War and Peace (Wordsworth Classics) [Paperback]

"There remains the greatest of all novelists--for what else can we call the author of War and Peace?"
--Virginia Woolf

"From the Paperback edition." --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

`reveals Tolstoy in his majestic scope and precision to this reader for the first time...ringing with mastery and truth'
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

'If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it' Margaret Reynolds, THE TIMES --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude.

This Wordsworth Edition includes an exclusive Introduction by Henry and Olga Claridge, University of Kent at Canterbury.

War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters.

Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery.

This translation is one which received Tolstoy's approval.

Packaged like the best most desirable literary fiction - the perfect Christmas gift. It Includes a translator's introduction, a chronology of Tolstoy's life and works, a list of characters, further reading, and four maps.
'This is the best translation so far of Tolstoy's masterpiece into English. It achieves the difficult feat of combining faithfulness to the original with smooth, idiomatic English. The result is a triumph of cultural mediation' – Robert Maguire, Professor of Russian, Columbia University, New York
'In Tolstoy’s work part of the translator’s difficulty lies in conveying not only the simplicity but the subtlety of the book’s scale and effect… Professor Briggs has rendered them both with a particular exactness and a vigorous precision not to be found, I think, in any previous translation' - John Bayley --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Professor Tony Briggs is former Professor of Russian at the University of Birmingham, and has translated widely from the Russian, especially Pushkin, is the author of several critical books on Russian literature. Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck and the author of A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 which was awarded the Wolfson Prize for History and, most recently, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia.