War and Peace (Russian: ????? ? ???, Voyna i mir) is a novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russkii Vestnik (Russian: ??????? ???????, "Russian Messenger"), which tells the story of Russian society during the Napoleonic Era. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy's two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world's greatest novels. War and Peace 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. The first draft of War and Peace was completed in 1863. At the time the published version was finished, about a third of the whole work had been published in a literary magazine under the title 1805. Tolstoy was not happy with the ending, and rewrote the novel in its entirety between 1866 and 1869. This version was afterwards published as the completed novel under the title War and Peace. He did not, however, destroy the original manuscript, which was edited in Russia in 1983 and since has been translated separately from the "known" version, to English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish and Korean. The first version is different from the later one in many aspects, especially with its strikingly happy ending. It might be objected that Tolstoy himself never intended to publish the original version; on the other hand, he later revealed that he was disappointed with the "known" version of War and Peace as well, describing it as "loathsome". Although Tolstoy wrote the bulk of the book, including all the narration, in Russian, significant pockets of dialogue throughout the book (including its opening sentence) are written in French. This merely reflected reality, as the Russian aristocracy in the nineteenth century all knew French and often spoke it among themselves rather than Russian. Indeed, Tolstoy makes one reference to an adult Russian aristocrat who has to take Russian lessons to try to master the national language. Less realistically, the Frenchmen portrayed in the novel, including Napoleon himself, sometimes speak in French, sometimes in Russian. It has been pointed out that it is the deliberate strategy of Tolstoy to use French to portray artifice and insincerity, the language of the theater and deceit while Russian emerges as one of sincerity, honesty and seriousness. So as the book progresses the use of French diminishes. When Pierre proposes to Helene he uses French - Je vous aime- so that when the marriage emerges as a sham he blames those words. The progressive elimination of French from the text is a means of demonstrating that Russia has freed itself from foreign cultural domination. The novel tells the story of five aristocratic families, particularly the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, and the Rostovs, and the entanglements of their personal lives with the history of 1805?1813, principally Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. As events proceed, Tolstoy systematically denies his subjects any significant free choice: the onward roll of history determines happiness and tragedy alike. The standard Russian text is divided into four books (fifteen parts) and two epilogues ? one mainly narrative, the other wholly thematic. While roughly the first half of the novel is concerned strictly with the fictional characters, the later parts, as well as one of the work's two epilogues, increasingly consist of (nonfictional) essays about the nature of war, political power, history, and historiography... [Source: Wikipedia.org]
war and peace, edition, eng, kindle, peace
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