. Only one writer in history ever did it, and no writer ever will again.
"War and Peace" gets its reputation not from dusty old college professors, but from the sheer power of its story and the awesome scope of its understanding, and its ability to impart that understanding to the reader in the guise of a riveting tale of adventure and romance. The novel survives not because it's A CLASSIC, but because it is impossible to pick it up and not be sucked into its hurricane of humanity.