Customer Reviews

War and Peace (Signet Classics)

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3 star:		(30)
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Ever since I was a teen (I'm 51) I tried reading War and Peace. The furthest I ever got was something like Page 80. Six summers ago, I thought, what the heck, give it another shot. After Page 100 or so, the book picked up steam, and I was absolutely awed as I've seldom been by all the great books I've read in my life. That's what I want to share with potential readers of this great book. Stick with it. It's like a trickling stream that grows and grows from many tributaries into a grand wide raging river. It's got everything in it, as if it were written by God. Tolstoy saw everything. There are so many, many unforgettable scenes in it. My favorite two are the costume party at the country estate (pure magic!) and the great wolf-hunting scene in which the wolf actually takes on a personality under the all-knowing skill of Tolstoy's great pen. In just a line or two, Tolstoy could actually get inside the "soul" of even an animal! I can only imagine how great this book is in the original Russian. After War and Peace, I devoured Anna Karenina, which is in many ways an even greater book. I'd recommend people read War and Peace with Cliff's Notes, as I did, because you get a sense of the historical background and it helps you from getting the hundreds of characters mixed up. War and Peace is more than a novel. It's an Everest of creation. Please stick with it!

I first tried to read War and Peace in High School. A teacher, who had carried the book all through the Pacific campaign in WWII recommended it as a book that had changed his life. I tried three times and couldn't get past a few hundred pages because of the numerous characters - each with multiple names. The fourth time I stuck with it and was rewarded with a reading experience that has seldom been equaled. Since that time I have reread the book every two or three years, so I must have been through it 15 or more times, and each time I find things I haven't noticed before.

This is such a grand book in terms of number of characters in all levels of Russian society, historical scope, period detail, philosophical implications, romance, drama, tragedy, action etc, etc, etc. There is just no way to enumerate all that is appealing about Tolstoy's masterpiece. The main characters are as humanly complex and interesting as real people. I feel that I know them like friends. The plot(s) are involving and get more tight and interconnected as the book progresses, so that there is a great satisfaction as various threads come together, and never with the jarring coincidences that propel a typical Dickins novel.

If I had to pick only one novel that I would ever be able to read again, it would have to be War and Peace. There is so much of interest going on in this book that it would be hard to wear it out in a lifetime.

Over the 4-week period it took me to read "War and Peace", I was asked several times by friends and co-workers who saw me with the book why it was so long. At first, I really didn't have a good answer although I felt I knew why. Having finished it, I would tell them that its length is due to its being a very thorough novel covering almost every aspect of life in general. This could be said about several books obviously, but in "War and Peace", Tolstoy covers human life more thoroughly than, although maybe not as well as, any other book I've encountered.

"War and Peace" lets us follow along in the daily lives of several land-owning class characters from early 19th Century Russia. The Bolkonsky and Rostov families comprise most of these figures, but their friends and acquaintances take up nearly as much of the focus of Tolstoy's classic novel. These characters cover a wide range of personalities from the devoutly religious Maria Bolkonsky and her close and conflicted friend Natasha Rostov to the independent Pierre Bezuhov and his miserable wife Helene Kuragin. Tolstoy is able to go in and out of his creations' lives with simplicity and without exaggeration, whether its in relating the most common moments of their daily lives or the climaxes of their earthly existences. The range of emotions, feelings, and actions that Tolstoy is able to relate is easily done through his genius in setting the story in the midst of Russia's War of 1812 (the history of which he knew very well), one of the worst in its long history. It's through such a life-shattering event that people can be seen everywhere from their best to their very worst, and Tolstoy, through a compelling story line and the novel's famous length, displays the entire spectrum.

I still love Dostoevsky's writing more, mostly because of the difference in the conclusions his characters come to in their cathartic moments, but "War and Peace" gave me a much greater respect for Tolstoy than I had previously held (having read Anna Karenina, among others). I definitely recommend taking the time to read this classic.

"War and Peace" is one of those mammoth behemoths of a novel that everyone aspires to read and few manage to finish. This is a shame, because its reputation as the Ultimate Big Massive Tome has, unfortunately, obscured the fact that it tells a very gripping story and is infinitely rewarding and re-readable.

I'm in a position to say this because I've read this book anywhere from half-a-dozen to a dozen times (to be honest I've lost count). For many years I would read one of Tolstoy's big novels every year, alternating between "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." Along the way I've read three of the four major translations of the book multiple times.

The four translations, in order of appearance, are:

1) Constance Garnett
2) Louise and Alymer Maude
3) Rosemary Edmonds
4) Ann Dunnigan

Of these four translations, I would recommend either Edmonds or Dunnigan. Here's why. The Garnett and Maude translations date from the first three decades of the 20th Century. Edmonds' translation was originally published in 1957, and Dunnigan's in 1968 (for some reason, no one has tried to come up with a new translation of "War and Peace" in the past 35 years). The definitive (to date) Russian text of the novel was published in the early 1960s: Edmonds revised her translation in 1978 to take into account the new version.

