War and Peace

Author(s): Leo Tolstoy

Classic Fiction

This beautiful Penguin Classics clothbound edition of Tolstoy's great novel is translated with an introduction and notes by Anthony Briggs, and with an afterword by Orlando Figes.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's superb translation combines stirring, accessible prose with fidelity to Tolstoy's original, while Orlando Figes's 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.'A masterpiece ... This new translation is excellent' - Anthony Beevor


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This indispensable new translation is as close to the original as it is possible to get while at the same time being a clear and fluid translation

"If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it" The Times "This is, at last, a translation of War and Peace without the dreadful misunderstandings and "improvements" that plague all other translations of the novel into English. Pevear and Volokhonsky's supple and compelling translation is the closest that an English reader without Russian can get to Tolstoy's masterwork. This is a great achievement. It is hard to imagine how this translation could be superseded." -- Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, "It is simply the greatest novel ever written. All human life is in it. If I were told there was time to read only a single book, this would be it" -- Andrew Marr "Reveals Tolstoy in his majestic scope and precision to this reader for the first time, unencumbered by the pidgin archaisms of previous translations, ringing with mastery and truth" Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year "It may sound pretentious, or strange, but I can remember the weeks (three weeks, to be precise) I spent reading War and Peace as a peak experience of sustained excitement and deep delight. Part of the delight was the largeness and strangeness of this world - the sense of the vastness and extremes of Russia, the unboundedness of everything" Finacial Times

Leo Tolstoy was born in central Russia on 9 September 1828.In 1852 he published his first work, the autobiographical Childhood. He served in the army during the Crimean War and his Sevastopol Sketches (1855-6) are based on his experiences. His two most popular masterpieces are War and Peace (1864-69) and Anna Karenina (1875-8). He died in 20 November 1910. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have been nominated for the PEN-Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize three times and have won it twice. They live in Paris

General Fields

  • : 9780099512240
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Penguin Books Ltd
  • : 1.004
  • : April 2009
  • : 213mm X 136mm X 48mm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Leo Tolstoy
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 891.733
  • : 1296