Date of publication: 1865-69
This novel 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. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics of Tolstoy's time did not consider it as such. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense.
Plot Summary
War and Peace depicts a huge cast of characters, both historical and fictional, Russians and non-Russians, the majority of whom are introduced in the first book. The scope of the novel is extremely vast, but the narration focuses mainly on five or six characters whose differing personalities and experiences provide the impetus to the story, with their mutual interactions leading up to, around and following the Napoleonic war.
(From Wikipedia, description text under GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL))
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