War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

Originally published in 1867, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy broadly focuses on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men. Leo Tolstoy, a Russian author, is considered a master of realistic fiction and one of the world’s greatest novelists. Oscillating between skepticism and dogmatism, he explored the most diverse approaches to human experience. His works have been praised as pieces of life, not pieces of art. This was Tolstoy's finest literary achievement, which offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth, marriage, age, and death. Though it is often called a novel today, it broke so many conventions of the form that it was not considered a novel in its time. Indeed, Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense.

War and Peace

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