In general, unless you're reading an older translation, not for the sake of its putative author but for the translator (which is the only reason to read, for example, the Urquhart-Motteux Rabelais or Chapman's Homer), you're almost always better off sticking with a modern translation. And that's the case with "War and Peace." It's either Edmonds or Dunnigan.

It's a close call. You really won't go wrong with either one of them. If I prefer Dunnigan, it's because Edmonds' translation is a wee bit too English for my taste. Having Russian peasants sound like Cockneys just doesn't work for me.

Can you really read such a lengthy book? Keep in mind that it's not all that long -- it's only around 800,000 words and both Proust and Gibbon are much longer. Plus, when you get past all of Tolstoy's interpolated essays on History (which you can easily skip the first time around, although they are interesting), what you're left with is a stirring story about a few Russian families struggling for survival during Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Tolstoy put into the book thinly veiled versions of his parents and relatives (and they are very thinly veiled -- the Volkonskys become the Bolkonskys), and there are quite a few inside jokes that will go sailing over your head the first time you read it.

(I'll only give away one -- when Princess Maria sticks her head out of her room while the Little Princess is about to give birth to Prince Andrei's son, she sees some servants carrying a leather sofa into the Little Princess's room. Tolstoy never says anything else about it, and never explains it. The fact is that Tolstoy himself was born on a leather sofa, and he insisted that his wife give birth to all of his many children on the same sofa.)

So don't be afraid of this very long novel, which Henry James once unwisely referred to as a "loose baggy monster." In fact it is nothing of the sort. It takes quite a few readings of "War and Peace" before you realize how brilliantly structured it is -- how something that seems at first glance as natural and casual as water flowing downstream is really meticulously and artfully plotted.

I hope I've talked you into at least taking a crack at this book. Unlike Proust, who has to be read incredibly slowly if you're going to get anything at all from him, "War and Peace" can be taken at a gallop. And its a lot of fun -- not at all the grim heavy tome it's made out to be.

So what are you waiting for?

This is one of the worst abominations in the history of publishing. As multiple Tolstoy scholars and translators have already pointed out, this is NOT a translation of a "version" of WAR AND PEACE, let alone the "original" version. It is a translation of a draft and very definitely not anything that was intended as a final draft. Tolstoy definitely never intended it to be published.

The only thing I can figure is that the publisher Ecco is cynically milking a public that suffers from mass attention deficit disorder. This is pandering of the worst possible kind. If they were marketing it as a translation of a draft this would be a different matter, but they are marketing it as the "original" version, which it most assured is not. It is simply an unfinished draft.

An anecdote seems apt here. For many years Henry James sent his older and more talented brother William copies of his novels. Henry suffered from an inferiority complex and was always anxious to hear what William's reaction would be. When William didn't respond to one such novel, Henry wrote him asking what he thought. "It's not WAR AND PEACE," re replied. Who knew that the same could be said of a "translation" of WAR AND PEACE itself?

My recommendation: read WAR AND PEACE. I read this original in the famous Maude translation and later in the Rosemary Edmonds translation. I plan on reading this again. This time I will turn to the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. They have produced many great translations of Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky. Turn to any of these translations instead. I think this particular edition should be of concern ONLY for those who are interested in the history of the production of the text. And no one else.

Amazon's policy of lumping all editions and reviews for a certain title is preposterous and extremely misleading. It even occurs for books that are only related by their title and have completely different content (e.g. the Harold Bloom collection of criticism regarding All Quiet on the Western Front is presented as if it's an edition of that book). In this case (War and Peace), the Kindle edition is NOT the translation that's mentioned in the product description (Pevear and Volokhonsky). In fact, it's impossible to know who translated the Kindle edition, even after the file is downloaded (most likely it's the Aylmer and Shanks edition, produced early in the 20th century). While probably not intentional on Amazon's part (it's almost certainly the result of a sloppy database), the result is clearly false advertising. It's not a big deal when the Kindle book costs $0.00, but the problem is common and can result in considerable wasted money and time.

Although my blind urge to read the Great Classics has (thankfully) faded somewhat over the years in favor of reading whatever I damn please, I finally decided it was time to give War and Peace a try. After all, how can anyone who enjoys novels resist the lure of "the greatest novel of all time"? And Tolstoy himself was an unusually interesting man -- not a screwed-up genius but one who seemed to eventually figure it all out. It took me maybe a hundred pages to get into the rhythm of the book and figure out who all those characters with multisyllabic Russian names were. After that, it was totally engrossing and surprisingly easy reading. There's no point giving you a book report on what happens -- you're supposed to read it yourself -- but I do disagree with some of the other reviewers who didn't care for the sections describing Tolstoy's philosophy of history. I found those sections (a very small proportion of the book) fascinating, albeit a change of pace. This is part of what makes the book great. War and Peace is not just a story of what happens to a bunch of made-up people, but a major work of art expressing the wisdom of a great man.

