From sophisticated Moscow soirees to breathless troika rides through the snow, from the bloody front line at Austerlitz to a wife's death in childbirth, the author conjures a broad panorama of rich, messy, beautiful and debased human life.
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
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 It is hard to imagine how this translation could be superseded."
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
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
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
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 1910.
Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated works by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov and Pasternak. They were twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for their translations of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) and their translation of Dostoevsky’s Demons was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France.