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Summary
Summary
"A sweeping, romantic saga of two noble families and their intertwined destiny,and a panoramic portrait of Russian society at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy's unforgettable masterpiece has inspired love and devotion in its readers for generations." "Now read the original version of Russia's most famous novel, which never made it to publication in Tolstoy's lifetime. Undiscovered for more than a century, this edition - with its subtly different characters, dialogue, and ending - is essential reading for devotees of Tolstoy and new readers alike: it is world-class fiction in its most vivid and vital form."--BOOK JACKET.
Author Notes
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828 in Russia. He is usually referred to as Leo Tolstoy. He was a Russian author who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. Leo Tolstoy is best known for his novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). Tolstoy's fiction includes dozens of short stories and several novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murad. He also wrote plays and numerous philosophical essays.
Tolstoy had a profound moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870's which he outlined in his work, A Confession. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. His ideas of nonviolent resistance which he shared in his works The Kingdom of God is Within You, had a profund impact on figures such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
On September 23, 1862 Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna Behrs. She was the daughter of a court physician. They had 13 children, eight of whom survived childhood. Their early married life allowed Tolstoy much freedom to compose War and Peace and Anna Karenina with his wife acting as his secretary and proofreader. The Tolstoy family left Russia in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union. Leo Tolstoy's relatives and descendants moved to Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the United States.
Tolstoy died of pneumonia at Astapovo train station, after a day's rail journey south on November 20, 1910 at the age of 82.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
British scholar Briggs unveils his lucid new translation of Tolstoy?s masterpiece?the first in almost 40 years?to a slightly anxious audience, from first-timers who, balking at the amount of time required by this massive yet startlingly intricate work, want to ensure they are reading the best translation available, to purists who worry that clunky modern prose will replace the cadences of earlier translations. But these concerns melt away after the first 100 pages of this volume. Briggs?s descriptions are crisper and the dialogue is sharper, with fewer ?shall?s,? ?shan?t?s? and ?I say!?s? than the Garnett, Maude, or Edmonds translations, leaving readers free to enjoy the rich and complex plot, vivid characters and profound insights into war and the nature of power. There are some awkward spots: Briggs claims his earthy rendering of soldierly banter is more realistic than earlier, genteel translators?, but it reads distractingly stagy: ?Give ?im a right thumpin?, we did.? It?s also a shame to have lost Tolstoy?s use of French, not only in the mouths of his characters, but also in the essays, as when he plays with Napoleon?s famous ?sublime to the ridiculous? quote. Briggs will face competition next year when Pevear and Volokhonsky release their new translation, but for now, this is the most readable translation on the market. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Guardian Review
What did Joyce mean by not being theatrical? "Then suddenly the most fearful scream - it couldn't be hers, she couldn't have screamed like that - came from inside the room. Prince Andrey ran to the door. The screaming stopped and he heard a different sound, the wail of a baby. 'Why have they taken a baby in there?' Prince Andrey wondered for a split-second." That is the untheatrical, impure, confused, comic way of describing a man as he waits for his wife to give birth. Tolstoy's War and Peace , whose unparaphrasable plot covers Russia during the Napoleonic wars, is a 1,400-page exercise in - a treadmill of - irony; and it is gleefully experimental. With War and Peace , Tolstoy introduced two novelistic innovations, both based on his new principle of length, which was part of his constant principle of irony. The first is luxurious detail. There is suddenly space to record deft things such as: "A doctor in a bloodstained apron came out of the tent, holding a cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his bloodstained hands to keep the blood off it." There are bad jokes, an emperor in trendy narrow shoes, mispronounced place names, dresses that have to be mended just before someone goes out. The second innovation is the way he breaks into the narrative, introducing historical essays. Flaubert and Henry James disliked them, considering them irrelevant and un-novelistic. But they can be exhilarating too: like the details, these essays are ironic. They are exercises in deflation. Such fun with form, however, has not always been obvious from his Eng lish translations. In 1889, for example, a man called Huntington Smith (working from a French version) abridged the novel into two sections - one for stories, one for essays - retitled it "The Physiology of War", and explained that Tolstoy was significant because he "had a message to deliver, a message worth hearing, and the world has shown itself ready to hear". This depressing sentence can stand as an allegory of the things that can go wrong in translation. But things have more often gone right. There are excellent translations by Constance Garnett, Rosemary Edmonds and, my favourite, by Louise and Aylmer Maude, whose version was approved by Tolstoy. And now there is a new translation, by Anthony Briggs, which is accurate and clear; and, in