War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy · translated by Aylmer Maude, Louise Maude

Reading time: about 41 h
Length: 563,720 words · 1326 pages
Structure: 365 chapters
Language: English (translated from Russian)
Era: Victorian

Five families — Rostovs, Bolkonskys, Bezukhovs, Kuragins, Drubetskoys — across the years of the Napoleonic wars, from the salons of St Petersburg in 1805 to Borodino, the burning of Moscow and the French retreat of 1812, and on into the peace. Leo Tolstoy published the book in 1869; it is the longest of the great novels and, for many readers, the greatest.

This edition uses the English translation by Aylmer and Louise Maude (1922–23), translators whom Tolstoy knew and approved. Because of its length it is issued in three matching volumes.

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

Part of Russian Classics.

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About the author

Leo Tolstoy

1828–1910 · Victorian

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, his family’s estate south of Moscow, served in the Caucasus and at Sevastopol, and between 1863 and 1877 wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. A spiritual crisis after Anna Karenina turned him to religious and moral writing and to the doctrines of non-violence and simplicity that made him, by the end of his life, a world figure; the late fiction includes The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection. He died at the railway station of Astapovo after leaving home at eighty-two.

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