War And Peace (Penguin Red Classics) - Softcover

Tolstoy, Leo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141025115 ISBN 13: 9780141025117

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2006

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"There remains the greatest of all novelists--for what else can we call the author of "War and Peace"?" --Virginia Woolf

From the Publisher:

Packaged like the best most desirable literary fiction - the perfect Christmas gift. It Includes a translator's introduction, a chronology of Tolstoy's life and works, a list of characters, further reading, and four maps.
'This is the best translation so far of Tolstoy's masterpiece into English. It achieves the difficult feat of combining faithfulness to the original with smooth, idiomatic English. The result is a triumph of cultural mediation' – Robert Maguire, Professor of Russian, Columbia University, New York
'In Tolstoy’s work part of the translator’s difficulty lies in conveying not only the simplicity but the subtlety of the book’s scale and effect... Professor Briggs has rendered them both with a particular exactness and a vigorous precision not to be found, I think, in any previous translation' - John Bayley

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0141025115
• ISBN 13: 9780141025117
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 1408