War And Peace

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It has become commonplace, almost a rite of passage, for novelists to sit in pure wonder, caught in a maelstrom between awe and praise, after they finish reading Leo Tolstoy’s magisterial novel, War and Peace. Many have called it the greatest novel ever written, and their ranks include such luminaries as E. M. Forster, John Galsworthy, and Hugh Walpole. Virginia Woolf gushed over it like a schoolgirl, saying, “If you think of the novels which seem to you great novels—War and Peace, Vanity Fair, Tristram Shandy, Madame Bovary, Pride and Prejudice, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Villette—if you think of these books, you do at once think about some character who has seemed so real (I do not by that mean so lifelike) that it has the power to make you think not merely of it, but all sorts of things through its eyes—of religion, of love, of war, of peace, of family life, of balls in country towns, of sunsets, moonrises, the immortality of the soul. There is hardly any subject of human experience that is left out of War and Peace.”

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