War and peace full text

Michael R. All happy readers need excuses to read or reread the classic, and all unhappy readers grow confused over which translations to select. Compared with manifestations of Dostoevsky in English, the writings of Tolstoy have suffered less at the hands of his early translators. Although his works were slow to gain recognition in England, they soon became very popular in America. Of course, not all readers were equally impressed, and some were outraged. Indeed, there have been at least ten previous English versions, the first translated from the French and published in by one Clara Bell, an enormously prolific professional translator; the second, in , by Nathan Haskell Dole, an extraordinary character, writer, and journalist, whose apparent lack of skill in the enterprise was such that Tolstoy himself felt compelled to beg him to stop translating his works. Of all these many previous versions, the two that have best stood the test of time and the stricter test of scholarly examination are those produced by the Maudes and Ann Dunnigan.

It is regarded as a central work of world literature and one of Tolstoy's finest literary achievements. The novel chronicles the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families. Portions of an earlier version, titled The Year , [4] were serialized in The Russian Messenger from to , then published in its entirety in Tolstoy said War and Peace is "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle. Instead, he regarded Anna Karenina as his first true novel. Tolstoy began writing War and Peace in , the year that he finally married and settled down at his country estate.