War and Peace

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War and Peace is the most famous and at the same time the most daunting of Russian novels, as vast as Russia itself and as long to cross from one end to the other. Yet if one makes the journey, the sights seen and the people met on the way mark one’s life forever. The book is set in the period of the Napoleonic wars (1805–1812) and tells of the interweaving of historical events with the private lives of two very different families of the Russian nobility—the severe Bolkonskys and the easygoing Rostovs—and of a singular man, reminiscent of the author himself—Count Pierre Bezukhov. It embodies the national myth of “Russia’s glorious period,” as Tolstoy himself called it, in the confrontation of the emperor Napoleon and Field Marshal Kutuzov, and at the same time it challenges that myth and all such myths through the vivid portrayal of the fates of countless ordinary people of the period, men and women, young and old, French as well as Russian, and through the author’s own passionate questioning of the truth of history.

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