(Ebook) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Louise Maude, Aylmer Maude ISBN 9780199232765, 0199232768

(Ebook) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Louise Maude, Aylmer Maude ISBN 9780199232765, 0199232768

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. At a glittering society party in St. Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon’s army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey, and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace, Tolstoy entwines grand themes — conflict and love, birth and death, free will and fate — with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur. 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 Woolf