This excellent new translation continues the trend to retranslate the monuments of fiction. From Magic Mountain to Man without Qualities, from Don Quixote to Madame Bovary, this movement proves again that great art is timeless, but interpretaion changes. In this way translation can be likened to the way two conductors can approach say, Mozart. It is still Mozart. It is always Mozart. But these are two interpretations.

Further, just as Mozart sounds better on a state of the art stereo system (or at concert), the binding, layout, and paper selection can enhance the reading experience. In this case Viking has done a superb job. The paper even smells great!

There is, finally, amother interpretation: that of age, and experience. I first read all of these books in my 'teens and 'twenties. I loved them then, but what did I know of life, or art? I am now sixty. The new translations give me an excuse, really a mandate, to reread them, and I am better for it.

You will be too. Spending an evening with this marvelous translation of War and Peace is vastly more rewarding than reading anything on the bestseller lists, or, dare I say it, watching American Idol.

As for me, I will wrap up Tolstoy this week, and move to book two of In Search of Lost Time (new translation.) Maybe I will finish Proust before I am seventy!

Note to Amazon: perhaps you could develop a section on your web site for these new translations, so we know what is available and what is coming.

War and Peace (Complete Version, Best Navigation, Active TOC) I usually judge books very critically, especially electronic ones. I believe that those should be done at least as flawlessly as the hard copy ones, if not better. Too many e-books on Amazon have the problem of notorious typos. It is quite frustrating. This publication from Forward2 is actually pretty good. I am glad to say that it's well done, as a great book of a great author SHOULD be! I definitely recommend this book to anybody looking for a high quality product at a fair price.

The two stars isn't for the literature, it is for the product. Two stars because I want this to serve as an alert to help the reader find what he is looking for when Amazon is aiming him/her in unknown directions.

Amazon sets up pages purporting to be a kindle product of the edition described on the page, which is not the case when it comes to these works with multiple translated editions out there. Because of this, it takes a lot of work to try to figure out if the version you want is even available, much less what is offered for download on that page. So to help you out, all I can suggest is to download the free sample and compare the first lines of the first two paragraphs to the following:

First, there is a recent translation of a very different first draft of War and Peace.
BROMFIELD (2007)

first paragraph:
"Eh bien, mon prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now merely estates, the private estates of the Buonaparte family."

second paragraph
"These were the words with which, in July 1805, the renowned Anna..."
----------------

PEVEAR AND VOLOKHONSKY (2007):
easy to tell because the entire first paragraph is all in french:

"Eh bien, mon prince, Genes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanges, de"
------------------

the rest can easily be distinguished by just the first line of the book, but I also compare the first line of the second paragraph to make it even more readily apparent:


BRIGGS (2005) :

first paragraph:

"Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now nothing more than estates taken over by the Buonaparte family. (1)"

second paragraph:
"These words were spoken (in French) on evening in July 1805..."
-------------------

EDMONDS (1957, revised in 1978):

"Eh bien, mon prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family."

"It was on a July evening in 1805 and the speaker was the well known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, ..."
-------------------

DUNNIGAN (1968):
"Eh bien, mon prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now no more than family estates of the Bonapartes,"

"With these words the renowned Anna Pavlovna Scherer, lady in waiting and confidante to the Empress..."
--------------------


MAUDE (1922):


"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes."

"It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honor..."
---------------

GARNETT (1904):

first paragraph:
"Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family. (1)"

"These words were uttered in July 1805 by Anna Pavlovna Scherer, a distinguished lady of the court,..."
------------

WIENER (1904)
I can offer some words for your comparison that come from Part IX for the volume (it is either III or VII) titled 1864-1869. Opening sentence:

"Toward the end of the year 1811 the Powers of Western Europe began a more active armament and concentration of their forces, and in 1812 these forces, consisting of millions of people (including those who transported and fed the army), moved from the West to the East, toward the boundaries of Russia, where, since the same year 1811, the Russian forces had been concentrating."
-----------

DOLE (1898)
first paragraph:
"Well, prince, Genoa and Lucca are now nothing more than the apanages, than the private property of the Bonaparte family."

second:
"It was on a July evening, 1805, that the famous Anna..."
-------------

CLARA BELL (1885-86)
first paragraph is totally different:

"When Russia, already half-conquered, saw the inhabitants of Moscow flying to ..."