War And Peace, part 2

by Leo Tolstoy

Part Two Of Four Parts

Written around the time of our own civil war, WAR AND PEACE concerns another violent conflict: the invasion of Russia by Napoleon in 1812. While Tolstoy himself was born 16 years later, he grew up in a Russia that was still recovering from Napoleon's carnage and his outlook was certainly influenced by the men he met and the stories he heard.

One finishes WAR AND PEACE in a state of exhil- eration, for we have come to know and care deeply about the lives, loves and fates of the teeming personalities who populate Tolstoy's masterpiece and who, henceforth, will walk with us on our journeys of imagination.

Audio Cassette

Published July 1, 1982

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reviews

[Facio · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I am correct, this is the part that The Great Comet of 1812 the musical is based on. In my copy it was a chunk of about 300 pages or less. I just saw the show last night, and I am very glad to have read it beforehand, as it made the experience that much more special. One of my favorite shows of all time, and I was surprised at how much dialogue was taken directly from the translation.

[Layal Amer]

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