general, faithful. But there are problems with fidelity. Everyone, after all, has different definitions. Tolstoy, says Briggs, in his note on the translation, is "an easy read for a Russian (and comparatively easy to translate). Stylistic angularities, shocks and surprises are infrequent, and the dialogue in particular is individualised but always natural. It seems most important to ensure in any translation the same kind of smooth reading, and varied but realistic-sounding dialogue." I have three reasons for feeling that Tolstoy has been betrayed here. First, this idea that he is an easy read in Russian. Vladimir Nabokov would remind his students that "simplicity is bunkum. No major writer is simple", and go on to show how Tolstoy's style is made up of "creative repetitions" - "he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words". For instance, Russian allows a gap between an adjective and its noun, and Tolstoy loved to elongate that fact. So in the final chapter, when Natasha is in the middle of a happy ending, Tolstoy describes her (literally) like this: "And a joyful, and at the same time pathetic, asking forgiveness for her joy, expression, settled on Natasha's face." This is not smooth Russian, but deliberate complication. In Briggs's translation, it reads: "And Natasha's face had shone with happiness, though it also had a pathetic look as if to apologise for any happiness." It is not that English offers him many ways of imitating Tolstoy's weird syntax, but that is no reason then to make out that nothing has been lost. It is no reason not to try. "Have you noticed Tolstoy's language?" asked Chekhov. "Enormous periods, sentences piled one on top of another. Don't think that it happens by chance or that it's a shortcoming. It's art, and it only comes after hard work." Secondly, this idea that a translation should be happily smooth. I agree with Milan Kundera: "Partisans of 'flowing' translation often object to my translators: 'That's not the way to say it in German (in English, in Spanish, etc.)!' I reply: 'It's not the way to say it in Czech either!'" And thirdly, there is the dialogue. The three great previous translators of War and Peace were all educated women. Briggs is impatient with them, on the grounds that their language could not be equal to the brute earthi ness of the soldiers' dialogue on battlefields. But it is not obvious that Briggs is so earthy either. "'You all right, Petrov?' inquired one. 'We gave it to 'em hot, men. That'll keep 'em quiet,' another said. 'Couldn't see nothing. They were hitting their own men! Couldn't see nothing for the dark, mates. Anything to drink?'" How much better is this than dialogue which Briggs dislikes: "I say, fellow-countrymen, will they set us down here or take us on to Moscow?" No, this novel is spikier than it now looks. While Moscow collapses, Pierre Besukhov is trying to predict the future, using a weird key which combines numbers with the French alphabet. Napoleon adds up to 666. Besukhov then tries to find Napoleon's numerical equal. Having failed with the Emperor Alexander, and the Russian nation, Pierre thinks, naturally, of himself: he doesn't work either. Finally, after adding in his nationality in French - russe - and then misspelling it, Pierre gets it right: "Dropping the e again (quite unjustifiably) Pierre got the answer he was after in the phrase l'russe Besuhof - exactly 666!" L'russe. If you needed an emblem of the novel, an un-French word - thrussian - made up by a French-speaking member of the Russian aristocracy would be it. And yet, in this translation, the loopiness of Pierre's bad French is mildly lost, because Tolstoy's sporadic French ambience has been cut out. It provides, therefore, a stray, enforced moment of polyphony. It is a small stylistic moment, but everything in this novel is small. Because War and Peace is a great novel not because Tolstoy's characters worry about God and death and nations, but because they make up weird words. Its subject is not grandiose: it is chance. And the only way to show this is minutely. Tolstoy is the greatest miniaturist in the history of the novel. He is economical. This outlandish, wonderful novel - which survives all of its impossible, necessary translations, including this thorough but imperfect one - is a masterpiece of reduction, and has style. Adam Thirlwell's novel Politics is published by Vintage. To order War and Peace for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-tolstoy.1 "As for [Leo Tolstoy]," James Joyce wrote to his brother, when Joyce was 23, "I disagree with you altogether. Tolstoy is a magnificent writer. He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!" I have three reasons for feeling that Tolstoy has been betrayed here. First, this idea that he is an easy read in Russian. Vladimir Nabokov would remind his students that "simplicity is bunkum. No major writer is simple", and go on to show how Tolstoy's style is made up of "creative repetitions" - "he gropes, he stalls, he toys, he Tolstoys with words". For instance, Russian allows a gap between an adjective and its noun, and Tolstoy loved to elongate that fact. So in the final chapter, when Natasha is in the middle of a happy ending, Tolstoy describes her (literally) like this: "And a joyful, and at the same time pathetic, asking forgiveness for her joy, expression, settled on Natasha's face." This is not smooth Russian, but deliberate complication. In [Anthony Briggs]'s translation, it reads: "And Natasha's face had shone with happiness, though it also had a pathetic look as if to apologise for any happiness." It is not that English offers him many ways of imitating Tolstoy's weird syntax, but that is no reason then to make out that nothing has been lost. It is no reason not to try. "Have you noticed Tolstoy's language?" asked Chekhov. "Enormous periods, sentences piled one on top of another. Don't think that it happens by chance or that it's a shortcoming. It's art, and it only comes after hard work." - Adam Thirlwell.
