War and Peace [Paperback]

Introduction by A. N. Wilson • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoy’s genius is seen clearly in the multitude of characters in this massive chronicle—all of them fully realized and equally memorable. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individual’s place in the historical process, one that makes it clear why Thomas Mann praised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers and placed War and Peace in the same category as the Iliad: “To read him . . . is to find one’ s way home . . . to everything within us that is fundamental and sane.”“There remains the greatest of all novelists—for what else can we call the author of War and Peace?” —Virginia WoolfA. N. Wilson is an award-winning novelist, biographer, and journalist, and the author of God’s Funeral and the biographies C. S. Lewis, Paul, and Jesus. He lives in London.

1. 1. In an article, “Some Words About War and Peace,” Tolstoy writes: “What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.” He goes on to discuss how many precedents for this “disregard of conventional form” there are in the history of Russian literature. Howl“·