War and Peace (Wordsworth Classics)Paperback,1024 pages

War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters.

Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery. This translation is one which received Tolstoy's approval.

About Leo Tolstoy
Leo N. Tolstoi, born on 9.9.1828 in Jasnaja Poljana near Tula, died on 20.11.1910 in Astapowo, today in the Lipetsk oblast, came from a Russian noble family. When he was an orphan at the age of nine, his father's sister took over guardianship. In 1844 he began studying oriental languages ​​at the University of Kazan. After moving to the law faculty, he stopped studying in 1847 to try to improve the situation of the 350 inherited serfs in the family estate in Jasnaja Poljana with land reforms. From 1851 onwards he experienced fighting in the Czarist army in the Caucasus and, after the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, the position war in the besieged Sevastopol fortress. The reports from this war (Sevastopol tales in 1855) made him known early on as a writer. Out of pedagogical interest, he traveled to western European countries in 1857 and 1860/61, where he met artists and educators. After his return, he strengthened the reform pedagogical efforts and set up village schools based on Rousseau's example. Since 1855 he lived alternately on the Jasnaja Poljana estate, in Moscow, and in Saint Petersburg. In 1862 he married the 18-year-old German-born Sofja Andrejewna Behrs, with whom he had a total of 13 children. In the following years of his marriage, he wrote the monumental novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which established Tolstoy's world-wide literary fame. Tolstoy's lifelong search for a suitable form of life culminated in 1910 when he left his wife, who was unwilling to separate from their common possessions. He died of pneumonia a short time later.