Library Journal Review
Not a new work by Tolstoy, alas, but a new rendering by two award-winning translators. Big in so many ways. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
From Joseph Frank's Introduction to War and Peace Tolstoy's masterly portrayal of military life, already evident in his earlier work, reaches new heights in War and Peace on a much larger scale. No other novel can compete with Tolstoy's in the superb panoply he offers of regimental displays and parades, and of battle scenes seen both from a distance and in close combat. Also, as Marie Eugène Melchior, vicomte de Vogüé, noted in Le Roman russe (1886), his pioneering book on the Russian novel, which brought writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to the attention of the European public, no one could compete with Tolstoy in his portrayal of the life of the court and the upper reaches of society. The Vicomte himself, who had frequented the Russian court, remarks that when writers attempt to portray such closed social circles of the highest society they rarely succeed in winning the confidence of their readers; but Tolstoy had no such difficulty because here he was "in his native element." He was in his native element as well, after his years in the Caucasus and in Sevastopol, in the many scenes in which the rank-and-file Russian soldiers banter with each other around their bivouacs or while marching to and from their battles. Nothing fascinated Tolstoy more, at least in this period of his career, than the mysterious force that, as he put it, moved millions of men to march from west to east and then back again, all the while "perpetrat[ing] against one another so great a mass of crime--fraud, swindling, robbery . . . plunder, incendiarism, and murder--that the annals of all the criminal courts of the world could not muster such a sum of wickedness in whole centuries." How could an event of this kind have taken place, "opposed to human reason and all human nature," while at the same time "the men who committed those deeds did not at that time look on them as crimes." The problem of war and warfare more and more preoccupies Tolstoy as the book moves on, and it evolves into a theory of history whose ideas are scattered throughout these later chapters and argued theoretically in the second epilogue. Sir Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox views Tolstoy as a fox, unremittingly occupied with the minutiae of particulars while longing for the unitary vision of the hedgehog "who knows one big thing." His brilliant and stimulating pages have given Tolstoy's views on history a new prominence, but this is not the place to plunge into their philosophical complexities. As a great novelist, Tolstoy dramatizes the pith of his doctrines with illuminating clarity, and we can grasp their essential point by citing a few scenes from the book. One such point is the impossibility of those presumably in command to anticipate what will happen on the battlefield, and thus the uselessness of all elaborate plans prepared in advance. The Austrian general Weyrother presents such a plan before the battle of Austerlitz and is certain that it will bring victory; but the combined Austrian-Russian forces are badly beaten. An even more elaborate plan is proposed before the battle of Borodino and proves equally useless. The reason for such failure is illustrated by the account of the minor battle of Schöngraben, where Prince Andrey watches the behavior of the Russian commander Prince Bagration as the fighting proceeds. All sorts of contradictory reports came in, but "Prince Bagration confined himself to trying to appear as though everything that was being done of necessity, by chance, or at the will of individual officers, was all done, if not by his order, at least in accordance with his intentions." As a result, officers who were "distraught regained their composure" and morale was strengthened. For Tolstoy, it was morale that ultimately decided the course of combat--the morale of the soldiers and the behavior of individuals like the unprepossessing Captain Tushin, who pays no attention to orders, responds to the immediate situation, and, as only Prince Andrey realizes, is really responsible for the Russsian success at Schöngraben . Tolstoy thus rejects the "great man" theory of history, particularly thinking of Napoleon, which attributes military success to the superior capacities of a leader capable of dominating in advance the uncertainties and vicissitudes of what transpires on the battlefield. Prince Andrey learns another Tolstoyan lesson when, sent to report on a minor victory, he is ushered into the presence of Emperor Francis of Austria and discovers that those presumably in command had little or no interest in what really occurred to those fighting and dying on their behalf. The questions he is asked by the Emperor are completely trivial; no opening is provided him "to give an accurate description, just as he had it ready in his head," and he realizes that the "sole aim" of the Emperor was to put a certain number of questions. "The answers to these questions, as was only too evident, could have no interest for him." Much the same point is made about those supposedly in command, like Alexander I and Napoleon, who are so far removed from the reality of battle that they have no control over the result. Tolstoy is particularly concerned to undermine the reputation of Napoleon and does so in numerous scenes that display him as an ordinary mortal, extremely self-confident and erroneously convinced that he had complete mastery of the situation. Nothing astonishes him more than the Russian refusal to reply to his overtures for peace after capturing Moscow. Excerpted from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.